Tarn insisted on joining Taramo and Nikalia on the return to the vault. They had a holy site that was lost to them, which he admitted was one of the goals of the Pitarav clan in moving to the city where they were bonded.

  "I did hear that this was your people's city before we took it." Nikalia remarked as they walked behind her shield marionette. "Grandfather said it was very difficult to conquer you."

  "You were one of the royals?" Tarn was flabbergasted.

  "Yes. If the kingdom had remained I would be it's queen."

  "Why didn't you leave with your people? How did you survive?" Taramo interjected.

  The arachne gave a light stroke to the potted vine that she held in a webbed sling "This goddess was the reason that I stayed. When my kin decided to leave and fled with everything they could they didn't take me because I asked. We had overreached and lost our armies so they returned to the homeweb. I conceded the land to the baron Arantol who keeps the port town and they lived here for a few centuries. They didn't like the idea of living on the bones of wraiths who might arise at any moment. I give some silk as a tax when they bother to come and collect, though they haven't for two centuries so they probably forgot."

  "It is strange to walk with someone who has lived so much longer than I have. I imagine someone like that being much more somber."

  "I choose to forget, though some remain friends." she gave a slight smile to the node of Ariwyn and fell into contented silence. They continued on with this silence until they reached the alleyway where Taramo had emerged.

  There was no trace of the silver chain except for the remnants of the dead vines in the sewer access room. Nikalia sent one of her new marionettes first.

  They were less ornamented than the others, each had a retractable blade in one arm, and they were split between 'shields' and 'swords'. With some help from Taramo to transmute the materials into their perfect form she'd made four additional golems. She'd also split their function with one, the shield, having only a shielding set of glyphs that, when activated, would set a near impenetrable ward. The 'swords' with identical body structure were instead build for offense and had a detonation that could be activated if it was needed to deal with a bothersome foe.

  The sword that was sent found nothing dangerous below so the rest of them followed.

  "How's an abandoned city sewer still smell?" Tarn was the only one unfamiliar with the sewer system

  "The city was less abandoned when the silver chain arrived. And without proper management the sewer does not flow as it should. There's an entire street in the south-east that will flood when there's too much rain."

  There were no spiders on the walk down to the shrine. Taramo stopped them at an innocuous bend.

  "Pop quiz. The shrine is camouflaged. Where is it?"

  "Well when you talked about it it sounded like somewhere right," and Tarn's hand did not push through the solid brickwork.

  "I'm surprised that I missed it so often." Nikalia mentioned, "The warding is very bright and noticeable."

  "The increased flow must have made the warding more noticeable." Tarn pushed against another wall. "The access tunnel was grated off so mana couldn't pass."

  "Mana hungry metal? I've heard of a many ways to make something like that, but I would need to see it before making any educated guesses." Tarn continued to search, not pushing through the walls that were very solid. Taramo leaned against his wall, waiting for him to notice.

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  "Well, I give up. Just show me wher-" Tarn shouted as he leaned against the same wall as Taramo, falling straight through. A closer eye would have noticed that Taramo was leaning on the air a finger's width away from the wall. Forgivable since there were only a few floating lights that Taramo had made for convenience.

  Tarn and Nikalia sat and appreciated the shrine while Taramo retrieved the dark grate. Using mana to move something that touched the grate instead of the grate directly only made him lose mana by the cupful instead of the bucket.

  Taramo loosened his grip on the rope and let the grate lean against one of the blank walls. Nikalia almost touched it but stopped at the last moment.

  "Wraith Iron. It's commonly used in the first half of blood magic rituals. It absorbs heaps of mana and then dissipates it. I don't think it needs blood magic to be made but for most uses other compounds are better."

  "The metal of gluttony" Tarn added "It always eats and never is full."

  "It can be filled. It would just need fifty times the mana of a mage pushed into it in moments." Nikalia continued, "but this wasn't what we were after. Let's continue."

  Taramo sent out Spot and let him lead them down the tunnel. When they arrived at the cave-in Nikalia gave out a small laugh.

  "I know where that leads. The palace had a tunnel that led to the home of the wraiths. The rocks were used so nobody could sneak in. When the palace was deconstructed after the arachne left someone must have warded it as tight as gravity's web."

  They continued on until a gathering of black wisps was encountered in front of a pile of rocks. The open vault door was on the other side. On noticing Taramo and the others the wisps, wraiths, started hissing aggressively. They were immediately shut down by a growl from Spot.

  (They were protecting the vault) Ariwyn projected into Taramo's mind.

  Taramo waved his arm and the rocks covering the vault door were lifted away. The wisps let him, seeming to recognize his mana signature, if not their fellow and apparent leader Spot.

  The vault door had remained open just as when Taramo had opened it. A quarter of the way with the wards impossibly ruined after so long to languish. Taramo forced it the rest of the way open and sent in two of the mobile flame lights. He saw something bobbing in the cauldron that was now without any internal light and threw up a shield preemptively.

  A mass of bone, skin, and chitin slammed against the shield, mandibles grinding through the warding and trying vainly to bite the infuriating cause of the shield that barred it. It looked like a beetle that had random human parts grafted onto it with no reason for their placement. A giant eye wheeled from the elytron, the shielding over it's abdomen.

  "I guess something got into the potion. Niki do you want to test your golems?"

  The shield was not as wide as the entire opening so the three swords and one shield shimmied by the warding, which itself was shrinking to concentrate the protection that was being shredded methodically by the grinding mandibles.

  Once one of the marionettes was past the shied the beetle thing turned it's large eye to it and rushed the sword. It was only able to escape by the flaring of the shield's warding spell that knocked the beetle out of the way so it only lost one arm.

  The other arm had the blade that it drew and it charged so the others could get into formation. the blade dug deep into a foreleg of the beetle but it got it's revenge by biting the marionette's abdomen, resulting in it's face handling a conflagration as the wood ignited in the explosion.

  The thing screamed in a startlingly human way but the other two swords were flanking the beetle on either side. One slammed it's blade home in the eye on the abdomen resulting in a second scream.

  After that Taramo set an audio ward to stop any more large noises. The beetle lost two more of it's legs before it was dispatched, leaving one sword and the shield as the two survivors and winners.

  The vitality draught was a total loss. It had thousands of little beetles, worms, and other things that were unable to lift themselves up to the lip of the cauldron to escape. he checked his cell with the broken bed and found nothing useful that he hadn't taken with him so they left and set a ward at the entry to the vault.

  "If something big comes out of there we'll want to know, but otherwise it should be good for the big spiders."

  "The great devourers." Tarn shuddered, "They're still here."

  "My father tried to domesticate them." Niki shuddered, "It didn't go well. But their webs are worth a lot."

  "Their legs are a bit tender and peppery." Taramo noted, "Let's find one and I'll cook it up for us."

  Both horrified, but a little curious, Tarn and Nikalia followed Taramo on his snipe hunt for the elusive mana-devouring dagger spider. They were more horrified when they found three in an hour, they were extremely dangerous.

  They also tasted good.