never missed with his enchanted crossbow. Riltana’s swordplay was dazzling. But there were too many. The spiders seemed endless, and it wasn’t the large ones that worried the queen most. It was the tiniest ones; they were hardest to notice.
Then the inevitable finally happened. A tiny scarlet recluse scuttled up Arathane’s armor and bit her neck. It felt like a splinter of lava under her skin. She slapped the spider away. The pain and a wave of dizziness made her stagger.
“Your Majesty?” said Chant, turning to her. Then an ettercap lying prone at the pawnbroker’s feet ended its ruse; it latched onto Chant’s leg and bit. Blood splattered.
Riltana rushed from behind and knifed the creature, even as a new wave of ettercaps closed.
Chant waved Riltana back with one hand as he shot a bolt that divided three times to lay low as many ettercaps. He took a step and winced. Blood trickled down his leg from the bite. He said, “Are you all right, Your Highness?”
Arathane lied, “I’m fine. How about you?” A thread of weakness wound down her spine and sent feelers into her arms and legs. But she made a show of discharging another blast, scattering a new mass of attackers.
However … if the venom spread any farther, her facade would crumble.
As a monarch, that just wouldn’t do. “We need to consider pulling out.” Even if that meant leaving Demascus? It pained her to contemplate it, but a leader couldn’t be swayed by sentiment.
Riltana narrowed her eyes. “What’s taking that leech-son deva so long?”
“Demascus!” someone called near the entrance. He couldn’t see that far with the scarf around his eyes, so he snatched it away. The drow dimness had lapsed, and normal vision was possible. He saw the floor between him and the exit was blocked by a mass of screaming ettercaps, groaning undead, and at least one drider. A glitter of storm-sharp light, followed by thunder, threw a handful of shadows across him before it guttered out. A fierce fight raged there.
“Demascus? Get your ass back here with that staff! We need to leave!” the voice came again. It was familiar … a woman he knew. He just wasn’t sure it concerned him. Especially not when he had three such premier targets to deal with. Not when the killing-glee sparked on his spine like a fuse, promising a wondrous detonation.
The drow wizard produced a scroll from his bag. But the warrior prevented Demascus from doing anything about it with his dancing sword. His facility with the weapon surprised Demascus. Few foes had ever fended him off for so long. Especially when hindered by having only one blade to the deva’s two. In Demascus’s defense, the Veil of Wrath and Knowledge was oddly unresponsive. Its ends were flapping all about without guidance. The scarf should have kept its ends tucked out of the way.
Finally Demascus broke around the warrior and charged the wizard. The same sensation as before, of something indefinably large moving just beyond sight, feathered across Demascus.
“Chenraya,” screamed the dark elf wizard, followed by something Demascus couldn’t understand. He assumed it was something along the lines of “You betraying bitch!”
Another fountain of awful energy burst from the floor. The blast swept away the remaining bits of darkness clotting the air, its virulence too extreme to allow any lesser blight in its presence.
Demascus leaped into a flailing shadow created by a lightning glare from the periphery of the chamber. He slipped into it not a heartbeat before the drow priestess’s calling engulfed the space where he’d been and where the drow wizard still screamed in fury and terror. He stepped across the all-too-brief shadow lane caused by a dying lightning bolt. He stepped back into reality at Chenraya’s elbow. What remained of the drow wizard was a greasy pool of flesh in which floated oddments of clothing. The single remaining drow glared at the priestess with undisguised hate.
The priestess was cackling.
Chenraya had just swatted down an able-bodied ally, even though it lessened her chances of beating Demascus, just because of the charge she got from killing. The realization partially woke Demascus from his daze. His assassin’s guise and power threatened to slip from him entirely. I’m not anything like her, he thought. I only kill those who deserve it. Those whose fate and the gods command! Except that you
He could imagine Riltana’s voice. “Now’s not the time to contemplate your navel, idiot!”
The final drow warrior saw Demascus appear behind Chenraya. But the dark elf didn’t betray the deva’s presence to the priestess. Demascus realized he’d just made an ally, if only briefly, in the drow’s hate for Chenraya.
Demascus sheathed his white-runed blade and snatched up the Veil of Wrath and Knowledge in his free hand. The fabric stirred at his touch. He turned to Chenraya. But he couldn’t detect the Veil’s secret shadow, the dim shroud only he could see. No time to wonder why.
He sheathed his other blade, then flipped the Veil around the drow priestess’s neck and pulled it tight. Sometimes the best tricks were the oldest.
Chenraya tried to gasp. But the scarf was already so tight she only squeaked. Then she thrashed like a bear caught in a trap. Her strength amazed him. Her feminine frame belied the vicious power of her limbs. He kicked her behind the knees and pulled her head back. With her feet no longer completely supporting her weight, her ability to resist was curbed. But she still flailed and pummeled like a demon. And he supposed she might partly be one, given whom she worshipped.
The drow warrior seemed to finally decide his distaste for Chenraya was less than his hatred for someone who would lay a hand on one of his own. He rushed the deva.
Demascus circled, trying to keep Chenraya between himself and the warrior. Her resistance allowed a few of the warrior’s quick sword thrusts to prick him, though none seriously. Besides, he only needed to keep pressure around her neck for just a few more heartbeats and Chenraya would be done. Just to be sure, he tied off the scarf as tightly as possible.
Her cloak picked that moment to reveal itself as an animate threat. The dark material spilled off her like liquid. Then it inflated, appearing for all the world like a very large spider with huge, razor-sharp mandibles. They snapped with convincingly loud clacks and tried to bite the deva around the neck. His only choice was to release his choke on the priestess or risk losing his head to a decapitating bite. He threw himself back.
Chenraya lurched forward, into the arms of the drow warrior. Her cloak-guardian retained its newfound spider shape and advanced. Demascus swept
He stepped up to meet the advancing cloak-spider. Chenraya, eyes still bugged out and skin noticeably pale from the scarf still fastened around her neck, squeaked out a single word. A word like the one used by the other dark elf to shroud the dais in darkness.
This word summoned arachnids. A blinding downpour of black, biting spiders, impossible to see through, or live through, if one wasn’t drowborn!
He slipped out from beneath the hem of lowering arachnids by a hair’s breadth. A few sticky legs latched onto him even as he spun away from the swarming mass by leaping from the dais. He awkwardly swatted at the crawling things before they could find a chink in his armor or crawl up his chest and onto his face. Even for someone like him, it was awkward to swat spiders while holding two swords and still land on his feet from a dozen-foot fall into a crowd of monsters, most of which were waiting for him.
Chenraya couldn’t breathe. What felt like iron cable constricted her throat. The deva had abandoned the dais, but not his strangling cord. Though spiders shrouded her like a feather bed, she took no comfort from it. She could see perfectly well through the otherwise solid mass of swarming arachnids. The last Bregan D’aerthe mercenary stood unmoving, studying her. She gesticulated, mouth agape, eyes bulging, at the constriction at her throat. For all her strength, she couldn’t loosen it. Alarm and fear coursed in her blood like acid. She might die here!
The male finally took action. He spun her around and fumbled at a fabric knot that bulged at the nape of her neck. Only moments had slipped by, but the pressure behind her eyes expanded like a balloon, and exploratory fingers of darkness intruded on her vision. For the first time in her long life, Chenraya couldn’t see, not through this darkness. She panicked. No strength remained, so she flailed, with no breath to call out to Lolth for aid; she couldn’t even gasp. Whether she lived or died was all down to a single drow mercenary whose name she’d refused to learn.
