Homeland - Chapter Seven

[kalinara]

So last time, Drizzt showed off and got himself a new mentor! And we learned the value of coin tricks!



This chapter, we rejoin our supposed villains. I say 'supposed' because, to be honest, so far they really haven't done anything more evil than our erstwhile protagonists. Well...not Drizzt of course. (And I'm not even mad about that. He's a child, after all.) But, to be fair to Mr. Salvatore, that's probably the point. There aren't any good guys here.

So anyway, we're back with Alton DeVir (now the Faceless One) and apprentice Masoj Hun'ett. Unsurprisingly, they're plotting something. Or at least Alton is. Masoj has his doubts.

The scheme appears to involve something that normally would be more in the realm of clerics, but Alton doesn't have a cleric at his disposal, so he's making due. We find out that a past attempt at trying to obtain answers from an ice devil ended pretty badly (they'd needed Masoj's magical cat - hi Guen! - to escape.)

So the big issue is that Alton doesn't know which House masterminded the fall of his own. And in Menzoberranzan, people don't just make accusations without very clear proof. And while a botched raid would likely end up with the perpetrators hunted down, a successful one meant the accuser was more likely to "wind up at the wrong end of a snake-headed whip".

But Alton has an ace up his sleeve: a tome penned by a wizard from the surface world. Drow wizards don't dare deal with the realm of the dead. But other wizards do.

This gets a little spiffly for me, because the Forgotten Realms setting really doesn't HAVE realms of the dead, per se. They have the outer planes, and souls tend to go to the plane of their deity. But it's not such a clear cut distinction as say the dark umbra in World of Darkness.

The "Hell" that Alton summoned the ice devil from is exactly the same kind of plane that his own soul will go when he dies. (Though since Lolth is in the Abyss, it'd be a different plane.)

But anyway, Alton and Masoj then bicker about the tome itself. And honestly, Masoj has a point. The book had apparently been stolen from a dead archmage by a simple orc. That does seem pretty unlikely. But Masoj is smart enough not to laugh outloud at someone more powerful.

And that's a good thing because Alton actually DOES manage to summon Matron Ginafae.

“Matron Ginafae!” Alton gasped again when the summons was complete. Hovering before him was the unmistakable image of his dead mother’s face.

The spirit scanned the room, confused. “Who are you?” it asked at length.

“I am Alton. Alton DeVir, your son.”

“Son?” the spirit asked.

“Your child.”

“I remember no child so very ugly.”

“A disguise,” Alton replied quickly, looking back at Masoj and expecting a snicker. If Masoj had chided and doubted Alton before, he now showed only sincere respect.

There is something oddly poignant about this part. A mother not recognizing her son because of the steps that he had to take to stay alive. Of course, this being the drow, she likely wasn't terribly maternal before that.

Anyway, Ginafae is very confused and scattered, but she seems to get more coherence when Alton recites her name and title. ("Matron Mother of House DeVir, Fourth House of Menzoberranzan, High Priestess of Lolth.")

Now though Ginafae insists he release her. She's not in Lolth's favor. She nearly tells Alton the answer he seeks but disappears instead, to be replaced by something scarier:

Alton leaped to his feet. “No!” he screamed. “You must tell me! Who are my enemies?”

“Would you count me as one?” the spirit image said in a voice very different from the one it had used earlier, a tone of sheer power that stole the blood from Alton’s face. The image twisted and transformed, became something ugly, uglier than Alton. Hideous beyond all experience on the Material Plane.

Alton was not a cleric, of course, and he had never studied the drow religion beyond the basic tenets taught to males of the race. He knew the creature now hovering in the air before him, though, for it appeared as an oozing, slimy stick of melted wax: a yochlol, a handmaiden of Lolth.

So the yochlol tells him off for disrupting Ginafae's torment. It mocks him, asking where he'd expect to find her: Frolicking in Olympus with the false gods of the surface elves?

...honestly, that touches on something that I've never really understood about the Forgotten Realms style theology. If you know that the god you follow will torture your soul for eternity, even if you serve her well, why do it?

The Forgotten Realms has some fairly nasty punishments for atheists/agnostics too, mind you. But if you're aware that other races have nicer gods, why not secretly worship them? It'd suck to get discovered and die in agony, sure, but it seems like you'd get a much nicer ending?

Things get messy here:

The yochlol’s mouth opened impossibly wide and spewed forth a hail of small objects. They ricocheted off Alton and tapped against the wall all around him. Stones? the faceless wizard wondered in confusion. One of the objects then answered his unspoken question. It caught hold of Alton’s layered black robes and began crawling up toward his exposed neck. Spiders.

A wave of the eight-legged beasts rushed under the little table, sending Masoj tumbling out the other side in a desperate roll. He scrambled to his feet and turned back, to see Alton slapping and stomping wildly, trying to get out of the main host of the crawling things.

“Do not kill them!” Masoj screamed. “To kill spiders is forbidden by the—”

“To the Nine Hells with the clerics and their laws!” Alton shrieked back.

Masoj shrugged in helpless agreement, reached around under the folds of his own robes, and produced the same two-handed crossbow he had used to kill the Faceless One those years ago. He considered the powerful weapon and the tiny spiders scrambling around the room.

“Overkill?” he asked aloud. Hearing no answer, he shrugged again and fired.

I don't really blame Alton here, but I'm not from a society of spider worshippers. So really, dude is a fucking moron. Masoj isn't though.

Masoj didn't kill Alton, just nicked him, which is enough to bring some sense back to the guy. He tries to escape the room, only for the exit to turn into Matron Ginafae's face. It licks him. For his part, Alton ends up lighting a fireball at his own feet.

He lives, actually, and Masoj thinks that he should have killed him when he'd had the chance.

We rejoin Alton afterward. Masoj has gone back to his studies, while Alton ruminates over his failure. He's been looking for answers for sixteen years and is running out of time. Meanwhile Masoj is more than halfway through his sorcerous studies. When he graduates, he'll be going back to House Hun'ett.

Alton himself is only seventy, young for a drow, and with a very long life ahead of him. And it's hard actually not to feel a little sorry for the guy. Given what we know about drow society, he's not a nice guy, but we haven't actually seen him do anything evil or even particularly cruel. He just wants vengeance. That's understandable.

The chapter ends with his unhappy ruminations.