Sacrifice of the Widow_ Lady Penitent - Lisa Smedman [34]
The cleric’s eyes widened. He spoke a prayer, and a square of darkness formed atop his mask, darkening it.
“Die!” he shouted, pointing at her.
The square of darkness lifted from his mask and flew toward Halisstra, turning edge-on just before it struck. It slashed across her chest, opening a wound from shoulder to shoulder. A little higher, and it would have severed her neck. She grunted, felt thick blood begin a sticky slide down her body. It dripped from her bare breasts and the eight tiny spider legs that drummed against her lower torso like restless fingers. The pain was intense. Exquisite. Nearly enough to overwhelm the lesser, constant pain of the eight pairs of never-healing punctures in her neck, arms, torso, and legs. She drank it in for a moment, letting it dampen the turmoil of emotion that boiled through her mind.
Then she sprang.
She landed on the cleric, knocking him to the ground and splattering him with her blood. Cursing frantically under his breath—any other male might have shouted for his companions, but Vhaeraun’s clerics were trained to fight silently—he fought her with darkfire. Hot black flames appeared around his left hand as he slapped it against her head. Her hair instantly ignited, and blazing black flames engulfed her head. Her eyes teared from the agony of a blistered scalp and ears, but she didn’t need to see to find her mark. Yanking the cleric close, she twined her spider legs around him. Then she bit.
She expected him to scream as her fangs punctured his soft flesh again and again, driving venom into his body. He did not. He continued fighting her, shouting the words of a prayer of dismissal. It might have worked, had Halisstra been a demon, but she was much more than that. She was the Lady Penitent, higher in stature than any of Lolth’s demonic handmaidens, battle-captive and left hand of the dark elf who had become Lolth.
The cleric’s struggles weakened. When they ceased, Halisstra yanked off his mask and cast it aside. The male was handsome, with a dimpled jaw and deep red eyes. In another life, he might have been someone she’d have chosen to seduce, but his jaw hung slack and his eyes were glassy. Dark blood—hers—smeared his black clothes and his long white hair.
She dropped him on the ground.
Halisstra waited several moments as the wound in her chest closed. The sting of her scalp eased and was replaced by a prickling sensation: her hair growing back in. When the clench of her flesh knitting itself together at last subsided, she picked up the cooling corpse. Working swiftly, she spun it between her hands, coating it with webbing. Then she stood it upright. The fully grown male was like a child to her, his web-shrouded head barely level with her stomach. She heaved him into the air and hung him from a branch where the others would be sure to find him.
She eyed her handiwork a moment more. Another of her mistress’s enemies, dead. Cruel triumph filled her then waned, replaced by sick guilt.
How she hated Lolth.
If only …
But that life was gone.
Springing into the branches above, she scuttled away into the night.
Q’arlynd followed Leliana and Rowaan across the open, rocky ground, Flinderspeld trudging dutifully in his master’s wake. This was the fourth night they’d spent walking across the High Moor toward the spot where the moon set, but they had yet to reach the shrine. Though the moon was getting slightly thinner each night—waning—and the sparkling points of light that followed it through the sky were dimming, their light still forced Q’arlynd to squint.
The days had been worse, intolerably bright yellow light from a burning orb in the sky. They had stopped to make camp whenever the sun rose, a concession to his “sun-weak eyes.” The priestesses had chuckled when Q’arlynd, sheltering under his piwafwi and fanning