The party traced the same path they had taken when in astral form and came once again to the entrance to the temple. The great stone face was itself shattered, revealing glimpses of the visage of Lolth but only in tiny, enigmatic fragments.
The doors swung wide.
"It was the gods," Valas whispered, his voice echoing in a million tiny pings across the ruined plaza.
Vhaeraun, who had come to kill Lolth because of their own rash decision to lead one of his priests there, had been confronted by Selvetarm—Lolth's protector—at the temple gates. Their duel was a sight that would be burned into Pharaun's memory if he lived to be ten thousand years old, and the contest had caused much damage, but. .
"Not this," the Master of Sorcere said, his own voice echoing, though in not quite the same way. "This is different. Older."
"Older?" the draegloth asked, his eyes darting from rock to rock.
"He's right," said Danifae, who was crouching, holding the skull of something that might have been half drow, half bat. "These bones are dried and bleached, almost petrified. The stone itself is crumbling to dust. The webs are rotten and brittle."
"This place was razed a century ago or more," Pharaun said.
"That's not possible," Valas argued, staring up at the open doors. "We were just here—righthere, and the doors were sealed, and. ."
The others didn't expect him to finish.
"Lolth has left this place," Quenthel said, her voice so quiet it barely managed to elicit an echo at all.
"She has left the Demonweb Pits?" Danifae asked. "How could that be?"
"She has left the Abyss," the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith said. "Can't you feel it?"
Danifae shook her head, but her eyes answered in the affirmative. The two females shared a long, knowing look that raised the hair on the back of Pharaun's neck. He sensed similar reactions from Jeggred and Valas.
"That's it then," said the Bregan D'aerthe scout. "We have come here to find the goddess but instead we have found nothing. Our mission is at an end."
Quenthel turned to glare at the scout, who returned it with a steady, even gaze. The vipers that made up the high priestess's scourge writhed and spat, but Valas paid them no mind.
"She isn't here," Quenthel said, "but that doesn't mean she isn't. . somewhere."
The scout took a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking all around at the ruined temple.
"So where is she?" he asked. "How much farther do we go? Do we search the limitless multiverse for her, plane by plane, universe by universe? She's a creature of the Demonweb Pits, and here we stand on the sixty-sixth layer of the gods-cursed Abyss and she's gone. If you don't know where she's gone to—and she could be anywhere—and she won't tell you where she is, maybe we all have to accept the fact that she doesn't want to be found."
It was the most Pharaun had ever heard Valas say all at once, and the words made his heart sink.
"He's right," said the Master of Sorcere.
To his surprise, Quenthel nodded. Danifae's eyes widened, and Jeggred growled low in his throat. The draegloth moved slowly, in that fluid, stalking way of his, and went to stand next to the former battle-captive.
"This is sacrilege," Danifae whispered. "Heresy of the worst sort."
Quenthel turned to look at the other priestess and silently raised an eyebrow.
"You presume to allow some—" Danifae turned to briefly glare at Valas— "maleto speak for Lolth? Does he decide the goddess's intentions now?"
"Do you?" Pharaun couldn't help but ask.
Surprisingly, Danifae smiled when she said, "Perhaps I do. Certainly I have more claim to that right than Master Hune. Capable a scout as he is, this is the business of priestesses now."
Quenthel stood a little straighter, though her shoulders still hunched. Pharaun marveled at how old she looked. The high priestess had aged decades in the past tenday, and exhaustion was plain in her heavy-lidded eyes and blunt temper.
Pharaun couldn't look at her, so he looked down at the floor of the plaza. He scuffed his boot through brown-powdered stone.
"I was wrong," the Master of Sorcere said. He could feel the others looking at him, could sense their surprise, but he didn't look up. "This didn't happen a century ago. This place was destroyed. . no, a battle was fought here, and it was fought a millennium past at least. At least."
"How can you say that, wizard?" asked the draegloth. "You were just here. Weren't you? Isn't this the same place Tzirik brought you?
Pharaun. nodded and said, "It is indeed, Jeggred, but the fact remains that what we see all around us is an ancient ruin, the corpse of a battlefield that's lain cold for a thousand years or more."
"We were only just here," said Valas.
"We aren't in the Underdark anymore, Master Hune," said Pharaun. "Time might move very differently here, in fits and starts like distance in the Shadow Deep. This could all be more illusion than real, the whim of Lolth or some other godly power. It could be that we simply see a ruin where there is nothing, see a ruin where there is in fact an intact temple, or everything we see is real and made a millennium old by a power so vast that it can manipulate time and matter and the aether itself."
"The Spider Queen isn't here," Valas added.
"If the priestesses say that she is not here," Pharaun replied, "then I'm content to believe that's true."
The Master of Sorcere looked up at the enormous open doorway, big enough for House Baenre to pass through it intact. The others followed his gaze.
"These doors were sealed shut before," Pharaun said, "but now they're open. Why?"
"Because Lolth wants us to step through them," Danifae said, her voice carrying a certainty that surprised Pharaun. "Who else could have opened them?"
Pharaun shrugged and looked at Quenthel, who was nodding slowly.
"We go on," the high priestess said.
Without a glance at the others, Quenthel walked toward the mammoth doorway. One by one the others followed: Danifae, then Jeggred, then Pharaun, and Valas at the rear. Each stepped more reluctantly than the last.
On the planes of chaos there were so many names for it, Aliisza didn't remember them alclass="underline" temporal flux zones, slipped time layers, millennia sinks. … It had been a very long time since she'd seen one, and it took her almost as long to realize what was happening.
The sixty-sixth layer of the Abyss had been abandoned. The glue that held the planes together was the gods themselves, and in the planes of chaos, just as in the planes of law, when all the gods left a particular place, entropy progressed in fits and starts, and even chaos itself spiraled out of control.
In the case of the sixty-sixth layer, there was the rest of the Abyss to hold it together and to provide echoes of its past that were strong enough to keep its physical form—in that there still was a sixty-sixth layer. Time was moving forward faster at times, then slower, then it might reverse itself. It was impossible to pin down, even for a tanar'ri like Aliisza. Places like that were better left alone, better avoided, better forgotten.
She watched Pharaun and his companions walk through the massive temple gates with a heavy heart. She didn't know exactly what they would find in there, but she was sure that whatever it was it would be disappointing for them. They had traveled to the sixty-sixth layer to find Lolth, but Lolth wasn't there. It was a guess on her part, but an educated one: the plane had been abandoned for longer than anyone imagined—longer than Lolth had been silent.