To the west, perhaps another five or six days' of foot travel away, were mountains. The great triangular peaks soared high into the sky, forming a wall of dark stone with sides as sharp, sheer,
and craggy as fangs. Caps of red ice crowned them. So too did storm clouds, an expanding bank of black as thick and as dark as demon's blood-a storm the likes of which Pharaun could never have imagined.
And it was moving toward them. The cutting wind and screaming webs were its prophets.
The line of souls, unbothered by the swirling wind and gathering storm, poured toward the base of one of the mountains. There, they congregated at a dark point, perhaps a valley or a pass,
between two of the largest peaks.
"Lolth's web and city sits on the other side those mountains," Quenthel said above the wind,
above the screeching of the webs.
Danifae held her hair back from her face and looked to the far horizon. The distant look in her eyes reminded Pharaun of a mad prophet he had once seen in Menzoberranzan's bazaar.
"All the souls are massing in that gorge at the base of the mountains," Pharaun said, not certain everyone had seen it.
"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 where slaughter 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.