He knew where they were. He had heard it described.
They had come to the Abyss. To the Plain of Infinite Portals.
They were falling and falling and screaming and screaming until they hit the ground.
The ship of chaos shattered into a thousand shards of bone and sinew, the human-skin sail ripping to shreds. The sound was a wild cacophony of snapping and booming and tearing and cracking. The four drow and the draegloth aboard the ship were sent spinning into the air, rolling and tumbling to a stop on the burning sand.
Chapter Twenty-two
It was raining souls.
All around Pharaun, one after another, transparent wraiths dropped from the burning sky onto the blasted sand of the Plain of Infinite Portals. He could pick out representatives of a thousand different races. Some he recognized, and some he didn't. There was everything from the lowliest kobold to enormous giants, humans by the hundreds, and no shortage of duergar. Pharaun could only hope that the latter were coming straight from the siege of Menzoberranzan.
Someone stepped close to him, and the Master of Sorcere turned to look. It was then that he realized he was lying on his back on the uncomfortably hot sand looking up. The wispy shade of a departed soul passed by him. The newly dead orc looked down but didn't seem to see Pharaun. Maybe the creature didn't care. It was headed to some porcine hell to serve its grunting god or demon prince, probably as a light supper. So what if it passed a sleeping dark elf along the way?
Pharaun blinked, expecting the passing orc to at least kick sand in his face, but the thing's feet were as insubstantial as they looked, and it made no sign of its passing on the dead ground. The Master of Sorcere slowly rose to a sitting position under painful protest from a dozen muscles, at least three of which he hadn't realized he possessed.
Taking a deep breath, he looked around.
The wreckage of the ship of chaos seemed oddly suited to their surroundings. Jagged fingers of bleached-white bone stood up like a more substantial line of souls against the red sky. The parts of the ship that had been alive with blood and breath sat shriveled and gray on the unforgiving sand.
Jeggred stood slouched in the center of the wrecked ship, his wild mane of white hair blowing madly in the hot wind. The draegloth stared at Pharaun expectantly. He looked even more battered and bruised, and he was bleeding again from a number of small wounds.
Danifae stepped out from behind the enormous half-demon. She held a long shard of broken bone and was dusty and disheveled but otherwise looked no worse for wear. The battle-captive looked down at the bone fragment she carried then absently tossed it to the ground where it clattered to a stop amid a myriad of shards like it. Danifae followed Jeggred's eyes to Pharaun.
The sound of a sigh startled the mage, and he spun, still sitting, to see Valas crouched next to him. He hadn't seen or heard the scout approach.
"Are you injured?" the mercenary asked him.
The scout's voice rose and fell on the wind, sounding distant though it came from only the few inches between his lips to Pharaun's ear.
"No," Pharaun answered, hearing his own voice echo in the same way. "I'm quite fine, actually. Thank you for asking, Master Hune."
"I'm no one's master," Valas replied, not looking the mage in the eye.
He stood and began to wander slowly back in the direction of the debris field.
Pharaun asked of all three of them, "Has anyone seen Quenthel?"
"I will thank you," Quenthel said from behind him, "to refer to me as 'Mistress. »
Pharaun didn't bother to turn. Quenthel walked past him, looking all around, apparently not giving the mage a second thought.
"My apologies, Mistress," he said. "I will extend Ma. . Valas's question to the rest of you. Are you all all right?"
Quenthel, Danifae, and Jeggred variously shrugged, nodded, or ignored him, and Pharaun decided that was good enough.
"Frankly," Pharaun added, "I'm utterly shocked we survived that crash. That was impressive, even by my standards. What an entrance."
The others only sneered at him, except Valas, who shrugged and began to shift though the wreckage.
"Yes, quite an entrance, but I'm getting worried about our exit," Danifae said. "How do you plan to get us back?"
Pharaun opened his mouth to speak then clamped his teeth shut.
He didn't say anything to Danifae but assumed his silence was explanation enough. Pharaun had no idea how they were going to get back to their home plane, home world, and home city without the ship of chaos.
"Lolth," Quenthel said, "will provide."
No one looked at the high priestess or commented on how little faith was evident in her voice.
Danifae scanned around her and up into the air as the phantasms continued to drop from the sky, only to form columns then pitch themselves headlong into one of the endless array of black, puckered pits that looked like bottomless craters scattered around them as far as the eye could see in all directions. None of them were marked in any way that Pharaun recognized, and he hadn't the faintest clue which of the pits would take them to the Demonweb Pits, the sixty-sixth layer of that endless infernal plane.
"What are they?" Danifae asked, looking around at the falling apparitions.
"The dead," Quenthel answered, her voice barely audible through all the unnatural echoes that the air around them threw in and around her words.
"Departed souls from all over the Prime," Pharaun added. "Anyone who served one of the Abyssal gods in life will pass through here then jump into the appropriate portal and they're on their way. Each of these pits leads to a different layer, almost an entirely different world. There are an endless number of them. This plain literally goes on into infinity in all directions."
Jeggred snorted, stood, and shook blood, water, and sand from his fur.
"So?" the draegloth asked.
Pharaun shrugged and said, "Actually I was hoping you could tell us more, Jeggred. After all you were sired by a native of the Abyss, and even a half-blooded tanar'ri should have some sensitivity to—"
"Never been here," the draegloth grunted. "You've mentioned my sire for the last time, too, wizard."
Pharaun was interrupted before he could answer the draegloth's unsubtle threat.
"How do we find the right one?" Danifae asked. "The right portal, mean.
Jeggred growled once and said, "There is only one entrance for each layer, but there are an infinite number of layers. We could be standing right next to the pit that will take us to the Demonweb Pits, or it could be a thousand miles or more in any direction … a million miles even."
"Not likely, actually," said Pharaun, "but thank you for the vote of confidence anyway, honored half-breed—" Danifae put a hand on Jeggred's arm when the draegloth lurched for Pharaun at the sound of that word—"but I was guiding the ship, at least up until the very end there, and I was willing it not simply to take us to the Plain of Infinite Portals but to the one portal that would take us where we wanted to go. Even though we crashed, we must be close by it. The ship was moving us at least in its general direction before things went astray."
"Well it's good to know that you're not entirely inept, Pharaun," Quenthel said, her voice louder and oddly more confident than it had been in a long while, "but I will take it… take us, from here."
Pharaun watched another ghostly orc step past him. It dropped into a deep back hole in the ground. There was no sound, nothing at all to signal that it had hit bottom or that anything had happened to it at all. It was gone.