War Of The Spider Queen - Condemnation Part 28

"Yes, Matron Mother," Andzrel said, bowing low.

"So," she continued, "where do we stop the duergar and their allies?"

Without hesitation, the weapons master replied, "We do not, Matron Mother. Given the losses we have already suffered, I advise withdrawing back to Menzoberranzan and preparing for a siege."

"I do not like that option," Triel snapped. "It reeks of defeat, and the longer an army sits on our doorstep, the more likely it is that they'll be reinforced by the arrival of some other enemy, such as the beholders or the mind flayers."

"That is possible, of course," Andzrel said, his voice carefully neutral, "but the gray dwarves will not find it easy to maintain a siege around Menzoberranzan, a hundred miles from their own city. I don't think the duergar can wait us out for more than a few months, and I doubt they have the numbers to take the city by storm. Our best course of action is to make the duergar set their siege, and see what kind of a threat we're really facing. It would provide us the opportunity to crush House Agrach Dyrr in the meantime."

"You're afraid to face the duergar in battle again?" Triel rasped.

"No, Matron Mother, but I will not advise a course of action that hazards the city on a battle for which we are not prepared, not unless we have no other choice. We are not yet at that point." He paused, then added, "We can always gather our strength within the city and sally in force in only a few days, if we see the need or the opportunity."

Triel weighed the weapons master's advice.

"I will return to Menzoberranzan and set the matter before the Council," she said at last, "but, until you're ordered otherwise, continue your withdrawal. I will have our captains in the city make ready to withstand a siege.

Halisstra opened her eyes and found herself drifting in an endless silver sea. Soft gray clouds moved slowly in the distance, while strange dark streaks twisted violently through the sky, anch.o.r.ed in ends so distant she couldn't perceive them, their middle parts revolving angrily like pieces of string rolled between a child's fingertips. She glanced down, wondering what supported her, and saw nothing but more of the strange pearly sky beneath her feet and all around her.

She drew in a sudden breath, surprised by the sight, and felt her lungs fill with something sweeter and perhaps a little more solid than air, but instead of gagging or drowning on the stuff she seemed perfectly acclimated to it. An electric thrill raced through her limbs as she found herself mesmerized by the simple act of respiration.

Halisstra raised her hand to her face in an unconscious desire to s.h.i.+eld her eyes, and she noticed that her eyesight was preternaturally keen. Each link of her mailed gauntlet leaped out in perfect symmetry, its edges boldly defined, the leather of her gloves gleaming with discrete layers of oils and stains.

Words failed her.

"You have not ventured here before, Mistress Melarn?" said Tzirik from somewhere behind her.

Halisstra craned her neck back to look for him, but in response the entire vista seemed to revolve and spin in one quick, smooth motion, bringing into her view the floating forms of her companions. The Vhaeraunite priest stoodno, that was not right, floated was bettera dozen yards from her, his armor as sharp as the edge of a knife, his cloak rippling softly in a breeze Halisstra could not feel. He spoke softly, yet his voice carried with a marvelous clarity and precision that made it seem that he stood within arm's reach.

"I would have expected a priestess of your stature to be familiar with the astral realm," the priest added.

"I know something of what to expect, but I have never had the occasion to journey to other planes," she replied. "My knowledge of this place is only . . . theoretical."

She noted that each of her comrades seemed every bit as sharply defined, as tangible and real, as Tzirik himself. From some spot she could not easily perceivesomewhere in the middle of their backs, or perhaps the napes of their neckssprang a slender, gleaming tendon of silver light.

Halisstra reached around behind her head and felt her own cord. The warm, pulsing artery vibrated with energy, and when her fingers brushed it, a powerful jolt quivered through her torso as if she'd just plucked the heartstring of her own soul. She jerked her hand back, and resolved not to try to touch her cord again.

"Your silver cord," Tzirik explained. "A nigh indestructible bond that ties your soul to its rightful home: your body, back in Minauthkeep." The priest offered a cruel smile. "You will want to be careful of it. There are few things that can part an astral traveler's cord, but if something did, that traveler would be destroyed in an instant."

Halisstra watched as Ryld felt for his own cord and touched it. His eyes widened and he s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand back just as swiftly as she had withdrawn her own.

"How long do these things get?" the weapons master asked.

"They are infinite, Master Argith," Tzirik said. "Don't worry, they fade to intangibility within a foot or two of your skin, so you won't be tripping over your own cord. In fact, it has the habit of keeping itself out of your way, quite without a thought on your part."

Halisstra glanced around the company, watching as the Menzoberranyr struggled to adjust themselves to their new environment. Ryld and Valas flailed their limbs slowly as if trying to tread water. Quenthel held herself as stiff as a blade, her limbs locked tight to her sides, while Danifae drifted languidly, her long white hair streaming behind her. Pharaun merely waited, his eyes sparkling with dark amus.e.m.e.nt as he watched the efforts of his companions. Tzirik glanced around, studying their surroundings, and nodded.

"This is something of a timeless place," he said, "but time does pa.s.s here, so I suppose we should begin our journey. Follow me, and stay close. You may think you can see forever from here, but things have a way of vanis.h.i.+ng in the mists."

He glided off without moving, arms folded, his cloak whipping silently behind him.

Follow him how? Halisstra wondered, watching the priest go, but somehow in conceiving the desire to keep the priest close by, she found herself leaping forward with such alacrity that her next impulse was to yelp out loud, if only to herself, "Stop!"

And she did, so quickly and with so perfect an end to motion that her mind told her she must lurch forward, as if she had tried to stop too suddenly from a run. She managed to throw herself into a violent circle before she stopped completely. Fortunately, she was not the only one having trouble.

Danifae scowled prettily as she tried to make herself go anywhere at all, and Ryld and Valas had somehow collided with each other and clung together, unwilling to trust themselves to the void again.

"Oh, in the name of the G.o.ddess!" Quenthel growled, watching them. "Simply clear your minds and think of where you want to go."

"With all due respect, Mistress, where is it that we should desire to go?" Valas asked as he disentangled himself from Ryld.

"Concentrate on following the priest," the Baenre replied. "He cast the spell, so he will be able to find the portal leading into the Demonweb Pits. It may take many hours, but you will find that time pa.s.ses strangely here."

With that, Quenthel moved off in pursuit of Tzirik.

Halisstra closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and concentrated on trailing the priest at a comfortable distance. She closed up quickly and smoothly, and this time she didn't allow herself to react in panic. Soon enough the rest of the company sailed along beside her, keeping together easily as they became more and more accustomed to the strangeness of the Astral Plane. Halisstra indulged herself by experimenting with her mode of locomotion, at first orienting herself horizontally so that she felt like she flew like a bird through the pearly void, then trying to face her direction of travel so that she felt as if she was walking swiftly without moving her legs.

As it turned out, it didn't really matter what she did with her body as long as her mind remained focused on staying near her companions, and the true immateriality of the astral sea began to seep into her understanding. She was only a spirit, weightless, perfect, yet she was in a place where spirits became tangible. Somewhere beyond the endless pearly expanse that met her eye lay the realms of the G.o.ds, a thousand infinite concepts of existence where the divine beings who ruled over the fate of all Faerunof all the worlds, for that matterhad their abodes. She could spend a hundred drow lifetimes exploring the domains that touched on the astral sea, and not even come close to seeing them all.

The thought made her feel small, almost insignificant, and she pushed it from her mind. Lolth had not called her to the Demonweb Pits for her to be overawed by the silver void of the Astral Plane. She had called Halisstra and the others to stand before her, capable and confident, to profess their faith and adoration. For what other purpose could the G.o.ddess have done all that she had done by withdrawing her power from her faithful, by permitting the fall of Ched Nasad, by causing the endless toils and tribulations that had a.s.sailed the First Daughter of House Melarn?

There is a purpose, Halisstra told herself, a purpose that will be made clear to me soon, if I keep my faith strong and do not falter.

The Queen of the Demonweb Pits has brought us this far. She will bring us a little farther.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

How long it took them to cross the Astral Plane, Halisstra could not begin to say. She'd never realized before the extent to which the routine processes of one's body measured the days. Her astral form didn't grow tired or hungry, and didn't know thirst or discomfort of any sort. Without the minor actions of looking after the body's needstaking a sip from a waterskin when thirsty, halting to take a meal during their day's march, or even stopping to sink deep into Reverie and while away the bright hours of daylighttime simply lost its doleful count.

From time to time they caught glimpses of phenomena other than the endless pearly clouds and twisting gray vortices that streaked the surrounding sky. Strange bits of matter drifted through the astral sea. On several occasions they pa.s.sed boulders or hillocks of rock and dirt that hovered in s.p.a.ce like miniature worlds, some nearly the size of mountains, others only a few yards across. Weird, empty ruins graced the larger of them, the abodes of astral sojourners or long gone residents. The strangest things they came across were whirling pools of color slowly revolving in the astral medium. The hues ranged from bright, s.h.i.+ning silver to blackest midnight shot with angry purple streaks.

"Don't stray too close to any of the color pools," Tzirik had said. "If you enter one you will be ejected into a different plane of existence, and I have no desire to wander into strange worlds looking for a careless traveling companion."

"How will we know which one will lead us to the Abyss?" Valas Hune asked.

"Do not worry, my friend, the spell Vhaeraun has granted me also confers a certain affinity for the destination I conceived when I s.h.i.+fted my spirit to this plane, and I am leading us more or less directly to the nearest color pool that will serve our purposes."

"How much longer must we travel?" Quenthel asked.

"We are drawing near," the priest answered. "It's hard to tell here, of course, but I would guess we are within four or five hours of our destination. We've already traveled for almost two days."

Two days? Halisstra thought. It seemed much less.

She found herself wondering what might have transpired back in Faerun in two days. Did Jeggred still maintain his vigil over their inert bodies? He couldn't have been entirely remiss in his duties, as they were all still alive, but how many more days would pa.s.s before they reached their destination, beseeched the G.o.ddess for an audience, and managed to return to their native plane?

Absorbed in her own thoughts, Halisstra kept to herself for the balance of the journey, scarcely noticing that her companions did the same. It came as a surprise to her when Tzirik slowed his effortless flight and finally arrested his motion all together, facing a whirlpool of black with silver streaks that slowly churned in the astral medium a short distance from the travelers.

"The entrance to the Sixty-sixth Layer of the Abyss," the priest of Vhaeraun said. "So far our journey has been uneventful, but once we set foot within Lolth's domain that is bound to change. If you have any second thoughts about this quest, Mistress Baenre, this would be the time to express them."

"I have no reason to fear the Demonweb Pits," Quenthel sneered. "I intend to do what I came here to do."

Without waiting for the priest she arrowed forward and plunged herself into the whirling, inky blot. In the blink of an eye her gleaming astral form was lost to view, swallowed by the maelstrom.

"Impatient, isn't she?" Tzirik remarked.

He shrugged and moved into the color pool himself. Like Quenthel, Halisstra sensed a certainty in the moment, and she did not mean to let any quailing sway her from her intended course. She entered the pool of swirling night a heartbeat behind Tzirik, her teeth bared in a defiant snarl.

There was no sensation at first, though the pool swallowed her sight completely the moment she plunged within it. The medium seemed much the same as the rest of the Astral Planea weightless, cool, perfect nothingnessbut the swirling current of the revolving pool caught her at once, tugging on her with some strange nondimensional feeling of attraction or acceleration that dragged her psychic form in a direction she couldn't even begin to comprehend. It didn't hurt, but it felt so alien, so dislocating, that Halisstra gasped in shock and distress, shuddering violently in the grip of the astral maelstrom.

G.o.ddess, help me! she pleaded in the silence of her own mind, as she flailed her arms and tried to extricate herself from the spinning ma.s.s. There was another long moment of indescribable motion, and She was through.

Halisstra swayed drunkenly with the return of gravity and struggled to catch her balance. She opened her eyes and found herself standing on something silver-gray, a steeply sloping ramp or wall top that dropped away an incredible distance before her. The rest of the party stood close by, looking around in silence as they rubbed their limbs nervously or fingered their weapons.

All around there was nothing but a black, smothering emptiness darker and more forbidding than the blackest chasm of the Underdark. Her nostrils filled with a foul, acrid scent, and a soft muttering updraft streamed constantly from below. Halisstra glanced into the abyss at her left hand and saw something gleaming there, a dull silver strand several miles away that sloped down through the darkness. Lesser strands intersected it at odd intervals, and as she followed some of them with her eyes she saw that they climbed back up slowly and met the very ramp or b.u.t.tress on which she stood. The hot, stinking breeze grew momentarily stronger and actually managed to induce a great, gentle swaying in the monstrous strand.

"It's a spiderweb," Ryld muttered. "A gigantic spiderweb."

"This surprises you?" Pharaun said with a sardonic smirk.

Danifae took a couple of cautious steps down the surface of the strand. The whole thing was easily thirty or forty yards in diameter, yet because its surface was round, it was difficult to feel comfortable walking more than a dozen feet or so from the centerline of the strand. She knelt and brushed her fingers over the strand's surface, and grimaced.

"Sticky, but not dangerously soand we appear to be completely physical again." She straightened, and stretched languidly. "Do I have two bodies now? One here, and one back in the Jaelre castle?"

"In fact, you do," Tzirik said. "When one leaves the astral sea and enters another plane, the traveling spirit constructs for itself the physical body it expects. You might say that your spirit must undergo a sort of condensation to resume a physical existence on another plane. When you leave this place, your spirit will return to the Astral Plane, while this sh.e.l.l you have created for yourself will simply fade away into nothingness."

"You seem well acquainted with the rigors of planar travel," Halisstra observed.

"Vhaeraun has called me to his service in the planes beyond Faerun on several occasions," Tzirik admitted. "In fact, I have been in the Demonweb Pits before now. All the G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 domainwhich, 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 seekan 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 wors.h.i.+per 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 s.h.i.+eld, and set off directly down the t.i.tanic 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 cus.h.i.+oned 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 t.i.ttering 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 pa.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls 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. "G.o.ddess, 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 scouts 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 ma.s.sive 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 circ.u.mference, 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 pa.s.sage?"

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. Jeggred, Ryld, 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 the monstrous cable, and leaped out into the dark.