Everyone rushed to the balcony rails. Below them, Recca sat, reached hands to his head and reset his own broken neck with a crack. Green blood pumped from his injuries, and where the blood touched his dead flesh, his wounds disappeared. His eyes were still regrowing, but already footsteps thundered as Lolth's guards came to investigate the noise. Jus grabbed Polk under one arm and threw himself back through a door into the citadel. The others followed suit, Enid staggering and weak. The Justicar slammed a hand against Enid's wound and sent a pulse of healing magic into her. The wound closed after the second spell, and Jus instantly led the way up a shattered flight of stairs.
Outside in the courtyard, there were yells and screams. Something had apparently interfered with Recca's healing. The Justicar raced up a flight of circular stairs, pounding hard and fast. Escalla shot through the air and took the point. Enid squeezed the whole stairwell shut behind. They ran and ran until the stairs ended in a door. Jus smashed heavy oak and steel open with one crash of his shoulder.
The door opened upon a rooftop. Wind whistled, and from this great height, all the world seemed exposed. The flattened, ruined city lay all about. Flooded plains stretched for miles around. To the north, a vast army scuttled, slid, and marched beneath a cloud of abyssal bats. Beside the citadel stood Lolth's titanic mobile palace. The huge machine squatted like a tarantula. Lolth and her entourage were mounting steps into the monster's maw. A gap of fifty feet led from the citadel roof to the spider palace's gleaming back.
Jus flicked out the portable hole and leaped inside. Henry and a protesting Polk were pushed in after him. Holding the hole in her mouth, Enid gathered and sprang out into the open air. Her wings lofted her effortlessly across the gap, while Escalla flew beside her, covering the jump with her wand.
Enid landed on the spider's broad metal back-and everything went wrong. Her feet skated out from under her. The metal was as slick as butter. She thrashed her wings impotently, unable to fly, and began to slide toward the ground a hundred feet below.
Hovering nearby, Escalla landed-had her own feet shoot out from under her, and began to slide. Her wings wouldn't lift her. As Enid slithered past, the faerie turned into a snake, her clothes hanging loose on her coils, and whipped herself out as a lifeline to hold Enid by the paw. Eyes bulging-tail wrapped around Enid and her neck wrapped about a jutting piece of metal, Escalla gagged as Enid hauled herself up to safety and tried to cling flat against the slippery, greasy metal.
Flailing at the end of Enid's paw, Escalla the snake tried to get a grip on the metal hull. "Jus. Help! We can't fly! Something's wrong! We can't fly!"
Escalla was being torn in half. The Justicar shot out of the portable hole and slipped. Groping for the magic rope on his belt-a rope taken from an erinyes a few short months before-he grabbed Enid by the scruff of her neck and lashed the rope like a whip. It wrapped itself about a porthole cover. The Justicar roared and tried to hold on, but Enid's weight was too heavy.
With a ponderous lurch, the spider palace began to move.
It rose from its crouch, its legs straightening. Hanging desperately on the magic rope, Jus felt the whole world give a sickening sway. Rocking like a ship in a mad sea, the spider palace trundled over the ruins of Keggle Bend. With Enid slipping in his grasp, Jus gripped the sphinx and Escalla, the magic rope cutting into his hand.
Ringing like monstrous bells, the spider palace's feet crashed over stones and splashed into muddy fields. Jus felt his grip giving way as the palace moved ponderously toward its gate to the Abyss. The magic circle gave off a sickly light. A stench of death, decay, and filth leaped into the air.
Jus's grip slipped. He roared and caught himself, blood leaking from his palm where the rope burned through his hide.
"Hold on!"
Henry appeared in the mouth of the portable hole and tried to stab a handhold into the palace's hull. Escalla turned into an octopus, her flailing suckers failing to take hold of the alien metal. Jus slipped again. The air around them turned thick with sulfurous smoke, ash, and death, and suddenly the whole team fell.
The bronze hull slipped past in a blur, and then the group was falling free. Escalla turned into a bat. Tumbling free, Enid thrashed her wings, felt resistance, and thrashed madly at the air. She broke the fall and saved them all from death. With a lurch, she crashed into the ground. The universe shook as titanic metal feet thudded to the ground beside them, and the spider palace marched on its way.
They lay on a field of ashes. The sky above them was purple as venous blood. Distant shapes wheeled and screamed in heavens that stank of death. Lolth's spider palace clanged and crashed, disappearing into the murk with frightening speed-and suddenly the adventurers were alone.
Escalla fluttered down and returned to form. Henry and Polk had fallen from the portable hole. They lay beside Enid, who blinked in shock, staring at the sudden change of scene.
Jus sat slowly and looked into the dull, thick air. They sat on a terrace hundreds of miles wide, a flat ridge at the edge of a vast chasm. The Abyss yawned before them-an infinite drop into eternity, ringed by six hundred and sixty-six descending rings of hell. The view was numbing-awesome and horrible.
The air shivered all about them like a dying scream. Locusts made of wormwood and brass skittered and chittered in the dust. The group could only stare at the vast gulf of the Abyss and shiver. Unperturbed, Escalla beat the ashes out of her little skirt and looked around.
"Hey, guys! It's the Abyss!" Happy to be making real progress, Escalla clapped her hands. "Well, we're here!"
Sadly diminished, Lolth-Queen of the Demonweb Pits, Lady of the Drow, and Mistress of Spiders-walked into the control room of her palace. Two succubi worked the controls. Each one seethed in annoyance at having to work. Lolth was greeted by her pack of pet spiders, scorpions, and miscellaneous arachnids, the creatures stretching up to their mistress for a pat. Mistress of all that she surveyed, Lolth allowed slaves to bring her a throne, and she lazily sat down.
"Morag?"
The secretary trailed behind the rest of Lolth's entourage. Seeing the drab, skinny creature enter, Lolth held a cup out and demanded tea.
"Morag, what was all that commotion behind us just now?"
Somewhere in her treasures, Lolth had written down Morag's true name. An order prefaced with that name would have to be obeyed-even an order to suicide. Morag poured the tea oh-so-nicely, then found an adamantite sugar spoon.
"Nothing, Magnificence. A brawl in the town ruins."
"Something attacked my guards?"
"No, Magnificence. It was lower creatures having a difference of opinion."
Lolth detected no untruths. She pinned Morag with a careful eye then lounged back in her throne, planted her feet on the back of a squatting slave, and drank her tea. She snapped her fingers at the succubi guiding her palace along the paths of the Abyss.
"Full speed for the Demonweb Pits." Lolth sipped her tea, found it insipid, and handed it back. "Morag, you bore me."
The secretary folded up her hands. "Yes, Magnificence. I will try to be more entertaining in the future."
16
The foul air shuddered with an immense, unending roar. Bruised and dazed, the party crept carefully to their feet. The dirt beneath felt like volcanic cinders-clinking, hollow stuff that leeched the skin of heat. The air brought no sense of life, wafting thick and dull as a mist of powdered lead.
The shuddering roar came from a titanic waterfall. A river too wide to see across flowed to the lip of the abyss and plunged straight down. Whole oceans of water thundered into the void, crashing into all six hundred and sixty-six layers of the Abyss on its way to the bottom of the pit. The mist of the waterfall was full of wheeling, shrieking shapes-skull-headed ghosts lost in time and mind. The waters stirred as dark shapes looped and slithered in the deeps. Numbed by the sight, Henry let his crossbow slip in his hands.