As ready as he would get, he waited.
The sunlight slid across the rockscape, birthing more spiders, closer, closer . . .
When it reached them, motion exploded all around. Thousands of spiders boiled from their holes like steam from a heated beaker, hissing and clicking. From a large tunnel to Pharaun’s right, rothé-sized masses of hairy spider legs issued forth—five, ten, a score. His heart hammered between his ribs. The creatures had no bodies as such, no heads. They were nothing more than a clumped, disgusting, squirming mass of legs, each of which was longer than Pharaun was tall, and eight of which ended in a pointed claw of chitin as long as his forearm.
“Chwidencha,” Pharaun said. “Two score or more.”
Chwidencha—he’d heard them called “leg horrors”—had once been drow, or perhaps drow souls, but they had failed Lolth, and as punishment had been transformed by the Spider Queen into that twisted form. The Demonweb Pits did not appear to Pharaun to be a paradise for the Spider Queen’s faithful. It looked more like a prison for her failures.
The chwidencha’s rapid, undulating movement was enough to cause Pharaun a wave of nausea. Impossible clusters of long, jointed legs, like a nest of vipers, squirmed a greeting to the red light of the dawn.
Though they had no eyes that he could see, the chwidencha immediately noticed the companions. Forty or more mouths offered muffled hisses from orifices buried under nests of legs.
“I see them, Master Mizzrym,” Quenthel said, turning around, but her voice lacked the same confidence it had held a moment before.
The thousands of spiders boiling from the holes around them did not come near the chwidencha and left the companions unmolested, a small island of sanity amidst the chaos.
Lolth’s damned appeared to command a certain respect, or fear.
With alarming speed and coordination, the chwidencha pack encircled them at a distance of perhaps ten paces.
The four drow closed ranks a few steps, a reflexive action. Pharaun called to mind the words to his fireball spell but held off casting. He shared a look with Quenthel but could not read her face. Jeggred’s chest rose and fell heavily, and his fighting claws flexed. The draegloth interposed himself as best he could between the arachnids and Danifae but it was little use. They were surrounded. His growls answered their hisses and tapping claws.
Outside the ring of Lolth’s damned, the spiders that had boiled forth stood still for a moment, like arena fighters gathering their strength. Then the urge to slaughter reached them, and they erupted into violence. Thousands upon thousands of spiders engaged in an orgy of dismemberment and feeding. Squeals, screeches, and hisses rang through the morning air. The ground vibrated under the volume of violence.
Within the ring, the tension grew. The chwidenchas’ legs churned sickeningly, as though they were agitated or somehow communicating. Though he could see no eyes, it was clear to Pharaun that the chwidencha were regarding them. He felt the weight of their looks, the heaviness of their malice, the depth of their hate.
“Well—” he started to say.
At the sound of his voice, the chwidencha pack hissed as one. The smaller legs sprouting from what would have been their faces writhed, squirmed, and parted to reveal fanged mouths larger around than Pharaun’s head. Finger-length fangs dripped a thick, yellow venom.
To all of them, Quenthel said, “We will not harm any of Lolth’s children.”
Pharaun could see that Quenthel was sweating as badly as he was, though her voice was calm.
“These are more like stepchildren,” he answered and ran through the inventory of spells in his mind.
“They are neither,” Danifae said, raising her holy symbol—a red spider encased in amber—before her. “These are her damned.”
At the sight of Lolth’s brandished symbol, the chwidencha pack emitted a high-pitched screech that made the hair on the nape of Pharaun’s neck stand on end. As one, they spasmed in anger, legs churning and squirming. The claws on the ends of their legs cracked rock, and Pharaun could not help but imagine what they could do to flesh.
“They do not appear to be the religious type, Mistress Danifae,” Pharaun said.
Danifae did not lower her symbol.
The wind gusted, set the songspider webs to screeching, a sound that temporarily rose above even the cacophony of the Teeming.
This entire plane of existence is mad, Pharaun decided. The priestesses are mad. I am mad.
The chwidencha answered the song of the webs with another screech of their own. Pharaun didn’t care for the look of their open, fanged mouths.
“Mistress,” he said to Quenthel, “perhaps you could discourage further discussion with these creatures? I find them poor conversationalists. Mistress Danifae?”
For that, Quenthel turned to look at him just long enough to stare daggers. Danifae smirked.
Quenthel raised her jet symbol at the chwidencha, mirroring Danifae’s gesture and eliciting a similar response.
Venom dripped to pool on the ground. Hisses answered their movements.
Quenthel pronounced, “Leave us now, damned of Lolth! We are servants of the Spider Queen about her will. You will not impede us.”
“Back to your holes!” Danifae commanded, offering her own symbol.
A palpable wave of divine power went forth from both the priestesses.
Pharaun expected to see the chwidencha turn and flee into their tunnels but the leg horrors did not move, at least not away from them. More hisses answered the priestesses’ command; legs squirmed and writhed. As one, the chwidencha took a slow step forward, and the circle of safety shrank.
While Danifae wore an inexplicable smile, Quenthel’s uncertain expression told Pharaun everything he needed to know.
chapter
six
As she stepped through the portal, Halisstra felt spread across a distance vast and deep. In only a fraction of a heartbeat, the portal moved her from the relatively calm gray nothingness of the Astral to—
She found herself in mid-air, falling.
Before she could activate the levitation power of her brooch, she dropped five paces and hit the ground with a grunt. She managed to keep her feet and found herself standing under a dim sun on blasted ground in the midst of a nightmare.
Spiders surrounded her, swarmed her, engulfed her, from hand-sized arachnids scurrying underfoot to horrid monsters twice her height. The creatures tore each other to pieces all around her. Hisses, clicks, and squeals filled her ears; black, brown, and red ichor stained the ground and splattered her face.
Halisstra was aswim in an ocean of Lolth’s maddened children. The Spider Queen must have caused Halisstra to arrive in the midst of the chaos as penance for her apostasy.
She steadied her stance, brandished the Crescent Blade, and took in her environment with only a single glance. She stood on a bleak, pit-ridden rockscape in the shadow of a slim spire of unusual looking rock, a tor of black stone that looked as though it should have toppled of its own weight in the gusting wind. The whirlpools of Lolth’s reawakened power dotted the cloudy sky. She had been ejected from one such and thanked the goddess that it had not been higher off the ground. A line of souls streamed through the heavens, all of them floating in the direction of a distant mountain range, drawn there by the lodestone of Lolth’s power.
An eerie keening rang in her ears, the sound of songspider webs whistling in the blustery wind, like some obscene attempt to mimic the sound made by Seyll’s songsword. In it, she heard the echo of the word she had heard on the Astral, the word that made the hair on the nape of her neck stand on end:
Yor’thae.
She had no time to consider the sound further. The spiders around her noticed her. A sea of frenzied fangs, pincers, legs, and hairy bodies broke around her. Arachnids scuttled over rocks, over each other, over her. She slashed and cut but there were too many. They bit and tore indiscriminately, killing and devouring anything in their path. Spider bodies thumped into her; fangs trie
d to bite through her mail; claws sent her spinning, knocked her to her knees.
She refused to die on her knees.
“Goddess!” she screamed and swung the glowing Crescent Blade in a wide arc.
As if in answer, Feliane and Uluyara appeared in the air through a short-lived gate that appeared perhaps twenty paces to her right and five paces high in the air. They fell to the ground, and she saw them for only an instant more—both wore expressions of surprise and horror—before they too were buried under a mass of writhing, leaping spiders.
From her knees, Halisstra swung blindly, hitting spider flesh with every pass. Ichor sprayed, splattered her face and hands. Hissing and clicking filled her ears; squeals of pain.
She fought her way back to her feet, impaling a large blue spider on the end of her blade. She slipped in its gushing fluids and nearly fell. A huge, black, hairy arachnid leaped on her back and sank its fangs into her shoulder, but her mail withstood the attack. She flung it from her and stomped its thorax to mush as another huge spider reared before her, lunged forward, and bit at her legs. She dodged backward and fended it off with the Crescent Blade. She felt as though she were up to her waist in the creatures; with each step, she crushed half a dozen small spiders under her boots. She saw no way out, no way she would ever get free. She would die under their fangs, and her body would be left a desiccated husk blowing in the screaming wind.
“Goddess!” she cried again, hacking wildly with the Crescent Blade.
The enchanted steel killed where it struck, slicing arachnid flesh easily, but there were thousands of them. Eilistraee had no particular power over the creatures, and in her desperation Halisstra almost fell back into her old habit of channeling Lolth’s power to command spiders. It would be so easy to simply order them back to—
Uluyara’s horn rang, and Halisstra latched onto the sound with the desperation of the drowning. She remembered the first time she had heard its clear call, on the World Above under the silver light of the moon. She centered herself, at least for a time, and with effort resisted Lolth’s pull.
If she were to live, she would have to save herself with the tools that Eilistraee, and only Eilistraee, had put into her hands.
Holding the Crescent Blade in both hands, Halisstra slashed about her with an abandon born of hopelessness, sending legs and spider flesh flying. Her small shield made her two-handed grip on the Crescent Blade a bit awkward, but she managed. She wanted the extra force to her swings.
Fangs clamped on her arm, her leg, and pierced her mail and flesh. Agony raced through her body, and warm poison throbbed into her veins. She grabbed the hairy blob on her forearm and squeezed it until it popped. She stabbed downward at another spider, impaling it, cross cut to her right, and took the mandible from another. She found it strange that killing Lolth’s creatures did not elicit the same elation she had felt back in the forest of the World Above when she had killed the phase spider in the name of Eilistraee.
Instead, she felt out of balance, dirty, guilty.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured as she killed but was not sure what she meant. The words just seemed to fit. Spider blood splattered her hands, her cloak, her face. “I’m sorry.”
Despite her words, she hacked her way through the roiling mass of bodies, legs, mandibles, and ichor toward where she had last seen her fellow priestesses. To her relief, she saw that both Feliane and Uluyara had found their feet and their blades. They dodged nimbly amidst the chaos, slashing and stabbing. They looked as though they were dancing—they leaped, spun, twirled, and tumbled, serving the Lady of the Dance even while they slaughtered. Both sported cuts and bites, and Feliane had a dark puncture on her bare forearm. Still, Halisstra thought them beautiful. Their blades whistled through the air, an answer and a challenge to the strange keening. Halisstra caught Feliane’s eye as both cut their way through the never-ending tide of spiders.
“Halisstra!” Feliane called. Cutting, chopping, her round face was splattered with blood and ichor.
Uluyara whirled a circle beside the elf priestess, her blade a blur, and met Halisstra’s eyes for a moment.
“Here!” Halisstra answered.
Without stopping, she opened the abdomen of a spider, then another and another. She was fifteen paces from her sisters.
From out of the maelstrom of bodies a brown sword spider leaped high above the fray. Time slowed for Halisstra.
Easily as large as a pack lizard, the creature’s eight arms ended in claws that looked like short swords and killed just as effectively. Halisstra’s breath caught as the creature reached the apex of its leap. She had seen sword spiders fight in the basement arena of House Melarn, cutting down out-of-favor male warriors with bloody, brutal efficiency.
As the sword spider descended toward Feliane, it clustered its swordlike claws together to form a single impaling blade, pointing downward at the slight elf priestess.
“Above!” Halisstra shouted but could not be sure that Feliane heard her. “Feliane!”
A large spider appeared before Halisstra, and she hacked off two of its legs with the Crescent Blade.
The shadow of the descending sword spider must have blotted out the dim red light of the sun. Feliane looked up, saw it, slipped to the side, and tried to raise her blade defensively. She was a heartbeat too slow. The sword spider crashed down on her, knocking her blade aside and driving her to the ground, flat on her back. Its clustered legs sheared through her armored shoulder and sank into her flesh. She screamed in pain, and blood spouted. Her sword fell from her hand, skittered away, and was lost under a throng of arachnids.
The sword spider straddled her small form, caging her in its bloody legs. She struggled beneath it, punching with her good arm, kicking, but she was already growing weak from blood loss. The blows crunched into the spider’s huge body but seemed to have little effect other than to elicit an angry hiss.
A pack of giant tarantulas drove Uluyara from Feliane’s side, and Halisstra lost sight of the High Priestess.
Halisstra shouted again and cut her way toward her sisters, hacking mercilessly at anything in her path. She left a trail of severed legs and pedipalps in her wake. Fourteen paces, twelve, ten. She killed with every step. Ichor covered her; soaked her. Small arachnids teemed over her exposed skin, her face, and her hair. She devoured those that got near her mouth and spat the pieces to the ground.
She knew that she would not reach Feliane in time.
The swords of its claws still glistening red with the elf ’s blood, the sword spider pinned the dying Feliane with three of its legs and raised its forelegs high in a strike that would lay open her chest and pierce her heart.
Uluyara materialized out of the madness to the sword spider’s right, blade held high. The High Priestess charged forward, calling on the Dark Maiden, and swung her blade in a crosscut designed to split the sword spider’s abdomen from head to spinneret.
But the spider saw her coming. It shifted slightly atop the wounded Feliane, parried Uluyara’s blow with one of its claws, and lashed out with another. The blow hit Uluyara squarely in the chest, sent mail links flying, and drove her backward. She stumbled, tripped on the carcass of a large spider behind her, and was instantly swamped with smaller arachnids.
The sword spider returned its attention toward Feliane. The arachnid again raised its forelegs high and drove them into Feliane’s chest. They split mail links, broke bones, and drove into the organs and flesh beneath. Feliane’s back arched with the agony, and blood pooled around her.
“Feliane!” Halisstra cried and cut down another spider and another.
She was five paces from the elf. Too far.
The elf ’s eyes were still open but glassy. Blood poured from her chest and dribbled from the corner of her mouth. The sword spider bared fangs as long as knives and sank them into Feliane’s flesh. Her head sagged to the side. The spider made as though to pick the elf up and carry her back to its lair.
Halisstra had no time to think, so she did
the only thing she could. She forced back the spiders near her with a flurry of vicious slashes, reached back over her head—a difficult maneuver with a shield slung on her arm—and flung the Crescent Blade with both hands at the sword spider.
The blade flew true, point first, and sank halfway to its hilt into the thorax of the huge arachnid. The creature uttered a hiss of agony, and its entire body spasmed. It withdrew bloodslicked fangs and claws from the elf ’s flesh and started to turn toward Halisstra. The Crescent Blade stuck out of its flesh like a pennon. Another spasm wracked its body, another hiss escaped its fanged mouth, and it collapsed atop Feliane, dead.
Feliane did not move.
Using her shield, Halisstra bashed another spider in its face as it lunged for her. She jerked Seyll’s songsword from the scabbard on her back. With its fluted hilt whistling a counter melody to the eerie sound of the wind, she slashed another spider, another, and rushed to Feliane’s side.
She kneeled, and blew a sigh of relief when she saw that Feliane was unconscious but alive—barely. Halisstra had no time to take a longer look. She whirled around and beat back a trio of giant widows, opening a long slash in one. Afterward, she turned, bent, and heaved the sword spider carcass off of the elf.
Unmolested for the moment by any spiders, Halisstra flipped her grip on Seyll’s sword and put the hilt to her lips. Placing one hand on Feliane’s wounded chest while still trying to keep an eye on the arachnids around her, she blew a single, soothing note. The sound served as a focus for her bae’qeshel healing magic.
The punctures in Feliane’s chest closed to pink dots, and her breath came easier, though she did not regain consciousness. Halisstra could not risk another spell amidst the swarming spiders. She took the hilt in her hands as three spiders the size of rats landed on her back. Their fangs could not penetrate her mail, and she pulled them from her as she rose and stabbed each in turn.
R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Extinction, Annihilation, Resurrection Page 75
