great artery that fed the body of the plane, roiled in its wide channel.
Given the upheaval, Inthracis had several times increased the magical protections that shielded Corpsehaven from such threats, but still the danger gave him pause. Corpsehaven sat on a level ledge sculpted from the otherwise precipitously steep side of the Blood Rift's largest volcano, Calaas. It would not do for an unexpected landslide or volcanic spasm to send
Inthracis's life's work skidding down the mountainside.
The wind outside rose again, a low whine that grew to an unbearable keen before beginning to die. Behind the wind's wail of pain, Inthracis could just make out the conspiratorial whisper of a word. He sensed it as much as heard it, and it was the same word he had been hearing intermittently for days:
Yor'thae.
Each time the gust hissed its secret, the corpses in his walls moaned through rotted lips and decayed arms loose from the wall squirmed to reach bony hands for rotted ears. With each utterance of the unholy word, the entirety of Corpsehaven wriggled like a hive of abyssal ants.
Inthracis knew the word's meaning, of course. He was an ultroloth, one of the most powerful in the Blood Rift, and he was versed in over one hundred twenty languages, including High Drow of Faerun. The Yor'thae was Lolth's Chosen, and the Spider Queen was summoning her Chosen to her side. It infuriated Inthracis that he had not been able to learn why.
He recognized that Lolth, like the Lower Planes, was undergoing a transmogrification.
Perhaps she would be transformed, perhaps the process would annihilate her. The calling of the
Yor'thae presaged events of significance, and the word was in the ear, on the tongues, and in the minds of all the powerful in the Lower Planes: demon princes of the Abyss, archdevils of the
Nine Hells, ultroloths of the Blood Rift. All were positioning themselves to take advantage of whatever outcome resulted.
Despite himself, Inthracis admired the Spider Bitch's temerity. Though he did not fully understand the stakes, he did understand that Lolth had gambled much on the success of her
Chosen.
Such a gamble should not have surprised him overmuch. At her core Lolth was the same as any demon-a creature of chaos. Senseless risk and senseless slaughter were her nature.
Which is why demons are idiots, Inthracis decided. Even demon goddesses. The wise took only well- calculated risks for well-calculated rewards. Such was Inthracis's creed and it had served him well.
He tapped his ring-bedecked fingers on the polished basalt table, and sparks of magical energy leaped from the bands. The legs of the table-human legs grafted to the basalt top-shifted slightly to better accommodate him. The bones of his chair adjusted to more comfortably sit him.
He looked upon the collective knowledge gathered in his library, seeking inspiration.
Desiccated hands and arms jutted from the walls of flesh, forming shelves upon which sat in orderly rows an enormous quantity of magical scrolls, tomes, and grimoires, a lifetime's worth of arcane knowledge and spells. Inthracis's multifaceted eyes scanned them in several spectrums.
Multifarious colors of varying intensities emanated from the tomes, denoting their relative magical power and the type of magic they embodied. Like the dead in his walls, the books offered him no ready answer.
Another tremor rattled the plane, another wail trumpeted the promise or threat of Lolth's
Yor'thae, another agitated rustle ran through the dead of Corpsehaven.
Distracted, Inthracis pushed back his chair, rose from the table, and walked to the library's largest window, an octagonal slab of glassteel wider than Inthracis was tall and magically melded with the bones and flesh around it. A lattice of thread-thin blue and black veins grew within the glass, a byproduct of the melding.
The veins looked like a spider's web, Inthracis thought, and he almost smiled.
The grand window offered a wondrous view of the heat-scorched red sky, a panorama of
Calaas's side and the rugged lowlands of the Blood Rift far below. Inthracis stepped close to the window and looked out and down.
Though he had flattened a plateau half a league wide into Calaas's side, he had raised
Corpsehaven right at the edge of the plateau. He had chosen such a precipitous location so that he could always look out and be reminded of how far he had to fall, should he grow stupid, lazy,
or weak.
Outside, the unceasing winds whipped a rain of black ash into blinding swirls. Arteries of lava, fed from the eternal flow of the plane's volcanoes, lined the lowlands far below. Fumaroles dotted the black landscape like plague boils, venting smoke and yellow gas into the red sky. The winding red vein of the Blood River surged through the gorges and canyons.
Here and there, swarms of larvae-the form mortal souls took in the Blood Rift-squirmed along the broken landscape or wriggled up Calaas's sides. The larvae looked like pale, bloated worms as long as Inthracis's arm. Heads jutted from the slime-covered, wormlike bodies, the only remnant of the dead soul's mortal form. The faces wore expressions of agony that Inthracis found pleasing.
Despite the ash storm and roiling landscape, squads of towering, insectoid mezzoloths and several powerfully muscled, scaled, and winged nycaloths-all of them in service to one or another of the ultroloths-prowled the rockscape with long, magical pikes. With the pikes they impaled one larva after another, collecting souls the way a spear fisherman hunted fish on the
Prime. The stuck larvae squirmed feebly on the shafts, overwrought with pain and despair.
To judge from the heads on some of the nearby larvae, most of the souls appeared to be those of humans, but races of all kinds found their way to the Blood Rift, all of them damned to serve in the furnaces of the plane. Some of the souls would be transformed into lesser yugoloths to fill out Inthracis's or another ultroloth's forces. Others would be used as trade goods, food, or magical fuel for experiments.
Inthracis looked away from the soul harvest and gazed down and to his left. There, barely visible through the haze of ash and heat, built into a plateau in Calaas's side not unlike that upon which Corpsehaven sat, Inthracis could just espy the pennons of skin that flew at the top of the Obsidian Tower, the keep of Bubonis. The ultroloth immediately below Inthracis in the Blood
Rift's hierarchy, Bubonis coveted Inthracis's position as much as Inthracis coveted Kexxon's.
Bubonis too would be scheming; he too would be planning how to use the chaos to further his ascent up Calaas's side.
All of the Blood Rift's elite ultroloths laired on Calaas. The relative height of an ultroloth's fortress along Calaas's side indicated the owner's status within the Blood Rift's hierarchy.
Kexxon the Oinoloth's fortress, the Steel Keep, sat highest of all, perched among the red and black clouds at the very edge of Calaas's caldera. Corpsehaven sat only twenty or so leagues below the Steel Keep and only two or three leagues above the Obsidian Tower of Bubonis.
Inthracis knew that the day would come when he would face a challenge from Bubonis, when he would himself challenge Kexxon. For the hundredth time in the past twelve hours, he wondered if the time had come. The thought of throwing Kexxon's corpse down the Infinite Deep amused him. The Infinite Deep descended to the center of creation, and its rocky sides were so sheer, so unbroken by any shelf or ledge of significance, that when things fell there, they fell forever.
Without warning, darkness descended on the library, darkness so intense that even Inthracis's eyes could not penetrate it, though he could see in virtually all spectra. Sound quieted; the wind seemed to offer its wail as though from a great distance. Inthracis could hear the walls squirming in the darkness. His hearts beat faster.
He was under attack, he realized. But who would dare? Bubonis?
The words to a series of defensive spells rose to the front of Inthracis's mind and he whispered the syllables in rapid succession, all while weaving his fingers through the air in a series of intricate gestures. In the span of three breaths, he was warded with spells that would protect him against mental, magical, and physical attacks.
He slid from his cloak a metal wand that fired a stream of acid upon command. Then he levitated toward the high ceiling and listened.
The walls of Corpsehaven rustled with a wet susurration. Decayed hands reached down from the ceiling to paw his robes, as though seeking reassurance. Their touch gave him a momentary start. He heard nothing save his own soft breathing.
