***

Chapter 17:

The Spirit in Battle

***

The Priestesses of Lloth -not of sufficient status to attend the ceremony that the Matron Mother Ardulace and her daughter were performing in the ritual chamber, but still important enough to stay within the temple proper itself while the ritual was taking place- were to say the very least shocked and more than a touch offended when the band of newcomers from Ched Nasad were invited to join in the ritual room by none other than the Matron Mother herself. They were again surprised when not more than five minutes after the ritual began those self-same newcomers exited the ritual chamber. To the eyes of a drow, trained since birth almost to sense weakness and discomfort in others and exploit it, the newcomers, under the command of the powerful and enigmatic Veldrin, seemed unusually discomfited. And then the killing began.

In the guise of Veldrin, Brynn was able to approach one of the priestesses, and the despite the fact that the priestess aware of 'Veldrin's' odd behavior she was the first of the many priestesses in the temple that day to be surprised for a third time when Brynn drew both of her katanas and severed her white-crowned head from her shoulders. The dance of death had begun again for Brynn Trueblade and her companions, and they knew the steps of that dance all too well for their opponents.

Which isn't to say taking down a temple full of Lloth's priestesses was easy for the Blades, it just wasn't as hard as the drow thought it ought to have been. Besides which, they weren't on a purge mission. The way Brynn looked at it they had to get to the door and if one of the priestesses happened to be unlucky enough to stand between her and that door she was willing to do a little blood letting to get there. Of course that caught the attention of the other drow in the temple, not just the priestesses, but the warriors that helped guard it as well, and pretty soon the whole place was a mess.

Not easy, no, but not hard either.

Outside the temple Brynn called a quick halt, pulled a piece of cloth from out of her belt pouch, and wiped the blood off of her blades before sheathing them again. At the same time Aerie and Anomen worked together to put a seal on the temple doors, preventing the remaining drow inside from getting out and warning the others.

"Make yourselves presentable," Brynn ordered with a sly grin. "I don't intend on starting anymore fights, some of these guys aren't that bad well, no some aren't as bad as the rest well no, they all are pretty much evil sons of spiders. Anyway, I'd prefer to get out of this with all my arms and legs still stuck to the rest of me and I assume you'd like the same, so try to act drow for a few more minutes."

Nods all around accompanied the end of her statement and the rest of the Blades quickly tidied up as best they could. They marched down the streets of Ust Natha just as they always had: their hands on the hilts of their respective weapons, an air of superiority on their assumed dark-elven visages. That is until they were on the platform that housed the gates out of the city, at which point an overly friendly, or perhaps hungry, spider of the monstrous type decided that it wanted Brynn to pet it.

Now, Brynn, despite her completely understandable moodiness, her grief-stricken depression, and the loss of her soul, had been a pretty good sport as far as spiders were concerned during her stay in Ust Natha. Utter disgust and hatred just sort of overwhelmed her better judgment this time though. Before the spider had the chance to get within a foot of Brynn it was reduced to a leg less blob as both of Brynn's blades swept out and sliced off all of its limbs. The next attack cut the spider into quarters, and the one after that into sixteenths, at which point there really wasn't much left for Brynn to cut up. Other than the legs, which lay flopping about a little on their own like a bunch of giant hard-shelled fuzz-coated caterpillars, the spider had become little more than a puddle of goop and spider guts on the floor of the platform.

Brynn looked supremely satisfied.

The half a dozen real drow on the platform looked ready to explode into violence. "Methinks we have been discovered, my raven," Haer'Dalis remarked dryly to Brynn as the drow began to close in on them.

Brynn flicked the spider guts off of her katana. "I've been wanting to do that ever since we got to this lightless little corner of hell," she said. "Hey!" she shouted to the advancing drow, "you sniveling little cowards, attack already, I've got better things to do than stand here and wait for you to work up the courage to do something other than wet yourselves!"

That did it. Though these drow were mere merchants they could still fight, and they still had the usual drow tendency to overreact to insults.

"I thought you wanted to get out without anymore trouble!" Jaheira accused Brynn. The two of them stood back to back, fending of their respective opponents.

Brynn casually parried the incoming attacks her opponent was making. "I changed my mind," she replied. She skewered the male that was attacking her, driving her right hand katana into his throat and out the back of his neck, and a few moments later Jaheira brought Blackblood down on her female opponent's head. The sound of crunching bone signaled the female drow's demise, and Jaheira stepped over the corpse to look for another opponent. She might as well not have worried. The rest of the Blades had pretty much everything in hand.

Three drow, two males and another female, lay in a circle around Haer'Dalis, Nalia and Aerie. The trio, knowing that magic spells were not as useful against the drow as other enemies, acted as bait while Minsc, Mazzy and Imoen came up from behind and killed the drow. Anomen had easily dispatched his single opponent with a rib-cracking blow to the chest with his mace and a follow up blow to the forehead. "Really, my lady," Anomen said, "do you think this was necessary?"

Brynn nodded. "We all need to a good fight to get our blood going again."

Minsc crowed in agreement, "Oh! They will tell tales of this for years to come! We have planted our boots firmly on the buttocks of evil today!"

"Minsc," Aerie whispered to the tall ranger, "you're raving again."

"C'mon," Brynn interrupted, "let's get out of here now. We've got eggs to return to a dragon and I doubt she wants to wait any longer."

"Here, here," Mazzy agreed, not quite as exuberant as her words made her out to be. "And this time might we actually try not to get into a battle on the way there?"

Brynn took the halfling's gentle chiding in stride. "What she said," Brynn agreed. "Onward!"

And so onward they went.

***

Solaufein crouched behind a tall stalagmite, waiting. He heard footsteps and indistinct voices approaching from the direction of Ust Natha. Though their words were muffled and blurred by the echoes of the stones he could tell they were speaking the language of his people, the drow. There were two possibilities as to the identities of this group of approaching drow. First, they could be the lady Vel er Brynn and her companions, or second, they could be a party of drow warriors sent to aid the battle that was ongoing between the surface elves and the Ust Nathans in the temple ruins above the city. He sincerely hoped it was the former instead of the latter, because if the footsteps he was hearing belonged to a drow war party the ritual must have been a success, and Brynn Trueblade, the half-elven warrior who had spared his life, was without a doubt, dead.

At last the party drew closer and Solaufein stepped out from his hiding place. "Hail, be you friend or foe?" he called out in surface common. When he had delivered a second false set of dragon eggs to Brynn and the Blades of Honor the day before Brynn had told him to repeat that phrase if he suspected he had run into her as she left the city. If the call was answered with an attack Solaufein was to suspect, as Brynn had so tastefully put it, "that they aren't us, so you'd better get your ass out of there as fast as you can."

"Friend," came the reply in undercommon. The glowing blobs that represented the Blades of Honor to Solaufein through his infravision changed and clarified as one of them called forth a spell that lit up the passageway in the normal spectrum of light.

Solaufein smiled at Brynn. "It is good to see that you have escaped," he said. "For a moment I was concerned that you had not."

"Have faith in us, Solaufein," Brynn replied jokingly. "We're not that incompetent." She paused. "Where to from here?"

"For me?" Solaufein asked.

"Yes, for you," Brynn agreed. "We're headed up and out, I was thinking that you might want to come along."

Solaufein shook his head though. "No, I am needed down here. This is my home, whether or not it welcomes me, and I am sure there are others down here who see that they have been walking the wrong path as I have. I will make this place safe for them one day, even if I die doing it."

Brynn raised an eyebrow. "All by yourself?" she inquired. "Solaufein, you're a smart man but sometimes I think you're a total void-brain." Solaufein looked at her, a little surprised, and Brynn continued, "You can't start a revolution with just one man and make it succeed. I know, I've read about this stuff in books, history books that tell just how those revolutions fail and the deaths of their supporters and creators. You need some back up before anything can be done, and the best place to find back up is on the surface."

It was Solaufein's turn to raise an eyebrow now. "Oh?" he asked.

"Sure," Brynn said to him confidently. "It might not be support in the form of troops, but it'd be something to start with. If you get backing from the surface, if you can convince someone that overthrowing the drow society is the right thing to do, and not only that, but profitable as well, you'll be a resounding success."

Solaufein chuckled. "And more importantly, you simply want me to come with you, correct?"

Brynn shrugged. "I like to keep track of my friends and allies, and I want to make sure you don't die down here trying to incite a coup. Come with us, make some allies on the surface, powerful ones, and then come back in a few decades and start a revolution. If we're all still alive I guarantee the Blades of Honor will help you without so much as a question."

"All right then," Solaufein said. "If you truly believe this is the tight path, V Brynn Trueblade, I will travel with you for now."

Brynn smiled. "Great," she said, "now all we have to do is smuggle you past the elves on the surface and we're set."

Suddenly Solaufein was wondering if this was actually such a good idea after all.

***

The Blades plus one delivered the dragon's eggs back to their mother, Adalon, who was overjoyed at seeing her 'babies' back again. She didn't act like it of course, not overly at least, but the way the caressed the eggshells when she transformed into her human form was indicative of her happiness. The silver dragon in a woman's body gave Solaufein a cold stare, but Brynn quickly explained the situation, citing Solaufein's invaluable assistance in recovering the eggs, and Adalon looked considerably less like she wanted to turn back into her natural form and bite the drow male in two. However, she didn't seem to like him much more either.

Despite her dislike of Solaufein, however, Adalon stayed true to her agreement and in addition to showing the Blades the way out of the underdark, gave them a substantial reward. After Adalon's departure from the group the Blades had a few minor scuffles with stragglers from the main drow attack force as well as a couple of rearguard troops, but nothing major, and certainly nothing they couldn't handle.

The last skirmish involved not only drow, but surface elves as well, and nearly turned into a disaster. As soon as all the attacking drow were dispatched the elves turned to the strangers in their midst and spotted Solaufein.

One of the elves nearest the newest member of the Blades of Honor, young, green as grass, and filled with anger at the drow, started to attack, but Brynn got their first and disarmed the young soldier. "Hold it!" She shouted at the top of her lungs. "We're friends!"

"Friends?" the young soldier demanded, his melodic elven voice was twisted with hate. "What friends of the elves travels with a drow?"

Meanwhile the commander of this elven force signaled to his troops to stand down for the moment. "His question is a valid one," said the commander in a cold voice. "I would like to hear an answer."

"Solaufein is a good man," Brynn said, wincing as she realized just how corny that sounded. "We have just escaped from the city of Ust Natha after stopping the Matron Mother Ardulace from calling on a most powerful demon to aid the drow in their fight. We would never have succeeded without Solaufein's help."

"And how can we be sure that you are not lying?" the elven commander asked.

Brynn faltered and Mazzy spoke up, "There are divinations that can discover the truth. Work your magic on us if you will, she is telling you the truth."

The elven commander frowned fiercely, his brow scrunching up as he pondered his course of action. At last he ordered, "Drop all of your weapons." And when that had been done he said to his men, "Bind their hands and gag the mages and clerics with them. We will take no chances. Elhan will see them."

***

Elhan, as it turned out, was the general of the elven forces, and he was no less pleased to see Solaufein than his underlings had been, and far more suspicious. That made Solaufein very, very nervous. He couldn't understand a for that was being said, for it was all in the tongue of the surface elves, which he did not know, but the looks on the faces of his surface brethren were enough to make his blood run cold. So, though the surface was strange and bright –painfully so even though they had emerged from the underdark in the middle of a thick forest- Solaufein could not look around in wonder at it for fear of catching the gaze of one of those many pairs of eyes. Instead he looked at his companions, seeing them clearly for the first time since they had regained their natural forms in Adalon's lair.

They looked so different. The warrior called Minsc was immense, standing well over six feet tall, and the warrior priest Anomen was, though nearly half a foot or more shorter, more than tall enough himself. The one called Mazzy was of all things, a halfling, which Solaufein had only heard about through second hand reports. He found it more than a little odd that a woman with such a strong presence was so small. The mage priest, Aerie was a surface elf, an avariel who strangely lacked her wings. The bard with the strange aura of wrongness, Haer'Dalis, was not so strange to Solaufein, he had seen and heard of tieflings before, but still the man looked a far cry from how he had as an dark elf, from the roots of his blue-gray hair to the soles of his boots. The mage, and as it turned out, amateur thief, Nalia was a human woman, not a striking specimen, but pretty enough with red-gold hair and blue-green eyes. The other mage thief, Imoen, also had red hair and blue eyes, though her hair had more brown and her eyes more gray. The woman Solaufein had assumed to be a simple warrior, Jaheira, was also a druid –a concept that Solaufein wasn't sure he quite understood, having lived in the underdark all his life and so therefore having never seen much of trees and forests- and a half-elf as well. The fact that she was a half-elf just added layers to the strangeness, for Solaufein had seen as many half-elves in his life as he had druids.

And Brynn she was the strangest of them all it seemed, for he had though he had known her best. Like the warrior druid, Jaheira, Brynn was a half-elf, though she was smaller than many of the female drow Solaufein had seen in Ust Natha and elsewhere in the underdark. Her eyes were blue-gray and speckled with gold, the same gold as the hair that she had bound up in her long braid. Her expression was different too, he noted, like she had dropped a mask other than the one that disguised her as a drow. What was beneath, Solaufein couldn't quite say, but it made him feel sad to look in her eyes.

Solaufein shook his head and turned his attention to the unintelligible conversation that was occurring between Brynn Trueblade and the elven general Elhan. As far as he could tell, and he couldn't tell much because of the language barrier, things were going well. That is until the general said something that evidently got Brynn's hackles up.

Then the shouting began

***

Brynn thought that, all things considered, things were going rather well with Elhan. She had answered all of his questions truthfully and politely, even though she had several times considered snapping out a witty retort at the general, and in return Elhan had called off his truth-detecting sages for the time being. The elf had also revealed that the elven army had been trapped out side of Sundanessellar, unable to find their way back into the city. However, aside from that, the fact that Irenicus, whom Elhan had called 'The Exile', had been the one to seal the elven city off, and Bodhi, who had returned to her old haunts in the graveyard district of Athkatla in the meanwhile, had the Rhynn Lanthorn, was all that Elhan was willing to say. Even that Brynn had to drag out of him.

"As for the dark elf," Elhan was saying in elven, "you may trust him, Brynn Trueblade, but I do not."

"Yet you trust me, General," Brynn pointed out calmly, also in elven. The rage was gnawing at her again, telling her to just kill Elhan, take the Rhynn Lanthorn and enter the elven city herself. She resisted the urge. All the fighting she had done recently had appeased the rage, at least for a time, but now that she had stopped it had become harder to control her dark blood. "If you trust me, then can you not trust my judgment of Solaufein's reliability?"

Elhan frowned darkly. "That I have let the drow live this long is testament to my trust in your judgment," he said. "I should have had him killed as soon as I saw him. My trust only goes so far, Brynn Trueblade, even for my own kind, and you are no an elf."

Brynn swallowed hard, forcing her rage down again. The elves had not said as much until now, but Brynn knew from experience that elves did not consider half-elves to be one of them. To the elves she was more of a half-human, tainted by the human side of her bloodline. The prejudice angered her, but she could endure it. What would they do, she wondered, if they knew I was the child of Bhaal?

"Then what do you suggest?" Brynn asked as soon as she was sure her anger would not show in her voice.

"My sages are capable of casting a spell on him to ensure his loyalty. A geas"

Elhan had barely finished the word 'geas' when Brynn shouted, "No!"

The elven general regarded Brynn with surprised curiosity, and a little confusion. She had not straight out denied any of his demands up until that point, preferring to argue her point calmly and rationally. There was not even a smidgen of rational thought in Brynn's mind at that point though, Elhan could see it plainly enough.

"Absolutely not!" Brynn growled, unconsciously taking a step toward Elhan and putting her hands to her sword belt and her empty scabbards. The rage sang to her now, and she wanted to give in, but she made herself deny the rage.

"Then he may not go," Elhan said. "He will stay here with my army, imprisoned, until you return." Brynn pressed her lips so tightly together that they turned white. "You are asking something that is unreasonable," she said through gritted teeth.

Kill him, the rage sang.

"A geas spell is not unreasonable," Elhan said. "It ensures that the drow will not betray us"

"Never!" Brynn shouted again. "Never, never, never, will I allow anyone to place that spell on anyone. Never! Yes, it will ensure loyalty, but it is far more evil to gain loyalty through a spell like that than whatever damage Solaufein could cause if he betrayed us!" Her eyes sparkled with an inner fire, and even Elhan recoiled a little at it.

And the rage sang, kill him!

"I am sure you have good reason to behave like this, and believe the way you do," Elhan began, not sure of any such things at all.

"You know nothing!" Brynn snapped. "Make your choice, General Elhan: Allow Solaufein to accompany me, free of that spell or find someone else to retrieve the Rhynn Lanthorn. If you can accomplish the latter I will be shocked. Whatever Bodhi was like when you knew her before she is far more powerful now.

Elhan stared at Brynn, his eyes narrowed. "You presume to dictate terms to me?" he demanded coolly.

"I presume nothing," Brynn replied, just as coolly as he. "I will not allow that spell to be cast on Solaufein, and if I have to die to prevent it so be it. If you have to die to prevent it, so be it."

"And what of all the elves yet remaining in Sundanessellar under Irenicus' attack?" Elhan asked. "Will you sacrifice their lives to prevent the casting of one spell on a drow?"

Brynn didn't even hesitate. "Yes," she said. "I have seen the evil of that spell, and it has caused more pain and suffering to me and to those around me than you can ever know." She grimaced, fighting back grief and tears. She continued on, far more quiet than before. "Solaufein does not deserve this sort of distrust, General Elhan, he is a noble man, and his heart is good. I will not allow you to have that spell cast on him."

For a long time Elhan was silent, then he said, "I do not know what has caused you to feel this strong emotion in you, Brynn Trueblade. You may be right that I can never know the extent of the pain you feel, though I can see you feel it clearly enough. Do you accept responsibility for any of the drow's actions, accept them as if they were your own and likewise accept the consequences?"

Brynn nodded. "Without question," she said sincerely.

Elhan sighed. "Then he may leave with you, free from any spells. If, however, your trust in him is proven false, know that the deaths of thousands of elves may well be on your head. Go now, one of my men will equip you with the holy water and wooden stakes you earlier requested."

Tired of nodding, and trembling a little from her emotional outburst, Brynn merely walked away, and the Blades followed. Elhan waved his hand and one of the guards unbound Solaufein, and the dark elf joined the other Blades as they left.

The Blades collected holy water, stakes and enough rations to last the trip to Athkatla, and left soon after. A distinct change came over Brynn as they traveled, whatever vigor had returned to her in the earlier battle had vanished utterly almost as soon as they had reached the surface. While fighting the drow she had been her old self again, if only for a few minutes. The new Brynn was back now though, and the brief reappearance of the old Brynn made her friends miss her all the more.