Spinner of Lies

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

DEMONWEB

21 LEAFFALL, THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

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 not merciful. The platform was no longer cloaked in spiders. Chenraya stood alone, holding the silvery staff in one hand, rubbing her neck with the other.

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 up into the portal mouth. Chenraya didn’t fall; she ascended, as if lifted by a mother’s careful hand.

Now or never, thought Demascus, as his own body began to feel a countervailing pull up through the portal. He tried to judge his own weight, Chenraya’s upward momentum, the changing gradient of pull between the floor and the portal.

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 Exorcessum into a single long blade even as he swung, aiming to sever Chenraya’s wrist.

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, Exorcessum cut through the shaft itself, immediately above where she gripped it.

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. 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 deva’s expression.

“Just go!” Demascus yelled. If the exit had been even twenty feet farther, Chant would’ve been right. As it was, dozens of tiny spiders launched themselves from the swarm crest before Demascus, bringing up the rear and plunging into the orange-misted portal. They lit on his arms, head, and back, and began biting. He swatted and rolled as he spilled through the transition into the courtyard.

Then the spiders were gone, as if they’d been scraped away. But their wounds remained. He scratched at a welter of red bumps on his forearm, eyeing the portal. If the swarm billowed out, the courtyard would be instantly swamped.

“Those creatures,” said Arathane between big breaths, “weren’t real. They were manifestations of the Demonweb. Those spiders simply don’t exist outside Lolth’s portal network.”

“You hope,” said Chant. Then he blushed, and added, “Your Majesty.”

“I guess we’ll see,” said Riltana, who was already on the far side of the courtyard. “Maybe the rest of you should come and stand by me, just in case.”

Everyone shuffled over to the windsoul. The portal remained quiescent for another span of heartbeats. Just a quiet arch filled with colorful mist.

Demascus said, “Your Majesty? You’d better take this.” He handed her the staff.

The queen received the arambarium relic with solemn dignity. “Demascus-all of you-Akanul owes you a great debt.”

Riltana smiled. A laugh escaped Demascus as he regarded the scene. What did it say about him that nearly everyone he called a friend in Airspur had only a nodding acquaintance with the rule of law? On the other hand, being on speaking terms with the queen of the entire country balanced out that particular equation, with coin to spare.

Arathane continued, “It appears no spiders or dark-elf assassins are going to immediately rush out of the portal. But I won’t have such a vile passage in my land. Demascus, could I ask you one more favor?”

“Of course.”

“Stand guard over the portal mouth until I return, with a company of Akanul sappers and elite peacemakers. We’ll collapse this entire cave and portal so that nothing can ever use it again.”

Demascus said, “I’ll watch over it. But hurry. I’m so tired I’m starting to hallucinate that I’m sleeping, not talking. Riltana, would you go with the queen, escort her out of the Catacombs?”

Arathane smiled at him and winked. He did a doubletake; had that been real or an invention of his tired mind? The queen whirled, all her stately grace back in full measure. “Would you do me the honor?” she asked the windsoul.

Riltana said, “Love to. Demascus and Chant can handle things here without me. I can’t wait to get out of this stink hole.”

“Wonderful,” Arathane said. “We’ll be back within two hours, no more.” She and Riltana left, the queen cradling the broken staff as if it was an infant.

Chant fidgeted.

“What’s wrong?” asked Demascus.

“I thought Jaul would be waiting for us, is all.”

Right. Chant’s son said he’d stay behind at the portal mouth. But the kid was nowhere to be seen. “Do you think he’s all right?”

Chant rubbed his hands, then sighed. “Yeah, I do think he’s all right. I just hoped he’d wait, like he said. But really, it’s more like him to get bored and head back to the Den of Games. Raneger has that boy brainwashed.” The pawnbroker looked at his boots.

Demascus could only nod. No matter how useful Jaul had earlier proved while they’d been out on the island, it seemed he would continue to be a trial to his father.

Chant shook his head as if to clear it. “Anyhow, that’s the second time you’ve come to the aid of the Throne of Majesty. That sort of thing can’t hurt your standing with the queen.”

Demascus nodded, unable to hold back a grin. “But before you get too happy imagining what royal rewards might await, I promised the ghost I’d relay a message.”

Demascus’s face froze. “What?”

“She said that if you survived this escapade, you were to come by the Copperhead and ask for her.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this. You know that.”

“Sorry. I just … you caught me off-guard. So, the Copperhead? What’s that?”

The pawnbroker just shrugged.