Venom and Song

by Wayne Thomas Batson

  Jett screamed out, a wrenching guttural moan, and fell to his knees.

  The young lords looked on, thunderstruck. For there was Kiri Lee—the one standing among them—holding the handle of a dagger whose blade had been broken off. The smile on her face was utterly ghoulish when she said, “Jett, your Mr. Wallace perished in much the same manner.”

  The Spider King let the real Kiri Lee fall to the ground as he raced back through the anteroom. Johnny unleashed a flaring blast of fire on the Wisp Kiri Lee, and it began to burn. The flash of heat snapped the other young lords from their paralysis.

  Jimmy ran to Kiri Lee and started to reach for her, but there was already so much blood pooling on the marble. His hands trembling, he looked up to Tommy, anguished, questioning.

  Tommy looked away, then stared back at the burning Wisp. Flames licked all around this ghoulish version of Kiri Lee, its burning flesh beginning to dissipate even while it laughed.

  “Oh no you won’t!” Tommy said, his voice low and menacing. “Vex lethdoloc vitica anis! Feithrill abysscrahl niy! ” Then he used his sword and plunged it into the Wisp’s chest. The grin on its burning face suddenly vanished. Then its head rolled back and the spirit shrieked . . . even as its form dissolved into a red mist.

  By this time, Autumn and Kat had helped Jett lie on his unhurt side. Johnny, his hands still smoldering, walked past Jimmy and Kiri Lee, then into the anteroom. “Hey! There’s a door back here!” Johnny yelled. “He’s getting away!”

  “Please help me,” Jimmy wailed. “She’s dying. . . . Help her.”

  This can’t be! The thought railed against Tommy’s mind as he looked upon his stricken friends. He sank to his knees beside Jett. Everything had been going to plan . . . but now? Learn from history, the Spider King had said, and Tommy had not. Decision after decision, clue after clue, Tommy had missed it. And now?

  “What are you waiting for, Tommy?” Jett growled, his words half choked. “All of you, don’t let him get away.”

  Tommy was visibly trembling. “But, Jett, you . . . you’re—”

  “Get up off your knees, Tommy!” commanded Jett, his expression weakening, but his eyes still fierce. He reached out and grabbed the top rim of Tommy’s leather breastplate, pulling his face close. “You are Lord Felheart Silvertree, blood-right ruler of Berinfell, and you have . . . a mission . . . to . . . finish!” Gasping in pain, Jett fell back onto the floor.

  Something changed within Tommy in that moment. He knew what he must do . . . what they all must do. Even the prophecies had said there would be a cost. Tommy took Jett’s hand and looked into his eyes. “Thank you, friend,” he said. “For everything.” Then realizing what perhaps the others had not yet, he added, “Choose well.” Then he stood up. “Kat, Autumn,” Tommy said, “we need to go.”

  “But he’s dying,” cried Autumn. “And what did you mean, choose well ? He’s dying! Can’t you see that?”

  Jett nodded at Tommy. His smile and the peace in his eyes told the story. He understood. And then so did Kat. Jett looked up to her. “Take care of them, Kit-Kat. Do what I can’t anymore.”

  “Oh—don’t say that—” But she knew it was true, and she covered her mouth, tears welling up in her eyes. “C’mon, Autumn,” Kat said. She kissed Jett on the cheek and gently took Autumn by the arm and led her away.

  “We need you, Jimmy,” Tommy said, walking to his friend and placing his hand on his shoulder.

  “No,” Jimmy said. “I need to be here. I need to stay with Kiri Lee . . . or she’ll die.”

  Tommy didn’t know why he hadn’t realized before. But now he saw it. Jimmy had fallen in love with Kiri Lee. And maybe, back in the woods, Kiri Lee wasn’t flirting with him . . . maybe she was asking him about Jimmy! Of course! “Jimmy,” he said. “Kiri Lee would want you to go. We’ve got to end this horror. Now.”

  Jimmy let Tommy lift him from his knees. “I should have warned you,” Jimmy whimpered. “I should have figured it out.”

  Tommy took Jimmy by the shoulders and by sheer force of will held his eyes. “That’s poison!” Tommy growled. “Don’t listen to that! We’ve got a job to do.”

  Each of the five lords looked one last time at their friends, and then they went after the Spider King.

  Kiri Lee took in a sudden deep breath, eyes snapping wide open. It all rushed back to her: crash landing the raptor, getting caught by the Cragons, being turned over to the Spider King. He’d poisoned her by stabbing her with a spider fang. She’d been paralyzed, forced to watch her friends walk into a trap, and then the cold. But she felt warm. Tingling. She turned her head and saw Jett lying beside her. He looked very pale. He had one hand pressed against her side, the other on her arm. “Jett,” she cried. “No . . . no . . . what are you doing? No!”

  40

  Strength to Rise

  HOW HIGH they had come! Tommy blinked, looking through the open archway at the breathless view of the mountainside and down into the courtyards far below. And beyond, the legions of Elves were still flooding the Lightning Fields and pouring over the main wall. Turning away, he continued to climb. Bound only to the cliff face on one side, open to midair on the other, the stairs were narrow and uneven, so the lords had to watch their footing even more. They followed a much wider spiral now, as they circled the mountain, climbing slowly toward the peak of Vesper Crag and the tower of red light.

  “Yes, yes, m’lords!” came the Spider King’s voice from above. “Come up. Come up if you can!”

  Two more turns, and they could see him now, a small figure leaning over a balcony on the tower.

  Tommy didn’t look down, but he could feel the distance drop away beneath him. It pulled at him, willing him to fall backward.

  “Don’t think such things,” Kat spoke into his mind.

  There came a rumbling from above. “Boulders!” Jimmy cried out. “Dodge right!” They moved with no time to spare as a massive oblong stone careened past them to their left, threatening to force them over the rail-less side of the stairs.

  “Get low!” Jimmy yelled. “This one will bounce over us.”

  They obeyed. The stone, a large round spinning thing, hit three steps above the lords, took a wicked hop, and came down behind them. Stone after stone they evaded. “We’re still coming!” Tommy bellowed.

  “Archers!” yelled Jimmy.

  From a ring of black pockets above, Gwar archers appeared. Their crossbows already loaded and wound tight, they fired on the lords. “My turn,” yelled Johnny. His hands erupted with a wide spread of white-hot fire. Heat washed down on the other lords.

  The enemy’s darts were consumed instantly, falling as harmless ash. Tommy was up in a heartbeat and put an arrow into one archer and hastily took out another.

  The remaining Gwar fired again, but Johnny’s flame took out three. Tommy killed another two. He and Johnny repeated the process, again and again, until the archers were slain.

  “Very impressive—even with just five,” jeered the Spider King from his balcony. The red light glowed behind him. “Very impressive. Just think if your other friends were still alive.”

  “I’m taking him out!” Johnny yelled, running up the stairs and launching twin streams of fire up at the tower.

  Jimmy yelled, “Wait, Johnny, look out!”

  Something moved on the dark stone up ahead, a long, glistening thing. Two bulbous eyes and a nest of clicking mandibles for a mouth. As large as a full-grown Warspider, but in shape more like a wingless Warfly, the creature rose up.

  “JOHNNY!” Kat screamed her thoughts into his mind, but he was too focused on the tower.

  The creature unleashed an appendage, a mantislike arm that flicked out from the center of its upper chest and slammed into Johnny’s left shoulder. A spray of blood, a grunt, and Johnny cartwheeled backward. He hit one step—hard—and went airborne.

  “Johnny!” Autumn screamed. But he was beyond her reach.

  Tommy couldn’t watch. The creature was turning toward him, seemingly
reloading its appendage. Tommy put one arrow in its left eye. Still the creature approached. He put a shaft deep into the creature’s forehead. It collapsed immediately and slid harmlessly onto the steps, then flipped off, careening down the mountainside.

  “No!” bellowed the Spider King looking beyond Tommy. “No!”

  Tommy spun around and caught his breath. Johnny had not fallen. There in the air, slowly descending, was Kiri Lee . . . with Johnny in her arms.

  “KIRI LEE!” Jimmy burst out, tears welling up in his eyes. But then he quickly composed himself and stood back.

  “Kiri Lee,” Johnny mumbled to her. “I thought you were—”

  “Jett,” she said.

  “How did you do that?” he asked, remembering the last time she attempted such a rescue.

  “I caught you,” she answered.

  “Yeah, but I’m heavy. Remember?”

  “Not anymore. You’re light,” she said. “When I touch you.” Her gift had matured.

  War horns sounded. The tide of the battle had seemed to turn. The surviving walls of Vesper Crag belonged to the Elves, and they were pushing hard toward the mountain. Johnny, Jimmy, Kiri Lee, Autumn, Kat, and Tommy—they turned as one and gazed at the Spider King.

  “You’re beaten,” yelled Tommy, hoping to keep the Spider King occupied so the others could act against him. “Why don’t you give this up?!”

  “THIS?” The Spider King momentarily lost his composure. He mastered himself and said, “Arrogant boy. Just what do you think ‘this’ is?”

  Tommy slowly climbed the stairs. He could feel his friends behind him. “This grudge,” Tommy exclaimed. “Your hatred of the Elves for enslaving your people . . . let it go.”

  And then, the Spider King laughed . . . if laughing it could be called. The sound that came from him had not the ring of mirth to it, but rather a compound of anguish, rage, and unassailable confidence. Then he gazed down on the Elves, and it seemed the red light behind him blazed even stronger. “You are mistaken!” He spat the words. “Revenge is but one drop of blood in the cauldron of my mission. There is no giving up.”

  Confused but undaunted, Tommy continued to climb. “Whatever your reason is,” Tommy said firmly, “it will stop today.” He saw a flare of orange, and Johnny, his hands alight, was at his side. “Your armies are losing,” Tommy continued. The stairs squared off now, aiming right at the Black Balcony. “You have nowhere left to go.” They had him.

  “One place, I think.” And before Johnny could loose a single burst or Tommy a single arrow, the Spider King vanished from the balcony into the red light.

  “It’s a portal,” Tommy said, staring at the face of a radiant blood-red gem that was seven feet tall. “It has to be.”

  “We’ve got to follow,” said Johnny.

  “But we don’t know where it goes,” said Autumn. Then she looked at Jimmy.

  Jimmy closed his eyes and squinted. “Nothing yet.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Kiri Lee. “We’ve got to try.”

  “What about our weapons?” Kat asked.

  There was an awkward silence.

  “I’ll still have my fire,” said Johnny. “And Kiri Lee can still air walk—even better now.”

  “What if the portal throws us back to Earth,” Jimmy asked, “in the middle of his other fortress in Canada?”

  There was another awkward silence.

  “Kat, Autumn, and I will lose our steel,” Tommy said. “And we may well be about to leap into a trap. But it can’t be helped. Besides, we know Vexbane. We are weapons.”

  One by one, shielding their eyes from the fierce brightness, the young lords stepped into the red light and vanished.

  They emerged from the portal without their weapons and wearing only leather armor, tunics, and breeches. It was dark, but a thin band of red light shone down from somewhere high above, creating a blood-red cone made of mist some fifty yards away. The Elves felt a hollow emptiness all around them as if it was some chamber of vast proportions.

  “Brave,” came the Spider King’s voice out of the shadows. “I thought you’d come,” he said, stepping into the red light. It almost seemed he spoke with a grudging kind of respect. “And the strong one made the choice to let the air walker live? How strange, given that he was the greater warrior. Your Elf parents had a similar misplaced determination.”

  Tommy wished, for once, that he had amplified hearing rather than sight because, as the Spider King spoke, it seemed there was another sound. Barely audible . . . a kind of high scraping noise.

  “They could have saved us all a great deal of trouble,” the Spider King continued. “Had they simply taken you as babes and fled into the hidden passages to Nightwish, we would have learned its location and exterminated the Elves much, much sooner. But no. They gave up their lives . . . so that your race could live on.” The Spider King reached to his side and drew a strange dagger from his belt.

  The grating sound continued, but Tommy found himself staring at the Spider King’s features. He looked familiar somehow. Not the eyes. No, the eyes were very foreign. But there was something in the shape of his face, the high cheekbones and the way they tapered back to the ears. Even the ears were different from the other Gwar he’d seen. His were less like an oak leaf, more compact. More slanted.

  “You know, it’s fitting that we should duel here,” said the Spider King, pressing the point of his strange dagger into the tip of his finger. He laughed quietly as he went on. “When the Drefids showed me how to breed the Warspiders and . . . make them mean . . . my wife and I used to hold tournaments.”

  Wife? thought Kat.

  “We’d watch from that balcony up there,” he pointed with the dagger to an opening some fifty or sixty feet up. “Watching as Gwar, spiders, or other things fought to the death. It was quite entertaining.”

  Half listening, staring full on at the Spider King’s face with telescopic magnification, it finally clicked. The thought blasted into Tommy’s mind like a freight train smashing into the station house at full speed. He blurted out, “You . . . you’re half Elven!”

  The Spider King stopped cold, just staring at Tommy. His hands dropped to his sides. “Yes,” he said at last, a strange disconnect in his voice. “My . . . father . . . was Elven. What does that do to your categories, young lords . . . your theories about me? About my motives?”

  “Don’t let him get to you, Tommy,” came Kat’s thoughts. “Remember, like Grimwarden said, ‘Evil or good, black or white, there’s no in between.’ ”

  “You know,” said the Spider King, “I married an Elf maiden. I guess you could say such prejudices run in my family. Would you like to meet her?”

  Kat! Tommy thought as loud as he could. Tell Johnny to ready his flame. When I give the word, I want him to blast the Spider King and everything around him.

  “Got it,” Kat said in his mind.

  A strange voice came out of the shadows somewhere above and to the left of the Spider King. It was a female voice but raspy, with a subtle buzzing undercurrent. “They speak,” she said, “in their minds. They prepare for us . . . a fire.”

  “That is no concern for us, Navira,” said the Spider King. “Come . . . meet our guests.”

  “NOW!” yelled Tommy. He and the other Elves parted, giving Johnny a clear shot.

  Johnny stepped up, braced his feet, and expelled his flames. The darkness of the chamber fled from the inferno, rising as high as the balcony. The walls around them seemed sheer. No way out. No place to hide.

  Johnny could not see past the flare of his own hands, but the others could. Through the ten-foot blaze, they saw Johnny’s fire cling to something immense, in the shape of a Warspider but with other features. Six legs, not eight . . . a more slender, oval abdomen, rather than the bloated bag common to most arachnids. From the torso rose something humanoid, but the arms were longer and had sharp, pinching claws instead of a hand with fingers. The head was angular and extremely misshapen. It looked like it had long nar
row ears that tapered to a point. And where the jaw was supposed to be, a pair of massive curving fangs protruded.

  “Your fire avails you not,” said the creature with an unnerving hiss. “For I am made from the fire of this realm by the dark arts, far more powerful than those things . . . those spidersssss.”

  Johnny turned off his flames. His mouth dropped open.

  The fire clung to the creature’s frame, but bit by bit, it was extinguished. And they all beheld her true form, glistening in the red light from above. She had no skin, but a hard, black, shell-like surface covered her entire body like articulated armor. Whiplike horns protruded from her segmented limbs, up the middle of her torso, and a great many from the back of her head like thick locks of hair. She had two large eyes, slanted ovals . . . dark, shining like black glass . . . and perfectly emotionless. And above these were three smaller eyes. They all seemed to be staring at the Elves. “Your fire tickles,” she said.

  The Spider King stepped out from behind her and said, “I, too, am unharmed.”

  “By my protection,” Navira said with another hiss.

  “Yes,” he replied. Then he removed a large ring of keys from his belt. “You will need more freedom to move around this time,” he said and he went to work unlocking a great many shackles that bound her long legs and a harness around her abdomen. “Now, kill them.”

  Navira hesitated a moment. She took one step toward the Elves and said, “I will kill . . . and feed . . . slowly.”

  The Elves spread out and made ready. But instead she turned on the Spider King, lunged, and sunk her fangs into his neck.

  The Spider King pulled himself off of Navira’s fangs. “What . . . have you . . . done?” His eyes bulging with shock and rage, he clutched his bleeding neck, stumbled backward out of the red light, and collapsed with a wet thud somewhere in the back of the chamber.

  “You . . . you killed him,” said Tommy, already rehearsing attack possibilities in his mind. Go low and evade, he thought. Johnny’s fire was completely ineffective, but if he could use it to hide them, then Autumn could run . . . she might be able to get to the Spider King’s body, get that dagger and put out Navira’s eyes. Maybe they’d have a chance.