Baldurs Gate 1 - Baldur's Gate by Forgotten Realms

Author:Forgotten Realms [Realms, Forgotten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Forgotten Realms, Fiction
ISBN: 9780786915255
Publisher: TSG Publishing Foundation
Published: 1999-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

Spiders and what could only be baby ettercaps scattered when Abdel burst into the chamber. The two adult ettercaps who had dragged Jaheira into the dome spun on him and attacked without pausing to think. Abdel went at them like a wild animal and actually laughed when he brought the second one down. Both of the things lay at his feet, their death spasms subsiding, and Abdel looked up.

What he saw there made him take two steps back. His knees shook, then gave out on him. He knelt on the uneven floor of the ghastly chamber and heaved once, then again, before he noticed that even the floor of the place was made from the desiccated husks of dead humans. He vomited into the gaping, screaming face of a mummified woman, and his hair stood up on end, and he scurried away repeating “Torm, Torm, Torm,” under his breath.

Jaheira whimpered, and Abdel stood up so fast he nearly went all the way over onto his butt. She was alive, he saw then, wrapped in the sticky net she’d been dragged in. Her back was too him. She was breathing, and her back and side quivered.

Directly over Jaheira’s prone, web-wrapped form was what Abdel might only have described as “the queen.” Webs hung in loose strands, draped from the dead-body walls.

Suspended in the center of the open space was a thing that once must have been a woman, maybe a human woman. It was tremendously, unnaturally fat, bloated and purple. Fold after fold of pale flesh dripped off the massive form, and it was dark enough in there that Abdel couldn’t see clearly what it was that moved in and out of those folds of flesh—spiders, certainly, and there were humanoid forms, small and furry. Abdel realized the spiders and their humanoid cousins were using this woman to breed, using her like a nursery, like an incubator, and Abdel retched again.

“Am I so hideous?” the woman asked, with a voice like a pig rooting in slop. “Yes, I suppose I must be.”

Jaheira screamed and said, “No, oh no.”

Sections of the woman’s pale, bloated flesh had been stripped away, eaten by her thousand crawling charges. Her face was a bruised, purple, venom-soaked mockery of the human form. One roll of flab actually fell across her forehead, blocking one eye. They were keeping her alive in here, alive but immobile, paralyzing her maybe with their poisons just to use her as a breeding ground. Abdel didn’t have anything left in him to vomit out, and thought his guts might come next. He couldn’t imagine the Abyss being any worse and wondered if maybe they had followed the ghoul off of Toril itself and into some nightmare dimension. What had Xan called it? Spider Hell.

“Jaheira,” Abdel said, ripping his mind free of the horror.

“Abdel,” she gasped, “Abdel, help me…”

He crossed to her, glancing at the bloated woman whose one porcine eye followed his path.

“I’m here,” he told her, and those two words seemed to relax her.

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