She took a moment to steady herself, readjusting her queasy stomach from her descent. Her spider legs still seemed to vibrate, and autonomous twitches racked her joints. Dizzy, she ventured a few cautious steps away from the wall of the valley, observing the thick white clouds drifting in all directions within the pervasive screen of mist. She couldn’t even see the ground; downward visibility ended at her knees, and the only hint of depth in the impenetrable fog was the flowing gaps in the clouds swimming by, which created only the suggestion of depth beyond their recesses.
A loud clatter of stones came from above, and Arthr skidded over the last segment of the cliff, landing in a graceless heap beside her with a grunt. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” he howled as he scrambled to recover. “Are you trying to kill us?”
Spinneretta ignored him and took a few more tenuous steps into the haze, the cold vapor wetting her cheeks. Her nose wrinkled as she tasted the air. The harsh chemical sting enveloped her. Dry, pungent, bleach-laced burning; it held a familiar sourness that reminded her of the taste of her own venom. She shuddered as the stench crept into her spiracles.
Arthr coughed as he made his way to his feet once more. “Christ, what the hell is that smell?”
She just stared at the flowing gaps in the fog, peering, trying to find some contour of land beyond the shifting white walls to follow. She squinted, suddenly aware that her eyes were watering, a mild burn in her tear ducts. “I don’t know. Try not to breathe too deeply, though. Now come on.”
“Come on? Where? I can barely see my hand in front of my fucking face!”
“This way. Trust me.” She gestured with her shoulder and legs toward the origin of the pulsing weight in her mind. But her first steps into the mist found her tripping as the unseen ground suddenly became uneven and loose. She threw her arms and appendages out to catch herself, and she winced as her palm scraped something smooth and sharp.
Arthr scoffed behind her. “Trust you? Is this what’s meant by the blind leading the blind?”
Spinneretta pushed herself back up and examined the shallow incision across her palm. The skin was puckering, and a tiny trickle of blood had started to ooze from its length. “Watch your step. There’s a bunch of shifty rocks here.”
He hobbled toward her. “Oh, yeah. I’ll be sure to watch it.”
“I thought you were promising to be a good brother. Good brothers don’t snark.” She brushed herself off and tried to ignore the hot pain of the cut. Another whiff of the deathly scent burned her nostrils. She covered her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket, hoping the valley was not as long as it had appeared from the mountains above.
And so they advanced into the endless sea of white, stumbling and tripping over the concealed terrain, guided forward by the call of the beating heart of Th’ai-ma.
As they ventured deeper into the swelling mists, visibility improved little. The occasional gap in the clouds gave subtle hints to the topography ahead of them, but most of those clues just confirmed the continuation of the endless white. Each step they took, tripping over unseen stones, stirred the vapors at their legs into swirling whorls that rose and danced.
The smell had long since ceased bothering Spinneretta; the scouring in her lungs had become a tolerable discomfort. Arthr, however, still walked with his sleeve drawn over his mouth and nose—an ineffective defense against the toxic scent. He gave an aggravated grunt as he tripped over another invisible obstacle for the fifteenth time in the last hour. “Goddammit! How much farther is it?”
Spinneretta stopped and closed her eyes. The throbbing pressure against her mind was getting closer, but it was difficult to tell for certain how much distance remained. “I could venture a guess, but I’d just be estimating based on how long the valley looked from above.”
“And?”
She thought about it. “If you’re really going to put me on the spot, another two hours should put us against the mountains on the other side.”
He huffed in irritation. “Two hours? You’re serious? Two more fucking hours of this?”
“Sorry.” It was all she could think to say.
“How do you even know we’re going in the right direction? Don’t tell me you can actually see something?”
“No. But I can feel it pulsing beyond the mountains. And I know we’re getting closer.”
He sighed, apparently calming down a little. “Know what? I’m just not going to question that at all.”
“Are you starting to believe me about all this stuff, then?”
Hunched over, he nodded, a gesture barely visible through the stark white screen between them. “At this point, if you told me the Earth was flat and Dave Mustaine was the new pope, I’d just take it at face value.”
She showed him a weak smile she was certain he couldn’t see. “Let’s hurry up, alright? That way we can get you home to Annika before the day’s over.” The words tasted foul; her false bravado wouldn’t convince him this was anything other than a death sentence. But it was the right thing to say, right? The sisterly thing to say.
Arthr sighed again, shook his head, and then started walking once more. “Lead the way, Princess.”
“Please don’t call me that.” She made it only a few more steps before a loud cracking sound behind her made her look over her shoulder.
Arthr was once again pushing himself up from having fallen prone in the mist. “Goddammit! This is fucking bullshit!”
Spinneretta stifled a giggle, but when Arthr let out an enraged shout her humor dissipated.
“I can’t fucking take this!” he shouted. “Fuck this valley! Fuck this fog! Fuck these motherfucking rocks!” He kicked at the ground again, and this time a chorus of dry cracks and hollow snaps sang from the site of impact.
Spinneretta gasped. “Wait, stop!”
He huffed at her. “What?”
Her tongue prickled with icy thorns. That sound had been wrong; it was too arid, too crisp, too light to have been from the breaking of stone. Mind drawn to the texture of the ground beneath her feet, she began to panic. Unfurling her lower legs, she eased herself onto her knees. The solid white vapor rose to the middle of her chest. Hands shaking, she groped blindly beneath the ocean’s surface. An ivory-smooth texture greeted her fingers as they found broken and unmatching shapes in the mist’s depth. Her palm glanced across a dome. Heart pounding in her stomach, she forced her fingers to seize it. She lurched back to her feet and reluctantly brought the artifact to eye level.
It was dull white, tainted with the yellowing of age. The sphere was caved in on one side, but the hollowness only confirmed its identity. A skull. Humanoid, and yet inhuman. Sharp fangs grew from the upper jaw in tightly packed rows. Its nasal cavity was long and thin, and above it sat a series of indentations in the bone’s surface. The rest of the object was smooth; there were no eyes.
“What the fuck is that!?”
Staring into the face of the semi-human creature’s skull, she realized just what it was she held. It was a remnant of the greatest of the King’s creations, the namesake of NIDUS’s monstrous but sterile hybrids. The facial geometry of the skull perfectly matched the images of the original Vant’therax depicted within the Repton Scriptures. Eyeless, mere slits for nostrils, a forest of jagged fangs protruding around a long, flapping tongue—those creatures who once filled this realm, servants to the great Yellow King, were no more.
Spinneretta gasped as a worse realization unfurled. As pernicious as the great scar had seemed from above, the walls of fog had concealed its greatest secret from their eyes. Now she understood why the ground was so uneven, so eager to shift and buckle beneath their feet: the entire valley was paved in mounds of ashen bone.
A breath stung her nose, and Spinneretta then realized something yet further. As her mind drifted along chains of thought, the other voice in her mind grunted a lethargic confirmation. That poisonous scent was not incidental. This valley was no random geographic formation, nor was it a mere graveyard. The skeletal remnants
covering the ground were scars of battle, a numberless army crushed in a single despicable attack—one which had forever poisoned the land for miles and miles in all directions. Oh, how frightful must the arsenal of the Yellow King have been to wipe out such a legion of enemies and leave the land dead for hundreds of years. There was little wonder why the fungal gliders, webstalks, and land-whales were entirely absent from this place—why there hadn’t been a single hint of life since they’d arrived in this wasteland.
But that wasn’t true.
Spinneretta’s heart skipped a beat. She remembered the black blotches in the distance as they’d crested the barren foothills. She’d thought them creatures, but that should have been impossible in these deadlands where nothing grew. Right? Without any food chain to support them, no creature could live in these toxic wastes.
A soft rumbling interrupted her thoughts. The caustic breath filling her lungs made her gag, her stomach retching and twisting in fear. She looked at Arthr, whose face was still trapped in that same look of disgust. No reaction from him. Lips trembling around the words, Spinneretta forced herself to speak. “Tell me that was your stomach.”
He looked at her as if she were insane. “My stomach?”
Everything went quiet. The only noise was the hiss of the gentle breeze carrying the tainted mist. A few moments passed in utter silence, and then she heard it again. It was so quiet it could have been her imagination—a staccato rumbling from beyond where Arthr stood. Then, as she listened even closer, the Instinct taking her sense of hearing to untold heights, she could make out a far more unsettling noise.
The gentle brush of fur gliding over the ground. The almost inaudible yet grating shrick of chitin lightly scraping over bone.
The sound of her heartbeat thundered in her ears. She looked at Arthr, pleading. “No sudden moves.” It was a mere whisper, and the perplexity upon his face announced he hadn’t understood. She raised a leg to gesture into the white depths behind him, and slowly his face was shadowed by fear.
Arthr jerked his head over his shoulder in defiance of her command. “What?”
“Move,” she commanded. “Slowly.” She began to slink backward, carefully placing each step behind the last. Arthr soon followed, eyes wide and steps clumsy. Spinneretta stared past him into the fog. The subtle sounds drew nearer, each shrick and brush amplified by the primal cocktail coursing through her veins. Another quick burst of that low, rumbling crackle.
It was little consolation that she’d been right. There was no food chain here to support life.
But there was prey.
Spinneretta counted the sounds as best as she could; there were two of them, just out of sight. Each step was another eternity spent waiting, hoping nothing would happen, that the sounds of the creeping predators would vanish into memory, mere incidental aberrations of the imagination. But each foot they advanced brought with it another of those brushing, scraping, and digging sounds. She hastened her steps a little, noticing the look of panic upon Arthr’s face. He looked as if he wanted to demand an answer to the questions that sat upon his tongue, but fear held his lips fixed in that half-ajar look of stupefaction. The curling mists wafting all around, carrying the scent of extinction, may have been the only thing keeping them safe from the blinded predators’ waiting jaws.
Mark had commented on the intelligence of the creatures; Cinnamon’s own precocious demeanor was evidence enough of the intellect the Leng cats possessed. And that meant her and Arthr’s sudden shift into a slinking, defensive crawl would not have gone unnoticed. Even now, the beasts must have realized they’d been discovered. There was a degree of wasted care, an increase in the volume of each sound. The rumbling seemed to grow louder, croaking strains from a ghastly alien maw. Even Arthr now seemed to hear the shrill scraping of chitin on bone.
Time was running out; it was a prisoner’s dilemma on a burning fuse. Their boldness surged, and a swelling hunger guided their steps. The hissing and crackling in the mist grew yet louder. Gambling beasts, she cursed. If she and Arthr were to survive, they, too, had to become gambling beasts.
Spinneretta bent down again, fingers searching. Her hands happened upon a cylindrical shaft of bone, and she seized it jealously. Her fingers shook. It was a poor excuse for a weapon, but she had no other choice. Chattering molars on edge, she gripped the bone as tightly as she could until she thought it would explode into ageless powder. Beside her, Arthr’s distress had become audible. His clumsy steps kicked the concealed bones about his ankles, squeezing small, desperate breaths from his lungs.
And yet she waited, the Instinct hijacking her fear and repurposing it into a judiciously sharpened blade. She held the broken bone close to her breast, waiting for the moment to strike. “Arthr,” she whispered. “When I give the signal, turn around and run.”
His eyes darted to her. “Run? Wh-where?”
“Anywhere. Just run like your life depends on it. Because it does.” She raised the bone overhead, her spider legs quivering in anxious anticipation. She’d come this far; she wasn’t going to let some hungry animals deny her her destiny.
A half-scuttle, then a snap of breaking bones on the ground. A gurgling snarl started low and swelled until she felt Arthr shiver. Then came a moment of silence, and it was immediately broken by the tremor of a great body lurching just out of sight. It was now or never.
She pulled her arm back and let the bone fly with all the force the Instinct could summon. It vanished in an instant, throwing the mist into discord. A loud crack answered her. A shrill cry split the air. Something heavy hit the ground mere feet from her. The stunned creature’s weight sent corpse-fragments splashing in all directions. Her whole body tensed. “Run!”
Spinneretta turned, her spider legs lashing at the death-paved earth, and took off into the chilling white world as Arthr staggered into his own panicked sprint. A moment later, that shrill banshee howl came again, and the beasts in the mist gave chase.
Chapter 34
The Vale of Kalka’thorum
Instinctual adrenaline poisoned Spinneretta’s bloodstream as she ran. Each surge of her legs was another bolt of pain through her tired muscles. But the crashing sound just behind gave her no time to rest. As she stumbled over the uneven mounds of concealed bone, her lower spider legs worked overtime to catch her falls and convert them into forward momentum. If nothing else, her pursuer was having just as much difficulty navigating the terrain. She could hear the dry, hollow clattering behind her as the Leng cat’s huge body crashed into the irregular piles, breaking apart skulls and rib cages, and scattering what could not be snapped. She felt the strength of its muscles in each huge movement; a single misstep would be the end.
The ground soared beneath her. Where her feet dragged, jagged chips flew and bit at her ankles. Her spider legs were wild windmills, whipping at the earth and pulling at anything solid enough to hasten her flight. Each swipe of her chitin legs sent more aberrant remains dancing through the blinding mists. Even her hands were soon clawing for purchase. The sharp skeletal fragments slashed at her fingers and drew blood. Though her hands were useless compared to her spider legs, she grabbed and pulled with all her might.
A shrill scream shredded the air behind her, accompanied by the sound of skulls being crushed underfoot. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. The ground gnashed against her chitin, trying to break it between its teeth. Her arms were covered in scratches that held no value in the face of death. And yet she could hear the snapping maw behind her, hungry for the blood covering her hands and wrists. The pounding of the monster’s limbs grew louder and nearer with each step, and Spinneretta searched for the strength to evade the creature’s grip for just a moment longer.
Fearing the end, Spinneretta cut suddenly to the left at a sharp angle. The Leng cat charged past her before readjusting for her divergence. But that minor adjustment cost it time, and so Spinneretta pulled ahead into the endless fog. She didn’t know where Arthr was, but she couldn’t worry about him
right now. He was fast, and his track and field discipline should have made up for his natural clumsiness. But the pang of abandonment rang through her heart; what could he hope to accomplish that she could not? The Leng cats were perfect predators, superior in design.
Beneath her foot, a bone protrusion caved. Her ankle twisted, and she felt the world tilt. A scream exploded from her lips. Her spider legs scrambled to catch herself, and her hands flew down to the unseen earth. Flakes of bone slashed at her palms, and she winced. Before her spider legs could pull her back into a run, a hard blow from behind sent the world into a hard spin. For a moment, there was only white, and then her side struck a raised mound of remains. She rolled, limbs banging and scraping across the ground. Up melded into down. When her back finally smashed her into a stop, she was too dizzy to react. Her eyes went wide, her mind numb, as the great beast emerged from the white mists and pounced. She threw her arms over her face, shrieking, as the wall fell upon her.
“Halt!”
The word split her head with a deafening roar. Her heart nearly stopped as that voice boomed out through the misty vale. Twisted, hate-filled—it was her own voice, poisoned by the malice of the alien thoughts that slept within her mind.
A snarl from the Leng cat, now poised to sink its fangs into her, set her whole body ashudder with fear. But instead of chomping down and snapping her in half, the creature froze. Its maw shuddered agape, a forest of worn teeth mere inches from her throat. Its four red eyes, dim beneath the gray fog, shone with some indiscernible emotion. They seemed to be studying her, a fact which made the voice in her mind scream out in fury.
“Insolent beast. Do you not recognize who is before you?”
At this, the thing shrunk back in obvious terror. Its eyes flickered as it continued to watch her. It lowered itself close to the ground, tongue tasting the air. It crouched half-concealed by the fog, mangy fur wrapped tight around its prominent endoskeleton. Spinneretta couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sorrow for the murderous beast—a twinge that rang through her core and made her shiver. That shiver turned into a whole-body convulsion as the voice spoke again.
Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3) Page 46