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into a run. The ships were lost, but perhaps the mercenaries he’d left behind were faring better.
    He ran through several passages before he heard the song: a jubilant paean to Eilistraee voiced by Qilué’s priestesses.
    Fury surged through him, speeding his steps into a headlong sprint, but even as he ran, Gorlist acknowledged the truth: The Dragon’s Hoard band was defeated. He was alone, without resources or allies. Everything Nisstyre had built over years of effort was gone.
    Or nearly everything.
    Gorlist veered off into a side passage, one that led to his own private stash. It would provide a new start. One way or another, Liriel Baenre would die. He would leave no means untested, scorn no alliance—no alliance, no matter how deadly or distasteful.
    Suddenly Gorlist knew what he must do. As soon as he could, he would return to the hoard chamber. He would find Nisstyre’s ruby, and he would seek out someone who hated Liriel nearly as much as he did.
     
    In the Abyss, time did not exist. There was no day or night such as the surface dwellers knew, no magical timepiece enchanted anew at the midnight hour. The drow female stumbling through that gray place could not know that the slim crescent moon that shone on the night of her defeat had since grown smug and big-bellied.
    The same moon had waned and waxed several times since the battle of the Dragon’s Hoard and the death of Nisstyre, her valuable and reluctant ally. The drow knew nothing of that, either, nor would that knowledge have mattered. Her purpose, her entire being, was focused on the hunt for Liriel Baenre. What was the passing of spring and summer to a drow of the Underdark, and what did it matter if the hunt took place in Menzoberranzan or across the seas of the surface world? Hatred, like the Abyss, knew no limits of time and place.
    Only that hatred fueled Shakti Hunzrin, traitor-priestess to both Lolth and Vhaerun, and kept her pressing on in her search for escape.
    To the exhausted drow, it seemed that both of her deities had abandoned her. She had viewed the Abyss through the scrying bowls employed by Lolth’s priestesses, but none of her studies had prepared her for the reality.
    Fetid mists rose from the ground, which was sometimes strewn with sharp rocks and sometimes so soft, so indistinct, that it hardly seemed solid at all. Bizarre fungi grew to huge size. More than once the famished drow had attempted to break off a piece of giant, malformed mushroom only to have some strange, slumbering creature come awake roaring for blood.
    So far, Shakti had been equal to all these battles. Hatred always made her stronger. In the Abyss, hatred was the natural element, and Shakti breathed it in as a fish breathes water, but though her spirit burned ever stronger, her physical form was weakening. She could not continue in this manner for much longer.
    “I can save you.”
    The words were spoken softly, seductively. Shakti whirled toward the sound, her hand instinctively flying to the handle of her snakeheaded whip.
    Too late, she remembered that the snakes were dead, slain in battle with Liriel Baenre. It was a marvel that she could forget this for even an instant, since the stench of rotting snake flesh had followed her for what seemed an eternity. It clung to her robes still, even though all that remained of the once-proud weapon was five slim chains of bone and cartilage held together by dried sinew. The rotting weapon had been a constant torment and a danger as well. The Abyss, like all places of the dead, had its scavengers, and the smell of carrion drew them. Yet never once did Shakti consider discarding the weapon. It reminded her that she had been a high priestess, heir to House Hunzrin. She would die with her whip in her hand as befitted a noble of Menzoberranzan.
    “I can save you,” the voice repeated, more insistently this time.
    Chagrined by her wandering thoughts, Shakti forced herself to focus on the swirling mists. A dark, lithesome