“You seem well acquainted with the rigors of planar travel,” Halisstra observed.
“Vhaeraun has called me to his service in the planes beyond Faerûn on several occasions,” Tzirik admitted. “In fact, I have been in the Demonweb Pits before now. All the gods of our race reside here, each in their own domain within this great chasm of webbing. My previous business did not take me to Lolth’s domain, though, and that was a good many years ago.”
Quenthel scowled and said, “All of the Demonweb Pits are Lolth’s domain, heretic. She is the queen of this entire layer of the Abyss, and the other so-called gods of our people exist here only at her sufferance.”
“I am certain you have correctly parroted your faith’s beliefs on the matter, and so I will not argue the point with you, priestess of Lolth. For our purposes, the exact relationship of our pantheon’s deities is not very important.”
Tzirik turned his back on Quenthel and surveyed the black gulf surrounding the party. He waved his hand in a sweeping gesture. “Somewhere below us we will find some kind of gate or border marking the place where this entryway opens to Lolth’s own domain—which, as I understand it, is much like the rest of the Demonweb Pits, except subject to her every whim and caprice.”
“If the plane is infinite, then the spot we seek might be infinitely far away,” Pharaun observed. “How are we to get from here to there?”
“If we had simply materialized at some random point in this reality, you would be correct, wizard,” Tzirik replied. “However, the astral spell is not a random means of travel. We are not too far from what we seek—an hour’s march, perhaps a day’s, but not much farther. Since we know that Lolth’s domain lies at the very nadir of this place, I would propose that we need only descend this strand and continue to descend each time we come to an intersection. In the meantime, be alert.”
“There will be others,” Quenthel added. “The souls of the recent dead. If you see anyone you recognize as a worshiper of the Spider Queen, we will follow them.”
If Lolth is still calling them home, Halisstra thought. The others seemed to be thinking the same thing.
The armored priest hefted his mace in his hand, adjusted the grip of his shield, and set off directly down the titanic gray strand, shoulders squared. The Menzoberranyr exchanged looks, but turned to follow, picking their way down the steeply pitched column of webbing behind the Jaelre priest.
The surface of the strand proved surprisingly easy to negotiate. Its surface was tacky, rather than truly adhesive, and it was composed of rough fibers that provided a sure footing. It was springy enough that it cushioned the jarring footfalls of the sharply descending walk. At first Halisstra thought the place was as empty as the silvery seas of the Astral Plane, since the vast distances from strand to strand of the webbing gave the whole place a sense of immense vacancy. Yet the farther she went, the more she became conscious of an active malevolence in the very air of the place, as if the entire plane watched their intrusion and seethed with anger. Strange, rasping rustling and oddly insectile tittering sounds rode on the fetid updraft from below, a crawling sound of distant movement and activity that carried no small menace with it.
Sometimes Halisstra spied motion on neighboring strands, even though the sagging gray cables were miles away across the bottomless space. She could make out frenetic activity here and there, the creatures or objects responsible so far distant that it was impossible to guess what they might be. More than once she sensed presences in the airy voids around their strand, slow, foul things that glided on the noisome exhalations from below, wheeling and drifting closer to the drow travelers as if sizing up an easy meal. They began to pass corpses at odd intervals, hulking forms of nightmare that combined the worst features of spiders and demons.
Great rents had been torn in the chitinous shells of the monsters, limbs twisted off, hairy thoraxes crushed and oozing sour green paste. Winged vulture-demons lay in shabby piles of filthy feathers, their foul beaks agape in death. Bloated, froglike things hung suspended in the ropy fibers of the great strand, swaying slowly in the hot stench of the place. Some of the demons still clung to life, too horribly damaged to do more than quiver and rasp, or croak dire threats at the drow as the company carefully climbed down past them.
“This place is a charnel house of devils,” Ryld muttered, holding one hand over his nose and mouth. “Is it always like this?”
“I saw nothing like this on my previous visit,” Tzirik said. “What it means, I cannot say, but I would not care to meet that which tears apart demons.”
“It is not like I recall, either,” Quenthel said. Her face was set in a thoughtful frown, her voice quiet and strained. “Change is the essence of chaos, and chaos is an aspect of Lolth.”
“Indeed,” Pharaun said. The fastidious wizard held a handkerchief to his nose and picked his way around a huge spider corpse whose bulbous abdomen had burst entirely, strewing the strand with its horrid contents. “It seems not unlikely that they did this to themselves. Demons are violent creatures, after all. In the absence of a powerful, commanding presence, they often turn on each other.”
“An absence . . .” Halisstra repeated. She frowned, studying the carnage. “There are no drow bodies here.”
Having descended a goodly ways, the neighboring strands were closer, and the intersections more frequent. Halisstra could see more broken forms clinging to the tattered strands nearby. Whatever battle had raged there must have spanned dozens of strands and miles of gaping darkness.
“The Spider Queen . . .” said Halisstra. “She has abandoned the denizens of her own plane, just as she has abandoned us. Much as we have done in Ched Nasad, the demons of her realm have destroyed each other.” She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the awful sight. The smell soured her stomach and left her light-headed with nausea. “Goddess, what is the purpose?” she murmured aloud.
“The Spider Queen will explain her purposes if she sees fit to do so,” Quenthel answered. “We can only beseech the restoration of her favor, and trust that we will find approval in her eyes.”
“We can also move along a little quicker, and stop gawking,” Valas Hune called. He was at the rear of the band, an arrow laid across the string of his double-curved bow. The scout stood peering up the strand behind them, his face pinched in a worried frown.
“Excuse the interruption, but we have company. Something is following us down the strand.”
Halisstra followed the scout’s gaze upward, swaying awkwardly as she lost her balance. She hadn’t realized just how far they’d descended until she looked back up the massive strand, sloping upward steeper and steeper into the darkness overhead. Something was following them, a crawling horde of tiny, spiderlike figures that swarmed over the strand’s entire circumference, heedless of whether they clung to the web’s top, sides, or bottoms. They were still many hundreds of yards behind the company, but even at that distance Halisstra could tell that they were ogre-sized monstrosities, and the alacrity of their pursuit certainly didn’t seem to be a good sign.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” Ryld said.
“Nor do I,” Quenthel agreed. “Pharaun, do you have a spell prepared that can bar their passage?”
The Master of Sorcere shook his head and answered, “Not without risk of severing the strand, I fear, and I find myself strangely unwilling to chance that. I could instead confer a spell of flying on enough of us to perhaps abandon this strand and reach another, or we could simply descend to that strand below us by levitation.” He pointed at a slender, almost wispy web a long distance below them and a little to one side.
“Save your magic,” Quenthel decided. “That strand will do. Master Argith, carry Valas and Danifae.”
She slid down the side of the great strand they stood on, and pushed herself off into the darkness. One by one, the others followed. Halisstra risked one more glance at the scuttling terrors behind them, and hastened to follow the Baenre priestess. She scrambled down the curving side of t
he monstrous cable, and leaped out into the dark.
Three days after his victory at the Pillars of Woe and twenty miles closer to Menzoberranzan, Nimor stood in the shadows at the mouth of the Lustrum, a wondrously rich mithral mine. Near the entrance, a wedge-shaped vault soared upward for hundreds of feet, widening as it climbed, but down on the cavern floor it was cramped and broken with the shattered remnants of huge boulders. The miners—slaves and soldiers of House Xorlarrin, or so he believed—had abandoned their tools and their homes in the face of the advancing duergar army, carrying off as much mithral ore as they could manage. Nimor gazed up at the narrow black rift above him.
The mithral mine was an interesting bit of decoration, but it was only one of the reasons he was there. The Lustrum stood between the army of Gracklstugh and the army of Kaanyr Vhok. The duergar stayed to the left and came up on Menzoberranzan’s southwest side, while the tanarukks pushed right and approached the city from the southeast. The drow army retreated ahead of them, in full flight for the dubious safety of their home city. Menzoberranzan’s Mantle—the great halo of twisting caverns and passageways ringing the city—offered the invading armies a thousand paths by which they might approach.
Of course, the matron mothers hadn’t left their outer demesnes completely undefended. Nimor glanced down at the green shards of one of the city’s infamous jade spiders, huge magical automatons of stone that guarded the city’s approaches. The wreckage of the one at his feet still smoked with acrid black fumes from the stonefire bombs that had destroyed it a few hours before. They were clever and deadly devices, but without cadres of magic-wielding priestesses to hurl all sorts of awful dooms and blights on invaders, the jade spiders were not sufficient to the task of halting the two approaching armies.
How much longer until Menzoberranzan’s great castles lie shattered like this device? Nimor mused.
The Anointed Blade was interrupted in his reflections by the tramp of dwarven boots and the angry scrape of iron on stone. The armored diligence of Crown Prince Horgar Steelshadow approached, escorted by a double file of the duergar lord’s Stone Guards. Nimor winced at the resounding clangor of the duergar soldiers.
One would think they’d get their fill of hammer blows and noise back in their city, he thought.
He brushed off his tunic and went down to meet his ally.
“Well met, Crown Prince Horgar. I am pleased that you honored my request for a parley.”
The duergar lord threw open the armored door in the side of his iron wagon, and stepped down to the cavern floor. Marshal Borwald followed a step behind, his scarred face hidden by a great iron helm.
“I have been looking for you, Nimor Imphraezl,” Horgar replied. “You vanished after guiding our vanguard to this maze of tunnels. What business did you have elsewhere that was more pressing than our assault on Menzoberranzan, I wonder?”
Victory had transformed the crown prince’s dour pessimism into a kind of ferocious hunger for more victories, and Horgar’s lairds echoed their ruler’s attitude. Where before the sight of the assassin brought black scowls and dark mutterings, the lairds of Gracklstugh had come to acknowledge his presence with gruff nods and open envy of his successes.
“Why, Crown Prince, my business concerned the upcoming assault,” Nimor said with a laugh. He kicked aside one of the jade shards from the ruined construct. “Once I’d shown your men how to disable these things it seemed to me that your army had matters well in hand, so I took the liberty of reporting to my superiors, and spying out how matters stand in the city.”
The duergar prince frowned, his brows knitting in thought.
“You felt free to gamble with the tanarukk army,” said Horgar. “They might have turned on us as easily as upon the Menzoberranyr, you know.”
“Under normal circumstances, perhaps, but there is opportunity in the air. I can smell it, Kaanyr Vhok can smell it, and I think you can, too. We stand at a fulcrum on which many great events might be made to turn.”
“Empty platitudes, Nimor,” the gray dwarf growled.
He folded his thick arms and stared into the darkness, waiting. After a short time, a scuffling and snorting drifted through the darkness, followed by quick and heavy steps.
Bearing an iron palanquin the size of a small coach on their hairy shoulders, a score of tanarukks loped into the cavern, bestial eyes aglow with red hate, axes and maces gripped in their powerful fists. The gray dwarves and the orc-demons glared at each other, nervously muttering and fingering their weapons.
The door to the palanquin creaked open, and Kaanyr Vhok slowly straightened out of the chair. The half-demon warlord was resplendent in his armor of crimson and gold, and his fine-scaled skin and strong features bespoke presence and charisma in a way that Horgar’s duergar churlishness and suspicious manner could never match. The alu-fiend Aliisza followed sinuously, stretching her wings as she emerged. Finally, Zammzt climbed out of the warlord’s coach.
“Well, I have come,” Kaanyr said in his powerful voice. He studied the assembled gray dwarves, and regarded Nimor as well. “We have driven the dark elves back to their city in disarray. Now how do we finish the job? And, more importantly, how shall we divide the spoils?”
“Divide the spoils?” Horgar rasped. “I think not. You will not help yourself to part of my prize after my army shouldered the brunt of the hard work in defeating the drow at the Pillars of Woe. You will be paid fairly for your assistance, but do not presume to claim a share of my victory.”
Kaanyr’s handsome brow creased in an angry frown.
“I am not a beggar crying out for your largesse, dwarf,” the cambion said. “Without my army’s approach, you would still be fighting your way toward Menzoberranzan, one step at a time.”
Horgar started to compose an angry retort, but Nimor quickly stepped between the gray dwarf and the half-demon and raised his arms.
“My lords!” he cried. “The only way the Menzoberranyr can defeat you is if the two of you turn on each other. If you cooperate, if you combine your efforts intelligently, the city will fall.”
“Indeed,” said Zammzt. The plain-faced assassin stood by Vhok’s palanquin, shrouded in his dark cloak. “There is little point in dividing the spoils of a city that you have yet to capture. There is even less point in allowing the effort of dividing the spoils to prevent the city’s fall in the first place.”
“That may be true,” Kaanyr said, folding his powerful arms across his broad chest, “but I will not be forgotten when the city is plundered. You brought me here, assassins.”
“You brought me here, as well,” Horgar rumbled, “and you brought the Agrach Dyrr. I suspect that your secret House will be hard-pressed to honor your promises to all three of your allies. Which of us do you mean to betray, I wonder?”
For the first time, Nimor found himself wondering if perhaps he had arrayed too many enemies against Menzoberranzan all at once. That was the nature of diplomacy in the Underdark, after all. No alliance outlived its usefulness, not even by a heartbeat.
To his surprise, he was rescued by Aliisza.
The alu-fiend draped herself at Kaanyr’s side and said, “He will not honor his promises to either of you, as long as the city stands. How can he? We will all go home empty-handed if you cannot come to an agreement.”
Nimor inclined his head in gratitude, making a very conscious effort not to allow his eyes to linger on Aliisza for too long when she stood next to Kaanyr Vhok. Somehow he doubted that she’d shared with her master the exact details of her visit to Gracklstugh, and he didn’t want to give the half-demon any reason to become curious.
“Lady Aliisza’s wisdom is as great as her beauty,” he said. “For the sake of avoiding argument, I propose this: To Horgar, five-tenths of Menzoberranzan’s wealth, populace, and territory; to Kaanyr Vhok, three-tenths; and for my own House, two-tenths, out of which I will come to terms with the Agrach Dyrr. All subject to final negotiation and adjustment when Menzoberranzan is ours, of course.”
“Because he is here,” Nimor said. “Take your army and go home if you like, Horgar, but look around you before you depart. We stand at the Lustrum, the mithral mines of House Xorlarrin. Menzoberranzan controls dozens of treasures such as this, and its castles and vaults are filled with the wealth of five thousand years. If you do not fight, your share will be nothing.”
That was the other reason Nimor had chosen the Lustrum as the place to hold his parley. It served as a tantalizing reminder of the true prize that waited.
Horgar’s eyes darkened, but the duergar prince turned aside to study the chasm and the gaping adits nearby. Marshal Borwald leaned close and whispered something to the crown prince, and the other lairds muttered among themselves. After a moment, Horgar shifted his thick hands to his belt and cleared his throat.
“All right, then. Subject to final negotiation, we agree. So how do you intend to reduce the city?”
“You will crush Menzoberranzan between your two armies,” Nimor said. “Given your victory at the Pillars of Woe, the Lolthites are committed to awaiting your assault in the city proper, but thanks to this maze of passages surrounding the city, they can’t know where you’ll make your attack. That means the Menzoberranyr will have to maintain a strong force in waiting somewhere near the city’s center to respond to whatever point is threatened. The Scoured Legion will provide that threat, and when we force the Lolthites to commit to battle, the army of Gracklstugh will commence its attack and break into the city.”
R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation Page 110