Even the drow, the undisputed masters of the Underdark, did not have easy access to this market. In the nearest dark-elven settlement, the great city of Menzoberranzan, no more than eight merchant companies at any one time knew the secret paths. This knowledge was the key to immense wealth and power, and its possession the highest mark of status attainable by members of the merchant class. Accordingly, it was pursued with an avid ferocity, with complex levels of intrigue and bloody battles of weaponry and magic, all of which would probably earn nods of approval from the city's ruling matrons-if indeed the priestesses of Lloth were inclined to take notice of the doings of mere commoners.
Few of Menzoberranzan's ruling females-except for those matron mothers who maintained alliances with this or that merchant band-had much interest in the world beyond their city's cavern. These drow were an insular people: utterly convinced of their own racial superiority, fanatically absorbed in their worship of Lloth, completely enmeshed in the strife and intrigue inspired by their Lady of Chaos.
Status was all, and the struggle for power all-consuming. Very little could compel the subterranean elves to tear their eyes from their traditionally narrow focus. But Xandra Shobalar, third-born daughter of a noble house, was driven by the most powerful motivating forces known to the drow: hatred and revenge.
The members of House Shobalar were reclusive even by the standards of paranoid Menzoberranzan, and they were seldom seen outside of the family complex. At the moment, Xandra was farther from home than she had ever intended to go. The journey to Mantol-Derith was long-the midnight hour of Narbondel would come and pass perhaps as many as one hundred times from the outset of her quest until she stood once again within the walls of House Shobalar.
Few noble females cared to be away for so long, for fear that they would return to find their positions usurped. Xandra had no such fears. She had ten sisters, five of whom were, like Xandra, counted among the rare female wizards of Menzoberranzan. But none of these five wanted her job.
Xandra was Mistress of Magic, charged with the wizardly training of all young Shobalars as well as the household's magically gifted fosterlings. She had a great deal of responsibility, certainly, but there was far more glory to be found in the hoarding of spell power, and in conducting the mysterious experiments that yielded new and wondrous items of magic. If one of the Shobalar wizards should ever have a change of heart and try to wrest the instructor's position away, the powerful Xandra would certainly kill her-but only as a matter of form. No drow female allowed another to take what was hers, even if she herself did not particularly want it.
Xandra Shobalar might not have been particularly enamored of her role, but she was exceedingly good at what she did. The Shobalar wizards were reputed to be among the most innovative in Menzoberranzan, and all of her students were well and thoroughly taught.
These included the children-both female and male-of House Shobalar, a few second- and third-born sons from other noble houses, which Xandra accepted as apprentices, and a number of promising common-born boy-children that she acquired by purchase, theft, or adoption-an option that usually occurred after the convenient death of an entire family, rendering the magically-gifted child an orphan.
However they came to House Shobalar, Xandra's students routinely won top marks in yearly competitions meant to spur the efforts of the young drow. Such victories opened the doors of Sorcere, the mage school at the famed academy Tier Breche. So far every Shobalar-trained student who wished to become a wizard had been admitted to the academy, and most had excelled in the Art. Even those students who learned only the rudiments of magic, and went on to become priestesses or fighters, were considered formidable magical opponents.
This high standard was a matter of pride, which Xandra Shobalar possessed in no small measure.
It was this very reputation for excellence, however, that had caused the problem that brought Xandra to distant Mantol-Derith.
Almost ten years before, Xandra had acquired a new student, a female of rare wizardly promise. At first, the Shobalar Mistress had been overjoyed, for she saw in the girl-child an opportunity to raise her own reputation to new heights. After all, she had been entrusted with the magical education of Liriel Baenre, the only daughter and apparent heiress of Gromph Baenre, the powerful archmage of Menzoberranzan! If the child proved to be truly gifted-and this was almost a certainty, for why else would the mighty Gromph bother with a child born of a useless beauty such as Sosdrielle Vandree? — then it was not unlikely that young Liriel might in due time inherit her sire's title.
What renown would be hers, Xandra exulted, if she could lay claim to training Menzoberranzan's next archmage! The first female to hold that high position!
Her initial joy was dimmed somewhat by Gromph's insistence that this arrangement be kept in confidence. It was not an impossibility, given the reclusive nature of the Shobalar clan, but it was brutally hard on Xandra not to be able to tout her latest student and claim the enhanced status that Baenre favor conferred upon her House.
Still, the Mistress Wizard looked forward to the time when the little girl could compete-and win! — at the mageling contests, and she bided her time in smug anticipation of glories to come.
From the start, young Liriel exceeded all of Xandra's hopes. Traditionally, the study of magic began when children entered their Ascharlexten Decade-the tumultuous passage between early childhood and puberty. During these years, which usually began at the age of fifteen or so and were deemed to end either with the onset of puberty or the twenty-fifth year- whichever came first-drow children at last became physically strong enough to begin to channel the forces of wizardly magic, and well-schooled enough to read and write the complicated Drowish language.
Liriel, however, came to Xandra at the age of five, when she was little more than a babe.
Although most dark elves felt the stirrings of their innate, spell-like drow powers in early childhood, Liriel already possessed a formidable command of her magical heritage, and furthermore, she could already read the written runes of Drowish. Most importantly, she possessed in extraordinary measure the inborn talent needed to make a magic-wielding drow into a true wizard. In a remarkably short time, the tiny child had learned to read simple spell scrolls, reproduce the arcane marks, and commit fairly complex spells to memory. Xandra was ecstatic. Liriel instantly became her pride, her pet, her indulged and-almost-beloved fosterling.
And thus she had remained, for nearly five years. At that point, the child began to pull ahead of the Shobalar's Ascharlexten-aged students. Xandra began to worry. When Liriel's abilities surpassed those of the much-older Bythnara, Xandra's own daughter, Xandra knew resentment. When the Baenre girl began to wield spells that would challenge the abilities of the lesser Shobalar wizards, Xandra's resentment hardened into the cold, competitive hatred a drow female held for her peers. When young Liriel gained her full height and began to fulfill her childhood promise of extraordinary beauty to come, Xandra simmered with a deep and very personal envy. And when the little wench's growing interest in the male soldiers and servants of House Shobalar made it apparent that she was entering her Ascharlexten, Xandra saw an opportunity and plotted a dramatic-and final-end to Liriel's education.
It was a fairly typical progression, as drow relationships went, made unusual only by the sheer force of Xandra's animosity and the lengths she was willing to go to assuage her burning resentment of Gromph Baenre's too-talented daughter.
This, then, was the succession of events that had brought Xandra to the streets of Mantol-Derith.
Despite her urgent need, the drow wizard could not help marveling at the sights that surrounded her. Xandra had never before stepped outside of the vast cavern that held Menzoberranzan, and this strange and exotic marketplace bore little resemblance to her home city.
Mantol-Derith was set in a vast natural grotto, a cavern that had been carved in distant eons by restless waters, which were even now busily at work. Xandra was accustomed to the staid black depths of Menzoberranzan's Lake Donigarten, and the deep, silent wells that were the carefully guarded treasures of each noble household.
Here in Mantol-Derith, water was a living and vital force. Indeed, the cavern's dominant sound was that of moving water: waterfalls splashed down the grotto walls and fell from chutes from the high-domed cavern ceiling, fountains played softly in the small pools that seemed to be around every turn, bubbling streams cut through the cavern.
Apart from the gentle splash and gurgle that echoed ceaselessly through the grotto, the market city was strangely silent. Mantol Derith was not a bustling bazaar, but a place for clandestine deals, shrewd negotiations.
Nor was it particularly crowded. By the best reckoning Xandra could get, there were fewer than two hundred individuals in the entire cavern. The soft murmur of voices and the occasional, muted click of boots upon the gem-
