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  Ascendancy of the Last

  Book 3 of The Lady Penitent series

  A Forgotten Realms Novel

  By Lisa Smedman

  PRELUDE

  The sava board hung in mid-air, a bridge across an endless divide.

  On one side of this line lay the Demonweb Pits, a vast plain of tortured rock under a purplish-black sky. An enormous black spider with red eyes dominated this landscape: the goddess Lolth, in one of her eight aspects. Sticky white webs stretched from her body to points near and far within her realm. They zigzagged back and forth between the spires of black rock that twisted toward the sky, and filled the many jagged craters that pocked the ground. Tiny bulges pulsed through these hollow webs: creatures, mortal and otherwise, who had found their way into her realm, either through death or deliberate folly. Muffled screams and moans came from within, bleeding out into to the sulfurous air.

  On the other side of the divide stood a forest: Eilistraee’s realm. A wind carried a whisper of song through tall trees, rustling branches heavy with moonstones. Half of the fruitŹlike orbs retained their original coloration—milky white with glints of shifting blue. The rest had darkened to a shadow black that drank in the moonlight dappling the forest. All lent a sweet perfume to the air.

  Under these branches stood the goddess herself, a tall, lithe figure with coal black skin and moon-pale hair that hung to her ankles. Once, she had walked proudly naked through her realm, but now she wore a loose black shirt and trousers that hid her feminine curves. A mask—black, but glinting with moonlight as her breath stirred it—hid her face from the eyes down.

  Eilistraee’s twin swords hung beside her hips, suspended by song and magic. As the goddess contemplated the sava board, she played with an assassin’s dagger, absently twirling the blade by its strangle cord.

  Spotting something, she stiffened. “What is this, Lolth? Another of your distractions?”

  Lolth paused in her web spinning, tore her abdomen free of the sticky strands, and scurried closer. Faint wails poured from the severed strands of silk that fluttered in her wake. She lowered her head until her palps brushed the board. “I see nothing amiss.”

  Eilistraee flipped the dagger and caught it by the hilt. She pointed the weapon at the sava board. “There.”

  “Ah.” Lolth’s spider mouth smiled.

  On the board stood hundreds of thousands of playing pieces. Slaves, Priestesses, Wizards, and Warriors stood alone or in clusters on lines that radiated from the players’ respective Houses. At the spot Eilistraee pointed to—a spot uncomfortably near the heart of her House—the board had grown spongy. One of her Priestess pieces was slowly sinking into this spot. Already it was ankle-deep.

  Lolth chuckled. “Looks like you’re going to lose more than one piece.”

  Other purplish-red stains appeared on the board, all of them close to Eilistraee’s House. They bulged. Figures rose from them: priest pieces that had not been in play before. All had the faces of drow, but with bodies like blobs of hardened wax.

  Anger blazed red in Eilistraee’s eyes. “Ghaunadaur,” she growled. “And his fanatics.” The swords at her hips thrummed their displeasure. She pointed her dagger accusingly at Lolth. “Leave was neither asked, nor given, for another to enter our game.”

  “Do not accuse me of cheating, daughter,” Lolth replied. “The Ancient One heeds no Mistress. Ghaunadaur was old even before Ao’s time. The god of slime comes and goes as he will. I neither command nor compel him.”

  “You drove him from the Abyss once before.”

  “And like a boil, he rises once more. Perhaps this time, you’ll lance him for me?”

  Eilistraee fumed. She had no doubt that Lolth was behind this. Even as she watched, several of her other pieces sank knee-deep in the spongy board. These spots of corruption, as dark as bruises on fruit, were spreading, joining together. If left unchecked, they would completely encircle Eilistraee’s House, cutting off a large number of her pieces from the rest of the board.

  Lolth must have maneuvered Ghaunadaur into choosing this moment to strike, but why? Eilistraee scanned the sava board, searching for the answer.

  Then she saw it: the move Lolth must have hoped she wouldn’t spot.

  Eilistraee reached for her strongest Priestess piece, the one that held the curved sword. When she saw Lolth flinch, she knew she’d made the right choice. She moved the piece forward along a path that allowed it to spiral into the very heart of Lolth’s House. The move wasn’t an attack on Lolth’s Mother piece, but it accomplished the next best thing. It blocked the Mother piece completely, preventing it from moving. Unless Lolth found a way to take the Priestess, her Mother piece would be held out of play.

  Taking out the Priestess piece Eilistraee had just moved, however, didn’t seem likely. It was in an unassailable position, protected on all sides.

  Eilistraee leaned back, satisfied. “Your move.”

  Lolth’s palps twitched. Her abdomen pulsed restlessly, and the webs of her realm quivered in response. She studied the board with her unblinking eyes. At last she rocked back on her eight legs, resting her bulbous abdomen on the ground.

  “Perhaps luck will favor me,” she said. She shifted into her drow aspect and reached for the dice. They were as they had been since Eilistraee had made her throw, earlier in the game: two octahedrons of translucent moonstone, each with a spider trapped deep within. Seven sides bore numbers; the eighth, a full-moon symbol representing the numeral one. One circle was the solid white of a full moon; the other dark, with only a new-moon sliver of white on one side.

  “One throw per game,” Lolth said. “I’ll take it now.”

  “I thought you preferred to weave your own destiny.”

  “That I do, daughter,” Lolth said in a silken voice. She rattled the dice in cupped hands.

  Eilistraee waited, tense and silent. If Lolth threw double ones, Eilistraee would be forced to sacrifice one of her pieces. She knew which one Lolth would choose: the Priestess that threatened Lolth’s Mother piece. Yet there was little cause to worry. The odds of both dice landing circle-uppermost were sixty-three to one. An unlikely throw. Except that Eilistraee herself had accomplished it earlier in the game, forcing Lolth to sacrifice her champion, Selvetarm. And now it was Lolth’s turn to try.

  Eilistraee nodded at the dice Lolth rattled between her slim black hands. “No tricks,” she warned. “If I see any web sticking to those dice, I’ll demand a re-roll.”

  Lolth arched a perfect white eyebrow. She wore the face of Danifae, her Chosen—the female she had consumed upon ending her Silence. Her features were beautiful: the lips seductive, the cheekbones high, the eyes a delicate hue. Yet her expression was as cold as winter ice.

  “No webs,” Lolth promised.

  Then she threw.

  The dice clattered onto the board between the pieces. One die rolled to a stop immediately, full moon symbol uppermost. The second came to rest against one of Lolth’s Priestess pieces. The die lay edge-uppermost, balanced halfway between the eight and the one.

  “The die is cocked,” Eilistraee said. “The roll is—”

  The spider inside it twitched.

  The die toppled, landing moon-uppermost. The new moon. Slowly, its stain spread throughout the die, rendering it as black as the Spider Queen’s heart.

  “You cheat!” Eilistraee cried.

  “Of course,” Lolth said with a smile.

  Eilistraee turned her face skyward. “Ao! I require a witŹness, Lord of All, and your judgment. Lolth has broken the rules, and must forfeit the game.”

  Ao’s repl
y came not in words or gestures, but as a sudden knowing. The dice, he revealed, had always been loaded. Moonlight had tipped the balance, the first time. Lolth had arranged this—a form of cheating, it was true—but the first result had been in Eilistraee’s favor. The second die roll would also stand.

  Ao had spoken.

  Eilistraee stared at the empty place on the sava board where the Spider Queen’s champion had once stood. “You wanted Selvetarm to die. You arranged it.”

  Lolth gave a lazy shrug. “Of course. And now it’s your turn to lose a piece of my choosing.”

  “No,” Eilistraee whispered. A tear squeezed from eyes that had turned a dull yellow. It trickled down the goddess’s face, and was absorbed by Vhaeraun’s mask.

  “Yes.” Lolth answered. Smiling cruelly, she extended a web-laced hand to point at a Priestess piece. “That one. I demand her sacrifice. Now.”

  CHAPTER 1

  The Month of Ches

  The Year of the Cauldron (1378 DR)

  T’lar slipped silently into the blood-warm river and clung to a gnarled tree root so the sluggish current wouldn’t carry her away. The river slid smoothly over her skin without impediment; upon acceptance in the Velkyn Velve, she had shaved her body from scalp to ankle—there would be no incriminating flashes of white to give her away. Floating on her back, she pulled a tangle of dead creeper vines across her naked body to conceal herself. She stared up at the sky, awash with the light of thousands of stars, and listened to the rustling of the night’s predators and the startled screeches of their prey. The World Above was a noisy place compared to the cool silence of the Underdark, but even over this restlessness she could hear the soft murmur of voices: the wild elf, and the female T’lar had been sent to kill.

  She let go of the root. The current caught her. As she drifted toward the voices, concealed under the tangle of vines, she adjusted the grip of her fingers on her spike-spiders, two walnut-sized metal throwing balls filled with poison and studded with hollow metal needles. A prick from either would numb her hands. Used against someone who hadn’t built up an immunity to their poison, they would render the entire body as rigid as petrified wood.

  Through the veil of creeper vine, T’lar observed her target: a drow female standing on the river bank, turned sideways to the water, her attention focused on the strange-looking male who squatted at her feet. The female was about T’lar’s size, but there the resemblance ended. The priestess had long, bone white hair, wound in a tight coil and bound by a black web-lace hair net at the back of her head. Black gloves embroidered in a white spiderweb design covered her hands and arms up to the elbow. She wore a thin silk robe, cinched at the waist by a belt from which hung a cerŹemonial dagger and whip. The whip’s three snake heads twisted beside her hip, forked tongues tasting the air, alert for danger.

  T’lar’s target was a noble of House Mizz’rynturl. T’lar knew her slightly. She had once been of that House, and had even played with Nafay on occasion when both had been girls—games like Stalking Spider and Flay the Slave. But T’lar had given up all other allegiances the day she was shorn. From her second decade of life, she had served Lolth alone.

  And Lolth had decreed that Nafay must die.

  T’lar hadn’t asked why—to have done so would have been insolence bordering on suicide. But she’d heard the whispers: that Nafay, who had only recently joined the Temple of the Black Mother, served Lolth only superficially. That her true devotions lay elsewhere—with Vhaeraun, it was rumored—though a female being accepted into the Masked Lord’s faith was about as likely as the moon turning into a spider and scuttling away from the sky.

  Still, Nafay had done something to incur Lolth’s wrath. Something that had prompted the valsharess to set T’lar on the hunt. And what a long chase it had been. Guallidurth lay more than four hundred leagues from here, as the spider crawled. What had drawn Nafay to the World Above and prompted her to seek the company of such a strange-looking male?

  The wild elf was heavily built—almost as muscled as a drow female. He had duskier skin than most surface elves. Yellow paint ringed his eyes, and his hair hung in tiny braids, each tipped with a tuft of downy white feathers. His only clothing was a baglike loincloth that accentuated his genitals. From its string ties hung a dart pouch. He squatted before the priestess, arms resting on his knees, holding a blowpipe, and spoke in a high-pitched, melodic voice that reminded T’lar of the chirping of a cave cricket.

  The priestess answered him in the same language.

  T’lar gave a silent mental command. Her earlobe tickled as the spider-shaped black opal on her earring stirred to life. She tilted her head slightly, encouraging the spider to crawl into her ear, and waited as it spun a web that thrummed like a second eardrum in time with the voices. Then she listened.

  “… lead me to it,” the priestess said.

  The male shook his head. “They will kill you. Strangers are not even permitted within the forest, let alone at the yathzalahaun.”

  The word had the cadence of High Drow. T’lar’s spider-earring translated it as “temple of first learning.”

  “Yet I am here, within the Misty Vale.”

  “Yes.”

  The priestess leaned closer to him. “And you will lead me to the temple.”

  The male sighed. “Yes,” he whispered. He gave her a tortured look of equal parts anguish and anticipation, as if she had promŹised him something—something he would pay dearly for.

  T’lar drifted even with the spot where Nafay stood; in another moment or two, the current would carry her past. She exhaled and sank beneath the surface, letting the tangle of creeper vine drift on alone. She kicked, sending herself shoreŹward, then twisted so that her feet touched bottom. She burst out of the water hands-first, and in the same motion hurled the spike-spiders. One struck the male square in the forehead. He immediately stiffened and toppled sideways. The second sailed toward the priestess. Before it struck, one of Nafay’s whip vipers reared. It snapped the spike-spider out of the air and swallowed it.

  The whip viper thrashed wildly as the spike-spider jammed in its throat. The other two snake heads hissed in fury.

  Nafay whirled. The holy disk hanging from her neck whipped around like a pendulum. She shouted a prayer and wove her hands together, glaring at T’lar through the tangle of her fingers.

  T’lar felt the spell brush against her body. It pulled at her abdomen, bloating it unnaturally. It teased two strands of flesh from her left side, attempting to twist them, together with her left arm and leg, into thin insectoid legs. Her mind was yanked toward the priestess. Web-sticky fingers plucked at her thoughts, trying to weave them to Nafay’s will.

  T’lar fought back with all her will. With a jolt, her body returned to normal. She leaped from the water. In mid-leap she used the dro’zress within her to pass into invisibility. A mid-air tumble and a kick off a tree trunk placed her where the priestess wouldn’t expect her. She jabbed stiffened fingers into the priestess’s upper-left abdomen, into the vital spot over the blood-sac. Her other hand punched into Nafay’s throat.

  The priestess gagged and buckled at the knees, unable to breathe and bleeding within. She grasped her holy symbol and tried to flutter her fingers in a silent prayer, but T’lar spun and slammed a heel into Nafay’s temple. The priestess collapsed, unconscious.

  One of the whip’s heads lashed out. T’lar leaped back. The snake’s poison-filled fangs snapped at air. T’lar stepped careŹfully around the whip and crouched behind the priestess. She pressed hard against the neck, where the blood flowed, and choked off the pulse. Nafay’s legs kicked once, and then her body relaxed. She was dead.

  “Lolth tlu malla,” T’lar whispered, giving the ritual thanks for a successful kill. “Jal ultrinnan zhah xundus.”

  Two of the whip’s snake heads spat furiously at her. The third had stiffened; two of the snake-spider spines had pierced its scaly skin from within and were protruding out of its body. T’lar picked up the wild elf’s blowpipe and u
sed it to nudge the whip aside. Later, after she collected her gear, she would bag the whip and carry it back to Guallidurth as proof of her kill, together with Nafay’s holy symbol. She slipped the pendant off the dead female and hung it around her own neck.

  Then she turned her attention to the wild elf. His body remained stiff, but his hands trembled and his eyelids flutŹtered. He was stronger than T’lar had expected. The poison would relinquish its hold on him soon. T’lar knelt beside him and placed her hands on his throat, then hesitated. She knew she should kill him now. Finish the job. But curiosity gnawed at her. She yearned to know what had brought Nafay to this place, what was so valuable to the priestess up here on the surface. A temple, the wild elf had said.

  Instead of tightening her grip, T’lar released the wild elf’s throat. She wouldn’t kill him—yet. She would force him to show her this temple first. She knew this might mean uncoverŹing secrets the valsharess would prefer remained buried, but if that meant T’lar’s death upon her return to Guallidurth, so be it. She would go to the altar willingly, certain in the knowledge she had served Lolth well.

  She plucked the spike-spider from the wild elf’s forehead. She removed the pouch from his string belt, sniffed the darts—they were poisoned—and set them aside. Then she drew Nafay’s spider-pommel dagger and used it to cut strips from the priestess’s silk robe. She used these to bind the wild elf’s wrists behind his back, and to hobble his ankles. She wadded more silk into his mouth and tied this makeshift gag tightly in place. Then she waited. From time to time, she slapped him. When he at last flinched, she grabbed him by the hair.

  “Blink twice if you understand me,” she said. She spoke in High Drow; the earring only allowed her to understand the wild elf’s language, not to speak it.

  The wild elf glared. The whites of his eyes had a yellowish tinge, signifying a malaise deeper than just the poison, one that had been affecting his vitals for some time. She rolled him over, inspecting his body. She found what she’d been looking for on his left thigh and calf: a series of small, raised red lumps. Spider bites. She touched one of them, and found it felt hot. Without healing, he would be dead by the time the sun rose.