With minimal effort, he slipped past the elaborate wards that protected the temple of Lolth.
No doubt Yasraena herself had cast them. Gromph thought her spellcraft paltry. Her wards were no match for him.
The interior of the temple appeared much the same as the temples to Lolth maintained by other great Houses. A sacrificial altar, limned in violet faerie fire and dotted with candles, sat in the apse at one end of the large, oval nave. Behind the altar towered the enormous sculpture of a spider, carved in lifelike detail from smooth basalt or perhaps jet.
Gromph knew it to be a guardian golem that would animate should anyone enter the temple without authorization.
High-backed, ornate stone benches lined the nave, facing the apse. Transparent gossamer curtains, made to look like spiderwebs, hung across the temple's faerie fire limned windows.
Spider motifs appeared on everything, from the black altar cloth to the carved door jambs to the armrests of the benches. Spiderwebs hung in every corner, the silvery threads and their small black creators regarded as blessings from Lolth.
A depiction of the Spider Queen in her hybrid form-a beautiful drow female head and torso jutting from the bloated body of a giant black widow-decorated the underside of the temple's domed ceiling. Gromph wondered in passing whether Lolth appeared the same since her return,
whether Lolth was the same.
Almost the whole of the temple glowed in Gromph's sight, alight with enhancements and protections cast by Lolth's priestesses. Otherwise, the nave was empty.
Gromph blew out a frustrated sigh and prepared to move on, but something rankled him. He kept the scrying eye on the temple, looking, thinking.
'What is it, Archmage?' asked Prath, excitement in his voice. 'Have you found it?'
'Silence,' Nauzhror admonished the apprentice, though the Master's voice too betrayed a certain eagerness.
Gromph shook his head. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but. .
The spider golem!
His scrying eye did not show it as magical, yet it should have detected as such-strongly-unless the Agrach Dyrr priestesses had replaced the former golem with a normal statue. He deemed that unlikely.
An excited charge ran through him. He caused the scrying eye to draw nearer to the golem until its image filled the viewing crystal. He pored over it, inch by inch. Was it standing atop a secret panel in the floor? He cast another series of divinations, attempting to get even an inkling of whether or not the golem's magic was being masked.
At first he met with no success, but he persisted.
Finally, and for only an instant, he caught a flash of a faint red glow, like light squeezed from under a closed door. In that single instant, the golem flared in his sight, as befitted the latent magic that would animate it, but a still brighter glow flared from within the golem.
Nauzhror smiled, Prath gasped, and Gromph could not contain a chuckle.
'The golem,' Nauzhror breathed.
The Master of Sorcere sounded as exhausted as Gromph, though he had done nothing other than observe.
'The golem is masked,' Gromph said, nodding. He could not believe the lichdrow's temerity.
'The golem is the phylactery?' Prath asked.
Gromph studied the construct for a while longer, confirming his suspicion with a series of spells.
When he finished, he said, 'No, but the phylactery is embedded within it.'
Despite the evidence they had seen in the crystal, Prath and Nauzhror's faces showed disbelief.
'Within the temple's guardian golem?' Prath said. 'It is heresy.'
'It is ingenious,' Nauzhror countered.
Gromph agreed. The lichdrow, a male, had not only hidden his phylactery within House
Dyrr's temple of Lolth, he had hidden it within the body of the temple's most powerful guardian.
Gromph had located it only because he had known the spider sculpture to be a golem that should have glowed in his magic-detecting sight. That it had not had caused him to look more closely,
and he still had almost missed it.
With a slight exertion of will, Gromph let the image in the scrying crystal fade. It moved to gray, then to black.
The archmage leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms over his head. His entire body ached, his temples pounded, and sweat soaked him. Unfortunately, he could not take time to recover. Getting through the anti-scrying wards and finding the phylactery had been the easier of his two tasks. Next he had to get himself physically into House Agrach Dyrr, into Lolth's temple,
and destroy first the golem, then the phylactery.
'You should rest first, Archmage,' Nauzhror said, reading his expression and knowing what would come next.
Gromph picked up his chalice and gulped another mouthful of wine. Enough. He did not want a light head when he assaulted House Agrach Dyrr.
'There is no time,' he said. 'Yasraena or her daughters may happen upon the phylactery. It will be easier to take out of the golem than it will be to take from Matron Mother Dyrr's hands.'
Nauzhror could not help but nod agreement with that. He asked, 'When, then?'
'Within the hour,' Gromph replied and blew out a tired sigh.
Prath and Nauzhror digested that. Gromph closed his eyes and tried to still the pounding in his head.
'The wards will be challenging,' Prath said at last.
Nauzhror backhanded Prath across his mouth and snapped, 'The archmage is aware of the challenges, apprentice.'
The rebuke drew blood. Prath sank back in his chair, daubing his broken lip. His eyes burned,
but he said nothing. Gromph was pleased to see the anger in Prath's face.
Gromph was aware of the challenges. He had just seen them; they all had.
An intricate network of wards, an altogether different layer of protections at least as complex as those he had just bypassed, would attempt to prevent his physical entrance into the fortress.
The combined power of all of the mages of House Xorlarrin had so far been unable to breach those wards. Gromph was no mere Xorlarrin wizard, of course, but neither was the second layer of wards likely to prove as easy to bypass as the anti-scrying protections.
And triggering a ward while he was physically present put him at risk for injury and death,
not merely detection. He remembered well the glaring red glow of the spell traps.
'Shall I accompany you, Archmage?' asked Nauzhror.
'No,' Gromph replied, and massaged his temples. 'I have other plans for you two. You,
Nauzhror, are to stay within my offices and help me attempt to scry House Agrach Dyrr.'
Nauzhror's fat face pinched in a question. 'Help you scry? You did exactly that. What do you mean?'
Gromph eyed Prath, who also looked confused.
'I mean,' Gromph said, 'that I will be in two places at once, Master Nauzhror.'
Gromph let his words hang in the air without further explanation.
After only a moment, realization showed on Nauzhror's face.
'Prath will remain here in your guise,' the Master of Sorcere said.
'Yes,' Gromph affirmed. 'And I in his, at least for a time. You will remain here too,
Nauzhror, as though assisting me with my divinations.'
Prath's expression showed understanding but also a question. 'Why the ruse, Archmage?' he asked. 'Yasraena and her mages cannot scry into your office. No one can.'
'No,' Gromph agreed, 'but no doubt she is trying. She knows I must move against her House,
and she will want to know when I am coming. We will mislead her. You and I will change forms to appear as the other. I will decrease the power of the wards around my office enough to allow
Yasraena and her wizards to finally get through. When she does, she will see Gromph and
