Condemnation (46 page)

“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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 buttress 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 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 condensation 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,” 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 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 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 domain—which, 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 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 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 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 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 tittering 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 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 sizing up an easy meal.

They began to pass 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 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 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. “Goddess, 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 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 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 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 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.

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 Xorlarrin, 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.