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 scanned the army for the ultroloth that he knew must be leading them. Nycaloths and mezzoloths were followers, servants to the archwizard yugoloths.
The haze in the air made it difficult to discern details, but. .
There.
Toward the back lurked a gray-skinned, bald ultroloth. Even from that distance, Pharaun felt the weight of its huge, black eyes. Two over-large canoloths, both armed with spiked barding,
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 cannot go back," Danifae said, giving voice to Pharaun's next thought. "And we must go forward."
"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 spanned the void, its far ends lost in infinity. All of
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,
priestess."
Each eyed the other for a moment, then both stepped back from the ledge, out of the sight of the yugoloths, and began to cast.
Back in his own body outside of Agrach Dyrr's temple, Gromph dispelled the dweomer that had reduced him to a fraction of his size. Still invisible, he watched the mighty stalagmite fortress begin to shake itself apart. Buildings cracked from their foundations to their roofs. The great stalagmite and adamantine walls vibrated. Dyrr soldiers scurried frantically along the walls for the stairways, sprinted across the grounds or leaped from the walls and levitated to earth.
Gromph would have laughed but for his own impending death. He might have tried to fly into the air and away from the fortress, if he had not left his spell components in his robe on Larikal and if he had thought it would allow him to escape. He did not think it would.
The explosion would be too big. There was no outrunning it.
With his dweomer-sensitive eyesight, he watched the pulse of power run along the master ward and saw it extinguish the lesser wards and draw their power into itself. It was a beast,
devouring all of the magical power in House Agrach Dyrr's intricate defensive structure. In moments, it would vomit it all out in an explosion that would shake Menzoberranzan's cavern.
The gathering energies caused Gromph's ears to pop.
The wave of power reached the outer wards on the gate and walls, gathered them in, and rebounded back, moving fast.
Roofs collapsed on the buildings around the archmage. Drow screamed. Priestesses shouted unheeded orders.
Another great tremor shook the temple behind him, and the central dome collapsed in a shower of crashing stone and glass. Gromph presumed that Yasraena, Larikal, and the vrocks died under its weight.
Fitting, he thought, that in the end Lolth had crushed the traitors.
Gromph stepped off the portico and away from the temple. He wondered distantly if the
Xorlarrin forces would be caught in the blast. Certainly enough power seemed to be gathering.
The energy from all of the wards would power the explosion. It would consolidate at the trigger,
in the center of the collapsed temple, and explode outward from there. Gromph thought it possible that all of House Agrach Dyrr would be destroyed.
He looked toward the gates and saw the wave surging back-a great, glowing wall of arcane power. The ground rippled before it.