Sacrifice of the Widow_ Lady Penitent - Lisa Smedman [96]
The plain was as uneven as a pox-scarred face, cratered with depressions and gouged with deep chasms. Everywhere Cavatina looked, there were webs. They drifted on the wind and snagged on her clothes and hair. Feeling something tickle her bare knee, she glanced down. The ground was covered in tiny red spiders, each no larger than a grain of rice. They swarmed up onto her boots. She whispered a prayer. Under its compulsion, the tiny spiders leaped from her boots and scurried away into cracks in the rock.
“Where is the temple?” she asked in a low voice. The cluster of red “stars” overhead made her wary of raising her voice.
Halisstra pointed at a spot, perhaps a league away, where dozens of what looked like flat-topped spires of stone protruded from the ground. “On top of one of those.”
Cavatina squinted at the distant objects. “What are they?”
“The petrified legs of giant spiders.”
Cavatina frowned. “That’s what you built Eilistraee’s temple on top of?”
Halisstra gave a lopsided grin. “It offered the best vantage point, easier to defend than anywhere else.” She gestured with a misshapen hand. “Come.”
Halisstra scuttled away across the wasteland toward the spires. The Darksong Knight activated the magic of her boots then followed, not wanting to let Halisstra get out of sight. Cavatina levitated and descended, levitated and descended, in a series of long, graceful strides. Each time a boot touched ground, it slipped slightly as it squished the tiny spiders that swarmed there. Certain that Lolth would react to this defilement of her domain any instant, Cavatina kept a watchful eye for whatever the Spider Queen would hurl at her, but there were no attacks. No spiders descended from the skies, no darkfire boiled up from the ground below, no madness-inducing peals of laughter echoed across the landscape. It was as if the domain itself held its breath, waiting to see what Halisstra and Cavatina would do.
It was certainly the Demonweb Pits, but one vital element was missing: Lolth’s fortress. Said to be shaped like an enormous iron spider, it should have been ceaselessly patrolling her realm, yet Cavatina could neither see nor hear it. Was the Demonweb Pits so vast that Lolth’s fortress was beyond the horizon? It was a question Cavatina could not answer. She knew only one thing. Wherever Lolth’s fortress might be, she was glad it wasn’t on top of them.
As she descended from yet another floating leap, her eyes were drawn to a web-choked crevice in the ground where something stirred. This gave her the warning she needed to spring to the side as a cluster of spider-things burst from the crevice and swarmed toward her. She recognized them at once: chwidenchas, creatures made from the magically altered bodies of drow who had displeased Lolth. Each of the four creatures was the size of a small horse, composed entirely of bristly black legs tipped with claws as sharp as daggers. Additional barbs lined the inside of each leg, turning it into the equivalent of a saw blade. Once a chwidencha landed on its chosen prey, those barbs would hook fast in a grapple. The only way to avoid being crushed when the creature squeezed was by tearing free—something that would carve jagged wounds into the victim’s flesh.
Cavatina had escaped the chwidenchas by levitating, but Halisstra wasn’t so fortunate. Attracted by the vibrations of her footfalls, the spider-things veered toward her. Halisstra whirled and blasted one of them with a web, suffocating it under a thick coating of sticky silk, but then the other three were on her. Legs rose and fell, the claws stabbing down. Most skittered harmlessly off Halisstra’s stone-tough skin, but a few of the jabs sank home. In an instant, Halisstra’s body was coated in blood.
Halisstra stood and fought them. If it was a ploy on her part to gain Cavatina’s sympathy, it was a dangerous one.
Cavatina landed, stamping her feet to draw the chwidenchas’ attention. Two of them broke off their attack on Halisstra and scurried