Extinction

Valas felt the knot of tension between his shoulders relax - just a little - as familiar darkness enveloped him. The harsh sunlight had been left behind after the third bend in the tunnel. He could still smell the earthy tang of wet leaves that told him the Surface Realms were just above their heads, but the air around him al-ready felt cleaner. As they descended the twisting fissure that led ever downward through the stone, he felt his eyes adjusting to the darkness. Gone was the itching glare of sunlight, allowing him to fully open his eyes and use his darkvision for the first time in too many days.

Behind Valas, Quenthel and the others followed in a line. They'd fallen quiet instinctively as soon as they'd left the sunlight behind. Even the upper Underdark could be a dangerous place for the unwary, and that particular tunnel was unknown territory. Yet compared to Valas, they hardly moved in silence. He could hear the scrape of armor against stone as someone behind him squeezed through a spot where the tunnel had narrowed, forcing them to turn sideways to slip through. A moment later he heard the scuff of a boot and a faint intake of breath as one of the females missed her footing. He turned and angrily started to signMove more quietlyto her, but dropped his hands when he realized it was Quenthel and not Danifae who had slipped. Danifae had once again positioned herself near the back of the group, just ahead of Ryld - not because of the potential dangers ahead, Valas was sure, but, with Halisstra gone, to keep a wary eye on her companions.

What have you stopped for?Quenthel signed from behind Pharaun.Keep moving.

One of the vipers in the whip tucked into her belt gave a slight hiss.

Nodding his head, Valas led the way through the tunnel once more. As before, Pharaun was close behind him, continually peering over Valas's shoulder as if he was searching for something. Ryld, on the other hand, was constantly looking back the way they had come. Whenever Valas caught his eye, the weapons master would signal that he thought someone was following them. Valas had never seen him so jumpy before.

The first two times Ryld had done that, Valas had doubled back to check for himself, but there had been nothing: no sounds, no signs of pursuit. Thereafter he ignored Ryld's anxious glances be-hind them.

Since Halisstra had been sent back to Menzoberranzan there were only six of them left. Personally, Valas thought that was a foolish decision on Quenthel's part. He doubted that Halisstra would make it without Lolth's magic to protect her. But no doubt Quenthel thought the same. She probably hoped to eliminate a rival priestess who might claim credit for discovering what had happened to Lolth - assuming that a return to the Demonweb Pits was even possible.

For the hundredth time since Quenthel had announced her plan to have Pharaun summon a demon, Valas wondered how that was going to help. In all likelihood, the demon would turn on them and swallow them whole without guiding them a single step of the way.

He reminded himself that the lot of a mercenary was not to ques-tion how, but to do - and bow. And so he led them on. As he moved cautiously ahead into the unknown darkness. Pharaun still crowding close behind him, Valas fingered one of the magical amulets pinned to his shirt - his lucky, double-headed coin - and hoped it would give him the edge he'd need when the demon eventually turned on them, as he was certain it would.

Halisstra stood on the bluff that overlooked the ruined temple, staring out at the horizon. The others had descended into the Underdark some time before, and the sun was slowly sinking below the horizon, painting the clouds shades of pink and gold. Though it made her eyes water to look at the sunset, Halisstra stared in fascina-tion, watching the colors shift into ever darker shades of orange, then red, then purple, gazing as new patterns formed each time the sun's slanting rays struck the clouds at a different angle. She was begin-ning to understand why the surface dwellers spoke in such rapturous tones about sunsets.

As the forest below darkened, her sight began to shift toward darkvision. She could see birds flitting through the branches below and could hear the thrumming of numerous wings as a flock of birds moved through the trees toward the bluff. She'd heard that surface-dwelling creatures followed the cycles of day and night, and it struck her that Ched Nasad's magic-controlled lighting and Menzoberranzan's famous pillar Narbondel - used for marking the passage of "day" and "night" - must have been holdovers from a distant time when drow still dwelt upon the surface. Had House Jaelre simply been following a call that other drow had not yet heard when they returned to the surface, forsaking the worship of Lolth?

The flock of birds had come closer, filling the treetops just below the bluff with strange whistling cries. One of them rose above the treetops, its wings beating so quickly they were a blur. Only when it was within a few paces of her did Halisstra recognize the "bird" for what it truly was. The furry body, the eight legs, the long, needle-shaped proboscis - all added up to a creature she hadn't realized was also a danger on the surface. Especially when there was not just one of the creatures flying toward her at the speed of an arrow, but doz-ens: an entire flock.

"Lolth help me," Halisstra whispered. "Stirges."

They were too close for a crossbow shot. Whipping out Seyll's long sword, Halisstra braced herself to meet the threat. Grimly, she realized her chain mail wouldn't be any help; the stirges' needle-thin noses would slip between its links.

As the first surge dived in to attack, Halisstra swung the long sword. It was still awkward in her grip, heavier than the blade she'd been used to. Even so, her blow connected, slicing the stirge cleanly

Then half a dozen of the creatures were on her.

For several frantic moments, Halisstra fended them off, killing two more with the sword and crumpling the proboscis of a third with a blow from the small steel shield she wore on her left arm.

She felt a piercing pain in her right shoulder as a stirge struck. A moment later, another plunged its proboscis into the back of her left leg, just behind the knee. The force of it caused her to stag-ger. Only by ducking frantically was she able to avoid the stirge lancing in at her neck. Whirling, she struck it with the sword as it flew past.

As still more of the creatures dived at her - nearly two dozen of them - Halisstra reached down with her shield hand and grabbed the stirge that had plunged into the back of her knee. She squeezed - and heard a satisfying pop as the creature's bloated midriff burst. Yanking it from her, she threw its body away, dimly noticing the spray of blood that had soaked her gloved hand. Meanwhile, thestirge in her shoulder continued draining her of blood.

The flock dived en masse, and four more stirges plunged into her flesh. One bit deeply into her left arm, two into her right leg, and the fourth into her shoulder, beside the one that was already greed-ily sucking away. Halisstra killed two more with the sword - which, with the air rushing through the holes in its hilt, was making constant, discordant noises like a badly played flute. Halisstra, rapidly losing strength as the stirges drained her of blood, suddenly shivered as she realized she might very well die there. Lolth was no longer watching over her, blessing her with the magic she needed to drive the foul creatures away. The only darksong spell that would affect so many creatures at once required a musical instrument as its arcane focus - and she could hardly pluck out a tune on her lyre and fight at the same time.

Then she realized something. Perhaps there was another instru-ment she could use, closer to hand. . . .

Abandoning her attempts to strike the stirges - there were too many of them - Halisstra reversed Seyll's sword and brought its hilt to her lips.Closing her eyes, she blew into the hilt, fingering the holes so the rush of air escaped through a single hole. Even though she sagged to her knees as blood loss weakened her, she felt magic flow from her lips into the hilt of the sword and out through the hole in a piercing blast. Her own ears rang, then wentnumb as a single note - sweet, high, and impossibly strong - shattered the air. All around her, stirges tumbled from the air as a magic blast hit them. Those on her body wilted, hung for a moment, then slowly slipped free of her flesh, hitting the ground around her with soft thuds.

In the silence that followed, Halisstra could hear only the sound of her own breathing. Opening her eyes, she saw dozens of stirges lying on the ground, some of them still twitching. She picked up the closest one and squeezed it. Its blood - her blood - soaked her gloves as its body burst. Dropping it, she continued from one stirge to the next, killing them one by one. Then she pulled off her blood-soaked gloves and cast them aside.

Perhaps the surface was not a place of beauty, after all.

Then she realized that something had disturbed the stirges - something that was moving through the forest toward the bluff where she stood. Hunkering down, she crept back toward the stairs, looking for a place to hide.

Valas signaled for the party to stop when the tunnel, which had been twisting its way ever deeper toward the Underdark, opened into a jumble of broken stone that led down to a medium-sized cavern whose floor was hidden by a deep pool of water. Pharaun gave a low chuckle, breaking the silence.

"Perfect," he breathed.

Keep quiet,Valas chastised, but Pharaun only laughed.

"It's going to be loud enough in here in just a moment," the mage said with a wink. Then he called back to the others, who were higher in the tunnel, up beyond where Valas could see. "Mistress, I've found a spot that will do nicely. Get Jeggred ready."

Valas heard Quenthel ordering the draegloth to kneel and the sound of a drawn dagger. Pharaun, meanwhile, laid a hand on Valas's shoulder.

"Excuse me," he said. "I need to get by."

Valas still wasn't certain what the mage was doing, but he flat-tened obediently against the cold stone, allowing Pharaun to squeeze past him into the cavern. Pharaun reached into a pocket of hispiwafwiand pulled out a tiny coneof glass. Rolling up his sleeve, he pointed the cone at the water at his feet.

"Chalthinsil!"hecried, his shout filling the cavern.

In that same instant, a cone of bitterly cold air erupted from the glass cone, filling the air with swirling frost. The magical cold struck the pool, instantly turning it to solid ice. Frost continued to roil in the air for a few moments more, coating the walls and ceiling of the cavern with sparkling white ice crystals. Then it vanished, leaving a chill in the air that made Valas shiver.

Pharaun tucked the cone of glass back into hispiwafwi.

"Perfect," he said again, staring down at the expanse of ice. "Nice and smooth. Just the thing to draw on." Then he shouted back over his shoulder, "Quenthel. I'm ready."

Behind him, in the tunnel, Valas heard a hiss of anticipation from one of the vipers in Quenthel's whip. A moment later he smelled the tang of freshly spilled blood. Quenthel appeared at the entrance to the cavern, and passed a cup to Pharaun. The mage clambered down the slope, holding the cup so its contents wouldn't spill.

Quenthel and Danifae crowded in behind Valas to peer past him at the cavern. Quenthel snapped her fingers, and Jeggred stalked down the tunnel as well, panting clouds of foul-smelling breath into the ice-cold air. One of his massive fighting hands was clamped around a spot on the wrist of his smaller arm. Blood welled out be-tween the clamped fingers and dripped onto the stone at his feet. A moment later, Ryld joined them, having at last given up his cautious watch over the tunnel behind them.

Pharaun was already out on the ice, moving across it in a skating slide. As the others watched, he pulled out a dagger and traced an enor-mous hexagonal star onto the surface, carving its lines deep, like troughs. When he was done, he stood a minute, looking for imperfections.

Quenthel frowned down at the mage."Six sides?" she asked. "Why not a standard pentagram?"

Pharaun shrugged and said, "Anyone can summon a demon with a pentagram. I like to do things with a bit more panache." He moved around the diagram, dribbling the blood from the cup into one of the lines he'd cut in the ice. After a few moments, he raised a hand and beckoned. "Jeggred, come here."

After a quick glance at Quenthel - who nodded her permission - the draegloth loped down toward the pool, dislodging rocks that tumbled down the slope to skitter across the ice. He crossed the frozen surface to the mage and obediently opened his hand, releas-ing his bloody arm when Pharaun gestured for him to do so. Taking that arm, Pharaun held the cup under the slashed wrist. When it was once again full, he motioned for Jeggred to re-clamp the wound, then continued limning the diagram in blood.

The mage had to repeat the process twice more before the pat-tern was complete. Despite the loss of blood, the draegloth remained impassive throughout the procedure. When Pharaun at last dis-missed him, Jeggred loped up the slope to join the others.

"Now," Pharaun said, cracking his fingers as he stretched, "for the difficult part."

From a pocket, he pulled a candle. He cut it into six pieces, trim-ming each back to expose the wick. He walked around the star, bor-ing a hole at each of the points and pushing one of the candies into it. Then he stood back and snapped his fingers. Six flames sprang to life as the candles began to burn. Their meager heat magically spread through the blood that had frozen inside the troughs in the ice. The blood melted and began to circulate, pumping through the veins of the hexagram.

Valas squinted as the flickering yellow light disrupted his darkvision. The frosted walls of the cavern picked up the illumi-nation and sparkled like a million tiny diamonds. The candles flickered, their flames guttering slightly to one side. Seeing that, Valas nodded. The cavern wasn't completely a dead end. There must have been some tiny fissure, hidden from view, through which air was circulating.

Standing with his hands extended over the hexagram, Pharaun began to chant. As his words echoed back and forth across the con-fined space, the candles burned at a terrific rate, melting down to puddles of wax against the ice. Yet still the wicks burned, and as soon as they touched the ice, the color of the flames turned a brilliant blue. The flame pulsed out along the lines of the symbol and, mixing with Jeggred's blood, turned a ghastly, glowing purple.

As Pharaun's chant rose to a crescendo the mage clapped his hands together over his head. The boom of thunder that resulted all but obliterated Valas's gasp and Jeggred's harsh grunt. For an instant, the frigid air in the cavern seemed to wrench itself in two. Through the split, Valas could see the roiling red-black clouds and furnace-hot flames of the Abyss. Then came a roar of utter rage and indignation as an enormous, humanoid figure hurtled through the portal between the planes, staggering as though it had been pushed by an invisible hand. Pharaun, facing it, backed up a step or two on the ice, then recovered his composure.

"He's done it," Quenthel said.

"So he has," Danifae agreed, and she sounded impressed.

Valas realized that he was gripping his lucky coin amulet and quickly moved his hand to the hilt of his dagger, instead.

The demon - a glabrezu - was nearly three times as tall as a drow and powerfully muscled. It had four arms - two with hands, and two with enormous, snapping pincers - and a doglike head. Its body emitted a stench that smelled like putrid corpses roasting over a sulfur fire. Its skin was so utterly black it was difficult to see its features clearly, save for a truncated snout filled with gnashing yellow fangs and eyes that glowed with penetrating intensity, as if all the fury of the Abyss swirled within their violet depths.

"You dare summon me?" it roared in a voice that filled the cav-ern, shaking loose small stones that tumbled down the slope onto the ice. "You dare!"

In what seemed a mockery of the gesture Pharaun had used to summon it, the demon flung its hands above its head. Intensely bright flame erupted between the outspread fingers, filling the cav-ern with a blinding light. Leering, the demon thrust its hands at Pharaun, sending the flame at him in a horizontal wave.

Instead of washing over Pharaun, the flame was contained by the lines of the hexagram. It licked along the veins of blood, roar-ing from point to point of the star in a dizzying blur, then gradu-ally began to slow. Rather than melting the ice, the flame seemed to freeze in place. Then it shattered with a tinkling sound, like breaking crystal.

A corner of Pharaun's mouth twitched up into a half-smile.

"Are you quite finished, Belshazu?" he asked dryly.

The demon's eyes narrowed.

"You know my name," it said, its voice dropping to a deep rumble.

"We do," Quenthel said from behind Valas. "And unless you wish to be trapped inside that hexagram for all eternity, you will tell us where we can find a gate that leads from this realm to the Abyss. Tell us that, and the mage will dismiss you."

Belshazu grunted, then dropped to its knees and sniffed at the symbol that bound it. When the demon looked up, its eyesfastened on Jeggred.

"Draegloth blood," it growled. "So that was why the drow bitch mated with me. What was her name? Tral? Tull? No . . .Triel." The demon spat a gob of foul-smelling phlegm onto the ice, then added, in a disdainful rumble, "That whore."

It stared past Pharaun at the group of drow above, its violet eyes burning with a terrible challenge that caused Valas to draw his kukris in readiness.

Jeggred returned the demon's growl. Tensing, he hunched into a crouch. Quenthel's hand darted to his back and clenched the draegloth's tangled mane. She jerked Jeggred back justas he was about to spring.

"Stay beside me," she commanded.

Jeggred complied.

Valas heaved a sigh of relief, glad the draegloth hadn't sprung forward to attack his father. Had Jeggred taken a single step across the symbol that had been wrought with his blood, the lines of magi-cal force that bound the demon would have stretched - and snapped. Which was what the demon had obviously intended, all along.

Pharaun cleared his throat, and the demon returned its attention to him.

"Now then," the mage said. "We need to get to the Demonweb Pits. Where's the nearest gate to the Abyss?"

Belshazu bared yellowed fangs in a smile and stared down at Pharaun as if contemplating which of the wizard's limbs to tear from his body first.

"Right here, in this cavern," it rumbled. "Just beneath my feet. Let me show you."

Summoning its magical fire again, the demon directed the flame from its hands downward, onto the ice at its feet. Because the magic was not trying to cross the hexagram itself, the flame took effect. Enormous clouds of steam rose from the melting ice, obscuring the spot where the demon stood. A crater appeared beneath the demon's feet, and as melt water rushed to fill it, Belshazu plunged flaming hands into the water and set it aboil.

Pharaun was leaning forward, intensely curious to see the gate the demon had promised. He reached into a pocket of hispiwafwi at the same time. Jeggred was still flexing his claws in barely sup-pressed anger at the insult to his mother. Danifae and Ryld stood closer to the tunnel entrance, and were talking in rapid sign. Their backs were turned to Valas, making it impossible for him to see what they were saying.

Beside him, Quenthel suddenly tensed.

"Pharaun, stop Belshazu!" she shouted. "He's trying to - "

Her order was lost in a furious hiss of steam and the loud bubbling of boiling water. Valas himself could only hear Quenthel because she stood right beside him. Then he saw what Quenthel was pointing to: the edge of the crater of knee-deep water Belshazu was standing in was crumbling back toward the line of the hexagram. At last awaken-ing to the danger, Pharaun saw it too - but too late.

With a hissing roar, the line of flowing blood tumbled into the boiling water and was gone.

The hexagram was broken.

"Wizard - you are mine!"

Roaring his triumph, Belshazu waded through the boiling water toward Pharaun, eyes blazing violet fury at the mage who had so foolishly dared to attempt to bind him.