Sacrifice of the Widow: Lady Penitent, Book I
Page 22
Cavatina’s breath fogged in the chill air. So late in the year, the days were short and frost sparkled on the ground from sunrise to sunset, but under the twisted oaks, the ground was bare, black and soft, as if something had melted it from below. Instead of the clean tang of impending snow, Cavatina smelled a sickly-sweet odor, like rotting flesh. As the ground began to descend sharply, she realized where Halisstra was leading her.
“The Darkwatch,” she breathed.
Her mother had told stories of the place. Millennia ago, in an age before Myth Drannor was founded, the surface elves had imprisoned an ancient evil there—according to some, the god Moander. The taint lingered still. To venture into the Darkwatch was to court madness, a madness that unleashed unspeakable violence, the kind that would set sister against sister. Cavatina could feel it nibbling at her awareness even then. She hacked at a thorny branch, barely containing the urge to slash and slash until the tree was a splintered ruin.
Halisstra grinned back over her shoulder. “Scared?”
Cavatina gritted her teeth. “I’m a Darksong Knight. We don’t scare that easily.”
Halisstra nodded.
Cavatina wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her sleeve. She didn’t trust Halisstra, despite what Qilué had said. Just before Cavatina had set out, the high priestess had told her of the prophecy she’d received three years before about the Melarn. One from that House would aid Eilistraee—but another would betray her. As was foretold, two Melarn had shown up at a time of great need: Halisstra and one of her brothers. Which one would betray the goddess was still an open question, but if it was Halisstra, Cavatina would be ready for it. Forewarned was forearmed.
She’d attributed her uneasiness at first to that warning, but she soon realized its cause must have been the Darkwatch itself. Why did the valley unnerve her so? She had slain yochlol in the deepest regions of the Lightdrinker, a chasm whose magic had prevented her from seeing farther than the tip of her outstretched sword, and she’d once battled a chaos beast on the lip of Throrgar, where shrieking winds had nearly torn her from the cliff’s edge, but there was something about the Darkwatch—something that ate its way into her resolution like dry rot into wood.
A dry branch cracked behind her. Cavatina whirled, singing sword at the ready.
A dog stood watching her—a hunting hound. It was thin, ribs standing out sharply against its sides. One flank was matted with dried blood. The hound must have been injured by whatever game animal it had been tracking. It whined softly, eyes pleading.
Cavatina hesitated then decided it posed no threat. The animal was in need of healing, something Eilistraee could provide.
Halisstra had halted at the same time as Cavatina. She loomed over the Darksong Knight, her spider legs twitching. “Kill it,” she hissed.
The dog let out a low groan.
“No,” Cavatina said. Halisstra was obviously spooking the dog. “By Eilistraee’s mercy, I’ll heal—”
The dog launched itself at Cavatina. Teeth snapped at her outstretched hand with a fury that made her gasp. She yanked her hand back and backed away, singing a prayer that should have soothed the beast, but instead of calming, the dog only became more savage in its attacks. Cavatina batted it away with the flat of her sword, but still it came at her, snarling.
Behind her, Cavatina heard Halisstra laughing, high and shrill. The sound worried at something in Cavatina—something brittle as a dried twig. Her restraint snapped, and she found herself returning the dog’s fury blow for blow, slashing at it again and again with her sword. Rather than singing in a sweet voice, the magical weapon keened. Blood splattered her arm and face, and soon she found herself on her knees, the sword in both hands, hacking at the fallen dog with furious swings that slammed her blade deep into the ground. Screaming with rage, she pounded the ruined body again, and again, and again …
A distant corner of her mind saw what she was doing and was sickened. The dog was a mutilated mess of splintered bone and pulverized, bloody flesh. With a wrench that she felt through her entire body, she at last halted her attack. Panting, trembling, she climbed to her feet.
Halisstra moved closer, sniffing at the bloody corpse. A low chuckle burst from her misshapen mouth. “Eilistraee’s mercy …” she muttered.
“Get away from it!” Cavatina shouted. “And shut up. Shut … up!” She flailed with her sword. A harsh note pealed from it.
Halisstra scampered back.
Cavatina closed her eyes and whispered a fierce prayer: “Eilistraee, help me. Protect me from this madness.” A moment later, the last vestiges of the rage ebbed. She opened her eyes again and took a deep, steadying breath—and winced, as the stench of blood filled her lungs. She turned her back on what she’d just done and spoke to Halisstra. “How much farther to the portal?”
Halisstra cocked her head, as if listening to something Cavatina couldn’t hear. “Not far.” She pointed at a rocky outcrop farther down in the canyon. A stunted black oak grew on top of it. “It’s under that tree.”
Cavatina grimly nodded. “Let’s go.”
They walked some distance farther, descending into the valley filled with stunted trees whose limbs seemed to claw at the sky above. As they drew closer to the outcrop, Cavatina could see that it was a jumble of square-cut masonry, the edges of the blocks worn down by the elements. Tufts of blade-stiff grass grew from crevices in the rock, and the tree atop the pile had a trunk so contorted it might have been twisted by a giant’s hand. Several large roots spread down over the pile of stones below like black fingers. As Cavatina walked around the rocks, she counted eight such roots—a number she was certain was no coincidence.
Halisstra clambered up onto the pile, which stood about twice Cavatina’s height. The bottom of the trunk was slightly raised, as if poised on its roots like a hunting spider about to spring. There was enough clearance between trunk and stones for even the monstrous Halisstra to have crawled through on hands and knees without touching the tree above.
“In here,” she said, hunkering down beside it and gesturing at the space beneath the tree.
Cavatina climbed warily up to where Halisstra waited. If it was indeed a portal to Lolth’s domain, Cavatina would have it sealed once the expedition was over. For the time being, she cast a spell that would allow others of her faith to find it. If she didn’t return from her quest, someone else could deal with it later.
She heard a faint, high-pitched sound like the wind whistling through taut-strung wire. It was an eerie wail, one that made Cavatina’s skin crawl. “The songspider?” she asked.
Halisstra nodded. “She must have repaired her web.”
Cavatina squatted beside Halisstra and peered between the roots. She could see faint lines of violet against the darkness—brief shimmers of hair-thin light that were there one moment, gone the next.
“Silence it,” she ordered.
Halisstra ducked her head—the best nod she could manage, with those thickly corded neck muscles—and reached into the hollow under the tree. Her fingers plucked at the strands of violet light. As she worked, a low, rasping sound came from her throat: a song. When it was done, Halisstra pulled her hands back. Her long, dark fingers were sticky with violet threads. The sound that had been coming from inside the hollow had stopped.
“It’s done,” she said. “The way is clear.”
“Good,” Cavatina said. “You first.”
Halisstra bowed her head. “Mistress.”
The look she gave Cavatina made it clear she understood that the Darksong Knight didn’t fully trust her. She turned and scrabbled her way into the space beneath the tree and stood, the upper half of her body vanishing from sight. One foot stepped up, then the other—and she was gone.
Cavatina took a deep breath. She had fought demons on the doorsteps of the Abyss as they emerged from portals, but she had never traveled to the outer planes herself. She fairly tingled with the thrill of it, even though it was not truly a hunt but a recovery mi
ssion. She cast a spell that would allow her to resist the negative energies of the Demonweb Pits then followed, singing sword in hand. As her body penetrated the spot occupied on the Prime Material Plane by the tree, the smell of moldy sap filled her nostrils. An instant later, her head forced its way through strands of web, snapping them with vibrations she could feel but could not hear. A thin film of stickiness covered her hair, shoulders, and clothes—strands of the songspider web. She climbed up, as Halisstra had done—and suddenly was standing somewhere else.
The first thing she did was search for the spider whose web they had just broken, but it was nowhere to be seen. A divination spell revealed nothing.
“Where’s the songspider?” she asked.
Halisstra shrugged. “Gone.” She pointed at something that lay a few paces away that looked like a bundle of old sticks. “I think her children ate her.”
Cavatina nodded as she recognized the dried husk as the remains of a spider. She’d expected a living foe. The passage had been easy. Too easy.
She looked around. The Demonweb Pits looked nothing like she’d expected. She’d always envisioned them as a vast cavern filled with steel-strong webs, upon which Lolth’s iron fortress crept like a spider. Instead the portal had delivered them to a blasted plain of barren, purple-gray rock, under a sky that was utterly black, save for a cluster of eight blood red stars that glared down like the eyes of a watchful spider. Hanging down from the sky on strands of web—so far overhead that they appeared little more than dots—were off-white balls. Every now and then, one of them burst, releasing the ghostly gray form of a drow—a soul, freshly dead. The souls were caught by the wind, which blew steadily in one direction, toward a distant line of cliffs.
The plain was as uneven as a pox-scarred face, cratered with depressions and gouged with deep chasms. Everywhere Cavatina looked, there were webs. They drifted on the wind and snagged on her clothes and hair. Feeling something tickle her bare knee, she glanced down. The ground was covered in tiny red spiders, each no larger than a grain of rice. They swarmed up onto her boots. She whispered a prayer. Under its compulsion, the tiny spiders leaped from her boots and scurried away into cracks in the rock.
“Where is the temple?” she asked in a low voice. The cluster of red “stars” overhead made her wary of raising her voice.
Halisstra pointed at a spot, perhaps a league away, where dozens of what looked like flat-topped spires of stone protruded from the ground. “On top of one of those.”
Cavatina squinted at the distant objects. “What are they?”
“The petrified legs of giant spiders.”
Cavatina frowned. “That’s what you built Eilistraee’s temple on top of?”
Halisstra gave a lopsided grin. “It offered the best vantage point, easier to defend than anywhere else.” She gestured with a misshapen hand. “Come.”
Halisstra scuttled away across the wasteland toward the spires. The Darksong Knight activated the magic of her boots then followed, not wanting to let Halisstra get out of sight. Cavatina levitated and descended, levitated and descended, in a series of long, graceful strides. Each time a boot touched ground, it slipped slightly as it squished the tiny spiders that swarmed there. Certain that Lolth would react to this defilement of her domain any instant, Cavatina kept a watchful eye for whatever the Spider Queen would hurl at her, but there were no attacks. No spiders descended from the skies, no darkfire boiled up from the ground below, no madness-inducing peals of laughter echoed across the landscape. It was as if the domain itself held its breath, waiting to see what Halisstra and Cavatina would do.
It was certainly the Demonweb Pits, but one vital element was missing: Lolth’s fortress. Said to be shaped like an enormous iron spider, it should have been ceaselessly patrolling her realm, yet Cavatina could neither see nor hear it. Was the Demonweb Pits so vast that Lolth’s fortress was beyond the horizon? It was a question Cavatina could not answer. She knew only one thing. Wherever Lolth’s fortress might be, she was glad it wasn’t on top of them.
As she descended from yet another floating leap, her eyes were drawn to a web-choked crevice in the ground where something stirred. This gave her the warning she needed to spring to the side as a cluster of spider-things burst from the crevice and swarmed toward her. She recognized them at once: chwidenchas, creatures made from the magically altered bodies of drow who had displeased Lolth. Each of the four creatures was the size of a small horse, composed entirely of bristly black legs tipped with claws as sharp as daggers. Additional barbs lined the inside of each leg, turning it into the equivalent of a saw blade. Once a chwidencha landed on its chosen prey, those barbs would hook fast in a grapple. The only way to avoid being crushed when the creature squeezed was by tearing free—something that would carve jagged wounds into the victim’s flesh.
Cavatina had escaped the chwidenchas by levitating, but Halisstra wasn’t so fortunate. Attracted by the vibrations of her footfalls, the spider-things veered toward her. Halisstra whirled and blasted one of them with a web, suffocating it under a thick coating of sticky silk, but then the other three were on her. Legs rose and fell, the claws stabbing down. Most skittered harmlessly off Halisstra’s stone-tough skin, but a few of the jabs sank home. In an instant, Halisstra’s body was coated in blood.
Halisstra stood and fought them. If it was a ploy on her part to gain Cavatina’s sympathy, it was a dangerous one.
Cavatina landed, stamping her feet to draw the chwidenchas’ attention. Two of them broke off their attack on Halisstra and scurried toward her. Cavatina sprang into the air, lifting her hunting horn up to her lips. She blew a strident note straight down at them. As the waves of sound struck the chwidenchas, they halted and curled into tight balls. A moment later, they sprang open again. Cavatina hesitated then blew the horn a second time. Once again, the two spider-things shuddered to a halt then opened more slowly. Visibly staggering, they scuttled around in circles, at least half of their legs dragging uselessly behind them.
Even in their weakened state, fighting the chwidenchas with a sword would be futile. The fist-sized “heads” of the spider-things were buried deep at the center of the creature. The legs would have to be hacked off, one by one, in order to do the creature any real damage, and the legs could regenerate.
Still floating above the wounded spider-things, Cavatina pressed her lips to the horn a third time, knowing that she might be inviting disaster. The magical horn was meant to be blown only once each day. Unleashing its energies more than that could trigger an explosion that could knock her senseless at the very least or snap her neck at worst, but Cavatina had not been invited into the ranks of the Darksong Knights by being unwilling to take chances. Anyone who fought demons for a living had to be bold.
She blew—and a third wave of sound shuddered through the chwidenchas, pulverizing them. They collapsed, twitched once or twice, and died.
Halisstra, meanwhile, was still battling the chwidencha that had attacked her. She knocked it away with a sweep of one powerfully muscled arm, but as soon as it stopped rolling it sprang at her again. It landed on her back, knocking her to the ground. Its legs sawed against her body, scrabbling for a hold.
Halisstra was not so easily beaten. She rose, wrenching the creature over her head to the front of her body—a move that tore deep gouges in her shoulders. She sank her fangs into one of the chwidencha’s legs. The chwidencha tried to push itself free, but Halisstra’s own spider legs held it fast, crushing it against her chest. She bit it again and again, working her way in toward its center, where the legs joined—and at last a deep shudder ran through the chwidencha and its legs fell limp.
Cavatina drifted to the ground beside Halisstra. “Bravely done.”
Halisstra, eyes gleaming, hurled the lifeless chwidencha aside.
Cavatina moved closer, her hand raised. “Those wounds. Shall I try to heal—”
“No.” Halisstra’s voice was harsh as she flinched away. “Lolth’s pact will heal me.”
“Hard to believe these were once drow,” Cavatina said as she pulled her sword free.
Halisstra’s head came up.
“Created by Lolth, just as you were.” Cavatina moved to the second chwidencha, levered it over, and thrust again, ensuring that it was dead. “Each leg was a person who angered Lolth in some way. They were transformed by fell magic and bound together to create a creature that knows only pain and hatred.” She moved to the third, flipped it, and drove her sword home. “We do them a favor by killing them. Among the legs might be some whose ‘crime’ against the Spider Queen was to contemplate the worship of some other deity, perhaps even Eilistraee. Some of the souls we free may go on to dance with the goddess in her domain.” She turned to face Halisstra. “Which proves that there’s always hope, no matter how grim things seem.”
Halisstra either missed the point or deliberately ignored it. “You’ve hunted chwidencha before.”
Cavatina nodded. “Among other things.” She nodded at Halisstra’s wounds. Already they were closing over. “Are you able to continue?”
“Yes.”
They continued toward the spires of rock and soon were among them. Cavatina could see that they were, indeed, petrified legs, most of them snapped clean and flat at the second joint, their clawed tips fused with the stone of the ground below. Each was as big around as a house. She tried to imagine the spiders whose legs they once had been, and shuddered. Such creatures could only have been spawned in the Abyss.
Most of the spires of rock were thick with spiderwebs that fluttered like torn flags from the bristles protruding from their sides. One spire, however, was clear of webs. Nearly two hundred paces tall, it was twisted in a way that reminded Cavatina of the tree that had served as the portal. Halisstra stopped in front of it and patted the black stone.