Then one spider had sprung onto Harathes’s shield and dragged it down, and another took his sword right in the nested cluster of its eyes, and Dion was forced to use her golden power to drive the hustling host back as he reclaimed his feet and his weapon, to prevent him being overrun—and that meant they were descending from above again. There seemed to be no limit to the monsters.

“We can’t hold them!” Cyrene yelled.

Then there was a creature that had sprung past Lief’s spear to leap onto his back, fangs up. Dion saw Cyrene desperately try to reverse the motion of her sword so she could swat it.

Enth took the spider and hurled it away into the midst of its fellows. He did not smash it or tear it apart, as he surely could have done. His movements were almost fastidious, practically delicate. He cast the creature away with care, as some benevolent soul might have shuffled one of its smaller brethren away out of a window.

There were more now, though, and they were growing bolder. Enth was put to evict another couple almost immediately afterward, and as much as Dion shifted and shaped the Light of Armes, she could not keep them away.

And then Penthos was calling out, “Gather close! Close, all of you! There’s only one way!”

Gratefully she pulled back, and pulled Harathes back too, until her back was to Penthos’s shoulder, until she was jostled in with Lief and Cyrene and the man-spider; until all six of them were pressed into a space barely wider across than her outstretched arms.

And Penthos let out a fearsome yell—something of savagery, something of elation, and something that owed nothing to a merely human throat. And he made fire.

She had said to him, at Cad Nereg, that he was one of the greatest wizards of her knowledge. He had many tricks, did Penthos. His transmutation of Enth was only one of them, for he was a magician’s magician, a man who had mastered many of the realms of magic, and perhaps all of them.

But he was a child at heart: he loved setting things ablaze. It was here that his most ardent studies were concentrated. And within the nest of the spiders, he called forth a weight and width of fire such as none of them had ever seen before.

Dion had a hand up, for the feeble protection it might grant her, but there was no heat turned inward. A shell of shimmering blue-white surrounded them, swirling like circling clouds. Beyond was only the inferno. She had a vague sense of scrabbling, blackened legs, of cracked bodies burst by the boiling of their own innards, of many-legged dances of agony that were mercifully brief. These were only shadows within the light.