it is a blank slate, and even as we speak it is being transformed.'
'The other patron fathers and I,' Tomphael said, 'under Patron Father Zammzt's expert guidance, will be concentrating our energies here.'
'As you always intended?' Nimor concluded.
Tomphael sighed and said, 'I know you've always considered me a coward, Nimor, but you were wrong. Only the fool misses the difference between the coward and the pragmatist.'
'Only the young seek glory over success,' said Zammzt.
'I could have won in Menzoberranzan,' Nimor argued.
'Perhaps,' said Tomphael. 'If you had, this conversation would have taken a very different tone. It was your opportunity to surprise us, Nimor. That is what you failed to do—surprise us. Our plans did not depend on the City of Spiders being delivered to us on a silver platter, nor did they assume that Lolth was never going to return from wherever it is she's been. We had this one opportunity, and we took all there was to take. There will be other opportunities to take more.'
'Other opportunities. . ' Nimor repeated, rolling the words over on his tongue.
'You could be Anointed Blade again, Nimor,' Tomphael said.
Nimor nodded, bowed, and said, 'I will return to the City of Wyrmshadows. . with your leave, Patron Father.'
Tomphael nodded, and Nimor turned and stepped into Shadow.
Pharaun hadn't felt so good in so long, he'd almost forgotten what it was like to be healthy. The priestesses, perhaps reveling in the return of their spells, were almost continuously chanting healing prayers. They conjured a banquet and clean, cool water. They healed every wound and soothed aching muscles.
Stretching, feeling too good to bother with Reverie, Pharaun stood and watched Quenthel and Danifae work on Jeggred. Again, likely because they couldn't resist using the spells that had been denied them so long, the two females worked together. As they sat cross-legged on either side of a nervous, reclining Jeggred, Pharaun sensed flashes of the old physical relationship the two priestesses had shared not too long ago. There was the accidental touch that turned into a lingering caress, the heavy-lidded eye contact past the draegloth's wild white mane, and the occasional play of a tongue along parted lips as the words to a series of complex healings taxed even their spell-rejuvenated throats.
The result of all of it was that Jeggred's severed hand grew back. Pharaun found the sight of the thing slowly taking shape from the dead end of the stump even more fascinating than the exchange between the two females. The hand came together in layers: bone, sinew, muscle, blood vessels, skin, fur, claws.
When they were done, the draegloth stood, flexing his hand, jaw agape, body quivering.
The two priestesses stood with him, separating, their eyes once again going cold toward each other.
Jeggred looked first to Danifae and said, 'My thanks, Mistress.' Then to Quenthel, 'Mistress Quenthel. .»
Anger poured over the high priestess's face like fog, and she turned away from her nephew, quickly gathering her pack.
'We've rolled around on the floor long enough,' she said, already walking swiftly down the corridor. 'This way.'
Danifae motioned to Pharaun to proceed, and the wizard gladly went after Quenthel. Valas followed behind the wizard, and Danifae and the draegloth took up the rear. Any distance, any buffer between the two priestesses was a good thing, and Pharaun was happy to provide it as long as they got moving. The Master of Sorcere was all but overwhelmed with curiosity.
Quenthel led the way with a confident stride and such assurance that none of the rest of them argued or second-guessed her at all. They went from one corridor to another, passed through rooms, sometimes through doors that Jeggred had to force open by brute strength. All the while the interior of the spider fortress maintained its cold, dark, dead, rusted feeling. Though Lolth's power had definitely returned to the two priestesses, the construct was as dead as ever, and Pharaun got the distinct impression that wherever that power was coming from, it wasn't the sixty-sixth layer of the Abyss.
When they saw light at the end of one of the passageways they all stopped, clinging to the walls and the concealing shadows. As he ran through the spells still available to him and closed his fingers over a wand that would send bolts of lightning crashing through the air, the Master of Sorcere took stock of the rest of the expedition. Quenthel and Danifae both looked down the corridor with hopeful, excited expressions. Jeggred looked at Danifae in the same manner. Valas was nowhere to be seen—as was usual for the scout.
'What is it?' Jeggred asked, his voice as quiet as was possible for the massive half-demon.
Pharaun guessed, 'A gate.'
'It's where we have to go,' Quenthel said.
'She's correct,' said Danifae.
'Well, then,' Pharaun replied, 'we ought to proceed right away. Should we be prepared to fight our way through?'
Quenthel stepped away from the wall and started walking quickly, back tall and straight, toward the strange purple glow.
Pharaun shrugged and followed, still holding the wand in one hand and the list of spells in his mind. The high priestess hadn't actually answered his question after all.
By the time they got to the end of the corridor Pharaun's instincts were telling him to approach more slowly, more cautiously—but he'd also grown accustomed to following the lead of the highest ranking priestess in attendance, so he followed Quenthel into the chamber at the end of the corridor with a hesitation in his mind but not in his step.
The corridor opened into a huge, round, high-ceilinged chamber walled in the same rusted steel as the rest of the spider fortress. In the center of the otherwise empty space was a circle that appeared to be welded together from jagged, rusted pieces of the fortress construct itself. The circle stood up on its end, perhaps eighteen feet in diameter. The center of the ring was filled with opaque violet light, swirling and folding in on itself as if it came from a luminescent cloud of vapor trapped in the confines of the circle.
Pharaun heard footsteps and brought the wand out from under his piwafwi.
'You will not require that here, mage,' a voice echoed in the chamber.
As the others filed into the room, Pharaun looked for the source of the voice. He sensed a figure lurking in a particularly dark shadow.
'There,' Pharaun whispered to Quenthel. 'See it?'
Quenthel nodded and said, 'You will cast no spell; you will make no move toward it unless I order it. Do you understand?'
Pharaun said, 'Of course, Mistress,' but the others stood silent.
'I said,' the high priestess reiterated, 'do you understand?'
Danifae and Jeggred nodded, and Pharaun again said, 'Of course, Mistress. Can you at least tell me what it is?'
'I prefer to be referred to as 'she',' the voice said, 'being female.'
The figure stepped out of the darkest part of the shadow and strode confidently into the purple light from the active but untuned portal. The sight of it took Pharaun's breath away.
The figure of a drow female slowly twisted and writhed a good ten feet in the air. The drow was perfectly formed and nude, her body more like Danifae's in its fullness than Quenthel's modest, strong frame. She dragged her hands over her body in long, slow caresses for which no part of her was forbidden.
From her sides grew two sets of long, segmented spider legs. It was those four legs—and four more like it all together—that held the drow female up above the rusted floor.
Pharaun had seen too many driders to count, but what stepped out in front of him was no drider. Everything about the spider-drow creature demanded the wizard's full attention. The drow form was beautiful—beautiful in a way that Pharaun had no words to describe. Her long, spindly spider legs simply reminded him of where he was: the home plane of—
The Master of Sorcere shook his head slowly from side to side. It couldn't be.
'Lo—?' he whispered.
'I am not the Queen of the Demonweb Pits, Master of Sorcere,' the spider-drow said in accented High Drow.
