Resurrection

The stink of burning flesh and hair filled his nostrils.

Jeggred roared with pain. The priestesses grunted against the burning.

Pharaun could not see through the fiery mist more than an armspan in front of him.

A second lightning bolt split the fog, rocked the ledge, and sent Pharaun crashing into the mountainside. The embers swirled in the explosion, rooting for exposed flesh.

"Dispel the cloud, Mistress!" Pharaun shouted and did not care which of the priestesses heeded him. "I will give us cover."

From his left and right he heard both Danifae and Quenthel chanting spells. Their voices sounded as one, eerily disembodied in the burning cloud. Jeggred growled low, the pained, angry rumble of a wounded animal.

Pharaun waited until the priestesses were well into their spell before begi

Quenthel stood-the explosions had sent both of them careening about the ledge-so he worded the spell to make the sphere as large as possible.

The priestesses finished their spells simultaneously, and one or both of the counterspells dispelled the magical cloud. One moment the cloud was there, the next it was gone.

Both priestesses were brandishing their holy symbols on opposite sides of the ledge. Jeggred crouched in a huddle near Danifae, his arms encircling her protectively, his mane and skin still smoking.

The priestesses stared at each other, Danifae holding her chunk of amber, Quenthel her jet disc.

Pharaun had no way to know whose spell had successfully dispelled the cloud, and the uncertainty troubled him. Everything about the recent past troubled him.

Still, he kept his concentration and finished his own spell. When he pronounced the final word, a transparent sphere of magical force took shape around the ledge, covering all of them.

Another fireball and lightning bolt slammed up against the sphere and exploded in light, but neither breached Pharaun's spell.

Jeggred stood to his full height, eyeing Quenthel. Dried blood caked his claws and ringed his mouth. Pharaun imagined it to belong to one of the Eilistraeeans.

"Mistress," Pharaun said, "my spell will not hold long."

"Of course it won't," Quenthel answered. "You are a male."

Pharaun ignored the barb, crept forward the rest of the way, and looked out over the ledge.

The others did the same.

A twisting path, bounded on its sides by sheer drops, led down the steep mountainside to a plateau riddled with chasms, craters, and pools of acidic venom. A green haze filled the air, and

Pharaun blinked at the acridity. Through the haze, Pharaun saw. .

An army waited below.

"Yugoloths," the mage observed. "Five hundred, at least."

"Mercenaries," Quenthel spat, following his gaze. Her serpents hissed.

Scaled, four-armed, nycaloths swooped through the air above an assembled force of insectoid mezzoloths. The squat, beetle-like mezzoloths bore long polearms in their four arms, while each of the nycaloths held an enchanted battle-axe. They were arranged in a crescent shape at the bottom of the path, a wall of armor and flesh. Pharaun knew the yugoloths to be resistant to most forms of energy. He assumed that most would have used magic to bolster their inherent resistances. Dealing with them would not be as easy as simply burning the lot with a fireball, but he had killed fiends before.

He sca

The haze in the air made it difficult to discern details, but. .

There.

Toward the back lurked a gray-ski

stood to either side of him. The ultroloth wore dark robes, a sword at his belt, and a quiver at his thigh filled with rods. He held another rod in his hand.

Souls continued to stream out of the pass behind them and soar over their heads. When the spirits reached the plains, the air itself caught them up and exploded in sheets of violet fire. They burned there for a time, writhing in the air above the yugoloth army, before being released. The flames reminded Pharaun of faerie fire, the harmless sheath of flame that most all drow could summon.

"The Purging," Quenthel said, seemingly more interested in the spirits than the yugoloth army.

"Where weakness is seared away," Danifae added.

Looking down at the yugoloth army, Pharaun said, "Speaking of searing. ."

Even as they watched, several of the mezzoloths held up their palms and balls of fire appeared there. They hurled them up toward the ledge, where they hit the wall of force and exploded.

Instinctively, the drow sheltered behind the ledge, but no fire pierced Pharaun's spell. They peeked back over.

The army remained in place.

"Why aren't they coming?" Jeggred asked.

"Why would they?" Pharaun answered. "They would bottleneck themselves on the path."

Pharaun knew that the four drow could have held for days the narrow path that led to the ledge. The yugoloths hoped to either force them down by bombarding them with spells or simply wait them out. It was no mystery that the four of them had not gone all the way to the very gates of Lolth's city only to turn back.

"We ca

"Of course we will," Quenthel said with undisguised contempt. "They are the final test."

"Are they?" Danifae asked.

Pharaun thought an army of yugoloths to be quite a test but kept his observation to himself.

He let his gaze wander and for the first time looked beyond the army, beyond the ruined plains,

to Lolth's city.

"Look," he said and could not keep the awe from his voice.

Half a league away, the plains ended-just ended, as though cut off with a razor-at a gulf of nothingness that went on forever in all directions.

A web of monstrous proportions somehow spa

Menzoberranzan could have sat insignificantly upon its strands.

Lolth's city, a heaped clump of metal and webs and souls and spiders as large as a hundred

Menzoberranzans, sat near the edge of the web. Mammoth legs-a grotesque amalgam of the organic and the metallic-sprouted from the city's base and held it in the web strands.

A roughly pyramidal temple capped the metropolis. Intuitively, Pharaun knew the pyramid to be the tabernacle of Lolth. Its great doors appeared closed.

"The children of Lolth. . " Danifae said, and it took Pharaun a moment to understand her meaning.

At the border where the Plains of Soulfire ended and the web began, an entire host had gathered: abyssal widows, driders, yochlols, billions and billions of spiders, more even than

Pharaun had seen during the Teeming.

"Her web covers all," Quenthel muttered and touched her holy symbol.

"And the world is her prey," Danifae finished. "Her host has come to bear witness."

"We must get through the yugoloths," Quenthel said.

"They should all die," Danifae added. "Their presence here is heresy."

Jeggred eyed the army below and growled in the way that Pharaun knew to be a prerequisite to his entering a battle frenzy. But for the wall of force, the draegloth looked as though he would leap over the ledge and charge down the path at any moment.

Quenthel's serpents haloed her head, and she nodded at something they communicated to her.

"We must pass," Quenthel said again.

Danifae smiled broadly and said to Quenthel, "Indeed we must. Summon what aid you can,