rewards would be rich indeed. Qilue was a veritable conduit to Mystra herself. The very thought made him lightheaded.
'I can do it,' he said.
Qilue beamed. 'Good.'
Part of him reveled in that smile. Another part wondered if he'd just signed his own death order. He crushed the second part mercilessly. To advance in life, one had to take chances.
'The geas, then,' Qilue said.
Q'arlynd bowed his head.
The high priestess laid cool fingers on his forehead and invoked the names of both Eilistraee-and Mystra. 'I command you to perform this service for me,' she began. 'To locate Malvag, and…'
When she finished, Q'arlynd's forehead tingled. A shimmer of silver magic shivered the hairs on his arms erect then was gone.
It was done. The geas had been laid upon him.
Now all he had to do was achieve the near-impossible.
'One favor,' Jub whispered as he descended through the cavern on a thread of silk. 'One favor I promised Qilue, and this is what she asks: to sneak into the lair of a dracolich.'
The dracolich in question had already swooped past him once, causing Jub to spin madly on his thread. The undead wyrm was an enormous creature, black as old blood and with wings so broad they brushed the walls on either side of the passage. The monster left the stench of death in its wake and had a deep, unhealed wound in its left flank, yet it lived-after a fashion. Jub was awed by the amount of magic it must have taken for a dragon to transform itself into an undead creature.
Jub had magic, too-the tiny metal box, attached to a leather armband, that he wore above his left elbow. He'd gotten a real bargain on the phylactery from the thaumaturgical shop in Skullport because of its 'curse.' It didn't polymorph properly-it would only change its wearer into 'vermin,' but that was just fine with Jub. With it, he could change into pretty much any bug he could think of, big or small. He usually liked to turn into a fly-nobody ever suspected a fly of spying-but Qilue had warned him that that wouldn't be a healthy form to choose this time around. The males he was searching for worshiped Selvetarm, champion of the Queen of Spiders. They were bound to be hundreds of her pets around, wherever they were holed up, so Jub had polymorphed into a spider himself. It was, he reflected with sly grin that set his fangs quivering, the perfect disguise.
The spider body had come in pretty handy so far. It had gotten him past a bunch of traps. It was fist-sized- too light to trigger the spring-spikes or pits. It had also enabled him to scurry into a crack in the wall when a heavy block of stone smashed down. The body had its drawbacks, however. Shooting out strands of web left his ass feeling twitchy, and having three pairs of eyes took a lot of getting used to. All of the colors were flat, and he kept getting mixed up about what was close and what was far away-not to mention distracted by the rush of the walls going past while simultaneously seeing the cavern dwindling away behind him. He didn't know how spiders could stand looking in all directions at once.
Reaching the floor of the cavern, Jub snapped the thread of silk and looked around. Several passages led out of there. They all looked enormous to Jub, but if he'd been walking around in his regular, half-orc, half-drow body, the white bristles on the top of his head would have brushed the ceilings of most of them. That figured… Dolblunde had been built by rock gnomes.
He scuttled along the cavern, trying to decide which side passage to explore first. Walking had been tricky at first, but now that he had the hang of having eight legs he could move pretty quickly. He'd covered a fair chunk of the ancient city already. Something was bound to turn up soon, unless Qilue had been wrong about the Selvetargtlin being there, of course. She might have been lied to.
Jub paused at the entrance to one of the passages. A noise issued from it, a clicking sound. It came to him through his feet, which were sensitive to vibrations in the floor. Deciding to check it out, he scuttled into the passage.
His leg hairs quivered more rapidly as he drew closer to the source of the sound, which stopped, then started again, then stopped again. The passage was wide enough for a pair of rock gnomes to have walked through it side by side, its ceiling high and narrow as a knife slash and its floor surfaced with crushed stone. The tunnel wound through the rock like a stream, which it probably had been at one point. Jub knew he was on the right track when he saw a clump of web on the wall. A spider must have passed that way, maybe one of the Selvetargtlin's pets.
About fifty paces along, Jub spotted a spider clinging to the wall. Hairy and black, it was about the same size as his polymorphed form. It turned as Jub scuttled by, watching him with its multiple eyes. Jub had chosen a spider form with a narrow body and long, graceful legs that would allow him to cover more ground. He hoped that bigger, heavier spider wouldn't see him as prey. He crept past it, ready at a moment's notice to polymorph back into his half-drow form and squish the thing, but the hairy spider ignored him.
The passage opened, up ahead, onto a large cavern filled with humid air. The clicking noise came again, and something moved across the mouth of the tunnel. It looked, strangely enough, like animated black swords walking about on their points. As Jub drew closer, he could see that these 'swords' were the legs of an enormous spider, its body big enough to have filled a small room. Its feet, sharp as whetted knives, clicked against the stone floor as it walked. It hung around just outside the passage as if guarding it, its abdomen expanding and contracting as it breathed.
Jub scurried out of the passage, wary of those sharp, stabbing feet. The monster, like its smaller, hairier cousin in the passage behind Jub, ignored him. Good thing, too. All it would have to do was sit on Jub and he'd be dead.
Jub scuttled up a wall, stopping when he was high enough to get a good view.
The cavern was enormous. At the far end was a deep pool of water. Fringing the shore of the pool were dozens of small ruined buildings.
Jub spotted at least a dozen people. Most were drow, easily recognizable, even to his limited eyesight, by their black skin and white hair. They wore robes, but Jub was too far away to tell if they were Selvetargtlin or not. He also spotted several aranea in spider form. He recognized them by their distinctive humpback and the humanoid arms jutting out from just below their chins. Their faces were entirely insectlike, with multiple eyes and gnashing fangs, but they moved with an intelligence and purpose that true spiders lacked.
Jub scurried across the ceiling, toward the city. As he drew closer to the ruins, he could make out details of individual buildings. It looked as though it had once been a marketplace. Each building was fronted with a slab of stone that had probably served as a shop counter. The smashed remains of doors hung from rusted hinges, and the floor was littered with broken pottery, shattered crates, and bones. Most of the skulls that grinned up at Jub were small-rock gnomes-but here and there he spotted the heavy-browed skulls of his full-orc kin. They'd sacked Dolblunde more than six centuries ago, and the city had lain empty since then.
It wasn't empty any more. In addition to the handful of drow and aranea Jub had already spotted, the ruined marketplace was filled with spiders. Jub could see them scurrying around everywhere. Most were about his size, but some of the larger ones were as big as dogs. They'd spun webs in the vacant doorways and shop windows and darted from one chunk of fallen masonry to the next. They paused and stared up at Jub with gleaming, multifaceted eyes as he made his way toward the center of the ruined marketplace.
There, next to the remains of a well, was what at first glance looked like a spider even larger than the sword-legged monster that guarded the entrance. It was motionless, however, and as Jub drew closer he realized it was a statue. The body of a drow lay in front of it, but there was no one else close by.
Jub descended on a strand of web for a better look. Close up, he could see the statue was only partially finished. The most detailed portion was the drow head that perched on top of the spider body.
Qilue had been right. The drow she'd asked Jub to find must be there after all. That statue was of Selvetarm, Lolth's drow-headed spider champion.
The corpse that lay in front of the statue was a drow female. She was sprawled face-down on a block of stone that had been hauled out of a nearby building, by the look of the scuffs on the floor. She was dressed in a long black piwafwi embroidered, in red, in a spiderweb pattern. The back of it was stained with dried blood, and more blood crusted the stone she lay on. The smell filled Jub's spider senses, making him twitchy.
