"It is not a gorge," Quenthel answered, her voice barely audible over the wind.

She offered nothing more, and Pharaun didn't like the haunted look in her eyes.

"The sun rises," said Jeggred, shielding his eyes with one of his huge fighting hands.

Pharaun turned to see the lip of a tiny red orb creep diffidently over the eastern horizon. It cast little more light than the silvery nighttime satellite of the World Above when it was full. The light from Lolth's sun formed a clear line on the landscape, a border between darkness and light, that oozed toward them as the orb rose higher. Just as Quenthel had said, the light caused only minor discomfort.

Pharaun lowered his hand from his eyes and watched the first sunrise of his lifetime.

To his surprise and alarm, where the dim light touched, movement occurred. At first, Pharaun thought the sunlight was causing the earth to ripple, but then he realized what was actually occurring.

The plane was birthing spiders. Millions of spiders.

Crawling, scuttling, clambering, they moved from the darkness of their fissures and caves and into the light, summoned by the dawn. All had eight legs, eight eyes, and fangs, but there the similarities ended.

Some were the size of rats, some were the size of rothe, and a few that clambered forth out of largest fissures had bloated bodies as large as giants. Some leaped, some phased in and out of reality, some pulled their bloated forms along on overlarge pedipalps or swordlike legs, others tumbled or flew on the gusting wind.

As the sun's light moved across the landscape, the pits, tunnels, and holes that it lit vomited forth their arachnid denizens. A ponderous but visible wave traveled across the earth as the sun slowly trekked higher into the sky. The ground was acrawl.

The light was moving toward them. They watched in awed silence.

Pharaun had lived with and amongst spiders his entire life but he had never before seen anything like the seething, roiling mass of arachnids that was beginning to blanket the surface of the plane. They coated everywhere the light touched, a seething blanket of legs, eyes, and hairy bodies.

At first, little occurred other than the birthing. The spiders that emerged from their holes seemed content to sit in the light as the birthing line moved across the world. But soon, first one, then another, then a hundred, then a million of the spiders attacked the others and fed upon the fallen. A slaughter trailed the birthing line by a few hundred paces, and there the surface of the plane erupted into a roiling, chaotic mass of fangs, pedipalps, and pincers, all biting, cutting, and tearing. Hisses, screeches, clicks, and the sound of ripping bodies filled the air, a wave of sound that followed hard after the sunlight. Severed legs dotted the rocks; huge carcasses flailed and bled; ichor stained the earth.

It was purposeless slaughter, madness made flesh, chaos given substance.

Lolth must have been smiling.

Pharaun could see plainly that anything caught in the midst of the bloody tumult would be fortunate to survive. He spared a glance under his feet, and saw pits and holes gaping like open mouths all around them.

Even above the wind he could hear the scrabbling of feet coming from within them, the eager clicking of fangs, the tapping of legs on stone. In his mind's eye, he pictured another million arachnids lurking just inside the darkness of the holes, waiting for the touch of the dim sun to set them free of their underground prisons.

Pharaun had no idea how such an ecology could sustain itself and did not care. Though born in a city whereslaughter was commonplace, even he found the level of violence repulsive.

And soon they would be in the midst of it. The sun was rising. The light was coming.

"Goddess be praised," Quenthel said, a rapturous look on her face.

The wind gusted, pasting his robes to his body. The webs keened in answer. Pharaun thought the Baenre priestess must have lost her mind.

Danifae emerged out from under her hood to greet the sun, not unlike the spiders emerging from their caves. Pharaun counted not less than seven tiny red spiders crawling in her hair, "Do we intend to simply stand here and wait?" he asked above the noise.

Neither priestess replied, and he decided that was answer enough.

"Afraid?" Jeggred asked, smirking.

Pharaun ignored the draegloth and mentally activated the power of his ring of flight. With a silent command, he surreptitiously lifted his feet half a handspan off the earth. If the priestesses had a plan, that was well. If not, he saw no need to remain earthbound in the face of the madness.

Together, the four of them watched as the light and violence churned its way toward them. As it grew closer, the clicking and screeching from the caves and pits around them grew louder, more eager, hungrier.

The arachnids within sensed the approach of the light.

Jeggred answered those sounds with a low rumble in his chest. He stepped before Danifae and assumed a fighting crouch. The priestesses did not even look at the ground around them. They had eyes only for the approaching slaughter.

Pharaun decided to try again. "Mistress," he said to Quenthel, "would it not be wise to take shelter?"

Quenthel looked at him sidelong and said, "No, mage. We must stand in the midst of this and bear witness."

From around her neck, she removed her holy symbol of Lolth-a jet disk inlaid with amethysts arranged to look like a spider. The serpents of her whip stood upright and watched the wave of spiders approach.

Quenthel chanted a prayer, the words in a language even Pharaun could not understand.

Pharaun bit back the cutting reply that came to his mind, content that he could take flight if and when the need arose.

Danifae put her hand on Jeggred's fur-covered back.

"It is the Teeming," she said to no one in particular, recalling the words of the soul-eating creature Pharaun had taken prisoner. Awe colored her tone.

Pharaun didn't care what it was called. He knew only that soon the sunlight would reach them, light the pits around them, and . . .

He imagined his body buried under a mountain of bloated bodies, jointed legs, mandibles, and unforgiving eyes.

Quenthel and Danifae both appeared lost in rapture, temporarily mad perhaps. Each held her holy symbol in her hands; each wore the wild but assured expression of an ecstatic.

Pharaun knew that ordinary spiders answered the priestesses' commands, but he did not know whether the arachnids native to the Pits would. Besides, the priestesses' powers were limited. They could not command millions of spiders, could they?

Pharaun liked the situation less and less. He reached into his piwafwi, removed a ball of sulfur-soaked bat guano, and held it between thumb and forefinger-just in case. Ordinarily, he would not have considered offering violence to Lolth's children, at least not in the presence of her priestesses, but if it came to killing spiders or dying himself under a heap of hairy bodies, the choice would be an easy one.

As ready as he would get, he waited.

The sunlight slid across the rockscape, birthing more spiders, closer, closer . . .

When it reached them, motion exploded all around. Thousands of spiders boiled from their holes like steam from a heated beaker, hissing and clicking. From a large tunnel to Pharaun's right, rothe-sized masses of hairy spider legs issued forth-five, ten, a score. His heart hammered between his ribs. The creatures had no bodies as such, no heads. They were nothing more than a clumped, disgusting, squirming mass of legs, each of which was longer than Pharaun was tall, and eight of which ended in a pointed claw of chitin as long as his forearm.

"Chwidencha," Pharaun said. "Two score or more."

Chwidencha-he'd heard them called "leg horrors"-had once been drow, or perhaps drow souls, but they had failed Lolth, and as punishment had been transformed by the Spider Queen into that twisted form.

The Demonweb Pits did not appear to Pharaun to be a paradise for the Spider Queen's faithful. It looked more like a prison for her failures.

The chwidencha's rapid, undulating movement was enough to cause Pharaun a wave of nausea.Impossible clusters of long, jointed legs, like a nest of vipers, squirmed a greeting to the red light of the dawn.

Though they had no eyes that he could see, the chwidencha immediately noticed the companions. Forty or more mouths offered muffled hisses from orifices buried under nests of legs.

"I see them, Master Mizzrym," Quenthel said, turning around, but her voice lacked the same confidence it had held a moment before.

The thousands of spiders boiling from the holes around them did not come near the chwidencha and left the companions unmolested, a small island of sanity amidst the chaos.

Lolth's damned appeared to command a certain respect, or fear.

With alarming speed and coordination, the chwidencha pack encircled them at a distance of perhaps ten paces.

The four drow closed ranks a few steps, a reflexive action. Pharaun called to mind the words to his fireball spell but held off casting. He shared a look with Quenthel but could not read her face. Jeggred's chest rose and fell heavily, and his fighting claws flexed. The draegloth interposed himself as best he could between the arachnids and Danifae but it was little use. They were surrounded. His growls answered their hisses and tapping claws.

Outside the ring of Lolth's damned, the spiders that had boiled forth stood still for a moment, like arena fighters gathering their strength. Then the urge to slaughter reached them, and they erupted into violence.

Thousands upon thousands of spiders engaged in an orgy of dismemberment and feeding. Squeals, screeches, and hisses rang through the morning air. The ground vibrated under the volume of violence.

Within the ring, the tension grew. The chwidenchas' legs churned sickeningly, as though they were agitated or somehow communicating. Though he could see no eyes, it was clear to Pharaun that the chwidencha were regarding them. He felt the weight of their looks, the heaviness of their malice, the depth of their hate.

"Well-" he started to say.

At the sound of his voice, the chwidencha pack hissed as one. The smaller legs sprouting from what would have been their faces writhed, squirmed, and parted to reveal fanged mouths larger around than Pharaun's head. Finger-length fangs dripped a thick, yellow venom.

To all of them, Quenthel said, "We will not harm any of Lolth's children."

Pharaun could see that Quenthel was sweating as badly as he was, though her voice was calm.

"These are more like stepchildren," he answered and ran through the inventory of spells in his mind.

"They are neither," Danifae said, raising her holy symbol-a red spider encased in amber-before her.

"These are her damned."

At the sight of Lolth's brandished symbol, the chwidencha pack emitted a high-pitched screech that made the hair on the nape of Pharaun's neck stand on end. As one, they spasmed in anger, legs churning and squirming. The claws on the ends of their legs cracked rock, and Pharaun could not help but imagine what they could do to flesh.

"They do not appear to be the religious type, Mistress Danifae," Pharaun said.

Danifae did not lower her symbol.

The wind gusted, set the songspider webs to screeching, a sound that temporarily rose above even the cacophony of the Teeming.

This entire plane of existence is mad, Pharaun decided. The priestesses are mad. I am mad.

The chwidencha answered the song of the webs with another screech of their own. Pharaun didn't care for the look of their open, fanged mouths.

"Mistress," he said to Quenthel, "perhaps you could discourage further discussion with these creatures? I find them poor conversationalists. Mistress Danifae?"

For that, Quenthel turned to look at him just long enough to stare daggers. Danifae smirked.

Quenthel raised her jet symbol at the chwidencha, mirroring Danifae's gesture and eliciting a similar response.

Venom dripped to pool on the ground. Hisses answered their movements.

Quenthel pronounced, "Leave us now, damned of Lolth! We are servants of the Spider Queen about her will. You will not impede us."

"Back to your holes!" Danifae commanded, offering her own symbol.

A palpable wave of divine power went forth from both the priestesses.

Pharaun expected to see the chwidencha turn and flee into their tunnels but the leg horrors did not move, at least not away from them. More hisses answered the priestesses' command; legs squirmed and writhed.

As one, the chwidencha took a slow step forward, and the circle of safety shrank.While Danifae wore an inexplicable smile, Quenthel's uncertain expression told Pharaun everything he needed to know.

Chapter Six

As she stepped through the portal, Halisstra felt spread across a distance vast and deep. In only a fraction of a heartbeat, the portal moved her from the relatively calm gray nothingness of the Astral to- She found herself in mid-air, falling.

Before she could activate the levitation power of her brooch, she dropped five paces and hit the ground with a grunt. She managed to keep her feet and found herself standing under a dim sun on blasted ground in the midst of a nightmare.

Spiders surrounded her, swarmed her, engulfed her, from hand-sized arachnids scurrying underfoot to horrid monsters twice her height. The creatures tore each other to pieces all around her. Hisses, clicks, and squeals filled her ears; black, brown, and red ichor stained the ground and splattered her face.

Halisstra was aswim in an ocean of Lolth's maddened children. The Spider Queen must have caused Halisstra to arrive in the midst of the chaos as penance for her apostasy.

She steadied her stance, brandished the Crescent Blade, and took in her environment with only a single glance. She stood on a bleak, pit-ridden rockscape in the shadow of a slim spire of unusual looking rock, a tor of black stone that looked as though it should have toppled of its own weight in the gusting wind. The whirlpools of Lolth's reawakened power dotted the cloudy sky. She had been ejected from one such and thanked the goddess that it had not been higher off the ground. A line of souls streamed through the heavens, all of them floating in the direction of a distant mountain range, drawn there by the lodestone of Lolth's power.

An eerie keening rang in her ears, the sound of songspider webs whistling in the blustery wind, like some obscene attempt to mimic the sound made by Seyll's songsword. In it, she heard the echo of the word she had heard on the Astral, the word that made the hair on the nape of her neck stand on end: Yor'thae.

She had no time to consider the sound further. The spiders around her noticed her. A sea of frenzied fangs, pincers, legs, and hairy bodies broke around her. Arachnids scuttled over rocks, over each other, over her. She slashed and cut but there were too many. They bit and tore indiscriminately, killing and devouring anything in their path. Spider bodies thumped into her; fangs tried to bite through her mail; claws sent her spinning, knocked her to her knees.

She refused to die on her knees.

"Goddess! she screamed and swung the glowing Crescent Blade in a wide arc.

As if in answer, Feliane and Uluyara appeared in the air through a short-lived gate that appeared perhaps twenty paces to her right and five paces high in the air. They fell to the ground, and she saw them for only an instant more-both wore expressions of surprise and horror-before they too were buried under a mass of writhing, leaping spiders.

From her knees, Halisstra swung blindly, hitting spider flesh with every pass. Ichor sprayed, splattered her face and hands. Hissing and clicking filled her ears; squeals of pain.

She fought her way back to her feet, impaling a large blue spider on the end of her blade. She slipped in its gushing fluids and nearly fell. A huge, black, hairy arachnid leaped on her back and sank its fangs into her shoulder, but her mail withstood the attack. She flung it from her and stomped its thorax to mush as another huge spider reared before her, lunged forward, and bit at her legs. She dodged backward and fended it off with the Crescent Blade. She felt as though she were up to her waist in the creatures; with each step, she crushed half a dozen small spiders under her boots. She saw no way out, no way she would ever get free. She would die under their fangs, and her body would be left a desiccated husk blowing in the screaming wind.

"Goddess!" she cried again, hacking wildly with the Crescent Blade.

The enchanted steel killed where it struck, slicing arachnid flesh easily, but there were thousands of them. Eilistraee had no particular power over the creatures, and in her desperation Halisstra almost fell back into her old habit of channeling Lolth's power to command spiders. It would be so easy to simply order them back to- Uluyara's horn rang, and Halisstra latched onto the sound with the desperation of the drowning. She remembered the first time she had heard its clear call, on the World Above under the silver light of the moon. She centered herself, at least for a time, and with effort resisted Lolth's pull.

If she were to live, she would have to save herself with the tools that Eilistraee, and only Eilistraee, had put into her hands.

Holding the Crescent Blade in both hands, Halisstra slashed about her with an abandon born ofhopelessness, sending legs and spider flesh flying. Her small shield made her two-handed grip on the Crescent Blade a bit awkward, but she managed. She wanted the extra force to her swings.

Fangs clamped on her arm, her leg, and pierced her mail and flesh. Agony raced through her body, and warm poison throbbed into her veins. She grabbed the hairy blob on her forearm and squeezed it until it popped. She stabbed downward at another spider, impaling it, cross cut to her right, and took the mandible from another. She found it strange that killing Lolth's creatures did not elicit the same elation she had felt back in the forest of the World Above when she had killed the phase spider in the name of Eilistraee.

Instead, she felt out of balance, dirty, guilty.