I.
Nizana Trisvaria, formerly of House Telarr,held the little parchment up and viewed it by the light of her dim candle.Her quarters were spartan; the light was expensive. She had it anyway, preferring the dim shadows it cast it to magical light, which always shone too stark for her dark, and darkness-loving eyes. The words that the dim, stubby little wax candle illuminated shown, she thought, as coppery red as the ink she had used to write it. In the infrared spectrum, it wouldn't show, but in the light it seemed a little bloody to her.
The Archpriestess had tasked her with detailing the rituals involved with the Swords of the Temple; she had done a practical application, already, and now the only thing left upon Nizana's plate resided in her hand.
Oh, there were other things, she mused, as she spread fixture on the paper and set it aside to dry. Brizshala, the heretic, still drew breath on the surface, teasing all sorts of possibilities from Nizana's twisted and spider-webbed mind. That had been a fulfilling, and interesting victory; the right tease of one edge of that web or another, and she had shaken another spider off of it. She had told the Commander, and the commander had told the Sword, and the sword had driven the knife deep into the Elistreean's heart.
Nizana wished she had been there to wield that particular blade, but she smiled as she realized that she would have the chance again.
As the Temple's new mistress of rituals – a title that Nizana would never breathe around the Archpriestess, but something that she mused over privately and with great pleasure – she had already done great things. She had reworked the Sword ritual, putting a male to the blade in the process through duplicity, and then with her newfound authority, inducted a third priestess. And her 'older sister' wasn't even a Priestess, yet – and likely, Nizana would be the one to perform that one as well. The High Priestesses did not bother very far to train the new Acolytes. She, herself, had been the Acolyte of the First Matron, personally, and as a Priestess, she acknowledged that formidable Matron as her superior.
The only impressive Drow in the entire city, though there were a few others that had her respect, that sort of immediacy hadn't been commanded by any of the others.
Well.
She let the paper down, back onto the heavy zurkwood desk that she had inherited from this room's previous owner, and twined her slender fingers together over her bare stomach. Next to that paper sat another book – a book on Devils, given to her by a certain amorous, and clever Orog. Arakh, Master of the Sharps. The flesh of the thing made her skin crawl slightly, and the small hairs on the back of her neck near the Priestess's spider mark standing nearly on end. House Freth. The Sharps. She could practically smell the brimstone rising off of it; speaking the names of devils and demons, even writing them down, gave the paper they were writ upon a certain sort of power and allure.
Eventually, she would ward her mind against evil, read the text, and so avoid the obvious trap that had been set before her. And then she would pretend she hadn't, masking all her true thoughts behind her carefully crafted smile and docile expression.
Menzoberranzan may be the drow race's very center of intrigue, the great, testing legs of that particular arachnid casting its net far and wide, but the nearsightedness of these particular drow amazed her. It had been too easy to build her own web of informants. Now she listened to it carefully, and knew the whole workings of this little city, and every time any new opponent stepped onto the web, she could feel the tremors.
Zala would eventually return to the only bed in the room. Lacking a male, or at least a consistent one, Nizana had begun to, in a small way, look forward to the slave's return. The other female seemed a poor substitute as a bedwarmer, but Nizana looked forward to it anyway. Her shoulders had tensed. Her neck hurt. Her eyes also hurt, a little, from the strain that the light caused them. The slave wasn't the best massuse, but she was a better massuse than a spy.
Nizana had read the shame on the other drow's face, in the heat that had gathered around the bridge of the woman's nose and spread across her high-boned cheeks during the ritual inducting the Sword. It hadn't been striking to her at the time – she had been elbow deep in the man's blood, and filled with divine ecstasy at it – but now that Nizana looked back, she could tell that the slave regretted her decision, regretted not giving herself to Lolth as Nizana had offered.
Well, Nizana had given her the choice of handmaiden or Sword, and she had chosen handmaiden. She wouldn't have given the slave the choice at all, if she had truly cared; she would have just ordered her one way or another. These thoughts drew Nizana's attention to another message, more a drawing than a message, of a drowess with a hood, mask, a slender build even for a drowess, and a pair of kama.
“Oathtaker.”
Nizana tilted the paper to the edge of the flame, feeling the tenseness in her shoulders as she let the thing catch fire. She did not need it anymore, the woman was fixed in her mind already, but burning it somehow felt as though she were destroying some sort of proof.
Andunor, city of Devil-worship. Andunor, which seemed to Nizana, as barely a drow city.
Those of the faithful whose loyalty is weak must be eliminated.
That had been absent from the Archpriestess's litany, Nizana had noted, when she had been confirmed as an Acolyte at this city's Arach-Tinilith. And, what's more than that, Nizana knew that others had noted it. How many times had she warned the Archpriestess, hoping to gain more of her favor? How many times had Nizana seen, in her own city, the jaws of intrigue closing around the unwary?
Unity...?
Nizana smoothed her hair back, gathering the volumnous mess of white back into a low ponytail.
The only unity drow knew, the only unity that Lolth found acceptable, was unity through fear. Priestesses all knew a very dark, very dear secret, and kept it close to themselves - never spoken of, never voiced, but intuited in the same way that all priestesses knew it. Lolth loved drow sacrifices. Lolth loved female drow sacrifices, powerful female sacrifices, and the Priestesses who forgot that or failed to intuit it from their devotions and from the motions of their everyday lives soon found out that everyone around them knew something they didn't.
A lone Priestess did not stay lonely for very long.
Unity, of a sort.
Nizana licked her fingers and extinguished the candle, and then went to bed to await her slave.
She slept, shortly afterwards.