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surprised.
    Gromph shifted his orb’s vision, searching as best he could for some sign of survivors, but the main cavern was largely deserted. He saw more than a few burned bodies among the smoldering debris, but any drow who’d lived through the burning of the city were clearly sheltering in the nearby caverns. Gromph was unable to bring them into the view of his scrying device, so after a time he decided that the effort was irrelevant and allowed the crystal orb to go dim again. He sat for a long time in silence, gazing absently at the darkened orb.
    “Now, do I need to share this with dear Triel?” he asked himself when he finally stirred from his reverie.
    He knew something that the matron mothers presumably did not, and that was always the sign of possibility. The trouble was, Gromph had no idea what possible advantage he could derive from hoarding the knowledge, and the risks of failing to communicate what he had learned were all too clear. Knowing that Lolth’s silence extended beyond Menzoberranzan, he might mount a direct challenge to the priestesses—if he were inclined to do so—but even if he brought the full strength of Sorcere against the ruling Houses of the city, what would be left if he did succeed? The smoldering wreckage of Ched Nasad seemed a likely result. Most likely the House loyalties among the masters of the wizards’ school would cripple any such nonsense from the start.
    No, Gromph decided. I am no revolutionary anxious to sweep away the old order—not yet, anyway.
    Besides, the most likely cause of all the trouble was some insidious new snare of Lolth’s devising. Gromph wouldn’t put it past the Spider Queen to fall completely and inexplicably silent, just to see who might slink out of the shadows in order to take advantage of her priestesses’ temporary “weakness.” That meant that sooner or later, Lolth would tire of her game and restore her favor to her clerics. When that happened, woe to anyone foolish enough to have shown the shallowness of his allegiance to the established order. No, the wisest thing to do was to pass along to Triel what he’d learned, and to make sure Matron Baenre didn’t hoard the knowledge to herself. Pharaun’s words indicated in a few quick brushstrokes a very grave danger to Menzoberranzan, and Gromph refused to be remembered as the archmage who allowed his city to be razed.
    With a sigh, he stood and dropped silently back down the shaft. He rather hoped Triel was in the middle of something awkward, so that he could savor the petty pleasure of interrupting her with news that could not wait.
     
    “The question is not where we should go next,” observed Pharaun with a wry grimace. “The question is how we shall escape Hlaungadath alive.” The Master of Sorcere was exhausted. Dust plastered the blood and sweat on his face, and he was so tired he could do no more than collapse into the shadow of a long, crumbling wall. Having long since exhausted any spells useful in battle, he wielded a wand of thin black iron from which he called forth bolts of lightning. Pharaun glanced up at the sky as if to gauge how much more daylight remained, and he quickly winced away. “Will the cursed sun never set?”
    “Get up, wizard,” said Quenthel. “If we rest, we die.”
    She, too, trembled with exhaustion, but she stayed on her feet. The long snake-headed whips she carried still coiled and hissed dangerously, covered with gore, but blood trickled from a nasty cut above her left eye, and two furrows of broken and twisted links in her mail shirt showed just how close she’d come to dying under the claws of some hulking monstrosity of gray skin and spiderlike eyes.
    “You’re more vulnerable to the lamias’ powers of suggestion and illusion while you’re fatigued,” Halisstra said. “Better to die fighting than to fall under the dominion of such a creature.”
    She was in much the same condition as the others. Since she and Danifae had survived their initial