There was a scream of fury and Harathes slammed his sword into the monster’s underside with all his strength. The fangs rammed down and struck his shield, knocking him flat to the ground and piercing through the steel.

Lief drove his spear into the spider’s bloated abdomen before falling back to Penthos’s side, and Cyrene was cutting at it as well, but the monster was so vast they seemed all pinpricks to it. Dion drew together her certainty of purpose—a battered and abused organ of her mind these days—and threw forth all her digust into a cutting sword of the Light that raked across those many eyes as though she were trying to blot out the sight of her own reflection.

The spider reared up a second time, one fang shattered to splinters already, and Harathes wedged his mauled shield under its belly and stabbed and stabbed past the rim, greenish-yellow ichor spattering him from every hole he punched in the creature’s shell. A wild swing from Cyrene cut the remaining fang in two and buried her blade deep in the thing’s body.

Abruptly some malign purpose was gone from the vast hulk, and Dion darted forward and dragged Harathes out from under its shadow before the monster collapsed.

In the silence that came after, Penthos gradually let his bluish shield fade, as the rank-smelling air from the queen’s chamber was evidently still replete with that goodness that sustained life. Harathes was staring about himself almost rebelliously, his ire fixed mostly on Enth.

“I see it didn’t help us.”

“He helped before,” Lief pointed out.

“He warned us about the ambush,” Cyrene added.

“Listen to the pair of you,” the warrior spat. “Or are we going to be terribly sorry now, that we killed these monsters? Is this creature going to be giving me its angry looks, because I defended us from the Dark? I suppose this is all our fault, is it? Are we going to tut and sigh and say they were only defending themselves?”