Halisstra felt sick and elated all at once.
She turned to find Uluyara looking at her, head cocked. The high priestess seemed to want to say something but instead gave Halisstra a nod of approval and kneeled beside Feliane. She took the elf's face in her hands and whispered healing words. After a few moments, Feliane's remaining wounds closed completely, color returned to her face, and her eyes fluttered open.
Uluyara helped her to her feet and held her steady.
"The Lady watches her faithful," Uluyara said to the elf, and Feliane nodded.
The slight elf warrior-priestess eyed the carcass of the sword spider. She looked thanks at
Halisstra.
Halisstra gave her an absent half smile but found her gaze reaching out, beyond the wall of blades. There, the slaughter went on unabated. Spiders bit, clawed, tore, and devoured one another in a nonstop orgy of violence. From time to time, one ventured or was carried by the combat into Uluyara's wall of blades, where it vanished in a spray of gore.
In a way that made her sick to admit, Halisstra found the slaughter somehow rational. The strong would devour the weak and become stronger still.
She knew that she was looking upon the pith of Lolth's doctrine made flesh, a metaphor for the Spider Queen's entire creed.
"This has to end sometime," she said. "We should hole up until it does."
Feliane, recovering her blade from the ground, asked, "Where will we go?"
"There," Halisstra replied, and nodded at the spire of stone looming over them. Few spiders prowled its sheer, strangely angled heights. They would be able to hold their ground atop it until the madness came to its bloody end. "We'll fly."
Seeing agreement in the eyes of Uluyara and Feliane, she again touched the medallion affixed to the chest of her mail and whispered a prayer to Eilistraee.
"Halisstra," Uluyara interrupted, her voice low and urgent. "The Crescent Blade."
The words to the prayer died on Halisstra's lips, and she felt her cheeks burn. She had left
Eilistraee's blade in the carcass of the sword spider.
She had forgotten it.
"Of course," she said, in a poor attempt to cover her neglect.
Without meeting Uluyara's or Feliane's eyes, she sheathed Seyll's songsword in the scabbard over her back, walked over to the dead sword spider, and withdrew the Crescent Blade. She cleaned it on the spider's carcass before putting it back in the scabbard at her waist.
When she turned, she saw the doubt in Uluyara's eyes and the embarrassment in Feliane's. She chose to ignore them both.
"You're wounded," Uluyara said, and pointed at the seeping wounds in Halisstra's legs and the holes in her arm.
Halisstra had forgotten them too. She was certain she had been poisoned by the bites. The magical ring she wore allowed her to sense as much, and yet she showed no ill effects. She didn't want to acknowledge why that might be.
"It's nothing," she said and began her spell anew.
When she completed the prayer, her body and gear and those of her fellow priestesses metamorphosed into an insubstantial gray vapor. She could still see, though her field of vision seemed to swell, contract, and roll. She could somehow still feel her body, or at least a body,
though it felt thin and stretched, not unlike her soul.
The gusting wind tugged at her but she resisted its pull and willed herself into the air. Feliane and Uluyara, both appearing as vaguely humanoid clouds of vapor beside her, followed after.
Free of her flesh for at least a few moments, Halisstra felt free of her doubt, of her inner struggle. She felt unburdened by the world, as light as one of Lolth's souls streaming through the sky high above. She wished she could feel that way forever.
Flying up the sheer, rocky side of the black, twisted outcropping, she looked for a likely place to wait out the slaughter. She was pleased to see no webs anywhere on the spire-though other tors had many-and the gusting wind seemed to keep the spiders from reaching its heights.
At its top, the spire looked as though it had been sheared off by a keen blade, forming a round, featureless plateau twenty paces in diameter. The wind would whip at them there, but they would be sheltered from the violence below.
Halisstra alit on the plateau, waited for Feliane and Uluyara to follow, and dispelled the magic. As one, the three priestesses regained their normal forms. Halisstra's doubt returned with her flesh. The gusting wind nearly lifted her from her feet.
"We'll need shelter," Halisstra said above the wind.
Even there, the keening webs called to her. Yor'thae, they whispered.
In the distance, she could see ominous clouds forming over a distant mountain range and moving rapidly in their direction-a storm was coming.
"Gather here," Uluyara said, pulling Halisstra and Feliane into a circle.
Wrapped in the arms of her fellow priestesses, Halisstra felt a sense of sisterhood that reassured her, at least for the moment.
"We will form a sanctuary together," Uluyara said above the wind. "A place of safety in the midst of this obscenity."
Feliane and Halisstra nodded, though Halisstra did not understand exactly what she meant.
Uluyara stepped back from their circle, removed her silver medallion from under her mail,
and spoke a prayer to Eilistraee. The wind swallowed her words, but when she was done, she joined her hands, pointed them at the stone of the tor as through they were a knife, and parted them.
The stone answered her gesture. Her magic turned the rock malleable, and she shaped it as though it were clay in her hands. Moving with precision, she used the spell to raise two walls from the flatness of the plateau. They met at a right angle and shielded them from the wind. She stepped forward and shaped them more carefully with her touch, smoothing them as best she could with her palms.
"Now you," Uluyara said to Feliane.
The elf smiled, nodded, and mirrored Uluyara's casting. She raised a third wall, and a fourth,
leaving a narrow archway in the middle of one to serve as the doorway.
"And you," Feliane said to Halisstra.
Halisstra spoke the prayer that allowed her to shape stone to her will. When she finished, her hands felt charged, as though they were attached to the earth. She moved them gently, as if she was a potter, thinning the walls and drawing the excess up into a flat roof to form a crude,
boxlike shelter.
She felt pleasure in working so closely with her fellow priestesses. They were creating. When priestesses of Lolth worked together, it was always to destroy, though Halisstra knew that sometimes-sometimes-destruction too brought pleasure.
When she finished her work, she and her fellow priestesses shared a smile. The wind whipped their hair into halos.
Inspired, Halisstra unsheathed the Crescent Blade and with its tip etched Eilistraee's symbol into the still-malleable stone above the open doorway.
"A temple to the Lady in the heart of Lolth's domain," Uluyara said, her voice defiant above the howling wind. "Well done, Halisstra Melarn."
Halisstra saw that the doubt that previously had clouded the expressions of her sisters was gone. Under their accepting gazes, the doubt in her own soul shrank until it was little more than a tiny seed in the center of her being, barely noticed.
At that exact instant, a knife stab of pain raced up Halisstra's leg. Her vision blurred. She grimaced and would have fallen had she not caught herself on Eilistraee's temple.