Read R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen: Dissolution, Insurrection, Condemnation for Free Online

reached up, slipped one of the enchanted beads from the specially crafted fine gold chain, and threw it at the spider.
    White light blazed around her, seemingly emanating from all directions at once. Thanks be to Lolth, this time her magic had an effect. The spider slipped and floundered. Encased in an invisible sphere of magical force it thrashed about in panic. The explosion had opened horrid sores that speckled the creature’s body. Unfortunately, it seemed able to ignore whatever pain those wounds caused it and continued scratching at the restraining sphere. Blue-white sparks flashed at the tips of its feet, and Quenthel knew it was using more than brute force and panic to break free.
    Speak to me , Quenthel thought, sure the words would be heard in the spider’s mind. She felt a connection, but a tenuous one, perhaps attenuated by the sphere of force.
    The sphere faded as Quenthel swung the whip again, trying to smash through the creature’s hideous visage and into the brain that presumably lay behind it.
    The spider sprang away as explosively as one of its tiny jumping cousins, arcing high and landing at the far end of the chamber behind a rank of sculptures. The spirit scuttled through the shadows, and even though Quenthel was watching intently, in another heartbeat she lost track of it.
    Where are you? she sent.
    The reply was a burst of anger from the creature no mere words could convey. Quenthel gave up trying to communicate with it, though if it was a servant of Lolth, it should respond to her.
    “You could get out now, Mistress,” said Hsiv, the first imp Quenthel had bound inside a whip viper. “From over there, it couldn’t reach you before you run out the door.”
    “Nonsense!” she snapped. “The brute disrupted my Academy, threatened my person, and I will have my vengeance.”
    Infected with her anger, the banded vipers reared and hissed until she silenced them with a mental command.
    One of the priestesses sprawled on the floor was moaning in pain. Quenthel stalked over to the spider’s victim and kicked her in the head, silencing her instantly.
    The drow high priestess had eliminated all extraneous sounds, but it didn’t help her locate the spider. Save for the soft hiss of her own breathing, the chamber was silent.
    Turning slowly, heart pounding, she inspected the arachnid effigies all around her. Did that jointed spindle of a leg just twitch? Did that head, coyly turned just enough that she couldn’t quite get an adequate look at it, possess too many eyes? Had the figure on the right shifted a hair closer when she wasn’t looking?
    No, no, and no. It was just her imagination, trying to supply what observation had not.
    She sniffed repeatedly, but that was no help, either. The spider’s stink hung in the air, but it seemed no stronger in one direction than another.
    Curse it, the demon had to be somewhere!
    Yes, she realized, but it didn’t have to still be on the floor, not if it could skitter up vertical surfaces like its smaller kindred.
    Assuming the demon was clinging to the upper walls or ceiling it might have taken it a moment to shake off the shock of the flare and its ugly wounds, but surely it was creeping into the best position from which to leap down on its adversary.
    Quenthel peered upward. The artists had decorated the shadowy highest reaches of the chamber as well. The ceiling was an octagonal web acrawl with painted spiders, providing splendid camouflage for the creature. If it was in fact crouching in their midst, she couldn’t see it.
    Still scanning the ceiling, the whip vipers keeping watch as well, she backed to one of the wall sconces and read the trigger phrase from another scroll, whereupon the candle flame leaped up and turned a roiling black. She put her arm into the darkfire, and her flowing gossamer sleeve caught instantly.
    Though they were at the end of what was, thus far, the nonburning arm, the serpents hissed and coiled in alarm. Quenthel brought them to