The spider poison.
Uluyara and Feliane crowded around her, concern in their expressions. Uluyara examined
Halisstra's wounds, found the blackened holes in her leg.
"Poison," Uluyara concluded.
"Let me," Feliane said and took Halisstra's hands in her own.
Feliane sang to the Dancing Goddess above the howl of the wind, and her song purged the poison from Halisstra's veins.
Halisstra felt as though something else might have been purged from her veins too. She thanked Feliane, who hugged her.
Afterward, the three priestesses of Eilistraee entered the temple they had raised. Uluyara quickly walked the interior, holding her holy symbol medallion and chanting the while.
When she was finished she looked at her two companions and said, "This is hallowed ground now, reclaimed from Lolth in the name of the Dark Maiden. At least for a time."
Halisstra could not help but smile. The interior of the temple did feel different, cleaner, purer.
Within its rough walls, she felt sure of herself for the first time in days.
All three priestesses sank to the floor, spent, their backs to the wall, their legs extended.
Exhaustion showed in both Uluyara's and Feliane's expressions. But elation too. They had reached the Demonweb Pits and survived the attack of a spider swarm.
After a few moments' respite, Uluyara healed them all of their minor cuts, scrapes, and bites.
Feliane conjured a meal of vegetable stew and fresh water into some small bowls she carried in her pack.
After the repast, Halisstra said to them, "We should take watch in shifts, just to be safe, while we wait. I doubt the spiders will dare the top of this spire in the wind, but we cannot be sure.
When things grow calmer below, we can continue on. I'll take first watch."
Uluyara nodded, shifted against the wall, and closed her eyes. She vented a sigh and soon was in Reverie. Feliane followed her quickly.
Both were seasoned warriors, Halisstra realized, taking rest wherever and whenever they could.
Halisstra quietly positioned herself near the open door. She drew the Crescent Blade, laid it across her thighs, and settled in for her watch.
Outside, the wind railed against the temple for the effrontery it was. In its angry wails,
Halisstra still heard it calling to Lolth's Chosen, but she knew-or at least she thought that she knew-that it was no longer calling to her.
"I'm coming for you," she softly promised. "Soon."
Being little more than nests of legs, the chwidencha charged forward with alarming rapidity.
Pharaun willed himself into the air as they closed and his ring answered. In one hand, he still held the ball of guano; with the other, he pulled a bit of flakefungus from a cloak pocket and shouted the words to a spell. As he uttered the last word to the incantation, he crushed the flakefungus in his hand and cast the powder in the direction of one of the charging chwidenchas.
It uttered a squeal of agony as the magic engulfed it, flensed it of flesh, stripped it of its carapace, and left nothing more than a shapeless pile of gore.
The rest of the pack did not so much as slow.
Jeggred bounded forward in front of Danifae and met three onrushing chwidenchas with a charge of his own. He caught the first of them in mid-jump, plucking it from the air in his powerful fighting arms and tearing off its legs by the bunch while the creature squealed and slammed its remaining claws against the draegloth's flesh, leaving bloody welts. Ichor sprayed,
coating the draegloth, mixing with his own blood. In three heartbeats, the draegloth had disarticulated the creature, leaving only a round lump of hair and flesh.
Two other chwidenchas leaped atop Jeggred, one on his back and one on his side. Their weight knocked him to the ground and the three fell in a snarling tangle of legs and claws.
Jeggred still clutched a handful of the legs from the first chwidencha he had killed. Chwidencha claws rose and fell like miners' picks, churning earth and flesh. Fanged mouths tried to penetrate the iron of the draegloth's flesh. Jeggred roared and answered with his own claws. Pieces of chwidencha flew high into the air.
The rest of the pack continued forward and swarmed the priestesses. Danifae barely had time to pocket her holy symbol and free her morningstar before the chwidenchas were upon her. She careened backward and struck one with the spiked weapon, snapping some of its legs. She spun away from a claw swipe from another and slammed the head of the weapon into another chwidencha's front, but a third leaped high and landed atop her. She tried to utter a spell, but the creature wrapped its legs around her as tightly as a cloak and tried to drive her to the ground. She turned a circle, its weight causing her to stumble, all the while offering a muffled chant. Finally she went down, and five chwidencha swarmed over her. Pharaun could barely see the priestess under the squirming mass of legs and claws. Claws pounded into her mail, her flesh.
To his surprise and to her credit, Danifae did not stop fighting. She pulled a dagger from a belt sheath and fought from the ground, kicking, stabbing, screaming, driving the dagger repeatedly into the flesh of chwidenchas that coated her. Pharaun figured her for dead and put her out of his mind.
Below and to Pharaun's right, Quenthel's whip cracked. All five serpents extended to twice their ordinary length and clamped their fanged mouths onto the legs of a chwidencha. Almost instantly, the creature's legs went rigid, and it fell over dead from the whip's venom.
Unperturbed, its fellows trampled over it. Chwidenchas closed on Quenthel from all sides.
Quenthel uttered a hasty prayer to Lolth and instantly grew to half again her size. A violet glow suffused her flesh, the power of Lolth made manifest. Using her magical buckler as a weapon, and driven by her spell-enhanced strength, she smashed its steel face into the front of a chwidencha, snapping a mass of legs like twigs. Three claws from a chwidencha to her right slammed into her in rapid succession, driving her backward but seemingly doing no real harm.
Her whip struck again, driving back one of the creatures. She caught another chwidencha in her buckler hand, gripping two thick legs in her fist, and threw the creature across the battlefield.
Before Pharaun could shout a warning, another two chwidenchas leaped onto Quenthel from behind. She bore the weight better than Danifae, tried to throw them over her back, but six others rushed forward. Claws thumped against her armor and tore gashes in her exposed flesh. Her serpents lashed out but missed. She fell, buried under a pile of seething, churning legs and claws.
Pharaun heard Danifae shout a warning, he turned in mid-air-
And saw only a curtain of legs, claws, coarse hair, and an open, fang-filled mouth before the creature was upon him. A chwidencha had leaped high enough into the air to reach him. It hit him full force in the chest and wrapped its legs around him. The impact drove him backward and down, despite the power of his ring of flying. He hit the earth in a heap, entwined with the creature, his breath gone. The chwidencha wrapped him up with some of its innumerable legs,
while it bit with its dripping fangs and flailed with its free claws like a mad thing. Blows slashed against Pharaun's sides, his arms, his face, into the earth around him.
Only Pharaun's enchanted piwafwi prevented the claws from disemboweling him, but he still felt blood flowing down his torso, and the impacts to his head nearly knocked him senseless.
He tried to fend off the blows with his hands and feet and roll out from under the chwidencha,
but it was too heavy and too determined to hang on. Unable to fly, he mentally summoned his rapier from his ring, remembering too late that he had lost the ring to Belshazu. The chwidencha's fangs ground against his magically armored cloak again and again, trying but failing to penetrate the garment and open his gut.