The night was short and Spinneretta slept fitfully, never more than a hair’s breadth from waking. The shallow rest was infested with violent images and a cold, sludge-like sense of impending doom. When the thin veil of sleep at last ruptured, she found the hills shrouded once more in a twilit haze. Whatever passed for a sun in the Web was either setting or rising, and whichever it was made no difference.
She sat up from her Mark-pillow, now aware of the aches ravaging the muscles in her legs and back. Whatever rest she’d gained hadn’t healed the soles of her feet, which were raw from hours of walking. Damn heels. Hope whoever invented you is in hell. With a sigh, she kicked off the offending footwear and flopped backward. Her four lowest appendages sprang into a loaded posture, absorbing her momentum and cradling her in a reclined sprawl.
And there she sat for a long while.
The great mountains were very near now. Though their peaks were still shrouded in the impenetrable cloud barriers, she could make out convex faces and bulging veins that had been spared the touch of erosion. Like everything else, they were lifeless and barren. A great fissure, like a bolt of black lightning crawling through the sky, split the range. Peering at the shape, she found it widened where it met the ground, only three rolling hills on from where they were. The deep gradient within the crevice made it look big enough to pass through. But where could it lead? More hills? More fungus bushes?
The thought deepened her sense of helplessness. Where were they going? What were they looking for? As hard as it was, she was gradually coming to believe she would never see her family or friends again. If the only way home was the sigil, and all it would now yield was a shock to her brain . . .
Suddenly far colder than the mist alone could account for, she stared up into the sky. Dark gray. No texture at all. Just a flat uniformity that dulled the senses and replaced them with sparks of hallucination, half-dreams, and delusions of prophecy.
But there was something else.
She broke her fixation upon the sky, yet still it remained. Something was there, high above, beyond the clouds. Something intangible. And now that she’d noticed it she was unable to push it away. It was like a distant echo of the sigil’s retaliation, but also like the strange psychic throbbing that had haunted her in the old corridors below San Solano. That sensation was concentrated, as though to a single point, but so faint as to be hardly noticeable. It felt impossibly distant, and yet she was certain she felt it, scraping, scratching.
God, I’m just tired. That’s all. Her eyes drifted shut, and provided another moment of escape. No comfort awaited her behind her eyelids. Only a growing certainty that they would never return home.
But a rustling brought her wide awake. She threw her gaze behind her, to the crest of the hill. A sleek shape, moving ponderously on four stubby limbs, skin gleaming in the dull of twilight. The thing was six feet long and ended in a tapering, eyeless bulb that flowered into a set of five articulated flesh-petals, each covered in hooked teeth. It looked like a horrible amalgamation of dolphin and mole and onion. Evolution favored the grotesque, and if this thing wasn’t a carnivore then it had adapted to scare its way to the top of its food chain.
But Spinneretta didn’t care. The land-dolphin was covered in meat, and the snarling in her stomach returned in full force. Her skin began to burn with a rush of that strange adrenaline, and her concealed fangs extended until they scraped against her tongue. Her venom glands shuddered, expelling just a drop of sour neurotoxin onto her taste buds. Her chitin tingled; her appendages writhed and took her to her feet. Nervous system in overdrive, she hurtled toward the creature. When it noticed her presence, the thing faced her and flourished its petalled mouth with a low and avian rumble. Driven by hunger, carried by instinct, Spinneretta pounced.
Chapter 4
Escalation
Mark dreamed of Simon Dwyre. Not a dream, but a memory. A vision of the past seen through the man’s eyes again, just as he’d seen when he ripped the thoughts from his brain.
He stood in a dim alcove in an abandoned building. Thin rays of light seeped between the boards on the windows. A pair of candles flickered on a nearby table. Above him—for his height had become diminutive and childlike—stood an old man with gray hair and an unkempt beard. The man, trembling, supported himself upon a gnarled cane. The air smelled alien, and the tendrils of mist that the candlelight revealed proved the source.
“Can I go, too?” Mark heard himself—the child Dwyre—asking. “To the Web?” He was leaden by guilt; he knew it was not the question to ask at such a hallowed moment.
Eyes closed, the man shook his head. “The covenant is already fulfilled.”
“But why? Why can’t I go, too?” His voice cracked, as though he were about to break into tears.
The old man sighed and began to stroke his beard. “Nobody knows what the future holds, least of all a geezer with one foot in the grave.” He cracked his lids open, letting the young boy see the yellow stains painted across his diseased eyes. “If it is Nayor’s will, then you will return. But we must now look ahead to the future, Simon. With these,” he said, gesturing behind him, “we can do the will of the King. We can at last follow in the footsteps of the Avan’razi. Do the work of Raxxinoth.” A hungry fervor came upon the man’s face. “We can become as gods, creating in His image. A new age of the Websworn begins tonight.”
Mark began to nod, feeling a deep disappointment wash through Simon’s body. Behind Griffith—somehow he knew that to be the man’s name—the shadows of their clandestine meeting place writhed with something just out of sight. Bestial things, clattering and clacking. They were huge, bigger than the table that sat along the wall, but he could make out no details of their forms. Instead, he looked up pleadingly at the forerunner and pointed at the leather parcel he carried under his arm. “Can I see it?”
With a soft chuckle, Griffith took the wrapped object from beneath his arm. Steadying himself on his cane, he pulled on the leather strap until the parcel opened. Inside was an ancient, shriveled hand. The hand’s dark color and texture reminded the boy of the mummies he had seen in his picture books. Black, crystalline growths erupted all over the skin, invading each of the digits in turn. From the wrist’s stump flowed a trickle of blood that had already stained a large portion of the hide wrapping.
He looked upon the artifact with reverence. It was verification; it was proof that Zigmhen not only existed, but was reachable. Though the covenant was already fulfilled, even he could still reach it. If he followed the path laid out before him, he would be rewarded. That’s what the twisted fingers of that hand said. The ridges of black matter that pierced the skin near the wrist reminded him of the illustrations in his favorite book, the one which spoke with such zeal of the World on the Web. He nodded, mesmerized, as the staccato clacking behind Griffith grew more frantic, frenzied.
“Soon, this will be yours to look after. To nourish into the promise. Now go, my boy. Gather the faithful. We have work to do.”
“Breakfast is served.”
Mark started awake from the bizarre dream-memory. At the sound of the spider-girl’s voice, he cracked his eyes open to a gray-tainted nothing. Vision still swimming with dregs of magic-induced pain, he pushed himself into a sitting position and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. His nerves were confused from being so deeply ingrained in another’s sensory universe and then being slammed back into reality. It was one reason why he hated thought-raiding; whatever information he gleaned was always accompanied by these bizarre afterimages of the psychic connection.
When the brightly colored swatches behind his eyelids disappeared, Mark found Spinneretta standing over him. Behind her on the ground was a large, rubbery white mass. He stared at it, sleep’s stupor dulling his mind. And then he jumped, pushing himself back away from the thing, sending cobbles clattering around him. “What the hell is that?”
“Are you deaf? I said it’s breakfast.” She wiped a ribbon of purple blood from her mouth with her
wrist. “And how did that shriek not wake you?”
“Shriek?” Looking closer, he found that the creature had two puncture marks in its serpentine flank. “But what is . . . . ”
“Who cares what it is? It’s got meat on its bones, and that’s all I care about. Now let’s eat.”
He shook his head, half-convinced he was still dreaming. “Wait a moment. You killed this thing? How?”
“I bit it. Venom did the rest. It would’ve gotten away if not for that.”
“You’re telling me you killed this thing with just a bite?”
She gave an impatient sigh. “I broke its neck once it was paralyzed. Not much point in letting it suffer.”
Though it had obvious limbs and form, the way it lay crumpled at Spinneretta’s ankles made it look more like a blob than a terrestrial creature. “If you bit it, is it even safe to eat?”
“That depends; were you going to eat it, or inject its blood directly into your veins? I’m venomous, not poisonous. Now do you have any more questions, or can we dig in?”
Mark nodded, studying the carcass. “What did you have in mind?”
“Cooking it. Not taking any chances with alien meat. Would you be a dear and lend me your special flames?”
They broke apart one of the stalk-bushes and built a pile of fungal timber. The material caught the Flames and roared into a sickly blue chemical fire. And soon, they were roasting strips of blubbery flesh.
Spinneretta dug in with a ravenous hunger propelled by the Instinctual remnants from her hunt. Using a pocket knife Mark lent her, she cut off strip after strip of meat and roasted each just long enough to make her feel safe. The way the meat snapped and popped reminded her of barbecuing in the back yard. The floral texture of the flesh, though disconcerting, wasn’t enough to ward off her hunger. If the animal’s flesh was poisonous, at least she’d die full. It charred easily and tasted like rancid cooking grease, but Spinneretta didn’t care. There was a subtle earthiness to the flavor that wasn’t so bad, just so long as she didn’t use her tongue to taste it.
“So,” Mark said around a mouthful of well-done flesh, “what is the plan from here?”
She swallowed the half-cooked fat sitting on her tongue and pointed over their modest campfire with a leg. “See that fissure in the mountain?”
His gaze followed her outstretched appendage. “Yes.”
“It almost looks like it leads somewhere. That crack right there. It might be worth checking out.”
He peered into the distance, though the campfire obscured the finer details of the mountains. “Are you expecting to find something there?”
“Expecting? No, hoping.” She shoved another strip of land-dolphin fillet into her mouth. “Maybe the rock in there is more receptive to portal formation. And if not, then perhaps you could test me for magic. Test me, teach me. If I actually knew what I was doing, I’m sure I’d have a better chance of opening that portal and getting us home.”
“Perhaps.” He gazed back into the fire, and his eyes flashed like burnished garnets. “Though I’m quite bothered.”
Cheeks stuffed full of meat, she could only answer with a questioning grunt.
“I cannot explain the power I felt in that last sigil,” he said. “It has been bothering me since. Why should a flavor so like the Flames exist here in this place? It almost felt . . . In any case, I cannot begin to imagine the meaning of it. But I likewise cannot believe that it is a coincidence you can no longer open the same portal that brought us here.”
“You’re saying that the Flames are, like, interfering or something?”
He took the knife from where it sat upon a flat rock and cut a chunk of meat from the side of the carcass. Instead of holding it to roast over the fire, he held it delicately between his fingers as though inspecting a precious gem. “Not the Flames, merely something like them. A vast pattern, or a tapestry, alike in its age and intangible aspect. As sure as the moon rises, they are connected. Though that is all I can say.”
It didn’t seem a significant development, and yet it still plunged her mood deeper toward some inescapable event horizon. What it meant she could not say, and why it mattered she would never understand. But that some magic as ancient and baffling as the Flames of Y’rokkrem was working against them was so far the most disheartening thing of all. All at once, she lost the will to eat. Her fingers and spider legs, slick with grease, fell limp. “So . . . that’s it then?”
Mark stared into the fire. Then his fist clenched, sending a stream of glistening juice down his wrist. “Fill your stomach, quickly. Those mountains aren’t going to explore themselves.”
The change in tone caught her off guard. “Huh?”
His pupils grew intense. The crackling fire illuminated a growing smile on his lips. “I’m becoming quite eager to prove my suspicions wrong.”
The sound of thunder woke Arthr from a tentative sleep. His dream scattered like a swarm of roaches, and he found his fingernails digging into the tangled mess of brown fabric the motel was dishonest enough to call a carpet. He was shaking, his breath uneven; the nightmare had been an echo of the previous night’s unbelievable events. The room seemed to spin around him. The sound of rain falling against the frosted window sounded like bones crunching between the robed monster’s impossibly strong fingers.
Heart pounding, he forced himself to sit up and reassess his surroundings, if only to verify he was safe within their motel room. A part of him had hoped in vain that his waking would find the entire night’s commotion undone. But there was no escaping the fact that everything had changed, perhaps forever.
“Something wrong?” came a voice from above him, making him jump. The fright dissipated when he looked up and saw Kara leaning over the corner of the bed, blond hair dangling like a waterfall frozen in time.
“What are you doing awake at this hour?” he asked, attempting to mask the fear that choked his lungs.
“I was watching you sleep.”
“Kara, that’s really weird.”
“But I have too much energy to sleep and I’m bored! I can’t do anything fun without waking you and Annie up.”
Arthr flopped back against the carpet, almost hitting his head as he did. “Then watch her sleep.”
“She already told me to knock it off.”
He groaned and laid his cheek against the filthy shag. His spider legs twitched and curled around him, their tips scraping against one another in a nervous dance. “Kara?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
She cocked her head to the side. “For what?”
“For doing a miserable job of protecting you. I’m your big brother, it’s my job to look out for you.” His spider legs drew tighter about his chest, and it became even harder to breathe. “I couldn’t do anything. I was too afraid to help, and when I finally got up the courage to do something it was too little, too late.” He looked down at the carpet and pressed his hand against it, feeling the texture between his fingers. It was too real. “If it wasn’t for Annika . . . ”
Kara yawned. “Whatever, it’s fine. All’s well that is well.”
“Ends well. And no, it’s not. I’m going to make it up to you. I promise I’m never going to let anything bad happen to you again.”
“Fine,” she said in a disinterested tone. It felt like she was just humoring him, ignoring the sincerity of his pledge.
Another question rose from the bubbling turmoil in his stomach. “How can none of this bother you?” he asked after a moment of silence.
She gave him a puzzled look. “None of what?”
He sat up again. “Are you kidding me? A bunch of armed men storm the house to kidnap you, and then when some woman in a trench coat comes out of nowhere to save our hides a damned monster comes to finish the job—I mean, stop me if you’ve figured out what’s wrong with this picture!”
“I don’t know, what?”
He sputtered. “Everything! There’s nothing normal about anything that’s hap
pening, and now Spins is missing along with Mark and we’re supposed to just wait until they get back. Not to mention Mom and Dad disappearing off to Seattle or wherever they’re going.”
“Why would anything be normal?” she asked. “When has anything ever been normal?”
A chill crept from his fingernails to his shoulders. Arthr gazed at her, trying to find her expression in the darkness. Her calm and serious tone was startling, somehow un-Kara. It was an answer far too profound to have been spoken by her. She gave a quiet sigh and rolled back onto the bed. She didn’t say anything to acknowledge Arthr’s failure to contradict her. The silence did more to prove her point than any words could have. Contemplating the strange lives the Warren brood had faced up to then, he laid his cheek back against the carpet and closed his eyes.
“Wake up, sunshine!” came a woman’s voice.
Arthr started awake once more. The light of morning revealed a pair of chocolate eyes hovering less than a foot from his face. He jumped, nearly hitting his head on the iron frame of the bed just to his left.
Annika chuckled. “Jesus, you’re jumpy. It’s just me, so relax, will ya?”
“Y-yeah, sorry.” Heart pounding, he looked around to again verify his surroundings. It felt like it had been night only a few moments ago.
The woman stood upright and put her hands on her hips. She wore the same blue blouse from last night, and her arm was still wrapped snug in a layer of Kara’s web. “What do you kids want for breakfast?”
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 4