Resurrection

Pharaun ignored the draegloth and mentally activated the power of his ring of flight. With a silent command, he surreptitiously lifted his feet half a handspan off the earth. If the priestesses had a plan, that was well. If not, he saw no need to remain earthbound in the face of the madness.

Together, the four of them watched as the light and violence churned its way toward them. As it grew closer, the clicking and screeching from the caves and pits around them grew louder,

more eager, hungrier. The arachnids within sensed the approach of the light.

Jeggred answered those sounds with a low rumble in his chest. He stepped before Danifae and assumed a fighting crouch. The priestesses did not even look at the ground around them. They had eyes only for the approaching slaughter.

Pharaun decided to try again. "Mistress," he said to Quenthel, "would it not be wise to take shelter?"

Quenthel looked at him sidelong and said, "No, mage. We must stand in the midst of this and bear witness."

From around her neck, she removed her holy symbol of Lolth-a jet disk inlaid with amethysts arranged to look like a spider. The serpents of her whip stood upright and watched the wave of spiders approach. Quenthel chanted a prayer, the words in a language even Pharaun could not understand.

Pharaun bit back the cutting reply that came to his mind, content that he could take flight if and when the need arose.

Danifae put her hand on Jeggred's fur-covered back.

"It is the Teeming," she said to no one in particular, recalling the words of the soul-eating creature Pharaun had taken prisoner. Awe colored her tone.

Pharaun didn't care what it was called. He knew only that soon the sunlight would reach them,

light the pits around them, and. .

He imagined his body buried under a mountain of bloated bodies, jointed legs, mandibles, and unforgiving eyes.

Quenthel and Danifae both appeared lost in rapture, temporarily mad perhaps. Each held her holy symbol in her hands; each wore the wild but assured expression of an ecstatic.

Pharaun knew that ordinary spiders answered the priestesses' commands, but he did not know whether the arachnids native to the Pits would. Besides, the priestesses' powers were limited.

They could not command millions of spiders, could they?

Pharaun liked the situation less and less. He reached into his piwafwi, removed a ball of sulfur-soaked bat guano, and held it between thumb and forefinger-just in case. Ordinarily, he would not have considered offering violence to Lolth's children, at least not in the presence of her priestesses, but if it came to killing spiders or dying himself under a heap of hairy bodies, the choice would be an easy one.

As ready as he would get, he waited.

The sunlight slid across the rockscape, birthing more spiders, closer, closer. .

When it reached them, motion exploded all around. Thousands of spiders boiled from their holes like steam from a heated beaker, hissing and clicking. From a large tunnel to Pharaun's right, rothe-sized masses of hairy spider legs issued forth-five, ten, a score. His heart hammered between his ribs. The creatures had no bodies as such, no heads. They were nothing more than a clumped, disgusting, squirming mass of legs, each of which was longer than Pharaun was tall,

and eight of which ended in a pointed claw of chitin as long as his forearm.

"Chwidencha," Pharaun said. " Two score or more."

Chwidencha-he'd heard them called "leg horrors"-had once been drow, or perhaps drow souls,

but they had failed Lolth, and as punishment had been transformed by the Spider Queen into that twisted form. The Demonweb Pits did not appear to Pharaun to be a paradise for the Spider

Queen's faithful. It looked more like a prison for her failures.

The chwidencha's rapid, undulating movement was enough to cause Pharaun a wave of nausea. Impossible clusters of long, jointed legs, like a nest of vipers, squirmed a greeting to the red light of the dawn.

Though they had no eyes that he could see, the chwidencha immediately noticed the companions. Forty or more mouths offered muffled hisses from orifices buried under nests of legs.

"I see them, Master Mizzrym," Quenthel said, turning around, but her voice lacked the same confidence it had held a moment before.

The thousands of spiders boiling from the holes around them did not come near the chwidencha and left the companions unmolested, a small island of sanity amidst the chaos.

Lolth's damned appeared to command a certain respect, or fear.

With alarming speed and coordination, the chwidencha pack encircled them at a distance of perhaps ten paces.