Read Homeland for Free Online Page A

turned inward as she felt the emanations of her spell. She held her fingers out in front of her, tracing a slow line, like some macabre divining rod, toward drow flesh.
    “In there!” she declared, pointing to a panel at the base of the wall. The soldiers jumped to it like a pack of ravenous wolves and tore through the secret door. Inside a hidden cubby huddled the children of House DeVir. These were nobles, not commoners, and could not be taken alive.
    Zak quickened his pace to get beyond the scene, but he heard vividly the children’s helpless screams as the hungry Do’Urden soldiers finished their job. Zak found himself in a run now. He rushed around a bend in the hallway, nearly bowling over Dinin and Rizzen.
    “Nalfein is dead,” Rizzen declared impassively.
    Zak immediately turned a suspicious eye on the younger Do’Urden son.
    “I killed the DeVir soldier who committed the deed,” Dinin assured him, not even hiding his cocky smile.
    Zak had been around for nearly four centuries, and he was certainly not ignorant of the ways of his ambitious race. The brother princes had come in defensively at the back of the lines, with a host of Do’Urden soldiers between them and the enemy. By the time they even encountered a drow that was not of their own house, the majority of the DeVirs’ surviving soldiers had already switched allegiance to House Do’Urden. Zak doubted that either of the Do’Urden brothers had even seen action against a DeVir.
    “The description of the carnage in the prayer room has been spread throughout the ranks,” Rizzen said to the weapons master. “You performed with your usual excellence—as we have come to expect.”
    Zak shot the patron a glare of contempt and kept on his way, down though the structure’s main doors and out beyond the magical darkness and silence into Menzoberranzan’s dark dawn. Rizzen was Matron Malice’s present partner in a long line of partners, and no more. When Malice was finished with him, she would either relegate him back to the ranks of the common soldiery, stripping him of the name Do’Urden and all the rights that accompanied it, or she would dispose of him. Zak owed him no respect.
    Zak moved out beyond the mushroom fence to the highest vantage point he could find, then fell to the ground. He watched, amazed, a few moments later, when the procession of the Do’Urden army, patron and son, soldiers and clerics, and the slow-moving line of two dozen drow zombies, made its way back home. They had lost, and left behind, nearly all of their slave fodder in the attack, but the line leaving the wreckage of House DeVir was longer than the line that had come in earlier that night. The slaves had been replaced twofold by captured DeVir slaves, and fifty or more of the DeVir common troops, showing typical drow loyalty, had willingly joined the attackers. These traitorous drow would be interrogated— magically interrogated—by the Do’Urden clerics to ensure their sincerity.
    They would pass the test to a one, Zak knew. Drow elves were creatures of survival, not of principle. The soldiers would be given new identities and would be kept within the privacy of the Do’Urden compound for a few months, until the fall of House DeVir became an old and forgotten tale.
    Zak did not follow immediately. Rather, he cut through the rows of mushroom trees and found a secluded dell, where he plopped down on a patch of mossy carpet and raised his gaze to the eternal darkness of the cavern’s ceiling—and the eternal darkness of his existence.
    It would have been prudent for him to remain silent at that time; he was an invader to the most powerful section of the vast city. He thought of the possible witnesses to his words, the same dark elves who had watched the fall of House DeVir, who had wholeheartedly enjoyed the spectacle. In the face of such behavior and such carnage as this night had seen, Zak could not contain his emotions. His lament came out as a plea to some god