Demascus saw no sign of any of the other drow or the Veil.
The hollow in the ceiling opened wider. And something popped. The air pressure in the chamber had increased. The domed portion of the ceiling had become a portal mouth to somewhere new. He felt dizzy. His mind insisted he wasn’t looking up, but rather that he was gazing down, as if taking in the view from a scenic point poised high above a massive subterranean vault. A magnificent dark city stretched out below him, with many structures carved into the sides of living stalagmites. Points of light striped each massive stone pillar, dotted the stone bridges that connected them, and spread out deeper like countless stars. Figures with skin dark as tar and hair like fresh snow moved with elven grace across the bridges and through the streets and galleries.
“Menzoberranzan!” screamed Chenraya. “I return! With a prize suitable for a goddess!”
As if naming the city made it real, ettercaps and reanimated miners around the base of the dais began to fall up into the portal mouth. Chenraya didn’t fall; she ascended, as if lifted by a mother’s careful hand.
Now or never, thought Demascus, as his own body began to feel a countervailing pull up through the portal. He tried to judge his own weight, Chenraya’s upward momentum, the changing gradient of pull between the floor and the portal.
He gathered his feet beneath him and leaped. As he’d guessed, the pull from the portal almost seemed to give him wings. He sailed in a high arc, intersecting Chenraya before she realized she was under attack. The drow held the staff high, jubilantly. Demascus merged Exorcessum into a single long blade even as he swung, aiming to sever Chenraya’s wrist.
The report of the blades’ merger drew the priestess’s attention. She retracted her arm in surprise. Instead of shearing off her hand at the wrist, Exorcessum cut through the shaft itself, immediately above where she gripped it.
The staff’s upper half and headpiece spun free. Demascus snatched it out of the air as his momentum propelled him away. His lateral speed carried him out from under the portal mouth, and the strength of its pull eased.
“No!” raged Chenraya behind and above him.
Demascus came down on the webbed floor. He watched the drow priestess convulsing in apoplectic rage as she passed through the portal mouth. She retained her hold on the lower portion of the staff, which he supposed still represented a generous fraction of the transformed relic. But he’d rescued the greater amount.
“Lolth slay you all!” Chenraya screeched from the other side of the portal, still falling away. “Rise, Demonweb; rise, ye manifestation of the Demon Queen!Destroy every creature infesting the crossroads-drow, ettercap, drider, and most especially those who have just denied you the-”
The portal in the ceiling snapped shut. Chenraya, the fragment of the relic she’d managed to retain, and the image of a drow city called Menzoberranzan were gone.
The pull exerted through the portal ceased; down was down once more. A rain of slave-soldiers fell hard to the floor. Something touched Demascus’s ankle. He yelled and flinched back before he saw that it wasn’t a web line-it was the Veil. It wound up his leg and tied itself snugly around his neck.
“Burning dominions,” he said to no one in particular.
An ettercap clacked its mandibles at him in the silence. Silence … Wait, hadn’t someone been calling his name? Where were his friends? He peered across the transept to the entrance. Though a few slave-soldiers had fallen up through the portal, most remained in the Demonweb, still blocking easy access into and out of the chamber. But he couldn’t see Riltana, Arathane, or Chant.
Demascus fended off a couple of animated corpses and one halfhearted attack from an ettercap. The creatures had all witnessed the departure of their mistress. In her absence, they seemed confused and fearful. Their anxiety and uncertainty was his chance to depart through the milling press. He didn’t have much time. If Chenraya’s parting words were any indication, in moments the Demonweb would rouse itself to destroy everyone within this chamber.
A charging drider interrupted his methodical escape through the crowd. The drider must’ve started on the periphery of the chamber. It dashed toward the dais, running over Chenraya’s slave-soldiers like an icebreaker in a frozen strait. Its eyes were fixed over the deva’s head, on the ceiling that had so recently hosted a portal. The drider keened like a lost child. And as fate would have it, Demascus was directly between it and its destination. Slave-soldiers scattered to get out of its way.
He wasn’t sure he could take down a drider and fend off the surrounding press simultaneously, now that the office of the Sword had slipped entirely from him. Luckily the drider was distracted. If he managed it just right, he might be able to get past the drider without a fight.
Demascus accelerated, moving directly toward the approaching creature. At the last instant, the deva lay back into a slide. He skimmed under the drider’s arachnid belly, nose just inches from the black carapace of its abdomen. He caught a whiff of something alkaline.
And he almost made it.
But the creature caught him with an anchoring web filament squirted from a fat spinneret. The filament pulled him up short, and he almost fumbled the staff. He stuffed its foreshortened length into his belt and fastened both hands on Exorcessum. He swept the blade through the restraining web, then rolled out from beneath the arachnid-drow before it could squash him merely by lowering its bulk.
He shouted, “I’ve dispatched your mistress. If you don’t let me pass, I’ll do the same for you.”
That’s when they all went mad.
Ettercap turned on ettercap, reanimated miner upon fellow miner. A nearby corpse plucked a dashing spideroid from the ground with undead strength and tossed it into the air like a ball. A contingent of ettercaps swarmed a corpulent miner like ants on a piece of meat.
“What in the name of all the Hells?” Apparently Chenraya’s servitors were sensitive to some influence Demascus couldn’t detect. He doubted his threat was the cause.
The creatures’ earlier anxiety and confusion was transformed into violent psychosis. Despite destroying three in as many rapid eye blinks, another spideroid was already bull-rushing him, trying to bite his face off with clacking mandibles.
Demascus flinched back. The horny ridges of a drider thorax on his shoulder blades caged him in place. Oh, yeah-how’d he manage to forget about the drider?
The attacking ettercap slipped past his guarding blade and slammed a balled fist into his head before he managed to hew it into two ichor-squirting segments.
Dazed and blinking, the deva twisted to face the drider. It meant turning his back on slave-soldier mayhem, but he judged they were less of a threat than the drider.
The drider had arrived at a similar conclusion. It slammed a massive pincer claw at Demascus’s head. He grunted with the effort of deflecting it with his blade. The impact jarred his shoulders, and forced him several paces back. Fortunately the creatures around him seemed as much interested in tearing each other leg from leg as getting a taste of deva meat.
The drider screamed something in its own language, expelling a spray of spittle with the vehemence of its pronouncement. Probably a curse of some sort, but hopefully not a literal one. Demascus backed away another step. Where were his friends?
He dodged a loose ettercap head hurled by a reanimated genasi, dodged another drider pincer claw, and severed the arm from a slave-soldier already bleeding from several wounds.