Halisstra clambered up onto the pile, which stood about twice Cavatina's height. The bottom of the trunk was slightly raised, as if poised on its roots like a hunting spider about to spring. There was enough clearance between trunk and stones for even the monstrous Halisstra to have crawled through on hands and knees without touching the tree above.

"In here," she said, hunkering down beside it and gesturing at the space beneath the tree.

Cavatina climbed warily up to where Halisstra waited. If it was indeed a portal to Lolth's domain, Cavatina would have it sealed once the expedition was over. For the time being, she cast a spell that would allow others of her faith to find it. If she didn't return from her quest, someone else could deal with it later.

She heard a faint, high-pitched sound like the wind whistling through taut-strung wire. It was an eerie wail, one that made Cavatina's skin crawl. "The songspider?" she asked.

Halisstra nodded. "She must have repaired her web."

Cavatina squatted beside Halisstra and peered between the roots. She could see faint lines of violet against the darkness-brief shimmers of hair-thin light that were there one moment, gone the next.

"Silence it," she ordered.

Halisstra ducked her head-the best nod she could manage, with those thickly corded neck muscles-and reached into the hollow under the tree. Her fingers plucked at the strands of violet light. As she worked, a low, rasping sound came from her throat: a song. When it was done, Halisstra pulled her hands back. Her long, dark fingers were sticky with violet threads. The sound that had been coming from inside the hollow had stopped.

"It's done," she said. "The way is clear."

"Good," Cavatina said. "You first."

Halisstra bowed her head. "Mistress."

The look she gave Cavatina made it clear she understood that the Darksong Knight didn't fully trust her. She turned and scrabbled her way into the space beneath the tree and stood, the upper half of her body vanishing from sight. One foot stepped up, then the other-and she was gone.

Cavatina took a deep breath. She had fought demons on the doorsteps of the Abyss as they emerged from portals, but she had never traveled to the outer planes herself. She fairly tingled with the thrill of it, even though it was not truly a hunt but a recovery mission. She cast a spell that would allow her to resist the negative energies of the Demonweb Pits then followed, singing sword in hand. As her body penetrated the spot occupied on the Prime Material Plane by the tree, the smell of moldy sap filled her nostrils. An instant later, her head forced its way through strands of web, snapping them with vibrations she could feel but could not hear. A thin film of stickiness covered her hair, shoulders, and clothes-strands of the songspider web. She climbed up, as Halisstra had done-and suddenly was standing somewhere else.

The first thing she did was search for the spider whose web they had just broken, but it was nowhere to be seen. A divination spell revealed nothing.

"Where's the songspider?" she asked.

Halisstra shrugged. "Gone." She pointed at something that lay a few paces away that looked like a bundle of old sticks. "I think her children ate her."

Cavatina nodded as she recognized the dried husk as the remains of a spider. She'd expected a living foe. The passage had been easy. Too easy.

She looked around. The Demonweb Pits looked nothing like she'd expected. She'd always envisioned them as a vast cavern filled with steel-strong webs, upon which Lolth's iron fortress crept like a spider. Instead the portal had delivered them to a blasted plain of barren, purple-gray rock, under a sky that was utterly black, save for a cluster of eight blood red stars that glared down like the eyes of a watchful spider. Hanging down from the sky on strands of web-so far overhead that they appeared little more than dots-were off-white balls. Every now and then, one of them burst, releasing the ghostly gray form of a drow-a soul, freshly dead. The souls were caught by the wind, which blew steadily in one direction, toward a distant line of cliffs.

The plain was as uneven as a pox-scarred face, cratered with depressions and gouged with deep chasms. Everywhere Cavatina looked, there were webs. They drifted on the wind and snagged on her clothes and hair. Feeling something tickle her bare knee, she glanced down. The ground was covered in tiny red spiders, each no larger than a grain of rice. They swarmed up onto her boots. She whispered a prayer. Under its compulsion, the tiny spiders leaped from her boots and scurried away into cracks in the rock.

"Where is the temple?" she asked in a low voice. The cluster of red "stars" overhead made her wary of raising her voice.

Halisstra pointed at a spot, perhaps a league away, where dozens of what looked like flat-topped spires of stone protruded from the ground. "On top of one of those."

Cavatina squinted at the distant objects. "What are they?"

"The petrified legs of giant spiders."

Cavatina frowned. "That's what you built Eilistraee's temple on top of?"

Halisstra gave a lopsided grin. "It offered the best vantage point, easier to defend than anywhere else." She gestured with a misshapen hand. "Come."

Halisstra scuttled away across the wasteland toward the spires. The Darksong Knight activated the magic of her boots then followed, not wanting to let Halisstra get out of sight. Cavatina levitated and descended, levitated and descended, in a series of long, graceful strides. Each time a boot touched ground, it slipped slightly as it squished the tiny spiders that swarmed there. Certain that Lolth would react to this defilement of her domain any instant, Cavatina kept a watchful eye for whatever the Spider Queen would hurl at her, but there were no attacks. No spiders descended from the skies, no darkfire boiled up from the ground below, no madness-inducing peals of laughter echoed across the landscape. It was as if the domain itself held its breath, waiting to see what Halisstra and Cavatina would do.

It was certainly the Demonweb Pits, but one vital element was missing: Lolth's fortress. Said to be shaped like an enormous iron spider, it should have been ceaselessly patrolling her realm, yet Cavatina could neither see nor hear it. Was the Demonweb Pits so vast that Lolth's fortress was beyond the horizon? It was a question Cavatina could not answer. She knew only one thing. Wherever Lolth's fortress might be, she was glad it wasn't on top of them.

As she descended from yet another floating leap, her eyes were drawn to a web-choked crevice in the ground where something stirred. This gave her the warning she needed to spring to the side as a cluster of spider-things burst from the crevice and swarmed toward her. She recognized them at once: chwidenchas, creatures made from the magically altered bodies of drow who had displeased Lolth. Each of the four creatures was the size of a small horse, composed entirely of bristly black legs tipped with claws as sharp as daggers. Additional barbs lined the inside of each leg, turning it into the equivalent of a saw blade. Once a chwidencha landed on its chosen prey, those barbs would hook fast in a grapple. The only way to avoid being crushed when the creature squeezed was by tearing free-something that would carve jagged wounds into the victim's flesh.

Cavatina had escaped the chwidenchas by levitating, but Halisstra wasn't so fortunate. Attracted by the vibrations of her footfalls, the spider-things veered toward her. Halisstra whirled and blasted one of them with a web, suffocating it under a thick coating of sticky silk, but then the other three were on her. Legs rose and fell, the claws stabbing down. Most skittered harmlessly off Halisstra's stone-tough skin, but a few of the jabs sank home. In an instant, Halisstra's body was coated in blood.