Queen to bear her blade. That strangeness made me. . concerned." She took a breath and straightened. "But it is not for us to question the will of the Dark Maiden. You are the bearer of the Crescent Blade. Come. We'll follow these unfortunates to Lolth and do what we came to do."

With that, the three set out again, following the line of the dead. Uluyara's words bounced over Halisstra's brain, and she could not help but wonder what exactly it was that she had come to do.

Yor'thae, said the wind into her ear.

As they flew through the fog of the aether, the energy bolts and power maelstroms grew more common. Halisstra's entire body felt charged, energized.

"We're getting closer to the source of Lolth's power," she said, and Feliane and Uluyara nodded. Only afterward did it occur to her to feel alarm that proximity to Lolth's power quickened her soul.

A short time later, they saw ahead a huge whirlpool of black and viridian energy, slowly churning. Its eight spiral arms extended out into the aether to almost the length of a crossbow shot. The whole of the maelstrom reminded Halisstra of a stylized rendering of a spider. She found its slow rotation hypnotic. One after another the souls streamed into it and vanished.

"That is the doorway to Lolth's plane," Halisstra said.

A bolt of ochre lightning split the emptiness.

Her companions nodded, eyeing the maelstrom. Feliane looked more pale than usual. The weight of their charge was settling on all of them.

"Are you prepared?" Halisstra asked, as much of herself as her comrades. She drew the

Crescent Blade from its scabbard. In her other hand, she held her small steel shield-Seyll's shield.

Face grim, eyes fixed, Uluyara nodded. She drew her own blade, put her horn to her lips, and sounded a short blast that echoed through the Astral. The souls showed no sign of having heard.

Feliane drew her thinblade and readied her round shield. She looked so small.

"Follow me," Halisstra said and propelled herself toward the whirlpool. She was careful to look none of the souls in the face.

She realized as she entered the portal that they should have taken a moment to offer a prayer to the Dark Maiden before entering Lolth's domain. She was certain the oversight had been accidental.

Almost certain.

As the energy of the gate took her, she felt herself being pulled between the planes. As she came apart, the word Yor'thae sounded once more in her ears.

As he stepped through the portal, Pharaun felt for a moment as though he were being stretched between two points, elongated across a vast distance until he was drawn as thin as the finest parchment. For a fraction of a heartbeat, though he knew it to be absurd and illogical, he felt as if he existed in two places at once.

Then it was over. He snapped forward in space and caught up with the rest of himself at the portal's destination. Healed and refreshed from Quenthel's and Danifae's spells, he stood under a nighttime sky on the rocky ground of the Demonweb Pits, Lolth's domain.

Quenthel stood to his right, regal and serene. Danifae and Jeggred stood to his left, a small,

dangerous spider and her hulking draegloth. A cool wind blew from the. .

Pharaun frowned. He had no sense of direction and nothing from which to gain his bearings.

Danifae looked around, one hand absently tangled in Jeggred's filthy mane. The wind pressed the former battle-captive's piwafwi against her body, tracing a sensuous line along the curve of her hips and the fullness of her breasts. She smiled and started to speak, but Quenthel interrupted her.

"We have arrived," Quenthel said in a hushed voice, looking out over the landscape. "The goddess's name be praised."

That seems a bit much, Pharaun thought but did not say. He saw little worthy of praise. Lolth might have moved the Demonweb Pits from the Abyss to its own domain, but the plane remained little more than the same blasted wasteland. He recalled that other gods in the drow pantheon-

among them Kiaransalee and Vhaeraun-maintained domains somewhere in the Demonweb Pits.

Pharaun could not see where. From what he could see, the whole of the plane was Lolth's.

They stood in the darkness atop a low rise overlooking a rolling plain of rocks that extended to the limits of their darkvision. In the distance, lakes of some caustic substance bled thick smoke into the air. Great chasms and gorges scored the landscape, open wounds in the earth whose depths Pharaun could not determine from afar. Caves, pits, and craters opened everywhere in the soil, like burst boils, or perhaps screaming mouths. Pharaun saw no vegetation of any kind, not even scrub or fungus. The land appeared dead, blasted as if from a great cataclysm.

Thin, curiously curved and kinked tors of black rock jutted at odd angles from the earth. The smallest of them stood as tall as Narbondel but half as big around, and the wind and weather had left each as pockmarked and hole-ridden as the corpses that had littered the streets of the Braeryn a decade before, when black pox had run rampant among Menzoberranzan's poor. There were hundreds of them, and several had toppled over the years. The broken chunks lay strewn over the ground.

Pharaun studied them for a few moments more, struck with something about their shape. They were reminiscent of something. .

"Are those the petrified legs of spiders?" he asked and was certain of it even as the words left his mouth.

"Impossible," Jeggred said with a snort.

But Pharaun knew better. The spires of black stone poking out of the ground were the weathered legs of petrified spiders, spiders that must have been as large in life as the stalactite fortress of House Mizzrym. The Pits had buried their bodies long ago, leaving only the legs exposed. Pharaun imagined the bloated stone bodies that must lie below the surface. He wondered if the spiders had died and been turned to stone in whatever cataclysm had left the

Demonweb Pits a wasteland.

"If Master Mizzrym is right," Quenthel said, eyes flashing, "we would have been blessed indeed to have seen such servants of the Spider Queen in life."

Pharaun thought that he had seen more than enough servants of Lolth already. He put the huge, dead arachnids out of his mind and examined his surroundings more closely.

Webs covered everything, some of ordinary size, some of enormous proportions. They hung like silvery curtains between many of the spires, blanketed the tunnel mouths, shrouded the open ground, blew over the landscape in sticky balls, and floated on the wind like the snow Pharaun had felt on the World Above. Some were larger than the calcified webs of Ched Nasad.

"Her webs encase all," Quenthel said.

"And the world is her prey," Danifae added.

Behind them, there was no evidence of the portal. The journey from the old Demonweb Pits to the new had been one way. Spells would have to return them home, if they returned home.

The wind picked up into a gust, spraying dirt and webs. An eerie keening gave Pharaun gooseflesh.

It took him a moment to pinpoint the source of the sound: some of the webs, thick-stranded,

silvery nets strung here and there, vibrated when the wind passed through them. The vibrations caused a haunting scream that rose and fell with the breeze. The spinners of the webs were head-

sized, long legged, elegant looking spiders with narrow red-and-yellow bodies.

"Songspider webs," Quenthel said, following Pharaun's gaze. A hint of awe colored her tone.

"The voice of Lolth."

She held her viper-headed whip in one hand and the five red and black snakes swayed to the keening, as though hypnotized. Quenthel leaned an ear toward the serpents and nodded at something they mentally communicated to her.