Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(22)

The filaments crossed with near-perfect angles, reaching out and about, drow to drow, like the spokes of a wheel, and when this skeletal structure was completed, those casters in the innermost ring turned their attention to Ravel and sent anchoring beams to the strange sphere, which caught their ends and held them taut.

The eighteen went fast to their weaving, running filaments across those anchoring spokes. White drow hair tingled and rose up in the growing energy of the creation. Ravel breathed deeply, inhaling the power he felt mounting in his anchor sphere, glorious reams of energy tickling his fingers and palms, and seeping into his bare forearms so that his muscles tightened and stood rigid. He gritted his teeth and stubbornly held on. This was the moment that distinguished him from the other promising spellspinners, Ravel knew. He accepted the mounting energy into his body and soul. He merged with this, becoming one, adapting rather than battling, like an elf walking lightly over a new fallen snow, while a less nimble, less graceful human might plod through it.

For Ravel instinctively understood the nature of magic. He was both receptacle and anchor, and as the web completed, the energy mounted even more swiftly and powerfully.

But Ravel was ready for it. He heard his lessers scrambling around, glimpsed drow fingers flashing furiously, relaying commands and preparations.

He was not distracted. Slowly Ravel began to wind his hands around, and the magical web responded by beginning a slow and steady spin, the bright strands becoming indistinct as they left glowing trails behind their movement.

Ravel heard commotion beyond the wall of summoned blackness, as he had expected. Quiet as goblinkin might be, they sounded quite clumsy and raucous to the dark elves.

The globes of darkness began to dissipate, and the wider cavern reappeared to the noble spellspinner, beyond the semicircle of goblin fodder, and beyond that line, barely fifty paces away, stood ranks of orcs interspersed with taller, hulking bugbears.

Several raised voices in protest at the sight of the goblins, with the drow still mostly obscured, but with that glowing, spinning web up high above the goblin line and in clear sight. Despite his discomfort and needed concentration, Ravel managed a smile at the stupefied reactions he noted among the humanoids.

Only for a moment, though, for then the spellspinner threw all of his energy and his concentration into the rotating web. He turned with it, a complete circuit, then another and a third, and as he came around, Ravel pulled back his left arm and threw forth his right, launching forth the web in a lazy spin. It floated out past the goblins, continuing its rotation, and without the anchor that was Ravel, the magical energies contained within it began to escape the spidery structure.

The web reached forth, floating, rotating, lines of white lightning shooting down to split the stone beneath it. Orcs and bugbears, eyes widened in shock, scrambled and tangled, falling all over each other to get out of the way.

The web rolled over them. A lightning blast hit an orc full force and the creature burst into flames, screaming and flailing among its scrambling kin. The whole cavern reverberated in the thunderous reports, one after another, drowning out the screams of the terrified orcs and bugbears.

The drow spellspinners moved aside of the cavern entrance in an orderly fashion, while the goblins scrambled frantically, and less effectively—so clumsily, indeed, that as the next wave of attackers entered, several of the unfortunate goblins got trampled under clacking appendages.

Ravel held his ground, not even looking back with concern, confident that the melee battalion, Yerrininae and his warrior driders, would not dare even brush him.

And they didn’t. With great agility considering their ungainly forms, the driders charged past the noble spellspinner, chitin clattering against the stone. Any stumbling goblin fodder were less fortunate, the driders taking great pleasure in stomping them down as they charged out into the cavern.

To a surface-dwelling human general, this group might have seemed akin to the heavy cavalry he would employ to dissolve the integrity of his enemy’s front line defense, and given the confusion already caused by the dissipating lightning web, the driders proved incredibly effective in this role. With their bulk and multitude of hard-shelled legs cracking against the stone, the stampede alone might have sent the whole of the opposing force running, but adding in the sheer ferocity of the cursed drow creations, and armed with tridents and long spears of exquisite drow craftsmanship, the cavern’s front-line defense was quickly and easily overwhelmed and scattered.

So terrified of the horrid driders, some of the orcs and bugbears retreated straightaway, inadvertently running back under the still floating energy web, running right into the midst of the continuing lightning barrage.

Ravel heard himself laughing aloud as one bugbear flew backward from the jolt of such a bolt, which split the stone floor right before it. The flailing creature never touched back down, for powerful Yerrininae thrust forth his great trident and caught it in mid-flight, skewering it cleanly and easily holding the threehundred-pound creature aloft with but one muscled arm.

Using that trophy as his banner, the drider leader rallied his forces around him and charged in deeper, breaking ranks perfectly to circumvent the lightning web, and coming together once more on the other side, in perfect, tumultuous formation.

Ravel lifted his hands so his companions could clearly view them. Find your place in the fight, he instructed the spellspinners.

And what is Ravel’s place? a drow hand-signaled back.

“Wherever he deems,” the spellspinner answered aloud, for he wanted Tiago Baenre to hear the imperiousness in his voice.