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How long it took thein to say She&039;d never realized before the extent to which the routine processes of one&039;s body row tired or hungry, and didn&039;t know thirst or disco after the body&039;s needs - taking a sip fro their day&039;sto sink deep into Reverie and while away the bright hours of day-light - time silimpses of phenoray vortices that streaked the sur-rounding sky Strange bits of h the astral sea On several occasions they passed boulders or hillocks of rock and dirt that hovered in space like miniature worlds, some nearly the size of mountains, others only a few yards across Weird, eer of theone residents The strangest things they ca in the astralsilver to black-est ry purple streaks

"Don&039;t stray too close to any of the color pools," Tzirik had said "If you enter one you will be ejected into a different plane of existence, and I have no desire to wander into strange worlds looking for a careless travel-ing companion"

"Hoe knohich one will lead us to the Abyss?" Valas Hune asked

"Do not worry, ranted me also confers a certain affinity for the destination I conceived when I shiftedus more or less directly to the near-est color pool that will serve our purposes"

"Hownear," the priest answered "It&039;s hard to tell here, of course, but I would guess we are within four or five hours of our destina-tion We&039;ve already traveled for alht It seeht have transpired back in Faerun in two days Did Jeggred still il over their inert bodies? He couldn&039;t have been entirely remiss in his duties, as they were all still alive, but how many more days would pass before they reached their destination, beseeched the goddess for an audience, and ed to return to their native plane?

Absorbed in her own thoughts, Halisstra kept to herself for the bal-ance of the journey, scarcely noticing that her companions did the same It caht and finally arrested hisa whirlpool of black with silver streaks that slowly churned in the astral medium a short distance from the travelers

"The entrance to the Sixty-sixth Layer of the Abyss," the priest of Vhaeraun said "So far our journey has been uneventful, but once we set foot within Lolth&039;s dohts about this quest, Mistress Baenre, this would be the time to express them"

"I have no reason to fear the Demonweb Pits," Quenthel sneered "I intend to do what I ca for the priest she arrowed forward and plunged her-self into the whirling, inky blot In the blink of an eye her glea astral form was lost to vieed by the maelstroed and moved into the color pool himself Like Quen-thel, Halisstra sensed a certainty in thesway her froht a heartbeat behind Tzirik, her teeth bared in a de-fiant snarl

There was no sensation at first, though the pool sed her sight coed within it The medium seehtless, cool, perfect nothingness - but the swirling current of the revolving pool caught her at once, tugging on her with so of attrac-tion or acceleration that dragged her psychic forin to comprehend It didn&039;t hurt, but it felt so alien, so dislocating, that Halisstra gasped in shock and distress, shuddering violently in the grip of the astral maelstrom

Goddess, help me! she pleaded in the silence of her own mind, as she flailed her armoment of indescribable h

Halisstra swayed drunkenly with the return of gravity and struggled to catch her balance She opened her eyes and found herself standing on so ramp or wall top that dropped away an incredible distance before her The rest of the party stood close by, looking around in silence as they rubbed their liered their weapons

All around there was nothing but a black, s than the blackest chasm of the Underdark Her nostrils filled with a foul, acrid scent, and a soft lanced into the abyss at her left hand and saw so there, a dull silver strand several h the darkness Lesser strands in-tersected it at odd intervals, and as she followed some of them with her eyes she saw that they climbed back up slowly and met the very rarew reat, gentle swaying in the monstrous strand

"It&039;s a spiderweb," Ryld antic spiderweb"

"This surprises you?" Pharaun said with a sardonic smirk

Danifae took a couple of cautious steps down the surface of the strand The whole thing was easily thirty or forty yards in diameter, yet because its surface was round, it was difficult to feel co more than a dozen feet or so froers over the strand&039;s surface, and grierously so - and we appear to be couidly "Do I have two bodies now? One here, and one back in the Jaelre castle?"

"In fact, you do," Tzirik said "When one leaves the astral sea and enters another plane, the traveling spirit constructs for itself the physical body it expects You o a sort of con-densation to resume a physical existence on another plane When you leave this place, your spirit will return to the Astral Plane, while this shell you have created for yourself will siness"

"You seeors of planar travel," Halis-stra observed

"Vhaeraun has called me to his service in the planes beyond Faerun on several occasions," Tzirik admitted "In fact, I have been in the Deods of our race reside here, each in their own do My previous business did not take ood o"

Quenthel scowled and said, "All of the Demonweb Pits are Lolth&039;s domain, heretic She is the queen of this entire layer of the Abyss, and the other so-called gods of our people exist here only at her sufferance"

"I am certain you have correctly parroted your faith&039;s beliefs on the ue the point with you, priestess of Lolth For our purposes, the exact relationship of our pantheon&039;s deities is not very important"

Tzirik turned his back on Quenthel and surveyed the black gulf sur-rounding the party He waved his hand in a sweeping gesture

"Soate or borderthe place where this entryway opens to Lolth&039;s own domain - which, as I understand it, is much like the rest of the Demonweb Pits, except sub-ject to her every whim and caprice"

"If the plane is infinite, then the spot we seek ht be infinitely far away," Pharaun observed "How are we to get from here to there?"

"If we had simply materialized at some random point in this reality, you would be correct, wizard," Tzirik replied "However, the astral spell is not a random means of travel We are not too far from e seek - an hour&039;s march, perhaps a day&039;s, but not much farther Since we know that Lolth&039;s domain lies at the very nadir of this place, I would propose that we need only descend this strand and continue to descend each time we come to an intersection In the meantime, be alert"

"There will be others," Quenthel added "The souls of the recent dead If you see anyone you recognize as a worshiper of the Spider Queen, ill follow theht

The others see

The arrip of his shield, and set off directly down the titanic gray strand, shoulders squared The Menzoberranyr exchanged looks, but turned to follow, picking their way down the steeply pitched colu behind the Jaelre priest

The surface of the strand proved surprisingly easy to negotiate Its sur-face was tacky, rather than truly adhesive, and it was co It was springy enough that it cushioned the jarring footfalls of the sharply descending walk

At first Halisstra thought the place was as empty as the silvery seas of the Astral Plane, since the vast distances froave the whole place a sense of immense vacancy Yet the farther she went, the more she became conscious of an active malevolence in the very air of the place, as if the entire plane watched their intrusion and seethed with anger Strange, rasping rustling and oddly insectile tittering sounds rode on the fetid updraft fro sound of distant move-ment and activity that carried no small hboring strands, even though the sagging gray cables were miles away across the bottomless space She could make out frenetic activity here and there, the creatures or objects responsible so far distant that it was iht be More than once she sensed presences in the airy voids around their strand, slow, foul things that glided on the noiso closer to the drow travelers as if sizingup an easyforht-mare that combined the worst features of spiders and demons Great rents had been torn in the chitinous shells of thesour green paste Winged vulture-demons lay in shabby piles of filthy feathers, their foul beaks agape in death Bloated, froglike things hung suspended in the ropy fibers of the great strand, swaying slowly in the hot stench of the place Soed to do more than quiver and rasp, or croak dire threats at the drow as the company carefully climbed down past them

"This place is a charnel house of devils," Ryldone hand over his nose andlike this on my previous visit," Tzirik said "What it means, I cannot say, but I would not care to meet that which tears apart demons"

"It is not like I recall, either," Quenthel said Her face was set in a thoughtful frown, her voice quiet and strained "Change is the essence of chaos, and chaos is an aspect of Lolth"

"Indeed," Pharaun said The fastidious wizard held a handkerchief to his nose and picked his way around a huge spider corpse whose bul-bous abdo the strand with its horrid con-tents "It seems not unlikely that they did this to themselves Demons are violent creatures, after all In the absence of a powerful, co pres-ence, they often turn on each other"

"An absence" Halisstra repeated She frowned, studying the car-nage "There are no drow bodies here"

Having descended a goodly ways, the neighboring strands were closer, andthe intersectionsto the tattered strands nearby Whatever battle had raged theredarkness

"The Spider Queen " said Halisstra "She has abandoned the denizens of her own plane, just as she has abandoned us Much as we have done in Ched Nasad, the demons of her real to shut out the awful sight The sht-headed with nausea "Goddess, what is thepurpose?"she murmured aloud

"The Spider Queen will explain her purposes if she sees fit to do so," Quenthel answered "We can only beseech the restoration of her favor, and trust that ill find approval in her eyes"

"We can also ," Valas Hune called He was at therear of the band, an arrow laid across the string of his double-curved bow The scout stood peering up the strand behind them, his face pinched in a worried frown "Excuse the interruption, but we have co us down the strand"

Halisstra followed the scouts gaze upward, swaying aardly as she lost her balance She hadn&039;t realized just how far they&039;d descended until she looked back up theupward steeper and steeper into the darkness overhead So horde of tiny, spiderlike figures that swarmed over the strand&039;s entire circu to the web&039;s top, sides, or bot-toms They were still many hundreds of yards behind the company, but even at that distance Halisstra could tell that they were ogre-sized mon-strosities, and the alacrity of their pursuit certainly didn&039;t seen

"I don&039;t like the looks of that," Ryld said

"Nor do I," Quenthel agreed "Pharaun, do you have a spell prepared that can bar their passage?"

The Master of Sorcere shook his head and answered, "Not without risk of severing the strand, I fear, and I findto chance that I could instead confer a spell of flying on enough of us to per-haps abandon this strand and reach another, or we could simply descend to that strand below us by levitation"

He pointed at a slender, al distance below theic," Quenthel decided "That strand will do Jeggred, Ryld, carry Valas and Danifae"

She slid down the side of the great strand they stood on, and pushed herself off into the darkness One by one, the others followed Halisstra risked oneterrors behind them, and hastened to follow the Baenre priestess She scra side of the monstrous cable, and leaped out into the dark

Three days after his victory at the Pillars of Woe and twenty miles closer to Menzoberranzan, Nimor stood in the shadows at the mouth of the Lustrue-shaped vault soared upward for hundreds of feet, widening as it climbed, but down on the cavern floor it was crae boulders The miners - slaves and soldiers of House Xor-larrin, or so he believed - had abandoned their tools and their ho off as azed up at the narrow black rift above hi bit of decoration, but it was only one of the reasons he was there The Lustruh and the arar stayed to the left and came up on Menzoberranzan&039;s southwest side, while the tanarukks pushed right and approached the city from the southeast The drow arht for the dubious safety of their horeat halo of twisting caverns and passageways ringing the city - offered the invading arht approach

Of course, the matron mothers hadn&039;t left their outer dereen shards of one of the city&039;s infauarded the city&039;s approaches The wreckage of the one at his feet still smoked with acrid black fumes from the stonefire bombs that had destroyed it a few hours before They were clever and deadly devices, but without cadres of priestesses to hurl all sorts of awful doohts on invaders, the jade spiders were not sufficient to the task of halting the two approaching arreat castles lie shattered like this device? Nimor mused

The Anointed Blade was interrupted in his reflections by the trary scrape of iron on stone The arar Steelshadow approached, escorted by a double file of the duergar lord&039;s Stone Guards Niar soldiers

One would think they&039;d get their fill of haht

He brushed off his tunic and went down to ar I am pleased that you honored ar lord threw open the aron, and stepped down to the cavern floor Marshal Borwald followed a step behind, his scarred face hidden by a great iron helar replied "You vanished after guiding our vanguard to this maze of tunnels What business did you have elsewhere that wasthan our assault on Menzoberranzan, I wonder?"

Victory had transformed the crown prince&039;s dour pessier for ar&039;s lairds echoed their ruler&039;s attitude Where before the sight of the assassin brought black scowls and dark e his presence with gruff nods and open envy of his successes

"Why, Crown Prince,as-sault," Nih He kicked aside one of the jade shards from the ruined construct "Once I&039;d shown your s it seemed to me that your army hadtoout how ar prince frowned, his brows knitting in thought

"You felt free to gaht have turned on us as easily as upon the Menzoberranyr, you know"

"Under normal circumstances, perhaps, but there is opportunity in the air I can smell it, Kaanyr Vhok can smell it, and I think you can, too We stand at a fulcruht be rowled

He folded his thick ar After a short tih the darkness, fol-lowed by quick and heavy steps

Bearing an iron palanquin the size of a small coach on their hairy shoulders, a score of tanarukks loped into the cavern, bestial eyes agloith red hate, axes and ray dwarves and the orc-de their weapons

The door to the palanquin creaked open, and Kaanyr Vhok slowly straightened out of the chair The half-deold, and his fine-scaled skin and strong features bespoke presence and charisar churlishness and suspicious manner could neverher wings as she eed Finally, Zammzt climbed out of the warlord&039;s coach

"Well, I have come," Kaanyr said in his powerful voice He studied the assearded Nimor as well "We have driven the dark elves back to their city in disarray Noe finish the job? And, more importantly, how shall we divide the spoils?"

"Divide the spoils?" Horgar rasped "I think not You will not help yourself to part of my prize afterthe drow at the Pillars of Woe You will be paid fairly for your assistance, but do not presume to claim a share of ry frown

"I aesse, dwarf," the cambion said "Withoutyour way toward Menzoberranzan, one step at a tiry retort, but Niray dwarf and the half-demon and raised his arms

"My lords!" he cried "The only way the Menzoberranyr can defeat you is if the two of you turn on each other If you cooperate, if you coently, the city will fall"

"Indeed," said Zammzt The plain-faced assassin stood by Vhok&039;s palanquin, shrouded in his dark cloak "There is little point in dividing the spoils of a city that you have yet to capture There is even less point in allowing the effort of dividing the spoils to prevent the city&039;s fall in the first place"

"Thathis powerful arotten when the city is plundered You brought ar rurach Dyrr I suspect that your secret House will be hard-pressed to honor your promises to all three of your allies Which of us do you mean to betray, I wonder?"

For the first ti if perhaps he had arrayed too ainst Menzoberranzan all at once That was the nature of diplomacy in the Underdark, after all No alliance outlived its usefulness, not even by a heartbeat

To his surprise, he was rescued by Aliisza

The alu-fiend draped herself at Kaanyr&039;s side and said, "He will not honor his pro as the city stands How can he? We will all go horee a very conscious effort not to allow his eyes to linger on Aliisza for too long when she stood next to Kaanyr Vhok Somehow he doubted that she&039;d shared with her h, and he didn&039;t want to give the half-demon any reason to becoreat as her beauty," he said "For the sake of avoiding arguar, five-tenths of Menzober-ranzan&039;s wealth, populace, and territory; to Kaanyr Vhok, three-tenths; and for my own House, two-tenths, out of which I will cootiation and adjustment when Men-zoberranzan is ours, of course"

"My army outnumbers the caain a share better than half of ar said

"Because he is here," Niar, but look around you before you depart We stand at the Lustrum, the mithral mines of House Xorlarrin Menzoberranzan controls dozens of treasures such as this, and its castles and vaults are filled with the wealth of five thousand years If you do not fight, your share will be nothing"

That was the other reason Nimor had chosen the Lustru rear&039;s eyes darkened, but the duergar prince turned aside to study the chas adits nearby Marshal Borwald leaned close and whispered so to the crown prince, and the other lairds ar shifted his thick hands to his belt and cleared his throat