the harmless sheath of flame that most all drow could summon.
'The Purging,' Quenthel said, seemingly more interested in the spirits than the yugoloth army.
'Where weakness is seared away,' Danifae added.
Looking down at the yugoloth army, Pharaun said, 'Speaking of searing. .'
Even as they watched, several of the mezzoloths held up their palms and balls of fire appeared there. They hurled them up toward the ledge, where they hit the wall of force and exploded.
Instinctively, the drow sheltered behind the ledge, but no fire pierced Pharaun's spell. They peeked back over.
The army remained in place.
'Why aren't they coming?' Jeggred asked.
'Why would they?' Pharaun answered. 'They would bottleneck themselves on the path.'
Pharaun knew that the four drow could have held for days the narrow path that led to the ledge. The yugoloths hoped to either force them down by bombarding them with spells or simply wait them out. It was no mystery that the four of them had not gone all the way to the very gates of Lolth's city only to turn back.
'We cannot go back,' Danifae said, giving voice to Pharaun's next thought. 'And we must go forward.'
'Of course we will,' Quenthel said with undisguised contempt. 'They are the final test.'
'Are they?' Danifae asked.
Pharaun thought an army of yugoloths to be quite a test but kept his observation to himself.
He let his gaze wander and for the first time looked beyond the army, beyond the ruined plains,
to Lolth's city.
'Look,' he said and could not keep the awe from his voice.
Half a league away, the plains ended-just ended, as though cut off with a razor-at a gulf of nothingness that went on forever in all directions.
A web of monstrous proportions somehow spanned the void, its far ends lost in infinity. All of
Menzoberranzan could have sat insignificantly upon its strands.
Lolth's city, a heaped clump of metal and webs and souls and spiders as large as a hundred
Menzoberranzans, sat near the edge of the web. Mammoth legs-a grotesque amalgam of the organic and the metallic-sprouted from the city's base and held it in the web strands.
A roughly pyramidal temple capped the metropolis. Intuitively, Pharaun knew the pyramid to be the tabernacle of Lolth. Its great doors appeared closed.
'The children of Lolth. . ' Danifae said, and it took Pharaun a moment to understand her meaning.
At the border where the Plains of Soulfire ended and the web began, an entire host had gathered: abyssal widows, driders, yochlols, billions and billions of spiders, more even than
Pharaun had seen during the Teeming.
'Her web covers all,' Quenthel muttered and touched her holy symbol.
'And the world is her prey,' Danifae finished. 'Her host has come to bear witness.'
'We must get through the yugoloths,' Quenthel said.
'They should all die,' Danifae added. 'Their presence here is heresy.'
Jeggred eyed the army below and growled in the way that Pharaun knew to be a prerequisite to his entering a battle frenzy. But for the wall of force, the draegloth looked as though he would leap over the ledge and charge down the path at any moment.
Quenthel's serpents haloed her head, and she nodded at something they communicated to her.
'We must pass,' Quenthel said again.
Danifae smiled broadly and said to Quenthel, 'Indeed we must. Summon what aid you can,
priestess.'
Each eyed the other for a moment, then both stepped back from the ledge, out of the sight of the yugoloths, and began to cast.
Back in his own body outside of Agrach Dyrr's temple, Gromph dispelled the dweomer that had reduced him to a fraction of his size. Still invisible, he watched the mighty stalagmite fortress begin to shake itself apart. Buildings cracked from their foundations to their roofs. The great stalagmite and adamantine walls vibrated. Dyrr soldiers scurried frantically along the walls for the stairways, sprinted across the grounds or leaped from the walls and levitated to earth.
Gromph would have laughed but for his own impending death. He might have tried to fly into the air and away from the fortress, if he had not left his spell components in his robe on Larikal and if he had thought it would allow him to escape. He did not think it would.
The explosion would be too big. There was no outrunning it.
With his dweomer-sensitive eyesight, he watched the pulse of power run along the master ward and saw it extinguish the lesser wards and draw their power into itself. It was a beast,
devouring all of the magical power in House Agrach Dyrr's intricate defensive structure. In moments, it would vomit it all out in an explosion that would shake Menzoberranzan's cavern.
The gathering energies caused Gromph's ears to pop.
The wave of power reached the outer wards on the gate and walls, gathered them in, and rebounded back, moving fast.
Roofs collapsed on the buildings around the archmage. Drow screamed. Priestesses shouted unheeded orders.
Another great tremor shook the temple behind him, and the central dome collapsed in a shower of crashing stone and glass. Gromph presumed that Yasraena, Larikal, and the vrocks died under its weight.
Fitting, he thought, that in the end Lolth had crushed the traitors.
Gromph stepped off the portico and away from the temple. He wondered distantly if the
Xorlarrin forces would be caught in the blast. Certainly enough power seemed to be gathering.
The energy from all of the wards would power the explosion. It would consolidate at the trigger,
in the center of the collapsed temple, and explode outward from there. Gromph thought it possible that all of House Agrach Dyrr would be destroyed.
He looked toward the gates and saw the wave surging back-a great, glowing wall of arcane power. The ground rippled before it.
An idea fluttered around the back of Gromph's mind. The wave was gathering and extinguishing all of the wards as it moved.
All of them.
Even the dimensional lock?
His heartbeat accelerated.
Could the lichdrow have made such a mistake?
Gromph thought it might be possible. He studied the surviving wards as the wave of power drew nearer. The dimensional lock was still in place and he could not tell if the master ward would draw on even it. If so …
If so, Gromph might be able to time a final spell just right. Fortunately, the spell he would use required no material component.
He waited. . waited.
The wave of power surged along the master ward and passed him, knocking him from his feet.
There! The wave subsumed the dimensional lock and hit the ruined temple. The whole structure glowed, pulsed a blinding white.
Gromph shouted the words to his spell as rapidly as he could without risking a mispronunciation.
Blinding beams of energy shot from the temple in all directions. An explosion was imminent.
He hurried through the spell. A word. Another. Another.
The temple burned as bright as the sun of the World Above as it exploded in a unequalled blast of magical energy. Gromph did not complete his spell.
Pain seared his body, a brief moment of agony unlike anything he had ever felt, and Gromph
Baenre knew pain.
Then it was over.
