“Well?” he said.
“You first,” she replied, still gazing at the gate in trepidation.
“I can’t,” the Master of Sorcere explained. “I must go last. Because I opened it, the portal will shut behind me.”
“What about Jeggred?”
“I will wait for them as long as I can,” Pharaun said as another groan emanated from the stonework around them.
The remains of the building tilted some more, and Quenthel’s eyes widened.
“There is no more time. Go through!” Pharaun said, and he pushed Quenthel toward the opening.
In a fury, the high priestess spun around, her hand reaching for the whip at her side. The five snakes were writhing madly, lashing at the mage even from where they hung, but the building lurched and tipped and Quenthel couldn’t hold on. She stumbled against the wizard, and the snakes snapped ineffectually against his piwafwi.
Pharaun caught her and set her on her feet again.
“Please,” he said to her. “We don’t have time for this.”
Quenthel’s scowl faded slightly, and she looked at the wizard with a slight smirk.
“If I didn’t know better, I would think you’re getting soft, wizard.” With that, she backed into the archway and was gone.
Pharaun shook his head in wonder and turned to see if there was any sign of Jeggred and Valas. The floor was slanted at a fairly steep pitch, and the mage slid down its surface toward the edge to peer over the side. Below, he could see the two of them, rising as rapidly as Jeggred’s levitation would allow. Chunks of stone and other debris was falling into the void beyond them, and Pharaun knocked a fragment loose from the edge of the crumbling floor. He cringed as he watched it tumble toward them, but it shot past, barely missing them.
Finally, almost excruciatingly slowly, the draegloth and his charge reached what was left of the structure. Together, the three of them worked their way toward the archway, which still glowed with an intense light.
“The others are waiting on the other side,” Pharaun explained, motioning to the doorway. “I have to go last. Hurry!”
Without hesitating, Jeggred leaped through the archway and vanished. Valas scrambled to go after him just as there was one final, bone-rattling tremor, and the remains of the room began to free fall. Pharaun gave the scout a good shove and dived in after him.
The portal sealed up and its light faded. A heartbeat later, what was left of the Dangling Tower, including the wall where the portal had been anchored, shattered into a million fragments as it struck a web street below.
Aliisza cringed when she saw the fury in Kaanyr Vhok’s eyes. He was displeased that she had neglected to keep him apprised of the situation in the drow city, and even her explanation of her troubles, the difficulties she had encountered with the drow, did little to soften his mood.
“So you say the entire city is ruined?” the cambion growled, pacing. “Brought down by a horde of miserable gray dwarves?”
“Not just gray dwarves, darling, but the drow themselves. They squabbled among themselves so much that they lost control. It destroyed them.”
“How could this have happened? Not that I bear any regret at the fall of the overly proud dark elves, but they do not seem to be the type who would allow such a travesty to occur to their great city. The forces of the Underdark are clearly out of balance.”
“I know,” the alu-fiend said, moving close to her mate, “but there is a reason.”
“You know what it is?”
“Yes, love, but your pacing is putting me on edge. Sit down, and I will tell you.”
Kaanyr Vhok sighed, but turned and plopped himself down in his throne.
“All right,” he said, patting his lap. “Tell me.”
Aliisza sashayed over to Vhok and settled herself into his lap. She had missed him, she realized, more than she’d thought she would. She leaned around and began to nuzzle his ear.
“Mmm,” he said, “I missed you,” echoing her own thoughts. “But before we get to the ‘welcome homes,’ tell me what you found out.”
Aliisza giggled as his fingers stroked her arm.
“They’ve lost contact with their goddess,” she whispered, blowing the words softly into his ear.
“What?” the cambion rumbled, sitting up straight and nearly dumping the demon on the floor. “Are you serious?”
The alu-fiend folded her arms beneath her breasts in a huff.
“Of course I’m serious,” she sniped. “Lolth has vanished from their sight, and they’re trying to figure out why, but of course, them being—what did you call them? Oh, yes—‘overly proud dark elves.’ Them being overly proud and set in their ways, they warred with one another to the point of bringing about their own extinction.”
“I see. Well, with Lolth out of the picture, I suppose if you wanted to gain a little retribution for some wrongs inflicted upon you in the past, now would be the time to do it,” the cambion said, staring absently into the distance.
“So, are you thinking of exacting a little revenge?” Aliisza said, nuzzling against her lover’s neck again.
“Maybe,” Vhok replied. “We’ll have to see. I guess it won’t be against Ched Nasad, hmm?”
“Mmm,” Aliisza purred, squirming, as Kaanyr Vhok’s fingers began to roam over her body again. “I guess not.”
All thoughts of the ruined City of Shimmering Webs left her then, for a good, long while.
High above the ruined City of Shimmering Webs, a single dark elf sat upon a perch of stone near the roof of the great cavern and watched. The smoke was heavy there, thick and acrid, but it didn’t bother him. He stared down at the destruction and smiled.
He was not attractive, not by drow standards, certainly, and few of any other species would look on him and think him handsome in the least, but he didn’t mind that either. What he sought was much more substantial than beauty.
They will be pleased, Zammzt thought, watching as fires slowly burned away, as whole sections of the city crumbled and collapsed, dropping into the murky depths of the cavern below. It is a good first step. There is still much to be done, but it is a good first step.
Shaking himself out of his reverie, the drow stood and stretched. I must go, he thought, somewhat regretfully.
He was proud of what he’d wrought, and he wished to stay and observe it a bit longer, but the others would be waiting. Sighing, he turned his sweeping gaze over the ruins of Ched Nasad one last time, then stepped into the darkest recesses of the shadows and vanished.
The food was gone and with it the warmth. All was hollow and empty, save the call to break free. That came most insistently, a subtle urging growing into desperation.
Eight tiny legs answered that imploring call. Eight tiny weapons struck at the concave wall. Battering and tearing, following the lighter shade of gray in this dark place.
A hole appeared in the leathery surface and the eight legs coordinated their attacks at that very spot, sensing weakness. Weakness could not be tolerated. Weakness had to be exploited, immediately and without mercy.
One by one, ten by ten, a thousand by a thousand, a million by a million, tiny legs waved in the misty space between universes for the first time, tearing free of their circular prisons. Driven by hunger and ambition, by fear and an instinctive vileness, the millions of arachnids fought their first battle against a pliable, leathery barrier. Hardly a worthy adversary, but they fought with an urgency wrought of knowing that the first to emerge would hold a great advantage, knowing that they—all of them—were hungry.
And knowing there was nothing to eat but each other. The warmth of the egg sac was gone, devoured. The quiet moments of solitude, of awakening, of first sense of consciousness, were past. The walls that had served as shelter and protection became an impediment and nothing more. The soft shell was a barricade against food, against necessary battle, against satiation on so many levels.
Against power.
And that, most of all, could not be tolerated by
these blessed and cursed offspring. So they fought and tore and scrabbled and scrambled to get out.
To eat.
To climb.
To dominate.
To kill.
To become. . . .
chapter
one
Streams of dust and sand hissed over old red stone. Halisstra Melarn drew her piwafwi close around her, and shivered in the bitter wind. The night was cold, colder than the deeps and caverns far below the world’s surface, and the wind moaned mournfully through the weathered ruins, crouching dead and silent in arid hills. Once a great city stood there, but no more. Shattered domes and tottering colonnades whispered of a proud and skillful race, long gone. Vast ramparts still stood against the desert wind, and the broken stumps of towers reached for the heavens.
In different circumstances Halisstra might have spent days wandering the silent ways of the mighty ruins and pondering their long-lost tale, but at the moment a far greater and more terrifying mystery held her rapt with awe and horror. Above the black silhouettes of crumbling towers and crooked walls, a sea of stars glittered like cold hard ice in a black and limitless sky.
She’d heard of such things all her life, of course. Intellectually she understood the concept of an open sky in place of a cavern roof, and the ludicrously distant pinpricks of light overhead, but to sit out in the open beneath such a sight and gaze on it with her own eyes . . . that was something else indeed. In her two hundred years she had never ventured more than a few dozen miles from Ched Nasad, and she had certainly never come within miles of the surface. Very few dark elves from the City of Shimmering Webs had. Like most drow, they largely ignored the world outside the endless intrigues, scheming, and remorseless self-interest of life in Ched Nasad.
She stared at the glittering lights above and bitterly savored the irony. The pinprick diamonds and the vast night sky were real. They had existed for some unimaginably long time, long before she had happened to look up in that forlorn, freezing desert and notice them, and they would doubtless continue long after she was gone. But Ched Nasad, the city of her birth, the city whose rivalries and loyalties and fortunes had completely absorbed all of her intellectual abilities and attention for her entire life, was no more. Not a day ago she had stood on the high balconies of House Nasadra and stared down in horror at burning stone and falling castles, witness to her city’s catastrophic destruction. Ched Nasad, with its wondrous webs of stone and darkly beautiful fairy-castles clinging to the chasm walls—Ched Nasad, with its awesome arrogance and hubris, its darkly beautiful noble houses and its ceaseless veneration of the Spider Queen herself—Ched Nasad, the center of Halisstra’s existence, was no more.
With a sigh, Halisstra tore her gaze away from the sky overhead and stood. She was tall for a drow, almost five and a half feet in height, and slender as a rapier. While her features lacked the alluring, almost rapacious sensuality many highborn drow women possessed, she was beautiful in an austere and measured manner. Even after hours of furious fighting and desperate struggle to escape fire, foe, and calamity, Halisstra moved with cold, absentminded gracefulness, the calm self-possession of a woman born to be a queen.
Sand pelted against the jet-black steel of her armor, while the wind caught at her cloak and tried to tug it away from her. Halisstra knew well the damp, chill motions of air in vast spaces under the earth, but the desert city was scoured by a relentless, stinging blast that buffeted her from a different direction moment to moment. She put the wind, the stars, and the ruins out of her mind, and silently drifted back to the others. They huddled in the lee of a great wall in a small court studded with broken pillars. At one end of the plaza the empty remnants of a lordly palace stood. No furnishings had survived the centuries of sand and weathering that had scoured the city, but the colonnades and courts, high chambers and proud halls, indicated that the building had once been the residence of a family of some power in the city, perhaps even the rulers or lords of the place. Not far away within the sand-blasted walls stood a blank stone portal, an archway of strange black stone, that housed a magical gate leading back to Ched Nasad. Through that portal Halisstra and the others had made their escape from the sack of the drow city.
She paused and studied her six companions. Danifae, her ladyin-waiting, knelt gracefully at one side, her perfect face composed, eyes closed serenely. She might have been dozing lightly, or simply awaiting the next turn of events with equanimity. Fifteen years before, Danifae, a captive priestess from the city of Eryndlyn, had been gifted to Halisstra as a maidservant. Young, beautiful, and clever, Danifae had resigned herself to bondage with surprising grace. She had no choice, really—a silver locket over Danifae’s heart enslaved the girl with a powerful enchantment. What passed behind those lustrous eyes and perfect features not even Halisstra could guess, but Danifae had served her as faithfully and as competently as her binding demanded, and perhaps even more than that. Halisstra found herself comforted to no small degree by the simple fact that Danifae was still with her.
Her remaining five companions did not comfort her in the least. The events of Ched Nasad’s last days had thrown Halisstra in with a party of travelers from distant Menzoberranzan, a city that had in the course of time been Ched Nasad’s enemy, rival, trading partner, and master. Quenthel Baenre sat wrapped in her own thoughts, her cloak pulled close against the chill. A sister priestess of the Spider Queen, Quenthel was a scion of House Baenre, the leading clan of Menzoberranzan. Of course, Quenthel was no friend of Halisstra’s simply because they both served as priestesses of Lolth; most drow noblewomen served the Spider Queen and spent their lives feuding for station and preeminence in her worship. That was the way of things for the drow, the pattern dictated by Lolth. If it pleased the Spider Queen to reward those who proved most ruthless, most ambitious in her service, then what else could a dark elf do?
Quenthel was in many ways the epitome of drow womanhood, a matriarch in the making who combined piety in Lolth’s service with physical beauty, strength of character, and absolute ruthlessness. Of the five travelers from Menzoberranzan, she was by far the most dangerous to Halisstra. Halisstra, too, was the daughter of a matron mother and a priestess of Lolth, so she knew well that she would have to watch Quenthel closely. For the moment, they were allies, but it would not take much for Quenthel to decide that Halisstra was more useful as a follower, as a captive, or simply dead.
Quenthel commanded the loyalty of the hulking Jeggred, a draegloth of her own House Baenre. The draegloth was half-demon, half-drow, the son of Quenthel’s elder sister and some unnamed denizen of the Abyss. Jeggred towered over the other drow, a fourarmed creature of bestial aspect who held a murderous violence in check at all times. His face was drowlike, and he walked upright, but a gleaming silver pelt covered his dark skin at chest, shoulders, and loins, and his claws were as long and as sharp as daggers. Halisstra didn’t fear Jeggred, as the draegloth was Quenthel’s creature and would not lay a finger on her without his mistress’s express command. He might be the instrument of Halisstra’s death, if Quenthel chose to order it, but there was no point in regarding him as anything other than Quenthel’s weapon.
The wizard Pharaun intrigued Halisstra greatly. The study of arcane lore was something that, like swordplay, was traditionally left to males. A powerful wizard merited a certain amount of respect despite the fact that he was male. In fact, Halisstra knew of more than one instance in which the matron mother of an important house ruled only with the consent of the powerful male wizards of the family, a situation that had always struck her as perverse and dangerous. Pharaun acted as if he commanded that kind of power and influence. Oh, he deferred to Quenthel quickly enough, but never without a sardonic smile or an insincere remark, and at times his disrespectful carriage verged on outright rebellion. That meant that he was either a complete fool—hardly likely, since he’d been handpicked in Menzoberranzan for the dangerous journey to Ched Nasad—or he was powerful enough to hold his own against the natural tyranny of a
noble female like Quenthel. Pharaun struck Halisstra as a potentially critical ally against Quenthel, if it turned out that she and Quenthel could not reach an understanding.
It seemed to Halisstra that Ryld Argith was to Pharaun what Jeggred was to Quenthel. A powerfully built weapons master whose stature matched Halisstra’s own, Ryld was a fighter of tremendous skill. Halisstra had seen that for herself in the escape from Ched Nasad. Like most males, he maintained a properly deferential demeanor in Quenthel’s presence. That was a good sign to Halisstra. Ryld might easily transfer loyalties to another woman of high birth in a pinch. She couldn’t count on Ryld turning against either Pharaun or Quenthel, but pure drow were less steadfast in their loyalties than the average draegloth.
The last and the least of the party from Menzoberranzan was the scout, Valas Hune. A small, furtive male, he said little and observed much. Halisstra had seen his type before. Useful enough in the sort of tasks they excelled at, they wanted nothing to do with the machinations of priestesses and matriarchs and did all they could to stay well clear of the politics of the great Houses. At the moment, Valas was crouched over a small pile of dry brush, working to start a fire.
“Is there any chance we will be pursued?” Ryld said into the icy wind.
“I doubt it,” Quenthel muttered. “The whole House fell after we used the portal. How could we be followed?”
“It is not impossible, dear Quenthel,” Pharaun replied. “A competent wizard might be able to discern where the portal led to, even though it was destroyed. He might even be able to repair the portal sufficiently to make use of it. I suppose it depends on how badly we are missed in Ched Nasad.” He glanced up at Halisstra and asked, “What about it, my lady? Don’t you think it likely that your kinfolk will hold us to blame for the unfortunate events of the last few hours? Won’t they go to great lengths to exact vengeance upon us?”
Halisstra looked at him. The question made no sense to her. Who could possibly be left to fix blame for the duergar attack on the party of Menzoberranyr? House Melarn had fallen, and House Nasadra as well. She became aware of a great weariness in her body, a leaden feeling in her heart and a fog in her mind, and she allowed herself to sink to the sand across from the others.
R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation Page 74
