Shadows of Amn

Chapter Seventeen

Phaere was more than a little unhappy. The young woman Jaenra had disappeared at some point during the night, and Phaere found that disrespectful. She had opened herself and her home more quickly and more completely to Jaenra than she'd ever done before, and though Phaere had a rather thick skin, she just couldn't help but take it personally… and take it out on someone.

She slapped the mage across the face with a hard, practiced backhand that sent the drow man reeling. The sorcerer hit the marble tiles of the plaza, and a pouch of spell components he wore on his belt burst open, scattering bits of string, crystals, feathers, and live spiders all over the tiles. He looked up at Phaere in horror, fully expecting to be killed.

"Ready!" Phaere shouted at the man. "Complete! Prepared! These words mean nothing to you?"

"The gate is ready, mistress," the mage said quickly, his voice quivering, "You have my word. I—"

She kicked him hard between the legs, and the man doubled over in pain.

"I didn't ask for your word you little—"

She was interrupted by the roar of a pack lizard rumbling across the plaza floor. She turned and saw something that made her blink several times before she could believe it.

The pack lizard was pulling an open cart onto which the silver dragon eggs were lashed. The cart was being driven by humans, their pale skin positively glowing in the ambient light of the plaza gate. One of them looked familiar—the big one, but how could he? There was a half-elf woman—Phaere had never seen a real half-elf before. She was underwhelmed.

This was Bodhi's crew, though Phaere thought there was supposed to be three of them. She counted two, plus the round-faced human Bodhi called out of the gate to … well, to apparently do what he was doing at this moment. The cart was headed for the gate.

Phaere waved a hand signal in the air that made the guards step back from the gate. Crossbows and hand crossbows were leveled at the cart, but the guards were all obedient enough to follow orders and not fire.

Phaere smiled though she was still disappointed. It had begun.

Abdel had stopped trying to keep a count of the obvious set-ups that had been perpetrated on him lately, they were coming so quickly and so regularly now. He saw the drow mistress Phaere standing over some cowering male drow at the edge of the plaza in the center of Ust Natha. She held a hand up in the air and made some gesture. Abdel couldn't understand drow sign language—didn't even know there was such a thing as drow sign language—but he could see the guards lining the plaza withdraw. They all glanced at Phaere, and though they raised their crossbows to fire, they held back. Abdel was running the cart fast and hard through the narrow streets, and the open construction of their vehicle gave them no cover. He'd been relying on dumb luck to get them through the gate, but thanks to Phaere he wouldn't need it. It was as if she was expecting them—and that couldn't be good at all. He said as much to Jaheira and Yoshimo.

"We have no choice!" Yoshimo yelled over the clatter of the cart's wheels on the marble tiles. "It's the only way out!"

"It's a trap!" Abdel repeated.

"What isn't?" was Yoshimo's cryptic reply. "Trust me one time."

Abdel opened his mouth, intending to regale Yoshimo with the full list of reasons why he'd never trust the Kozakuran when a lithe, pale body leaped into the cart behind him.

"Imoen!" Jaheira gasped.

"Don't go through that gate!" Imoen shouted to Abdel, clutching his shoulder to steady herself on the bouncing cart.

That was all Abdel had to hear. He pulled hard on the reins, and the lizard pulled up short. Everything and everyone on the cart slid rapidly forward, and Abdel nearly fell sprawling onto the giant lizard's back. Imoen and Jaheira collided with Abdel from behind, and both of them grunted at the same time. Yoshimo fell against the back of Abdel's seat, bloodying his nose.

"Destroy it!" Imoen panted even as the cart fish-tailed to a stop. "We have to destroy that thing—they mean to march an army through it."

"That's great," Abdel said as he pulled the reins to the left, forcing the giant pack lizard around. In the plaza the drow guards stepped forward but still held their fire. Abdel knew it would take nothing but a wave of Phaere's hand to make pincushions out of them all.

"How do we destroy the thing?" Jaheira asked Imoen. "It's not like you can just—"

"With this!" Imoen exclaimed, producing a crystalline wand out of her shimmering spidersilk robe.

"Don't do this," Yoshimo said, his voice ragged and desperate. "In the names of all our ancestors, I beg of you. It is our only way out of here. You have to—"

Abdel shot one elbow back and connected hard with Yoshimo's temple. The Kozakuran fell into one of the eggs, shifting but not cracking it. He tried to get up for a second, then fell unconscious, sprawled across the silver dragon's eggs.

"Do it," Abdel said to Imoen. "It's as good a day to die as any."

Phaere's heart sank, and she cursed herself silently when she saw the third human run across the roof of a granary at the edge of the gate plaza and jump into the speeding cart. It was Jaenra, and she was as pale as a human. She was human.

Phaere's mother had a list of criticisms of her. At the top of it was her weakness for a certain type of woman, a physical weakness that made her make fast, rash decisions based more on passion than cunning. Phaere had always liked to think that passion was as good a motivator as cunning. She'd made some of her best decisions based on it, but…

. . but this was not one of them. Phaere grimaced realizing everything she'd said to the woman in the bath, in bed, whispered into her ears, into the gentle soft curve of her neck … by Lolth's malignant teeth, she'd told the human everything.

Phaere pulled her own hand crossbow and cocked a poisoned dart as the cart came to a nearly tumbling stop in front of the blue-violet gate. Jaenra, if that was really her name, produced from her robe—one of Phaere's robes—a long, thin, glittering..

"Oh gods, no," Phaere murmured. It was the wand. Had she really done it? Had she whispered the command word into Jaenra's ear? She had.

Phaere leveled the hand crossbow at Jaenra and something happened to blur her vision. Was that a tear? Was that what she'd come to? At that moment Phaere knew two things: She couldn't kill the young woman, and everything she'd planned, everything she'd worked so hard for, was shattering before her eyes. It was over. She didn't shoot.

The girl didn't seem to see her, didn't know that Phaere was letting her live, was punishing herself by letting this human woman—who'd managed to manipulate her so well she could have been a drow after all—destroy the gate.

Phaere couldn't hear Jaenra actually say the command word, but a blue-white arc of lightning leaped out of the tip of the wand and met the swirling magic of the gate. The blue-violet gate energy puckered at the point the lightning struck it and coalesced into a churning storm cloud.

Phaere saw the humans leap from the cart, abandoning the eggs in a desperate attempt to avoid what everyone—even the reticent drow guards—knew was coming.

The gate exploded, blasting clouds, and balls of blue-violet energy, and trails of white lightning through the plaza. Phaere put her arm up across her eyes when the cart flashed into a red light that stood out in contrast to the cooler colors of the gate eating itself alive.

The cart was gone in an instant, taking the humans and the dragon eggs with it.

There was a heartbeat of silence and darkness in the plaza, then the gate exploded again.