Annihilation

thought but who was able to out-think and outfight him at every turn, and the damned lich was barking orders at him.

Dyrr began shouting again, but Nimor didn't understand what he was saying.

'I can't—' the Anointed Blade started to say then stopped when he realized that the lich was casting a spell.

Gromph heard him too. With one hand still holding the axe in front of him, the archmage tapped his staff on the pockmarked floor of the smoldering Bazaar and was instantly enveloped in a globe of shimmering energy. No sooner did the globe appear than Dyrr finished his muttering, and the sound of the lich's voice was replaced by a low, echoing buzz.

Nimor, eyes still locked on Gromph's, blinked. The archmage glanced over at the lich, and one side of his mouth curled up into the beginning of a smile. Nimor had to look, and he knew that Gromph had no intention of attacking him anyway.

The buzzing sound grew louder, escalating to an almost deafening roar. Nimor saw what looked like a cloud of black smoke winding through the air at him, and it was a few seconds before he realized it wasn't smoke. The cloud wasn't a cloud at all, but a swarm of tiny insects—perhaps tens, even hundreds of millions of them.

The swarm descended over Gromph, but they didn't penetrate the globe that surrounded the archmage. Nimor had to assume they were being directed by Dyrr, so when the insects turned on him, he took it personally.

Before the first of them could land on him, sting him, bite him, or do whatever they were meant to do to him, Nimor stepped into the Shadow Fringe. The act was second nature to him. He was there in the Bazaar, then he wasn't. The swarm became a shadow, the Bazaar a dull world, barely corporeal, drenched in blackness.

Nimor looked at his claws. His mind was strangely blank, his mood impossibly serene.

'Is that it?' he said aloud into the unhearing shadows. 'Have I lost?'

He closed his eyes and thought of the lich. . and stepped back into the solid world right behind him.

Nimor grabbed the spindly undead mage from behind and beat his wings hard to pull him up and away from the floor of the Bazaar. The lich stiffened and drew in a breath—perhaps to cast a spell—but was wise enough to stop when Nimor pressed one razor-sharp talon into the lich's desiccated throat.

'You might not bleed, lich,' Nimor whispered into the lichdrow's ear, 'but if your head comes away from your neck. .'

'What are you doing?' Dyrr asked, his voice a thin, reedy hiss. 'You could kill him. Our moment is at hand, and you turn on me? Me?'

'You?' Nimor sneered. 'Yes, you. I should kill you now, but then you're already dead, aren't you, lich? All you did was waste my time, and now the Spider Queen is rattling in her cage, and our time together is spent.'

'What?' Dyrr asked, honestly confused. 'What are you saying?'

'Not that you deserve to know it before I let Gromph Baenre kill you,' Nimor replied, 'but it's over.'

'No!' the lich shouted.

Nimor grunted when something pushed hard against his chest His hand came away from the lich's throat, and he was forced backward, driven through the air by some unfathomable force. Despite any attempt to fly, Nimor was repulsed.

The assassin spared a glance down at Gromph, who had put away his stolen duergar battle-axe and was looking up at them, laughing.

Nimor laughed too. Why not?

'We failed, lich,' Nimor called to Dyrr, 'but at least for me there will be another chance.'

'Wefailed?' the lich wailed. 'We? No, you wretched son of a wyrm, you failed. You'll go back to the Shadow with your dragon's tail between your legs, repeating your feeble excuses to yourself over and over again. Blame me if you wish, Nimor, but I'm still here. Live or die, I'll still be here, in Menzoberranzan, fighting.'

'Perhaps,' Nimor said, the first waves of a profound exhaustion beginning to soften his tired muscles, 'but not for long.'

The lich screamed his name, but Nimor didn't hear the first echo before he drifted into the Shadow Fringe and was gone from Menzoberranzan forever.

Chapter Twenty-four

Inside the temple walls was a city twenty times the size of Menzoberranzan. Like the walls and the surrounding plazas, the city was a battered, war-ravaged ruin that looked to Pharaun as if it had been abandoned for a thousand years or more.

The architecture throughout mimicked all manner of dark elven dwellings, from the calcified webs of Ched Nasad to the hollowed-out stalagmites of Menzoberranzan. The only thing the structures had in common was that they were all at least partially collapsed and they were devoid of life.

Valas appeared behind the mage as he always did, as if by magic. Pharaun didn't bother trying to pretend the scout's sudden appearance hadn't startled him. The time for keeping up appearances and jockeying for position in the party had come and gone.

Valas nodded once to the Master of Sorcere and said, 'There's more metal the deeper in we go.'

Pharaun found himself shaking his head, unsure at first what the scout was trying to tell him. He looked around more closely and saw that Valas was right. Though they had seen jagged, twisted chunks of rusted iron and scorched steel in the plaza outside, the deeper into the temple they walked, the more they all had to step around larger and larger pieces.

Valas stopped and reached out to touch a gently curving wall of steel three times the scout's height.

'It looks like it was ripped off of a larger piece,' the scout said. 'I've never seen this much steel.'

Pharaun nodded, examining the relic from a distance.

'It looks like a piece of a giant's suit of armor,' the wizard commented, 'a giant bigger than any you might find on the World Above, but this is the Abyss, Valas. There could be such a creature here.'

'Or a god,' the scout replied.

'Selvetarm was that big,' Danifae said. Both the males turned to look at her, surprised that she'd stopped to join the conversation. The former battle-captive had been walking in silence with the draegloth never far from her side, apparently unfazed by her surroundings. 'So was Vhaeraun.'

Valas nodded and said, 'There are other pieces, though, and there are things that don't look like armor.'

'The mechanical bits,' Pharaun interjected. 'I've noticed those too.'

'Mechanical bits?' the young priestess asked.

Pharaun continued walking as he said, 'The odd moving part. I've seen hinges and things that seem to act almost like a joint, like a shoulder or knee joint in a drow's body but with wires or other contraptions in place of muscles.'

'Now that you mention it,' Valas said, 'some of them did look like legs or arms.'

'Who cares?' the draegloth grumbled. 'Are you two really wasting your time examining the garbage? Do you have no understanding of what's happened here?'

'I think we have at least a rudimentary understanding of what's gone on here, Jeggred, yes,' Pharaun said. 'By 'examining the garbage, as you so eloquently put it, we might gain some understanding beyond the point where it can still be described as rudimentary. Alas, that's not a state of mind with which you tend to be familiar with yourself, but those of us with higher—'

The air was forced out of Pharaun's lungs in a single painful grunt. The draegloth was on top of him, smashing him into a crumbling pile of bricks that had once been part of a soaring cathedral. The wizard brought to mind a spell that didn't require speech but stopped himself from casting it when Danifae's voice echoed across the temple grounds.

'Jeggred,' she commanded, 'leave it.'

It was a command someone might give a pet rat distracted by a cave beetle. As the draegloth withdrew and Pharaun struggled to his feet, he wondered which was a greater insult, Jeggred smashing him to the ground or Danifae's rude remark. The Master of Sorcere brushed off his piwafwi, did his best with the wild mop his hair had