Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3)

by Bartholomew Lander

  Each motion threatened to cramp her neck, but after a few strained moments the blade sliced through the rope. The severed section fell limp to the cavern floor, just as a robed thrall began to try to climb it. She panted over the knife handle. Relief crept up her neck. Fingers clenched tight around the end of the rope’s new terminus, she coiled a further length about her hand and pulled like she never had before. Muscles surged beyond the breaking point, but a few steps up the wall later she was back on track. The air tasted damp and hot, but it tasted like victory. The rope was moving faster now. The cries of heave grew louder. Chelsea must have been helping now.

  With a final lunge, Annika at last reached the ledge. When Chelsea offered her a hand, she ignored it. The girl couldn’t have handled that much weight. She just clawed at the edge and dragged them both up. Amanda cringed as they rolled onto their left sides, and Annika’s arms were met with impossible relief disguised as sublime pain. A cough burst out of her mouth, and she let her knife clatter to the stone. Fuck yeah, it’s horizontal! Though her muscles screamed and shook, she couldn’t help but laugh. It was ecstasy. Her fingers and palms were covered in rope splinters, but she didn’t care. They’d made it.

  Chelsea was immediately at Amanda’s side, helping her back to something resembling standing. Kara’s spider legs took Annika by the shoulders and lifted her into a sitting position. “Annie, are you alright?”

  Annika noticed one of the spider-girl’s legs hanging limp at her shoulder. She tried to ignore the blood running down the side of her shirt. Kara was strong, and they needed to move. Annika took a few shallow breaths and gave a ferocious nod. Her eyes found the torch-lit passage leading into an upward incline. “Come on,” she said, struggling to her feet. “That didn’t buy us much time.”

  Man has come. Surely guided by that undead smoke-spirit, he has encroached upon my sacred city and pillaged the artifacts once used to create my servants. I wish to warn them of the danger that comes with such power, but I cannot. I have no will left. And were I to attempt to communicate, I fear that the smokebeast would prevent me from getting my message across.

  I now understand why the daemon took my hand from me. It is for the same reason that I took blood from the original quolls, skin from my own flesh. It is to fuel its own ambitions, to draw out the imperfections from my blood and use them to its own ends. But as it cannot act on its own, it instead relies upon the ignorance of man to go forth and carry out its plot. What machinations have I become accomplice to?

  And as I turn the thoughts over in my brain, staring down at the trespasser from the great loggias in my keep, I feel nothing but hollowness. Without purpose, I am no more than a fixture of the kingdom I created.

  Chapter 45

  Ember of the End

  The tunnels grew steadily steeper as Annika and the others rushed ever upward. The torches in the cubbies along the walls began to degrade in quality, the ornate borders and striated designs fading into rapidly cut orifices that put function before form. They were the same ones Annika had seen when they first arrived. They were getting close.

  After a few more minutes, they came upon a large cavern with a low ceiling. It must have been a hundred feet in diameter, circular, and punctured by a set of hewn pillars clustered around the center of the cave. Braziers smoldered along the walls, and dozens of tunnels opened between them, plunging again into darkness.

  Annika paused at once. She recognized this room. They had passed through it on their way down, and then must have taken a different route than Amanda and the others.

  Chelsea groaned. “Oh, God. Which way was it?” She put a hand on Amanda’s shoulder and gently rocked her. “Mandy, do you remember which way?”

  “I remember,” Annika said, thankful for her photographic memory. She raised a finger toward the far wall, where the ground fell away into a gravelly slope that sloughed ten feet down to a tunnel wider than the rest. “That’s the one we came in from.”

  Chelsea blinked in the direction she pointed. “Ahh, you’re right. That does look familiar.”

  Kara abruptly gasped. “Ahh, oh my God, how long has it been? I need to open the portal!” She dropped onto all eight and began to carve into the rock floor with her seven intact legs, cringing as her plating dragged shallow marks through the stone.

  Annika held her breath. The sound of the approaching Websworn was again grinding and pounding in the distance, only from a different direction than before. “Kara, whatever you have to do, hurry.”

  Kara bit her lip and just kept carving, eyelids twitching as her chitin flexed and bent. A light blossomed from within the design and birthed a swirling mist that grew and seethed about the center.

  Mark’s head was swimming. Everything was a drowsy blur, a Vaseline screen over the pain ringing through every bone and muscle. Gravity pulled his consciousness down and away from the light, away from the sound of the wind and the damp chill on his skin.

  His thoughts came and went for a great while. If he slept or died in the interim, he’d have known it only for the gaps in the feeble thoughts banging at his mind. But soon, even those thoughts found rest in the comfort of the dark behind his eyelids. Quiet came. Worries melted to inconsequentia. The pain that stabbed at his brain with each heartbeat became duller and duller until all that remained was a tickle spreading along his forehead and down his neck.

  So, this is it, huh?

  His thoughts echoed against the walls of the endless abyss, returning to him in waves.

  Never thought I’d die from such a mundane attack.

  “Mark, stop!”

  Ugh. I know that voice, don’t I?

  “You’re going to do something stupid, aren’t you?”

  A wintry chill crystallized in the void. Ellie?

  “Mark? Where are you?”

  A bloodcurdling shriek split the darkness, and all the pain unconsciousness had robbed him of returned. His eyes shot open and silence fell again. The penumbral shapes of the shifting trees swayed all around, stirred by the fires blazing in the distance. Tall grass scratched at his pant legs, dancing to the dirge of the dying breeze. Y’rokkrem’s disk, magnified by the bloodletting on that fate-damned red moon’s night, loomed overhead. He was back in Arbordale. In the middle of the Warren compound glade, he beheld a figure hunched over, and heard a thunk-thunking that beat back the far-off crackling of the burning town.

  Something beckoned him forward, and so Mark approached the shape. Amid the musty stench of damp soil, Mark beheld himself patting down the last of four mounds of dirt with a shovel. His breath caught in his chest. Ellie.

  The shovel fell to the ground. The dreamform Mark dropped to his knees and let out a warbling breath that hid the sobs rattling his lungs. “I’m so sorry, Ellie,” the other him spoke. “Please, please forgive me. I had no idea that I . . . ”

  The young boy’s sobs flowed, and Mark felt daggers plunging into his soul. And yet some deep-seated masochism would not allow him to turn away. He glided another step toward himself.

  “I was so stupid. It’s all my fault. I promised you. That I’d keep you safe.”

  His jaw tightened. He remembered it well, for it was the only promise he’d ever broken.

  “And now what?” The boy shook, straining to keep the tears inside. “This happened. Because I was proud. I thought myself invincible. But now I understand it was mere hubris. Ellie, forgive me. If I can’t keep your promise,” he said, the familiar words engraved in Mark’s heart, “then I’ll make you another. Right here, right now, I swear to you: I will never again use the true power of the Chosen. The power that made me so damned arrogant. Never again. I swear that to you, though I know it changes little. But the power is poison. It brings only destruction and death. So, I bind this promise. Whatever good comes of it now, it’s for you. Never again will I use its power. Ever. I swear to you, Ellie.”

  The sobbing boy stood and dried his eyes on the back of his wrist. “I have to go now. I have to go find Lily. I’ll save so
meone. I promise that, too. Don’t worry about her, okay? She’ll be safe. I’ll see to it.”

  Despair surrounded him. The memory was almost too painful to bear. The pain he’d caused. The death he’d wrought. Was there no escape from it? It didn’t matter how much time passed. It didn’t matter how he tried to atone. It didn’t even matter if he found Lily. Because in the end, he was bound to that singular oath that sat lodged in his heart. As long as he lived, as long as he kept that promise, he would relive the last moments he spent with her on that night. He would shed those tears again and again, transfixed upon his own unforgivable past.

  But as Mark stood there, another voice echoed through his mind.

  Promise me.

  It was somebody else this time.

  Promise me that you’ll save that stupid girl.

  Annika. Mark’s stomach moved and shook with the inevitability that thought carried.

  Promise me.

  Very well. I promise.

  The sound of his own response nearly broke the dam holding back his tears. Spinny. Was she not worth it? Was her life not worth another nail in his own coffin? A brick in the wall that sealed the tomb of his filthy soul?

  If you really cared about saving Spinneretta, then you wouldn’t hold back.

  He cringed. Annika’s voice grew louder, thundering through his head like a volcanic eruption.

  If you don’t let go of what happened in Arbordale, then nothing’ll ever change!

  Those words echoed to the trees far in the distance. Even the wind fell silent.

  No more holding back. No matter how high the cost, promise me that you’ll save that stupid girl, by any means necessary. Promise me you’ll end it this time.

  Mark’s whole body shook. The moon and the trees and the glimmer of the blazing fires began to recede beyond the curtain of darkness. He felt himself falling back toward awareness, out of the dream and into reality. The blackness flashed to white, and pain again enveloped his body.

  “Mark!” Arthr shouted in his ear. “Mark, can you hear me? Get up!”

  Mark groaned and batted at the hand shaking his shoulder. The light burned his eyes as he squinted to get a grasp on his surroundings. The top of the rampart again.

  Arthr gasped in relief. “Oh God, you’re alive. You’ve gotta do something, Spinneretta’s—”

  “I know.” The drifting mist stroked his cheek, and his mind returned at once to the voice in the dream. Certainty filled him. His dilemma was only momentary. “Sorry Ellie,” he whispered, straining to push himself up to his knees. “But I think I have to break my promise to keep a more important one.” He glared over the edge of the great wall, down upon the expansive ruins of the fortress city, down upon the yellow shape of his enemy. The azure Flames again engulfed his trembling fist. Ghostlight scattered in all directions, and spacetime tore beneath his resolve.

  As the twisted foot of the Helixweaver ground the air from Spinneretta’s lungs, the vibrant ghostlight between them grew, blossoming into a human shape. A twinge of fear raced from the crushing weight to her extremities. No, get out of here, she thought, hoping desperately her thoughts would reach him. Don’t throw your life away for me. A blinding flash erupted overhead, scattering wisps of fire in shimmering daggers all around. The weight vanished from the gap in her ribs. Mark stood over her, his shaking left hand projecting an immaterial barrier that held back Nemo’s quivering fist. The two strained on either side of the spell, neither willing to be the first to crack.

  Nemo clucked a vile song. “So determined are you to save her? Relish your despair, Warren. Drink it in. You have one foot in the grave, and you think you can stop—”

  “Silence!” Mark thrust both his arms forward. The spellwall folded into itself. The singularity burst, loosing a shockwave that threw Nemo from his feet and slammed him against the ground some twenty feet away near the base of the rampart. Mark’s posture slumped, his arms hanging like two inert pendulums.

  Spinneretta pushed herself back along the ground, unable to take her gaze off him. Something was different. Each labored breath shook his entire body with something other than pain, something palpably eldritch. Even though he faced away from her, she could see the hint of fiery beacons blazing where his eyes should have been. She swallowed hard. Was it an illusion? No, it couldn’t have been.

  “I swear I shall make you pay,” Mark said between hoarse breaths, “for forcing me to break my promise.”

  As Nemo recovered from his daze, he twisted himself into a low crouch. The folds of the great yellow robe spread in all directions along the sands. His deformed spider legs unfurled, poised like scorpion tails. His one eye bulged, and an enraged snarl opened his lips around his jungle of teeth. “Can you not understand how hopeless it is to fight? Your era has passed, Warren. I am the dawn, the herald of the next age of the spider. You cannot stop me, even with all your self-destructive magic.”

  Spinneretta shuddered. She found her way to her feet despite the pain ringing through every bone in her body. When she stood, she instinctively slipped back a few steps, her eyes on Mark’s back. She could hear his lungs soaking and expelling shallow breaths. A blue-green flash arced down his arms, and then it was gone. He released an airy growl and stomped forward, widening his shoulders and legs. His stance was hunched, the muscles in his spread arms tight and quivering. A chill shot through Spinneretta’s spider legs as he began to speak again.

  “Chosen. You think yourself Chosen? Enlightened? I have seen things that would melt your eye in its socket and freeze the blood in your veins. Do you know who I am? I am the prodigy of the Lunar Vigil. I am the last Golgotha. I am the Chosen of Y’rokkrem, the heir to Manilius. I am the incarnation of the cult’s sins—and I shall not allow those sins to hold me back any longer.” His eyes began to glow brighter. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The Flames of Y’rokkrem blossomed in his hands and spread up his forearms. As the Flames enveloped him with their azure depth, he folded his arms back into himself. Iridescent flashes drew the rest of his shape inward until what remained was a kaleidoscopic plasma chrysalis. Lightning and colorless energy fulminated off of him. A terrible weight formed in Spinneretta’s gut.

  Nemo’s eye bulged further as he stared into the brilliant reaction. “What is this?”

  A great wave of hot air billowed off the thing, blasting Spinneretta’s hair back. A lance of green electricity split the cocoon open, and the Flames dispersed around what emerged. But what emerged was no earthly being. The creature appeared to be made of flowing bands of prismatic light. Tendrils of crackling otherworldly power flowing, breaking apart, reforming. Arms and legs, longer than any human’s. The suggestion of claws where fingers should have been. It was translucent, but the image behind it was distorted, as though it bent the light passing through its core. A convecting sheet of shadow billowed behind the creature, like a nightmarish imagining of a cloak or wings. Its whole body was in a constant state of splitting and merging in an endless cycle. The only recognizable feature of Mark’s—if indeed this creature still was Mark—was the pair of luminous beacons shining in the thing’s face. It was as though his human shape had been warped into something both beautiful and horrid. It was alien, magnificent, ghastly, glorious.

  Nemo, only halfway up from where he’d been thrown, stared at the emerged creature with terror chiseled into his face. “What . . . ”

  “Behold,” Mark said, his voice booming from all around. It was no human vocalization; it was a sound like thunder, or of a thousand rushing waters. “I am the destroyer of legacies, the eraser of history, the scythe that paints the earth with the cursed blood of death itself. If you, Helixweaver, are the dawn, then I am the void that swallows its light and bathes the world in darkness—forever. As sure as the moon rises, so rise I. I am Mark Hosea-Silas Warren. I am the end.”

  Spinneretta couldn’t control her shaking. The creature before her, the sidereal thing Mark had metamorphosed into, was familiar. It was no vague sense of fa
miliarity as it so often was; it was no intangible déjà vu or dreamborn phantasm. This recognition screamed at her like a gigantic bell ringing from the halls of the dead.

  The voice in Spinneretta’s head stirred. Its thoughts painted a vivid portrait of a creature blurring through the sky of Zigmhen, painting the black with streaks of scouring light. Through the lost kingdom. Through the Web. Thunderous crashes and bursts of green and gold flames over Th’ai-ma. Hatred. The Wine, pouring out in a desperate bid to destroy the invader. The hollow victory. The pain of power severed and crippled—and so the Web, too, came to be sealed, cursed by the spell of that treacherous creature, the god of fire to Repton and Fatewoven to the Avan’razi.

  That voice growled, articulating unpronounceable words of rage. Spinneretta hated it. She hated the thing before her, but that thing was Mark, and she loved Mark. But the sight of him now moved her heart toward a precipitous fall toward the Origin. Shivering, a thick, molasses-like loathing hardened in her stomach. All she could do was stare at the lithe resplendence before her. “Mark,” she choked. “What the hell are you?”

  “I am—”

  “My key!”

  All at once, everything changed. The light that shone across the ruined battlements of Th’ai-ma faded. When the shadows began writhing in the periphery, Spinneretta was certain the Vant’therax had come. Yet it was not their shadowmagick, but a shimmer of smoke materializing in the air. Something shot across the ground, and in the blink of an eye had pierced through Mark’s form. His convecting unflame body twisted, and his limbs and ethereal extensions began to shake and seize. An agonized shout echoed through Spinneretta’s mind. There he floated, suspended, unmoving, as though trapped in a single instant of time. But far more disturbing than that was the presence that now stood before her.