Gromph feigned a stumble and the spider pounced. The archmage dived aside, regained his feet in an instant, and unleashed a vicious downward slash that severed one of the golem’s legs at the shoulder.
The golem struck at Gromph with another leg as it tried to turn to face him—the blow opened the archmage’s thigh— but Gromph bounded between two of its remaining legs and chopped furiously. Chunks of the golem flew into the air as it clambered around.
Another blow struck Gromph, cracking ribs and driving the breath from his lungs, but he dared not stop his attack. His ankle caught under the golem and snapped.
Stars exploded in his vision. Agony raced up his leg. Shouting, spraying spit, he continued his onslaught. His axe rose and fell, rose and fell. Pieces of the golem lay scattered about the temple like so much Darklake flotsam.
After an indeterminate time, Gromph became aware that the spider golem was not moving. Fueled with spell-induced ferocity, he chopped at it several more times before he was sated.
When he came back to himself, the pain nearly caused him to lose consciousness. The bulk of the golem lay before him, cracked and broken. Its bulk pinned his leg. Pieces of it lay all around, scattered amidst the broken benches.
Another boom sounded against the temple’s double doors, fairly shaking the whole of the structure. Yasraena and her wizards had not yet been able to breach Gromph’s holding spell. They would try the windows next.
Gently, hissing at the pain, he pried up the golem’s body with the duergar axe and slid his foot free. Bone ground against bone, and the pain caused Gromph to vomit the mushrooms he had eaten in his office earlier. He did not look at the break. His ring was working to heal his wounds, but too slowly. He reached into his robe—its magic had protected it from the acidic breath of the golem—and extracted two healing potions, both ordinarily serving as material components to his spells. He tore their seal with his teeth and drank the warm fluid down, one after the other.
His ankle reknit and the gash in his thigh and shoulder closed. Even most of the acid burns healed.
He sighed, tested his ankle, found it fine, and climbed atop the golem’s body. There, he found his footing and straddled the point at which the rope of the master ward vanished into the golem’s body. He raised the axe high and started to chop.
With each swing he grew more and more eager and the light from the phylactery’s dweomer grew brighter and brighter in his sight.
After half-a-score swings, the axe blows revealed a hollow within the spider golem’s thorax. Gromph stopped, sweating, and stared.
There, floating in the air, intertwined with the vein of the master ward, was a shimmering, fist-sized sphere of red.
The sphere turned yellow. Then green. Then violet.
Gromph watched the globe cycle through seven colors before beginning the sequence anew. In a distant way, he knew the globe for what it was—a prismatic sphere. The colors lay atop each other, alternating spheres within spheres, like the layers of a flakefungus. The lichdrow must have found a way to make a prismatic sphere permanent. He had placed his phylactery within it and placed the whole within a specially constructed golem.
Gromph knew how to bring down a prismatic sphere. Certain spells defeated certain colors. Touching certain colors without dispelling them resulted in harm or death. He would have to defeat all of the colors to get at the phylactery within.
It would take time. Time he did not have. Besides, he had another problem.
The transformative spell that had turned him into a warrior had temporarily modified his mind, closing the door on that part of him that interacted with and drew on the Weave. He knew that he could cast spells, but the knowledge that allowed him to link with the Weave was gone, temporarily crowded out by the knowledge imparted to him by the transmutation spell.
He could not end the spell early. It had to run its course. Only after it had would he be able to bring down the sphere.
Above him, a portion of the conjured stone wall before one of the temple’s windows shattered, destroyed by some spell cast by one of Yasraena’s wizards. The stone rained down on the temple floor.
Gromph had only the wall of force between him and the forces of House Dyrr.
He was almost out of time.
A scrabbling sound turned him around. What he saw caused a pit to form in his stomach.
Each of the pieces he had chopped from the golem—the legs, the chunk of thorax, the claw, the piece of abdomen—cracked and split. Eight legs of jet sprouted from the cracks, a pair of mandibles. The threescore chunks of golem that Gromph had left scattered around the temple had been reanimated as buds of the main golem. The battle was not over.
For the tenth time in the last hour, Gromph cursed the lichdrow.
Danifae looked through the tiny, unglassed window of her garret in the Braeryn. Narbondel glowed red two-thirds of the way up its shaft. It was late in the day.
Danifae had lost track of time. For her, one day seemed much like another, one hour bled into the next.
She found it easier to measure time not with Narbondel but with corpses. It had been thirty-seven corpses since Lolth had selected her—Danifae could not so much as think her name—as Yor’thae.
Though Danifae had never been to Menzoberranzan before Lolth had selected her Yor’thae, she had come to know it well since. And to hate it.
To her right, far across Menzoberranzan’s cavern Danifae eyed the mammoth steps of the great stairway that led up to Tier Breche. She could see it at such a distance only because of its enormous size and the violet faerie fires that illumined its steps. On the high plateau beyond the stairs—invisible to her at that distance—stood Lolth’s grandest temple, ArachTinilith, the heart of the Spider Queen’s faith. Danifae had never set foot within it and never would.
Within Arach-Tinilith presided the bitch, Lolth’s Yor’thae.
Anger still boiled in Danifae, hate without end for the Yor’thae. She vented it on the males who came to her.
Danifae had created her own temple to Lolth, her own Arach-Tinilith: a tiny, stinking garret deep in the Braeryn. There, she spun her web and fed on her prey in Lolth’s name.
She leaned out of the window—her holy symbol still dangled from her neck, the amber smudged with grease and soot—and looked down to the street below. Addicts haunted the alleys like sunken-eyed, dazed ghosts. Fellow whores loitered in the doorways below her, soliciting anyone and anything that passed them by.
Groups of filthy orcs and bugbears leered at the fallen drow females. Danifae could see that the whores had sold their dignity along with their flesh. Not her. She served the Spider Queen still and ever would, despite the Yor’thae.
A thick sludge of sewage and trash coated the street. “The Stenchstreets,” they were called, and rightly. Danifae could not but think of the whole of the Braeryn as an open sewer that she could not escape.
She would not let Danifae escape.
The odor of freshly emptied chamber pots carried up to the window and made Danifae wrinkle her nose. The expression felt awkward around the stiff scars that marred the left side of her face. Thinking of her disfigurement brought another flash of anger. She willed hate through the air and across the cavern to Tier Breche.
She had long ago given up trying to hide her scars. They were part of her, as much as her faith, as much as her hate.
After Lolth had made her choice, the Spider Queen’s resurrection had been completed and the Yor’thae had come to Menzoberranzan in triumph. She had promised to usher in a new age for the Spider Queen and her worshipers.
But not for all of her worshipers.
The Yor’thae had punished Danifae for her presumption, forcing her to live a houseless life, dispossessing her of almost all of her property, marring her features to make her ugly, denying her the dignity of an execution.
Even Lolth herself appeared to have turned her back on Danifae. The goddess no longer granted the former battlecaptive spells and instead merely haunted her
dreams. When she slept, Danifae saw visions of eight spiders, eight sets of fangs, legs, eyes, and poison.
Despite it all, Danifae refused to accept the label of apostate. She worshiped Lolth still, though she was a congregation of one.
Poor and disfigured, she sold her body to males to earn enough coin to eat. Though the Yor’thae had scarred her face, men still lusted for her body and were willing to pay for its use. Danifae abhorred their touch, despised making them feel as though she were subjugated to them, but nevertheless did what she had to to survive—like any good spider.
The Yor’thae had laughed when she’d cast Danifae into squalor, thinking that a life of penury would make Danifae weak. But Danifae was a survivor, like all spiders, and her trials were but another test in a long line of tests. She had and would survive it. She would grow stronger. She could not be broken, not ever.
If Danifae had learned but one tenet from Lolth’s worship, from her life as a slave to Halisstra Melarn, it was that existence was a test. Always. The strong preyed on the weak and the weak suffered and died. There was nothing more to know.
And though Danifae was not the Yor’thae, she refused to be weak.
She left off the window, turned, and looked upon her sparsely furnished garret. She preferred to think of it as her web, an unassuming web, like that of the widow, within which lurked a predator.
A mushroom fiber pallet strewn with soiled blankets sat against the near wall. Every day, she carried the sheets to the shores of the Darklake to launder them—the routine had long ago taken on the significance of a religious ritual—but the smell of sweat and sex always lingered. She slept on the floor, refusing to take rest in the same bed that she shared with a male. A clay oil lamp sat on a stool near her bed, its tiny flame guttering in the stagnant air. In the corner stood a stone chair, upon which she hung the few articles of clothing she owned. A chamber pot and washbasin sat on opposite walls.
Danifae owned nothing of significant value except her faith, her holy symbol, and the blackroot distillate that she kept in a vial at her sash. She refilled the vial every fourth tenday by giving her body to an old, half-drow apothecary who worked out of the bazaar. She had made herself immune to the poison long ago through slow exposure.
She had sunk far, she knew, much farther even than when she had been a battle-captive. But she refused to surrender her faith. Most thought her nothing more than an insane whore or a cast-off hag afflicted with grand delusions. But she was neither. She was a spider, and she was being tested, nothing more and nothing less.
She had failed Lolth back in the Demonweb Pits—that was why she had not been chosen to be the Yor’thae—but she would atone for that failure and someday again find favor in the Spider Queen’s eight eyes.
In the meantime, Danifae murdered in Lolth’s name. Every eighth client that came to her garret fell prey to her. The Spider Queen might not have been answering Danifae’s prayers, but Danifae offered sacrifices nevertheless.
She disposed of the corpses by selling them to an elderly drow fungus farmer. Danifae’s prey ended up fertilizer in the mushroom fields of the Donigarten.
The weak fed the strong, she thought, and smiled through her scars.
A knock on her door turned her around.
“ ’Fae,” said a slurred voice from behind the door. “Open up. I want to taste your flesh.”
Danifae knew the voice. Heegan, the second son of a failed merchant, who always stank of pickled mushrooms and mindwine.
“Hold a moment,” Danifae said, and the male did as he was told.
Heegan was number eight.
Danifae pulled the vial of blackroot distillate from her pouch, daubed her finger, and coated her lips. Donning a smile, she moved to the door and opened it.
There in the hallway stood Heegan, his white hair mussed, his filthy shirt partially unbuttoned. Danifae stood two hands taller than the male. She looked at his watery, dull red eyes and thought, You are one of the weak.
“Well met, ’Fae,” he said, leering at her breasts, covered only in her threadbare shift. “Aren’t we a pretty pair?”
He dangled a pouch of coins under her nose.
Danifae snatched the coins and slapped him across the face. He smiled through his bleeding lip, seized her in his arms, and pressed his lips to her. His breath was foul, his excited grunts fouler. She abided, knowing that with each kiss he became more ensnared in her web.
She allowed him to steer her toward the bed. He tried to lay her down but she used her superior strength to turn him around and force him down instead. He grinned drunkenly, muttering some ridiculous endearment.
She straddled him and he licked his lips in excitement. His hands fumbled with her shift, her sash, and she could tell from his movements that more than mindwine was clouding his mind. His hand passed over the blackroot vial and never paused, so eager was he to get at her skin.
Smiling into his face, she teased him for another thirty count—until his eager expression grew confused, then alarmed.
“What’s happening to me?” he said, his speech thick and sloppy. “What have you done to me, bitch?”
He tried to shove her off him but the drug had already taken hold. His strength was gone, and he managed only to paw at her shoulders. In moments, he was fully paralyzed and could only stare up at her in horror.
She eyed him coldly, still smiling, and began her incantation. Her voice called upon Lolth, offering the male’s death for her amusement. When she finished her prayer, she put her hands on his throat and throttled him.
He died with bulging eyes and a wet gurgle.
“You are the weak,” she whispered in his ear. “And I am the spider.”
chapter
seventeen
Deep within the serpent writhed the tiny, partially consumed essences of millions of failed souls. Their screams, rich with despair, fat with terror, bombarded Halisstra. She struggled to stand her ground. She saw her own fate in them—she too was a failed soul—but instead of causing her despair, it raised her anger.
“Face me,” she said and did not know whether she was talking to the creature or to someone else.
The serpent hissed again and slithered sinuously forward. The souls wailed their pain and terror with each movement of the creature.
Halisstra stared at the glowing souls and wondered for a moment if Ryld was trapped within the creature. She decided that she did not care and moved forward.
She roared, lifted the Crescent Blade, and charged, meeting the serpent’s advance with one of her own.
Halisstra stepped into the Pass of the Soulreaver and felt her body stretch through time and space. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to keep moving forward. Vomit raced up her throat, but she fought it down.
A narrow path stretched before her and behind her. Sheer walls rose to either side. A mist cloaked her ankles.
The mist screamed at her and hissed.
She clutched the Crescent Blade. She was not alone and she knew it.
“Come out,” she said, her voice low and dangerous.
Ahead, the mist swirled and formed into a vast serpent whose body stretched behind it to infinity. Black, empty eyes stared into Halisstra’s soul and pinioned her in place. The serpent opened its mouth and hissed. The sound turned Halisstra’s legs to water.
The miniature golems swarmed forward at Gromph. The transmutation that allowed him to fight prevented him from casting any spells to stop them, and he refused to abandon his station over the prismatic sphere atop the main body of the golem.
The smaller constructs scrabbled and leaped up the body of the golem to get a Gromph, thirty of them, forty. The archmage roared and brandished his axe.
A spider golem landed on his back, then another, and both bit into his flesh. Others clambered up his legs to beat at his chest. His armor spells deflected some but not all of their bites, and he grunted with pain over and over again.
He grabbed one of the creatures by a leg, threw it atop the b
ody of the golem, and chopped it with his axe. He chopped another, and another, all the while waiting for the transformative spell to abate so that he could focus on the real issue—the prismatic sphere.
To his horror, the miniature golems that he struck split into smaller fragments and within a five count sprouted eight legs each and came at him again.
He cursed, swung at more of the spiders, again and again. Each time he struck, the small constructs burst into pieces, and each piece itself became another, smaller spider golem. Killing one made five more.
He was surrounded by a roiling swarm of constructs. They came at him from all sides, a swarm of fearless, remorseless killers. Eventually, he stopped chopping at them with his axe and instead tried to throw or push them off of the main body of the golem. But he could do only so much and in moments was covered in them, their weight so heavy that he could hardly move.
He tried to trigger the levitation power of his House Baenre brooch but the weight of the golems crawling over him was too much. He could not get airborne.
Their fangs and claws ripped through his defensive spells and into his flesh. He screamed with rage, pain, and frustration. His ring struggled to heal the wounds inflicted by the spiders, but there were too many. For every spider that he jerked from his body or threw down from atop the golem, another three took its place. He shook them from his hands, pried them from his face, pulled them from his legs. Agony lit him. He roared as he fought. If not for the regenerative magic of his ring, he would have been dead.
With the suddenness of a whipdagger strike, his transformative spell ended.
Knowledge returned to him in a rush. Physical strength drained out of him, and he sagged under the burden of the golems. His understanding of combat—swings, feints, and footwork—faded out of his memory like a half-remembered dream. His normal understanding of the Weave—the necessary gestures, component admixtures, the language of the arcane—refilled his mind.
Gromph was himself again, and he was in agony. A hundred holes pockmarked his flesh. Blood soaked his robe. In theory he could again cast spells, but the pain was too much.
R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Extinction, Annihilation, Resurrection Page 94
