Ascendancy of the Last - Lisa Smedman [119]
She sang a protective hymn, then a glamor that would screen her from sight until she chose to strike a blow. Her third prayer would allow her to slip through the tangle of webs unimpeded. She crept closer to the mound and eased her way into the tangle of web. The sticky silk slid past her body as if her skin were oiled. Just ahead was a haphazardly spun cocoon. Looking around, Cavatina saw dozens more, each of them easily large enough to contain a drow. Several bulged and rocked, as whatever was trapped within struggled to get free.
"By all that dances," Cavatina breathed. "This looks like Halisstra's handiwork!"
Was Halisstra still alive? After betraying Cavatina to the demon Wendonai, she had reappeared briefly atop the Acropolis, then vanished without a trace. That had been two years ago. No one had been able to learn where she had disappeared to-not even Qiluй.
A sound within the cocoon next to Cavatina drew her attention. Over the discordant music coming from within the mound, she made out a muffled female voice: a word or two of song, then a struggling gasp, then another faint note of song. She was debating whether to tear the cocoon open when another of the cocoons turned slightly, revealing a partially rotten hand protruding through a gap in its side. A spider-shaped ring adorned one of the death-stiffened fingers: Lolth's symbol.
Cavatina sang a divination. A dim purple glow leaked out of the cocoons that were still twitching: the aura of evil. Cavatina's eyes narrowed. Did each contain one of Lolth's faithful? Had Halisstra turned against the Spider Queen?
The answers, Cavatina was certain, would lie within the mound.
She spoke Laeral's name, and whispered what she'd just seen. As she did, she stared at the cocoons, debating what to do. Four years ago, she would have reveled in slaying an evil deity's helpless faithful, but now she found the thought repugnant. She said a prayer for those inside, praying they might survive long enough to be cut down and freed by the priestesses Laeral would soon bring. "May you find redemption," she whispered, her fingers touching the cocoon in front of her.
She crept on through the tangle of webs, closer to the hill they covered. A tree near the base of the hill had fallen, its roots tearing a hole in the earth, and inside this gap lay an adamantine door. More webs dangled, like a curtain, in the empty doorframe. She slipped into a chamber with a depression in its black marble floor and blasphemous murals showing masked spiders. Drying blood was splattered everywhere. The metallic smell of it overwhelmed the stench of the cocooned corpses outside. The far wall held a mural of a spider with a drow head and a lesser spider dangling from each arm; the abdomen was a dark hole in the masonry. The harp music came from inside it.
Beyond the hole was a second, stone-walled chamber. Cavatina spoke Laeral's name again and described what she saw. Nine corridors radiated from the second chamber. The harp music came from the one in the middle of the rear wall. More murals adorned the walls of this chamber, but they were obscured by webs and ruptured egg sacs. Movements on the floor caught her eye. Thousands of tiny red spiders, none of them bigger than a drop of blood, coursed back and forth, scurrying first in one direction, then another. They seemed to be moving in time with the music-scurrying, then stopping, then moving in another direction again as its tempo and melody changed.
Cavatina smiled grimly. She liked a challenge. She sprang through the hole and ran through the chamber, leaping gracefully from one clear patch of floor to the next in an improvised dance. The spiders thinned once she was inside the corridor, allowing her to slow her pace. After a short distance, the corridor opened onto a third chamber. Cavatina, still invisible, peered inside, battling the urge to pinch her nostrils shut against the sulfurous smell within: the stench of demon.
The room was larger than the