Spinner of Lies frotg-1

by Bruce R Cordell

  Demascus accelerated, moving directly toward the approaching creature. At the last instant, the deva lay back into a slide. He skimmed under the drider’s arachnid belly, nose just inches from the black carapace of its abdomen. He caught a whiff of something alkaline.

  And he almost made it.

  But the creature caught him with an anchoring web filament squirted from a fat spinneret. The filament pulled him up short, and he almost fumbled the staff. He stuffed its foreshortened length into his belt and fastened both hands on Exorcessum. He swept the blade through the restraining web, then rolled out from beneath the arachnid-drow before it could squash him merely by lowering its bulk.

  He shouted, “I’ve dispatched your mistress. If you don’t let me pass, I’ll do the same for you.”

  That’s when they all went mad.

  Ettercap turned on ettercap, reanimated miner upon fellow miner. A nearby corpse plucked a dashing spideroid from the ground with undead strength and tossed it into the air like a ball. A contingent of ettercaps swarmed a corpulent miner like ants on a piece of meat.

  “What in the name of all the Hells?” Apparently Chenraya’s servitors were sensitive to some influence Demascus couldn’t detect. He doubted his threat was the cause.

  The creatures’ earlier anxiety and confusion was transformed into violent psychosis. Despite destroying three in as many rapid eye blinks, another spideroid was already bull-rushing him, trying to bite his face off with clacking mandibles.

  Demascus flinched back. The horny ridges of a drider thorax on his shoulder blades caged him in place. Oh, yeah-how’d he manage to forget about the drider?

  The attacking ettercap slipped past his guarding blade and slammed a balled fist into his head before he managed to hew it into two ichor-squirting segments.

  Dazed and blinking, the deva twisted to face the drider. It meant turning his back on slave-soldier mayhem, but he judged they were less of a threat than the drider.

  The drider had arrived at a similar conclusion. It slammed a massive pincer claw at Demascus’s head. He grunted with the effort of deflecting it with his blade. The impact jarred his shoulders, and forced him several paces back. Fortunately the creatures around him seemed as much interested in tearing each other leg from leg as getting a taste of deva meat.

  The drider screamed something in its own language, expelling a spray of spittle with the vehemence of its pronouncement. Probably a curse of some sort, but hopefully not a literal one. Demascus backed away another step. Where were his friends?

  He dodged a loose ettercap head hurled by a reanimated genasi, dodged another drider pincer claw, and severed the arm from a slave-soldier already bleeding from several wounds.

  The drider charged, its pincers raised high, promising a lethal denouement. Demascus sidestepped the monster, but his foot caught on the loose head he’d earlier evaded. He went down hard, somehow managing to knock the wind out of himself on the webbed floor.

  He sucked air as he attempted to regain his feet, only to be bashed back to the ground by a pincer. A thread of pain pulsed on the left side of Demascus’s body where the pincer tip had scored.

  He internally searched for any remaining vestige of the Sword of the Gods. It was almost as if he’d exhausted its ability to manifest with his earlier fight with Chenraya. That, or the power didn’t like to be summoned; it liked to appear of its own accord, and was choosing to withhold its grace now-

  The deva rolled away from another blow and managed to get Exorcessum up into guard. At least its power remained constant, evident in its blazing runes of red and white. His attacker paused, and Demascus finally managed to regain his feet. The sour, rotten smell of the drider’s breath engulfed him, nearly a presence in itself-one hardly less lethal than the monster.

  Something struck him from behind hard enough to make him stumble. He groaned. Too many foes surrounded him. Light and shadow, where the Hells was his mastery? He tried to remember a word of power or a glyph of-

  Thunder rode the heels of a crazy line of electric light that zagged past Demascus and impacted whatever was attacking him from behind.

  He followed the blast back to its source and saw Queen Arathane, mantled in snapping sparks.

  The queen was alive! And kicking. Relief warmed him.

  The drider took advantage of Demascus’s distraction with another flurry of pincer strikes, forcing him back behind the point of his blade. He risked another glance at Arathane. She remained visible through the press, and he saw Chant and Riltana, too. They’d remained where he’d told them, of course.

  Demascus deflected another blow, and gouged a bloody furrow up one of the drider’s arms. A bare instant later, flesh closed up where he’d torn it. Damn, the thing was regenerating its flesh. It enjoyed too many blessings of Lolth for the deva’s comfort.

  The thought triggered a recollection. Oh, yeah, that’s how it was done! With a mental command, he activated one of the red runes on his blade. A rune in the shape of a tongue of fire.

  “Burn!” he commanded, and swung the blade of his sword low along the ground, surprising the drider. Expecting another slash, it danced back. The triggered fire rune jumped from the blade like a flying fish from the sea. The drider attempted to evade, but the rune exploded into a sphere of raging flame. The creature was enveloped. Demascus dove away from the fury of the blast and failed to keep his feet. Which was becoming tiresome; he’d spent an inordinate amount of the fight on his face.

  When the fire faded into sizzling wisps a heartbeat later, the monster survived only as a flaming heap of legs and pincers waving a thin banner of black smoke.

  Then Demascus got up and sprinted along the irregular lane between the slave-soldiers, many of whom were momentarily enthralled by the drider’s fiery destruction.

  He reached the chamber entrance. Chant was reloading his crossbow. Up close, he saw that Arathane was unsteady on her feet and much the worse for wear.

  Riltana said, “Took your damn time,” but smiled.

  “I’ve got the staff!” he shouted. He pulled the foreshortened length from his belt with one hand and waved Exorcessum like a lunatic in the other. “Most of it, anyway.”

  Behind him, the chamber itself convulsed. A shriek of pure hatred rang the Demonweb like a bell. The sound was equal parts demonic bloodlust and a promise of endless death. No mortal throat could have produced such a horrible noise. And the fury of the remaining ettercaps and undead miners in the chamber had increased. Perhaps their madness wasn’t so unexplainable after all. The mind in the Demonweb, Lolth herself, was rousing to fury.

  “Time to go,” said the queen.

  Demascus herded the others before him down a webbed tunnel that pulsed like the throat of a swallowing giant. Chant moved as if his impressive girth was an illusion. But a particularly loud scream made him slow and glance behind him, his brow furrowed.

  “Faster!” Demascus yelled. “Don’t stop!”

  “Tell us something we don’t know,” came Riltana’s retort from farther down the bucking tunnel. The windsoul had the lead, literally flying, but Arathane was her shadow; the queen seemed to ride a chariot of lighting.

  Demascus glanced over his shoulder.

  A wave of arachnid fury filled the temple chamber they’d just left. Spiders in uncountable thousands boiled forward like stew on a cookstove. Their mandibles frothed with poison and malice. Not even the slave-soldiers were immune-ettercaps and the remnant undead miners were consumed so quickly they might as well have been disintegrated.

  “Lords of light and shadow,” he murmured. The swarm flooded into the web corridor after the group, surging more quickly than even Riltana could fly.

  “Sharkbite,” gasped Chant, breathless and suddenly more scared than intrigued by his situation. It seemed he’d finally realized that they might not make it. His eyes were wide as they saw a pang of mirrored fear in the deva’s expression.

  “Just go!” Demascus yelled. If the exit had been even twenty feet farth
er, Chant would’ve been right. As it was, dozens of tiny spiders launched themselves from the swarm crest before Demascus, bringing up the rear and plunging into the orange-misted portal. They lit on his arms, head, and back, and began biting. He swatted and rolled as he spilled through the transition into the courtyard.

  Then the spiders were gone, as if they’d been scraped away. But their wounds remained. He scratched at a welter of red bumps on his forearm, eyeing the portal. If the swarm billowed out, the courtyard would be instantly swamped.

  “Those creatures,” said Arathane between big breaths, “weren’t real. They were manifestations of the Demonweb. Those spiders simply don’t exist outside Lolth’s portal network.”

  “You hope,” said Chant. Then he blushed, and added, “Your Majesty.”

  “I guess we’ll see,” said Riltana, who was already on the far side of the courtyard. “Maybe the rest of you should come and stand by me, just in case.”

  Everyone shuffled over to the windsoul. The portal remained quiescent for another span of heartbeats. Just a quiet arch filled with colorful mist.

  Demascus said, “Your Majesty? You’d better take this.” He handed her the staff.

  The queen received the arambarium relic with solemn dignity. “Demascus-all of you-Akanul owes you a great debt.”

  Riltana smiled. A laugh escaped Demascus as he regarded the scene. What did it say about him that nearly everyone he called a friend in Airspur had only a nodding acquaintance with the rule of law? On the other hand, being on speaking terms with the queen of the entire country balanced out that particular equation, with coin to spare.

  Arathane continued, “It appears no spiders or dark-elf assassins are going to immediately rush out of the portal. But I won’t have such a vile passage in my land. Demascus, could I ask you one more favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Stand guard over the portal mouth until I return, with a company of Akanul sappers and elite peacemakers. We’ll collapse this entire cave and portal so that nothing can ever use it again.”

  Demascus said, “I’ll watch over it. But hurry. I’m so tired I’m starting to hallucinate that I’m sleeping, not talking. Riltana, would you go with the queen, escort her out of the Catacombs?”

  Arathane smiled at him and winked. He did a doubletake; had that been real or an invention of his tired mind? The queen whirled, all her stately grace back in full measure. “Would you do me the honor?” she asked the windsoul.

  Riltana said, “Love to. Demascus and Chant can handle things here without me. I can’t wait to get out of this stink hole.”

  “Wonderful,” Arathane said. “We’ll be back within two hours, no more.” She and Riltana left, the queen cradling the broken staff as if it was an infant.

  Chant fidgeted.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Demascus.

  “I thought Jaul would be waiting for us, is all.”

  Right. Chant’s son said he’d stay behind at the portal mouth. But the kid was nowhere to be seen. “Do you think he’s all right?”

  Chant rubbed his hands, then sighed. “Yeah, I do think he’s all right. I just hoped he’d wait, like he said. But really, it’s more like him to get bored and head back to the Den of Games. Raneger has that boy brainwashed.” The pawnbroker looked at his boots.

  Demascus could only nod. No matter how useful Jaul had earlier proved while they’d been out on the island, it seemed he would continue to be a trial to his father.

  Chant shook his head as if to clear it. “Anyhow, that’s the second time you’ve come to the aid of the Throne of Majesty. That sort of thing can’t hurt your standing with the queen.”

  Demascus nodded, unable to hold back a grin. “But before you get too happy imagining what royal rewards might await, I promised the ghost I’d relay a message.”

  Demascus’s face froze. “What?”

  “She said that if you survived this escapade, you were to come by the Copperhead and ask for her.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I wouldn’t joke about something like this. You know that.”

  “Sorry. I just … you caught me off-guard. So, the Copperhead? What’s that?”

  The pawnbroker just shrugged.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE CITY OF AIRSPUR, AKANUL

  22 LEAFFALL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

  Fragrant smoke greeted Demascus as he entered the Copperhead. He’d learned it was a tavern that specialized in tabac, not ale. Either way, it seemed like an odd place for a ghost to haunt.

  He wondered if his friends had misunderstood Madri.

  He scanned the hazy chamber. Scents of apple, cedar, jasmine, and tabac swirled above the gurgle of bubbling water. Relaxed expressions softened the faces of the patrons. It was all somehow familiar to Demascus. As if he’d been here before. Or someplace remarkably similar. Madri, however, wasn’t here.

  “Sir?” said a young earthsoul. “If you step over here, I can fit you with a pipe. Have you ever-”

  “I’m looking for a woman. A human. Her name is Madri,” said Demascus.

  The server blinked as if seeing the deva for the first time. “I have a message for someone answering to your description.”

  “What?” Demascus felt his face grow warm.

  The server held up a placating finger, then pointed to an empty table along the wall. “Only this-if someone fitting your description shows up, that you should have a seat and wait right there.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until Madri shows up.”

  “Do you know her?” said Demascus, stepping closer.

  The server’s eyes widened and his hands went up. Demascus realized he’d raised his voice. But he didn’t much care.

  “Answer me,” he said.

  “I don’t! She … she comes here sometimes! Sort of just shows up, you know? Last time I saw her, she gave me this message. That’s all!”

  “When did she give it to you?”

  “Two days ago. I haven’t seen her since. I swear!”

  “I believe you. I just … haven’t seen my friend for a while.”

  The server looked at him, then flicked his gaze to the sword scabbards on the deva’s belt. The kid was worried Demascus was going to draw on him. Great. He’d just guaranteed himself terrible service henceforward at the Copperhead. He took a seat where the server indicated and waited.

  No one came by to offer him a water pipe.

  Three days had passed since Chant had relayed Madri’s message. Sealing the portal by collapsing the cave had come off without a hitch, thanks to the skills of a cadre of earthsoul sappers. Demascus was pretty sure no drow or other fell influence had seeped through before it was shut. Hopefully for good.

  Arathane had explained that the arambarium relic had been remanded to a vault beneath Airspur Palace. When asked if anyone in the queen’s court had managed to convert it back to its original shape, the monarch had replied that they were still working on it.

  Then Arathane had handed Riltana a scroll. She said it was a copy of what she’d sent to a mutual friend in High Imaskar. Riltana broke the seal and visually devoured the contents in moments. Then she hugged the queen.

  Riltana later joked that the peacemaker bodyguards had nearly shat themselves upon witnessing such physical familiarity with Her Royal Highness by someone they’d been told was a “messenger.”

  Of course the Stewards had not launched a preemptive attack on Tymanther. The queen returned from the Demonweb in time to quiet the drumbeat to war with evidence of Akanul’s true enemy in hand.

  The next day, Chant had engaged his network of secret gatherers to locate the Copperhead. Airspur was a large city. If you didn’t already know an establishment, a name by itself was just the first clue to tracking it down.

  And just what was the situation? Madri had seemed intent on making him pay for what he’d done to her. But when she had the chance to let this incarnation die in the mine collapse, she’d
saved him. He needed to find out why. He also needed to uncover her connection to Kalkan, how she’d come back from death, and what she intended to do with the Whispering Child called the Necromancer.

  “I see you’ve managed to scare the waitstaff witless.”

  Demascus jumped. “Madri!”

  “Last time I checked.” She sat down across from him. She hadn’t been in the room a moment earlier, but she didn’t look the least bit like a ghost.

  “I got your message,” he finally managed.

  She nodded. “Remember the last time we were in a water pipe lounge, Demascus?”

  “Um, not really.”

  She frowned.

  “But seeing you here, Madri, and smelling the tabac-it’s like a word on the tip of my tongue that I can’t quite place.”

  “You might be telling the truth. You might be lying. I expect it’s the latter, based on how things ended for me back in Halruaa.”

  Demascus cast his gaze down at the table. They’d been through all this under the rock fall. Madri wasn’t inclined to believe he was different. Still …

  “Then why’d you save me?” he asked. “You could’ve had your revenge. A life for a life.”

  Madri smiled for the first time. His breath caught. He remembered this woman, if only in flashes and moments. And he had loved her.

  “It wouldn’t have been my revenge, would it? I wasn’t the one who tried to crush you under an island.”

  “So you saved me, just so you could personally kill me?”

  She smirked, then shook her head. “No, I’m joking. The old you would have gotten it. Maybe you are telling the truth, Demascus.”

  “I swear by all the gods of light and shadow, I’m not the same person who murdered you. I could never do that.”

  Madri stared at him. Demascus measured the time in uneasy heartbeats. What was she thinking? Probably that he was a no-good lying sack of rat feces. Or that-

  “All right, Demascus.”

  “All right? Does that mean you believe me?”