Up.
Up.
Into the face of a monster.
To call Na’eth a spider was to call a sword a knife, or to call death a respite. This was a being of stars and nightmares, fallen to the center of the earth and there to abide for all ages, a thing of black malice and bright laughter, whose children fed on human flesh and whose mercy might—just might— save an entire people.
“Yes, Na’eth,” Maika said at last. “I come to beg the gift of Illindra’s sight.”
“Do you know what it is you ask, Kentakuyan?”
“I do.”
“Do you know the cost of that which you ask? Such a gift is not granted without sacrifice. A terrible price, for one such as you.” Maika imagined—surely, she imagined—that the nightmare thing spoke with pity.
Years ago, when Maika was very small and foolish, and trying to find her place in the hot, dark world, she had made her first decree, one which had set all the courtiers to laughing: that no spider might be smashed or harmed in any way. It was for this reason, perhaps, that the queen of spiders now granted the darkest wish of her heart.
Quicker than death, darker than shadows, Na’eth reared up. Her fangs glistened red and wet, and Maika froze in terror.
They will stab through me, she thought, and I will die here in the dirt—
Her mage-torch died, plunging them into darkness. A soft touch, gentle and loving as she had always imagined a mother’s might be, brushed the nape of Maika’s throat.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“Little queen,” said Na’eth in a voice like dead things, “it is done.”
Pain blossomed in her throat and raced through her veins like wildfire, weaving trails of searing agony across her skin and bones and blood. The Araid’s icy fire consumed her.
She fell.
* * *
“You are bound now, child. You are bound to us.”
It was her mother, who had died birthing her.
It was Yaela.
It was Aasah.
It was Na’eth, spinning her empty webs into the darkness and keeping the stars at bay. Of all the Araids, Na’eth had told her, only the great daughters of Illindra believed that humans were more than food, more than skin and blood and bile. When she herself was a spiderling, she had heard a human singing an old song, and it had warmed a corner of her sword-touched heart. It read her poetry and sang a child’s rhymes in a dreadfully untrained voice, and showed her a child’s drawings of home.
So she had not yet devoured the little humanling who came to her, in the dark place at dark times, bearing torchlight which hurt her eyes and food she could not eat, and allowed this small thing to ask a boon.
“Little Maika,” the voice crooned, “you are bound to me. Wake. See.”
Maika opened her eyes and would have screamed, but her mouth was bound. She hung suspended by a strand of web around her feet, head down, hair trailing back and forth across the cavern floor as the web sagged and trembled with Na’eth’s weaving.
The great spider—if a sword is a knife—was moving with a delicate grace as she fastened tiny globes of magesilver to her web, weaving a grand design. Maika craned her neck to see, bound as she was, terrified as she was, because the web of forever was a thing of such beauty that it would be worth death to have experienced it.
Her breath caught in her chest as she saw at once that each globe held the image of a person’s face. There was Aasah, and Yaela, and Tamimeha—there she was, Queen Maika, lovelier than she had ever seen herself, prouder and more regal. There was Lehaila, mouth and eyes open wide in death’s agony. And there, before her face in a glowing orb twice the size of the others, she beheld a figure clad all in shadows, bright and terrifying. It threw back its hood, stared into her eyes, and laughed. “You see,” Na’eth whispered, endlessly pitying. “You have paid the price, and now you can see.”
I do not understand.
“Of course you do not understand,” Na’eth snapped, a spider if death is but sleep. “I gave you vision, not the wisdom to understand what you are seeing. That is for you to earn, little humanling. I gave you what you asked for—I gave you sight. There is your savior; now you can see him. Only call, and you will be delivered from this land, you and yours.”
Yes, Maika thought. Of course. It was what all the old stories called for—a hero in times of darkness, to lead the people forward into the light. She reached out, not with her hands, which were bound, but with sa and ka, the heart and breath of her soul, and touched the glowing orb. It burned— how it burned!—but it was a good pain, a true pain, the pain of a queen’s sacrifice for her people.
The face in the orb smiled, a brilliant smile which brought her to tears, and winked out.
“You have seen, you have called,” Na’eth said. “It is done.”
Maika closed her eyes and prepared to die.
I am ready, she thought. I will pay the price.
“Hissssst, hisssst, silly humanling.” Na’eth laughed like the clash of knives. “The price has been paid. You are free to go.” She stretched one foreleg out and brushed the single strand that held Maika to the web. The strand broke.
Again, Maika fell…
Forever.
* * *
When the web-marked door slid back again and Maika stumbled forward into the light, Tamimeha was waiting for her. The warrior yelled with surprise and delight, dropping her torch and scooping her fainting queen up to cradle her in her arms like a child.
“Oh, my queen!” she cried, patting her hair and rocking. “Oh, my heart, where have you been? I feared you were—” Her voice broke.
“Tamimeha,” Maika rasped. Her voice was raw from screaming, and she hurt everywhere. “There is no time. We must go. We must ready the people to leave this place.”
“Hush now. Are you harmed?” Tamimeha stood Maika up and held her at half an arm’s length, just far enough to search her with hungry, anxious eyes. “Your tracks led here, and no further. Where have you been? What happened to—oh. Oh! Oh, my queen, your eyes!” The horror on her face broke Maika’s heart all over again. “Pelang!”
“Gather your warriors,” Maika repeated, softly so as not to hurt her raw throat or reveal the depth of her emotions. “A savior is coming to lead us all from the Seared Lands. I have seen it. You must gather your best warriors and meet her upon the shadowed roads, and bring her here to us.”
“Eyes of Pelang!” Tamimeha wailed again, as if Maika had not spoken. “What have you done?”
“I needed to see into the future,” Maika answered with quiet dignity. The horror on Tamimeha’s face hurt; it took an effort of will for her not to hide her eyes from the sight. I have nothing to be ashamed of, she reminded herself. I did only what I had to do. “So that I might find a way to save my people. And I have seen it, I have found it. The price was mine to pay, and I have paid it.”
“But, my queen—Maika—it is forbidden for one to hold the throne who has eyes of Pelang. It is too much power— this is forbidden by laws as old as time.”
“Laws change.” Maika smiled, though she was weary to the song in her bones. “Times change… I have seen it.”
TWENTY - SIX
Killing the lionsnake had been easy. Hannei had faced her kind more than once in the fighting pits of Min Yaarif. They were slower and less cunning than their desert cousins. Their venom was milder. The trick was to kill the beasties before they could wrap those powerful coils around limb or midsection.
If heat and thin air and slow, stupid snakes are the worst these mountains have to throw at us, Hannei thought to herself, this journey may prove easier than a day spent gathering spiders’ eggs for the Mothers.
Such good fortune was unlikely, she knew—would have been unlikely had she been riding with a fist of sisters, rather than this band of idiots, thieves, and pirates. So she kept her watch with as much vigilance as if she were guarding the pride’s bachelor herds.
There was a new voice of the winds. The mountain
s had been laughing at them since first they set out—sometimes wheezing, sometimes howling with a thousand mad voices, even hissing like foul breath through rotten teeth—but since Hannei had been unable to talk, she had learned to listen better. Thus she was the first who noticed that the howl of mad laughter was not coming from one direction, as winds from on high, but from points all around them, above and below.
She roused Sulema, and the others. In haste they seized what weapons were to hand and piled their fire high with sage-brush and dead branches so that it blazed up into the night, sending a shower of sparks flying to meet the stars and warning the predators that this group of humans was no easy meat.
The mymyc came as a rush of dark water down the moonslit and cruel face of Avolk Tohn, first among the Jehannim in height and in wickedness. They also rose as a black mist from the foothills below, red-eyed and ravenous, rending the air with the cackling laughter they had stolen from men and which raised the chillflesh along Hannei’s arms. From a distance they seemed as fine black horses, sleek and slender and lovely, but their movement was catlike, predatory, as they crept along the jagged rocks and the moonslight glinted off of scaled hides, revealing them as dragonkin.
One of them screamed like a human woman and the others laughed. Being predators, mymyc would hunt rabbits or goats or even a lone vash’ai, if they had to, but they took the greatest delight in the taste of manflesh.
Hannei stood naked but for her trousers and sister-swords, still and silent between Rehaza Entanye—who shifted impatiently from foot to foot, panting heavily in the thin, hot air—and Sulema, whose golden eyes glinted in the pale light, as hungry for this fight as the mymyc were for her bones.
She still loves the thrill of the hunt, Hannei thought, because she still has a love of life and holds it precious.
In that moment, Hannei hated her sister.
In the next the mymyc were upon them, and there was no time to ponder. One beast, larger and thicker with muscle than the rest and with a torn ear, wrinkled its lips back from long white teeth and growled in a tongue so human that it seemed to Hannei that she could almost understand it. Other mymyc crouched, dragonish eyes glowing red in the firelight, and as one they leapt, howling and screeching and laughing to frighten and confuse their prey.
Laughing her own mirthless, tongueless laugh—a scarred sound born of the cruelty of men and the betrayal of women—Hannei leapt to meet them. Her swords, forged of black iron by slaves and thrice quenched in blood-salted oil, did not throw back the fire’s blaze but burned rather with their own dark fire, as if they drank deep of the night’s sorrow and belched it forth as fresh death.
Azdafani, she had named one sword, a name which meant beauty in sorrow, and Idbataani the second, or beauty in treachery. With laughter the citizens of Min Yaarif had debated which was the lesser of two evils. The mymyc learned that, in the hands of Kishah, treachery was followed by sorrow and sorrow by pain and death. As she slashed and hacked her way through the snarling mass of claws and fangs and scaled hide that hungered for her flesh, there was little beauty there by the light of the fire, under the eyes of the moons.
Battle was who she was by then, killing was all of her— growling and grunting as if she were more of a beast than the mymyc, dark blades flashing till her shoulders and belly and back screamed with it. Her companions fought well, sword and spear and bludgeon sending sprays of blood to dance with the embers and the stars. Soon the corpses of mymyc were piled all about them, some twitching, all stinking of death and offal, but it was not enough.
There were too few of the humans, or too many of the foe, however you counted it.
We have come to the mountains to die, she thought, and was surprised that the thought did not aggrieve her. More, it was a comfort. She had vowed to kill her sword-sister in these mountains, and so buy her freedom. Here at the end of her life’s road, Hannei Ja’Akari—who had named herself vengeance and killed without hesitation or pity—discovered too late that there was yet more honor in her heart than murder.
Blood sprayed into her eyes, and Hannei skipped back a two-step, shaking her head to clear her vision. A bright swirl of robes dazzled and confused her before she recognized Keoki, the shadowmancer from Quarabala.
“Ware!” he shouted to her. “Fire!” He bellowed something else, something she could not quite catch, as he shook a drinking horn at her, a drinking horn plugged at one end with scraps of red cloth. She had seen its like, once only, in the fighting pits…
Balefire!
Hannei turned and ran as the shadowmancer drew back his arm and tossed the horn into the heart of their campfire. She took two long strides toward Sulema, and another toward Rehaza Entanye. Grabbing them both by the shoulders, she bore them to the ground even as the mymyc closed in, laughing. Hannei covered their bodies with hers as best she could, even as claws tore into her shoulder and teeth tore a chunk of flesh from her ruined back.
Sulema went still, covering her head with both hands as they had been taught. Rehaza Entanye struggled to rise, fighting her hold even as Hannei squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath.
The world went red.
TWENTY - SEVEN
Balefire!
Even as he wrenched his short sword from the still-thrashing carcass of a mymyc, Leviathus shouted in alarm at the sight of a plugged horn tumbling through the air and into the bonfire they had built. He had seen its use before, once deep in the catacombs beneath Salar Merraj as the Salarians sought to open a new salt mine, another time by his father’s imperators to collapse a colony of soldier beetles grown too close to the city.
It seemed as if a blast tore through his body before the horn had even completed its deadly arc, inspiring his legs to move more swiftly and strongly than ever before. As he bolted he caught a glimpse of silken robes and dark mystery, of wide green eyes sharp and deadly and beautiful as his sword.
“Yaela!” His shout was drowned in the blood and pain and tumult of battle, but not before it had reached her. The apprentice turned, her eyes widened, pupils dilated like shadows swallowing the moons. Spinning on her heel she fled into the dark, scrambling over rock and brush, clinging to the sheer face of the cruel mountain with Leviathus close behind.
The explosion was a dragon’s roar, searing the backs of their heels and singeing Leviathus’s hair as the flames sped past. The hot air was sucked from his lungs and he gasped, choking on ash and deafened by the terrible noise. Yaela’s pale and fluttering robes were his only guide.
If the blast had frightened the mymyc they did not much show it. The greater predators chased their prey like hunting cats after a flushed hare. Claws scrabbled on the rocks so close behind that Leviathus expected every moment, every labored breath to be his last. He imagined those claws tearing into his back, those bright teeth rending the flesh as they tore mouthfuls of meat from his bones.
Yaela disappeared.
Leviathus stumbled in surprise and would have fallen, but a strong hand grabbed his shoulder and wrenched him sideways. Yaela dragged him through a narrow opening between two large rocks—nearly too narrow for his frame. He left most of his tunic and much of his skin behind as they tumbled together into a depression in the stone, almost a small cave.
The mymyc were still outside, just beyond the narrow passage that had scraped him raw, scrabbling at the entrance and snarling their frustration. The thin moonslight dimmed as one of the beasts sought to follow them, but its too-broad shoulders made passage impossible, and it withdrew, growling in its own fell tongue.
The son of Ka Atu sucked in ragged breaths of air, stale and thin, as a man dying of thirst might drink from a worm-riddled mudhole. Sweat poured from his body and was wicked away at once, leaving his skin dry and sticky with salt.
A fine seasoning for our pursuers, he thought with wry humor, should they have their way with me. The calls and howls and scrabbling at the cave entrance made it apparent that the night-skinned predators had not given up, not by any means.
; A hand on his shoulder sent Leviathus jumping half out of his skin. Yaela. Her laughter floated round him, rich and warm and sweet.
“King’s son,” she said to him, “we need to make a fire. Build it big and hot, ta? Burn their eyes, singe their hides if they get in, turn their thoughts to softer prey.”
“An excellent idea,” he agreed. “Unfortunately for us, the mymyc are between us and our blaze. Unless you would like me to ask them politely to stand aside while I fetch a few embers?”
“Fortunately for us, I do not walk about the world unprepared,” she answered. Her pale eyes gleamed soft in the night, jade lamps filled with starslight. Leviathus heard a sound of rustling, and of rocks, and she turned her face from him. Presently came a sharp clack-clack and a scattering of miniature stars burst forth on the cave floor.
“Flint?” he asked, astounded. “You have flint?”
“Yes,” she answered. Clack-clack, more stars.
He tried, and failed, to stop his mind from guessing where she might have kept the flint concealed, and what else she might be hiding beneath those silk wraps.
“Also knives, a mirror, a bit of rope, and…” Clack-clack, a shower of tiny sparks, and a tiny ember came to life, breathing a tiny sigh of gray smoke. “…other such things as may come in handy. We have lived different lives, you and I.” She breathed upon the ember, and it leapt dancing into bright flame under the glory of her attention.
“Different, yes,” he said, “but surely that does not mean that—”
Whatever he had been about to say died in Leviathus’s throat.
“Divines save us.”
Yaela’s tiny fire illuminated more than her comely face and alluring figure. As the shadows fled, a great hulking form was revealed at the back of their cave. Eyes each as big as his face blinked at them in the firelight, teeth longer than his sword revealed themselves as the monstrous beast yawned, flicking a scarlet tongue into the air.
“Wyvern,” Yaela whispered. Her eyes were as frightened as Leviathus felt. She drew herself up into a dancer’s pose, attention fixed on the creature as shadows pooled about her feet, eager to do her bidding.
The Seared Lands Page 22