Pharaun heard footsteps and brought the wand out from under his piwafwi.
“You will not require that here, mage,” a voice echoed in the chamber.
As the others filed into the room, Pharaun looked for the source of the voice. He sensed a figure lurking in a particularly dark shadow.
“There,” Pharaun whispered to Quenthel. “See it?”
Quenthel nodded and said, “You will cast no spell; you will make no move toward it unless I order it. Do you understand?”
Pharaun said, “Of course, Mistress,” but the others stood silent.
“I said,” the high priestess reiterated, “do you understand?”
Danifae and Jeggred nodded, and Pharaun again said, “Of course, Mistress. Can you at least tell me what it is?”
“I prefer to be referred to as ‘she’,” the voice said, “being female.”
The figure stepped out of the darkest part of the shadow and strode confidently into the purple light from the active but untuned portal. The sight of it took Pharaun’s breath away.
The figure of a drow female slowly twisted and writhed a good ten feet in the air. The drow was perfectly formed and nude, her body more like Danifae’s in its fullness than Quenthel’s modest, strong frame. She dragged her hands over her body in long, slow caresses for which no part of her was forbidden.
From her sides grew two sets of long, segmented spider legs. It was those four legs—and four more like it all together—that held the drow female up above the rusted floor.
Pharaun had seen too many driders to count, but what stepped out in front of him was no drider. Everything about the spider-drow creature demanded the wizard’s full attention. The drow form was beautiful—beautiful in a way that Pharaun had no words to describe. Her long, spindly spider legs simply reminded him of where he was: the home plane of—
The Master of Sorcere shook his head slowly from side to side. It couldn’t be.
“Lo—?” he whispered.
“I am not the Queen of the Demonweb Pits, Master of Sorcere,” the spider-drow said in accented High Drow. “To even say it would be blasphemy.”
“I’ve only read about you,” Quenthel whispered.
A second spider-drow appeared, stepping lightly out of the gloom, and a third hung suspended from the ceiling, both their drow bodies those of a writhing naked drow female.
“Abyssal widows,” Danifae said.
The name meant nothing to Pharaun.
“You are her handmaidens, and—” Quenthel started.
“And her midwives. We were only legend,” the first abyssal widow purred. “We were only prophecy.”
“Prophecy . . .” Quenthel whispered.
“We exist now,” the abyssal window said, “to guard the entrance to the Demonweb Pits.”
“But,” Pharaun said almost despite himself, “we’re in the Demonweb Pits.”
The beautiful drow female smiled, her teeth perfect and clean, the skin of her cheeks smooth and utterly devoid of blemish or imperfection.
“No,” the creature replied, “not anymore.”
“What’s happened?” Quenthel asked. “Where is the goddess if not in the Abyss?”
“All your questions will be answered, Mistress,” said the widow, “when you pass through the gate.”
“It’s a plane all its own now,” Pharaun guessed.
The abyssal widows all nodded in unison and moved to stand on either side of the portal—guards along a procession route.
“You have come this far,” one of the widows said.
“And so have proved you are worthy,” continued another.
“To face Lolth and speed her into her new form,” finished the third.
“Her new form?” asked Pharaun.
The abyssal widows all shared a coy look and gestured to the yawning violet portal.
“Did you . . .” the Master of Sorcere said, his throat dry, his hands shaking no matter how hard he tried to stop them. “Did you call yourself a midwife?”
“Pass,” one of them said. “You are expected.”
Quenthel stepped forward, Danifae close on her heels, and boldly walked into the roiling mass of purple light. She disappeared instantly, Danifae only steps behind her. Jeggred was a bit more reluctant, regarding the abyssal widows with blazing eyes as he passed them. Soon enough, he was gone as well.
Pharaun turned to Valas, whose eyes were darting from one widow to another. He had a hand on one of the many garish trinkets he wore pinned to his vest.
“So, Master Hune,” Pharaun said, “here we are.” Valas looked at him and nodded.
“Where we’re going . . .” the wizard said, pausing to gather
his thoughts—not easy with the prospect of stepping through that particular portal looming so close. “It could be that your services are no longer required.”
Valas locked his eyes on Pharaun’s and said, “My services are no longer adequate.”
Pharaun took a deep breath.
“Well,” the wizard said, “as I said before, we would benefit from your skills and experience wherever we go, but here we’ve come to a point where you must make a decision.”
“I have,” said Valas, the look in his eye inviting no more conversation.
“Yes, well,” Pharaun said, “there it is.”
The wizard turned and without a backward glance stepped into the portal, leaving Valas Hune behind.
Eight legs, eight.
Clattering on the stones, ticking, ticking, tapping, tapping impatiently.
They were done with their battle, with their feasting, devouring their siblings, growing stronger with each juicy bite. Bloated and spent, they stood around the octagonal stone, myriad eyes staring into myriad eyes, eight legs eight tapping and clattering.
They could eat no more; they could fight no more. Exhaustion held them in place, as Lolth had desired from the beginning. The thousands became eight—the eight strongest, the eight smartest, the eight most devious, the eight most ruthless. One would fuse with the Yor’thae. One would assume the mantle of a goddess, the deity of Chaos.
Only one, whom the others would serve . . . if the One gave them that choice and that chance. If not, then they, like their thousands of dead siblings, would be devoured.
The spiders knew that they could not influence the choice any longer. The competition was long past, the fight decided, and only She Who Was Chaos could make the final pronouncement. The spiders did not delude themselves with false hubris. They did not deceive themselves with any thoughts that they might undo that which would be done. The broodling war was over.
Eight legs eight tap-tapped nervously on the stone.
Beyond the cocoon of the inner sanctum, the drow were not so accepting. They basked in pride, they placed self above Lolth, they thought themselves worthy or even beyond that peak. They dared presume knowledge of Lolth, of the choice before them all, and they dared plot and connive to deny their rivals their proper place.
Fools, they were, and the spiders knew it. Futility glided in their every step, their fate long sealed.
The plot was scripted by the Lady of Chaos, and that was the most perplexing and tantalizing of all. For any road paved by Lolth would not run straight, nor to any expected destination.
That was the beauty.
The spiders knew it.
The time was approaching.
The spiders knew it.
Eight legs eight clattered on the stones, ticking, ticking, tapping, tapping, patience twisted, stretched and torn asunder.
Eight legs, eight.
chapter
one
Inthracis sat in his favorite chair, a high-backed throne made from bones packed together with a mortar of blood and pulped skin. Tomes and scrolls, the tools of his research, lay open atop the large basalt table before him. The soaring walls of the threestory library of Corpsehaven, his fortress, loomed on all sides.
Eyes stared at him from out of the walls.
Made from th
e heaped decay of thousands upon thousands of semi-sentient, magically preserved corpses, Corpsehaven’s walls, floors, and ceilings could have filled the cemeteries of a hundred cities. Bodies were the bricks of Inthracis’s keep. He regarded himself as an artisan, a fleshmason who smashed and twisted the moaning forms into whatever contorted shape he needed. He was indiscriminate in his choice of materials; all manner of bodies had been pressed into the structure of his keep. Mortals, demons, devils, and even other yugoloths had found a home in Corpsehaven’s walls. Inthracis was nothing if not a fair murderer. Any being that stood in his way on his rise through the ranks of the Blood Rift’s ultroloth hierarchy ended up in one of his walls, decaying and near death but still sensate enough to feel pain, still alive enough to suffer and moan.
He smiled. Being surrounded by his dead and his books always settled his mind. The library was his retreat. The pungent reek of decaying flesh and the piquant aroma of parchment preservative cleared both his cavernous sinuses and his cavernous mind.
And that was well, for he desired clarity. His research had revealed little, only tantalizing hints.
He knew only that the Lower Planes were in an uproar and that Lolth was at the center of it. He had not yet determined how best to capitalize on the chaos.
He ran a mottled, long-fingered hand over the smooth skin of his scalp and wondered how he might turn events to his advantage. Long had he waited to move against Kexxon the Oinoloth, Archgeneral of the Blood Rift. Perhaps the time for action had come, during the Lolth-spawned chaos?
He stared into the bloodshot, pain-filled eyes of his walls but the corpses offered him no answers, only lipless grimaces, soft moans, and agonized stares. Their suffering lightened Inthracis’s spirit.
Outside Corpsehaven, audible even through the walls of pressed flesh and glassteel windows, the scream of the Blood Rift’s blistering winds sang their song of agony—a high pitched, rising keen, similar to that made by the dozen or so mortals Inthracis had personally flayed. As the sound subsided, Inthracis cocked his head and waited. He knew that a planar tremor would follow hard after, trailing the wind’s wail with the same certainty that thunder followed lightning in an Ethereal cyclone.
There.
A slow rumble began, just a soft shaking at first, but building to a crescendo that shook the entire fortress, a paroxysm that caused flakes of skin meal and dried hair to rain like volcanic ash from the high ceiling of the library. Inthracis suspected that the entirety of the Blood Rift, perhaps even the whole of the Lower Planes, was shaking. Lolth had torn the Demonweb Pits free of the Abyss, he knew, and raw, purposeless power— reified chaos—poured into the Lower Planes and sent shudders throughout the cosmos.
The multiverse, Inthracis knew, was in parturition, and the cosmic birthing was rattling the planes. Reality had been reorganized, entire planes moved, and the Blood Rift, Inthracis’s home plane, groaned under the resulting onslaught of energies. Ever since Lolth had begun her . . . activities, the barren, mountainous plane had suffered a plague of volcanic eruptions, blizzards of ash, and thunderous rockslides that could have buried continents on the Prime Material. Fissures opened at random in the mountainous, rocky landscape, swallowing leagues of earth. The churning, gore-filled flow of the Blood River, the great artery that fed the body of the plane, roiled in its wide channel.
Given the upheaval, Inthracis had several times increased the magical protections that shielded Corpsehaven from such threats, but still the danger gave him pause. Corpsehaven sat on a level ledge sculpted from the otherwise precipitously steep side of the Blood Rift’s largest volcano, Calaas. It would not do for an unexpected landslide or volcanic spasm to send Inthracis’s life’s work skidding down the mountainside.
The wind outside rose again, a low whine that grew to an unbearable keen before beginning to die. Behind the wind’s wail of pain, Inthracis could just make out the conspiratorial whisper of a word. He sensed it as much as heard it, and it was the same word he had been hearing intermittently for days:
Yor’thae.
Each time the gust hissed its secret, the corpses in his walls moaned through rotted lips and decayed arms loose from the wall squirmed to reach bony hands for rotted ears. With each utterance of the unholy word, the entirety of Corpsehaven wriggled like a hive of abyssal ants.
Inthracis knew the word’s meaning, of course. He was an ultroloth, one of the most powerful in the Blood Rift, and he was versed in over one hundred twenty languages, including High Drow of Faerûn. The Yor’thae was Lolth’s Chosen, and the Spider Queen was summoning her Chosen to her side. It infuriated Inthracis that he had not been able to learn why.
He recognized that Lolth, like the Lower Planes, was undergoing a transmogrification. Perhaps she would be transformed, perhaps the process would annihilate her. The calling of the Yor’thae presaged events of significance, and the word was in the ear, on the tongues, and in the minds of all the powerful in the Lower Planes: demon princes of the Abyss, archdevils of the Nine Hells, ultroloths of the Blood Rift. All were positioning themselves to take advantage of whatever outcome resulted.
Despite himself, Inthracis admired the Spider Bitch’s temerity. Though he did not fully understand the stakes, he did understand that Lolth had gambled much on the success of her Chosen.
Such a gamble should not have surprised him overmuch. At her core Lolth was the same as any demon—a creature of chaos. Senseless risk and senseless slaughter were her nature.
Which is why demons are idiots, Inthracis decided. Even demon goddesses. The wise took only well-calculated risks for well-calculated rewards. Such was Inthracis’s creed and it had served him well.
He tapped his ring-bedecked fingers on the polished basalt table, and sparks of magical energy leaped from the bands. The legs of the table—human legs grafted to the basalt top—shifted slightly to better accommodate him. The bones of his chair adjusted to more comfortably sit him.
He looked upon the collective knowledge gathered in his library, seeking inspiration. Desiccated hands and arms jutted from the walls of flesh, forming shelves upon which sat in orderly rows an enormous quantity of magical scrolls, tomes, and grimoires, a lifetime’s worth of arcane knowledge and spells. Inthracis’s multifaceted eyes scanned them in several spectrums. Multifarious colors of varying intensities emanated from the tomes, denoting their relative magical power and the type of magic they embodied. Like the dead in his walls, the books offered him no ready answer.
Another tremor rattled the plane, another wail trumpeted the promise or threat of Lolth’s Yor’thae, another agitated rustle ran through the dead of Corpsehaven.
Distracted, Inthracis pushed back his chair, rose from the table, and walked to the library’s largest window, an octagonal slab of glassteel wider than Inthracis was tall and magically melded with the bones and flesh around it. A lattice of thread-thin blue and black veins grew within the glass, a byproduct of the melding.
The veins looked like a spider’s web, Inthracis thought, and he almost smiled.
The grand window offered a wondrous view of the heatscorched red sky, a panorama of Calaas’s side and the rugged lowlands of the Blood Rift far below. Inthracis stepped close to the window and looked out and down.
Though he had flattened a plateau half a league wide into Calaas’s side, he had raised Corpsehaven right at the edge of the plateau. He had chosen such a precipitous location so that he could always look out and be reminded of how far he had to fall, should he grow stupid, lazy, or weak.
Outside, the unceasing winds whipped a rain of black ash into blinding swirls. Arteries of lava, fed from the eternal flow of the plane’s volcanoes, lined the lowlands far below. Fumaroles dotted the black landscape like plague boils, venting smoke and yellow gas into the red sky. The winding red vein of the Blood River surged through the gorges and canyons.
Here and there, swarms of larvae—the form mortal souls took in the Blood Rift—squirmed along the broken landscape or wriggled up Calaas’s side
s. The larvae looked like pale, bloated worms as long as Inthracis’s arm. Heads jutted from the slime-covered, wormlike bodies, the only remnant of the dead soul’s mortal form. The faces wore expressions of agony that Inthracis found pleasing.
Despite the ash storm and roiling landscape, squads of towering, insectoid mezzoloths and several powerfully muscled, scaled, and winged nycaloths—all of them in service to one or another of the ultroloths—prowled the rockscape with long, magical pikes. With the pikes they impaled one larva after another, collecting souls the way a spear fisherman hunted fish on the Prime. The stuck larvae squirmed feebly on the shafts, overwrought with pain and despair.
To judge from the heads on some of the nearby larvae, most of the souls appeared to be those of humans, but races of all kinds found their way to the Blood Rift, all of them damned to serve in the furnaces of the plane. Some of the souls would be transformed into lesser yugoloths to fill out Inthracis’s or another ultroloth’s forces. Others would be used as trade goods, food, or magical fuel for experiments.
Inthracis looked away from the soul harvest and gazed down and to his left. There, barely visible through the haze of ash and heat, built into a plateau in Calaas’s side not unlike that upon which Corpsehaven sat, Inthracis could just espy the pennons of skin that flew at the top of the Obsidian Tower, the keep of Bubonis. The ultroloth immediately below Inthracis in the Blood Rift’s hierarchy, Bubonis coveted Inthracis’s position as much as Inthracis coveted Kexxon’s. Bubonis too would be scheming; he too would be planning how to use the chaos to further his ascent up Calaas’s side.
All of the Blood Rift’s elite ultroloths laired on Calaas. The relative height of an ultroloth’s fortress along Calaas’s side indicated the owner’s status within the Blood Rift’s hierarchy. Kexxon the Oinoloth’s fortress, the Steel Keep, sat highest of all, perched among the red and black clouds at the very edge of Calaas’s caldera. Corpsehaven sat only twenty or so leagues below the Steel Keep and only two or three leagues above the Obsidian Tower of Bubonis.
R. A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Extinction, Annihilation, Resurrection Page 67