Resurrection

and components. The room was disordered, as though someone had searched it roughly.

Thinking that the lichdrow's laboratory or quarters were a likely hiding place for the phylactery, Gromph moved carefully through the lichdrow's wards and pored over the rooms. His frustration mounted when he found nothing. He went over it again, certain that somewhere was the telltale spoor of a masking spell. Again he found nothing.

He was exhausting his spells, exhausting his body. Between his spell duel with the lichdrow and his scrying of the fortress, he had spent fully half of his repertory. If he did not find the phylactery soon, he would have to rest, restudy his spellbooks, re-memorize the incantations that slipped from his fatigued mind one by one as he cast them. By then, Yasraena might have located the phylactery herself.

He sighed, mopped his forehead, and moved on. He had only the temple to Lolth and a few other structures remaining.

The temple first.

With minimal effort, he slipped past the elaborate wards that protected the temple of Lolth.

No doubt Yasraena herself had cast them. Gromph thought her spellcraft paltry. Her wards were no match for him.

The interior of the temple appeared much the same as the temples to Lolth maintained by other great Houses. A sacrificial altar, limned in violet faerie fire and dotted with candles, sat in the apse at one end of the large, oval nave. Behind the altar towered the enormous sculpture of a spider, carved in lifelike detail from smooth basalt or perhaps jet.

Gromph knew it to be a guardian golem that would animate should anyone enter the temple without authorization.

High-backed, ornate stone benches lined the nave, facing the apse. Transparent gossamer curtains, made to look like spiderwebs, hung across the temple's faerie fire limned windows.

Spider motifs appeared on everything, from the black altar cloth to the carved door jambs to the armrests of the benches. Spiderwebs hung in every corner, the silvery threads and their small black creators regarded as blessings from Lolth.

A depiction of the Spider Queen in her hybrid form-a beautiful drow female head and torso jutting from the bloated body of a giant black widow-decorated the underside of the temple's domed ceiling. Gromph wondered in passing whether Lolth appeared the same since her return,

whether Lolth was the same.

Almost the whole of the temple glowed in Gromph's sight, alight with enhancements and protections cast by Lolth's priestesses. Otherwise, the nave was empty.

Gromph blew out a frustrated sigh and prepared to move on, but something rankled him. He kept the scrying eye on the temple, looking, thinking.

"What is it, Archmage?" asked Prath, excitement in his voice. "Have you found it?"

"Silence," Nauzhror admonished the apprentice, though the Master's voice too betrayed a certain eagerness.

Gromph shook his head. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but. .

The spider golem!

His scrying eye did not show it as magical, yet it should have detected as such-strongly-unless the Agrach Dyrr priestesses had replaced the former golem with a normal statue. He deemed that unlikely.

An excited charge ran through him. He caused the scrying eye to draw nearer to the golem until its image filled the viewing crystal. He pored over it, inch by inch. Was it standing atop a secret panel in the floor? He cast another series of divinations, attempting to get even an inkling of whether or not the golem's magic was being masked.

At first he met with no success, but he persisted.

Finally, and for only an instant, he caught a flash of a faint red glow, like light squeezed from under a closed door. In that single instant, the golem flared in his sight, as befitted the latent magic that would animate it, but a still brighter glow flared from within the golem.

Nauzhror smiled, Prath gasped, and Gromph could not contain a chuckle.

"The golem," Nauzhror breathed.

The Master of Sorcere sounded as exhausted as Gromph, though he had done nothing other than observe.

"The golem is masked," Gromph said, nodding. He could not believe the lichdrow's temerity.

"The golem is the phylactery?" Prath asked.

Gromph studied the construct for a while longer, confirming his suspicion with a series of spells.

When he finished, he said, "No, but the phylactery is embedded within it."

Despite the evidence they had seen in the crystal, Prath and Nauzhror's faces showed disbelief.

"Within the temple's guardian golem?" Prath said. "It is heresy."

"It is ingenious," Nauzhror countered.

Gromph agreed. The lichdrow, a male, had not only hidden his phylactery within House

Dyrr's temple of Lolth, he had hidden it within the body of the temple's most powerful guardian.

Gromph had located it only because he had known the spider sculpture to be a golem that should have glowed in his magic-detecting sight. That it had not had caused him to look more closely,

and he still had almost missed it.