Baldur's Gate (15 page)

“I may admit that mistake soon enough, Xan,” Abdel said, forcing a grim smile.

“It can be a difficult thing,” the elf retorted, “being right all the—there!”

Abdel stopped and followed the elf’s finger. He saw just a sliver of the rust-brown side of the thing. It was furry, but the fur was coarse.

“Like a spider,” Jaheira said, finishing Abel’s thought.

“Spiders die,” Abdel said, hoping to reassure her, “just like everything else.”

“Keep moving,” Xan said. The elf was beginning to sweat profusely, and he drew his sword. “We need to just keep moving. If they get overconfident…”

“They’ll come in close enough to—ack!” Abdel spat the spider out of his mouth and grabbed at his face with both hands to clear the web.

“You walked right into it,” Jaheira said, as if Abdel had to be told.

There was a loud rustle in the undergrowth behind them, and Jaheira took hold of Abdel’s arm and screamed, “Come on!”

Abdel didn’t bother to resist. He picked away the last sticky bits of web and followed Jaheira, who had gone after Xan and Korak at a dead run. The rustle subsided behind them, the creature, whatever it was, didn’t attack.

Abdel got his face clear just in time to see Xan’s still back and stop before he ran the elf over.

“What’s wrong?” Abdel said, then looked up, heard Jaheira stifle a scream, and nearly screamed himself.

The trees gave way to a clearing, a clearing full of webs of all sizes, shapes, and levels of complexity, from simple strands hanging from one twisted branch to another, to enormous ropy constructions resembling tales Abdel had heard of the cities of Evermeet. Things that looked like nests crawled with tiny spiders, and in one enormous web, with strands easily thicker than the stoutest rope Abdel had ever seen, was a spider the size of a cow. Its bulbous, black body was stippled with red. Smoking green venom was dripping from its twitching mandibles.

Jaheira just stood there with her mouth open and her eyes bulging. She’d gone past panic, past the ability to scream. Xan mumbled something in Elvish that was certainly a prayer, and a single tear tracked through the grime of his right cheek.

Korak shuffled his feet, trying to decide which direction to run away in, and said, “Oops.”

In the center of the clearing was what Abdel could only describe as a building.

The giant spider looked up and screamed. The sound was echoed by a shrill, mindless shriek from Jaheira. Abdel almost screamed himself as his flesh crawled over the muscles of his arms and shoulders, down his back, and into his tightening groin. He looked at Jaheira and almost screamed again. She was losing her mind.

The ettercaps—the bristle-furred humanoids—chose that moment to attack, or maybe the giant spider’s scream had been an order. When they came out of the spider-infested undergrowth Abdel quickly slid his sword out of its back sheath and met their charge with his usual grim determination. This set the ettercaps off balance, and the first one to him had to make its opening attack alone.

The things were shorter than Abdel but taller than Jaheira and Xan. They moved no faster than an average man, but their thin—yes, spidery—limbs flailed wildly and made them appear fast. The one that charged Abdel opened a fang-lined mouth, and Abdel almost gagged at the smell of its venom. He swiped at the thing with his sword, but the blade sliced across too high and only clipped off the tip of one of its long, pointed ears.

The ettercap yelped but pressed its attack. Abdel heard Xan move in to attack another one that had burst from the growth near him. A long-fingered hand raked sharp claws across Abdel’s left arm, drawing blood and a string of curses from the sellsword. It was at this moment that Abdel stopped thinking about the world around him, and even forgot about Jaheira, who he’d last seen in a state of horrified paralysis. He was fighting now, and that was all.

He took the ettercap’s hand off, and the thing let out a long, whistling shriek and backed two quick steps away to be replaced by two more of its kind. Abdel stabbed one in the eye while the other managed to tear into his right leg with those awful, needlelike claws. Abdel grunted, lifted his left leg and kicked out at the thing, hitting it squarely in one sagging breast. The stubbly fur crinkled under the blow, and the creature let out a stinking breath all at once and fell to its knees. Abdel brought his sword around and up, then sliced down hard into the kneeling monster’s right shoulder. It didn’t make a sound, but Abdel must have hit an artery. Blood came out of it fast and pulsing with the thing’s rapid, but rapidly decreasing heartbeat. It put one spindly hand to the wound, and its lifeless gray eyes rolled in its round, bulldog skull.

There was another raking pain in Abdel’s left shoulder, and he jumped back one step—just in time. The only unwounded ettercap scratched him again, but Abdel had avoided a venom-dripping bite. He stabbed fast and hard with both hands, and the tip of his bloody broadsword pierced flesh, clicked off bone, and came out of the ettercap’s back with a pronounced popping noise.

Abdel had to kick it off his sword with one foot, and before it hit the ground, Abdel whirled at the sound of a scream behind him.

Jaheira called, “Khalid,” and Abdel winced at both the name she chose as her possible savior and the woman’s most dire predicament. She was wrapped tightly in what looked like a net made from thick, strong strands of spider silk. Two of the hulking humanoid spider things were dragging her harshly through prickly underbrush and nest after nest of tiny crawling spiders. Jaheira was gasping for air, gasping to scream and scream again.

Abdel took one step forward, ignoring Xan fighting for his own life, then the big sellsword was tripped. His ankle was tangled quickly in a thick, adhesive rope. An ettercap moved in at him as Abdel flipped over onto his rump and slashed out at the strand. Trying to avoid cutting off his own foot, Abdel reached out far, and his sword came down into the ettercap’s distended belly instead of along the length of the web. The silk strand was coming out of the ettercap’s abdomen, and the web mixed with blood and lost its cohesion when the thing died shrieking. Hot blood and liquid spider silk splashed on Abdel’s legs, and he kicked the sticky substance, almost getting it off his leg before more, thicker, stickier strands of the stuff fell on him from above. His sword arm was pinned, so he risked tossing the heavy blade to his other hand. Once it was in his free hand, he spun again on his rump and brought the blade up to protect his face.

The giant spider they’d first seen sitting in the middle of its enormous web was coming down the face of a bark-stripped tree, coming fast and hard at Abdel, poison oozing from between its sideways jaws.

“Torm save me,” Abdel called and sliced his sword back to his left, then right. The spider paused, and Abdel rolled all the way over to one side, hoping to escape the web. Hair was pulled painfully from his arm, and a strand of web stuck to his neck. He was a fly now, a meal for this eight-legged predator, and like a fly, his desperate struggles only served to cement his captivity in the sticky web.

“Hold still,” the spider said, and Abdel flinched at the sound of its voice. It was a sound like glass being drawn across steel, and it set Abdel’s hair on end as much from the sound of it as from the horror that such a creature had the power of speech at all. “Hold still, human, and let Kriiya drain you. Let Kriiya drain you dry.”

Abdel screamed and lunged upward. He feinted once, and the spider fell for it, twitching quickly to one side. Abdel fed the thing his sword, and the blade went into the spider’s mouth over a foot before meeting resistance. Blood and poison gushed from the dying thing’s mouth, and it convulsed so hard that Abdel nearly lost his grip on his sword. Its legs curled up under it with a loud crinkling sound that masked Jaheira’s scream enough so that Abdel only thought she screamed, “Daddy!” but couldn’t be sure.

The thing was falling right at him, and Abdel, eyes and mouth closed tightly to avoid the horrid poison, pulled as hard as he could and shifted the thing’s weight—and it was easily a ton—off the tree in a slow semicircle. It hit the undergrowth, and the thing’s shell cracked, sending a gushing wave of slime, poison, and stomach acids sizzling through the webs and vegetation.

“Jaheira!” Abdel screamed, but there was no answer. From down on the ground it was hard for Abdel to see, so he tried to stand, but couldn’t. He was still stuck in the strands of thick spider web, and his range of motion was severely limited. He still held his gore-soaked sword in his left hand and after some struggling and some cutting managed to sit up. He could hear Xan fighting, the elf was breathing heavily but steadily and footfalls were hard to mask in the tangled underbrush. When Abdel could finally see the elf, he was immediately impressed with Xan’s swordsmanship. They’d been traveling together for some time, but Abdel hadn’t had much opportunity to see Xan in action. Typically. when Xan was fighting, so was Abdel, and when Abdel was fighting he rarely had an eye for much else. The elf’s sword was a bright blur in front of him, and to Abdel the blade resembled some kind of magical shield more than a sword, but there was no magic about it, the elf was good.

There were two ettercaps on the ground in front of the elf, and Xan was busy wearing down the last. The thing was bleeding from dozens of cuts, and its gray eyes showed a look of obvious desperation, but it didn’t hesitate. It kept at the elf, and Abdel, not daring to shout encouragement for fear of distracting the elf, could only look on and hope. It didn’t take long, though, before Xan managed one more cut, then another, then—gurgling on its own blood—the thing went down.

“Xan!” Abdel called. The elf looked at him sharply, still on his guard. Abdel could see a coin-sized spider skitter across the elf’s chest just as he felt one cross his own leg. “Xan, get me out of this! We have to help—”

The huge spider jumped on Xan’s back. It just came out of nowhere, and Abdel grunted in surprise along with the elf, who was pushed roughly forward and to his knees. Xan made eye contact with Abdel and looked confused. Abdel pulled at the web on his ankle and the skin started to tear. The sellsword screamed as he continued to pull away, leaving his skin behind. The spider on Xan’s back opened its sideways jaws around the elf’s neck, and Xan, still looking at Abdel, realized what was about to happen.

“Xan!” Abdel screamed, still pulling himself off the web. “No!”

The spider’s jaws came together, and the elf’s head came off with a loud, crackling pop.

“No!” Abdel screamed again, and his right arm came free, trailing blood and strands of spider silk. He screamed again and stood.

The spider leaped at him, and Abdel cut it in two in midair. This spider’s blood was so hot it actually burned Abdel where it splashed on him. It twitched and rolled violently in the undergrowth, and Abdel turned away from it. “Jaheira,” he said, “I’m coming.”

“She’s in there,” Korak said. Abdel looked up with a start. He’d forgotten about the ghoul. “They dragged the lady into there.” Korak pointed, and Abdel made to charge him. The ghoul ran away, and Abdel, panting, soaked in blood and venom, burning and bleeding and shaking, let him go. He turned in the direction the ghoul had pointed, to the center of the hellish clearing. It was a building.

It looked like a domed hut but of massive size, as big a building as Abdel had seen on the Sword Coast. It was a mass of brilliant white and pale gray, smooth in places, but irregular. It was made of spider silk, but there was something else Abdel couldn’t make out clearly until he got closer. The thing was constructed from bodies—human bodies, mostly—drained of blood and guts, desiccated and cocooned in spider silk to act as buttresses for this inhuman domicile.

Abdel didn’t have time to be sickened by the sight any more than he had time to be impressed with its construction. Jaheira had been pulled inside there, Xan was dead, and the ghoul had run off. She needed him, and he knew he couldn’t go on without her. Under any other conditions he might have paused to consider that revelation, maybe even argue with the feeling. He was in love with her. She was in there, and Mad Cyric alone could imagine what might be happening to her. If he couldn’t save her, he wanted to die trying. He knew he didn’t want to live without her.

Spiders and what could only be baby ettercaps scattered when Abdel burst into the chamber. The two adult ettercaps who had dragged Jaheira into the dome spun on him and attacked without pausing to think. Abdel went at them like a wild animal and actually laughed when he brought the second one down. Both of the things lay at his feet, their death spasms subsiding, and Abdel looked up.

What he saw there made him take two steps back. His knees shook, then gave out on him. He knelt on the uneven floor of the ghastly chamber and heaved once, then again, before he noticed that even the floor of the place was made from the desiccated husks of dead humans. He vomited into the gaping, screaming face of a mummified woman, and his hair stood up on end, and he scurried away repeating “Torm, Torm, Torm,” under his breath.

Jaheira whimpered, and Abdel stood up so fast he nearly went all the way over onto his butt. She was alive, he saw then, wrapped in the sticky net she’d been dragged in. Her back was too him. She was breathing, and her back and side quivered.

Directly over Jaheira’s prone, web-wrapped form was what Abdel might only have described as “the queen.” Webs hung in loose strands, draped from the dead-body walls.

Suspended in the center of the open space was a thing that once must have been a woman, maybe a human woman. It was tremendously, unnaturally fat, bloated and purple. Fold after fold of pale flesh dripped off the massive form, and it was dark enough in there that Abdel couldn’t see clearly what it was that moved in and out of those folds of flesh—spiders, certainly, and there were humanoid forms, small and furry. Abdel realized the spiders and their humanoid cousins were using this woman to breed, using her like a nursery, like an incubator, and Abdel retched again.

“Am I so hideous?” the woman asked, with a voice like a pig rooting in slop. “Yes, I suppose I must be.”