Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3)

by Bartholomew Lander

  They are both wounded, but the flame has enough life left to invoke a spell of destitution upon me. I feel my power ripped from my mind at once, its essence scattered by the seal. The power bleeds from me in torrential streams. I feel the loss in my heart of hearts. And when the smoke disperses and the fire at last recedes, I find myself alone amidst the charred remnants of my kingdom.

  I am trapped. Without the gift of the Wine, the power granted by Mother Raxxinoth, what have I? And though the coming days bring proof that the war has ended, they also bear evidence of the eternal solitude that remains. I alone have survived. And though the war has ended, it has come at great cost to the soil, to the air.

  Only ruin and decay remain to see the return of peace.

  Chapter 37

  The Two Kingdoms

  Beyond the heavy stone gate, Mark and Annika plunged deeper into the unimaginable caverns. They found high-domed ceilings, uneven walls porous with extensive tunneling, and water-worn pits to whom millennia must have seemed a trivial quantum. There was no sign of life, save for the torches quietly burning at regular intervals within cubbies carved into the labyrinthine passages.

  Mark had no idea how many hours had passed. Every now and again, he noticed Annika checking her phone, though she made no comment regarding what she learned. Whenever they came upon another chamber with multiple exits, they always followed the downward-leading path as the Vant’therax suggested. After a great while, the air grew warm and thick, perfumed by distant smoke and scorched incense.

  As they passed through a hewn doorway leading to yet another steeply declining tunnel, Mark paused. “This feels so wrong,” he said. “Where is everyone? The Dawn must surely have patrols.”

  Annika hummed. “Perhaps they heard the gunshots and ran for their pitiful lives. Unlikely, huh?”

  “The cult’s base is yet further below,” Silt said, emerging briefly from the shadow puddles. “They have no reason to waste time so near the surface.”

  After another age of wandering down the dim passages and twisting tunnels, a dull amber light illuminated the slate gray walls ahead. Drawing nearer, Mark found that the far wall was divided by a fissure that opened abruptly into a titanic gulf. For a moment, the reason-defying scale and scope of the void paralyzed his lungs.

  The great cavern was miles across, with no visible ceiling nor floor. The walls were sculpted, carved into faceted towers that plunged down farther than he could see. Thick bridges hung suspended between the walls, with large plazas and tiered stone structures dotting their length. Flames blazed all along those bridges, and the deep shadows beneath them concealed complex networks of megastructures that stretched down to the untainted black below.

  “Welcome to Ur’thenoth,” Silt said. “The old kingdom of the worshipers of Raxxinoth.”

  Mark stared at the sprawling vista before him, at a loss for words. That a cavern this colossal could have existed in the first place was incredible, to say nothing of the constructions that stood as silent sentinels of forgotten eras.

  Annika whistled. “This’s some Indiana Jones shit. You’re not honestly going to tell me those underdwelling savages built this, are you?”

  “That would be impressive,” Silt replied. “This kingdom was ageless at the dawn of your civilization.”

  “Why has no one discovered this before?” Annika asked, gazing into the yawning darkness.

  Dirge emerged from the shadows to stand beside Silt. “One man did,” he said. “And that was the beginning of everything.”

  Silt nodded to himself. “The most recent dwellers of this place were completely subterranean. They had little reason nor motivation to build their cities accessible to the surface world. It was an accident that brought Repton the Elder to its gates, and the perseverance of the Dawn that opened these tunnels to the light of day.”

  He raised a finger toward the largest of the bulging towers, situated half the length of the cavern away. It was a massive cylinder partly buried in the wall, from the bottom of which an army of giant stalactites dripped. A number of hanging bridges were strung between it and other intermediate structures, and distant lights flickered within the gaping windows pitting its sides. “That is the ritual heart of the new cult. That would be a good place to begin our search.”

  Mark could only gaze with wonder upon the structure. It was impossibly huge, large enough to house a dozen Arbordales within its walls. And the presence of the innumerable stalactites that grew from its lowest extremities proved the Vant’therax’s words beyond any reasonable doubt. For such a formation to have occurred, these megalithic fortresses must have been geologically ancient, perhaps hundreds of millions of years in age. It made his brain shudder to consider. The upper caverns they’d first breached had been free of such formations, indicating they’d been excavated relatively recently, mayhap by the legendary vagabond spider kingdom. But that left a grim and poignant question heavy in his mind: what sentience could have built these lower ruins?

  Unwilling and unable to consider the question now, Mark shook off the shivers that assaulted him and set his sights upon a doorway set into the wall not far away, which would presumably lead closer to the city in the gulf. “Lead the way,” he said, already starting toward the door.

  The first star had set, and another had risen on a different, stranger horizon. Spinneretta and Arthr had finally made it to the foot of the central fortress. Its grotesque terraces were now clearly visible, even from within the dark curtain it cast down on them. It was made up of an alien architecture, blocky and yet geometrically perverse. The towers and columns looked as though they had somehow been braided together. Spinneretta could just make out the shapes of windows and galleries peeking out from the citadel’s face high above. Sharp protrusions bridged the gaps between the lower spires and another ring of guard towers that surrounded the center of the city.

  As the rampart took them past the centermost concentric enclosing wall, the throbbing pressure on Spinneretta’s brain reached a new level of intensity. And now, at last, she could see from where that horrible resonance came.

  A short distance from the sheer outer walls of the fortress, a stout tower stood surrounded by half-eroded columns evocative of the Ionic order. The tower rose in three tiers to an elaborate cap, engraved with friezes long lost to time. Like everything else, its style was unnerving, unwholesome; but it was clearly nothing like the other structures in the Web. She stared at the structure, studying the remnants of the designs that had once adorned it. The throbbing against her mind chugged, churned, stirred. What the hell is that?

  A’vavel, her other thoughts said, making her jump.

  A’vavel? she thought back at it. She knew that name. It was the name given in the Repton Scriptures for the prison of Raxxinoth, where the Primal One had been bound in black flames and sealed in time immemorial. For all the import and gravity the name represented, Spinneretta had expected something far more impressive, more ceremonial—were it to really exist at all, that is.

  But the temple enshrining the portal to the spider god’s tomb just stood there, almost mocking in its stoic simplicity. And that beating, buzzing hum drew her attention even deeper with its hypnotic call. It, too, was familiar, but not in the way everything else was. It was the same buzzing—she was certain—that had permeated the walls and floor of the Warren home when Mark had placed his hand atop hers and allowed her to feel the barrier to Y’rokkrem’s prison. It felt like everything around her had been vibrating. This was the same sensation, only amplified and personal.

  “What are you staring at?” Arthr asked.

  She raised a leg toward the top of the temple, which barely reached the height of the rampart. “That. That’s the prison of Raxxinoth.” It was such an absurd thing to say aloud, but it felt so natural.

  “Wait, what? That?” He leaned forward, peering at it scrupulously. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Can’t you feel it beating?”

  He blinked at her. “No?”
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br />   And just why should that surprise me? As she turned away from the strange building and back toward the end of the wall ahead, she thought she felt that pulsing grow more insistent. It was scraping, grinding, like sandpaper on her brain. Cringing, she almost thought she could interpret the grooves and texture of that sensation like a psychic phonograph needle. DO NOT LET HIM OPEN THE GATE.

  The voice in her head stirred and echoed the words. Do not let him open the gate.

  Spinneretta tried to ignore the nonsensical thoughts. It had to just be the stress of being here, at the doorstep of a tyrant demigod. Yeah. That was it. She was just going crazy, that was all. What a reassuring idea.

  The holy land. The relics of a people and their god. She should have been amazed by it all. She should have been humbled, disturbed, aghast at this alien world and the civilization that sprawled across its all too earth-like surface. But she wasn’t. It was too normal. It all felt too damn normal to her now and, be it genetic memory or the symptoms of genuine insanity, all she could do was think about the spider throne and the final battle that loomed. Not wanting to dwell on the thoughts that clawed and gnawed at her certainty, she just started walking once more.

  It was not long before they found themselves at the end of the path, where the rampart met the base of the faceted fortress. There, set deep into the maroonstone walls, a stone door lay broken in its frame. Weary, Spinneretta leaned forward, craning her neck to see past it and into the concealed depths of the structure. This was it. The threshold of the end.

  Be careful. Anything could lurk beyond. She grabbed the edges of the tilted slab with her spider legs. She could taste a thick aura of dust mixed with age-old rot from within. Cringing at the smell invading her spiracles, she heaved her shoulders and dislodged the door from its housing. When its edge slipped past the frame, it almost pulled her down with it. She let go just in time, but couldn’t stop herself from stumbling forward as the stone slab slammed into the ground and cracked, shaking the floor.

  Arthr recoiled as the door rattled the ground, arms pulled back to shield himself from the spray of dust. “Is it safe?”

  Spinneretta peered into the recesses of the unlit chamber beyond the doorway. Nothing moved. “I think so.”

  At the very edge of the light’s reach, she spied a structure upon the wall. She cautiously brought her hand to it and removed the dusty metal fixture from the looped hook holding it in place. The metal was black, not at all smooth. It was covered in rusty blisters. At the top, a collared cage held a bundle of twig-like organic matter. She thought she recognized it as the dried remnants of those fungal stalks she and Mark had encountered here.

  “Arthr,” she said, “do you have your lighter?”

  “Yeah, of course.” He checked his pocket, produced his Zippo, and handed it over.

  Spinneretta bitterly regretted mocking Arthr for the purchase after their move. Only vaguely familiar with the device, she flicked the lid back. A sharp, metallic click rang from the mechanism and echoed off the silent walls. After a momentary struggle, she produced a modest flame from its mouth. She touched the fire to the bundle of twigs, and a flash of sparks took to the air. The gray twigs sputtered and began to smolder a deep orange, just like the charcoal in the old barbecue. Just as she’d thought—the fixture was a torch. She capped the lighter, smothering the flame, and handed it back to Arthr. “This looks pretty dim, but it’ll help.”

  He shrugged and slipped the Zippo back into his pocket. “If you want to entrust your life to an old tinder-stick, be my guest.” When his hand came back out, it held his phone. A few swipes of his fingers brought its flash to a blinding, steady brightness.

  Spinneretta felt a little embarrassed to have not thought of the flashlight app, but she quickly reminded herself that its battery would not last forever. Not that her torch had any greater intrinsic longevity. Her heart beating loud and heavy in her stomach, she crept into the chamber. The light from the old torch flickered against the walls, but it was too dim to see much of anything. It brought her visibility to a few feet ahead, but that was it.

  Bubbly lesions of rust and corrosion covered the antechamber, stark black rashes against the stone. The smell of scorched dust was heavy in the air, but the smoke from the torch tasted vaguely of pine needles. It was a sickening combination. As she slunk inch by inch past the doorway, her lungs cried out for the ozone taste of the air outside.

  Arthr sidled in along the doorframe, holding his phone out like a police badge. Its light beam, while brighter than the torch, was too narrow to illuminate much at once.

  Spinneretta tried to hold her breath. Up to her ankles in broken door, she slipped further inside, searching the void for a passage she knew must have been there. It was Arthr’s light that found it. Unlike the one that now lay shattered upon the floor, this door was made of a rough, impure metal. She walked up to it, straining her eyes at its surface. It was covered in decorative carvings and script. In the center, an embossed disc sat at eye-level. Within its circumference, a spiderwork pattern of scratches and lines stared at her.

  Bringing the torch closer, she blinked in confusion, and then awe. Beneath the scratches, she found a familiar design. It was the sigil of the King, regal and shapely. Unlike the crude facsimile she used to invoke passage to this world, it was made up of supple curves and sharp, powerful lines. But the sigil was also crisscrossed by shallow incisions that glared in gray, showing the raw color of the metal it was fashioned out of. The lines were thorough, slashed barbarically across the sign as though in an attempt to remove it. She swallowed hard. It seemed that like some reviled Pharaohs of old, the King’s enemies had defaced his proud symbol.

  I wonder if that’s why I couldn’t get this close, she thought, recalling the absence of sigils within the walls of the city. It made sense, but that brought another thought to her. That then meant that throughout Th’ai-ma, the very seat of the Yellow King’s rule, every single one of his signs had been desecrated to the point of uselessness. It spoke of defiance on a scale she’d never even considered.

  Or desperation, the voice in her head thought with a heavy air. Paranoia.

  “Spins?”

  She snapped out of the thought. “Huh?”

  “How do we open it? There’s no knob or handle or . . . ”

  She traced the dusty surface with one of her legs, her heartbeat running wild. “Let’s see.” The rough texture rubbed on her chitin as she explored its surface. She should have known, something told her. The tip of her leg glided over the edge of the embossed disc. The voice in her mind grunted in confirmation, and muscle memory took over. She placed three of her appendages against the disc and pushed down. At first, nothing moved. A deep breath flowed into her.

  Try again.

  And so she did, fighting the rust in the gaps of the mechanism. A cracking sound came, and at last the disc depressed with a bang. She shifted the tips of her legs to the indentations within the King’s sign, searching for traction.

  Clockwise.

  Her legs obeyed. The disc resisted at first, but soon clicked into an offset angle. Withdrawing her appendages, she placed her free hand upon the door. At only a light press, the surface unfolded like a set of double doors, exposing vertical slits she hadn’t noticed before. A rush of cold air poured out of the opening, blowing her hair back and sucking a gasp from her lips. Another permeating dark awaited, far more foreboding than the first.

  Clang!

  She jumped in fright. The folding door had struck the stone walls on either side. Just the door. It was just the door. She gulped down an unsatisfying breath and raised her torch toward the hall. “Ready?”

  Arthr gave a nervous nod, his own light in hand. “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

  Mark and the others made their way through the ancient stone hallways that honeycombed the walls of the titanic hollow. There was little similarity to the rough tunnels they’d passed through up to this point, save for the cubbies that held low-burning torches.
Every so often, large windows in the wall opened to the void outside, affording a closer look at the huge bridges spanning the endless depths. Though they were nearly perfectly preserved, they were pockmarked by crumbling lips and segments from which the masonry dripped in time-frozen stalactites. Along their length, beside the blazing bonfires, crude shelters now came into view. They appeared to be little more than pale hides stretched over thin skeletons, reminiscent of the nomadic tribes of Asia and the Americas.

  They came upon a wide chamber lined with doorways on one side. Ornate carvings—both scenes and script—covered the walls. But what veneration Mark may have felt for such ancient relics was undercut by the debris and human waste littering the floor. He would’ve kept walking to escape the putrid smell had Annika not grabbed his shoulder and stopped him.

  “Mark, look.”

  He turned to the wall where she gestured. The lines in the mural were tightly packed and cluttered, but gradually the image unfurled before him. Surrounded by a halo-like cartouche that stretched nearly to the edge of the wall, a figure stood. Its body was obscured by a garment which—despite the crude, antiquated style of the engraving—conveyed a sense of imposing power. Two eyes gleamed beneath its drawn cowl, their age-worn, pale pigments no more than suggestions after untold centuries of abandon. Eight long, spindly legs grew from the figure, bending into decadent, horrific angles that defied all reason.

  “This is their king?” Annika asked.

  Mark hummed in confirmation. “Have you not seen the pictures in the Repton Scriptures?”

  “I haven’t. This would’ve been a juicy little detail to share. I was picturing this King as an old man in a bathrobe. This is quite different. Makes you wonder how many more of these creatures exist if this spider god spread her spawn through the cosmos as you say.”

  Mark said nothing. The resemblance was perfect, and the original style did a far better job of conveying it than Repton’s unskilled reproductions. He let his gaze drift to the other images engraved upon the walls, his nose wrinkling at the lingering insult the Dawn had left the Yellow King.