The last time Zorian had visited the aranean web that called itself Illustrious Gem Collectors, he found a colony that specialized in harvesting various precious stones that were abundant in their local underworld and trading them to the nearby human village in exchange for various human-produced goods. They were miners, essentially. They had informed him straightaway that they had agreed not to trade with any humans except the ones at the village, but gave him the locations of five other webs that might be more willing to help him. Since his main goal had been to locate as many aranean webs as possible and sound them out, Zorian had accepted this explanation at face value and moved on. However, after thinking about it for a while, he realized he had been kind of stupid. Just because they
