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of the Third House wished to be able to peer over the plateau’s edge and gaze enviously upon the manors fortunate enough to be located alongside the exalted House Baenre.
    It was an apt analogy for Faen Tlabbar’s political maneuverings. Only two Houses stood ahead of them in Menzoberranzan’s dark hierarchy: Baenre, the First, and Barrison Del’Armgo, the Second. Nimor thought it likely that Matron Mother Tlabbar harbored great aspirations for her House. Del’Armgo, the Second House, was strong but with few allies. Baenre, the strongest, was as weak as it had been in centuries. Houses such as Faen Tlabbar gazed on the Baenre and remembered centuries of absolute arrogance, humiliating condescension, and they wondered whether the time had come for several lesser Houses to band together and end Baenre’s dominance once and for all.
    “That would be a merry game to watch,” Nimor mused.
    He suspected that in such a scenario Baenre might prove stronger than their resentful rivals guessed, but the bloodletting would be spectacular. Several great Houses would fall, for Baenre would not go alone into the gentle night. Of course, that would go a long way toward advancing the schemes of the Anointed Blade of the Jaezred Chaulssin.
    That would be a play for another day, though. Nimor meant to strike a deep and grievous blow at Faen Tlabbar, not incite them against House Baenre. Ghenni Tlabbar, Matron of the Third House, would die beneath his blade. Her blood would purchase treason on a grand scale, and place into the assassin’s hand the stiletto Nimor meant to drive into Menzoberranzan’s heart.
    A scrabbling sound and the clink of mail caught Nimor’s notice. He withdrew softly into the shadows and waited patiently as a squad of Tlabbar warriors mounted on great riding lizards climbed along a small, unworked stalactite nearby. The pallid reptiles possessed large, sticky pads on their clawed feet that allowed them to cling to the sheerest of surfaces, and many of Menzoberranzan’s noble Houses used the creatures for patrolling the high places of the city’s vast cavern. Faen Tlabbar was renowned for its squadrons of lizard cavalry. The assassin had studied the Tlabbar patrols from his precarious perch for more than an hour, carefully timing their sweeps.
    Right on time, Nimor observed. You’ve allowed yourselves to become predictable, lads.
    The riders carried crossbows and lances at the ready, scurrying along in single file as they looped around the smaller stalactite and scanned the cavern ceiling. As Nimor expected, the leader turned to the left and followed the curve of the stone pinnacle down and out of sight.
    “You would do well to vary your routine, Captain,” Nimor whispered to the departing squad. “An intrepid fellow such as myself might be deterred by the possibility of your unexpected return.”
    With a single silent spring, Nimor launched himself out into the vast darkness, plunging through the eternal night.
    By an accident of cavern formation, House Tlabbar held little of the city’s roof and overcaverns. One large column and a pair of small stalactites linked Tlabbar to the ceiling, which meant that Tlabbar had something of a blind spot directly over its palace roof. This was the weakness Nimor intended to exploit. His black cloak streamed behind him, and cold air rushed past his face. Nimor bared his teeth in a savage grin, delighting in the long seconds of his great leap. His body burned with the dark fires of his heritage, and he longed to shed his rakish guise, but this was not the time.
    While he fell, he mouthed the words to a spell that made him invisible, and as the spearlike pinnacle of Faen Tlabbar’s central palace rushed up at him, he quickly halted his fall by employing his power of levitation. Less than six heartbeats from the moment he’d leaped from the abandoned stalactite overhead, Nimor alighted on the knifelike ridge of a steep hall, invisible and undetected. He listened for any