The Nether Scroll

Left with a choice between staying alone on one side of the waterfall or being with the people he knew best on the other, Tiep chose to follow Dru and Galimer through the water. A simple supper was waiting for them. The food looked natural and smelled delicious after three days of frog soup and other delicacies. Druhallen needed a moment of watching Galimer and Rozt'a eat before he overcame his reservations about eating Lady Mantis's food. Tiep needed a moment more.

The lady herself did immediately join them but carried Sheemzher to a white marble building similar to the one in her Weathercote glade, but larger and divided into chambers. Galimer whispered that he'd dwelt in a different chamber than the one Wyndyfarh chose for Sheemzher. She remained out of sight for several moments then sat at the head of her table as if her plain wooden chair were a gilded throne. Wyndyfarh didn't eat the food she served, but did keep her word about answering questions.

She began with the questions Druhallen asked regarding Beast Lord's fascination with the Dekanter goblins. "To an illithid—a mind flayer here in Faerun—anything that is sentient but is not illithid is thrall: a slave to be kept for work, breeding, amusement, and, of course, consumption. There is, however, an ideal thrall, a sentient race some call the gith. Gith were specifically bred to serve their masters. When the gith revolted successfully, the illithid race entered a decline from which they have never recovered and from which they will never recover, partly because they have forgotten what they were and partly because there are those, including the children of the gith, who will never forget."

"Are you a child of the gith?" Dru asked when she paused.

He thought it a serious question. Wyndyfarh found it droll. She laughed to herself before replying,

"Imagine a taller, cleverer goblin and you might imagine the gith. No living mind flayer of Faerun has seen one—"

Rozt'a interrupted with, "The Beast Lord is an alhoon."

Wyndyfarh indulged another private laugh. "Be assured, it has never seen a gith. It is guided only by memories stolen from the elder brain of the colony where it was spawned, wherever that was. That memory became an obsession that led it into a study of material magic, which is anathema among illithids. They have their own disciplines of will and thought which they refuse to call magic. An illithid practicing material magic is driven out of its colony and invariably pursues the spells that will transform it into a lich, an alhoon."

"Invariably?" Dru rejected invariably; invariably there were exceptions.

"Illithids do not believe in death," Wyndyfarh said with a stiff smile. "The only conceivable fate for an illithid is Commencement—becoming a part of its colony's elder brain. An exiled illithid invariably seeks to avoid death. They are a rational race, according to their understanding. I have no interest in illithid obsessions, but the Dekanter alhoon most likely believed that if it could recreate the gith, its elder brain would forgive it and it would receive Commencement. For a hundred years it had pursued its obsession, seeming to nurture the goblin tribes and littering the Greypeaks with the deformed, crippled fruits of its labors in the abandoned mines. Then it found a Nether scroll. Duke Windheir cannot guess how it could learn anything from a Nether scroll, but it did, and you have seen the results. My servants were lost, defiled. I claimed vengeance and was denied. I sent no more servants to Dekanter. My eyes were blind until Sheemzher came, and Sheemzher brought me you."

"And vengeance could be served, if it was not done in your name?" Tiep had found his voice and his courage.

Lady Mantis wore her most predatory expression when she saw who had spoken, but she answered the youth's question. "In a word, yes."

She continued to study Tiep as though he might make a tasty meal. Druhallen sought to redirect her attention.

"And so long as Duke Windheir never found out?" He didn't know of a Duke Windheir and would have been surprised if any Faerun mortal did.

Wyndyfarh confirmed Dru's suspicion with an icy glance and Galimer issued a statement, not a question, to break the tension—

"You were lucky there were mind flayers from Llacerelly hunting the Beast Lord while you were trying to steal the Nether scroll."

Dru had never heard of Llacerelly either and foresaw lengthy conversations with his best friend once they were free of Weathercote and Lady Wyndyfarh.

Wyndyfarh used Galimer's remark as the threshold for her own questions most of which they couldn't answer. None of them had noticed the patterns on the mind flayers' robes or whether any of them had six tentacles rather than four. Tiep remembered that one of the mind flayers had longer tentacles than the others, but he hadn't noticed if they were tipped with claws of horn or steel. They did agree the Beast Lord was fighting for its undead life.