A scream of sheer agony tore loose from Skarm's throat, and in that instant Nathifa knew the barghest was lost.
She was about to order Makala and Haaken to slay Skarm-though the barghest was next to useless, he had served her for many years and therefore had earned a swift death. But before the words could leave her mouth, a pair of web-wrapped corpses that had been lying hidden in sepulchers sat up. Beneath their gossamer covering, the mummies' skin rippled, as if numerous small creatures squirmed within. The mummies began climbing out of their hiding places, and Nathifa decided that Skarm hadn't been that good a servant after all. It would take the spider several moments to finish implanting a fresh batch of eggs inside the barghest's body and wrapping it in silk to turn him into a new web mummy. The mummies needed to be destroyed now, before they had the chance to release the broodswarms that writhed within them.
"Forget Skarm! Stop the others!" Nathifa ordered.
The web mummies had finished lurching out of their sepulchers and now shambled toward the vampire and the wereshark.
"Skarm who?" Makala said with a laugh, and she and Haaken ran toward the web-covered corpses.
"But whatever you do, don't-"
Haaken rammed a gray-fleshed fist the size of a ham through the chest of a web mummy, while Makala took hold of the other's head and ripped it off the creature's shoulders with a single, savage twist.
"— break open their bodies," Nathifa finished with a sigh.
As Haaken withdrew his hand, a swarm of fist-sized bright-red spiders surged forth from the gaping hole he'd created in their host's body. A second broodswarm began to emerge with equal swiftness from inside the neck of the web mummy Makala had decapitated.
"Now you tell us!" Makala said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As the broodswarm spiders launched themselves at Makala and Haaken, their mother dropped Skarm. The barghest-partially covered in webbing and writhing in pain-hit the floor of the crypt with a sharp crack of snapping bone. The tomb spider released her grip on the ceiling, flipped over as she descended, landed on her legs, and scuttled toward Makala and Haaken.
Tomb spiders reproduced by implanting their eggs in humanoid corpses, which in turn reanimated as undead creatures called web mummies. Once the eggs inside them hatched, the mummies served as both incubator and food source for the spider's young. As they grew within their undead host, the spiderlings began to devour those weaker than themselves until eventually only the strongest individual survived to emerge from the mummy as an adult. But if the immature spiders were released prematurely, they formed a broodswarm, attacking any living humanoids in the vicinity. In turn, the parent spider would seek to replace a ruined web mummy, for the immature spiderlings would never live to reach adulthood once released from their host.
Nathifa knew the tomb spider wasn't trying to save her children, for she could not do so. She was instead seeking hosts in which to implant more eggs. The lich didn't know whether Makala or Haaken could serve as effective hosts, since one was undead and the other a lycanthrope, and she didn't care. All that mattered was that they provided a distraction to occupy the tomb spider so the sorceress could work. Nathifa could have easily used her magic to slay the tomb spider. A simple fire spell would have sufficed, given the flammable webbing that filled the crypt chamber. But she refused to spare even the smallest fraction of her power to aid her servants. She needed every scrap of her magic to accomplish the task before her, especially now that she would be forced to drain the magic from Paganus's hoard as fast as she could. Maintaining control of the energy transference into the Amahau would take a greater effort than she had originally planned, but there was no hope for it. Bastiaan and his followers would be here soon: she could sense it. Swiftness was paramount now.
Besides, Nathifa thought, if the tomb spider managed to destroy Makala, the creature would be doing her a favor.
Makala and Haaken were fighting to shake off the crimson spiderlings they had released, when the two web mummies-even though one was headless-lurched forward and grabbed hold of them. The tomb spider raced toward them, intending to inject the intruders with her venom. Nathifa didn't bother to watch anymore. Whatever the outcome of her servants' battle with the giant spider, she would claim the power of Paganus's hoard in the name of Vol.
Before she could begin, she needed to do one last thing. She reached up, pressed her fingers against her left eye, and gouged it from the socket. The lich felt no pain, but even if the action had caused her excruciating agony, she would have gladly endured it for her Queen. She spoke a series of blasphemous words and tossed her eye into the air. The detached orb swelled to the size of a melon and hovered above its owner's head, facing the crypt's entrance. In case her servants failed to defeat the tomb spider, Nathifa wanted to make certain that someone was guarding her back, and there was no one she trusted more than herself.
She plunged her remaining hand inside her chest and withdrew the dragonwand from her inner darkness. She held the mystical artifact out before her, the golden dragonhead with crystalline teeth and ruby eyes that was the Amahau affixed on the end. She concentrated on activating the Gatherer, and the dragonhead's ruby eyes glimmered as the device began to do what it was designed for: absorb magic power. The undead sorceress shifted her perceptions until she could see multicolored lines of mystic force curl upward from the hundreds of objects Paganus had stolen over the centuries. The energy-tendrils began snaking toward the Amahau, and despite her vow to maintain strict control as the absorption proceeded, Nathifa couldn't help laughing.
The companions followed the direction of the barghest's scream and discovered a tunnel at the far end of the dragon's cavern. They hurried down it and soon came to a crudely excavated opening leading to a chamber of some sort, and they paused at the entrance.
Diran took the situation in at a glance: ancient crypt filled with webbing, tomb spider, broodswarm younglings, a pair of web mummies (one without a head), a wereshark-where had it come from? — Makala (his heart lurched at the sight of her), the barghest lying on the floor half-covered in webbing, and the lich Nathifa, holding Tresslar's dragonwand out before her, a huge crimson eye floating over the sorceress's head as she worked some manner of foul spell. Makala and the wereshark were held in the grip of the web mummies, broodswarm spiders crawling all over them, the younglings' mother rushing in to join her children's attack.
Diran had no idea what the floating eye hovering over Nathifa could do, and he really didn't want to find out. He hurled a dagger at the levitating orb, hoping to spear the eyeball the same way he'd practiced throwing knives at pieces of fruit when he was a boy. But as the dagger flew toward the crimson eye, a beam of necromantic energy lanced forth from the pupil, deflecting the blade. The dagger's new trajectory sent it hurtling toward the tomb spider, and the blade pierced the giant arachnid's abdomen.
The spider screeched and whirled about, as if to shoot an accusing glare at whoever had dealt it such an insulting wound. The monster's inhuman black eyes fixed on the companions and then, though the creature gave no obvious command, a dozen more web-covered figures sat up inside the black-stone sepulchers, their skin writhing from the motion of all the spiderlings growing inside them.