Sacrifice of the Widow lp-1

by Lisa Smedman

  It was done. The geas had been laid upon him.

  Now all he had to do was achieve the near-impossible.

  "One favor," Jub whispered as he descended through the cavern on a thread of silk. "One favor I promised Qilue, and this is what she asks: to sneak into the lair of a dracolich."

  The dracolich in question had already swooped past him once, causing Jub to spin madly on his thread. The undead wyrm was an enormous creature, black as old blood and with wings so broad they brushed the walls on either side of the passage. The monster left the stench of death in its wake and had a deep, unhealed wound in its left flank, yet it lived-after a fashion. Jub was awed by the amount of magic it must have taken for a dragon to transform itself into an undead creature.

  Jub had magic, too-the tiny metal box, attached to a leather armband, that he wore above his left elbow. He'd gotten a real bargain on the phylactery from the thaumaturgical shop in Skullport because of its "curse." It didn't polymorph properly-it would only change its wearer into "vermin," but that was just fine with Jub. With it, he could change into pretty much any bug he could think of, big or small. He usually liked to turn into a fly-nobody ever suspected a fly of spying-but Qilue had warned him that that wouldn't be a healthy form to choose this time around. The males he was searching for worshiped Selvetarm, champion of the Queen of Spiders. They were bound to be hundreds of her pets around, wherever they were holed up, so Jub had polymorphed into a spider himself. It was, he reflected with sly grin that set his fangs quivering, the perfect disguise.

  The spider body had come in pretty handy so far. It had gotten him past a bunch of traps. It was fist-sized-too light to trigger the spring-spikes or pits. It had also enabled him to scurry into a crack in the wall when a heavy block of stone smashed down. The body had its drawbacks, however. Shooting out strands of web left his ass feeling twitchy, and having three pairs of eyes took a lot of getting used to. All of the colors were flat, and he kept getting mixed up about what was close and what was far away-not to mention distracted by the rush of the walls going past while simultaneously seeing the cavern dwindling away behind him. He didn't know how spiders could stand looking in all directions at once.

  Reaching the floor of the cavern, Jub snapped the thread of silk and looked around. Several passages led out of there. They all looked enormous to Jub, but if he'd been walking around in his regular, half-orc, half-drow body, the white bristles on the top of his head would have brushed the ceilings of most of them. That figured… Dolblunde had been built by rock gnomes.

  He scuttled along the cavern, trying to decide which side passage to explore first. Walking had been tricky at first, but now that he had the hang of having eight legs he could move pretty quickly. He'd covered a fair chunk of the ancient city already. Something was bound to turn up soon, unless Qilue had been wrong about the Selvetargtlin being there, of course. She might have been lied to.

  Jub paused at the entrance to one of the passages. A noise issued from it, a clicking sound. It came to him through his feet, which were sensitive to vibrations in the floor. Deciding to check it out, he scuttled into the passage.

  His leg hairs quivered more rapidly as he drew closer to the source of the sound, which stopped, then started again, then stopped again. The passage was wide enough for a pair of rock gnomes to have walked through it side by side, its ceiling high and narrow as a knife slash and its floor surfaced with crushed stone. The tunnel wound through the rock like a stream, which it probably had been at one point. Jub knew he was on the right track when he saw a clump of web on the wall. A spider must have passed that way, maybe one of the Selvetargtlin's pets.

  About fifty paces along, Jub spotted a spider clinging to the wall. Hairy and black, it was about the same size as his polymorphed form. It turned as Jub scuttled by, watching him with its multiple eyes. Jub had chosen a spider form with a narrow body and long, graceful legs that would allow him to cover more ground. He hoped that bigger, heavier spider wouldn't see him as prey. He crept past it, ready at a moment's notice to polymorph back into his half-drow form and squish the thing, but the hairy spider ignored him.

  The passage opened, up ahead, onto a large cavern filled with humid air. The clicking noise came again, and something moved across the mouth of the tunnel. It looked, strangely enough, like animated black swords walking about on their points. As Jub drew closer, he could see that these "swords" were the legs of an enormous spider, its body big enough to have filled a small room. Its feet, sharp as whetted knives, clicked against the stone floor as it walked. It hung around just outside the passage as if guarding it, its abdomen expanding and contracting as it breathed.

  Jub scurried out of the passage, wary of those sharp, stabbing feet. The monster, like its smaller, hairier cousin in the passage behind Jub, ignored him. Good thing, too. All it would have to do was sit on Jub and he'd be dead.

  Jub scuttled up a wall, stopping when he was high enough to get a good view.

  The cavern was enormous. At the far end was a deep pool of water. Fringing the shore of the pool were dozens of small ruined buildings.

  Jub spotted at least a dozen people. Most were drow, easily recognizable, even to his limited eyesight, by their black skin and white hair. They wore robes, but Jub was too far away to tell if they were Selvetargtlin or not. He also spotted several aranea in spider form. He recognized them by their distinctive humpback and the humanoid arms jutting out from just below their chins. Their faces were entirely insectlike, with multiple eyes and gnashing fangs, but they moved with an intelligence and purpose that true spiders lacked.

  Jub scurried across the ceiling, toward the city. As he drew closer to the ruins, he could make out details of individual buildings. It looked as though it had once been a marketplace. Each building was fronted with a slab of stone that had probably served as a shop counter. The smashed remains of doors hung from rusted hinges, and the floor was littered with broken pottery, shattered crates, and bones. Most of the skulls that grinned up at Jub were small-rock gnomes-but here and there he spotted the heavy-browed skulls of his full-orc kin. They'd sacked Dolblunde more than six centuries ago, and the city had lain empty since then.

  It wasn't empty any more. In addition to the handful of drow and aranea Jub had already spotted, the ruined marketplace was filled with spiders. Jub could see them scurrying around everywhere. Most were about his size, but some of the larger ones were as big as dogs. They'd spun webs in the vacant doorways and shop windows and darted from one chunk of fallen masonry to the next. They paused and stared up at Jub with gleaming, multifaceted eyes as he made his way toward the center of the ruined marketplace.

  There, next to the remains of a well, was what at first glance looked like a spider even larger than the sword-legged monster that guarded the entrance. It was motionless, however, and as Jub drew closer he realized it was a statue. The body of a drow lay in front of it, but there was no one else close by.

  Jub descended on a strand of web for a better look. Close up, he could see the statue was only partially finished. The most detailed portion was the drow head that perched on top of the spider body.

  Qilue had been right. The drow she'd asked Jub to find must be there after all. That statue was of Selvetarm, Lolth's drow-headed spider champion.

  The corpse that lay in front of the statue was a drow female. She was sprawled face-down on a block of stone that had been hauled out of a nearby building, by the look of the scuffs on the floor. She was dressed in a long black piwafwi embroidered, in red, in a spiderweb pattern. The back of it was stained with dried blood, and more blood crusted the stone she lay on. The smell filled Jub's spider senses, making him twitchy.

  He landed on the block of stone next to the corpse. A platinum chain hung around her neck, the medallion on it partially hidden under her shoulder. Jub eased it out with his forelegs. The disk, also platinum, was embossed with the image of a spider-Lolth's holy symbol. On the ground, next to the dead female's dangling hand, was further pr
oof of her status: an adamantine whip handle, topped with what had once been two living snakes. Their heads had been sliced clean off. They lay on the ground next to the whip.

  The body presented a puzzle. Those wounds looked like something the sword-footed spider might have done, except that the spider was hanging out by the tunnel entrance and didn't seem inclined to move around much. Jub doubted that a priestess of Lolth-capable of controlling spiders with a thought-would have died like that.

  No, those wounds were probably blade thrusts, aimed at the back, just over the vitals, like a rogue's surprise stab, swift and deadly, and without much warning by the look of it. Otherwise, the priestess would have taken a few of her attackers down with her using that whip of hers.

  The weirdest thing was that the dead priestess was still lying there. She'd been killed a while ago, judging by the dried blood, but the Selvetargtlin didn't seem to have noticed her yet.

  When they did find her, things were going to get hot. Selvetarm was Lolth's champion. His followers would be furious as a swarm of stirges when they found one of the Spider Queen's priestesses murdered. They'd turn the cavern upside down looking for her killer.

  Jub's leg hairs suddenly vibrated. It took him a moment to identify the sound as the clash of steel on steel. It came from inside one of the nearby buildings-a windowless, two-story structure that looked as though it might have once been a warehouse. The doorway was invitingly open, its shattered double doors lying on the ground nearby, but Jub wasn't stupid enough to blunder in that way. Instead he scrambled up a wall to the roof. Centuries of dripping water had pitted it, leaving holes in the thin stone just big enough to scuttle through. Jub crawled inside and clung to the ceiling, staring down.

  Below him, two Selvetargtlin in blood-red robes danced around each other, one with an adamantine sword in hand, the other with a spiked mace of black iron. Both had long white hair that hung in thick braids that whipped around as they spun, parried, and thrust. Their robes barely moved. As one flipped back, Jub saw it was lined with chain mail. Both males wore steel gauntlets over their hands. A nasty looking blade stuck out of the back of each gauntlet.

  The pair fought furiously, sword and mace clanging in a flurry of parried blows. They battled in silence-something that, he'd heard, was unusual for a Selvetargtlin. Selvetarm's priests usually worked themselves up for a fight by shouting out their deity's name. Nor were they using spells against each other. Odd, for a fight that seemed to be in deadly earnest.

  The male with the mace feinted-then spun backward, the blade on his gauntlet slicing a line through the other male's robe, exposing the gleaming chain mail that lined it. The second male retaliated by slashing at the first one's neck, torso, and hamstrings-but the first avoided all three swings. He leaped into the air, his lower body twisting sideways. His boots struck the wall and stuck. Running up it like a spider, he crouched, ready to spring, but the Selvetargtlin with the sword was equally quick. He, too, ran up the wall as if it was a horizontal surface. The battle continued until suddenly the sword went spinning to the ground, smashed out of the hands of the male who had been wielding it. The disarmed Selvetargtlin leaped after it, but the male with the mace was just as fast. He landed on the floor a heartbeat after the first and smashed down with an overhand blow that should have left his opponent sprawling and bloody, but though the first had lost his sword, he still had his bladed gauntlets. He twisted and sprang inside the arc of the descending mace, punching both blades into the other male's chest.

  The death grunt was loud enough to set Jub's hairs quivering. The mortally wounded Selvetargtlin collapsed on the floor, blood bubbling from his chest as the gauntlet blades yanked free. Shuddering with effort, he twisted his head to the side-an invitation to his opponent, who was at last retrieving his sword, to finish him.

  The other drow laughed. "Well fought," he said between gulps of air, sheathing his sword. Then he kneeled and slapped both gauntleted hands down on the other's chest, a palm over each wound, and began to pray. Darkness, threaded with a tracery of white webbing, coalesced around his hands then bled down into the wounds. The threads of white stitched themselves back and forth, sealing the wounds shut, preventing the other from dying.

  A moment later, the victor helped the healed Selvetargtlin to his feet. The other male wiped bloody lips with the back of his sleeve then picked up his mace. "You fought well, too," he said, pausing to spit the last of the blood from his mouth. He rubbed the spot where the wounds had been. "I didn't expect that last thrust. Let's hope your chitines prove as competent."

  "They already have," the other answered. "They're surprisingly capable of following orders. Of course, it helps that they think those orders come from Lolth herself."

  Both males laughed.

  Jub's hairs shivered erect. Chitines were four-armed magical creations of the drow. Bred as slaves by wizards centuries ago, they were only three-quarters the height of a male. Abandoned by their creators as unfit, they had escaped, decades ago, to distant reaches of the Underdark, where they lived still. Jub had blundered into one of their web-filled caverns once-luckily for him, just one chitine denned there. He'd killed it but had come away covered in gouges from its hook-lined palms and feet. He'd been lucky to get out alive. The chitines hated the dark elves with an intense, smoldering anger. They attacked all drow on sight-even a half-drow like Jub.

  Yet these Selvetargtlin were talking about the chitines as if they were pet lizards.

  Lizards that, by the sound of it, were fighting battles for them.

  The males were still talking, though in less boisterous voices as their breathing gradually slowed. Wanting to hear more, Jub descended from the ceiling on a thread of silk.

  "… glad to hear your chitines fought well," the Selvetargtlin with the mace was saying. "What was their target?"

  "The Moonwood. They killed eight dark dancers."

  Jub jerked to a halt and thought, No wonder Qilue said this job was so important. These guys are attacking Eilistraee's shrines.

  "If our underlings do their job too well, we'll bleed them gray, instead of just drawing them away with our feints," the male with the mace said.

  "I hope not. I want a few of them still standing when we jump to the temple, at least sixty-six of the bitches-one for each of us to kill."

  Both laughed as they walked toward the door.

  "So the chitines didn't suspect anything?" the Selvetargtlin with the mace asked.

  "None." The other grinned. "I told them the Spider Queen would reward them with…"

  The voices faded away as the pair walked out into the street. Jub hung from his thread, slowly spinning in place, waiting for their shouts of alarm. The dead priestess was just outside the door. The two would practically have to step over her on their way outside, but no alarm came. The Selvetargtlin, it seemed, didn't care that a priestess of Lolth had been killed.

  Probably, Jub realized, because they'd killed her.

  He wondered if he should follow the pair of clerics, but then figured they'd be walking too quickly for him to keep up. He'd heard enough, anyhow. "Temple," they'd said. "The temple." They were planning an attack on the Promenade. Sixty-six of them, it seemed-a curiously exact number.

  The Promenade wasn't far away-only a few leagues, as the worm burrowed-but its magical protections were rock-solid. Jub wondered how the Selvetargtlin were planning on getting inside. Far as he could see, there was no way they'd be able to.

  He turned and scrambled back up the strand of web then out onto the roof. It was time to make his report.

  He scuttled back to the tunnel, crossing rooftops where he could, but several times he was forced to scurry along the floor. He had an anxious moment when he reached the exit. The sword-foot spider nearly skewered him, its blade-sharp feet clacking down all around him as he made a dash for it-but then he was in the passage once more.

  He hurried along it, back to the empty cavern.

  Once there, he ducked into another of the side
passages and shifted back into his half-drow form. Qilue had told him to report any discoveries back to her the moment it was possible to do so. She probably didn't expect him to get out of there alive with a dracolich flying around. That pricked his pride, but not so much that he wouldn't do as she'd asked. He owed Qilue. Fourteen years ago, her consort had died while freeing Jub and a bunch of other wretches from a slave ship in Skullport. Instead of blaming the slaves for her consort's death, Qilue had set them free-and invited them back to the Promenade to live. She hadn't even tried to claim the slaves as her own. All she'd demanded, in return for their freedom, was one favor from each of them.

  Fourteen years later, Jub was finally going to pay her back.

  His clothing and gear had polymorphed with him when he invoked the phylactery's magic, and they were back on his half-drow form. He pulled a slim metal tube from his pocket and uncorked it then carefully tipped out its contents. A feather with a silver shaft fell into his hand, followed by a roll of parchment. He sat, cross-legged, and touched the magical quill to his tongue to prime it. Then he began to write.

  His letters were clumsy-simple block letters, like a child would write. If anyone else but Qilue were going to read it, he'd have been embarrassed, but Qilue never made fun of him. She was as beautiful, body and soul, as Jub was ugly.

  SELV. CLERICS ATTACKED THE MOON WOOD WITH CHITTENS. BUT IT WAS JUST A FAINT. THEYR GOING TO. ATTACK THE PROMENAD, TOO. 66 OF THEM. NOT SURE WHEN.

  He paused a moment, thinking, then added:

  THEYR IN DOLBLUND,LIKE YOU THOT.I THINK THEY KILT A LOLTH PREESTIS THERE.

  He paused again. Qilue had told him to write down everything he saw and heard, no matter how insignificant it seemed. So he added:

  His message finished, Jub tapped the magical quill against the parchment three times. On the third tap, the words he'd written flowed back into the quill, vanishing from the page. Jub held the feather close to his mouth and whispered Qilue's name, then released it. The feather streaked through the air like an arrow, vanishing in a sparkle of silver motes.