Homeland Read Online Free PDF Page B

time to stay.
    Briza trembled and could barely remember the incantation herself. She whispered the final rune into the matron’s ear, almost fearing the consequences.
    Malice gathered her breath and her courage. She could feel the tingling of the spell as clearly as the pain of the birth. To her daughters standing around the idol, staring at her in disbelief, she appeared as a red blur of heated fury, streaking sweat lines that shone as brightly as the heat of boiling water.
    “ Abec ,” the matron began, feeling the pressure building to a crescendo. “ Abec .” She felt the hot tear of her skin, the sudden slippery release as the baby’s head pushed through, the sudden ecstacy of birthing. “ Abec di’n’a’BREG DOUWARD! ” Malice screamed, pushing away all of the agony in a final explosion of magical power that knocked even the clerics of her own house from their feet.

    Carried on the thrust of Matron Malice’s exultation, the dweomer thundered into the chapel of House DeVir, shattered the gemstone idol of Lolth, sundered the double doors into heaps of twisted metal, and threw Matron Ginafae and her overmatched subordinates to the floor.
    Zak shook his head in disbelief as the chapel doors flew past him. “Quite a kick, Malice.” He chuckled and spun around the entryway, into the chapel. Using his infravision, he took a quick survey and head count of the lightless room’s seven living occupants, all struggling back to their feet, their robes tattered. Again shaking his head at the bared power of Matron Malice, Zak pulled his hood down over his face.
    A snap of his whip was the only explanation he offered as he smashed a tiny ceramic globe at his feet. The sphere shattered, dropping out a pellet that Briza had enchanted for just such occasions, a pellet glowing with the brightness of daylight.
    For eyes accustomed to blackness, tuned in to heat emanations, the intrusion of such radiance came in a blinding flash of agony. The clerics’ cries of pain only aided Zak in his systematic trek around the room, and he smiled widely under his hood every time he felt his sword bite into drow flesh.
    He heard the beginnings of a spell across the way and knew that one of the DeVirs had recovered enough from the assault to be dangerous. The weapons master did not need his eyes to aim, however, and the crack of his whip took Matron Ginafae’s tongue right out of her mouth.

    Briza placed the newborn on the back of the spider idol and lifted the ceremonial dagger, pausing to admire its cruel workmanship. Its hilt was a spider’s body sporting eight legs, barbed so as to appear furred, but angled down to serve as blades. Briza lifted the instrument above the baby’s chest. “Name the child,” she implored her mother. “The Spider Queen will not accept the sacrifice until the child is named!”
    Matron Malice lolled her head, trying to fathom her daughter’s meaning. The matron mother had thrown everything into the moment of the spell and the birth, and she was now barely coherent.
    “Name the child!” Briza commanded, anxious to feed her hungry goddess.

    “It nears its end,” Dinin said to his brother when they met in a lower hall of one of the lesser pillars of House DeVir. “Rizzen is winning through to the top, and it is believed that Zaknafein’s dark work has been completed.”
    “Two score of House DeVir’s soldiers have already turned allegiance to us,” Nalfein replied.
    “They see the end,” laughed Dinin. “One house serves them as well as another, and in the eyes of commoners no house is worth dying for. Our task will be finished soon.”
    “Too quickly for anyone to take note,” Nalfein said. “Now Do’Urden, Daermon N’a’shezbaernon, is the Ninth House of Menzoberranzan and DeVir be damned!”
    “Alert!” Dinin cried suddenly, eyes widening in feigned horror as he looked over his brother’s shoulder.
    Nalfein reacted immediately, spinning to face the danger at his back, only to put