“It’s another story by whatshisname. It’s about a street lamp who’s about to retire. And the next day he’s going to get inspected to see if he’s still fit for service, and if not they’ll send him to a factory to be melted down.”
Spinneretta’s eyes drifted shut. Her thoughts were still on Isabella. “Mmhmm.”
Kara’s voice receded toward the horizon. “And the street lamp is worried about getting melted down, ’cause like, if he gets melted down he doesn’t know if he’ll even remember being a street lamp, you know?”
“Mm.” Hard to remember anything when you’re dead, she thought. And nary a man has survived being melted down to his base elements.
“And so because he was all worried about the future, he couldn’t burn brightly on his final night of duty. And the wind blows, and tells the lamp he’ll blow into his brain and make sure he always remembers what’s happened, and . . . ”
Spinneretta wouldn’t hear the conclusion of Kara’s rambling story. She was already over the edge and fast asleep.
When the sun had vanished from above Manix, and the midnight blue sky darkened to an inky void, the prophecy foretold by the gas station clerk came to pass. One by one, beads of fire began to flicker along the sand-swept ridges of the alluvial fan. At first there was only one, but by the time they had driven out toward it at least a dozen more burned in scattered clusters along the hillside. And as they drew nearer the ominous flames on foot, Amanda saw the shadows of men dancing in the meager light.
“Mandy, do we really have to do this?” Chelsea asked.
A gust of dry wind blew Amanda’s hair across her face, and she pulled it back into place automatically. “We’ve been over this. We’re the only ones we can trust to do something. And if Spinneretta—”
“I know why we’re doing this.” A tremor of fear bent Chelsea’s tone into the hysterical range. “I mean, do we have to?”
Amanda was quiet for a moment. “If you want to go home, then call your dad and tell him where you are. I won’t think any less of you.”
The dark sky arced overhead. The bright balls of fire blazed along the hills. The rocky mountains stood silhouetted against the subtly unblack sky. Though she wasn’t cold, Amanda shivered. She was scared, though she couldn’t admit it. This was more important than fear. It was more important than anything. She took a deep breath, laced with the smell of dirt, and blew out her apprehension. “Shall we?”
Chelsea was quiet for a long moment. “Okay.”
Deep in her heart, Amanda felt doubt stirring. This is what we have to do, she thought. She gripped the tome in her hands tightly and felt the hard cover pressing against the bones of her fingers. “Let’s go.”
She started off toward the nearest beacon. Soon, two sets of footsteps began to follow. The ground, uneven and covered in rough cobbles, soon became an indistinct smear as she set her sights on her target. The shadows dancing about the fire became clearer. Rattleweed clawed at her ankles. Shards of rock slipped and clattered under her feet. And when they came near enough that their undisguised footsteps carried to the dancing figures, they were at last noticed.
The shadows ceased their enthralled locomotion. The closest of the figures were black, flowing silhouettes, but Amanda could make out the details of some of the dancers on the other side of the fire. Two were wrapped in black-hooded robes. Three of them, two men and one woman, had filthy, matted hair and were dressed in street clothing. Jeans with torn holes, a flannel overshirt stained with dirt and blood, khaki shorts that sagged on one side. It looked like none of them had changed in weeks.
The nearest of the silhouettes slipped to the sides, studying the three of them. Amanda felt their eyes scraping against her face, her legs, her arms. With trembling hands, she held the Repton Scriptures out toward the gathering. The gazes of all in attendance went immediately to the book, and the muttering—which Amanda hadn’t even realized she heard—vanished.
She took a deep, smoke-tainted breath to steady herself. “My name is Amanda Lark,” she announced. The mountains seemed to whisper the words back to her. “I am the daughter of Lionel Lark, son of Charles Lark.”
The shadows shifted, and the glassy-eyed expressions of the unrobed ones remained steadfast. One of the silhouettes approached, and Amanda felt Chelsea recoil in fright. Amanda looked up into the shadow. It was tall, and the contours of its outline suggested it was one of the robes.
“What is it that you seek?” it asked in a gravelly voice.
Her breathing became shallow. There was no turning back now. She licked her lips. “We have come to join the Yellow Dawn.”
After countless failures, the imperfect things that crawl from the experimental wombs have at last become stable, sustainable life. They lack features, and their appendages seem fused to one another such that their count is halved, but the success is undeniable. I have created something that is, at least superficially, like myself. And when I call to the creature and receive a response, I know that I must create more of them. Even if they are imperfect, they are my children—the children of Mother Raxxinoth. And by the helix forged of man and spider, we shall craft our own culture, free from the mark of the exiled. Free from persecution. Free from tyranny.
Here, upon this misty shore, we shall build our kingdom.
Chapter 19
Beneath the Sands
The rustling robes led Amanda and the others up to the foot of a mountain rising from the desolate sands of the Mojave. At the base of that mountain, amid piles of stone and rubble, was an excavated crater-like depression. The depression, which sloped toward a point twenty feet below the ground, exposed the long-buried face of the mountain that sat below the alluvial fan. Ornate stone braziers stood in two lines, their flickering flames poisoning the dry air with foul, oily-smelling fumes. Those flames led down to the sheer substrate, where the light from the fires exposed dark relief carvings around a blackened orifice.
The robes stole down to the entrance. Amanda’s pace slowed as her mind attempted to process the sight. The ground here had been recently excavated. The sparse shrubbery growing along the desert surface was entirely absent here, and as she navigated the slope of the crater she was aghast at how much work must have gone into its creation. She could feel Chelsea’s hesitation behind her, but Kyle followed without any fear. Comforted by his bravado, Amanda kept following the retreating backs of the two robes. Squinting back the radiant heat of the braziers, she approached the black shape where the robes had vanished.
Within, the heat of the torches faded. The sand under her feet became stone. As her scorched eyes readjusted to the dark, she found they had come upon a small antechamber eight feet wide and twelve deep. The walls were covered in the same bizarre carvings as the exposed cliff face. Built into a heavy frame upon the far wall stood a large stone grate made up of thick, angular beams that crossed one another in an impressive geometric lattice. On each side, four faintly shining objects protruded from the wall, resembling notched dials or gears of some kind.
“Wait,” came the gruff voice of one of the robes. His words echoed off the walls of the antechamber, and the aggressive sound made Amanda’s heart race. The man placed each hand upon a gear-thing and began to turn them in opposite directions. Deep, mechanical clangs rang through the chamber as the rotating teeth interfaced with hidden machinery. The other robe slipped past them, and without a word began to manipulate two more of the dials in unison. When a resounding click vibrated through the walls, the robes stopped and moved on to the next sets of gears, turning them in either direction like a combination safe. At last, when eight of the resonant clicks had boomed, the floor began to rumble. Distant mechanical groans and whines battled for dominance, and the great stone lattice began to rise. The eight gear-like protrusions spun as the gate receded into the ceiling. Beyond it was another dark chamber, where the sparse light of more graven torches burned.
The robe on the right nodded toward them. “Come.” Without waiting, he slunk ahead into
the darkness followed by the other.
As Amanda moved to follow, Chelsea seized her by the shoulders and brought her lips close to her ear. “Mandy, this is stupid,” she said in a hot, panicked whisper. “Let’s get out of here, come on! This is a bad idea! Even you have to understand that, right?”
Amanda shook her head and took Chelsea’s hand. “We’ll be fine,” she whispered as reassuringly as she could.
Shaking, Chelsea stared at her with a horrified expression. “You think I’m just panicking or whatever, but I’m telling you, you’re gonna get us killed. L-look, Mandy, we know that it’s true now, okay? The, the zombies or whatever, we know that it has to be same as back home. So let’s get out of here. We’ll tell the police or the media or, or someone! Just—”
“We’ll be fine,” Amanda repeated, though she could not hold back the shiver that slithered up her back. “We have Kyle to protect us, right?” When neither Chelsea nor Kyle replied, she coughed and fell back to Plan B. “Besides, if they were going to kill us, they could have done so at any point. It’s not like they haven’t had ample chance, anyway.”
Chelsea wrapped her arms around herself and peered into the depths beyond the gate. “I don’t know, Mandy. There are worse things than death.”
“You’re being overdramatic.”
“I’m being realistic,” she hissed, leaning in close. “For fuck’s sake, if I were in a crazed cult and two underage girls just wandered in, I wouldn’t be interested in killing them. Cults are dangerous, even more so when they have mind control, and death doesn’t have a thing to do with it!”
Amanda put her hand on Chelsea’s shoulder, and the girl’s trembling invaded her own muscles. “I promise nothing bad is going to happen.”
Chelsea slapped Amanda’s hand off her shoulder and slid a step backward. “Based on what? How can you possibly promise that while leading us into a fucking cave in the middle of nowhere?” Helplessness filled her eyes. Her lips quivered. “Mandy, you really have gone insane, haven’t you?”
Amanda bit her lip but didn’t answer. She gave a nervous glance over Chelsea’s shoulder to where Kyle stood. He, too, looked unnerved and apprehensive. When he caught her eye, however, he let out a low breath and showed her a strong, artificial smile. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s like you said. I’ll keep you two safe.”
Relief flooded her chest. Had Kyle not said that, her best friend’s despair may very well have crushed her certainty. She filled her lungs with dusty air. “I’m not going to make you come, Chels. But I’m going. Because I have to.”
Chelsea looked at Kyle, and then back at Amanda. The torchlight glinted off tears standing in her eyes. She curled her lip and, shoulders trembling, nodded. “Okay. But, you have to promise me that as soon as it even looks dangerous, we’re out of here. Okay?”
Amanda nodded confidently. “That’s a promise. Now come on. We’d better follow them before they get too far ahead.”
Beyond the buried vestibule, a network of cavernous chambers linked by tightly winding tunnels awaited. After what felt like hours of descending through dimly lit passageways and wide grottoes, the ground ended in a sheer drop. Torches lining the walls below revealed an impressive cliff descending two hundred feet to the ground. Heavy stakes driven into the stone shelf held metal rings in place, from which thick ropes affixed by sturdy knots hung.
One of the robes flowed like liquid over the edge, grabbing the hanging ropes with a practiced hand. The other, standing at the lip of the shelf, turned his eyes to Amanda and the others. “Can you climb?”
Just a glance over the edge made Amanda dizzy, but she nodded. “Yeah. We can, right?” She could feel Chelsea’s deepening panic, but they needed to push on. The answers they wanted couldn’t have been much farther.
“Then climb.” The robe slipped back and grabbed the heavy ropes before vanishing.
They did as instructed, slowly rappelling down the two-hundred-foot wall. Despite the demanding physical exertion, the pitted footholds worn into the rock at regular intervals made the descent significantly easier. It took several minutes to reach the bottom of the pit, where wall-mounted torches blazed and the light turned the gravel-paved ground into a kaleidoscope of shimmering jewels.
Beyond the terrifying pit, the naturally worn caverns abruptly transitioned into a far more unnerving architecture. More torches lit the chambers beyond, each of which was hewn to dimensions too perfect even for the ancient Egyptians. Great statues and columns towered from floor to ceiling in the entrance halls, each engraved with alien markings and sigils. The walls, covered in carved murals, depicted robed figures in procession bowing to an imposing ruler whose face had been scratched out. Ghastly iconography of grotesque spider-things enclosed in arabesque cartouches and rings of indecipherable script stared down at them from the high walls of the stone-worked galleries.
It was only then that Amanda realized exactly where they were. The revelation made her shudder despite the heat rolling off the braziers. Beneath Grantwood, Sir Charles Repton had discovered the ruins of an ancient spider kingdom. Three hundred and fifty miles away, they were now at the threshold of the very same kingdom. With a terrified shiver, Amanda uttered the civilization’s sacred name. “Ur’thenoth.”
The nearest of the robes leading them grunted. “You know of our kingdom.”
She nodded, fighting the chill that pulled her skin into goose bumps. Was it possible these ruins were connected to those beneath Grantwood? Was the kingdom of Ur’thenoth truly so vast that it spanned hundreds of miles? The possibility disturbed her, and the more she looked upon the decadent icons and images, the more dreadful the chills became. She hoped Chelsea wasn’t right about this being a mistake.
“Incredible,” Kyle whispered under his breath. “There really is . . . I mean, there was a . . . What does this mean?”
Amanda shook her head and just kept following the robes. The graven images lining the walls seemed to be judging her. Covered in all manners of ideographic scripts, they depicted bizarre scenes of strange worlds and characters. Four-legged spider-things—abominations she was loath to admit she knew the names of—entrusting vessels to prostrated men. A creature of fire radiating light upon a crudely depicted civilization. A horrible, shapeless slug-thing covered in tendrils and eyes. And a recurring image, one she knew well from the Repton Scriptures. But the depictions of the legendary Yellow King were not quite the same as those she’d seen in her grandfather’s book.
All the images of the robed monarch shared one disturbing commonality: every single face had been effaced by violent chiseling. Before one particularly large mural, Amanda stopped, entranced by the flowing lines of the King’s cloak. Eight spider legs were flourished to the King’s sides, extending like the rays of the sun. Though the detail of the creature’s face had been removed, and though its arms and legs were dark, misshapen things, the similarity was undeniable.
Unlike the bulky appendages of the Vant’therax depicted in the scriptures, the spider legs of the King were lithe and well-proportioned—and those proportions were exactly the same as Spinneretta’s. Moreover, the specific formation of the legs, the gesture the King was depicted in the midst of, was one she’d seen Spinneretta make many times before. It was a proud, gaudy gesture that said certainty, smugness, confidence. Amanda shuddered. Had the engraved figure any visible hair beneath its drawn cowl, she’d have believed it was Spinneretta herself depicted upon these millennia-old walls.
The room the robed men eventually led them to, after descending seemingly endless flights of age-eaten stairs, was more a vault than anything else. Behind the heavy stone door, the chamber was perfectly square, fifteen feet on any side. A set of four matching stone slates—beds—were arranged along one wall, and just as many crude stools stood beside a rock shelf opposite them. In the back, a neat grid of cubbies lined the wall like honeycomb.
Kyle was the only one who did not sit when the robes bade them do so. Instead, he stood close to the two girls
, trying to keep his stomach calm. It was hard to get Amanda’s words out of his head. If the cult so desired, they could be killed with no hope of ever being discovered. But the girl was also connected, it seemed. And that was a check in the play-along-for-a-while column. With all the carvings and iconography in this place, there was more than enough proof to revive his career. Even if Spinneretta or Arthr or Kara never showed up, he could always pilfer some artifacts on the way out, and it would take exactly long enough for their authenticity to be verified for his life to be put back on track. He only wished he’d brought his camera.
And yet that thought filled him with self-loathing; what was he doing, thinking such selfish thoughts at a time like this? Whatever he had to lose, these girls had far more at stake. He didn’t know why Amanda would trust him of all people to protect them, but her confident tone niggled at his memories. She reminded him of what it had been like to be a father, to have a family he was responsible for protecting. It had been so long since anyone trusted him like that; even if it was undeserved, he was grateful to have the chance to feel needed again. He’d do everything in his power to make sure no harm came to them.
After nearly an hour of waiting restlessly, the vault door clacked, groaned, and then swung slowly open. Two black robes stood on either side of a half-naked, decrepit old man. The man was deathly thin, his skin pale and sickly. Liver spots and scars painted him up and down. What little hair he had was gray and wispy, unkempt, and served only to emphasize the size of his beard. His wrinkled skin was drawn tight over his bones, and rows of fleshy holes punctuated the length of his arms. The primitive hide garments he wore gave him the appearance of a shaman from some lost indigenous tribe.
The old man raised one hand in a gesture to the robes. “Stay.” He hobbled into the room on unsteady knobs of knees, eyes fixed squarely upon Amanda. Kyle could taste the rot pouring from the old man’s gaping jaw, and he thought he saw Chelsea recoil from the stench as well.
Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3) Page 26