“I know,” Danifae answered.
Halisstra loved her too, despite it all.
“I know,” Danifae said again, and her embrace softened.
Halisstra could bear no more. With a grunt, she pushed Danifae away, screaming as the blade exited her flesh. The effort knocked them off balance, and both sprawled to the ground, Danifae still stuck through with steel. They both sat on Lolth’s ground, bleeding and gasping.
Quenthel Baenre eyed them both.
“Here is where it ends,” she said, and advanced on Danifae. The whips of her serpent glared.
A hiss and sizzling sound turned Halisstra’s head, turned Quenthel’s head, turned the heads of the whip vipers.
Nycaloths appeared around them, teleporting in from the battlefield below. One, three, eight, a dozen—the smallest of them towered over even Quenthel. Their muscles rippled under their scaled skin. Each bore a rune-inscribed axe. Their muzzles twisted into snarls.
Desperation contorted Quenthel’s face. She looked at the nycaloths, at Danifae, at Halisstra.
Halisstra could see the indecision in her eyes. It resolved into an expression of utter hate.
“It is not you,” the Baenre priestess said to Danifae, her voice shrill.
She ignored the danger of the nycaloths and raised the whip high for a killing strike when high atop the grotesque heap of Lolth’s city the double doors to the Spider Queen’s tabernacle flew open. Rays of violet light poured from the temple doors.
For Halisstra, time seemed to stop. Motion ceased. Every being within sight of Lolth’s city—yugoloths, drow, demons, and draegloth—stayed their hands. All eyes turned toward the unending web, toward the Spider Queen’s city.
A ripple ran through the arachnid host gathered at the far edge of the plains, an anticipatory shuffling. The sound of their motion reminded Halisstra of the downpour of rain she had heard while in the World Above.
Her heart hammered; her breath came fast. She clutched the broken Crescent Blade in her fist so tightly she feared her skin would split. She barely felt her wound. Danifae lay a few paces from her, facing the city, eyes wide, breathing shallow, her cloak soaked with blood. A whispered prayer of healing, a powerful one, leaked from the battle-captive’s lips. Seyll’s sword slid from her flesh, and the wound closed. Halisstra echoed the prayer and closed her own wound.
Quenthel didn’t notice either of them. She stood and stared back at Lolth’s city, frozen, her whip still held high for a strike.
Souls hung sizzling in the air over the Plains of Soulfire, writhing in agony, bleeding weakness from their eternal forms.
A sudden breeze picked up, blowing outward from the tabernacle. It turned to a gust, to a screaming gale, and in its scream Lolth’s voice spoke, the sound that of multiple voices, the seven voices of Halisstra’s vision: “Yor’thae.”
Around them, the nycaloths shared a look. Halisstra saw the fear in their eyes, the uncertainty.
Without warning, they blinked out, teleporting back from whence they came. The retreat spread rapidly to the rest of the surviving army, and they too fled. The klurichir, its flesh torn and one of its pincers severed, nevertheless gathered another mouthful of mezzoloths and blinked out himself. The swarm of spiders dissipated, and the creatures made their way back to their mountain dens. The undead mezzoloths animated by the ultroloth fell to the ground, as inert as the soil.
Corpses lay everywhere over the still Plains of Soulfire. Pharaun Mizzrym hung in the sky over the broken land, strangely motionless. Halisstra did not see Jeggred Baenre anywhere.
“She has chosen,” Danifae said as she rose to her feet.
Halisstra did the same.
A ripple went through Quenthel Baenre’s body, though whether from ecstasy or fear, Halisstra could not tell.
Pharaun couldn’t move or speak. He controlled his flight with his ring, which followed his mental urgings. Blood continued to pour down his sides from the wounds inflicted on him by the nycaloths.
He had heard Lolth’s call, had seen her temple open, but none of that concerned him. If he did not get aid from one of Lolth’s priestesses, and soon, he would die of blood loss.
He maneuvered his posture in the air so that he could see the ground. Movement from below drew his eye: Jeggred rose, staggering, from underneath a heap of mezzoloth corpses, his flesh bloody, one of his inner arms torn off at the elbow, one of his eyes little more than a bloody hole.
The draegloth looked not to Lolth’s temple but back up the path toward the Pass of the Soulreaver, to where the three priestesses stood.
Halisstra Melarn had followed them, somehow.
Quenthel, Danifae, and Halisstra stood high above the field of slaughter, staring up at Lolth’s tabernacle. They reminded Pharaun of queens surveying their realm.
In the air around Pharaun, souls still burned in violet fire. After undergoing purgation for a time, they flew on to Lolth’s city.
Pharaun knew that the priestesses too had undergone purgation. So had he. So, in his way, had Jeggred.
He flew toward them, marveling that they did not kill each other.
Pharaun supposed that Lolth’s call was bigger than their hate for each other. The Spider Queen’s voice controlled their conflict, just as her worship controlled the conflict endemic to drow society.
His vision blurred, but he fought back the oblivion of unconsciousness. He was weakening.
He wanted to call out to Quenthel but he could not speak. He flew toward the path.
The priestesses saw him coming. Halisstra retrieved a sword from the ground, but none of them moved to help. He set himself down before Quenthel.
Behind and below, he heard Jeggred loping up the ledge.
“Your male has returned,” Danifae said with a smirk, though Pharaun took satisfaction in her wince of pain.
“And yours is returning,” Quenthel said over her shoulder, meaning Jeggred.
The Baenre priestess studied Pharaun for a time, a peculiar look on her face. The Master of Sorcere saw in Quenthel’s expression that his life sat on a blade’s edge.
“You can fly due to your ring but are otherwise immobile?” she asked.
Pharaun could not answer.
“A counterspell will do,” Quenthel said.
Pharaun would have breathed a sigh of relief, if he could have.
Quenthel incanted her spell, and when she finished, Pharaun still could not move.
A dark smile split the high priestess’s face.
“No more flying,” she said.
He tested her words, mentally calling upon the ring to lift him. It did nothing.
The bitch had countered the magic in his ring!
“The goddess summons me, Master Mizzrym,” she said. “You have served your purpose, as all males do. But now your soul belongs to her.”
Jeggred loped up, panting, bleeding, the ragged flesh of his arm stump seeping crimson.
“Mistress,” the draegloth said to Danifae and eyed Quenthel and Pharaun with undisguised hate.
Danifae looked at Jeggred, looked at Pharaun, looked out over the Plains of Soulfire.
“The goddess summons us, Quenthel Baenre,” she said to Quenthel. To Jeggred, she said, “Carry Master Mizzrym down to the plains and leave him there. As Mistress Quenthel said, his soul belongs to the Spider Queen.”
Pharaun wanted to curse, to cast, to rail, but he could do nothing. His heart beat fast in his chest.
Jeggred did not question. He leered into Pharaun’s face and reached out to take him in his fighting arms.
A surge went through the mage. The ultroloth had not dispelled Pharaun’s contingency spell.
The moment the draegloth touched him, a magical fist would come into effect. Pharaun could control it mentally. He tensed, ready.