Archmage Read Free Page A

self-preservation. Those lesser Houses were too busy securing their own fences and structures to contemplate invading others.
    Matron Mother Baenre blinked open her red eyes and considered the glorious revelations.
    “Chaos begets order,” she whispered.
    Yvonnel the Eternal’s memories had shown Quenthel the way.
    “No, she said more loudly, shaking her head, for surely this diabolical possibility had been divinely inspired. “Lady Lolth has shown me the way.”

    His sly taunting of his sister did little to improve Gromph’s bitter mood. Even if he toppled her, even if he destroyed every matron mother and high priestess in the city, what would he accomplish?
    He was a male, nothing more, and even when Lady Lolth had turned to the Weave, to a domain he had come to dominate more than any dark elf in centuries—in millennia, in perhaps the entire history of the race— Lolth’s gratitude had not reached to him, nor his fellow male wizards.
    Sorcere, the drow school of arcane magic, the academy under the control of Gromph, had counted among its students almost exclusively male drow, with only a few notable exceptions of priestesses looking to enhance their magical repertoire by adding arcane spells to their divinely inspired magic. Yet as soon as the Weave had become a web, as soon as it appeared that Lady Lolth would steal the domain of the goddess Mystra, the noble Houses had flooded Sorcere with their daughters as students.
    The matron mothers, with Lolth’s blessing, would not suffer the males of Menzoberranzan their position atop the ranks of Lolth’s arcane disciples.
    Would Gromph’s ultimate title of archmage have proven secure? But Lolth had lost her bid for the Weave, so Gromph had learned, though the details were not yet known to him. The Weave was no longer in her spidery claws and the city and school would return to normal, perhaps. Gromph would remain the archmage, and, he now even more poignantly understood, would remain a “mere male” in Menzoberranzan.
    Or perhaps not, he mused as he pushed through the door of his private chambers, to see Minolin Fey seated on the great-backed chair, their tiny child Yvonnel suckling at the high priestess’s breast.
    “Your presence is long overdue,” the infant said in a gurgling, watery voice. Baby Yvonnel turned her head to stare hard at the archmage, her threatening visage only slightly diminished by the spit and mother’s milk dribbling out the side of her tiny mouth.
    Her eyes! Those eyes!
    Gromph remembered that look so well. With that one petulant expression, Yvonnel his child had thrown him back a thousand years and more, to the court of Yvonnel his mother.
    “Where is Methil?” the infant demanded, referring to the ugly illithid who had imparted the memories and knowledge of Yvonnel the Eternal, Gromph’s mother, the longest-serving matron mother Menzoberranzan had ever known, into the malleable mind of this tiny creature before she had even been birthed. “I told you to bring Methil.”
    “Methil will soon arrive,” Gromph assured her. “I was with the matron mother.”
    That brought a bit of a growl from the child, one that sounded almost feral.
    Gromph courteously bowed before his baby.
    The side door to the chamber banged open then and in slid a handmaiden, an ugly yochlol, resembling a huge, half-melted gray candle with waving tentacles.
    “The illithid has arrived for your lesson, Yvonnel,” the demon creature said in a bubbly, muddy voice that still somehow managed to hold the sharp edge of a shriek. The handmaiden slid over to the child, leaving a trail of muddy goo, its tentacles reaching for the babe though it was still several feet from Minolin Fey—who was all too happy, even eager, to surrender the baby.
    Out of the room glided the yochlol, one tentacle dragging back to clasp the door and slam it shut.
    Minolin Fey slumped back in the high-backed great chair, not even bothering to straighten her gown to cover her exposed,