Queen's realm, aunt?'
Danifae snickered, or perhaps it was a cough.
Over her shoulder, Quenthel answered, 'Sometimes, nephew. They are demons-bound by me-
and have some knowledge of the Lower Planes that I require them to impart. Perhaps Mistress
Danifae can fill in the rest of our understanding?'
She stopped, turned, and looked at Danifae.
The battle-captive did not lower her hood. 'When I have something to add,' she said, 'I will offer it.'
Quenthel smiled at her nephew and started again to walk.
'Perhaps we should use spells to transport us, Mistress?' Pharaun suggested to Quenthel,
though he did not know exactly where they were going.
Quenthel shook her head and replied, 'No, mage. This is the Spider Queen's realm, and she wants us to experience it. We will walk until I say otherwise.'
Pharaun frowned but made no other answer. He could have flown, of course, using the ring he had taken from Belshazu, but decided not to provoke Quenthel. For him, the new Demonweb Pits was an obstacle to be overcome. For Quenthel, it was a religious ordeal to be experienced. Circumventing it would have been heresy.
Throughout their nighttime trek, the eight stars of Lolth peered down at them through a hole in the clouds that moved with the satellites across the night sky. Pharaun felt the Spider Queen's gaze pressing into his back like the tips of eight spears. Lolth's voice, in the form of the keening of the wind through the songspider webs, hummed in his ears. Pharaun found it maddening but kept his thoughts to himself.
High above them, the river of souls streamed silently onward. Sparking power vortices continued to dot the sky and vomit forth the spirits of the dead.
Pharaun marveled at the number of drow souls. He knew that all of them must have died after
Lolth had fallen silent. Where had they all come from? How many worlds did Lolth's children populate? He hoped many. Otherwise, he feared he would return to find Menzoberranzan as empty as the space between Jeggred's ears. The fact that Gromph had stopped responding to his sendings did not allay his concerns. Possibly the Archmage was too preoccupied with the siege of Menzoberranzan to reply; possibly, Gromph was dead.
He shook his head, pushed away the doubt, and focused on the now.
Pharaun's magical boots allowed him to stride and jump with more ease than the rest, but even he found the footing treacherous. Jagged rocks edged as sharp as daggers, boulders as large as buildings, sheer drop-offs, hidden pits, and shifting fields of loose scree challenged their every step. Most of the pits turned out to be web- lined tunnels that snaked down into the darkness under the landscape. Pharaun assumed that the whole plane must have been honeycombed with them. The stink of rot and a soft, barely audible insectoid clicking floated up from the black depths of the holes. He did not like to think of what might be lurking under their feet.
After a few hours travel, they stopped for a moment to eat their rations of fungus bread,
cheese, and cured rothe-meat near the edge of a pit as large across as an ogre's arm span. A
disturbing clicking sound emerged from somewhere deep in the darkness of the hole. A musty stink wafted out of it.
'What is that sound?' Jeggred asked above the wind, around a slobbering mouthful of meat.
'What is that smell, you mean,' Pharaun corrected. 'It's almost as bad as your breath, Jeggred.
And I mean that in a brotherly way.'
Jeggred answered him with a glare as he tore into another shank of rothe meat.
From under the hood of her cloak, Danifae whispered, 'The sound is the voice of Lolth's children.'
'Breeding pits, I would guess,' Quenthel said by way of clarification and bit into a piece of dried meat.
She held forth her whip, and the serpents snaked their heads downward into the pit and hissed.
The clicking stopped. At the same time, the wind died, and the keening of the songspider webs went silent. The night grew still.
Pharaun's skin went gooseflesh, and the four of them sat motionless, staring into the pit and waiting, expecting a horror to crawl forth. It didn't, and after a time the wind started anew and with it, the keening.
Pharaun hurriedly finished his repast, rose, and said, 'Shall we continue?'
Quenthel nodded, Jeggred stuffed another mouthful of cured rothe into his jaws, and they left the pit behind them and moved onward. As they walked Danifae smiled from under her hood at
Pharaun with undisguised contempt. She obviously found his discomfort with the plane amusing.
Pharaun ignored her and thought he had never imagined he could so miss Valas Hune. No doubt the mercenary guide could have led them along the path of least difficulty. Or perhaps it was Ryld he missed after all, who would have at least provided a nice partner for conversation.
Quenthel and Danifae, on the other hand, simply trekked along under the souls in silence,
oblivious to the difficulties of the terrain. And Jeggred was worth speaking to only to taunt.
Webs were everywhere, growing increasingly more common. They coated everything, from the ordinary- sized traps of a black widow to the monstrous, thick-stranded curtains of silver as large as the skin-sails on the Ship of Chaos. Pharaun's shoes were caked with webs. The air itself,
thick and irritating to his throat, seemed infested with invisible strands.
After several more exhausting hours of travel, webs coated them all in a sticky sheathe.
Pharaun had to continually remove the delicate strands from his face so that he could breathe. He felt as though the whole plane was really a giant spider, cocooning them all so slowly that they would not realize their peril until they were wrapped up, immobile, and awaiting the bite of fangs.
Pharaun shook his head and put the image out of his mind.
Despite the many large webs hanging between the boulders and tors, up to then Pharaun had seen only ordinary-sized arachnids, ranging in size from a fingernail to the size of a head. The narrow-bodied, long-legged songspiders were the largest spider he had seen, though he knew there had to be larger ones somewhere. Spiders lurked over, under, and between every rock and hole on the surface. The ground was acrawl with them. Pharaun assumed that the originators of the largest webs must have laired in the tunnels underground, where he hoped they would stay, at least for the time being. The small spiders were enough of an irritant.
Though he knew that not even the smallest of the creatures could sneak through the magical protections of his spells, Sorcere ring, and enchanted piwafwi, Pharaun could not shake a constant crawling sensation on his skin.
Danifae and Quenthel, on the contrary, appeared to enjoy allowing the spiders to crawl freely over their skin and hair. Jeggred, of course, seemed as oblivious to the spiders as he was to most everything, though even the half-demon took care not to willfully squash any of the creatures while he walked.
As they picked their way through yet another field of petrified spider legs, Pharaun caught a flash of motion from near the top of one of the tallest of the spires. He stopped and watched, but the motion did not repeat itself.
Curious, and otherwise bored, Pharaun activated the power in his ring and took flight. He rose rapidly into the air up the face of the tor. He spared a look down as he rose and saw his traveling companions looking up after him. He knew then how they all must look to Lolth's eyes-small and meaningless.
When he reached the top of the stone spire, he stopped and hovered in mid-air, the words to a spell ready in his mind.
The wind gusted, rustling his hair and cloak. Farther above him floated the glowing,
translucent line of souls, the lowest of which were almost within arm's reach. The spirits did not respond to his presence so he ignored them. Power vortices swirled in the heavens, raining green and blue sparks. Acrid clouds of smoke peppered the air.
From below, Quenthel shouted something, but he could not make it out in the wind. Still, he could imagine what she was probably saying.
He ignored her and focused on the object of his curiosity.
Irregular outcroppings of rock covered the otherwise flat expanse of the tor's top, as if the spider's leg had been hacked off before it had been petrified. Thick webs hung between every outcropping, blanketing the surface in silver.
Hanging there in Lolth's air with Lolth's dead, Pharaun felt inexplicably comfortable, as though soaking in a
