Spinner of Lies

Slave-soldiers scattered to get out of its way.

He wasn’t sure he could take down a drider and fend off the surrounding press simultaneously, now that the office of the Sword had slipped entirely from him. Luckily the drider was distracted. If he managed it just right, he might be able to get past the drider without a fight.

Demascus accelerated, moving directly toward the approaching creature. At the last instant, the deva lay back into a slide. He skimmed under the drider’s arachnid belly, nose just inches from the black carapace of its abdomen. He caught a whiff of something alkaline.

And he almost made it.

But the creature caught him with an anchoring web filament squirted from a fat spinneret. The filament pulled him up short, and he almost fumbled the staff. He stuffed its foreshortened length into his belt and fastened both hands on Exorcessum. He swept the blade through the restraining web, then rolled out from beneath the arachnid-drow before it could squash him merely by lowering its bulk.

He shouted, “I’ve dispatched your mistress. If you don’t let me pass, I’ll do the same for you.”

That’s when they all went mad.

Ettercap turned on ettercap, reanimated miner upon fellow miner. A nearby corpse plucked a dashing spideroid from the ground with undead strength and tossed it into the air like a ball. A contingent of ettercaps swarmed a corpulent miner like ants on a piece of meat.

“What in the name of all the Hells?” Apparently Chenraya’s servitors were sensitive to some influence Demascus couldn’t detect. He doubted his threat was the cause.

The creatures’ earlier anxiety and confusion was transformed into violent psychosis. Despite destroying three in as many rapid eye blinks, another spideroid was already bull-rushing him, trying to bite his face off with clacking mandibles.

Demascus flinched back. The horny ridges of a drider thorax on his shoulder blades caged him in place. Oh, yeah-how’d he manage to forget about the drider?

The attacking ettercap slipped past his guarding blade and slammed a balled fist into his head before he managed to hew it into two ichor-squirting segments.

Dazed and blinking, the deva twisted to face the drider. It meant turning his back on slave-soldier mayhem, but he judged they were less of a threat than the drider.

The drider had arrived at a similar conclusion. It slammed a massive pincer claw at Demascus’s head. He grunted with the effort of deflecting it with his blade. The impact jarred his shoulders, and forced him several paces back. Fortunately the creatures around him seemed as much interested in tearing each other leg from leg as getting a taste of deva meat.

The drider screamed something in its own language, expelling a spray of spittle with the vehemence of its pronouncement. Probably a curse of some sort, but hopefully not a literal one. Demascus backed away another step. Where were his friends?

He dodged a loose ettercap head hurled by a reanimated genasi, dodged another drider pincer claw, and severed the arm from a slave-soldier already bleeding from several wounds.

The drider charged, its pincers raised high, promising a lethal denouement. Demascus sidestepped the monster, but his foot caught on the loose head he’d earlier evaded. He went down hard, somehow managing to knock the wind out of himself on the webbed floor.

He sucked air as he attempted to regain his feet, only to be bashed back to the ground by a pincer. A thread of pain pulsed on the left side of Demascus’s body where the pincer tip had scored.

He internally searched for any remaining vestige of the Sword of the Gods. It was almost as if he’d exhausted its ability to manifest with his earlier fight with Chenraya. That, or the power didn’t like to be summoned; it liked to appear of its own accord, and was choosing to withhold its grace now-

The deva rolled away from another blow and managed to get Exorcessum up into guard. At least its power remained constant, evident in its blazing runes of red and white. His attacker paused, and Demascus finally managed to regain his feet. The sour, rotten smell of the drider’s breath engulfed him, nearly a presence in itself- one hardly less lethal than the monster.

Something struck him from behind hard enough to make him stumble. He groaned. Too many foes surrounded him. Light and shadow, where the Hells was his mastery? He tried to remember a word of power or a glyph of-

Thunder rode the heels of a crazy line of electric light that zagged past Demascus and impacted whatever was attacking him from behind.

He followed the blast back to its source and saw Queen Arathane, mantled in snapping sparks.

The queen was alive! And kicking. Relief warmed him.

The drider took advantage of Demascus’s distraction with another flurry of pincer strikes, forcing him back behind the point of his blade. He risked another glance at Arathane. She remained visible through the press, and he saw Chant and Riltana, too. They’d remained where he’d told them, of course.

Demascus deflected another blow, and gouged a bloody furrow up one of the drider’s arms. A bare instant later, flesh closed up where he’d torn it. Damn, the thing was regenerating its flesh. It enjoyed too many blessings of Lolth for the deva’s comfort.

The thought triggered a recollection. Oh, yeah, that’s how it was done! With a mental command, he activated one of the red runes on his blade. A rune in the shape of a tongue of fire.

“Burn!” he commanded, and swung the blade of his sword low along the ground, surprising the drider. Expecting another slash, it danced back. The triggered fire rune jumped from the blade like a flying fish from the sea. The drider attempted to evade, but the rune exploded into a sphere of raging flame. The creature was enveloped. Demascus dove away from the fury of the blast and failed to keep his feet. Which was becoming tiresome; he’d spent an inordinate amount of the fight on his face.

When the fire faded into sizzling wisps a heartbeat later, the monster survived only as a flaming heap of legs and pincers waving a thin banner of black smoke.

Then Demascus got up and sprinted along the irregular lane between the slave-soldiers, many of whom were momentarily enthralled by the drider’s fiery destruction.

He reached the chamber entrance. Chant was reloading his crossbow. Up close, he saw that Arathane was unsteady on her feet and much the worse for wear.

Riltana said, “Took your damn time,” but smiled.

“I’ve got the staff!” he shouted. He pulled the foreshortened length from his belt with one hand and waved Exorcessum like a lunatic in the other. “Most of it, anyway.”

Behind him, the chamber itself convulsed. A shriek of pure hatred rang the Demonweb like a bell. The sound was equal parts demonic bloodlust and a promise of endless death. No mortal throat could have produced such a horrible noise. And the fury of the remaining ettercaps and undead miners in the chamber had increased. Perhaps their madness wasn’t so unexplainable after all. The mind in the Demonweb, Lolth herself, was rousing to fury.

“Time to go,” said the queen.

Demascus herded the others before him down a webbed tunnel that pulsed like the throat of a swallowing giant. Chant moved as if his impressive girth was an illusion. But a particularly loud scream made him slow and glance behind him, his brow furrowed.

“Faster!” Demascus yelled. “Don’t stop!”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” came Riltana’s retort from farther down the bucking tunnel. The windsoul had the lead, literally flying, but Arathane was her shadow; the queen seemed to ride a chariot of lighting.

Demascus glanced over his shoulder.

A wave of arachnid fury filled the temple chamber they’d just left. Spiders in uncountable thousands boiled forward like stew on a cookstove. Their mandibles frothed with poison and malice. Not even the slave-soldiers were immune-ettercaps and the remnant undead miners were consumed so quickly they might as well have been disintegrated.

“Lords of light and shadow,” he murmured. The swarm flooded into the web corridor after the group, surging more quickly than even Riltana could fly.

“Sharkbite,” gasped Chant, breathless and suddenly more scared than intrigued by his situation. It seemed he’d finally realized that they might not make it. His eyes were wide as they saw a pang of mirrored fear in the