After a few hours, a deep twilight had fallen over the plain, and just when it seemed they would need to head back for the day, a glimmer boiled above the mountains. At first it was a mere halo, a glow distorted by atmospheric scattering, and then it became a luminous, blinding disk. Spinneretta briefly stared into its depths, retinal damage be damned, and her mind stumbled to come up with an explanation. It was another star, seemingly larger than the first. But how could that have been possible? She’d heard of binary star systems, but any planets orbiting such a system should have orbited the center of their mass, right? Or at the very least, she thought, gravity should have pulled these two stars far closer together than their current hundred-and-twenty-degree spread. And though she stared after the rising disk for a while, Mark continued on without paying it any mind. Was she overreacting? Get over it, Spins, she thought. Weird astronomy is the least of your worries now. If nothing else, it explained the strange cycle of lighting she’d noticed before.
Before the first star vanished completely over the horizon, there came a booming screech from across the great plains. They turned toward the source of the sound. It had come from the monstrous gullet of one of the land-whales. The howling creature was hurling itself across the ground as fast as its prodigious mass would allow. The ground quaked with each stomp, and Spinneretta squinted across the deepening cobalt-tinted land at the creature. At first, she saw nothing that could explain its violent haste.
But then, she caught a glimpse of something dark embedded in its side. A moment later, that dark shape leapt off the creature, leaving a small trail of blood behind. When the shape reached the ground, she saw it was not alone. A number of small, black blotches skittered after the land-whale. And when one of the shapes moved out from beneath the eclipsing shadow of the white behemoth, the second star revealed the sharp contours of its body. A chill ran up her spine. Though she glimpsed the thing for only a moment before the shadow again enshrouded it, there was no doubt that the dark shape was riding on a set of eight familiar legs. Dark, chitin legs, splayed across the ground around a body rendered featureless by the distance.
“They’re spiders,” she said with ghastly realization, her own plated legs tingling.
Mark gazed at the scene unfolding, seemingly unimpressed. “Queer-looking spiders.”
She shook her head, starting to feel sick. “They’re . . . Everything else here is different. But those things are . . . ” She couldn’t see close enough to say for certain, but the way those creatures moved, skittering with alternate legs moving in tandem, was all too earthly. Identical chitin legs, identical locomotion. If this was the Web, the ancient realm of the Overspider, then was this also the ancestral realm of all spiders? Herself included? She swallowed hard. “What does this mean?” she asked, wrapping her legs about her trunk as her unease deepened.
Mark shrugged. “It could be a coincidence. Could be that they share an evolutionary ancestor with the spiders of Earth.”
Spinneretta crossed her arms. Then she dared to speak the words eating away at her peace of mind. “You think they’re children of Raxxinoth as well?”
To her surprise, he didn’t immediately dismiss the idea. He mimicked her stance by crossing his own arms and looked off toward the pack of insectoid things. “That’s a definite possibility.”
Without anything else to say, the two watched the group of spider-things in the distance retreat from the shrieking whale-beast, whose lumbering steps still rattled the ivy-covered ground. When the things had fallen back a distance, Spinneretta chuckled under her breath. “Eyes bigger than their stomachs, I guess.” There was no humor in anything. Just a surreal familiarity and a want of home.
“Those things appear quite large,” Mark said. “Predators, if that white beast’s reaction is to be gauged. Now that we know there are predators about, we must be careful. We wouldn’t want to run afoul of those things.”
“That goes without saying.”
He jerked his head in the opposite direction, downstream. “I don’t know what those black chasms are, but if we’re not returning to camp now then we should follow them. They may keep us out of sight from these spider-cousins of yours.”
“Don’t you dare call them—”
A sharp droning, like the call of a foghorn, interrupted her. Her attention snapped back at once to the enormous beast in the distance just in time. The great land-whale fumbled, stub-legs scraping ivy and soil from the ground, and then fell. The land shuddered from the impact, and a rumble reverberated through the earth and sky like a ringing gong. It was only moments before the skittering shapes were upon it again, legs twitching and indistinct maws clattering at the fallen animal’s hide. The autonomous twitching of the land-whale’s muscles was unmistakable, for she’d seen the same spasms in the rabbits and owls Kara often hunted, and in the death-throes of the juvenile she’d killed herself. It was the hallmark of neurotoxin. Those spider-things, whatever they were, were venomous. And it had to be insanely potent to fell a beast of that size in so short a time.
“What the hell,” she said, an inexplicable nausea clawing at her gut.
Mark nodded gravely, his eyes fixed on the living feast. “Venom. Inject it with enough to bring it down, and then get out of the way of its fall. A komodo dragon on arachnid legs.”
She was unable to take her eyes from the grisly sight. Even in the distance, she could make out the peeling of flesh and gushing blood in alarming detail. “I think we were safer in the desert.”
“Mayhap that is so.” He turned away and rolled his neck in the other direction. “Come. Let us get to those chasms, now. There may be more of those about.”
“Y-yeah.” She reminded herself to breathe, but the air suddenly tasted like tin. Her mind buzzed with discordant and unwelcome thoughts. Spiders. But not spiders. What is with this place?
And so, they continued their journey, eager to make the most of the second light from the star whose orbit defied comprehension. With scarcely a look back at the corpse of the land-whale or the pack of unspiders, they made their way toward the nearest of the gashes in the landscape, unsure what they were even searching for.
The news didn’t change much over the course of the day, and the constant blabbering about the murder of Simon Dwyre was starting to make Arthr feel sick. It wasn’t the horror of the murder or anything like that; his own trauma from the other night eclipsed that and then some. No, it was the vulture-esque pandering for views the local news station was engaged in, treating this death like a sideshow in a carnival and promising late-breaking exclusive details just after this commercial break. He wished he’d had the foresight to bring something to do; the battery on his phone was almost dead, and he hadn’t yet beaten this evening’s high score of twelve on Snake.
“Annie,” Kara said, peeking out from behind the carton of Chinese take-out she’d been picking at for the last hour. “Can’t we go somewhere already?”
Annika didn’t look up from the local news flying by on the TV. “Nope.”
“But you said we could! And that was when we got here!”
“That was before this little development hit.” She scowled at the anchors reporting on a kidnapping in some county that had nothing to do with them. “They said there were reports of another murder, and they won’t go back to that. If it’s connected to Dwyre, then it could change everything.”
Arthr groaned. “They’re not going to report anything else. Just the same three things, over and over.” His snake hit the pixelated wall again, breaking into a blocky explosion. Game over. Sick of the game, he plopped his phone onto the nightstand and watched Kara slip out of her chair and scuttle across the carpet toward her bag. She threw it open and rummaged about before pulling out her pale, blank-covered book. She threw herself back onto the bed and began to turn through the pages. “What’re you reading?” Arthr asked her.
“Unicorns!” She started reading but stopped a moment later. “Annie, do you read Whispering Unicorns?”
“Never heard of i
t,” she said.
Kara bolted upright, excitement glistening into hardened beads in her irises. “It’s great! You should read it!”
Annika’s gaze was locked to the interlaced picture on the screen. “I think I can get by without reading a series for kids.”
“It’s about the Unicorn Kingdom, and Starshine Butterwinkle lives there. She’s the most beautiful of the unicorns, and all the boy unicorns wanna get with her. And, and there’s an evil mask that wants to destroy the Unicorn Kingdom, and only Starshine can stop it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, and there’s a queen, from the Muffin Kingdom. She used to be good, but then she died because of the mask and she turned into a ghost-monster and became evil. One time, the Muffin Queen invited the unicorn royalty to a banquet in the swamp, and then when they got there she killed them and chopped them all into little pieces.”
“Listen, Kara,” Annika said in a measured tone, “that’s great, but now isn’t the time for it.”
The girl again began to pout. She lay back on the bed and held the book open in her plated appendages. “Fine, then.”
Annika went back to listening to the bantering anchors. Without anything else to do, Arthr did the same. But it was not long before his legs began to shake with anticipation. “What’s taking them so long? How long are we going to be stuck here?”
Annika glanced at the evening light piercing the drawn curtain. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll be getting out of here soon. If they don’t show by midnight, we’re leaving.”
“Where for?” Kara asked, at once alarmed.
Annika bit her lip. “We’ll stay at another motel until your parents give us a more permanent heading. Probably somewhere across the county line.”
“And what about Spins and Mark?”
“If Mark is still alive, then I’m sure he’ll be able to find us if he needs to. As for your sister,” she said, narrowing her eyes, “we’ll just have to see what happens.”
Mark and Spinneretta reached the nearest of the large chasms around the time the second star was beginning to sink. The imminent scar in the landscape, which ran all the way to the horizon, was huge. The jagged gully started abruptly with a sheer drop of twenty feet with little transition from level ground. The first layers of the high walls were made of packed dirt, and below that it was porous rock the whole way down. Spinneretta scaled the wall with little effort thanks to her spider legs. Mark had a little more trouble, but after some encouraging words his feet touched down on the rugged floor of the scar.
But as soon as he hit the ground, his left leg buckled and he nearly collapsed. A small yelp of pain bounced off the earthen walls of the chasm.
Spinneretta rushed to his side. “Hey, are you okay?”
He drew a sharp hiss between his teeth. “Forgive me. I did not intend to worry you. My leg will be fine.”
Spinneretta’s spider legs unfurled from beneath Mark’s jacket and began to clack against one another. “Be straight with me. You’re still not feeling better, are you?”
He met her gaze for but a moment before giving the rocks under their feet his full attention. “It is taking longer than I thought to recover completely. But it shall not hinder us. I can spare enough magic to keep the pain at bay.”
A sudden indignation struck her in the gut. “What kind of damage are you doing to your leg, just walking on it like that?”
“Flesh is but a tool, and pain its primary weakness. As long as there is no pain, there is no flaw.”
“Are you kidding me? You’re probably going to ruin your leg forever if you keep using it like that, you know!”
“I care not.”
She blinked at him. “You what?”
He shook his head dismissively. “Come. Let us—”
“Don’t you come me!”
Her outburst startled him, and he fell back a step. “Uh?”
With a deep breath, Spinneretta put on her sternest expression. “We’re going back. It’s already dark, and you need rest.”
A dry scoff. “You needn’t be so concerned on my behalf. More important than that is finding a renewable source of food.”
“Look, it’s late anyway. At this rate, we’re never going to find anything to eat. There’s nothing but twist-wood and ivy carpet up there, unless we want to compete with those spider-things. And if we’re not going to starve, we should head back to base and eat some more of those damn bat-things.” Bile burned her throat at the thought, but she had to put her foot down somewhere.
He began to nod, gaze glassy and distracted. “Perhaps you are right. I would not be eager to sleep under the stars tonight.”
“That settles it, then. Let’s go.” She started off down the ravine, back in the direction of the barrier mountains and their temporary home. But even as Mark began to follow her, her thoughts were weighed down with a new helplessness. Barren wastelands on the one side. A fertile but competitive prairie-slash-killing-field on the other. Whoever had once inhabited the fortress city must have worked hard to eke out the living they had. Could she and Mark do it as well? And even if they could, for how long would they have to?
Chapter 11
Zenith and Nadir
Inside the shade of the scar, a permanent chill had crawled beneath Spinneretta’s skin. They’d followed the earthen trench for hours, and the glow of the second star had vanished. Now there was only the dullest glint of evening light to illuminate their return to the mountain city, accompanied by periodic spurts of ghostly illumination from the Flames of Y’rokkrem. They did not speak, aware of the danger that might lurk just out of sight. With the silence sacred and unbroken, Spinneretta focused on the only thing she could: swirling the mentally projected energy around her in expanding and shrinking concentric circles.
One foot in front of the other. Another step, another unspoken mantra of focus and certainty. Her mind was a thousand miles away. Her eight spider legs automatically shifted and extended, as though to feel out the auric traces around her. And all the while, the air grew denser. The current was distinct, undeniable. Clockwise and then counter, the imagined field seemed to move in whichever direction she beckoned it, spiraling out from her core and intertwining with unseen matter.
The mind is the master, she thought. The mind is the master. If that’s the case, then let’s see what you can do. She focused on that illusory orbiting field, feeling it, tasting it in the air. Her leg-joints creaked, a barely perceptible rattle grinding her chitin against itself. The field flowed, broke, reformed, swept in tighter circles, and then—an errant thought—twisted and tightened, cold mental humidity bursting the form like a ruptured wineskin.
A crack, a bolt of something, split the air in front of her with an electric presence. The sensation shocked her alert, and the hard-won moisture-field dissipated in an instant. A yip sounded from her lips before she could stop it.
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked.
Her heart was pounding, and the increased blood flow to her brain tried to tilt the world on its side. Her legs worked overtime to maintain her balance. One deep breath after another swelled her chest. “I did something,” she gasped.
“Forgive me, but you will need to be more specific.”
“Mark, can we stop for a bit?”
“Now?” Exhaustion weighed his voice. “If you need to rest, we must be close to the mountains now. Can you not wait?”
“No,” she said. “It has to be now. I can feel it. It’s going to happen.”
Mark’s irritation seemed to depart. “Happen? What is?”
She shook her head, searching for an explanation. “I was practicing that aura crap. And I felt something. Something magical, it has to be. I’m ready for you to test me. If you’re ready.”
“After so short a time? If that’s true, then . . . that would be quite impressive.” A slow breath. In the low light, Spinneretta could just make out the sight of his silhouette beginning to nod. “Very well. If it must be now, then sit.”
> She did as instructed, falling into a loaded crouch supported by her lower appendages.
Mark sank into a cross-legged posture next to her, a grunt of pain shaking through him as he did. Her concern for him was muted when he raised a hand as if in negation. “Now,” he said. “Whatever it is that you think you’re doing. I need to you to do it again. Concentrate on your aura, and see it rolling into a vortex around you.”
With a deep breath, she began to comply. Her eyes slipped shut. In the slightly deeper dark that greeted her, she imagined a glistening haze, a fog of her own body’s energy taking shape. And then she willed it to move around her as she had done before. It took mere moments for the air to grow thick and the grating sensation of some unexplainable gravity to tug at her chitin.
“Can you feel it swirling?” Mark asked.
She gave a silent nod.
Good. Now focus on that energy. Put out your hands, palms facing one another. Then, try to harness the entirety of your body’s field and guide it to flow between your hands. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she said. She did as he asked and placed her hands out in front of her, a foot apart, and began to concentrate on guiding the swirling energy toward them. It seemed to hum in response, flowing effortlessly toward the target. It permeated her hands, sending a chill across her skin and through the bone, ice-cold and electric. She imagined the vortex spinning faster between her outstretched hands.
“Can you feel it?” Mark asked.
“I can.” The sensation coursing back and forth between her hands couldn’t have been an illusion of the mind. It was too real.
“Alright. Keep your hands right there. I’m going to summon the Flames between them. When I give the signal, I want you to push all the energy you can muster into them. Keep the energy flowing as rapidly and consistently as you can.”
“What’s going to happen?” she asked, at once nervous of the soul-breaking Flames.
“You shall see. Are you ready?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” She thought she felt a disturbance in the field between her palms as Mark put his hand between hers. Mind is the master, she thought. The mind is the master. The chill deepened, and she heard the crackle of the Flames flaring to life. Her confidence grew, and she summoned more of her imaginary power to cycle between her fingers and through the Flames.
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 11