Harathes was arguing with Lief, and nobody seemed quite to have understood what he had shouted before. There was no time for breaking matters gently. He knew what must happen now.

“Now!” he yelled. “They’re coming now!”

In the echo of that they all heard the massed sussuration of hundreds of chitinous feet, like the sound of the tide.

The wave of sound made Dion feel queasy. How many of the monsters were there in these tangled halls? Even one is too many was the instant answer.

“Into the cave ahead!” Penthos commanded. “Let’s have room to fight!”

“No! There are traps!” Enth started, but then the wizard thrust his hands forward and sent a wall of flame rolling out into the dark, illuminating a chamber whose very walls seethed with hairy, bulbous forms. She saw invisible lines and nets abruptly turned into brief-blazing patterns of fire, flaring and dying like alien glyphs—like whole books of inhuman lore put to the torch. Then she had Armes’s disc held out, directed back the way they had come, seeing her holy Light reflected in dozens of glittering eyes.

She gave out a shout and sent a searing ray of devotion to scorch them, killing a couple and forcing the rest to keep their distance. By that time, Harathes had his shield between her and the enemy, while Lief and Cyrene flanked Penthos’s advance.

“Up!” Lief was shouting. “Send something up! They’re dropping on us!”

She shaped the flow of radiant energy from her soul so that it formed a canopy above them. She did it even before she looked, and that was just as well because the sight was nauseating. Scores of spiders had been abseiling down toward them, legs outspread like the fingers of skeletal hands. The nearest dropped straight into her light, and there they thrashed and burned in lurid detail, caught by the solid power that Armes held over all Dark things. Others were reeling themselves hurriedly up, while all around them the ceiling and the cavern sides boiled with the horrible creatures.

Cyrene was hacking viciously away on one side, while Lief had a spear braced. Harathes was bellowing out a hymn as he cut and stabbed—their party was surrounded already by a scattering of lost limbs, ruptured abdomens, the lifeless orbs of bulbous eyes. Still the monsters came on, heedless of individual survival, driven mad with their lust to sink their fangs into human flesh.

And Enth…

The man-spider was almost shoulder to shoulder with her. She recoiled with a start, almost losing her grip on Armes’s disc. It was standing there, staring at everything with those ghastly round eyes, which glittered and gleamed with the reflections of Penthos’s fire.