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 needs - taking 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 day-light - time 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 sur-rounding sky. Strange bits of matter drifted through the astral sea. On several occasions they passed boulders or hillocks of rock and dirt that hovered in space 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, shining silver to black-est 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 travel-ing 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 shifted my spirit to this plane, and I am leading us more or less directly to the near-est 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 destina-tion. 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 pass before they reached their destination, beseeched the goddess for an audience, and managed to return to their native plane?
Absorbed in her own thoughts, Halisstra kept to herself for the bal-ance 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 her-self 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 Quen-thel, 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 de-fiant 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 Plane - a weightless, cool, perfect nothingness - but the swirling current of the revolving pool caught her at once, tugging on her with some strange nondimensional feeling of attrac-tion 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.
Goddess, help me! she pleaded in the silence of her own mind, as she flailed her arms and tried to extricate herself from the spinning mass. 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 in-tersected 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 buttress on which she stood. The hot, stinking breeze grew momen-tarily 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 so - and 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 con-densation to resume a physical existence on another plane. When you leave this place, your spirit will return to the Astral Plane, while this shell you have created for yourself will simply fade away into nothingness."
"You seem well acquainted with the rigors of planar travel," Halis-stra 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 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 sur-rounding the party. He waved his hand in a sweeping gesture.
"Somewhere below us we will find some kind of gate or border mark-ing 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 sub-ject 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 sur-face 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 web-bing 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 move-ment 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 sizingup an easy meal.
They began topass corpses at odd intervals, hulking forms of night-mare 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 bul-bous abdomen had burst entirely, strewing the strand with its horrid con-tents. "It seems not unlikely that they did this to themselves. Demons are violent creatures, after all. In the absence of a powerful, commanding pres-ence, they often turn on each other."
"An absence . . ." Halisstra repeated. She frowned, studying the car-nage. "There are no drow bodies here."
Having descended a goodly ways, the neighboring strands were closer, andthe 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 thepurpose?"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 therear 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 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 bot-toms. They were still many hundreds of yards behind the company, but even at that distance Halisstra could tell that they were ogre-sized mon-strosities, 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 per-haps 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.
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 Xor-larrin, 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 com-pletely 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-wieldingpriestesses 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 dili-gence of Crown Prince Horgar Steelshadow approached, escorted by a double file of the duergar lord's Stone Guards. Nimor winced at the re-sounding 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 ac-knowledge his presence with gruff nods and open envy of his successes.
"Why, Crown Prince, my business concerned the upcoming as-sault," 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 mat-ters 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, fol-lowed 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 grippedin 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 com-bine 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 Menzober-ranzan'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 Men-zoberranzan is ours, of course."
"My army outnumbers the cambion's by better than two to one, so why does he gain a share better than half of my own?" Horgar said.
"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 commit-ted 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 com-mence its attack and break into the city."
"It's not a bad plan," Kaanyr Vhokobserved. "However, it is exactly what the Menzoberranyr must expect us to try, given the situation. They'll be very careful in committing their strength to any one threat."
"Aye," Horgar said. "How will you draw them out, now that you've taught them caution at the Pillars of Woe?"
Nimor smiled. It didn't escape him that Horgar and Kaanyr were examining the tactical problem of defeating Menzoberranzan, instead of quarreling over what they expected to gain from their efforts.
"My brothers and I expect to help in that regard," he said. "We're not numerous but we're well-placed, and, my lords, you have forgotten House Agrach Dyrr."
Horgar and Kaanyr exchanged a nod, even a smile.
Prepare well, Menzoberranzan, Nimor thought. I'm coming.
"I never imagined so many demons in my life," Ryld grunted. He leaned on Splitter, watching as a huge, bat-winged, bloated form spiraled feebly down into the darkness, vainly trying to fly with its wings savaged by blows of the weapons master's greatsword. He straightened and wiped the back of one hand across his brow. "It's getting hotter, too. I hope we're close to whatever we're looking for."
Halisstra and the rest of the company stood nearby, swaying with nausea or trembling with fatigue as the environment and their exertions warranted. For what seemed like hours, they'd continued to fight their way down strand after strand. Sometimes they descended for miles past strands that were empty or held nothing but corpses, but more and more fre-quently they encountered demons that were alive and hungry. Most of the infernal creatures threw themselves headlong into battle as if all reason had deserted them, but a few retained enough of their intelligence to employ their formidable magical abilities against the interlopers.
With fang, claw, sting, and unholy sorcery the denizens of the Demonweb Pits scoured and scored the drow company. It didn't help that Quenthel had commanded Pharaun to hoard his spells carefully so that the company met each new demonic threat with steel, not the wizard's magic.
"Save your breath, Master Argith," Quenthel said. She slowly straight-ened from her own fighting crouch, her whip splattered with the gore of a dozen demons. "We must press on."
The company hadn't gone more than another forty yards before their strand shuddered, and an enormous taloned hand appeared from be-neath. Clawing its way around from the unseen bottom side of the web, a massive, bison-headed demon with foul, coarse fur sprouting from its shoulders and back hauled itself to the top of the strand and bellowed a vast challenge.
"A goristro!" Pharaun cried. "What in all the hells is that doing here?"
"Some pet of Lolth's that's gotten loose, I don't doubt," Tzirik replied.
The Vhaeraunite priest began to chant a spell, while the others leaped into action. Before the monster could clamber to its feet, Valas feathered it with at least three arrows, the black shafts sprouting from its shoulders and thick neck like pins in a cushion. The goristro snorted in pain and anger, and reached out one hulking hand to pick up the corpse of a small spider-demon nearby. It flung the corpse at Valas, catching the scout as he fished in his quiver for more arrows. The impact staggered Valas, who stumbled and slipped down the side of the strand, cursing in several languages.
Ryld ran forward with Splitter held high, Quenthel at his side, while Halisstra and Danifae carefully tried to circle the beast to one side as best they could on the narrow strand, hoping to surround it on all sides.
Tzirik finished his spell and shouted out a deep, rolling word of power, creating a great whirling disk of spinning razors across the goristro's torso. Blades bit and blood flew, but still the monster came on undeterred.
"What will it take to stop this thing?" Halisstra called. "Does it have any weaknesses?"
"It'sstupid," Pharaun replied. "Barely sentient, really. Don't meet it blow for blow."
The wizard gestured and struck the monster with a gleaming green ray of energy that chewed into the goristro's chest, while Tzirik moved in behind Ryld and Quenthel to help them against the monster. The weapons master and the high priestess leaped and slashed at the crea-ture's belly and torso, while dodging the ponderous blows of its enor-mous fists. One glancing blow spun Quenthel to her hands and knees, but she managed to scramble out of the way before the creature could finish her off.
"Noooot stuuuupiiiid!" roared the goristro.
It lifted one hoofed foot and stamped it down on the strand with such astonishing power that the whole miles-long cable thrummed like some-thing alive. The shock wave threw all of the drow into the air, yet the goristro had failed to anticipate the consequences of its mighty stomp, for the shock threw it into the air as well. The monstrous demon landed awk-wardly on its side and slid off the strand, catching itself by one arm dug into the upper surface. It scrambled and kicked, its struggles shaking the strand even more.
Quenthel picked herself up from the trembling surface, and weaved her way past the brute's arm to look down at its face. With a deliberate motion, she flicked her snake-headed whip at one of its beady eyes and destroyed the organ in a sickening burst of gore. The goristro howled in agony and recoiled, losing its grip on the strand and tumbling down into the abyss. Its bellows of rage continued for a long time, diminishing as it fell away from them. She didn't bother to watch it fall. Instead she turned to the rest of the company.
"Get up," she snarled. "We're wasting time."
Halisstra picked herself up from the weband glanced around. Valas scrambled back into view from his precarious position on the side of the strand. Danifae climbed to her feet as well. They followed after Quen-thel as the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith set off again at once, moving at an impatient lope as she bounded down the strand. Halisstra was too tired to keep up the pace for long, but she had even less energy for an argu-ment with the single-minded priestess, and so she merely set her jaw and endured.
They reached the bottom - almost.
For some time they'd noticed converging strands drawing closer to their own, and Halisstra could see the reason why. A great ring of webbing a dozen times thicker than any of the gray strands was suspended below them, binding the ends of the strands together. Its circumference was so great that Halisstra could hardly describe a curve at all in the ring's vast arc. Inthe center there wassomething - a titanic black structure or island of sorts hanging in the mighty web. The drow paused, surveying the scene, until Valas broke the silence.
"Is that it?" he said in a low voice.
"The entrance to Lolth's domain," Tzirik answered, "lies somewhere within that ring."
"Are you sure?" asked Ryld.
"I am," Quenthel replied for the priest.
She didn't look aside or hesitate, but simply set off again at the same hard pace.
As the strand approached the central ring its steep pitch gradually flattened and thickened somewhat, and for the first time in seemingly endless hours and miles the company found itself traversing something like level ground instead of picking their way down the sloping cable. More demonic and spidery corpses appeared, some half-buried in the strand as if they'd fallen from the limitless heights above - which they most likely had.
The travelers reached the thick ring and crossed one more stretch of twisted webbing only to find that the structure in the center was some kind of immense stone temple, a baroque building of gleaming black obsidian miles in diameter. Spiked stone buttresses soared across the bot-tomless space, linking the structure to the ring around it. Vast dark plazas of smooth stone large enough to swallow cities surrounded the temple's flanks. Without speaking, the company picked their way over to one of the colossal flying buttresses and advanced toward their goal.
Halisstra found herself trembling, not with exhaustion, but with a combination of terror and ecstasy as she realized that she must soon with-stand Lolth's scrutiny in the flesh.
I am worthy, she told herself. I must be.
The demons that had plagued their progress through the webs didn't seem to care for the black temple. In any event, no more of the mon-sters pursued the company once they left the web behind them. For a long time the dark elves simply walked onward, crossing the huge outer plaza, as the walls of the temple came closer and closer, revealing their dark details.
Quenthel oriented their march on a sharp-edged break in the cyclo-pean wall, a huge cleft that must have been the temple's portico. From time to time they passed the strange, inanimate forms of large, spiderlike beings that seemed to be sculpted from fluid black stone. Oddly enough, the petrified forms grew smaller and smaller the closer they came to the cleft. Halisstra dismissed the mystery from her mind, concentrating only on the goal before her.
At last they reached the mouth of the temple, and looked upon its entrance. A vast face confronted them, the face of a cruelly beautiful dark elf, her features calm and still as if in contemplation. Perfect black stone barred the entrance from one side to the other, sculpted into the image of the Spider Queen's visage. Only her half-lidded eyes showed any animation at all. Gazing down blankly at the tiny supplicants below her, Lolth's eyes gleamed with a roiling, hellish glee focused entirely on what-ever thoughts or processes lay behind them.
The company stood gazing up in wonder and terror, and Quenthel prostrated herself before the image of her goddess. Halisstra and Danifae joined her at once, groveling on the cold black stone. Even the males dropped to the ground, lying on their faces and averting their eyes. Tzirik, as a priest of Vhaeraun, settled for taking one knee and lowering his gaze respectfully. He didn't serve the Queen of the Demonweb Pits, but he and others of his faith certainly recognized her divinity.
"Great Queen!" called Quenthel. "We have come from Menzober-ranzan to beseech you to restore your favor to your priestesses! Our ene-mies encroach on your holy city and threaten your faithful with destruction. We humbly beg you to instruct us in what we must do to find approval in your eyes. Arm us with your holy might once more, and we will hunt your enemies until their blood fills the Underdark and their souls fill your belly!"
The face did not respond.
Quenthel waited for a long time, still prostrate, then she licked her lips and uttered another prayer. Halisstra and Danifae joined their plead-ing to hers, and they begged and pleaded with every prayer, every invoca-tion, every catechism they had ever been taught, scraping and groveling at the temple door. The males simply waited, still stretched out on the black stone. After a time, Tzirik moved off a short distance and sat down with his back to the face, communing with his own god. Halisstra ignored him and continued her supplications.
Still the face did not respond.
The three priestesses kept up their pleas for what must have been hours, but finally Quenthel pushed herself upright and gazed full on the visage of Lolth.
"Enough, sisters," said the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith. "The goddess plainly does not deign to answer us at this time."
"Perhaps we are in the wrong place," Pharaun suggested. "Perhaps we must go farther in order for you to offer your prayers."
"There is no place farther to go," Tzirik said, rejoining the party. "Vhaeraun informs me that this is the only point of approach to Lolth's domain through the Abyss. If she refuses to hear you at this spot, she will not hear you anywhere else in this plane."
"But why does she continue to ignore us?" Halisstra asked in a plain-tive voice. She climbed to her feet, her heart sick with longing. After all that had happened - the fall of her House, the destruction of her city, the travails of the quest - to stand before Lolth's temple and be ignored was simply incomprehensible. "What more do we have to do?"
Tzirik shrugged and said, "I cannot answer that question."
"Apparently Lolth can't, either,"Halisstra said.
She ignored the disapproval and fear that flickered across Quenthel's features, and strode up angrily to stand within arm's reach of the tower-ing face.
"Hear me, Lolth!" she cried. "Answer me! What have we done to earn your displeasure? Where are you?"
"Speak with respect!" hissed Quenthel, her eyes wide with terror.
Ryld quailed, but managed to find the strength to take a couple of steps forward.
"Mistress Melarn . . ." he said, "Halisstra, come away from there. No good - "
"Lolth!"Halisstra screamed. "Answer me, damn you!"
She struck the cold stone of the face with her fists, flailing away in futility, in anger. Her mind went empty as animal fury rose up to over-throw her reason. She screamed curses upon her goddess, she battered at the uncaring face until her hands were bruised and bloody, and still no answer came. After a time she found herself huddled against the cold stone, weeping, her hands broken and useless. Like a lost child, she cried with all the ache in her heart.
"Why? Why?" was all she could manage to say through her sobs. "Why have you abandoned us? Why do you hate us?"
"You speak heresy," Quenthel said, her voice hard with disapproval. "Have you no faith left, Halisstra Melarn? The goddess will speak in her own time."
"Do you really believe that still?" Halisstramuttered.
She turned her face away and gave herself up to her tears, no longer caring what Quenthel, or Danifae, or any of the others thought. She'd had her answer from Lolth.
"Weak ..." she heard Quenthel whisper.
Standing a short distance from the rest of the company, Tzirik sighed and said, "Well, that's that, I suppose. Lolth hasn't chosen to break her silence for you, so now I have something I must do."
He raised his arms and made a complex series of passes, while mut-tering dire words of power. The air crackled with energy. Quenthel's eyes widened as she recognized the spell the Vhaeraunite spoke.
"Stop him!" she screeched, whirling to face the priest.
She started forward, raisingher deadly whips, but Danifae caught her arm as she rushed past.
"Carefully!" hissed Danifae. "Our bodies are still in Minauthkeep."
"He's creating a gate!" Quenthel snapped. "Here!"
"What are you doing, Tzirik?" Pharaun said with some alarm.
The wizard recoiled a step and prepared a defensive spell, but Dani-fae's warning was just enough to cause him to hesitate before interfering.
Ryld and Valas held their hands as well, uncertain of what would happen if they harmed the cleric whose spell had brought them to Lolth's door. The weapons master and the mercenary drew their weapons but halted there.
"Pharaun, what should we do?" Ryld said.
Before the wizard could answer, Tzirik finished his spell. With an enormous tearing sound, a great black rift: appeared in the air beside the Jaelre priest.
"I am here, my lord!" he cried into the rift. "I stand before the Face of Lolth!"
And from the depths of blackness within the rift, a voice of ineffable power, of terrible potency, answered,"Good. I come."
The blackness seemed to stir, and from the rift stepped something that had the size and shape of a lean, graceful drow male, but was obviously something more. Dressed in black leather, a purple mask draped over his face, the being radiated puissance and presence, his form almost quivering with the potentialities he contained. Even Halisstra, absorbed in her own misery with her back turned to the scene, whipped her head around as she sensed the being's arrival. With imperious ease, the being surveyed the plain of dark stone and the black temple.
"It is as I thought," he said to Tzirik, who had fallen prostrate at his feet. "Rise, my son. You have done well, and brought me to a place from which I was barred."
"I have only done as you commanded, Masked Lord," Tzirik said, standing slowly.
"Tzirik," Quenthel managed in a strangled voice, "what have you done?"
"He has opened a gate for me," the being who could only be a god said, with a cruel smile on his face. "Do you not recognize the son of your own god-dess, priestess of Lolth?"
"Vhaeraun," Quenthel breathed.
The god folded his arms and drifted past the company of Menzober-ranyr to confront the perfect stone visage, giving the mortals no further thought. He made a small shooing gesture with his left hand, and Halis-stra, still huddled before the face, was violently hurled aside. She flew spin-ning through the air and landed badly at least thirty yards away, tumbling to a halt on the fluted ebon stone of the plaza.
"Dear Mother," Vhaeraun said, addressing the face, "you were foolish to leave yourself in such a state."
The god spontaneously began to grow, his radiance increasing as he soared to a height taller than a storm giant, scaling himself to the task at hand. He held out his hand, and from out of nowhere a black, gleaming sword made of shadows appeared in his grip, sized to his towering form.
A spearcast distant, Halisstra groaned and raised her eyes from the cold stone under her aching body. The Menzoberranyr stood paralyzed by indecision. Tzirik, on the other hand, watched smugly as Vhaeraun levi-tated upward to confront Lolth's gaze directly, blade in hand. With careful deliberation, the Masked Lord drew back his sword of shadows, his mask twisting into a rictus of hatred.
And Vhaeraun hewed at the Face of Lolth with all his godly might.