A strand of something silken brushed my hand, and I jerked, sitting up with a yelp only to realize it had not been a spiderweb but the feather touch of something else—an invisible, barely tangible Mora-touch like the bat of a butterfly wing. My guide, it seemed, remained with me.
I let the pull guide my hand until it steadied on a diagonal line across the city. I had a direction if I could follow it. My bad hip would support my weight for a while if I could ignore the growing pain, but my gunshot leg would almost certainly begin to bleed again, and walking would spread the venom from the caterpillar sting through my system. I saw nothing to use as a crutch or splint. That left walking as my only alternative. I could lose a lot of blood and still stagger along for a few days if necessary.
I hobbled across the city as the sun rose overhead, turning the city drab and grey and stifling. Broad sunlight robbed the web castles of color and damped their luminescence. The ground rocked with every step I took on my wavering legs, and I couldn’t get enough breath.
I paused at intervals to inspect the wounds in my legs through the spiderweb bandages. The gunshots had not begun to bleed again, but the venom in my blood was causing internal bleeding around the damaged tissue, turning it red and blue with bruising. The caterpillar sting still oozed a variety of unpleasant colors. The flesh was almost black and so painful I could hardly bring myself to touch it. If it continued to swell, I would have to make an incision to relieve pressure and prevent loss of circulation to the swollen muscle. Until then, the best and only thing I could do was go on.
My head grew lighter. I struggled to breathe while I concentrated on anything but intra-cranial bleeds, lungs filling with blood, or my heart bursting as the force of its own contractions caused it to bruise and bleed into itself. The sun reached its zenith and descended the sky as I trudged and stumbled. It began to fill the sails and billows of the higher webs with bitter orange sunset, and I heard the first high note of a spider singing through the harpstring rigging. I kept up my dogged pace while more voices joined the first, higher or lower, vibrating the city with the vastly-growing chord, and a shadow glided behind a sheet of web below the line of sunset where the sinking sun still painted the tops of the towers. More sweet voices joined the chord, and the first of the spider women emerged from the lightly billowing sheets and floated toward me.
I leaned against a boxy car whose color I couldn’t make out under its coat of webs and dust, and looked up at the face set in the creature’s thoracic plate and into ten blank compound eyes. Her face, the skin charcoal black in the shiny black plate of her thorax, turned slightly in its shell, and her long, high note fell from perfect lips.
Then her spinnerets pulsed, and her rearmost legs began to draw out silvery threads. They lengthened and fell, floating in a faintly-glowing shroud like Rapunzel’s tresses laid to lure a prince into her lair. Fatigue and the hypnotic effect of the siren’s one-note song held me immobile as the tangle trap drifted toward me. I reached out to run my hand through the silver strands, dizzily imagining Mora’s hair falling out of its tangled knot at the back of her head.
At that moment, the sensation of dozens of butterfly wings all batting wildly at my cheek roused me from a half-dream. I jerked my hand back and dropped to the ground, rolling under the car just as the sticky skein fell on the roof and stuck.
The car jerked and rocked, and I hoped the tires wouldn’t deflate under the assault. Just to be safe, I inched out the other side and looked up. The spider woman hung over me, tethered like a kite to the car by her own trap. If that sticky thread had touched me, she could have done almost anything she liked to me before I got loose. Her one-note song cracked and grated as she worked her spinnerets and tugged at the threads, but her charcoal face remained impassive, the ten black eyes expressionless.
Her sisters floated by above her, turning their black faces to look, then rising to glide back into the rigged web sails. As their voices began to fade, the trapped siren’s spinnerets pulsed once, cutting the threads. Her rear legs brushed the silk trap down and away, and she began to rise. I inched back under the car to avoid the gently settling silk, then pulled myself out and watched her float up and turn to follow her sisters, their voices filling the air with their chorded notes until they faded behind the sheets and sails which had begun to luminesce with the spreading dark.
My guide had saved me from capture by the spider women, but it couldn’t give me extra strength or stop the poison from spreading through my body. I had already begun to bruise in places I couldn’t remember having bumped against anything.
I had no warning that I had reached my exit. The guide pulled no harder or more urgently. I simply staggered around the corner of a cocooned building and around a different kind of corner neither right nor left that bent and spindled me before I unfolded and tumbled out into grassland and sprawled under a thin sun.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I lay on my back with the grasses wavering almost a yard tall above me, the stems a dusky aquamarine and the reddish pollen brushes crackling as they spilled their pollen into the wind. I closed my eyes against the light, working my dry throat as I waited for some kind of strength to return to arms and legs.
I breathed the smells of grass and earth and water. Fresh water. I should have jerked upright at the smell, but I had grown so weak I only lay and thought about it—the taste, the wet slide down my throat. I imagined my shriveled lips and tongue swelling with new moisture, but I could not move.
My back itched. I ignored it. My shoulders began to itch, then the back of my neck. I rubbed against the rough stems of the grass under me. The itch grew into a burn, and now I no longer smelled anything. My sinuses had swelled shut. My eyes burned and itched and would have watered if there had been enough water left in my body for inessentials.
I sat up and reached over my shoulder to scratch. I felt the rough bumps of hives. Driven by the now-maddening itch, I found it easier than I expected to get up and stand. Red clouds of pollen blew across the tops of the grass. Thousands of blue-green bumblebees bumbled from stem to stem, coating their bodies with red pollen before launching into the air to carry their load away.
Beyond the grass and the bumblebees, a narrow river ambled and roamed across the plain, its flat surface reflecting the thin blue of the sky. I stumbled through the grass toward the water, holding my hands up and well away from the grass-tops for fear my fingers would swell to sausages. I had sacrificed the last of my pajama shirt to bandage my assorted injuries, and my naked belly soon had a belt of red and swollen skin across the front, and my bare feet were thick and red, the toes fat and rubbing painfully together.
As I came nearer to the water, the grass grew shorter until it gave way to sedges and rushes. Sand, not mud, lined the shore, and I crossed the little beach and waded directly into the water, which was cool but not cold enough to deter me. A film of red pollen covered the surface, and I swept it aside with my arms before I ducked under. Water rushed over the crown of my head, washing away the sweat and grime of a score of worlds.
I rose and splashed water into my face, trying to wash my burning eyes. I itched wherever the red pollen had touched, and I soaked my hands in the cool water, hoping to reduce the swelling. I pushed more pollen out of the way and finally scooped a double-handful of water which I sucked, ignoring the flat taste of suspended dirt and algae. I drank again, ducked under the surface, imagining I felt my skin drinking in great gulps.
My eyes and nose burned, and my throat felt tight and sore. I took a reading from my fragile guide. My next gate lay more or less in line with the path of the river, which would give me opportunity to drink again as moisture worked its way into water-starved tissues.
I took another drink and waded out to check my wounds. The fresh bandages seemed to have stopped the bleeding, and the black bruises hadn’t spread since my last examination. I could hope that meant the coagulant in the web had countered the effect of the venom. The bottoms of my feet had bruised just from walki
ng on the asphalt pavement of the spider world. The packing in the caterpillar sting still leaked unhealthy colors, but the pain wasn’t that of blocked circulation or dying tissue. My heart still thunked unpleasantly, and I couldn’t draw enough breath, but I thought the infection might heal on its own if I were careful.
I turned upriver and hobbled along as near the bank—and as far from the grass—as possible. Bless this world, it apparently had trees, although none that grew within my field of view. I passed dead branches and gnarled roots carried to the plain in former floods and left behind when the flood receded. I came on a snarl of odd sticks and branches lodged in a backwater. Among them I found three pieces that I thought might make an adequate crutch or staff. The smooth, straight one turned out to be too soft, its fibers made spongy by long immersion. The second, though harder, had thorns I had not noticed when I extracted it from the pile. The last, though, seemed sound. It was light and hard, gnarled but straight enough to manage easily, and a little longer than my height. I almost sighed taking my first few steps with its support.
My insubstantial guide teased me upstream, and I soon had to choose between following the bows of the river or crossing stretches of the blue-green grass. The one would extend the length of my journey many times over, the second meant greater exposure to the pollen that already forced me repeatedly to the water to wash my weeping eyes and running nose. I had begun to cough as well—dry hacks I felt sure would grow into deep, wet, snarling barks if I stayed in this world long enough.
I tried to divide the difference, cutting off as much of the windings as I could without going into grass higher than my knees. Still, the pollen swelled my bare feet, turning the skin red and shiny until I wondered how long I could walk before my feet split like overripe tomatoes.
Before I learned the answer, a waft of red pollen outlined a flicker in the air, and I finally spotted the unrolling, unroiling mouth of an interstice. It shrank in mid-air to the size of a small dog, pulsed a few times, and expanded again into a man-sized opening. I lost no time in ducking through the portal before it had a chance to disappear like a soap bubble.
I trudged through half a dozen worlds on auto-pilot. My feet returned to their proper size and shape, and the water I had drunk both cleared my head and got my abscessed leg bleeding again, which I could only consider a good sign. Meanwhile the bruising caused by the blood-thinning venom still spread but slower.
In a breezy, wild place where brush clung to a talus slope, and a rugged landscape sloped down to a river thick with red mud, I looked up the face of a low bluff and realized I would have to climb the rock wall to reach the portal unfolding in mid-air some thirty yards above me.
The rock face was not quite vertical, and I thought I could spot enough good hand and footholds. I abandoned my staff and started the climb. Each step upward burned my shoulders, numbed my hands and pained my weak hip, and every step with my abscessed leg caused foul-smelling stuff to pulse from the wound.
The air grew hotter as I climbed higher above the river valley, and I had not found drinkable water in the last three worlds. I had not wanted to try the river at the bottom of the valley, first because it was out of my way and second because herds of white grubs the size of buffalo grazed the floodplain. They looked, in fact, something like buffalo with great humped backs mounded with shaggy hair. I might have braved them had I not seen one of the harmless-looking grazers suddenly leap a solid ten yards, fast as a flea, thrust its pointed snout into the moss and come up with a squealing animal about the size of a golden retriever which it gulped down in two swallows. It might have made a few more bites of me, but I was not thirsty enough to test the case.
Now I wished I had taken the risk. My mouth and eyes burned. My throat, already raw from the effects of the grass world, began to tickle again with the threat of an incipient cough. I could rest a moment at a time when I reached a place where the cliff face lay back enough that gravity could hold me in place, but within a minute or two the pain in my hip would spike, and I would have to move up again.
I went slower with each step, working my fingers into cracks, wedging a knee or an elbow wherever I found a ridge, double-checking each hand or foothold before I risked my weight not for fear of the rock giving way but that my arms and legs would give way under me. I concentrated all my attention on the next handhold, the next foothold, the next pull/push/shift until, taking a moment to lean my chest against the stone, I turned my head and saw the portal nearly at a level with my eyes.
Adjusting my weight, I extended my arm, and then I recognized what I had not considered from my vantage on the ground. The portal hung too far out from the cliffside to reach, a yard beyond the furthest stretch of my fingertips. I rested my forehead on sun-heated stone to think.
Though outside the range of an easy step, I would have been able to reach it with my staff had I not left that at the top of the talus slope. The interstice was not too far for a good leap if I’d had any strength left in my legs. As it was, a jump would end my journey very suddenly at the bottom of the cliff. But gravity need not be my enemy. I eyed again the distance between cliff and portal, then looked up the rock wall. Another yard or two higher, and I would be above the gate. Assuming I could climb another step, much less another two yards.
Taking a breath of hot air, I looked for my next handhold, reached, wedged my bloody fingers and shifted my weight into my next step upward. One step, one reach, one gasp at a time, the sun blistering my bare shoulders, I crawled up the face of the rock, clenching my jaws against the pain. I found half my handholds now by touch, too weary to waste energy on mere sight until, unable to move again, I opened my eyes and looked over my shoulder for the interstice. It was gone. The shock of terror and despair almost dislodged my grip before my gaze slipped down and I saw the endlessly unfolding mouth of the universe below me. Well below my feet.
Half incredulous that I had climbed so far in the bleary interval, I tightened my fingers and wedged my toes tighter into a crack in the rock. It would be no casual hop, and I was not sure I had the strength left in my hip to cross the gap, but I could not rest my leg in my present circumstances, and gravity would have its way with me in either case. I took a last breath of heat-blasted air, twisted my body, pushed with my arms and used the last strength in my legs to thrust away from the cliff wall and fall.
Another gate. A whipcrack stretch of my body seemed to shatter every bone then pull it back to shape, then I crashed into a thicket of something that felt like every thorn in the universe had gathered to break my fall. My head struck thick forest duff, and the impact of my body on the earth knocked my breath loose so I had to wrench for air before my diaphragm relaxed from its spasm. I had fallen hard on my injured shoulder, and I thought from the pain that I might have broken it along with a rib or two. I breathed cool air, cataloging injuries by kind and severity, and gradually regained the power of sense and movement.
I lay in a tangle of shrubbery—some thorny, but most of the scratches and pricks had been made by dry twigs stabbing into bare skin. I smelled bracken and humus and sun-heated fruit. I rolled out of the thicket and into a hollow surrounded by lacy ferns like green ostrich feathers. Hitching a little further—my left arm still hurt too much to hold my weight—I found a higher place where I could see over the ferns and bushes. I had landed in a wood of twisted, unfriendly trees. Flecks of sunlight dropped through pinholes in the canopy and freckled the shrubbery and the vines that climbed the trees and hung small white flower bells along the branches.
I knew those flowers. I knew the cries of the birds that winged out of sight in high branches and wider spaces, and my heart leaped into a frightened gallop. I tried to take a reading from my guide, but though I knew it was with me, I couldn’t feel it past the beat of my heart.
Adrenaline was at least an antidote to both pain and fatigue. I got my feet under me, hugged my left arm against my ribs and staggered toward the lighter part of the forest where the dark trees gave way to sweet fru
it and singing birds.
I felt safer on the path where neither the hounds nor the hunter had seemed able to set foot on my last trip through His world. Meanwhile, there was food here, and Alistair hadn’t said the fruit was bad, just that it was His. I limped along the sandy path, eying the branches overhead until I spotted a ripe fruit as big as my two fists together, gold blushed with rose where the sun struck its cheek.
I picked it from its branch and paused, listening.
Nothing happened. Brightly-colored birds continued to call and flit from tree to tree. The breeze continued to cool my scratched and sunburned skin. I smelled the fruit, and though I couldn’t describe it, the smell itself seemed to satisfy some of my hunger even as my mouth began to run with saliva. I licked my lips and sank my teeth into the skin.
I’d half expected some unspeakable shock, blood or black bile spurting from the flesh of the fruit, or grubs like the contents of the jellyfruit in another world, but it had the consistency of custard and the taste of a peach or a pineapple. Salivary glands contracted painfully as I chewed and swallowed. I scanned the forest behind the sunny garden, waiting for the belling of hounds or the rumble of three-toed hooves as I ate the fruit to its core, a smooth brown seed like a chestnut. I sucked the seed clean, turned it in my fingers and tossed it into a clear space between two full-grown trees where it might have a fair chance to grow. I wiped my wrist across my mouth and chin to clean away the custard stains.
Then I heard the hounds.
Their swelling, belling voices didn’t hypnotize or seduce this time. I lacked the strength to respond either to the beauty of their calls or the threat they represented. I took a reading from my guide and began to trudge along the path. I would have to turn aside from its protection to reach my exit, but I meant to keep on it as long as I could. My pace increased as food returned me some strength. I even tried a light jog until my right leg, between the abscessed caterpillar sting and my bad hip, gave way and almost dropped me to the ground before I caught my balance.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 16