He took a deep breath, forcing himself to slow down. Halisstra may not have even made it through the portal, he reminded himself. Her skeleton might very well be somewhere under the heap of rubble on which he squatted. He would not allow himself to hope. Not yet.

A sighing noise behind him made him whirl, his free hand reaching for the wand sheathed at his hip, but it was only the driftdisc he'd summoned earlier. It could just as easily, however, have been one of his enemies. He chastised himself for letting his guard down. It was a stupid thing to do, if one wanted to keep on living.

And Q'arlynd wanted very much to do just that.

He glanced back at the arch. The script no longer glowed. It should be a simple enough matter to re-activate the portal-the inscription was in Draconic, which Q'arlynd could read-but he wasn't about to step blindly into unknown territory, not without learning all he could about the dead priestess. She had, after all, come from wherever the portal led to.

He took a careful look around, noting landmarks in the rubble. Then he settled himself cross-legged on the driftdisc and sped away.

Nearly three hundred leagues to the east, in a little-visited section of the sprawling underground labyrinth known as Undermountain, a Darksong Knight and a novice priestess of Eilistraee patrolled a dark cavern that wound its way past several natural columns of stone. Nearly a thousand years ago, the cavern had been one arm of a sprawling Underdark city. The drow who built that city were long gone-consumed by the slimes and oozes they had venerated-but traces of what they built could be seen still. The columns and walls, for example, were carved with notches that had once served as handholds and footholds. Holes in the cavern ceiling were the entrances to buildings that had been hollowed by magic out of native stone. Still more holes, arranged in intricate, lacelike patterns, had served as windows in the floors of these buildings. Some of the clearstone in these windows was still intact, but centuries of accumulated bat guano had obliterated any view inside.