Resurrection

She straddled him and he licked his lips in excitement. His hands fumbled with her shift, her sash, and she could tell from his movements that more than mindwine was clouding his mind.

His hand passed over the blackroot vial and never paused, so eager was he to get at her skin.

Smiling into his face, she teased him for another thirty count-until his eager expression grew confused, then alarmed.

"What's happening to me?" he said, his speech thick and sloppy. "What have you done to me,

bitch?"

He tried to shove her off him but the drug had already taken hold. His strength was gone, and he managed only to paw at her shoulders. In moments, he was fully paralyzed and could only stare up at her in horror.

She eyed him coldly, still smiling, and began her incantation. Her voice called upon Lolth,

offering the male's death for her amusement. When she finished her prayer, she put her hands on his throat and throttled him.

He died with bulging eyes and a wet gurgle.

"You are the weak," she whispered in his ear. "And I am the spider."

Chapter Seventeen

Halisstra stepped into the Pass of the Soulreaver and felt her body stretch through time and space. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to keep moving forward. Vomit raced up her throat, but she fought it down.

A narrow path stretched before her and behind her. Sheer walls rose to either side. A mist cloaked her ankles.

The mist screamed at her and hissed.

She clutched the Crescent Blade. She was not alone and she knew it.

"Come out," she said, her voice low and dangerous.

Ahead, the mist swirled and formed into a vast serpent whose body stretched behind it to infinity. Black, empty eyes stared into Halisstra's soul and pinioned her in place. The serpent opened its mouth and hissed. The sound turned Halisstra's legs to water.

Deep within the serpent writhed the tiny, partially consumed essences of millions of failed souls. Their screams, rich with despair, fat with terror, bombarded Halisstra. She struggled to stand her ground. She saw her own fate in them-she too was a failed soul-but instead of causing her despair, it raised her anger.

"Face me," she said and did not know whether she was talking to the creature or to someone else.

The serpent hissed again and slithered sinuously forward. The souls wailed their pain and terror with each movement of the creature.

Halisstra stared at the glowing souls and wondered for a moment if Ryld was trapped within the creature. She decided that she did not care and moved forward.

She roared, lifted the Crescent Blade, and charged, meeting the serpent's advance with one of her own.

The miniature golems swarmed forward at Gromph. The transmutation that allowed him to fight prevented him from casting any spells to stop them, and he refused to abandon his station over the prismatic sphere atop the main body of the golem.

The smaller constructs scrabbled and leaped up the body of the golem to get a Gromph, thirty of them, forty. The archmage roared and brandished his axe.

A spider golem landed on his back, then another, and both bit into his flesh. Others clambered up his legs to beat at his chest. His armor spells deflected some but not all of their bites, and he grunted with pain over and over again.

He grabbed one of the creatures by a leg, threw it atop the body of the golem, and chopped it with his axe. He chopped another, and another, all the while waiting for the transformative spell to abate so that he could focus on the real issue-the prismatic sphere.

To his horror, the miniature golems that he struck split into smaller fragments and within a five count sprouted eight legs each and came at him again.

He cursed, swung at more of the spiders, again and again. Each time he struck, the small constructs burst into pieces, and each piece itself became another, smaller spider golem. Killing one made five more.

He was surrounded by a roiling swarm of constructs. They came at him from all sides, a swarm of fearless, remorseless killers. Eventually, he stopped chopping at them with his axe and instead tried to throw or push them off of the main body of the golem. But he could do only so much and in moments was covered in them, their weight so heavy that he could hardly move.

He tried to trigger the levitation power of his House Baenre brooch but the weight of the golems crawling over him was too much. He could not get airborne.

Their fangs and claws ripped through his defensive spells and into his flesh. He screamed with rage, pain, and frustration. His ring struggled to heal the wounds inflicted by the spiders, but there were too many. For every spider that he jerked from his body or threw down from atop the golem, another three took its place. He shook them from his hands, pried them from his face,

pulled them from his legs. Agony lit him. He roared as he fought. If not for the regenerative magic of his ring, he would have been dead.

With the sudde

Knowledge returned to him in a rush. Physical strength drained out of him, and he sagged under the burden of the golems. His understanding of combat-swings, feints, and footwork-faded out of his memory like a half-remembered dream. His normal understanding of the Weave-the necessary gestures, component admixtures, the language of the arcane-refilled his mind.

Gromph was himself again, and he was in agony. A hundred holes pockmarked his flesh.

Blood soaked his robe. In theory he could again cast spells, but the pain was too much.

Thinking fast, he did the only thing he could. He leaped from atop the golem and hit the ground in a roll. The impact jarred many of the spiders loose. With fewer attached to him, he triggered the levitation magic inherent in his brooch and went airborne.

He shook free the remaining spiders and hung in the air, gasping and breathing, dripping blood.

Below him, a thousand eyes stared upward, tiny mandibles clicking, tiny pedipalps waving.

His broach allowed him only vertical movement, so he took a feather-a spell component difficult for him to procure in the Underdark-and spoke the words to a spell of flying. When he finished,

he floated to his right.

As one, the swarm of spiders followed him, eyes turned upward. An idea occurred to him-

A sizzling sound from above and behind turned Gromph around. Green veins of magical energy arced along his wall of force. The Dyrr wizards were attempting to dispel it but their first attempt had failed.

Gromph had to move fast. He flew farther to his right, drawing the swarm of golems away from the body of their destroyed parent. He took from his robe a finger-shaped lodestone, one end of which was covered in iron shavings.

Hovering above the swarm of golems, he incanted the words to a powerful transmutation.

When he finished the casting, the shavings moved from one end of the lodestone to the other and within a cylindrical area that ran from floor to ceiling and included Gromph and all of the spider golems, up became down.

Under the effect of his flying spell, Gromph simply adjusted his internal bearings, flipped over, and remained hovering in the air. The golems, however, fell up toward the ceiling, just as if they had stepped off a cliff. Gromph dodged them as they fell past. Two latched onto him, but he shook them free, and they too fell upward. All of them crashed into the ceiling, but it damaged them little.

With the entire swarm treating the ceiling as if it was the floor, Gromph spoke the words to another wall of force and ringed the area of effect in which he had reversed gravity. The golems would not be able to walk out of the affected area of his spell and fall to the floor. They were hedged in.