Danifae eyed Quenthel before she took a step toward the chasme.
She entered the summoning circle, reached up, and ran her fingertips along the horn of the chasme’s nose. The demon’s wings buzzed uncontrollably. His mouth fell open, showing a long, hollow tongue, wet with stinking saliva.
“I believe we will be able to come to some... amicable arrangement,” Danifae purred.
A thick, dark fluid leaked from the chasme’s mouth. The demon shifted his gaze past Danifae to Jeggred—himself the spawn of a drow-demon coupling—buzzed his wings, and leered at Danifae.
Something long, thin, and dripping slipped out of his thorax.
Pharaun found the scene grotesque but fascinating.
Danifae only smiled, wrapped her hand around the demon’s horn, and said, “I trust you find my offer appealing?”
“Most appealing, priestess,” the chasme answered. With his thick, yellow tongue, Vakuul licked the ridges that served as his teeth. “I will carry you within my arms, carry you close. And afterward,” his wings buzzed with excitement, “closer still.”
Danifae released the demon’s horn and said, “My draegloth must accompany us.”
The chasme’s wings beat in agitation. His voice rose still higher. “No, priestess, no. He is too big, his smell too foul. Just you.”
Jeggred said nothing, merely stared.
Pharaun found it mildly amusing that a giant fly-demon found Jeggred too foul for transport.
A cutting quip seemed in order, but he restrained himself.
Danifae smiled and put her hand on Vakuul’s head. The chasme’s wings beat fast as she ran her fingers along the bristles of the demon’s hair.
“You cannot begin to comprehend what I am prepared to do for you,” she said, low and husky, “if you but do this for me and my servant.”
The thing protruding from the creature’s thorax managed to squirm out just a little farther.
“Both then,” the chasme said, drooling from his open mouth. “Come. Come, now.”
Danifae turned and gestured Jeggred forward.
“Come, Jeggred,” she said, even while signing to the draegloth:
When we arrive at the mountains, tear off anything that is sticking out of it, then kill it.
Jeggred smiled at the demon and stalked forward.
When Danifae turned back around to face the chasme, she again wore a seductive smile.
Pharaun could not help but admire her. The woman was not as powerful as Quenthel—that was clear—but she was as skilled a manipulator as Pharaun had ever encountered. Pharaun thought back to his encounter with Jeggred in the chwidencha tunnel. Pharaun had said that Danifae was manipulating the draegloth; Jeggred had answered that Danifae was instead manipulating Pharaun and Quenthel.
Pharaun began to suspect that both were likely true. Where Quenthel was raw power, Danifae was skillful subtlety. Both women were dangerous. He was coming to believe that either could be the Yor’thae, or perhaps neither. In truth, he did not care, as long as he came out of it with his life and his position.
Danifae looked back to Quenthel and Pharaun and said, “To the mountains then, Mistress Quenthel?”
Quenthel nodded, her face a mask of impassivity that poorly hid her anger.
Jeggred took the smiling Danifae in his arms, and the chasme wrapped both of them in his legs. Vakuul’s wings beat so fast that they became a barely visible blur.
“Heavy,” the demon said, in his whining voice but managed to get off the ground. “So heavy.”
Quenthel turned to the nalfeshnee and allowed him to scoop her up in his huge arms. His wings too began to beat, and somehow those absurd little appendages bore his huge bulk aloft.
“Follow, wizard,” Quenthel called.
Pharaun sighed, called on the power of his ring, and took flight behind them.
They soared high over the Demonweb Pits, flying into the teeth of the wind. They stayed below the souls but above the highest of the tors. The nalfeshnee cradled Quenthel against his mammoth chest. Her hair whipped in the wind. The chasme held Jeggred and Danifae close.
The creature pawed at Danifae as best he could while they flew.
Despite their respective loads, the demons moved at speed, and Pharaun struggled to keep up.
He could hear nothing over the roar of the wind other than the muted buzz of the chasme’s wings.
Rain pelted his face.
Taking flight allowed them to avoid the difficulties of the harsh terrain, and they devoured the leagues quickly. On foot, they would have had a five or six day trek to the mountains. Flying at the rate they were, Pharaun expected to reach the mountains around daybreak, perhaps a bit after.
He surveyed the plane below him as he flew. From above, the surface of the Pits looked like diseased skin-blistered, scarred, pockmarked. Lakes of acid dotted the ground, spider carcasses lay everywhere, and great crevasses split the landscape like scars.
He looked ahead toward the mountains but they remained invisible in the darkness. He could see the glowing souls, though, flying toward the mountains’ base, toward the Pass of the Reaver.
He replayed the demon’s words in his mind: You cannot attempt the pass and live, Zerevimeel had said. Then, I will think fondly of your soul being devoured by the Reaver.
Pharaun decided that he would rather keep his soul than not, but he still flew on.
Chapter Ten
The night was hours old, and still Halisstra had not disturbed her sisters’ Reverie. She knew she should. They ought to have used the night to travel, in case the slaughter renewed with the dawn, but Halisstra knew her sisters needed rest. They would have little opportunity for it after they left their makeshift temple atop the tor. Besides, Halisstra wanted them to have a few more hours of peace, alone with her faith. They soon would have little opportunity for that too.
She sat near the edge of the tor praying to the Dark Maiden for the strength to face the challenges ahead.
Above her, swirling vortices of colored energy still dotted the sky. With each passing moment, one or another of the vortices ejected a glowing soul into the air. With each moment, a worshiper of the Spider Queen died somewhere in the multiverse and the soul found its way to the Demonweb Pits. The process was as regular as a clockwork. Halisstra watched it happen time and again, and each time the newly arrived soul fell into the never-ending line of spirits floating toward their dark goddess, their eternal fate.
It would go on that way until the multiverse ended.
Unless Lolth died.
She watched the souls moving methodically toward their doom and wondered if Danifae was among them. With the Binding between them severed, Halisstra would not have sensed Danifae’s death. She fervently hoped that her former battle-captive still lived.
Thinking of Danifae sent a surge of hope and fear through Halisstra. Danifae had told her once, as they stood together in some ruins in the World Above, that she had felt Eilistraee’s call.
The battle-captive had spoken those words when she had come to warn Halisstra that Quenthel had sent Jeggred to kill Ryld.
Danifae had warned her.
There was a kinship between them, Halisstra knew, something born in the Binding that once had joined them as master and slave. She knew that Danifae could be redeemed. And since Halisstra had given herself fully to the Lady of the Dance, she would be able to help Danifae along the path of redemption—as long as she wasn’t already dead.
An overwhelming sense of regret tightened Halisstra’s chest, regret for a life ill-spent inflicting pain and engaging in petty tyrannies. She had wasted centuries on hate. Tears threatened, but she fought them back with a stubborn shake of her head.
The wind gusted, sliced through her prayer, cut through the song-spider webs, and called out for the Yor’thae.