Which meant …
This is it, she thought. She’d have collapsed, but the swarming spiders held her upright with hundreds of tiny legs. Miraculously, the strangling cord was pulled away! She sucked in huge breaths. The surrounding swarm gave her space to breath.
“You saved me,” she rasped to the figure before her.
The last Bregan D’aerthe nodded. He held the offending white length of fabric in one hand. He took her left hand with the other. His grasp was warm, warmer than she would have guessed. She had never allowed herself such intimacy with the inferior sex before.
She cleared her throat. “I owe you a great debt. Please tell Lolth that, through you, her plans have moved a step closer to completion.”
“What?”
She plunged her favorite dagger into the mercenary’s heart with her right hand. Then she chanted the keystone word that would finally create the opening to her home, to Menzoberranzan.
The drow collapsed, his eyes round with accusation. It was the last expression he ever made. The strangling cord in his hands trembled, then slithered down the dais like a white snake. She let it go; it no longer mattered. The entire Demonweb was shuddering. Her ritual had come to fruition. The temporary portal in the ceiling shuddered open.
Oh, such glory would be hers! She’d acquired a portion of a dead Primordial so powerful, yet so tractable, that it would prove the perfect component. Thanks to her, Lolth’s coming apotheosis would succeed. And when Lolth became the new Goddess of Magic and the Weave, wouldn’t she raise Chenraya Xolarrin up as her first exarch?
Yes, Chenraya decided, as the influence of the temporary gate pulled her into its embrace. And as an exarch, a divine being in her own right, she’d be in a position to deal with her lessers as they deserved. A time of reckoning for the less-fair sex was imminent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Demascus landed in the mass of slave-soldiers at least ten feet from the dais base. He didn’t land gracefully, and he garnered a few more bites. But he’d escaped the shroud of spiders above, and was on his feet a moment later, his twin swords accelerating like threshing blades. Two ettercaps rushed him, hoping to bring him down while he was still distracted. Their hope was in vain. Spidery ichor sprayed those shoving closer, a gory warning to the others to stay clear of him unless they wished the same.
He grinned, as the office of the Sword once more began to expand across his awareness-
“Demascus!” The cry for aid was louder than ever and truly desperate this time. A note of despair cut through his killing trance, enough that he was able to recognize Riltana’s voice.
“Chant’s hurt; Arathane’s poisoned. Help!”
The top of the dais remained within the swarm summoned by Chenraya. He’d left the Veil knotted tight around the priestess’s neck. If fate willed it so, the scarf had already strangled her to death.
He leaped over a reanimated miner, severing its head with a horizontal sweep of his blade. As he came down, he kicked an ettercap full in its face, breaking its mandibles. It screamed and fell back into its fellows. Demascus glanced to the top of the dais and saw the gods were
Demascus saw no sign of any of the other drow or the Veil.
The hollow in the ceiling opened wider. And something popped. The air pressure in the chamber had increased. The domed portion of the ceiling had become a portal mouth to somewhere new. He felt dizzy. His mind insisted he wasn’t looking up, but rather that he was gazing down, as if taking in the view from a scenic point poised high above a massive subterranean vault. A magnificent dark city stretched out below him, with many structures carved into the sides of living stalagmites. Points of light striped each massive stone pillar, dotted the stone bridges that connected them, and spread out deeper like countless stars. Figures with skin dark as tar and hair like fresh snow moved with elven grace across the bridges and through the streets and galleries.
“Menzoberranzan!” screamed Chenraya. “I return! With a prize suitable for a goddess!”
As if naming the city made it real, ettercaps and reanimated miners around the base of the dais began to fall
Now or never, thought Demascus, as his own body began to feel a countervailing pull
He gathered his feet beneath him and leaped. As he’d guessed, the pull from the portal almost seemed to give him wings. He sailed in a high arc, intersecting Chenraya before she realized she was under attack. The drow held the staff high, jubilantly. Demascus merged
The report of the blades’ merger drew the priestess’s attention. She retracted her arm in surprise. Instead of shearing off her hand at the wrist,
The staff’s upper half and headpiece spun free. Demascus snatched it out of the air as his momentum propelled him away. His lateral speed carried him out from under the portal mouth, and the strength of its pull eased.
“No!” raged Chenraya behind and above him.
Demascus came down on the webbed floor. He watched the drow priestess convulsing in apoplectic rage as she passed through the portal mouth. She retained her hold on the lower portion of the staff, which he supposed still represented a generous fraction of the transformed relic. But he’d rescued the greater amount.
“Lolth slay you all!” Chenraya screeched from the other side of the portal, still falling away. “Rise, Demonweb; rise, ye manifestation of the Demon Queen!Destroy every creature infesting the crossroads-drow, ettercap, drider, and most especially those who have just denied you the-”
The portal in the ceiling snapped shut. Chenraya, the fragment of the relic she’d managed to retain, and the image of a drow city called Menzoberranzan were gone.
The pull exerted through the portal ceased; down was down once more. A rain of slave-soldiers fell hard to the floor. Something touched Demascus’s ankle. He yelled and flinched back before he saw that it wasn’t a web line-it was the Veil. It wound up his leg and tied itself snugly around his neck.
“Burning dominions,” he said to no one in particular.
An ettercap clacked its mandibles at him in the silence. Silence … Wait, hadn’t someone been calling his name? Where were his friends? He peered across the transept to the entrance. Though a few slave-soldiers had fallen up through the portal, most remained in the Demonweb, still blocking easy access into and out of the chamber. But he couldn’t see Riltana, Arathane, or Chant.
Demascus fended off a couple of animated corpses and one halfhearted attack from an ettercap. The creatures had all witnessed the departure of their mistress. In her absence, they seemed confused and fearful. Their anxiety and uncertainty was his chance to depart through the milling press. He didn’t have much time. If Chenraya’s parting words were any indication, in moments the Demonweb would rouse itself to destroy everyone within this chamber.
A charging drider interrupted his methodical escape through the crowd. The drider must’ve started on the periphery of the chamber. It dashed toward the dais, running over Chenraya’s slave-soldiers like an icebreaker in a frozen strait. Its eyes were fixed over the deva’s head, on the ceiling that had so recently hosted a portal. The drider keened like a lost child. And as fate would have it, Demascus was directly between it and its destination.
