Behind the sorceress, the imp snorted and let out a little shriek.

Sylora ignored the tiny devil, focusing on the zombie and the sensation in her wand because of the proximity of the creature. She’d felt this before, but from afar, and now with Ashenglade’s first round of construction completed, the wand, the Dread Ring, had compelled her to further investigate.

She reached out to the zombie and closed her eyes.

Soon she was seeing through the undead creature’s eyes.

Sylora could inhabit it at will, could see through it, could hear through it, could control its every movement. She almost unleashed the creature’s continual fury, then, for in looking back at herself, in looking past her meditating form, she noted the imp, its face a mask of disgust, its long and pointed tongue hanging out and flicking with distaste. Through the zombie’s ears, Sylora heard the curses muttered under impish breath.

Sylora moved back fully into her own consciousness, and slowly turned to face the impudent little imp. “You don’t approve of my pet?”

“Wretched disgusts me, it does,” the imp whined.

“This is a child of the Dread Ring,” Sylora explained.

“Let it fall dead and bury it deep!” said the imp.

“You try my patience,” Sylora warned. “Only because of Arunika’s favor do I not punish you for such words.”

“Arunika! Arunika is not my mistress! I’m indebted to her, but I’m free when done with you!”

A wry smile widened on Sylora’s face, telling the imp that perhaps it should not have admitted such a thing. “You insult the zombie, you insult the Dread Ring,” she said.

“Wretched disgusts me!”

“And if I allow the zombie to act on your insults?” asked Sylora. She felt the wand thrumming in her hand, the power building with her intent and her understanding now that she didn’t have to put up with the impudent little beast.

The imp’s long tongue flicked and sent a line of spittle at Sylora’s feet. “I go!” it announced.

“You do not!” Sylora demanded sharply. “First you must battle and defeat this child of the Dread Ring you have so callously insulted.” She glanced over at Valindra, letting the lich see her grin, but that brought more puzzlement to Valindra’s expression than anything else.

Sylora recognized that and wasn’t surprised by the lich’s reaction, given that Valindra hardly understood what was happening either. But something surely was happening, within the wand and deep in her subconscious, and the sensation she received from the Dread Ring was of power and pleasure, like a building climax.

The imp spat on the floor again and cursed Sylora.

She invited the release.

The ashen zombie beside Valindra exploded into a puff of black smoke and ashes, and before any could spread wide or descend to the floor, the wand drew them in, hungrily eating the zombie’s remains.

Sylora’s eyes closed in a fit of power and pleasure, and she let the decomposed zombie flow through the wand, bursting back out in a black spray that struck the imp and sent it flying backward into the wall. It howled in pain as wafts of smoke began rising from all around it.

“What have you done?” Valindra asked happily, but Sylora ignored her, couldn’t be bothered with her at that moment as she, too, tried to sort out the magic she’d just enacted.

The imp came forward, but slowly, its movements sluggish as if it was in thick mud or tar. It was the ash, Sylora realized, hardening around its joints and skin. The imp tried to spit, attempted to stick out its tongue, but Sylora saw the black goo covering the creature’s mouth press forward.

The magic fully encased the creature except for one eye the imp had managed to close before being struck, and that the imp had opened quickly enough to avoid the hardening black coating. That eye revealed the creature’s hatred for Sylora, a red gaze of sizzling and seething flame.

The diminutive beast kept approaching, and Sylora was too mesmerized to even realize she should retreat, or strike again.

But it didn’t matter. The imp turned aside and dived into the fireplace. It rolled around on the logs and slid its limbs under the hot coals, burning the black goo from its body. The fire didn’t bother a creature of the lower planes, after all. In moments, it was free, and it shot one last hateful look at Sylora, full of indignity and dire threats, then rushed up the chimney and out of Ashenglade entirely.

“That show was worth the cost of a zombie,” Valindra said coyly.

Sylora turned to her and held forth the crooked, blackened wand Szass Tam had given her. “There’s more,” she said with both conviction and confusion, for she knew there were indeed more and varied catastrophes she could conjure with the magical energy of the ashen zombies, though she wasn’t quite sure what those disasters might be.

Sylora’s eyes sparkled at the possibilities.

“You can channel the power of the Dread Ring,” Valindra reasoned, and Sylora nodded.

“It’s intoxicating,” the sorceress admitted.

“More powerful than your own practiced magic?”

Sylora considered that for a few moments, then nodded once more. “I had thought my time here near its end,” she admitted. “One last strike at the Netherese and the settlers of Neverwinter, one added massacre to complete the Dread Ring, and I would move along to another place, another mission.”

“But now?”

Sylora was too lost in the sensations of the wand to catch the undertone of concern in Valindra’s voice, or to even consider that she hadn’t made her impending departure a secret, or that her departure would place Valindra Shadowmantle as her heir apparent in Neverwinter Wood.

Valindra’s question remained unanswered as Sylora fell deeper into the connection to the Dread Ring, trying to sort out the powers it might now afford her. She wasn’t quite sure.

But she intended to find out.

Chapter 17: Into the Hive

IT’S NEW TO ME,” DAHLIA WHISPERED. SHE LAY ON A GRASSY KNOLL, Drizzt to her right and the man she’d known as Barrabus the Gray farther to her right, beyond the drow.

“It’s a very recent addition,” Entreri replied, though Dahlia had aimed her remark at Drizzt. She hadn’t spoken a word to Entreri since the fight of the previous day. “I’ve been scouting Sylora Salm for some time—all through your journey to Gauntlgrym. I’ve been near to her, looking over her shoulder, and I’ve seen nothing like this fortress before. Not a hint that any such thing existed.”

“It reminds me of my homeland, strangely,” Drizzt added.

He couldn’t help but make that comparison. The centerpiece of the grand fortress was a treelike tower, obsidian colored, set on the side of a rocky hill. If some wizard graced that tower with purple faerie fire, it could well be set in Menzoberranzan to hide among the stalagmite mounds that served as homes for the various drow families.

The whole of the fortress also showed that same otherworldliness as Menzoberranzan. The obsidian-black walls were not of mortared bricks, but seemed as if they’d simply lifted up from the ground, pressed forth by magic, in a single piece. Gate towers—perhaps they were gate towers—showed at various points, looking much like smaller versions of the treelike tower on the rocky hillside that dominated the place. Other structures showed, usually abutting the walls, and those, too, were obviously created and not constructed: large blackened boulders, roughly shaped to resemble squat stone buildings, like barracks and other necessary structures. One on the far side of the fortress was open faced, a forge burning within. Another appeared as no more than a stone lean-to, and under its sheltering wall lay a rack of bows, piled quivers of arrows, and a host of those Ashmadai staff-spear scepters.

“The Dread Ring did this,” Dahlia said, nodding as she figured it out. “Sylora, or perhaps Valindra, has found a way to tap its power.” She looked over at the other two. “That’s no small thing.”

Her companions looked at her with curiosity.

“I lived in Thay for most of my adult life,” Dahlia explained. “I’ve witnessed a fully thriving Dread Ring—several, in fact. It was no secret among we who served Szass Tam that the archlich derived his power from that primary source, and his power was beyond anything you have witnessed, I assure you.”

“She’s trying to scare us,” Entreri deadpanned to Drizzt. “Are you so certain she’s truly allied with us against Sylora Salm?”

Drizzt’s amused snort disarmed Dahlia’s angry retort before she could begin to utter it. In response, the elf woman narrowed her eyes even more and shifted her gaze from Entreri to Drizzt, allowing him to be the source of her ire if that was what he so desired.

“If you’re scared, then please do leave us,” she said.

“I’ve been many things in my long life,” Entreri replied. “I don’t believe that ‘scared’ has ever been one of them.”

“Until now,” Dahlia said.

“Including now.”

“Then you’re a fool,” said Dahlia.

“If you’re scared, then please leave us,” Entreri shot back. “I’m going over that wall to find Sylora Salm, and finish her at last.”

He shifted up into a crouch and moved along the ridgeline to view the fortress from other vantage points. Dahlia started to follow, but Drizzt held her back and let Entreri get some distance away.

“He’s not our enemy in this,” the drow reassured her.

“How do you know? He’s a long-lost friend, then?”

Drizzt almost fell over at the sheer irony of that statement, given his turbulent past with Artemis Entreri, a man he’d battled, had hunted, and who had hunted him, both with the intent of killing the other.

But there were other times, Drizzt recalled whenever he came to question the assassin’s motives. Trapped beneath Mithral Hall before King Bruenor had reclaimed and civilized the place, Drizzt and Entreri had fought side-by-side for their common good. Trapped in Menzoberranzan, slaves to the drow, Drizzt, Entreri, and Catti-brie had likewise fought together for their common good.

Artemis Entreri was a violent man, hardly a friend to Drizzt Do’Urden, but he also was, above all else, a pragmatic survivor. It was in Entreri’s interest to see Sylora Salm fall. Drizzt believed that, so he didn’t doubt Entreri’s loyalty to him and Dahlia in this matter. And hadn’t Entreri proven that when he’d surprised Drizzt in the first moments of their meeting, when he’d lunged forward, bringing his knife to a hair’s breadth from Drizzt’s throat? If Artemis Entreri had meant to kill Drizzt, Drizzt would have died then and there.

But still, despite that moment and despite his instincts even before the further evidence of alliance, the thought had occurred to Drizzt more than once in the last day that he was fooling himself, that his judgment was clouded because Entreri represented the last shred of that distant past of which Drizzt didn’t want to let go. The Companions of the Hall were gone, Thibbledorf Pwent was gone, Jarlaxle was gone, and only Drizzt remained—only Drizzt and Artemis Entreri.