“Dinin will see to it,” Malice replied with a wave of her hand, not turning her eyes from her daughter’s pernicious stare.

“I will take my leave,” Jarlaxle said, nodding to the elder boy.

Before the mercenary had taken his first step toward the door, Vierna, Malice’s second daughter, burst into the room, her face glowing brightly in the infrared spectrum, heated with obvious excitement.

“Damn,” Jarlaxle whispered under his breath.

“What is it?” Matron Malice demanded.

“House Hun’ett,” Vierna cried. “Soldiers in the compound! We are under attack!”

Out in the courtyard, beyond the cavern complex, nearly five hundred soldiers of House Hun’ett―fully a hundred more than the house reportedly possessed―followed the blast of a lightning bolt through House Do’Urden’s adamantite gates. The three hundred fifty soldiers of the Do’Urden household swarmed out of the shaped stalagmite mounds that served as their quarters to meet the attack.

Outnumbered but trained by Zaknafein, the Do’Urden troops formed into proper defensive positions, shielding their wizards and clerics so that they might cast their spells. An entire contingent of Hun’ett soldiers, empowered with enchantments of flying, swooped down the cavern wall that housed the royal chambers of House Do’Urden. Tiny hand-held crossbows clicked and thinned the ranks of the aerial force with deadly, poison-tipped darts. The aerial invaders’ surprise had been achieved, though, and the Do’Urden troops were quickly put into a precarious position.

“Hun’ett has not the favor of Lloth!” Malice screamed. “It would not dare to openly attack!” She flinched at the refuting, thunderous sounds of another, and then still another, bolt of lightning.

“Oh?” Briza snapped.

Malice cast her daughter a threatening glare but didn’t have time to continue the argument. The normal method of attack by a drow house would involve the rush of soldiers combined with a mental barrage by the house’s highest-ranking clerics. Malice, though, felt no mental attack, which told her beyond any doubt that it was indeed House Hun’ett that had come to her gates. The clerics of Hun’ett, out of the Spider Queen’s favor, apparently could not use their Lloth-given powers to launch the mental assault. If they had, Malice and her daughters, also out of the Spider Queen’s favor, could not have hoped to counter.

“Why would they dare to attack?” Malice wondered aloud.

Briza understood her mother’s reasoning. “They are bold indeed,” she said, “to hope that their soldiers alone can eliminate every member of our house.” Everyone in the room, every drow in Menzoberranzan, understood the brutal, absolute punishments exacted upon any house that failed to eradicate another house. Such attacks were not frowned upon, but getting caught at the deed most certainly was.

Rizzen, the present patron of House Do’Urden, came into the anteroom then, his face grim. “We are outnumbered and outpositioned,” he said. “Our defeat will be swift, I fear.”

Malice would not accept the news. She struck Rizzen with a blow that knocked the patron halfway across the floor, then she spun on Jarlaxle. “You must summon your band!”

Malice cried at the mercenary. “Quickly!”

“Matron,” Jarlaxle stuttered, obviously at a loss. “Bregan D’aerthe is a secretive group. We do not engage in open warfare. To do so could invoke the wrath of the ruling council.”

“I will pay you whatever you desire,” the desperate matron mother promised.

“But the cost―”

“Whatever you desire!” Malice snarled again.

“Such action―” Jarlaxle began.

Again, Malice did not let him finish his argument. “Save my house, mercenary,” she growled. “Your profits will be great, but, I warn you, the cost of your failure will be far greater!”

Jarlaxle did not appreciate being threatened, especially by a lame matron mother whose entire world was fast crumbling around her. But in the mercenary’s ears the sweet ring of the word “profits” outweighed the threat a thousand times over. After ten straight years of exorbitant rewards in the Do’Urden-Hun’ett conflict, Jarlaxle did not doubt Malice’s willingness or ability to pay as promised, nor did he doubt that this deal would prove even more lucrative than the agreement he had struck with Matron SiNafay Hun’ett earlier that same week.

“As you wish,” he said to Matron Malice with a bow and a sweep of his garish hat. “I will see what I can do.” A wink at Dinin set the elderboy on his heels as he exited the room.

When the two got out on the balcony overlooking the Do’Urden compound, they saw that the situation was even more desperate than Rizzen had described. The soldiers of House Do’Urden―those still alive―were trapped in and around one of the huge stalagmite mounds anchoring the front gate.

One of Hun’ett’s flying soldiers dropped onto the balcony at the sight of a Do’Urden noble, but Dinin dispatched the intruder with a single, blurring attack routine.

“Well done,” Jarlaxle commented, giving Dinin an approving nod. He moved to pat the elderboy Do’Urden on the shoulder, but Dinin slipped out of reach.

“We have other business,” he pointedly reminded Jarlaxle.

“Call your troops, and quickly, else I fear that House Hun’ett will win the day.”

“Be at ease, my friend Dinin,” Jarlaxle laughed. He pulled a small whistle from around his neck and blew into it. Dinin heard not a sound, for the instrument was magically tuned exclusively for the ears of members of Bregan D’aerthe.

The elderboy Do’Urden watched in amazement as Jarlaxle calmly puffed out a specific cadence, then he watched in even greater amazement as more than a hundred of House Hun’ett’s soldiers turned against their comrades.

Bregan D’aerthe owed allegiance only to Bregan D’aerthe.

“They could not attack us,” Malice said stubbornly, pacing about the chamber. “The Spider Queen would not aid them in their venture.”

“They are winning without the Spider Queen’s aid,” Rizzen reminded her, prudently ducking into the room’s farthest corner even as he spoke the unwanted words.

“You said that they would never attack!” Briza growled at her mother. “Even as you explained why we could not dare to attack them!” Briza remembered that conversation vividly, for it was she who had suggested the open attack on House Hun’ett. Malice had scolded her harshly and publicly, and now Briza meant to return the humiliation. Her voice dripped of angry sarcasm as she aimed each word at her mother. “Could it be that Matron Malice Do’Urden has erred?”

Malice’s reply came in the form of a glare that wavered somewhere between rage and terror. Briza returned the threatening look without ambiguity and suddenly the matron mother of House Do’Urden did not feel so very invincible and sure of her actions. She started forward nervously a moment later when Maya, the youngest of the Do’Urden daughters, entered the room.

“They have breached the house!” Briza cried, assuming the worst. She grabbed at her snake-headed whip. “And we have not even begun our preparations for defense!”

“No!” Maya quickly corrected. “No enemies have crossed the balcony. The battle has turned against House Hun’ett!”

“As I knew it would,” Malice observed, pulling herself straight and speaking pointedly at Briza. “Foolish is the house that moves without the favor of Lloth!” Despite her proclamation, though, Malice guessed that more than the judgment of the Spider Queen had come into play out in the courtyard. Her reasoning led her inescapably to Jarlaxle and his untrustworthy band of rogues.

Jarlaxle stepped off the balcony and used his innate drow abilities to levitate down to the cavern floor. Seeing no need to involve himself in a battle that was obviously under control, Dinin rested back and watched the mercenary go, considering all that had just transpired. Jarlaxle had played both sides off against the other, and once again the mercenary and his band had been the only true winners. Bregan D’aerthe was undeniably unscrupulous, but, Dinin had to admit, undeniably effective.