Sacrifice of the Widow: The Lady Penitent, Book I (13 page)

It was empty, utterly empty. There were no exits, no gaping pits in the floor or holes in the ceiling. The chamber was perhaps ten paces across and more or less round. The walls and ceiling were just as smooth as the floor. It had obviously once been the lair of an ooze, but that creature was long gone. The walls were dry, and the air smelled only of cold stone.

There were, however, several objects scattered across the floor. They were the size and shape of eggs—about sixty of them, by Thaleste’s quick estimate. She stepped into the room and squatted down next to one. It turned out to be a polished oval of black obsidian. She whispered a prayer and saw that all of the stones glowed with magic. She had no idea what this signified, but it was certainly worth reporting to Iljrene. She picked up one of the stones and slipped it into the pouch on her belt.

By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she was breathing heavily. In Menzoberranzan, she’d traveled everywhere by drift disc. Even after two years of training she still wasn’t used to such exertion, especially in a heavy chain mail tunic. Even so, she all but ran down
the corridor, back to the first secret door she’d found. She opened it a crack and peeked out, but the chamber beyond was empty. Stepping out of the passage, she let the door slide shut behind her. She climbed swiftly down the column, and breathlessly hurried back in the direction of the Promenade, keen to report to Battle-mistress Iljrene what she’d just found.

An alarm sounded, just a few paces away. Thaleste started, nearly dropping her sword then realized she’d neglected to sing the hymn that would prevent the magical alarms from sounding. She did so, but the alarm continued to clang.

Something soft and squishy tapped her on the back then pulled away with a soft sucking sound, plucking at the chain mail it had just touched.

Thaleste shrieked and spun. Behind her was a creature from a nightmare, an enormous wormlike
thing
as thick around as a large tree trunk. Eight tentacles waved in front of its face, and its teeth clicked together hungrily. Eyestalks swiveled this way and that as its mouth opened. A foul, rotting-meat stench came from it, together with a dribble of maggots.

A carrion crawler.

Thaleste’s hand shook so violently her sword was like a quivering leaf. Backing slowly away, she began a prayer that would strengthen her, but before she could complete it, two tentacles lashed out. Thaleste dodged one, but the other struck her sword hand. The skin felt as if it was on fire. The sensation spread swiftly up her arm, leaving numbness in its wake. Within a heartbeat, it had reached her torso. A heartbeat more, and her face and legs were also affected. She stood, paralyzed, her prayer halted in mid-word. Her breath came in short, fluttering gasps—all her lungs could manage.

Knowing that she was about to be devoured, she tried to bring her hands up to her belt. At the very least, she
would spill the stone she’d found from her pouch where a patrol could find it. She strained until tears welled in her eyes, but her arms refused to move.

The carrion crawler advanced, its body undulating, its clawed feet making soft clicking noises on the stone floor. Thaleste watched in horror as the crawler reared above her then descended. Its mouth enveloped her head, and its teeth lanced into her shoulders. The pain was intense. She let out a suffocated gurgle that would have been a scream had her vocal cords not also been paralyzed. The crawler’s teeth sawed back and forth, ripping apart Thaleste’s chain mail tunic. There was more pain, and blood, flowing down her body in hot streams that soaked her shirt and trousers. Then a sharp pain, deeper than anything she had experienced before, and—

Thaleste blinked. The pain, the stench—all sensation was gone. She drifted on a gray, featureless plain, cradled in soothing song. Moonlight fell gently on her from above. She raised something—arms? No, that wasn’t quite it. She could no longer feel her body, but the moonlight understood. The song intensified, the moonlight lifted her toward its source: a swirling dance that filled the air above.

“Eilistraee,” she sighed.

The soul of the drow who had once been called Thaleste joined the dance and found peace.

D
eep in the Underdark below the Misty Forest, the judicator Dhairn stood in a vast cavern whose walls were honeycombed with tunnels that had been bored out centuries ago by a long since vanished purple worm. Above him, webs crisscrossed the ceiling. Cocooned corpses hung from them, dripping putrid liquid onto the floor, and a rancid smell thickened the air. Dozens of faces peered down at Dhairn from the tunnels, faces with ebon-black skin and glowing red eyes. Driders—drow from the waist up, but with the eight-legged lower thoraxes and bulbous abdomens of spiders.

Dhairn himself was a drow—a race the driders would ordinarily attack on sight, but his sudden entrance had given the creatures pause, as had
his appearance. His scalp was shaved, save for the circle of hair at the back of his head that was braided into a long strand, the end of which was crusted solid by repeated drippings in blood. His black skin was webbed with lines of glowing white, the hallmark of the deity he served. His eyes had no color, only black dots where the pupils were. Anyone looking closely might have seen the faint yellow lines that formed a web pattern across the white of each eye and noted that his pupils were not truly round but shaped like spiders.

The driders weren’t getting that close, however, not after having noted the massive two-handed sword the judicator carried. The hilt of the magical weapon had two guards, each shaped like a spider. One of these had its legs clenched tightly around Dhairn’s right fist. He wore no sheath, and he could let go of the weapon with his left hand but never with his right.

Dhairn swept back his cloak with his free hand, revealing red robes and an adamantine breastplate embossed with Selvetarm’s holy symbol: a crossed mace and sword, overlaid with a spider. The magical cloak had allowed him to effect an unexpected appearance in the driders’ cavern by stepping out of solid stone. As they hissed at him from above, trying to work up the courage to attack, he spoke.

“Spawn of Lolth!” he shouted. “Exiles from Eryndlyn, from Ched Nasad, from Menzoberranzan, by Selvetarm’s will, you are to be outcasts no longer! There is a place for you in the ranks of the Selvetargtlin, if you would take it!”

From above him came a rustling and the hiss of whispered speech. One of the driders sprang out of a tunnel and descended toward Dhairn, head-down, on a strand of web. The drider was male, his long, uncombed hair hanging from his scalp like scraps of cobweb. His face was pinched and thin, his eyes narrowed in what looked like a permanent wince. A curved fang protruded from each
of his cheeks, its hollow point oozing venom. He turned slowly on the strand of webbing, twisting his head so that he could keep Dhairn in sight. “You serve Lolth’s champion?”

Dhairn’s sword swept out, severing the strand. The drider hovered in mid-air a moment too long before falling to the ground, confirming Dhairn’s suspicion. The dangling drider had been an illusion. Dhairn followed through with his swing, spinning around to slice through seemingly empty air behind him. His blade bit into something solid. A drider’s head flew in one direction, while the suddenly visible body crumpled. Dark blood rushed from the severed neck like wine from a ruptured wineskin. The drider had a glove on one hand that glowed with an intense magical aura. The puddle of blood in which that hand had landed sizzled, disintegrating into nothing.

Dhairn looked up at the remaining driders as his sword drank in the blood that coated its blade. Eyes blinked. Several of the driders drew back into their tunnels. The one Dhairn had just slain had probably been their wizard. A pity, that. His talents would have been useful.

“We are all Lolth’s champions,” Dhairn told the driders, “drow and drider alike.”

“That’s not what her priestesses say.” The voice was female, probably their leader. Dhairn glanced from hole to hole, trying to spot her.

“We are the damned,” she continued. “We failed Lolth and were marked for our weakness. This is Lolth’s punishment.”

Dhairn spotted her. The female had reared up on her spider legs and held her arms wide. She might have been beautiful once. Her ears were delicately pointed, her eyes slanted to match. Her upper body was shapely above a slender waist. Even the venomous fangs that protruded from her cheeks did little to spoil her appearance, but life as an exile had left her no pride. Her hair was tangled, and her body fouled with the stinking drippings of the corpses
the driders loved to eat. Her dark skin was streaked with smudges of rock dust.

“Has it never occurred to you,” Dhairn asked, “to wonder why Lolth should have altered your bodies into a semblance of the holiest of creatures? Do you honestly conceive of your half-spider forms as a
punishment?
No, I say it again. You are her champions, as much as Selvetarm is.”

He stood, waiting, letting the driders consider what he’d just told them.

Their leader frowned down at him and said, “Lolth’s priestesses—”

“Lied to you,” Dhairn said in a cold voice, “as Lolth herself orders them to. It is all part of the Spider Queen’s plan. Your exile has made you stronger, more cunning. By preying upon the drow, you cull from our ranks the weak, the incapable. You make our race stronger.” He paused to let that sink in. “If you had truly fallen from the goddess’s favor, then why did she grant you such power? You have been stripped of your House insignia, but you can still levitate. You are no longer drow, but you can still cloak yourselves in darkness and reveal hidden enemies by limning them in magical light. You have powers that Lolth bestows only upon the most favored of her drow children, the ability to recognize your enemies by their auras and to magically spy on them from a safe distance while you plot your ambushes. Lolth has transformed you into the perfect weapon, a creature endowed with a drow’s cunning, and a spider’s venom and stealth. What you lack is the hand to wield you.”

“And you are to be that hand?” the leader asked, a hint of bitterness in her voice.

Dhairn lifted his chin. “Selvetarm is to be that hand,” he told her. “I am but his judicator.” He lifted his sword. “Come and be welcome in his faith. It is time to reclaim your place among the drow.”

It took a moment more, but the leader jumped from her
tunnel and descended on a strand of web. As her spider legs touched the floor of the cavern, other driders followed her lead, some descending on strands, others scuttling down the walls. Soon Dhairn was surrounded by several dozen of the creatures, the majority of them male. None approached within sword range, and all had wary, distrustful expressions, but their eyes also held a cautious hope. They had lost their possessions, their status within their Houses, their ability to carve out their own destinies after their transformation and exile, and something more—the greatest sting of all. They bore the painful stigma of thinking they had been judged by their goddess and found wanting, of thinking that this failure had been branded upon their bodies for all the Underdark to see.

But someone had come to tell them that it was all part of the Spider Queen’s plan, that Lolth still carried them close to her dark heart, that there was a place for them in the web of life. And it was not just anyone who told them that, but a powerful cleric of Selvetarm, Lolth’s champion, a demigod whose form was similar to their own.

Dhairn could see that the driders ached to believe him, but they needed something more before they would allow themselves to accept his words as truth. Dhairn would give it to them—a bloody victory.

“There are indeed drow who are an abomination in Lolth’s eyes,” he told them, “drow who have strayed far from the web of life that Lolth intended us to weave, drow who live on the World Above and practice a blasphemous worship. This is to be your task: to be the scourge that either drives these blasphemers back into Lolth’s embrace—or that flays their traitorous flesh from their bones. It will be your chance to prove yourselves, a test you will not fail.”

He held his sword before him. Its blade was clean, the wizard-drider’s blood completely absorbed by its steel. He glanced from one drider face to the next. “Who of you will
be the first to join the ranks of the Selvetargtlin?”

The driders hesitated, looking to their leader. She met Dhairn’s eye, taking his measure. Then she stepped forward, her spider legs clicking on the stone floor, and kneeled. “Chil’triss, of House Kilsek.”

Dhairn nodded. It was probably the first time in decades that she had used her House name.

“Chil’triss of House Kilsek,” he repeated, touching the tip of his blade to her cheek. Slowly, he drew the blade down her face, cutting a thin but bloody line diagonally from cheek to jawline. He repeated it, turning the line into an
X
. Two more lines, one horizontal, one vertical, completed the pattern: the radiating support lines of a web. “I welcome you to the ranks of the Selvetargtlin.”

When it was done, she smiled through the blood that dribbled down over lips and chin. Her fangs twitched with excitement, and a determined fire had rekindled in her eyes.

“Kneel,” she shouted at her people. “Join the swarm.”

Dhairn smiled.