While Larikal and Geremis led the search for the lichdrow’s phylactery, Yasraena decided that she would attempt to buy her House peace, or failing that, time.
She sat on the stone throne of her reception hall—a locale that Triel Baenre could easily pinpoint with a spell—and hoped that the Matron Mother of the First House would respond.
She gathered her thoughts, held her holy symbol in hand, and spoke the words to a sending. The spell would allow her to speak and send to Triel Baenre a statement of not more than twenty-five words. Defensive wards had no effect on a sending, mostly because the spell did nothing other than transmit the speech of the caster. It could carry no spells or words of power.
When she finished the casting, she spoke Triel’s name to denote the recipient and recited her message.
“Matron Mother Baenre, Matron Mother Agrach Dyrr wishes to discuss situation. I am in Dyrr reception hall. Scrying wards are lowered. Do same. Mutual clairaudience.”
With that, Yasraena spoke the triggering word to lower the anti-scrying ward in the reception hall, and contacted Anival telepathically through the magical amulet at her breast.
Matron Mother? Anival answered.
Send one of the House wizards to my throne room, one skilled in divinations. Now.
Yes, Matron Mother, Anival answered, and the connection went silent.
While Yasraena waited from the House wizard to attend her, she cradled her holy symbol in her hand and recited the words to a minor spell that allowed her to see scrying effects. If and when Triel’s House wizard placed a clairaudience sensor in Yasraena’s throne room, Yasraena would know.
In less than a fifty-count, one of the House wizards, Ooraen, a recent graduate of Sorcere, entered through the far archway of the reception hall. He made obeisance and hurried down the aisle to the throne.
“How may I serve you, Matron Mother?”
“You know how to cast a clairaudience divination, I presume?” she asked.
The wizard nodded.
“For the time, stand beside my throne and be silent. When I command it, you will cast the spell at the location I designate and leave me.”
The male bowed and stepped beside the throne.
Yasraena drummed her fingers along the haft of her tentacle rod and waited. And waited. Nearly an hour passed, and she grew increasingly impatient.
A small magical sensor materialized in the throne room, a fist-sized red globe that would have been invisible but for Yasraena’s augmented eyes.
“I see it, Matron Mother Baenre,” Yasraena said to the sensor.
At the mention of Triel’s title, Ooraen gave a visible start. Yasraena turned to him and said, “Cast your clairaudience spell in the reception hall of House Baenre.”
Yasraena knew that Ooraen had never seen the inside of House Baenre but that did not matter. An adequate verbal description of the desired location would serve.
After only a moment’s hesitation, Ooraen removed a tiny metal horn from his cloak, held it to his ear, and recited the words to his spell. When he completed the divination, Yasraena heard Triel’s voice through the sensor: “Greetings, Yasraena.”
That Triel had called her by her given name rather than her title was an intentional slight, but Yasraena gulped down her anger. She waved Ooraen from the chamber, and the wizard fled down the aisle.
“Greetings, Matron Mother Baenre,” Yasraena replied.
“How fares House Agrach Dyrr?” Triel asked, and Yasraena heard the sarcastic smile in the voice.
“Well,” Yasraena answered, defiant. “House Agrach Dyrr fares well.”
Triel’s laughter carried through the sensor.
Yasraena ignored it and said, “Matron Mother, I sought this communication so we might discuss a settlement.”
“Indeed?” Triel answered.
“Indeed,” Yasraena replied and wasted no further time with conversational niceties. “House Agrach Dyrr’s alliance with the forces besieging Menzoberranzan was undertaken in secret by the lichdrow. By the time I learned of it, the plot already was in motion. Since then, I have endeavored to quietly undermine the lichdrow’s plots at every turn. Now that his body is destroyed—”
“Now that your ambition has proven far too large for your capabilities,” Triel interrupted, “you wish to sue for peace. Is that not so, Yasraena?”
Yasraena could not keep anger from her own voice. “You mistake me, Matron Mother Baenre. I—”
“No,” Triel interjected. “You mistake me. You seek to save your House by blaming your own failings on the lichdrow. Even if what you said was true, it simply demonstrates your own incompetence to rule.”
Yasraena gripped the tentacle rod so tightly in her hand that her fingers ached. Anger burned in her, and she almost exploded at Triel. Almost.
Instead, she calmed herself and answered. “Perhaps you speak some truth,” she said, slightly emphasizing the word ‘some.’ “Which is why I wish to make you an offer.”
Silence. Then, “Speak it.”
“House Agrach Dyrr is made a vassal House to House Baenre for five hundred years, the arrangement to be ratified by the Ruling Council. My House will be removed from the Council—” temporarily, Yasraena added to herself—“and in the meanwhile will be under Baenre rule and protection during that half-millennium period. I and it will be at your disposal, Matron Mother.”
Yasraena knew the offer to be a bold one. It had been long since any of the city’s Houses had been made a formal vassal to another. But it was not unheard of, and she had few other options.
A long silence followed, during which Yasraena held her breath. No doubt Triel was mulling the possibilities.
At last, Triel said, “Your offer has some small potential, Yasraena.”
Yasraena exhaled.
Triel continued, “To show me your sincerity, you will destroy the lichdrow’s phylactery.”
Yasraena had expected nothing less. “Of course, Matron Mother. I am in the process of locating it but the siege makes it difficult. As does what I presume to be the inevitable assay of the Archmage. Temporarily halt the siege and restrain your brother. When I have the phylactery, I will contact you again and provide evidence of its destruction.”
Triel laughed. “Do not be foolish, Yasraena,” she said. “You will demonstrate your worthiness to be a vassal House to House Baenre by finding and destroying the phylactery even while House Agrach Dyrr is under siege by the Xorlarrin. And if the Archmage decides to try your defenses, then you will abide that too. Or you will not. And if not, then destruction is what your House warrants.”
Yasraena bit back the angry words that flew to her lips. She had little choice but to accept.
“Your terms are reasonable,” she said through gritted teeth.
“I’m pleased you find them so,” Triel answered. “Do not contact me again, Yasraena, unless it is to provide evidence of the lichdrow’s destruction.”
With that, the connection went quiet. A heartbeat later, the sensor in Yasraena’s reception hall dematerialized.
Yasraena sat in her throne and thought, her mind racing. She had made her play but was not sure how it would unfold. If she did in fact locate the phylactery, she was undecided whether she would honor the terms of the deal or instead safeguard it until the lichdrow could reincorporate. A part of her very much desired the permanent destruction of the meddling undead wizard, but the pragmatist in her knew that she weakened her House, if not her own personal position within it, by destroying the lichdrow. But to throw herself on the mercy of House Baenre . . .
Yasraena shook her head. She had no decision to make if her House fell to the Xorlarrin or Gromph Baenre found the phylactery before her. She rose and went searching the halls for Larikal.
Silence reigned for the next several leagues of travel as Pharaun and his cohorts picked their way through the towers of stone and the blasted ground. The entire plane, the very air, felt restive and stretched, as though about to explode.
Ove
r the hours, the wind grew steadily more forceful, with intermittent gusts so strong that Pharaun had to lean forward to avoid being blown off his feet. The gusts howled between the towers of stone, set the songspider webs to screeching, and stirred up a blizzard of spiders, dirt, webs, and loose scree. Jeggred protected Danifae from the living hail with his hulking body. Pharaun shielded himself with his magical piwafwi. Quenthel merely smiled into the storm and held her arms outstretched to provide a haven for any spiders that blew onto her. After a time, spiders teemed in her hair and on her piwafwi.
She was home, Pharaun realized, and pulled the hood of his magical cloak lower to protect his face. The Yor’thae was returning home.
The gusts grew more frequent and still more intense with each passing hour. An increasingly powerful hail of pebbles, webs, and spiders pelted them, like a blizzard of sling bullets. The keening webs sounded more and more like the agonized wail of a creature in pain. Pharaun had little experience with surface weather patterns, but even he could smell a storm on the wind.
“Perhaps we should find shelter,” he said above the shrieking winds.
“Faith is our shelter, mage,” Quenthel answered back, the wind whipping her hair around her face. A small black spider crawled over her eyelid, down her nose, and over her lips. She only smiled.
Danifae put back her cloak hood and cocked her head as though she heard something. Red spiders thronged her hair too, and her face.
“Can you not hear it in the keening, mage?” Danifae shouted. “The Spider Queen calls us onward. We continue.”
Pharaun squinted into the wind, looked from one priestess to the other, and said nothing. He heard nothing in the wind but the abominable screech of the webs. And as for faith providing a shelter? He knew better than that. He had seen Lolth’s faithful trapped in a web atop a tor, waiting to be fed upon. That was the shelter provided by faith in the Spider Queen.
Still, he bit his tongue and trudged forward, bent against the wind and hurtling debris. Time passed; fatigue dulled his mind and body. The storm and winds continued to build as the hours dragged on.
When the sky to his left lightened enough to afford a better view of the landscape, he decided to call that direction “east.” Despite Quenthel’s assurance to Jeggred that the sun would not harm them, Pharaun found himself squinting, bracing for its impact.
To the west, perhaps another five or six days’ of foot travel away, were mountains. The great triangular peaks soared high into the sky, forming a wall of dark stone with sides as sharp, sheer, and craggy as fangs. Caps of red ice crowned them. So too did storm clouds, an expanding bank of black as thick and as dark as demon’s blood—a storm the likes of which Pharaun could never have imagined.
And it was moving toward them. The cutting wind and screaming webs were its prophets.
The line of souls, unbothered by the swirling wind and gathering storm, poured toward the base of one of the mountains. There, they congregated at a dark point, perhaps a valley or a pass, between two of the largest peaks.
“Lolth’s web and city sits on the other side those mountains,” Quenthel said above the wind, above the screeching of the webs.
Danifae held her hair back from her face and looked to the far horizon. The distant look in her eyes reminded Pharaun of a mad prophet he had once seen in Menzoberranzan’s bazaar.
“All the souls are massing in that gorge at the base of the mountains,” Pharaun said, not certain everyone had seen it.
“It is not a gorge,” Quenthel answered, her voice barely audible over the wind.
She offered nothing more, and Pharaun didn’t like the haunted look in her eyes.
“The sun rises,” said Jeggred, shielding his eyes with one of his huge fighting hands.
Pharaun turned to see the lip of a tiny red orb creep diffidently over the eastern horizon. It cast little more light than the silvery nighttime satellite of the World Above when it was full. The light from Lolth’s sun formed a clear line on the landscape, a border between darkness and light, that oozed toward them as the orb rose higher. Just as Quenthel had said, the light caused only minor discomfort.
Pharaun lowered his hand from his eyes and watched the first sunrise of his lifetime.
To his surprise and alarm, where the dim light touched, movement occurred. At first, Pharaun thought the sunlight was causing the earth to ripple, but then he realized what was actually occurring.
The plane was birthing spiders. Millions of spiders.
Crawling, scuttling, clambering, they moved from the darkness of their fissures and caves and into the light, summoned by the dawn. All had eight legs, eight eyes, and fangs, but there the similarities ended. Some were the size of rats, some were the size of rothé, and a few that clambered forth out of largest fissures had bloated bodies as large as giants. Some leaped, some phased in and out of reality, some pulled their bloated forms along on overlarge pedipalps or swordlike legs, others tumbled or flew on the gusting wind.
As the sun’s light moved across the landscape, the pits, tunnels, and holes that it lit vomited forth their arachnid denizens. A ponderous but visible wave traveled across the earth as the sun slowly trekked higher into the sky. The ground was acrawl.
The light was moving toward them. They watched in awed silence.
Pharaun had lived with and amongst spiders his entire life but he had never before seen anything like the seething, roiling mass of arachnids that was beginning to blanket the surface of the plane. They coated everywhere the light touched, a seething blanket of legs, eyes, and hairy bodies.
At first, little occurred other than the birthing. The spiders that emerged from their holes seemed content to sit in the light as the birthing line moved across the world. But soon, first one, then another, then a hundred, then a million of the spiders attacked the others and fed upon the fallen. A slaughter trailed the birthing line by a few hundred paces, and there the surface of the plane erupted into a roiling, chaotic mass of fangs, pedipalps, and pincers, all biting, cutting, and tearing. Hisses, screeches, clicks, and the sound of ripping bodies filled the air, a wave of sound that followed hard after the sunlight. Severed legs dotted the rocks; huge carcasses flailed and bled; ichor stained the earth.
It was purposeless slaughter, madness made flesh, chaos given substance.
Lolth must have been smiling.
Pharaun could see plainly that anything caught in the midst of the bloody tumult would be fortunate to survive. He spared a glance under his feet, and saw pits and holes gaping like open mouths all around them. Even above the wind he could hear the scrabbling of feet coming from within them, the eager clicking of fangs, the tapping of legs on stone. In his mind’s eye, he pictured another million arachnids lurking just inside the darkness of the holes, waiting for the touch of the dim sun to set them free of their underground prisons. Pharaun had no idea how such an ecology could sustain itself and did not care. Though born in a city where slaughter was commonplace, even he found the level of violence repulsive.
And soon they would be in the midst of it. The sun was rising. The light was coming.
“Goddess be praised,” Quenthel said, a rapturous look on her face.
The wind gusted, pasting his robes to his body. The webs keened in answer. Pharaun thought the Baenre priestess must have lost her mind.
Danifae emerged out from under her hood to greet the sun, not unlike the spiders emerging from their caves. Pharaun counted not less than seven tiny red spiders crawling in her hair,
“Do we intend to simply stand here and wait?” he asked above the noise.
Neither priestess replied, and he decided that was answer enough.
“Afraid?” Jeggred asked, smirking.
Pharaun ignored the draegloth and mentally activated the power of his ring of flight. With a silent command, he surreptitiously lifted his feet half a handspan off the earth. If the priestesses had a plan, that was well. If not, he saw no need to remain earthbound in the face of the madness.
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nbsp; Together, the four of them watched as the light and violence churned its way toward them. As it grew closer, the clicking and screeching from the caves and pits around them grew louder, more eager, hungrier. The arachnids within sensed the approach of the light.
Jeggred answered those sounds with a low rumble in his chest. He stepped before Danifae and assumed a fighting crouch. The priestesses did not even look at the ground around them. They had eyes only for the approaching slaughter.
Pharaun decided to try again. “Mistress,” he said to Quenthel, “would it not be wise to take shelter?”
Quenthel looked at him sidelong and said, “No, mage. We must stand in the midst of this and bear witness.”
From around her neck, she removed her holy symbol of Lolth—a jet disk inlaid with amethysts arranged to look like a spider. The serpents of her whip stood upright and watched the wave of spiders approach. Quenthel chanted a prayer, the words in a language even Pharaun could not understand.
Pharaun bit back the cutting reply that came to his mind, content that he could take flight if and when the need arose.
Danifae put her hand on Jeggred’s fur-covered back. “It is the Teeming,” she said to no one in particular, recalling the words of the soul-eating creature Pharaun had taken prisoner. Awe colored her tone.
Pharaun didn’t care what it was called. He knew only that soon the sunlight would reach them, light the pits around them, and . . .
He imagined his body buried under a mountain of bloated bodies, jointed legs, mandibles, and unforgiving eyes.
Quenthel and Danifae both appeared lost in rapture, temporarily mad perhaps. Each held her holy symbol in her hands; each wore the wild but assured expression of an ecstatic.
Pharaun knew that ordinary spiders answered the priestesses’ commands, but he did not know whether the arachnids native to the Pits would. Besides, the priestesses’ powers were limited. They could not command millions of spiders, could they?
Pharaun liked the situation less and less. He reached into his piwafwi, removed a ball of sulfur-soaked bat guano, and held it between thumb and forefinger—just in case. Ordinarily, he would not have considered offering violence to Lolth’s children, at least not in the presence of her priestesses, but if it came to killing spiders or dying himself under a heap of hairy bodies, the choice would be an easy one.
R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Extinction, Annihilation, Resurrection Page 74
