'You do not understand everything.'
'Enough,' the old man said. 'I know that you have no allegiance among the other guilds, not even with Dwahvel and her little ones or Quentin Bodeau and his meager band. Oh, they swear neutrality-we would have it no other way-but they will not aid you in your fight, and neither will any of the other truly powerful guilds. And thus are you doomed.'
'And you know of every guild?' Entreri asked slyly.
'Even the wretched wererats of the sewers,' Pasha Basadoni said with confidence, but Entreri noted a hint at the edges of his tone that showed he was not as smug as he outwardly pretended. There was a sadness here, Entreri knew,
a weariness and, obviously, a lack of control. The lieutenants ran the guild.
'I tell you this out of admission for all that you did for me,' the assassin said, and he was not surprised to see the wise old pasha's eyes narrow warily. 'Call it loyalty, call it a last debt repaid,' Entreri went on, and he was sincere-about the forewarning, at least-'you do not know all, and your lieutenants shall not prevail against me.'
'Ever the confident one,' the pasha said with another phlegm-filled laugh.
'And never wrong,' Entreri added, and he tipped his bolero and walked behind the dressing screen, back to the waiting dimensional portal.
'You have made every defense?' Pasha Basadoni asked with true concern, for the old man knew enough about Artemis Entreri to take the assassin's warning seriously. As soon as Entreri had left him, Basadoni had gathered his lieutenants. He didn't tell them of his visitor, but he wanted to ensure that they were ready. The time was near, he knew, very near.
Sharlotta, Hand, and Gordeon all nodded-somewhat condescendingly, Basadoni noted. 'They will come this night,' he announced. Before any of the three could question where he might have garnered that information, he added, 'I can feel their eyes upon us.'
'Of course, my Pasha,' purred Sharlotta, bending low to kiss the old man's forehead.
Basadoni laughed at her and laughed all the louder when a guard shouted from the hallway that the house had been breached.
'In the sub-cellar!' the man cried. 'From the sewers!'
'The wererat guild?' Kadran Gordeon asked incredulously. 'Domo Quillilo assured us that he would not-'
'Domo Quillilo stayed out of Entreri's way, then,' Basadoni interrupted.
'Entreri has not come alone,' Kadran reasoned.
'Then he will not die alone,' Sharlotta said, seeming unconcerned. 'A pity.'
Kadran nodded, drew his sword, and turned to leave. Basadoni, with great effort, grabbed his arm. 'Entreri will come in separately from his allies,' the old man warned. 'For you.'
'More to my pleasure, then,' Kadran growled in reply. 'Go lead our defenses,' he told Hand. 'And when Entreri is dead, I will bring his head to you that we may show it to those stupid enough to join with him.'
Hand had barely exited the room when he was nearly run over by a soldier coming up from the cellars. 'Kobolds!' the man cried, his expression showing that he hardly believed the claim as he spoke it. 'Entreri's allies are smelly rat kobolds.'
'Lead on, then,' said Hand, much more confidently. Against the power of the guild house, with two wizards and two hundred soldiers, kobolds— even if they poured in by the thousands-would prove no more than a minor inconvenience.
Back in the room, the other two lieutenants heard the claim and stared at each other in disbelief, then broke into wide smiles.
Pasha Basadoni, lying on the bed and watching them, didn't share that mirth. Entreri was up to something, he knew, something big, and kobolds would hardly be the worst of it.
Kobolds indeed led the way into the Basadoni guild house, up from the sewers where frightened were- rats-as per their agreement with Entreri-stayed hidden in shadows, out of the way. Jarlaxle had brought a considerable number of the smelly little creatures with him from Menzoberranzan. Bregan D'aerthe was housed primarily along the rim of the great Clawrift that rent the drow city, and in there the kobolds bred and bred, thousands and thousands of the things. Three hundred had accompanied the forty drow to Calimport, and they now led the charge, running wildly through all the lower corridors of the guild house, inadvertently setting off the traps, both mechanical and magical, and marking the locations of the Basadoni soldiers.
Behind them came the drow host, silent as death.
Kimmuriel Oblodra, Jarlaxle, and Entreri moved up one slanting corridor, flanked by a foursome of drow warriors holding hand crossbows readied with poison-tipped darts. Up ahead the corridor opened into a wide room, and a group of kobolds scrambled across, chased by a threesome of archers.
'Click, click, click,' went the crossbows, and the three archers stumbled, staggered, and slumped to the floor, deep in sleep.
An explosion to the side sent the kobolds, half the previous number, scrambling back the other way.
'Not a magical blast,' Kimmuriel remarked.
Jarlaxle sent a pair of his soldiers out wide the other way, flanking the human position. Kimmuriel took a more direct route, opening a dimensional door diagonally across the wide floor to the open edge of the corridor from which the explosion had come. As soon as the door appeared, leading into another long, ascending corridor, he and Entreri spotted the bombers. There was a group of men rushing behind a barricade, flanked by several large kegs.
'Drow elf!' one of the men shouted, pointing to the open door. Kimmuriel stood across the dimensional space behind the other door.
'Light it! Light it!' cried another man. A third brought a torch over to light the long rag hanging off the top of one keg.
Kimmuriel reached into his mind yet again, focusing on the keg, on the latent energy within the wood planking. He touched that energy, exciting it. Before the men could even begin to roll the barrel out from behind the barricade it blew apart, then exploded again as the burning wick hit the oil.
A flaming man tumbled out from the barricade, rolling frantically down the corridor, trying to douse the flames. A
second, less injured, staggered into the open, and one of the remaining drow soldiers put a hand crossbow dart into his face.
Kimmuriel dropped the dimensional door-better to run through the room-and the group set off, rushing past the burning corpse and the sleeping and badly injured man, past the third victim of the explosion, curled in death in a fetal position in the corner of the small cubby, then down a side passage. There they found three more men, two asleep and a third lying dead before the feet of the two soldiers Jarlaxle had sent out to flank.
And so it went throughout the lower levels, with the dark elves overrunning all obstacles. Jarlaxle had taken only his finest warriors with him to the surface: renegade, houseless dark elves who had once belonged to noble houses, who had trained for decades, centuries even, for just this kind of close-quartered, room-to-room, tunnel- to-tunnel combat. A brigade of knights in shining mail and with wizard supporters might prove a credible enemy to the dark elves on an open field of battle. These street thugs, though, with their small daggers, short swords, and minor magics, and with no foreknowledge of the enemy that had come against them, fell systematically to Jarlaxle's steadily moving band. Basadoni's men surrendered position after position, retreating higher and higher into the guild house proper.
Jarlaxle found Rai'gy Bondalek and half a dozen warriors moving along the street level of the house.
'They had two wizards,' the wizard-priest explained. 'I put them in a globe of silence and-'
'Pray tell me you did not destroy them,' said the mercenary leader, who knew well the value of wizards.
'We hit them with darts,' Rai'gy explained. 'But one had a stoneskin enchantment about him and had to be destroyed.'
Jarlaxle could accept that. 'Finish the business at hand,' he said to Rai'gy. 'I will take Entreri to claim his place in the higher rooms.'
'And him?' Rai'gy asked sourly, motioning toward Kimmuriel.
