ceiling jerked and writhed, then disgorged bloated mine workers like hatching insects. The miners dropped to the stone floor. Only about half staggered back to their feet. Then the undead corpses, the spiders, and the newly revealed ettercaps surged across the vault toward the queen’s party.
“Too many!” Riltana yelled. She leaped into the air, trusting that it would catch her. It did, and she soared higher on wings of wind. “How’d they all get out here to the island?”
“The Demonweb?” asked Chant. He brought up his crossbow and began firing.
“Jaul, stay behind me!” Riltana’s retort was lost in the attacking throng’s scream. Like an advancing army, the creatures squealed battle cries with hard mandibles and dead lips.
From her floating vantage, the thief saw the first wave of spiders pour onto the platform where Demascus and the queen stood. The deva’s twin swords moved in a complicated hourglass pattern, creating an alternating red and white glow that burned the smallest spiders to cinders and dazed the ettercaps and corpses, making them stumble and sway when they came into its light.
The queen whirled her spear over her head, then plunged it into an ettercap that had slipped around the sword of her bodyguard. The creature lit up from the inside, lightning-bright, then disappeared with a ripping pop.
Something sticky brushed Riltana’s face, and she wiped it quickly away. Gore? No-an ettercap was trying to lasso her with a web line! A veritable blizzard of webs sleeted the air toward her. She swallowed a curse and dropped beneath the canopy of lofting nets, coming too close to the irregular ground for her comfort. Chant shouted something, but Riltana couldn’t make it out over the din. She skimmed only a few feet above the swarming attackers.
A genasi corpse with clear fluid sopping his shirt saw her. It tried to bash her head in with a broken pickaxe. Riltana bobbed under the blow, caught his arm, and broke it with a rising knee. The corpse staggered back too far and dropped off the platform into one of the surrounding pits.
Demascus, the queen, and her swearing bodyguard advanced along a plank to another stony rise, closer to Chenraya. Riltana snarled and flung herself once more into an updraft she coaxed into being with-
Something grabbed one of her rising boots.
“Get off me, you leech-son!” she snarled, and kicked at the ettercap trying to pull her back down. For its trouble, the thing got a steel-toed kick to the crown of its head. It made a sighing noise as it dropped back into the press of spiders. The windsoul used the momentum of her blow to whirl back above the fray. A cresting wave of spiders rolled toward Demascus and Arathane.
The lone drider that had been on the far side of the vault appeared between the deva and the queen in a shadowy blast tinged with purple light. The queen’s elite bodyguard yelled, pressing the drider with a flurry of attacks. The drider drew back before the peacemaker’s glinting sword … until one of the drider’s coal-dark legs slashed down and cut him from neck to navel with a clawed tip.
Arathane fended off another clawed leg with her spear.
Riltana realized Demascus was plastered in webbing.
“Half-wit deva!” she cursed.
The thief arrowed downward at an angle, holding her sword like a spike. She plunged it into the bulbous thorax of the drider even as it reared up over Demascus.
It screeched. Its legs convulsed. One knocked the queen over the crumbling edge, more by accident than design. Another struck Riltana, smashing her out of the air. She rolled a few times along the stone in the opposite direction, gathering bruises, and dropped her sword in glovespace just in time to free her hands. She clung to the powdery lip of the mesa. The pit beneath her crawled with spiders on sticky webs-she did
Riltana contracted her arms and kicked high. She got a boot heel over the edge, and pulled herself up. The drider had jumped to a neighboring platform. In its free human hand, it gathered a ball of purplish black light.
“Demascus!” she yelled. Where’d he go? The webs that caught him fluttered, but he was no longer visible. Had he been knocked into one of the pits?
Arathane hurled her spear at the drider. It became a jagged streak of light in midflight and played across the drider’s form like lightning prodding a prairie. When the crackling radiance died away, the drider swayed, leaking ichor from several char spots on its skin and exoskeleton. The spear appeared back in Arathane’s hand with the sound of distant thunder.
The drider was hurt but not finished. It raised high the vile mass of light still squirming in its hand and screamed, “Lolth, I summon thee.”
“Oh, fist!” said Riltana. Was it really calling a demon goddess? “Lolth, turn your visage upon this-”
A shadow swept across the drider, moving so swiftly that Riltana could barely track it. Where it passed, a line of fresh ichor gushed. When it stopped next to the massive bulk of the drider, she saw it was Demascus, cloaked in gloom. His weapons blazed out of the dimness, casting just enough light across his face for Riltana to recognize the cruel, gleeful lines of the Sword of the Gods. A line of greenish fluid trailed from a perfect cut across the drider’s neck. Its incantation was ruined. Good! But … goose bumps speckled her arms.
Demascus gestured as if casting an invisible shroud across the drider’s bulk, even as the spider-thing whirled to get a glimpse of its attacker. Before it had completely turned, Demascus charged, and with a dual, scissors-like swing, decapitated the dark elf torso from the spider body. The drider fell in two parts, dead.
“Good job, Demascus!” Riltana yelled. She came down next to him. Her boot heels rang on the stone.
The deva glanced at her. His scarf had come loose in the fight and hovered around him like a cobra’s hood, lending him a more dramatic air of menace than usual. His blank eyes were holes in shadow. She stepped back without realizing it.
Demascus fixed his eyes across the chamber. The original ettercaps who’d pulled the sledge into the chamber had taken up picks and hammers and were excavating the hand. Chenraya and Lord Pashra seemed content to monitor the dig.
It struck Riltana as slightly odd that they hadn’t reacted with alarm when the drider had fallen. In fact, it almost seemed to her that a big blue smirk hovered at the edges of Pashra’s lips. The drow was too far away to make out her expression. But her posture suggested she was waiting for something.
Demascus laughed and stepped into shadow. He stepped out twenty paces farther into the room, bypassing a good portion of Chenraya’s massed might.
“Demascus, wait!” she yelled.
The deva found another door through obscurity. He reappeared dozens of yards farther into the vault. He’d spanned about three-fourths of the distance to the mine face, where ettercaps dug at the entombed hand like ferrets drunk on glitter weed.
Chenraya smiled. It must’ve been a wide smile for Riltana to notice it from so far.
Oh shit! she thought. “Demascus, get-”
The ceiling fell. Tons of stone simply dropped. It smothered the center of the vault. Riltana’s last glimpse of Demascus was his raised arms, as if he had a hope in heaven of protecting himself from the rock fall. Then the stone ground him down, and an explosive plume of rock dust covered everything like a shroud.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The peak shivered beneath a sky of endless silver.
The mountain was a divine domain, an island of tranquility adrift in the Astral Sea. A god’s benevolence suffused each new day with peace. Or once had. Trouble had come to this particular paradise. A devilish entity determined to claim godhood for itself assaulted it.
The summit shuddered as if waking from sleep. It groaned as if finally letting go of a burden carried for too many years. Then the mountain roared in full-throated agony. As a wave breaks, the pinnacle broke, and an avalanche of snow and stone splashed downward, enrobing the mountain in a lengthening garment of roiling
