But then, from just behind, the crackle of the Flames of Y’rokkrem greeted her ears. She turned just in time to see Mark appear from a wreath of verdant fire, one hand blazing with the soul-shattering spell. His feet touched the ground, and he fell into a steady advance toward where Nemo was hunched upon the ground. “There are those who are Chosen,” Mark announced to the robe, “and those who merely believe they are Chosen. Which are you, Helixweaver?” The Flames flashed brighter, pulling a grimace over Mark’s face. His whole body blurred forward toward his target. “The Gate is closed to you—the Void awaits!”
His fist flashed down into Nemo. The blue-green Flames painted a glorious lunar arc in the air before blasting immaterially through Nemo’s chest. A pained cry sounded from the half-man’s lungs, and the impact again sent him rolling across the rampart’s surface, limp. When he stopped another ten feet away, the gentle fluttering of the King’s robe in the breeze was the only sound that remained.
A rush of adrenaline attacked Spinneretta’s heart. She righted herself with her spider legs and found she could scarcely stand. Her human legs were all wobbly. Her starved lungs began to convulse. Laughter spilled out with each breath. “Oh my God, we did it!”
Arthr, now quite a distance down the rampart, gave a victorious cry and pumped his fist in the air. “Way to fuckin’ go, guys!”
Silt approached her, a distant look on his face. He was inspecting his hands, which had been mangled during his relentless attacks against the stonework. Black strips of chitin had already begun growing along his metacarpals, which had been all but stripped of skin. “I suppose we have a habit of underestimating you,” he said, his voice ringing with a quiet reverence. “You truly are the daughter of the King.”
Mark, however, just stood there, staring into his open palm. His fingers trembled, and his gaze drifted to where the fluttering robe sat. “There’s nothing.”
Choking on her own joyous laughs, Spinneretta made her way over to him. “What do you mean?”
Jaw tight, he pointed to where the King’s tattered robe subtly fluttered in the breeze. “No soul. There is no soul in this one.”
Spinneretta started and followed his finger. “What?” He didn’t answer. She watched the rustling of the King’s garb and realized with a creeping horror that it was not the breeze that stirred it.
The shaking grew more violent, and the sound of staccato laughter met her ears. It was high-pitched and unrestrained, blood-curdling in its inhumanity. The Helixweaver rolled and then lurched back to his feet. Beneath the tattered cowl, a sunken eye filled with madness drilled into her soul. Nemo’s laughter, like the caws of hellish birds in a storm of knives, sank into her spirit. All at once, her relief and hope melted from her. Even after their three-fold attack, he just stood there, laughing, immortal. Despair coated her insides and pulled her spider legs around her torso.
“So, Warren?” Nemo said between bouts of lunatic chortling. “Which of us is merely the believer, then?”
The Flames sparked in Mark’s open palm. He began to pace, keeping his body turned to the side to present the smallest target possible. “It’s true after all. I knew I felt your soul shatter when I struck your puppet back at the Golmont building. But if your soul was truly destroyed, then how can you yet live?”
“I was not meant to die yet. Not before Raxxinoth is released and the will of the Writhing Malefice is done.” In a flash, Nemo soared across the ground toward him.
Mark spun about, his left foot drawing an arc across the ground. The air birthed a shimmering veilwall, ready to swallow anything that crossed its path.
With a predatory grin, Nemo sank into the ground mere feet from the veil and vanished in a flood of darkness. Mark leapt back as the slithering shadows passed unimpeded beneath the spell. But an instant later, the inky-black pool burst into a rising yellow stain. The blow took Mark in the chest and sent him sprawling across the ground. He rolled to a stop a distance away, unmoving.
Spinneretta gasped. “Mark!”
Silt attacked, an oily smudge in Spinneretta’s vision. Another massive punch fell into Nemo, but this time the Helixweaver’s body rolled and flexed to absorb the impact. The force dispersed into the rampart’s surface, shaking it like a brief but tumultuous earthquake. There he stood, arms coiled with Silt’s, that damned maniac smile stretching from ear to ear.
“Do you know who you now face?” Nemo breathed in a low, hideous snarl. “I am Urn-ma Nemo. Reborn of Heinokk. Chosen of the Writhing Malefice. I have become far stronger than your precious Yellow King. Stronger than the Warren. Stronger than anyone to ever come before me. Nothing can stop me now. Least of all a soulless insect like you!”
A blue flash sparkled at Nemo’s shoulder, and the robe flexed and split. Flesh turned, spiraling about a pair of bulbous shapes growing from his upper arm. And then, the tumor ruptured, loosing a great black shape from the flesh cocoon. When Spinneretta saw what it was, her blood ran cold. Between the torn ribbons of raw tissue, two gigantic chitin appendages emerged. They were long—an arm and a half at least—but overly thick, malformed, hideous. They looked like they were assembled of molted exoskeletal chunks carelessly melted together.
As the two chitin appendages unfurled, Nemo’s whole body twisted about. The pseudo-legs whipped across Silt’s body. A jet of blood sprayed from his severed throat and slopped across the floor for but a moment before Nemo struck again. The legs flew forward and sank into the Vant’therax. With a wet splattering sound, Silt was thrown across the rampart and came to rest not far from where Mark lay.
Nemo let out a raspy sigh and turned to Spinneretta. His two mangled chitin appendages extended to one side, twitching and curling autonomously. “Now for you.”
The sickness of the display receded at once beneath the inferno in her veins. Mark. Silt. Even that bastard Dirge. The blood in the air set her legs ashiver. A carnal hunger for more poured out from the gate of her mind. The voice, stirring and rumbling, seemed to vocalize the fury and indignation that she herself could not. You will not hurt them. I shall not allow you to hurt them!
Breath accelerating, Spinneretta put one foot behind the other, sidling backward. As soon as she began to move, so too did Nemo. He stalked toward her at an oblique angle, seething in apparent ecstasy. “Oh, how I will savor this,” he breathed. “Eldest daughter of the King.”
She tasted the ledge behind her. Her foot then found the lip. A two hundred foot drop. She froze, muscles shaking with the Instinct, but now also with fear. The pounding of her heart pushed in against the edges of her vision. “You want me so bad? Then come get me.” One more step backward. Gravity sunk its talons into her, and she fell over the edge of the rampart.
Wind enveloped her, and mist painted her skin with icy patches of moisture. The dizzying drop echoed in her stomach. Her spider legs unfurled and ripped into the ancient face of the wall. Chitin ground stone and her molars ground each other. Her descent slowed, and then stopped. The feeling of nothing below her feet disoriented her. When her shoes found the crusty surface of the wall, she gasped at the sensation of hanging by a thread. A flicker of her traitorous eyes revealed the ruins of the city below, now separated only by the tenuous hold her legs had upon the wall. Timeless dust poisoned her spiracles. Adrenaline had entirely replaced her blood. Her spider legs shifted to a more natural posture, pressing against the rampart’s masonry hard enough to make her spine ache.
Fifty feet above, Nemo gazed over the edge at her in fury. He roared and released a downward strike into the wall. A merlon shattered, spilling dust and maroonstone shards down at her like grapeshot. Her spider legs tensed, her true nature taking over. With a pair of natural motions, she rappelled ten feet down and then laterally scuttled from the projectiles’ path. If she ignored the creaking along her lower segments, the movement felt as fluid as on horizontal land.
Through the falling dust and sand, Nemo’s visage glared down at her once more. “Impertinent whore child!”
Spin
neretta bent her spider legs and arched her back, showing him the most bestial snarl she could shiver out. “Heretic imposter!” The words flowed from her other thoughts. “Come! I will send you back to your precious Writhing Malefice!” She knew he wanted her bad enough to leave the others alone in pursuit of his prize, and that alone made the gamble worth it.
A shrill cry pierced the air, and the Helixweaver jumped over the edge after her. The air around him flashed and hissed with magic, and the free fall that should have taken him to his grave soon affixed him to the wall wherever he touched it. He slid down toward her, scraping loose chips of stone from the wall’s surface. His cry grew more fanatical, and he raised his two gruesome appendages above him.
Spinneretta leapt to the side, avoiding the monstrous attack. The whole wall shook from the impact, and the blow stripped a sheet of the surface away. She turned and scuttled backward away from him, her body now parallel to the wall’s run. The thrill of the fight now made her movement far more fluent; the unease in her gut and the weight of her hair cascading to one side were the only clues that gravity was trying to kill her.
Readjusting to the side of the wall, Nemo stretched a hand out toward her. It sparkled with a glimpse of magic, and the air was torn apart. Spinneretta braced for impact and threw two legs out in front of her. The psychic mist obeyed and swept across the wall in an arc. The spell broke against the strands of her counter. A grating crackle racked her legs, and the effects of the spell washed around her. Chunks of stone were ripped and gouged from the wall, but her immediate vicinity was left untouched. As soon as it was safe, she scuttled upward against gravity, circling him. “Is that the best the fucking Helixweaver can do?”
He sneered up at her. “I’d have never imagined the Wine ran through your blood.”
She ignored the remark and pounced. Nemo slid along the wall in a simian fashion, each limb acting like magic Velcro. She caught herself against the wall again, her joints wrenching under the force. Nemo shimmied closer, arm retracted, and launched another huge strike.
A hard hop against gravity, and the attack ruptured the stone below her. She pivoted and swiped at him with a pair of anterior legs out of reflex, but her attack only put a new rip in the King’s robe. Nemo teetered, off-balance, but remained affixed to the wall through his spell. Spinneretta curled her spider legs and her mind stretched. Her aura formed once more into the psychic mist—the Wine, as he’d called it—and she whipped her legs through the air. With a shout, she sent the field of anti-magic billowing down along the surface of the wall. She felt the erosion of the counterspell like pins sinking into her brain. The magic holding Nemo to the wall scattered at once, and he fell.
Nemo shouted. His newly birthed chitin appendages flailed, diving into the wall and sending chunks of stone flying as he scrambled for purchase. Fifty feet further down he at last came to a stop, his hands and grotesque leg-things half-buried in the surface of the wall.
It’s now or never! Spinneretta tensed and shot down at him, ready to bury her legs in his skull and end the nightmare. But just as she closed upon his perilously hanging form, the robe vanished out from under her. Momentum and gravity carried her downward toward the ground. Panic. She twisted and thrust her own legs into the wall to stop her descent. Stone ground against chitin, and the harsh vibrations turned immediately to a wrenching pain. Before she could deaden her velocity, her legs dragged eight scars another forty feet through the surface of the wall, and she felt the tips of three of her appendages crack.
When she finally came to a stop, she flipped herself around, searching for her opponent on the wall above her. Nothing. Panting, mind in a stark panic, Spinneretta noticed the shadow swimming toward her a moment too late. The dark coalesced, and a fist emerged from the solid wall beneath her. The blow merely glanced across her stomach, but it was enough. The strike threw her off the wall and into free fall.
Her mind went blank. The world was spinning, and the rush of air and mist on all sides drowned out all sound. Her heart and stomach melted into her throat, and a cold nausea spread throughout her body. She flailed her legs, desperate to find a solid surface to cling to, but there was none.
She fell for what felt like forever, and then she struck the earth. Her legs automatically flexed to absorb the impact, but it was like hitting concrete at the speed of sound. The wind evacuated her lungs, and pain rang through her bones and chitin, blurring her vision until a dull gray emptiness surrounded her.
The killing lust of the Instinct bled away as her lungs choked and the ache in her bones grew more intense. The fine sand between her fingers told her she was lucky to be alive; the broken hovels and tall structures that grew from that sand only a dozen feet away would have killed her had she landed on them. But that was little consolation. She couldn’t breathe; every time she tried, a wrenching pain in the core of her chest caused her to reject the air with a series of sputtering coughs.
As her senses gradually melded back into her, she tried to drag herself toward the nearest shelter. But her limbs failed after only a few feet. A small cloud of dust rose as her neck went limp and her cheek fell flat against the sand. The scent of alien dirt sank into her spiracles. She was only now aware of the nerve pain that stabbed at the broken tips of her legs and the hollows of her bones.
Unable to move any further, Spinneretta just lay there. Each breath hurt her ribs and lungs, and so she stopped breathing, letting her spiracles passively soak in the dirty air. The dark that encroached upon the edges of her consciousness invited her eyes to slip shut and embrace sleep. But she couldn’t. Not while she still had work to do. I can’t give up now. I have to kill him. I have to save Mark and Arthr. And the Vant’therax. So we can all go back together. In the end, we can all win. Things can go back to normal.
Stand up.
I will. I’m going to. I just need a moment.
Can you?
I can. I think.
If you can stand, then stand. You will die if you don’t.
Her bones throbbed as she made a motion to get up. But everything hurt, and she was too tired. Despite her best efforts, all she could manage was to roll onto her back. The mists drifted over the sands and caressed her cheeks. Her eyes slipped shut.
Hey, tell me something, she thought at the voice.
What?
What are you, anyway? I mean, I thought I had it all figured out back there. That you were the King. But the King’s dead.
Do you not yet understand?
If I did, I wouldn’t ask, would I? How about throwing me a bone instead of acting all indignant?
I know only what you know and can reveal nothing more. Now stand up.
No. I can’t. I think I’m finished.
Stand up.
Something struck her in the center of her chest, and the air burst from her lungs once more. Her eyes shot open. The yellow robe towering above her was little more than a silhouette, but she could still read the bladed smile in its depths. She groped and swatted at the foot planted in her solar plexus, but she hadn’t the strength to fight it.
Even death had a silver lining. Mark was alive. Arthr was alive. They could still escape and buy a future for Kara. If they did, then the Helixweaver would be trapped in this dead realm, forever. She’d already made her own peace with death; when she’d left Lake Cormorant, it had been under the assumption she would die at her journey’s end. She just hadn’t expected it to be so pointless a death.
“Have you any last words?”
With the foot crushing the air from her chest, she coughed four syllables that died before they reached her throat.
Nemo released some of the pressure upon her. “Hmm? I cannot hear you.”
“I said, go fuck yourself.”
“How very crass of you. Time to die.”
She did not protest his judgment. She’d done everything she could. At least she’d die without begging for mercy, giving the metaphorical finger to her murderer. The foot on her chest pressed down harder, and t
he air between them exploded into verdant flames.
Chapter 44
The Pit
Annika and the others ran on. The darkness let up just ahead, and the tunnel opened into a wide, natural chamber paved with gravel and scattered boulders. As they all stopped to catch their breath, Annika nodded toward Chelsea with Amanda heavy against her shoulder. “Here, take her for a minute.” The girl reacted to the command, and Annika slipped out from under Amanda. She sidled along the rear wall, assessing their surroundings. The chamber was vertical, stretching an untold distance upward, where torchlight illuminated a mere fragment of the void. The opposite wall was artificially smooth, covered in small pits that suggested nails or stakes had at one point dotted its surface.
Behind her, Chelsea gasped for breath. “This is where we came in,” she said between pants. She raised a finger at the pitted wall. “There should be a rope we can climb up with.”
Annika scanned the wall again, but the dim lighting made it hard to make out any further detail. “Well, we definitely came in a different way, then. I don’t remember any ropes.”
Chelsea shuffled forward, stumbling a little under Amanda’s weight. “Yeah, this is—this is it, right, Mandy? There’s . . . It’s gotta be . . . ”
Amanda groaned a wet sound. She tried to stand up off her friend, but Kara was at her side and easing her back down in a heartbeat.
A knot began to form in Annika’s abdomen as she stared at the cliff face. “I hope you’re mistaken. Because there’s no rope here.”
Chelsea slumped toward the wall. “No, no, it has to be here. It’s just—it’s always here, isn’t it? This is how they get in and out because it’s faster than going the . . . ” When she reached the center of the room, she stopped. Her shoulders drooped, and the girl’s obvious distress made Annika’s hair stand on end. “It’s . . . not here?”
Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3) Page 59