Morag swept majestically out of the room. "The ship is powering up. We leave for the Flanaess within the hour."
The door closed with a bang, and Escalla sat up, scowling.
"Actually, I was hoping more for something on the lines of 'Two doors on the left, her bedroom's just great! You can ambush her there. Lolth goes shut-eye at eight.' " The girl shrugged. "Ah, well…"
"It could have been worse." The Justicar came over to Escalla's side to examine the desk. "It could have been a poem."
Polk shambled forward, his belt fur dragging. "It should have been a poem, damn it! Don't that snake know anything about adventuring? It should have been a rede!"
Escalla recoiled. "A reed? What? Like a bull rush?"
"No, a rede, girl! A rede! A saying! A phrase put into rhyme so it won't be forgotten!"
"The Flanaess has been literate for a couple of thousand years now, Polk. Some might think rote-learning is a tad old fashioned." Escalla was happily poking about in the desk. "Huh! What do you know? Some old decorator's plans for the palace. They even wrote in the titles of the rooms so workmen knew what furniture went where." The girl flipped out the map. "Morag is so careless. This should have been filed!"
The spider palace was laid out in a series of decks-engine rooms in the belly, a control room in the head. The rest of the place seemed to be palatial audience chambers, throne rooms, and guards quarters. Perfectly able to read any language ever written or devised, Enid took charge of the charts, smoothing them flat upon the floor. One big lion claw traced scribbles in the tanar'ri script written over some of the rooms.
"Let me see. The private chambers are right at the very top. Handmaiden chambers, guard chambers…" The sphinx gave a pretty scowl. "What exactly are we looking for?"
"Lolth." The Justicar's hand scratched as it ran over the stubble of his chin. He pondered Morag's words carefully and thoroughly. "Superiority breeds contempt. Contempt breeds a need to control…"
"Easy!" Escalla was changing entries in Lolth's appointment book, booking up her lunchtimes for the next seventeen years. "Contempt! She's a goddess. She won't see us as a threat, so if we challenge her, we can draw her into a trap! You know-slap Enid's stun symbol over a door, then I moon Lolth and we beat her when she runs through the door and gets hit by the spell!"
With a sigh, the Justicar regarded the faerie. "Lolth's magic resistant."
"Well… then we attack from behind the door!" Escalla shadowboxed back and forth between the legs and tails of her friends. "We bind her in the magic rope, use a silence spell to stop her casting magic, and give her the fist-beating of a lifetime!" The faerie was overjoyed. "This is gonna be simpler than I thought! Hey, Cinders! Fetch!"
She threw a pencil. All eyes followed it as it clinked onto the floor and rolled. Cinders wag-wag-wagged his tail, his teeth gleaming in the overhead lights.
What?
Everyone looked wearily at the faerie. Escalla shrugged.
"I'm lookin' for an instinctive reaction. I'm gonna sneak it up on him!" The faerie slapped Jus on the shoulder. "All right, big J! Got a route? Let's go!"
The Justicar was not yet ready to move. He stood over the map, one hand resting on Enid's warm shoulder as he looked down at the diagrams.
"Wash away evil. Wash it clean…?" The Justicar tapped Benelux's wolf-skull pommel. "It's a clue. Enid, you're our riddle consultant. Any ideas?"
"Um, not really. Unless the washing-thing is a clue to a room we should use?"
Jus scratched the stubble of his chin. "Is there a bath house on the map?"
"There's this!" The sphinx carefully read Morag's beautiful round handwriting. "It says, 'Black Dragon Lair. Please grout tiles properly.' "
"That's not it." The ranger heaved a frustrated sigh. "Escalla? Henry? Any ideas?"
Henry could only shrug helplessly. Escalla merely cocked her frost wand and stuck her lich staff through her belt like a dagger.
"We'll keep an eye out as we go. What's to worry? You're all stoneskinned up, we have a map, and the faerie's taking point! What could possibly go wrong?"
They moved onward into the palace, and Enid leaned closer to Henry as they walked. "Henry, I get such a shiver down my spine whenever she says that."
"Absolutely."
Inside the palace were Lolth's private quarters-her treasury, audience chambers, and carefully prepared lines of defense. She would have long ago planned her retreat and her tactics in case of invasion. The Justicar looked at his map then chose a door. Above him, Cinders looked slyly left and right and made a happy growl.
We go find spider lady?
"No. No, we make the spider lady come to us."
Burn spiders! Wheee!
Cinders's grin turned to the palace above, and the party walked into the spider's lair.
Lolth stood in the center of her audience chamber, arranging one of her nasty little triumphs of ingenuity. The floor was a dead, leaden gray, made from quicksand gathered from the swamps of the Abyss. Lolth had a secret bridge running across the floor, hidden an inch or two beneath the sand. Anyone crossing the floor without knowledge of the secret path would end up dead and drowned! The goddess watched her giants bring in the last buckets of quicksand, and she flicked out her long hair in glee.
"Excellent."
A door opened, and Morag cruised serenely into the chamber. She saw the arrangements and flipped open a notebook, jotting down an estimate of the costs. Lolth saw her at work and raised a droll little smile.
"Morag! How good of you to join us at last. All your little files and folders stowed away?"
"Yes, Magnificence."
"Ah." The spider goddess walked the length of her hidden bridge. The aura about her made the air crackle with power. "Have you seen any intruders, Morag?"
Morag tucked her pen behind one ear. "I have seen no intruders, Magnificence."
"Yes." The goddess stood, held her arms outstretched, and horrible amorphous handmaidens oozed from under a door and removed their mistress's lounging clothes. Lolth allowed herself to be accoutered for war. Her handmaidens stripped her naked-all except for the delicately engraved gems she always wore about her neck. "Yes, Morag. Still, I have a little inkling that something might be wrong. Have you any thoughts upon that matter?"
"Your intuition is divine, Magnificence." The secretary flipped open her notebook. "I will rouse the palace guards and have them begin an immediate search. The webs, the palace, the boulder fields. It will delay our departure for at least two hours."
"No delays!" The goddess whirled, scornful and magnificent. "We will return to the Flanaess! I have to renew the spells that bind my armies. Have you any idea what those fools will be doing without my genius to guide them?" Lolth shoved her handmaidens aside and strode along the rim of her quicksand pool. "I can't trust any of you idiots to do anything right. How long until we leave?"
The secretary coolly pulled out a little timepiece-hand-crafted modron work that she greatly admired. "Thirty minutes, Magnificence. Web fluid is still being loaded into the palace tanks. We still have only three boilers on line."
"Tell them to hurry!"
"I will tell them, Magnificence." Morag closed her book. "But we may find that water will only heat so fast. There are laws of physics in operation, even here."
Lolth stabbed a look of pure calculation at Morag. The goddess tapped at the gems hanging from her neck.
"There is something very un-tanar'ri about you, Morag."
"Yes, Magnificence." The secretary proudly settled her swords and pens. "That is why you enslaved me."
Lolth whirled. She looked at her quicksand floor in satisfaction and folded her hands.