Dion found herself nodding. Of course the monsters did not value their young. The thought was almost reassuring. It was just one more ready and convenient way to find them sufficiently alien as to be below her consideration.

She listened to the run of her own thoughts, knowing them riddled with logical defects. And yet she had the trump card to send all her qualms packing, of course: whatever they might be, whatever Cyrene and Lief might think, these things were of the Dark. Ridding the world of them was a holy duty.

They crossed the nursery-turned-morgue and were just about to exit when the great pile shifted slightly.

They all of them recoiled—Enth as much as anyone—and Lief let out a yell of horror. The great stack of arachnids rippled as though even smaller spiders were charging about underneath it, and then stiff dead bodies were cascading down, breaking or rolling as they struck the floor.

Everyone had their weapons ready now, crouched close to Penthos still. Beneath the clumped mass of the dead was something pale and mounded, something of dense webbing.

“It’s a plug,” Enth said, but Dion did not understand him.

Cyrene did, in the next moment, “A door. They made a door to keep the fire out. Could it keep the good air in?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Penthos began. “It would depend on the—” and then the webbing plug expoded outward, and vomiting forth from the chamber beyond came a vast spider the size of four horses: the mother; the queen.

The monster barrelled for them instantly, moving far faster than anything that size should have been able. It was as big as Enth’s own Mother, who had donated a fang and a son so unwillingly to their quest, but Dion guessed there would be no patient negotiation with this beast.

She got her disc out, throwing a wash of divine Light at the creature. Armes’s holy force struck and seared the spider queen without slowing her. It let out a screech that might have been a voice, or might have been its fluid boiling in its joints.

Harathes met the monster, not a head-on charge that would have flattened him, but ramming it from the side with his shield, deflecting it slightly. Cyrene darted forward and got a solid strike in with her blade, shattering one of the queen’s forelimbs, but the answering spasm knocked her across the floor. Dion found herself facing into the thing’s plate-sized eyes, seeing herself and the Light she placed her faith in reflected there, multiplied and in miniature.

It reared up, scythe-long fangs cocked back to drive into her. Penthos flung his arms forward, but achieved only a feeble scattering of fire that did nothing but singe the monster’s hair.