Escape From the Drow

"We believe that too," said Jade. "The elves sow indolence and they get nothing but wasted lives. We sow industry and in spite of our harsh environment we have reaped wealth and prestige. But getting back to our enemy. According to our legends, there were those that wanted it both ways. They wanted to be immortal like the elves but powerful like the drow. Nobody was ever sure whether any of them succeeded in this aim, but if they did, then their fell combination of immortality and power would be deadly. And without old age or death to blunt the edge of their cruelty, they would be totally insatiable."

"So they are just another drow, only even more psychotic," sneered Digg. "And we have just dispatched a few of those, so what's the big deal."

"Don't show your ignorance," snapped Jade. "Don't you see that immortality means not only limitless cruelty, but also limitless accumulation of knowledge, strength and power? Once these enemies understood the cancer that started to afflict them, they used it to their own advantage; incorporating the growths to make them bigger and stronger, and to give them the power to replicate themselves.

"The growths transformed and deformed them, into the huge hideous gargoyles they have become. They learned to use the mind -- to burrow into the brains of their enemies and to control them. And what is worse, they never kill their enemies, but totally enslave them. Infecting them with their own cancer to make them immortal - yet twisted and unsatisfied. We call them the Über-drow, but I believe you dwarfs and stunted humans have other names for them -- brain drillers, death dealers, soul strippers, mind slayers."

The rest of the party fell silent. All of them knew of the mind slayer. A shadowy creature of legend, part devil, part mortal; fully evil. An underworld gargoyle, reputed to strip the soul from the body. The adventurers now realised what they were up against, and all wondered if they would ever get back alive.

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Maxi also had a fair idea what was in store for the prisoners. He had never fully believed in the Über-drow, but he suspected their involvement after his intelligence reports told him of captured drow fighting their former companions, and how their brains had been too scrambled to be of any use when they were recaptured. So when the old High Priestess had told him in the strictest of confidence that she suspected a mind-destroying Über-drow in the mine pits, he was not completely surprised.

But Maxi had more immediate and pressing concerns. When he first took on his present command he was perfectly aware that the halflings were thieves and deserved to die a painful death at the altar, but he had deliberately withheld this information. Not at that time because of any conscious wish to rebel, and certainly not because of any tender feelings towards the prisoners, but simply for tactical reasons. The halflings were far too valuable to be wasted on meaningless temple rituals, no matter how entertaining these might be. Maxi thought there was far too much of the frivolous in the priesthood, and that their temple rituals were altogether elven in their hedonistic vulgarity. There is too much disembowelling going on here, he thought to himself regretfully.

Unknown to the two priestesses, Maxi had been in contact directly with the Secretariat through the spying ball. He had been following orders from this source in killing Meriem, who for some reason had ran foul of the new High Priestess. Maxi detested these grudge killings among the women, which he sneeringly described as 'bitch slap executions,' (though only to himself). He resented being used as their instrument for revenge when two former colleagues fell out.

But in this case Maxi remembered Meriem's insults and the wild lunge at his face, which would have seriously maimed or blinded most warriors with slower reactions to his own. It was obvious to Maxi that she had wanted to scar him badly. And not in a nice way, he thought, smiling with fond memories as he touched some of the scars Trieste had inflicted during their most passionate love making sessions.

Adding the acolyte to his hit list had been his own idea, and pushing them into the fray alive had certainly been a risk. But he had decided that the prisoners must continue to believe that their escape was unplanned.

Jade seemed to have been an afterthought of the new High Priestess, and Maxi again cursed a ruling elite that put petty revenge above military strategy. As someone familiar with drow society and culture, Jade would have suspected what was going on. What made it worse was that Jade was almost fluent in the lowland lingua franca spoken by the halflings and dwarf woman, and would have lost no time in communicating her thoughts.

The presence of a high level drow priestess and three attendants obviously attempting to kill them, may have served to allay some of those suspicions. Nevertheless, Meriem was a dangerous adversary, and even with his warning shot, things might have gone differently if it was not for the quick thinking of Jade in rushing them. Just like her mother, Maxi thought with some admiration.

The teenage acolyte had almost unravelled his plan after Jade had charmed her. The temple favourite did not know much, but may still have told the prisoners rather more than Maxi wanted them to know. Maxi was again in luck when the prisoners were so distracted by Meriem and the soldiers that they did not notice him open the secret door a crack and discharge a bolt into her neck.

Maxi had also misjudged his men's reaction. They did not resent him killing two of their own. The lads had been insubordinate, and any leader would have done the same. Their sexual frustration would also have gnawed at them, and many of them would have been secretly delighted at the punishment meted out to others who got lucky in that regard.

No, the main problem was their simmering unease over the death of not one but two priestesses, even though he had managed to convince most of them that Meriem and her acolyte were traitors to their own order and deserved to die. He had even planted in their minds the thought that the High Priestess herself was suspect, and that there were intrigues within intrigues that they could not possibly understand. In other words he had totally confused his rather simple minded foot soldiers, and played upon their loyalty to the greater good of the drow as a whole, relying on his own status as a commander.

This ruse of baffling his men had always worked in the past and they had never before questioned his actions. But in this case, it seemed that the deliberate killing of two priestesses was just a step too far. Maxi naturally assumed his men would hate and fear the priestesses as he did, so he was disconcerted and quite amazed to discover that Meriem and her whelp actually had some followers among his men.

In his youth, Maxi had read widely on theological matters, and had even attended some of the temple instruction. This was designed for women, particularly those with aspirations for the priesthood, but some of the more talented males had been allowed to attend. But the more Maxi learned about the demonic Spider, the more disillusioned he became.

Maxi was certainly no stranger to cruelty. He had used torture himself on recalcitrant prisoners, though he did find it rather distasteful. But the priestess's fascination with cruelty for its own sake, their orgiastic blood lust and the pleasure they felt in sheer domination revolted him. He rejected the Spider, and having neither the imagination nor the training to conceive of any other type of god, he became a staunch atheist. The strange fascination that both his own compatriots and captive prisoners had towards their fantasy creations was something he found difficult to come to terms with, and so he had underestimated the mutinous rumblings that would occur with the murder of two priestesses.

There was also the problem of his men discovering the messy destiny the High Priestess had planned for the prisoners. It had been decided that the foot soldiers would not be let into the secret, because the hierarchy did not want to incite the mass panic that even the mention of the Über-drow would engender. However, some of them seemed to be mistrustful even before Meriem met her end. Maxi wondered whether he should let the men into part of the plan, and tell them there were vermin in the mines for the prisoners to wipe out, but not mention the Über-drow mind slayer.

And then there was the nagging problem of Jade. Maxi realised that he actually missed Trieste. Not just the sex, which was amazing, but the sparring matches, the long cosy evenings in bed, and waking up with her warm body beside him. At first he had been jealous of Trieste's affections towards Jade, but later came to accept them, and even admire them as part of her character. He wondered what would happen to drow society if all women had been allowed to keep their own children.

Maxi had promised Trieste he would look after her daughter on her death. So far, he thought ruefully, I have not done very well on that count. Maxi realised that having Jade's soul sucked out by a brain drilling Über-drow was not what Trieste had had in mind as the future for her daughter.

Maxi wondered what he could do to help Jade. Then he started fantasising about continuing his relationship with Trieste through her daughter. He would join with Jade and the others in fighting the Über-drow, and while he was with her he would woo this obviously spirited girl with a mixture of tenderness and strength, aided by his good looks and obvious military prowess. Maxi could then elope with his lover to one of the above ground frontier human settlements, where he would have no trouble securing work as a mercenary, fighting his own former companions.

But then he dismissed this idea as impractical, and totally sentimental. Maxi knew more than anyone else, that even if the prisoners defeated the mind slayer, they still had to contend with Maxi's own guard. Maxi had trained the guard himself and had no illusions about their prowess in battle and the strength of their loyalty. His men followed him while he had the seal of approval from the temple, but as soon as he became a renegade their loyalties would shift and they would cut him down without hesitation.

Unless he could turn their superstition and fear to his own advantage. A plan started to form in his mind, one that would use the mind slayer to gain freedom for Maxi and his potential love.

Chapter 6 - Maxi's plan

Before revisiting his plan, Maxi checked again the secret double door that led from the operations room to the passageway, and thence to the mine complex. It had been imposed on him under pain of death that it had to remain closed and locked at all times. The door was magical; it could be opened with ease from the operations room, but could not be opened, closed or even detected from inside the passageway.

Originally it had been a normal, non-magical secret door. Or as normal as any door could be when it was fashioned by the dwarfs. The drow had employed them as free labourers, not slaves, because the intricate craftsmanship and loving care required for such an important piece of work could not be achieved by any forced labour. Even drow slaves engaged in intellectual and artistic pursuits such as temple functions were not totally mistreated; and drow were used to slavery. Dwarfs, with their strange society that valued freedom almost as much as the elves and lowland humans, would never work at their best when subjected to any form of coercion.

So even when the door was first fashioned, it was special, a dwarfen master work that could not be detected when closed, even by other dwarfs. So if prisoners escaped from the mines, or even if goblins, shriek demons, kobolds and other more terrible inhabitants of the underworld crept into the working mine tunnels, they would not find their way to the operations room and the garrison.

Then, when the door had only recently been completed and the first prisoners had been forced to work the mines, some of them overthrew their overseers with the help of a mob of feral orcs. This was before the Secretariat had fashioned the spying glass with their arcane spells, so the escape was not discovered until the guards were overdue at the barracks. The troop leader had arrogantly -- and foolishly in Maxi's opinion -- led a frontal assault down the mine. The drow warriors could only move one at a time down the mine corridors, and they were easily picked off by snipers using the captured crossbows of the overseers. The commander had assumed the slaves would be ill-armed, undisciplined, demoralised and unskilled, but it soon became apparent they were being guided by a leader with prodigious skill and iron fisted discipline, capable of melding a maladjusted rabble into a well drilled unit.

As her troops started falling around her, the military commander changed tactics. She retreated back into the operations room, and the priestess cast a powerful closing spell, ensuring that even those with sufficient penetration and ability to find the secret door, would not be able to open or close it from the mine complex. The slaves would be starved out, together with their unknown leader, or forced to negotiate their way down over ever narrowing passages to the underworld, where even drow had never trodden. Either way, the problem would go away and the garrison temple would not be violated.

So six months later, after the diminished garrison had been relieved by a new detachment, the new leader reopened the door, this time accompanied by the priestess in charge of the mine garrison, and both led a renewed assault down the corridor. The two leaders expected a quick mopping up operation, disposing of the remains, with maybe the capture of the last few emaciated prisoners to be the star turns at a ritualistic temple sacrifice.

But as the leaders approached the central chamber at the bottom of the mine tunnel, they were met firstly by a hail of crossbow bolts, and then by an unknown force that made the knees of the surviving troops buckle under them, and caused them to writhe on the ground. The military leader was unaffected by the blast, and had skilfully deflected the bolts with her shield. But even she was brought down by the next assault; a writhing mass of tentacles from a grotesque parody of a drow woman -- her head deformed into a shapeless lump, and her bloated viscera hanging out of her gut. The mind slayer had oozed out of the shadows and surprised them all. The beast was cold and clammy, and was therefore undetected even by the keen heat vision of the drow.

The priestess kept her head. The blast momentarily stunned her, but nothing more. And she was too far away to be hit by the bolts, or entangled in the hideous gargoyle that was now sucking the brain out of the military commander. She dropped her shield and fled. She quickly slipped through the open door into the operations room and closed it behind her, just as the mind slayer gave chase and a second blast hit her. This time she was the sole target of the mind slayer and was hit with its full force. The priestess was thrown across the room, banged her head against the wall, and lost consciousness.

When she came round, with a headache such as she had never known before, the priestess tried to recall her experiences in the caverns. She remembered every minute of the time in the mines, as though she was seeing it in slow motion. She also just remembered her military commander opening the door and marching upon the remnants of the rebel slaves. But her memory of the time before was gone. She could not access her magical powers, and even her name was hard to recall. She knew then that she would not last more than a day if she returned to the main drow settlement, and that when the next shift relieved her in six months time they would not be keeping her alive.

The priestess knew what to do. She took out a quill and parchment and started writing, quickly at first in case her short term memory also faded. But then as she realised this was not going to happen, she wrote more slowly, dredging her mind for every last detail of what had happened to her and to the soldiers. She described how the soldiers had reacted to the first blast; the way their knees had buckled, how they howled with agony, and the blood and grey material seeping from their ears and noses. Then as some of them shakily got to their feet, how the bolts had torn into them, cutting them down like so many mushrooms at harvest.

She recorded her own experience of the first blast. Her first sensation had been agonising pain like a knife in her head, quickly replaced by an unpleasant sucking sensation, as if her memories were being violently torn from her brain, leaving a sticky mass of tangled emotions behind. It had taken a supreme effort of will to wrench herself away, drop her shield and run to the secret door. She only saw the creature for a fleeting second, but it was one of the clearest memories she had. One that caused flashbacks and nightmares for many days afterwards.

She vividly described the sunken eye-holes, the reptilian scales, the hideous growths over all the body, the trailing viscera, and the loathsome tentacles, twitching in a face with no expression at all. Yet what made the vision even more horrifying was the remnant shape of a young and beautiful drow woman within that bloated body.

Although her long term memory had gone, her short term recall and her powers of observation were excellent. Part of a plethora of skills that had elevated her to the priesthood to start with. So it was that the drow gained what was probably the best ever description of a devouring Über-drow attack from one who had survived the encounter.

The priestess spent the next month writing and rewriting her account, adding new material as she remembered further details. Then once her memory had been wrung dry and all committed to parchment she made her final preparations. Putting on her ceremonial robes as Priestess of the Spider Goddess, she kindled the fire at the base of the altar, adding a drop of purple liquid to the brazier to give the flames the purple glow characteristic of the demon pits. She thought she could see the figure of the Spider flickering in the firelight, and she had never felt so close to her Goddess.

The Spider's devoted admirer climbed on top of the altar and positioned herself as she had herself positioned so many others. Then after a short prayer she cut a rope that was next to her. The last thing she remembered was the swishing sound of the blade, just before it severed her carotid arteries.

Maxi had found the priestess's report in Meriem's chamber, and he read it one more time, admiring the author's narrative skills. Then his mind became distracted with thoughts of Jade, and then Trieste. Maxi drifted back to that final night with Trieste, when Jade had been away learning her art from the temple slave who was also her tutor.

Trieste had summoned him to her quarters, and had rushed him as soon as he came into the room, knocking him to the floor. Maxi had fought back as Trieste jumped on top of him, pinning her knee in his groin -- though not too hard because she wanted it later. Maxi had pushed Trieste away by grabbing her jaw and forcing it upwards. After Trieste fell off him, they roughly tore at each others clothes and made love all day.

But Maxi's fantasies towards Jade moved in another direction, and while they still led to the same end, they traversed over totally unfamiliar ground to get there. Ground that involved a different and protective side to Maxi's nature. Where he defended his love from the evil beings of the underworld, and won her devotion. And where Jade gave herself to him willingly, passionately and gently, without either fighting him or jumping on him.