“How will we know which one will lead us to the Abyss?” Valas Hune asked.
“Do not worry, my friend, the spell Vhaeraun has granted me also confers a certain affinity for the destination I conceived when I shifted my spirit to this plane, and I am leading us more or less directly to the nearest color pool that will serve our purposes.”
“How much longer must we travel?” Quenthel asked.
“We are drawing near,” the priest answered. “It’s hard to tell here, of course, but I would guess we are within four or five hours of our destination. We’ve already traveled for almost two days.”
Two days? Halisstra thought. It seemed much less.
She found herself wondering what might have transpired back in Faerûn in two days. Did Jeggred still maintain his vigil over their inert bodies? He couldn’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 managed to return to their native plane?
Absorbed in her own thoughts, Halisstra kept to herself for the balance of the journey, scarcely noticing that her companions did the same. It came as a surprise to her when Tzirik slowed his effortless flight and finally arrested his motion all together, facing a 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’s domain that is bound to change. If you have any second thoughts 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 came here to do.”
Without waiting for the priest she arrowed forward and plunged herself into the whirling, inky blot. In the blink of an eye her gleaming astral form was lost to view, swallowed by the maelstrom.
“Impatient, isn’t she?” Tzirik remarked.
He shrugged and moved into the color pool himself. Like Quenthel, Halisstra sensed a certainty in the moment, and she did not mean to let any quailing sway her from her intended course. She entered the pool of swirling night a heartbeat behind Tzirik, her teeth bared in a defiant snarl.
There was no sensation at first, though the pool swallowed her sight completely the moment she plunged within it. The medium seemed much the same as the rest of the Astral Plane—a weightless, cool, perfect nothingness—but the swirling current of the revolving pool caught her at once, tugging on her with some strange nondimensional feeling of attraction or acceleration that dragged her psychic form in a direction she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. It didn’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 arms and tried to extricate herself from the spinning mass. There was another long moment of indescribable motion, and—
She was through.
Halisstra swayed drunkenly with the return of gravity and struggled to catch her balance. She opened her eyes and found herself standing on something silver-gray, a steeply sloping 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 limbs nervously or fingered their weapons.
All around there was nothing but a black, smothering emptiness darker and more forbidding than the blackest chasm of the Underdark. Her nostrils filled with a foul, acrid scent, and a soft muttering updraft streamed constantly from below. Halisstra glanced into the abyss at her left hand and saw something gleaming there, a dull silver strand several miles away that sloped down through the darkness. Lesser strands intersected 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 ramp or buttress on which she stood. The hot, stinking breeze grew momentarily stronger and actually managed to induce a great, gentle swaying in the monstrous strand.
“It’s a spiderweb,” Ryld muttered. “A gigantic 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 comfortable walking more than a dozen feet or so from the centerline of the strand. She knelt and brushed her fingers over the strand’s surface, and grimaced.
“Sticky, but not dangerously so—and we appear to be completely physical again.”
She straightened, and stretched languidly. “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 might say that your spirit must undergo a sort of condensation 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 simply fade away into nothingness.”
“You seem well acquainted with the rigors of planar travel,” Halisstra observed.
“Vhaeraun has called me to his service in the planes beyond Faerûn on several occasions,” Tzirik admitted. “In fact, I have been in the Demonweb Pits before now. All the gods of our race reside here, each in their own domain within this great chasm of webbing. My previous business did not take me to Lolth’s domain, though, and that was a good many years ago.”
Quenthel scowled and said, “All of the Demonweb Pits are Lolth’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’s beliefs on the matter, and so I will not argue the point with you, priestess of Lolth. For our purposes, the exact relationship of our pantheon’s deities is not very important.”
Tzirik turned his back on Quenthel and surveyed the black gulf surrounding the party. He waved his hand in a sweeping gesture.
“Somewhere below us we will find some kind of gate or border marking the place where this entryway opens to Lolth’s own domain—which, as I understand it, is much like the rest of the Demonweb Pits, except subject to her every whim and caprice.”
“If the plane is infinite, then the spot we seek might 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 what we seek—an hour’s march, perhaps a day’s, but not much farther. Since we know that Lolth’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, we will follow them.”
If Lolth is still calling them home, Halisstra thought.
The others seemed to be thinking the same thing.
The armored priest hefted his mace in his hand, adjusted the grip 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 column of webbing behind the Jaelre priest.