was no longer calling to her.
'I'm coming for you,' she softly promised. 'Soon.'
Being little more than nests of legs, the chwidencha charged forward with alarming rapidity.
Pharaun willed himself into the air as they closed and his ring answered. In one hand, he still held the ball of guano; with the other, he pulled a bit of flakefungus from a cloak pocket and shouted the words to a spell. As he uttered the last word to the incantation, he crushed the flakefungus in his hand and cast the powder in the direction of one of the charging chwidenchas.
It uttered a squeal of agony as the magic engulfed it, flensed it of flesh, stripped it of its carapace, and left nothing more than a shapeless pile of gore.
The rest of the pack did not so much as slow.
Jeggred bounded forward in front of Danifae and met three onrushing chwidenchas with a charge of his own. He caught the first of them in mid-jump, plucking it from the air in his powerful fighting arms and tearing off its legs by the bunch while the creature squealed and slammed its remaining claws against the draegloth's flesh, leaving bloody welts. Ichor sprayed,
coating the draegloth, mixing with his own blood. In three heartbeats, the draegloth had disarticulated the creature, leaving only a round lump of hair and flesh.
Two other chwidenchas leaped atop Jeggred, one on his back and one on his side. Their weight knocked him to the ground and the three fell in a snarling tangle of legs and claws.
Jeggred still clutched a handful of the legs from the first chwidencha he had killed. Chwidencha claws rose and fell like miners' picks, churning earth and flesh. Fanged mouths tried to penetrate the iron of the draegloth's flesh. Jeggred roared and answered with his own claws. Pieces of chwidencha flew high into the air.
The rest of the pack continued forward and swarmed the priestesses. Danifae barely had time to pocket her holy symbol and free her morningstar before the chwidenchas were upon her. She careened backward and struck one with the spiked weapon, snapping some of its legs. She spun away from a claw swipe from another and slammed the head of the weapon into another chwidencha's front, but a third leaped high and landed atop her. She tried to utter a spell, but the creature wrapped its legs around her as tightly as a cloak and tried to drive her to the ground. She turned a circle, its weight causing her to stumble, all the while offering a muffled chant. Finally she went down, and five chwidencha swarmed over her. Pharaun could barely see the priestess under the squirming mass of legs and claws. Claws pounded into her mail, her flesh.
To his surprise and to her credit, Danifae did not stop fighting. She pulled a dagger from a belt sheath and fought from the ground, kicking, stabbing, screaming, driving the dagger repeatedly into the flesh of chwidenchas that coated her. Pharaun figured her for dead and put her out of his mind.
Below and to Pharaun's right, Quenthel's whip cracked. All five serpents extended to twice their ordinary length and clamped their fanged mouths onto the legs of a chwidencha. Almost instantly, the creature's legs went rigid, and it fell over dead from the whip's venom.
Unperturbed, its fellows trampled over it. Chwidenchas closed on Quenthel from all sides.
Quenthel uttered a hasty prayer to Lolth and instantly grew to half again her size. A violet glow suffused her flesh, the power of Lolth made manifest. Using her magical buckler as a weapon, and driven by her spell-enhanced strength, she smashed its steel face into the front of a chwidencha, snapping a mass of legs like twigs. Three claws from a chwidencha to her right slammed into her in rapid succession, driving her backward but seemingly doing no real harm.
Her whip struck again, driving back one of the creatures. She caught another chwidencha in her buckler hand, gripping two thick legs in her fist, and threw the creature across the battlefield.
Before Pharaun could shout a warning, another two chwidenchas leaped onto Quenthel from behind. She bore the weight better than Danifae, tried to throw them over her back, but six others rushed forward. Claws thumped against her armor and tore gashes in her exposed flesh. Her serpents lashed out but missed. She fell, buried under a pile of seething, churning legs and claws.
Pharaun heard Danifae shout a warning, he turned in mid-air-
And saw only a curtain of legs, claws, coarse hair, and an open, fang-filled mouth before the creature was upon him. A chwidencha had leaped high enough into the air to reach him. It hit him full force in the chest and wrapped its legs around him. The impact drove him backward and down, despite the power of his ring of flying. He hit the earth in a heap, entwined with the creature, his breath gone. The chwidencha wrapped him up with some of its innumerable legs,
while it bit with its dripping fangs and flailed with its free claws like a mad thing. Blows slashed against Pharaun's sides, his arms, his face, into the earth around him.
Only Pharaun's enchanted piwafwi prevented the claws from disemboweling him, but he still felt blood flowing down his torso, and the impacts to his head nearly knocked him senseless.
He tried to fend off the blows with his hands and feet and roll out from under the chwidencha,
but it was too heavy and too determined to hang on. Unable to fly, he mentally summoned his rapier from his ring, remembering too late that he had lost the ring to Belshazu. The chwidencha's fangs ground against his magically armored cloak again and again, trying but failing to penetrate the garment and open his gut.
Pharaun struggled to regather his senses and his breath.
The chwidencha raised one of its claws high and drove it toward Pharaun's face. He tried to squirm aside, failed, and the claw hit him with enough force to split rock. His protective enchantments prevented his face and skull from splitting open but the impact still exploded his nose and drove his head hard against the rocky ground. For a horrifying moment, consciousness started to slip from him. He grabbed at it and reeled it in with the entire force of his will.
Dazed and increasingly angry, he realized that he still clutched in his right hand the ball of bat guano.
'Here's a treat,' he mumbled through a blood-filled mouth.
He mouthed the words to a spell that would turn the chwidencha and the entire area into cinders. He swallowed down the blood leaking into his mouth from his ruined nose and spoke the words clearly. He would have to hope that the inherent drow resistance to magic would shield him and his companions; that, or he would have to hope they could take more punishment than the chwidencha.
Just as he was about to utter the final syllables of the spell, the creature's fangs penetrated his piwafwi and sank into the skin of his chest. A bolt of pain caused his body to spasm but Pharaun did not lose the cadence of his spell. He had trained in Sorcere, cast spells as an apprentice while his Masters had held candle flames to his bare flesh. A bite from one of Lolth's failures could not break his iron concentration.
He finished the spell as the chwidencha reared back to take another bite of his flesh. Gritting his teeth, Pharaun closed his fist around the tiny ball of guano and shoved it into the chwidencha's open maw.
Reflexively, it clamped down on his hand.
Pharaun closed his eyes just as his universe exploded in orange light and searing heat. He felt some of his hair melt, felt the flesh of his arm, chest, and face char. He could not contain a scream.
The force of the blast blew apart the chwidencha atop him, reducing it instantly to ash.
Hisses, growls, and screams sounded all around him, audible above the explosion. He smelled the stink of burning flesh. His own, no doubt.
It was over in one agonizing heartbeat.
He opened his eyes and found himself staring up into the dark sky above. For a moment, he had the absurd thought that his spell had charred the clouds, but then he realized that the storm was gathering above them.
Blinking, dazed, he shook the charred chwidencha pieces from his body-they were little more than chunks of seared flesh-and slowly sat up. He wiped the blackened blood from his face and nose and blinked until his blurry vision cleared. His hand was a blackened, seared piece of meat.
It did not yet pain him, but it soon would.
He looked around and saw that the fireball had wrought a perfect sphere of devastation. A
circular swath of blackened and partially melted rock denoted its boundaries. He had not burned the sky, but he had nicely burned the earth. He took a professional's pride in the damage it had done.
Within the circle, Jeggred sat on his four hands and knees, chest heaving, eyes blinking. A
seared chwidencha corpse lay in pieces under his claws, and chwidencha legs dangled from his mouth. Bleeding but only mildly burned, the draegloth eyed Pharaun coldly as he spat the legs to the ground and climbed to his feet.
