Annihilation (War of the Spider Queen #5) 8

How could there be any sense to a world that existed, in a universe made of chaos? In a place where the only rule was that there were no rules? When they were there last, not very long ago, they walked enormous strands of spiderweb and saw nothing alive until they were beset upon by a horde of feral demons at the gates to a temple sealed by the face of Lolth herself. There, a god tried to break through but couldn't.

Though they had been away from the Demonweb Pits for only a short time, much had changed.

The smooth expanse of the gigantic webs was pitted and worn. Patches of what looked like rust went on for acres at a time. In spots they had to climb or levitate up and down cliffs of crumbling webbing and traverse craters big enough to hold all of Menzoberranzan in their uneven bowls.

All around them was the stench of decay, so intense at times Pharaun Mizzrym thought he would suffocate.

The wizard had been walking for hours in uncharacteristic silence. None of the drow or the draegloth commented aloud on the state of the Demonweb Pits. It was too difficult to voice the palpable sense of despair the ruined place imbued in them all. They stopped occasionally to rest, and minutes would go by where they didn't even look at each other.

Constantly on their guard for the plane's demonic inhabitants, at first they were all on a knife's edge, but as the hours dragged on and they saw nothing alive, let alone threatening, they soon began to relax. That was when the despair deepened even further.

They walked on and on and finally came to Lolth's temple. The once imposing, otherworldly structure stood in ruin, infected by thesame decay as the universe-spanning web. The obsidian stone had turned brown and was crumbled away in spots. Huge columns of smoke rose from the interior. Many of the great buttresses stood like shattered stumps, amputated by some inconceivable power. The surrounding plazas were difficult to traverse, littered with boulders of carved stone and iron rusted and twisted out of shape. Bones lay everywhere-the bones of millions stacked in great piles or scattered as if by the cruel winds alone. The petrified spider-things they had marveled at before were gone, leaving holes in the floor of the plaza and along the buttresses as if they'd pulled up their feet from the stone and marched away.

The party traced the same path they had taken when in astral form and came once again to the entrance to the temple. The great stone face was itself shattered, revealing glimpses of the visage of Lolth but only in tiny, enigmatic fragments.

The doors swung wide.

"It was the gods," Valas whispered, his voice echoing in a million tiny pings across the ruined plaza.

Vhaeraun, who had come to kill Lolth because of their own rash decision to lead one of his priests there, had been confronted by Selvetarm-Lolth's protector-at the temple gates. Their duel was a sight that would be burned into Pharaun's memory if he lived to be tenthousand years old, and the contest had caused much damage, but. . . .

"Not this," the Master of Sorcere said, his own voice echoing, though in not quite the same way. "This is different. Older."

"Older?" the draegloth asked, his eyes darting from rock to rock.

"He's right," said Danifae, who was crouching, holding the skull of something that might have been half drow, half bat. "These bones are dried and bleached, almost petrified. The stone itself is crumbling to dust. The webs are rotten and brittle."

"This place was razed a century ago or more," Pharaun said.

"That's not possible," Valas argued, staring up at the open doors. "We were just here-right here, and the doors were sealed, and . . ."

The others didn't expect him to finish.

"Lolth has left this place," Quenthel said, her voice so quiet it barely managed to elicit an echo at all.

"She has left the Demonweb Pits?" Danifae asked. "How could that be?"

"She has left the Abyss," the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith said. "Can't you feel it?"

Danifae shook her head, but her eyes answered in the affirmative. The two females shared a long, knowing look that raised the hair on the back of Pharaun's neck. He sensed similar reactions from Jeggred and Valas.

"That's it then," said the Bregan D'aerthe scout. "We have come here to find the goddess but instead we have found nothing. Our mission is at an end."

Quenthel turned to glare at the scout, who returned it with a steady, even gaze. The vipers that made up the high priestess's scourge writhed and spat, but Valas paid them no mind.

"She isn't here," Quenthel said, "but that doesn't mean she isn't. . . somewhere."

The scout took a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking all around at the ruined temple.

"So where is she?" he asked. "How much farther do we go? Do we search the limitless multiverse for her, plane by plane, universe by universe? She's a creature of the Demonweb Pits, and here we stand on the sixty-sixth layer of the gods-cursed Abyss and she's gone. If you don't know where she's gone to-and she could be anywhere-and shewon't tell you where she is, maybe we all have to accept the fact that she doesn't want to be found."

It was the most Pharaun had ever heard Valas say all at once, and the words made his heart sink.

"He's right," said the Master of Sorcere.

To his surprise, Quenthel nodded. Danifae's eyes widened, and Jeggred growled low in his throat. The draegloth moved slowly, in that fluid, stalking way of his, and went to stand next to the former battle-captive.

"This is sacrilege," Danifae whispered. "Heresy of the worst sort."

Quenthel turned to look at the other priestess and silently raised an eyebrow. "You presume to allow some-" Danifae turned to briefly glare at Valas- "male to speak for Lolth? Does he decide the goddess's intentions now?" "Do you?" Pharaun couldn't help but ask.

Surprisingly, Danifae smiled when she said, "Perhaps I do. Certainly I have more claim to that right than Master Hune. Capable a scout as he is, this is the business of priestesses now."

Quenthel stood a little straighter, though her shoulders still hunched. Pharaun marveled at how old she looked. The high priestess had aged decades in the past tenday, and exhaustion was plain in her heavy-lidded eyes and blunt temper.

Pharaun couldn't look at her, so he looked down at the floor of the plaza. He scuffed his boot through brown-powdered stone.

"I was wrong," the Master of Sorcere said. He could feel the others looking at him, could sense their surprise, but he didn't look up. "This didn't happen a century ago. This place was destroyed . . . no, a battle was fought here, and it was fought a millennium past at least. At least."

"How can you say that, wizard?" asked the draegloth. "You were just here.

Weren't you? Isn't this the same place Tzirik brought you?

Pharaun. nodded and said, "It is indeed, Jeggred, but the fact remains that what we see all around us is an ancient ruin, the corpse of a battlefield that's lain cold for a thousand years or more."

"We were only just here," said Valas.

"We aren't in the Underdark anymore, Master Hune," said Pharaun. "Time might move very differently here, in fits and starts like distance in the Shadow Deep. This could all be more illusion than real, the whim of Lolth or some other godly power. It could be that we simply see a ruin where there is nothing, see a ruin where there is in fact an intact temple, or everything we see is real and made a millennium old by a power so vast that it can manipulate time and matter and the aether itself."

"The Spider Queen isn't here," Valas added.

"If the priestesses say that she is not here," Pharaun replied, "then I'm content to believe that's true."

The Master of Sorcere looked up at the enormous open doorway, big enough for House Baenre to pass through it intact. The others followed his gaze.

"These doors were sealed shut before," Pharaun said, "but now they're open. Why?"

"Because Lolth wants us to step through them," Danifae said, her voice carrying a certainty that surprised Pharaun. "Who else could have opened them?"

Pharaun shrugged and looked at Quenthel, who was nodding slowly.

"We go on," the high priestess said.

Without a glance at the others, Quenthel walked toward the mammoth doorway. One by one the others followed: Danifae, then Jeggred, then Pharaun, and Valas at the rear. Each stepped more reluctantly than the last.

On the planes of chaos there were so many names for it, Aliisza didn't remember them all: temporal flux zones, slipped time layers, millennia sinks. ... It had been a very long time since she'd seen one, and it took her almost as long to realize what was happening.

The sixty-sixth layer of the Abyss had been abandoned. The glue that held the planes together was the gods themselves, and in the planes of chaos, just as in the planes of law, when all the gods left a particular place, entropy progressed in fits and starts, and even chaos itself spiraled out of control.

In the case of the sixty-sixth layer, there was the rest of the Abyss to hold it together and to provide echoes of its past that were strong enough to keep its physical form-in that there still was a sixty-sixth layer. Time was moving forward faster at times, then slower, then it might reverse itself. It was impossible to pin down, even for a tanar'ri like Aliisza. Places like that were better left alone, better avoided, better forgotten.

She watched Pharaun and his companions walk through the massive temple gates with a heavy heart. She didn't know exactly what they would find in there, but she was sure that whatever it was it would be disappointing for them. They had traveled to the sixty-sixth layer to find Lolth, but Lolth wasn't there. It was a guess on her part, but an educated one: the plane had been abandoned for longer than anyone imagined-longer than Lolth had been silent.

"There's a lot you never told them," Aliisza whispered to the Spider Queen. If the goddess could hear her-and Aliisza had no reason to believe she could-Lolth didn't answer.

The alu-fiend absently scratched a doodle in the brown dust on the underside of the massive web strand onto which she clung: a bit of graffiti no eyes would ever see. Her mind was racing; she had a lot to think about.

Aliisza had abandoned Pharaun and the others, leaving them to crash into the Plain of Infinite Portals simply on a whim. It pleased her that Pharaun survived, but she didn't give the others a second thought. Still, Aliisza had made her choice, and it was an obvious one. She chose Kaanyr Vhok.

Though she knew she would go back to him, she also knew that she had helped Pharaun and his expedition along a bit more effectively than Vhok would have approved of. He might not have asked her to stop them,but he certainly hadn't asked her to help them. Aliisza knew the cambion well enough, though, to know that the more she came back with, the more forgiving he would be.

Pharaun and the other drow disappeared into the abandoned ruin, and Aliisza closed her eyes.

She was a tanar'ri and as such could move about the planes with a bit more ease than most. With a thought she was back in the Astral, floating free in the endless aether.

"You left the Abyss," Aliisza whispered to herself, though she addressed Lolth, "before you fell silent, so . . ."

She didn't bother finishing the thought, only concentrated on a name: Lolth. She closed her eyes again and let the name roll over and over again in her mind, and after a time, her body began to move. Any god's name has power, if you know how to use it.

When she opened her eyes she was surrounded by ghosts.

Translucent gray shades floated all around her, all of them with similar features: the pointed ears, almond-shaped eyes, and thin, aristocratic faces of the dark elves. There were a lot of them-a war's worth-and they were all headed across the Astral Plane toward the same destination.

Aliisza drifted in front of one of them, a strong-looking male dressed for battle, regal in his armor and helm.

"Can you hear me?" she asked the spirit. "Can you see me?"

The dead drow looked right at her and lifted an eyebrow. He stood stock still, but his body continued to drift through the endless expanse, unerringly falling sideways toward its final destination.

"My name is Aliisza," she said. "Do you know where you are?"

Yes, the drow answered directly into her mind. His mouth was open, but his lips didn't move. I can feel it. I'm dead. I died. I was killed.

"What is your name?"

I was Vilto'sat Shobalar, the soldier answered, but now I am nothing. My body rots away, my House forgets me, and I pass on. Are you here to torment me? "I'm sorry?" the alu-fiend asked, confused by the drow spirit's suddenchange of subject.

You're a demon, he said. Are you here to torment me? For my failure on the battlefield or simply to satisfy your cruel nature?

Aliisza's hackles rose, and she couldn't help but sneer at the dead drow. He had obviously mistaken her for a different sort of tanar'ri altogether, and she didn't find it flattering in the least.

"If I was here to torment you," she said, "you'd know it, mushroom farm." Vilto'sat Shobalar turned away from her with a look of haughty contempt that was the only thing, apparently, dark elves took to the grave.

Aliisza moved on along the line of dead drow, and as she progressed in the direction of their travel, moving faster than the wandering souls, the density of the ghosts increased, as if they had been stacking up, one after another, for a long time. Finally, her curiosity getting the better of her, she stopped another drow spirit: a female dressed in finery that made the alu-fiend momentarily jealous.

"Lady," she said, sketching an overwrought bow that the dead dark elf seemed to find insulting, "may I speak with you briefly as you complete your journey?" There's nothing you can do to torment me, demon, the shade said into Aliisza's mind, so move on and let me be dead in peace.

Aliisza hissed and almost reached out to grab the female by her throat then realized that her hands would pass through the priestess. The dead female would have no physical form again until she arrived at her final destination. The Astral Plane was only a way to get from one universe to another. There, the dead drow were incorporeal ghosts.

"I'm not here to torment you, bitch," Aliisza said, "but I will if you don't answer a question or two."

Lolth has turned her back on us, the priestess replied. What worse could you do?

"I could leave you in the Astral forever," Aliisza replied-a hollow threat, but the ghost didn't need to know that.

What do you want? the drow replied.

"Who are you," she asked, "and how long have you been here, awaiting Lolth's grace?"

I am Greyanna Mizzrym, the ghost replied-and Aliisza thought something about the name was oddly familiar. I have no idea how long I've been here, but I can feel myself moving. That only just started. Is Lolth ready to take us in? Has she sent you?

"Can you feel her?" Aliisza asked, ignoring he dark elf's questions. "Does she call you?"

The priestess looked away, as if listening for something, then she shook her head.

I'm moving toward something, Greyanna said. I can feel it, but I do not hear Lolth.

Aliisza turned to look in the direction the line of drow souls were moving. At the end of the very long line was a whirlpool of red and black-a gateway to the outer planes that was drawing the souls in.

"That's not the Abyss," Aliisza said.

It's home, whispered the bodiless soul of Greyanna Mizzrym. I can feel it. It is. It's the Demonweb Pits.

Aliisza's heart raced.

"The Demonweb Pits," the alu-fiend repeated, "but not the Abyss."

Aliisza stopped herself and hung in the gray expanse off to one side of the procession of dead drow.

"Well," Aliisza whispered to an unhearing Lolth, "moving up in the world, aren't we?"

The alu-fiend closed her eyes and concentrated on Kaanyr Vhok. She let her consciousness travel through the Astral and back to the cold, hard Underdark. There she found her lover's mind and dropped a message into it.

Something is happening with the Demonweb Pits, she sent. It's a plane unto itself now, and the gates are open. Lolth welcomes home the dead. She lives. That was all she could say, and she hoped it would be warning enough. Aliisza could have shifted back to the Underdark in an instant and been by her lover's side, but she didn't. She wanted to stay where she was, though she didn't know why.

Nimor had given up trying to claw Gromph. Instead, he started to work on forcing the archmage to attack him, but the drow wouldn't oblige. The feeling Nimor had that Gromph somehow knew what he was thinking-maybe before he even thought it-grew stronger and stronger and made Nimor start to second-guess himself. It was no way to fight.

Nimor stepped back and so did Gromph. The assassin could see Dyrr slowly circling them both from a safe-some would say cowardly-distance. The assassin was about to speak when a familiar nettling buzzed in his skull.

Aliisza is in the Demonweb Pits, the voice of Kaanyr Vhok sounded in his head. Something is happening, and it will be bad for us all. I'm not waiting to find out how bad.

For the first time in a very, very long time, Nimor's blood ran cold.

Gromph twitched, almost gasped, and Nimor couldn't help but look at him. Their eyes locked, and an instant of understanding passed between them. Nimor stepped back, and Gromph nodded. The archmage still kept the ghostly battle-axe in front of him but didn't advance. He breathed heavily, sweat running down the sides of his face and matting his snow-white hair to his forehead.

Again, Nimor was about to speak, and again he was interrupted.

"What are you doing?" the lichdrow demanded. "Kill him!"

Nimor let a long, steady breath hiss out through clenched teeth. It was bad enough that a key component of his alliance was abandoning the cause, worse still thatLolth was somehow, for some reason he might never understand, choosing that moment to finally return-or do something that scared Kaanyr Vhok, anyway, and the cambion wasn't the type to scare easily. All that, an opponent he should have been able to dispatch with nary a thought but who was able to out-think and outfight him at every turn, and the damned lich was barking orders at him.

Dyrr began shouting again, but Nimor didn't understand what he was saying. "I can't-" the Anointed Blade started to say then stopped when he realized that the lich was casting a spell.

Gromph heard him too. With one hand still holding the axe in front of him, the archmage tapped his staff on the pockmarked floor of the smoldering Bazaar and was instantly enveloped in a globe of shimmering energy. No sooner did the globe appear than Dyrr finished his muttering, and the sound of the lich's voice was replaced by a low, echoing buzz.

Nimor, eyes still locked on Gromph's, blinked. The archmage glanced over at the lich, and one side of his mouth curled up into the beginning of a smile. Nimor had to look, and he knew that Gromph had no intention of attacking him anyway. The buzzing sound grew louder, escalating to an almost deafening roar. Nimor saw what looked like a cloud of black smoke winding through the air at him, and it was a few seconds before he realized it wasn't smoke. The cloud wasn't a cloud at all, but a swarm of tiny insects-perhaps tens, even hundreds of millions of them.

The swarm descended over Gromph, but they didn't penetrate the globe that surrounded the archmage. Nimor had to assume they were being directed by Dyrr, so when the insects turned on him, he took it personally.

Before the first of them could land on him, sting him, bite him, or do whatever they were meant to do to him, Nimor stepped into the Shadow Fringe. The act was second nature to him. He was there in the Bazaar, then he wasn't. The swarm became a shadow, the Bazaar a dull world, barely corporeal, drenched in blackness.

Nimor looked at his claws. His mind was strangely blank, his mood impossibly serene.

"Is that it?" he said aloud into the unhearing shadows. "Have I lost?"

He closed his eyes and thought of the lich . . . and stepped back into the solid world right behind him.

Nimor grabbed the spindly undead mage from behind and beat his wings hard to pull him up and away from the floor of the Bazaar. The lich stiffened and drew in a breath-perhaps to cast a spell-but was wise enough to stop when Nimor pressed one razor-sharp talon into the lich's desiccated throat.

"You might not bleed, lich," Nimor whispered into the lichdrow's ear, "but if your head comes away from your neck . . ."

"What are you doing?" Dyrr asked, his voice a thin, reedy hiss. "You could kill him. Our moment is at hand, and you turn on me? Me?"

"You?" Nimor sneered. "Yes, you. I should kill you now, but then you're already dead, aren't you, lich? All you did was waste my time, and now the Spider Queen is rattling in her cage, and our time together is spent."

"What?" Dyrr asked, honestly confused. "What are you saying?"

"Not that you deserve to know it before I let Gromph Baenre kill you," Nimor replied, "but it's over."

"No!" the lich shouted.

Nimor grunted when something pushed hard against his chest His hand came away from the lich's throat, and he was forced backward, driven through the air by some unfathomable force. Despite any attempt to fly, Nimor was repulsed. The assassin spared a glance down at Gromph, who had put away his stolen duergar battle-axe and was looking up at them, laughing.

Nimor laughed too. Why not?

"We failed, lich," Nimor called to Dyrr, "but at least for me there will be another chance."

"We failed?" the lich wailed. "We? No, you wretched son of a wyrm, you failed. You'll go back to the Shadow with your dragon's tail between your legs, repeating your feeble excuses to yourself over and over again. Blame me if you wish, Nimor, but I'm still here. Live or die, I'll still be here, in Menzoberranzan, fighting."

"Perhaps," Nimor said, the first waves of a profound exhaustion beginning to soften his tired muscles, "but not for long."

The lich screamed his name, but Nimor didn't hear the first echo before he drifted into the Shadow Fringe and was gone from Menzoberranzan forever.