Annihilation (40 page)

All around them was the stench of decay, so intense at times Pharaun Mizzrym thought he would suffocate.

The wizard had been walking for hours in uncharacteristic silence. None of the drow or the draegloth commented aloud on the state of the Demonweb Pits. It was too difficult to voice the palpable sense of despair the ruined place imbued in them all. They stopped occasionally to rest, and minutes would go by where they didn’t even look at each other.

Constantly on their guard for the plane’s demonic inhabitants, at first they were all on a knife’s edge, but as the hours dragged on and they saw nothing alive, let alone threatening, they soon began to relax. That was when the despair deepened even further.

They walked on and on and finally came to Lolth’s temple. The once imposing, otherworldly structure stood in ruin, infected by the same decay as the universe-spanning web. The obsidian stone had turned brown and was crumbled away in spots. Huge columns of smoke rose from the interior. Many of the great buttresses stood like shattered stumps, amputated by some inconceivable power. The surrounding plazas were difficult to traverse, littered with boulders of carved stone and iron rusted and twisted out of shape. Bones lay everywhere—the bones of millions stacked in great piles or scattered as if by the cruel winds alone. The petrified spider-things they had marveled at before were gone, leaving holes in the floor of the plaza and along the buttresses as if they’d pulled up their feet from the stone and marched away.

The party traced the same path they had taken when in astral form and came once again to the entrance to the temple. The great stone face was itself shattered, revealing glimpses of the visage of Lolth but only in tiny, enigmatic fragments.

The doors swung wide.

“It was the gods,” Valas whispered, his voice echoing in a million tiny pings across the ruined plaza.

Vhaeraun, who had come to kill Lolth because of their own rash decision to lead one of his priests there, had been confronted by Selvetarm—Lolth’s protector—at the temple gates. Their duel was a sight that would be burned into Pharaun’s memory if he lived to be ten thousand years old, and the contest had caused much damage, but….

“Not this,” the Master of Sorcere said, his own voice echoing, though in not quite the same way. “This is different. Older.”

“Older?” the draegloth asked, his eyes darting from rock to rock.

“He’s right,” said Danifae, who was crouching, holding the skull of something that might have been half drow, half bat. “These bones are dried and bleached, almost petrified. The stone itself is crumbling to dust. The webs are rotten and brittle.”

“This place was razed a century ago or more,” Pharaun said.

“That’s not possible,” Valas argued, staring up at the open doors. “We were just here—
right
here, and the doors were sealed, and …”

The others didn’t expect him to finish.

“Lolth has left this place,” Quenthel said, her voice so quiet it barely managed to elicit an echo at all.

“She has left the Demonweb Pits?” Danifae asked. “How could that be?”

“She has left the Abyss,” the Mistress of Arach-Tinilith said. “Can’t you feel it?”

Danifae shook her head, but her eyes answered in the affirmative. The two females shared a long, knowing look that raised the hair on the back of Pharaun’s neck. He sensed similar reactions from Jeggred and Valas.

“That’s it then,” said the Bregan D’aerthe scout. “We have come
here to find the goddess but instead we have found nothing. Our mission is at an end.”

Quenthel turned to glare at the scout, who returned it with a steady, even gaze. The vipers that made up the high priestess’s scourge writhed and spat, but Valas paid them no mind.

“She isn’t here,” Quenthel said, “but that doesn’t mean she isn’t … somewhere.”

The scout took a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking all around at the ruined temple.

“So where is she?” he asked. “How much farther do we go? Do we search the limitless multiverse for her, plane by plane, universe by universe? She’s a creature of the Demonweb Pits, and here we stand on the sixty-sixth layer of the gods-cursed Abyss and she’s gone. If you don’t know where she’s gone to—and she could be anywhere—and she won’t tell you where she is, maybe we all have to accept the fact that she doesn’t want to be found.”

It was the most Pharaun had ever heard Valas say all at once, and the words made his heart sink.

“He’s right,” said the Master of Sorcere.

To his surprise, Quenthel nodded. Danifae’s eyes widened, and Jeggred growled low in his throat. The draegloth moved slowly, in that fluid, stalking way of his, and went to stand next to the former battle-captive.

“This is sacrilege,” Danifae whispered. “Heresy of the worst sort.”

Quenthel turned to look at the other priestess and silently raised an eyebrow.

“You presume to allow some—” Danifae turned to briefly glare at Valas—“
male
to speak for Lolth? Does he decide the goddess’s intentions now?”

“Do you?” Pharaun couldn’t help but ask.

Surprisingly, Danifae smiled when she said, “Perhaps I do.
Certainly I have more claim to that right than Master Hune. Capable a scout as he is, this is the business of priestesses now.”

Quenthel stood a little straighter, though her shoulders still hunched. Pharaun marveled at how old she looked. The high priestess had aged decades in the past tenday, and exhaustion was plain in her heavy-lidded eyes and blunt temper.

Pharaun couldn’t look at her, so he looked down at the floor of the plaza. He scuffed his boot through brown-powdered stone.

“I was wrong,” the Master of Sorcere said. He could feel the others looking at him, could sense their surprise, but he didn’t look up. “This didn’t happen a century ago. This place was destroyed … no, a battle was fought here, and it was fought a millennium past at least. At least.”

“How can you say that, wizard?” asked the draegloth. “You were just here. Weren’t you? Isn’t this the same place Tzirik brought you?”

Pharaun nodded and said, “It is indeed, Jeggred, but the fact remains that what we see all around us is an ancient ruin, the corpse of a battlefield that’s lain cold for a thousand years or more.”

“We were only just here,” said Valas.

“We aren’t in the Underdark anymore, Master Hune,” said Pharaun. “Time might move very differently here, in fits and starts like distance in the Shadow Deep. This could all be more illusion than real, the whim of Lolth or some other godly power. It could be that we simply see a ruin where there is nothing, see a ruin where there is in fact an intact temple, or everything we see is real and made a millennium old by a power so vast that it can manipulate time and matter and the æther itself.”

“The Spider Queen isn’t here,” Valas added.

“If the priestesses say that she is not here,” Pharaun replied, “then I’m content to believe that’s true.”

The Master of Sorcere looked up at the enormous open doorway,
big enough for House Baenre to pass through it intact. The others followed his gaze.

“These doors were sealed shut before,” Pharaun said, “but now they’re open. Why?”

“Because Lolth wants us to step through them,” Danifae said, her voice carrying a certainty that surprised Pharaun. “Who else could have opened them?”

Pharaun shrugged and looked at Quenthel, who was nodding slowly.

“We go on,” the high priestess said.

Without a glance at the others, Quenthel walked toward the mammoth doorway. One by one the others followed: Danifae, then Jeggred, then Pharaun, and Valas at the rear. Each stepped more reluctantly than the last.

On the planes of chaos there were so many names for it, Aliisza didn’t remember them all: temporal flux zones, slipped time layers, millennia sinks…. It had been a very long time since she’d seen one, and it took her almost as long to realize what was happening.

The sixty-sixth layer of the Abyss had been abandoned. The glue that held the planes together was the gods themselves, and in the planes of chaos, just as in the planes of law, when all the gods left a particular place, entropy progressed in fits and starts, and even chaos itself spiraled out of control.

In the case of the sixty-sixth layer, there was the rest of the Abyss to hold it together and to provide echoes of its past that were strong enough to keep its physical form—in that there still was a sixty-sixth layer. Time was moving forward faster at times, then slower, then it might reverse itself. It was impossible to pin
down, even for a tanar’ri like Aliisza. Places like that were better left alone, better avoided, better forgotten.

She watched Pharaun and his companions walk through the massive temple gates with a heavy heart. She didn’t know exactly what they would find in there, but she was sure that whatever it was it would be disappointing for them. They had traveled to the sixty-sixth layer to find Lolth, but Lolth wasn’t there. It was a guess on her part, but an educated one: the plane had been abandoned for longer than anyone imagined—longer than Lolth had been silent.

“There’s a lot you never told them,” Aliisza whispered to the Spider Queen.

If the goddess could hear her—and Aliisza had no reason to believe she could—Lolth didn’t answer.

The alu-fiend absently scratched a doodle in the brown dust on the underside of the massive web strand onto which she clung: a bit of graffiti no eyes would ever see. Her mind was racing; she had a lot to think about.

Aliisza had abandoned Pharaun and the others, leaving them to crash into the Plain of Infinite Portals simply on a whim. It pleased her that Pharaun survived, but she didn’t give the others a second thought. Still, Aliisza had made her choice, and it was an obvious one. She chose Kaanyr Vhok.

Though she knew she would go back to him, she also knew that she had helped Pharaun and his expedition along a bit more effectively than Vhok would have approved of. He might not have asked her to stop them, but he certainly hadn’t asked her to help them. Aliisza knew the cambion well enough, though, to know that the more she came back with, the more forgiving he would be.

Pharaun and the other drow disappeared into the abandoned ruin, and Aliisza closed her eyes.

She was a tanar’ri and as such could move about the planes
with a bit more ease than most. With a thought she was back in the Astral, floating free in the endless æther.

“You left the Abyss,” Aliisza whispered to herself, though she addressed Lolth, “before you fell silent, so …”

She didn’t bother finishing the thought, only concentrated on a name: Lolth.

She closed her eyes again and let the name roll over and over again in her mind, and after a time, her body began to move. Any god’s name has power, if you know how to use it.

When she opened her eyes she was surrounded by ghosts.

Translucent gray shades floated all around her, all of them with similar features: the pointed ears, almond-shaped eyes, and thin, aristocratic faces of the dark elves. There were a lot of them—a war’s worth—and they were all headed across the Astral Plane toward the same destination.

Aliisza drifted in front of one of them, a strong-looking male dressed for battle, regal in his armor and helm.

“Can you hear me?” she asked the spirit. “Can you see me?”

The dead drow looked right at her and lifted an eyebrow. He stood stock still, but his body continued to drift through the endless expanse, unerringly falling sideways toward its final destination.

“My name is Aliisza,” she said. “Do you know where you are?”

Yes
, the drow answered directly into her mind. His mouth was open, but his lips didn’t move.
I can feel it. I’m dead. I died. I was killed
.

“What is your name?”

I was Vilto’sat Shobalar
, the soldier answered,
but now I am nothing. My body rots away, my House forgets me, and I pass on. Are you here to torment me?

“I’m sorry?” the alu-fiend asked, confused by the drow spirit’s sudden change of subject.

You’re a demon
, he said.
Are you here to torment me? For my
failure on the battlefield or simply to satisfy your cruel nature?

Aliisza’s hackles rose, and she couldn’t help but sneer at the dead drow. He had obviously mistaken her for a different sort of tanar’ri altogether, and she didn’t find it flattering in the least.

“If I was here to torment you,” she said, “you’d know it, mushroom farm.”

Vilto’sat Shobalar turned away from her with a look of haughty contempt that was the only thing, apparently, dark elves took to the grave.

Aliisza moved on along the line of dead drow, and as she progressed in the direction of their travel, moving faster than the wandering souls, the density of the ghosts increased, as if they had been stacking up, one after another, for a long time. Finally, her curiosity getting the better of her, she stopped another drow spirit: a female dressed in finery that made the alu-fiend momentarily jealous.

“Lady,” she said, sketching an overwrought bow that the dead dark elf seemed to find insulting, “may I speak with you briefly as you complete your journey?”