“Scour your memories for any clue, Geremis,” she commanded. “Or I will extract your brain and sift it with my own fingers. Where would the lichdrow have hidden his phylactery?”
Visibly shaking, Geremis shook his head and did not meet her eyes. “Matron Mother, the lichdrow shared such information with no one. Please. Our divinations have—”
“Enough!” shouted Yasraena, and stomped her foot on the stone floor. “The time for excuses is past. Larikal, you and Geremis organize a team to search the House. By hand, on all fours if necessary! Perhaps an ordinary search can find what spells cannot. Keep me informed on the hour.”
She knew that Geremis sometimes shared Larikal’s bed. Both were ugly, and the thought of their coupling made her ill.
“Yes, Matron Mother,” answer Larikal, not daring to argue. To Geremis, Larikal commanded, “Follow me, male.”
Both hurried from the scrying chamber, eager to get out of the way of Yasraena’s wrath.
After they had gone, Yasraena looked to Esvena. “You, find a way to penetrate the wards around Gromph Baenre’s sanctum within Sorcere.” She eyed the two remaining males, both homely, middle aged wizards; she did not even know their names. “You two, assist her. And bolster our own defenses. If you cannot get through the Archmage’s wards, or if he or any Xorlarrin piece of dung breaches ours, I will be displeased.” She let the threat linger in the air.
One of the males cleared his throat and began, “Matron Mother—”
Yasraena lashed out with her tentacle rod. Two of the black, rubbery arms at its end extended themselves and wrapped around the throat of the wizard. He gagged and clutched at the tentacles. His red eyes went wide; his mouth moved but no sound emerged. With a mental command, Yasraena ordered the rod to squeeze the male’s throat harder.
“You will speak only when I command it,” she said and looked into the face of the other male. He did not meet her gaze. “As I said, the time for excuses is past. Do what needs to be done.”
Esvena looked on with a cold smile.
With her free hand, Yasraena backhanded her daughter across the mouth. The younger priestess stumbled back, bleeding from her lip and glaring hate at her mother.
“Do not dare smile in my presence,” Yasraena spat. “The fate of our House is at stake. Indulge your petty pleasures after we have defeated our enemies.”
Esvena wiped the blood from her lip and lowered her eyes. “Forgive me, Matron Mother,” she said.
Yasraena knew the apology to be insincere but would have expected nothing else. She released the male from her rod. He fell to his knees, before the scrying basin, gasping and choking.
“We all live or die with this House,” Yasraena announced. “Should I so much as suspect treachery or half-efforts, you will be flayed to death, resurrected, and flayed anew. That process will continue indefinitely until my anger is sated. Do not doubt my resolve.”
She eyed her daughter, and Esvena’s eyes showed real fear. The males did their best to grovel.
“Proceed with the attempt to scry the Archmage’s offices,” Yasraena said, “and do not stop until you succeed. Gromph Baenre will be coming and I must know when. I will check back on the hour.”
As she turned to leave the scrying chamber, a tremor shook the House, a byproduct of the Xorlarrin onslaught.
Telepathically connected to her First and Second daughters through the magical amulets they wore, she projected, Anival, what is happening?
Her First Daughter’s calm mental voice returned, Xorlarrin ogre shock-troops bearing a magically augmented battering ram attempted the gates. All of them are dead and the ram ruined. The wards hold, and the Xorlarrin cannot gain even the moat. They appear to be regrouping. Another House may join them soon, Matron Mother.
Yasraena knew, but to her First Daughter she replied with only, Very well. Continue on and keep me apprised.
Yasraena did not know how long her House could withstand the continued siege of the Xorlarrin wizards. Wards and protective spells sheathed the House’s moat, bridge, and adamantine wall—some of them Yasraena had cast, some her forbears, many the lichdrow—but wards could be broken. So far, the Xorlarrin had not been able to breach them, but sooner or later, given enough time, they probably would.
Yasraena silently prayed to Lolth that the wards would hold for just a short time longer, long enough for the lichdrow to reincorporate and again stand at her side. That was all she would need to save the House. Unless . . .
Perhaps there was another way. It galled her, but it might save her House.
She would contact Triel Baenre. At the very least, she might be able to give her House more time.
Without another word, she left her underlings behind and headed for her private chambers. As she exited the scrying chamber, she heard Esvena berating the male wizards.
chapter
five
Traveling the rocky, uneven terrain proved difficult. Pits, gorges, and smoking lakes of acid forced Pharaun and his three traveling companions to weave a circuitous route. They picked their way around gorges and holes, between the tall, black spires of petrified legs. Pharaun particularly disliked walking in the shadow of the petrified spider legs. He felt at any moment that they would return to life and catch them up in their embrace. Spiders and webs thronged the petrified limbs, darting into cracks and crevices.
The wind fought against them as they moved, and it whistled through the songspider webs. Pharaun was sweating. He felt exposed.
“Mistress,” he said to Quenthel. “The passage of hours may bring a dawn. We are under open sky.”
Pharaun had no desire to experience the blinding light of another sunrise like he had seen in the World Above.
Quenthel did not look at him. One of her whip vipers— Yngoth, Pharaun was certain—hovered near her ear for a moment. Quenthel nodded.
“A sun will rise over Lolth’s Pits,” she said. “But it is dim, red, and distant. You have nothing to fear, Master Mizzrym. We will find traveling under its light as easy as traveling by night.”
Jeggred snorted and asked, “Do the snakes of your whip fill the holes in your understanding of the Spider Queen’s realm, aunt?”
Danifae snickered, or perhaps it was a cough.
Over her shoulder, Quenthel answered, “Sometimes, nephew. They are demons—bound by me—and have some knowledge of the Lower Planes that I require them to impart. Perhaps Mistress Danifae can fill in the rest of our understanding?”
She stopped, turned, and looked at Danifae.
The battle-captive did not lower her hood. “When I have something to add,” she said, “I will offer it.”
Quenthel smiled at her nephew and started again to walk.
“Perhaps we should use spells to transport us, Mistress?” Pharaun suggested to Quenthel, though he did not know exactly where they were going.
Quenthel shook her head and replied, “No, mage. This is the Spider Queen’s realm, and she wants us to experience it. We will walk until I say otherwise.”
Pharaun frowned but made no other answer. He could have flown, of course, using the ring he had taken from Belshazu, but decided not to provoke Quenthel. For him, the new Demonweb Pits was an obstacle to be overcome. For Quenthel, it was a religious ordeal to be experienced. Circumventing it would have been heresy.
Throughout their nighttime trek, the eight stars of Lolth peered down at them through a hole in the clouds that moved with the satellites across the night sky. Pharaun felt the Spider Queen’s gaze pressing into his back like the tips of eight spears. Lolth’s voice, in the form of the keening of the wind through the songspider webs, hummed in his ears. Pharaun found it maddening but kept his thoughts to himself.
High above them, the river of souls streamed silently onward. Sparking power vortices continued to dot the sky and vomit forth the spirits of the dead.
Pharaun marveled at the number of drow souls. He knew that all of them must have died after Lolth had fallen silent. Where had they all c
ome from? How many worlds did Lolth’s children populate? He hoped many. Otherwise, he feared he would return to find Menzoberranzan as empty as the space between Jeggred’s ears. The fact that Gromph had stopped responding to his sendings did not allay his concerns. Possibly the Archmage was too preoccupied with the siege of Menzoberranzan to reply; possibly, Gromph was dead.
He shook his head, pushed away the doubt, and focused on the now.
Pharaun’s magical boots allowed him to stride and jump with more ease than the rest, but even he found the footing treacherous. Jagged rocks edged as sharp as daggers, boulders as large as buildings, sheer drop-offs, hidden pits, and shifting fields of loose scree challenged their every step. Most of the pits turned out to be web-lined tunnels that snaked down into the darkness under the landscape. Pharaun assumed that the whole plane must have been honeycombed with them. The stink of rot and a soft, barely audible insectoid clicking floated up from the black depths of the holes. He did not like to think of what might be lurking under their feet.
After a few hours travel, they stopped for a moment to eat their rations of fungus bread, cheese, and cured rothé-meat near the edge of a pit as large across as an ogre’s arm span. A disturbing clicking sound emerged from somewhere deep in the darkness of the hole. A musty stink wafted out of it.
“What is that sound?” Jeggred asked above the wind, around a slobbering mouthful of meat.
“What is that smell, you mean,” Pharaun corrected. “It’s almost as bad as your breath, Jeggred. And I mean that in a brotherly way.”
Jeggred answered him with a glare as he tore into another shank of rothé meat.
From under the hood of her cloak, Danifae whispered, “The sound is the voice of Lolth’s children.”
“Breeding pits, I would guess,” Quenthel said by way of clarification and bit into a piece of dried meat.
She held forth her whip, and the serpents snaked their heads downward into the pit and hissed.
The clicking stopped. At the same time, the wind died, and the keening of the songspider webs went silent. The night grew still.
Pharaun’s skin went gooseflesh, and the four of them sat motionless, staring into the pit and waiting, expecting a horror to crawl forth. It didn’t, and after a time the wind started anew and with it, the keening.
Pharaun hurriedly finished his repast, rose, and said, “Shall we continue?”
Quenthel nodded, Jeggred stuffed another mouthful of cured rothé into his jaws, and they left the pit behind them and moved onward. As they walked Danifae smiled from under her hood at Pharaun with undisguised contempt. She obviously found his discomfort with the plane amusing.
Pharaun ignored her and thought he had never imagined he could so miss Valas Hune. No doubt the mercenary guide could have led them along the path of least difficulty. Or perhaps it was Ryld he missed after all, who would have at least provided a nice partner for conversation. Quenthel and Danifae, on the other hand, simply trekked along under the souls in silence, oblivious to the difficulties of the terrain. And Jeggred was worth speaking to only to taunt.
Webs were everywhere, growing increasingly more common. They coated everything, from the ordinary-sized traps of a black widow to the monstrous, thick-stranded curtains of silver as large as the skin-sails on the Ship of Chaos. Pharaun’s shoes were caked with webs. The air itself, thick and irritating to his throat, seemed infested with invisible strands.
After several more exhausting hours of travel, webs coated them all in a sticky sheathe. Pharaun had to continually remove the delicate strands from his face so that he could breathe. He felt as though the whole plane was really a giant spider, cocooning them all so slowly that they would not realize their peril until they were wrapped up, immobile, and awaiting the bite of fangs.
Pharaun shook his head and put the image out of his mind.
Despite the many large webs hanging between the boulders and tors, up to then Pharaun had seen only ordinary-sized arachnids, ranging in size from a fingernail to the size of a head. The narrow-bodied, long-legged songspiders were the largest spider he had seen, though he knew there had to be larger ones somewhere. Spiders lurked over, under, and between every rock and hole on the surface. The ground was acrawl with them. Pharaun assumed that the originators of the largest webs must have laired in the tunnels underground, where he hoped they would stay, at least for the time being. The small spiders were enough of an irritant.
Though he knew that not even the smallest of the creatures could sneak through the magical protections of his spells, Sorcere ring, and enchanted piwafwi, Pharaun could not shake a constant crawling sensation on his skin.
Danifae and Quenthel, on the contrary, appeared to enjoy allowing the spiders to crawl freely over their skin and hair. Jeggred, of course, seemed as oblivious to the spiders as he was to most everything, though even the half-demon took care not to willfully squash any of the creatures while he walked.
As they picked their way through yet another field of petrified spider legs, Pharaun caught a flash of motion from near the top of one of the tallest of the spires. He stopped and watched, but the motion did not repeat itself.
Curious, and otherwise bored, Pharaun activated the power in his ring and took flight. He rose rapidly into the air up the face of the tor. He spared a look down as he rose and saw his traveling companions looking up after him. He knew then how they all must look to Lolth’s eyes—small and meaningless.
When he reached the top of the stone spire, he stopped and hovered in mid-air, the words to a spell ready in his mind.
The wind gusted, rustling his hair and cloak. Farther above him floated the glowing, translucent line of souls, the lowest of which were almost within arm’s reach. The spirits did not respond to his presence so he ignored them. Power vortices swirled in the heavens, raining green and blue sparks. Acrid clouds of smoke peppered the air.
From below, Quenthel shouted something, but he could not make it out in the wind. Still, he could imagine what she was probably saying.
He ignored her and focused on the object of his curiosity.
Irregular outcroppings of rock covered the otherwise flat expanse of the tor’s top, as if the spider’s leg had been hacked off before it had been petrified. Thick webs hung between every outcropping, blanketing the surface in silver.
Hanging there in Lolth’s air with Lolth’s dead, Pharaun felt inexplicably comfortable, as though soaking in a warm bath. The Demonweb Pits stretched large and alien below him; the sky extended vast and strange above him, but he did not care. He thought that it might be almost comfortable to lie amongst the webs, to wrap himself in their warmth. He floated forward, desperate for a rest.
Within the strands, he saw, prey struggled—large prey. He could not make out their forms because they were covered entirely in webs. The prey nearest him, perhaps agitated by his presence, wriggled, struggled, and some of the web strands parted to reveal an open eye.
Aliisza’s sending had hit Kaanyr Vhok like a lightning bolt. The words still bounced around his head.
Lolth welcomes home the dead. She lives.
Then nothing more. Kaanyr had expected Aliisza to return to him, but she had not, nor had she communicated with him since. He found her behavior surprising.
For a moment he had convinced himself that the alu-fiend was lying about Lolth’s return, but he knew he was deceiving himself. He had heard no falsehood in her mental voice, and he knew her well enough that he would have been aware had she been telling a lie. She could have been mistaken, so he would confirm her missive, but in his core he knew it to be true. Soon, he and his men would be facing not only Menzoberranzan’s soldiers and wizards, but also its priestesses of Lolth. Lots of them.
He had warned Nimor already of Lolth’s return, though the drow had not so much as acknowledged the sending.
The ungrateful ass, Kaanyr thought.
According to Kaanyr’s spies, Nimor had fled the battle with the Archmage of Menzoberranzan, leaving the lichdro
w Dyrr to face the Baenre wizard alone. Details were few, but it appeared that the Baenre wizard had at last prevailed. Apparently, the city’s bazaar had been leveled and many Menzoberranyr destroyed or petrified.
At least the lichdrow had done something worthwhile, Kaanyr thought.
Kaanyr evaluated his situation. First, the lichdrow was destroyed and House Agrach Dyrr was closed up and under siege. Second, Nimor Imphraezl had fled. Third, and most importantly, the Spider Queen lived and her priestesses could again cast spells.
The evaluation allowed only one conclusion, and the conclusion settled over him like a shroud.
He had lost the battle for Menzoberranzan.
The realization sat heavily on him. He’d had to turn it around again and again in his mind before he came to accept it.
Sitting on a luxuriously upholstered divan in the magical tent that served as his headquarters, he held a goblet of brandy to his lips and drank. He barely tasted it, though he ordinarily savored its sweetness. He sighed, set the goblet on a nearby table, and sagged back into the cushions of the divan.
He had been so tantalizingly close to victory. So close!
His Scourged Legion had fought well and hard in the tunnels along Menzoberranzan’s southeastern border, and in the Donigarten, amidst the dung-fed forests of fungi. He had lost five score of his tanarukks but killed half again that many drow, along with several score of their fighting spiders and a drider or two. For a time, it had appeared that his tanarukks would force their way through the drow lines, penetrate all the way to the great mansions perched on Qu’ellarz’orl, and lay siege to House Baenre itself.
But then he had received Aliisza’s sending.
He could not win the battle; he knew that. All that was left was to ensure that he did not lose his hide, and that would require quick action. He had no doubt that the drow and their priestesses were planning counterattacks even then.
Fortunately, Kaanyr Vhok had a plan. He would use Horgar and the duergar to cover the retreat of his Scoured Legion. The stinking, incompetent little waddlers had done nothing in the battle for the city other than hide behind siege walls and lob their stonefire bombs at Tier Breche. If the duergar forces actually had gained and held even a single defended tunnel, Kaanyr would be shocked.
R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Extinction, Annihilation, Resurrection Page 72
