He tried to scream again, but still couldn’t. Another wave of panic flooded his thoughts, and he felt the bindings holding him vibrate once more as something large shifted and scurried past him.
This time it took far longer to regain control. He wasn’t sure if he had passed in and out of consciousness at some point – deprived of his senses, it was difficult to tell. He tried to regulate his breathing through his nose. It was so damnably hot.
Then the voice spoke to him.
“You wake,” it murmured.
Hope filled Logan – unreasoning, heart-pounding hope. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t going to die here blind and dumb amidst these scuttling monstrosities.
He tried desperately to speak but could only force out a muffled grunt.
“Good,” said the voice. It was slow and rattling, at once familiar but alien to him. “You are first,” it went on. “I hoped you would be. I am glad.”
The web around him vibrated again, as though dozens of creatures were scuttling over its taut threads. Logan made an ugly, mewling noise. He felt something probing the side of his face, all questing, hooked, hairy limbs. Abruptly the webbing binding his mouth was ripped away. He gasped, panting in the humid, stinking air, trying to find his voice.
“W- Who are you?” he managed.
“You do not recognize?” croaked the voice in the darkness. “Let me help.”
More spiders’ legs snatched and groped his face. This time Logan was able to scream. He made the most of it.
More webbing unraveled and fell from his eyes. He blinked, but it did him no good, not at first anyway – it was pitch black, wherever he was. Slowly, however, a hot, golden light started to glow ahead of him. He made out fingers, splayed beneath the tiny, coruscating ball of illumination, then a full hand, then an arm. The light grew, like an Al-Kalim dawn, until it had illuminated the entirety of the figure who had conjured it.
Lady Damhán stood before Logan, the light in her hand making her thin gray robes seem almost translucent. Her whole body was suffused with the glow. She looked at Logan, but her expression was unmoving, as emotionless as a mask. Her eyes were black and held only hunger.
“Do you know me yet, Logan Lashley?” she hissed in a rattling, deathly voice.
Logan didn’t respond. His mind was racing like a sparrow’s heartbeat, too fast for conscious thoughts. She raised her arms up straight, the orb of light floating until it was above her, her palms touching above her head. As though snatched by a sudden wind, her gossamer robes bolted against her body, moving of their own accord. They tightened and overlapped, until Damhán was no longer clad in thin, loose gray robes, but in a lattice of web-like bindings that hugged her entire form. The last remnants of her cloak wove about her gaunt face, wrapping over and over, completely covering her. As the last piece was snatched into place, a burst of light as bright as the midday sun dazzled Logan. When his sight returned, Damhán’s mummified face was shielded by a golden mask, young, feminine and expressionless. For a second he thought he could feel the heat of the desert.
“Now you know me, don’t you?” hissed the voice from behind unmoving golden lips.
“Ariad,” Logan stammered. “Spawn of Arachne, Goddess of Spiders.”
“Yes,” the creature that had been masquerading as Lady Damhán said. Its speech was jerky and disjointed now that it had stopped trying to mimic its human prey. It let out a hideous ticking noise.
“I see you forget not. It has been long since Sudanya.”
“You were stabbed by Durik,” Logan said, not believing what he was seeing. “And then crushed when the temple fell. You had transformed by then. You… you couldn’t have survived!”
“Naive fool,” Ariad hissed. “It will take more than a savage’s spear to cut the thread of my life.” She indicated her left side, where the web-like rags that bound her body were knotted and twisted. “I repay that soon. When my children bring the savage.”
The mention of Durik gave Logan a moment’s hope. It didn’t have him yet.
“Where is Ulma?” he demanded. The arachyura queen raised a hand, and the golden light above her head floated towards Logan, then went right.
“Oh gods,” Logan breathed. The light picked out the thousands of strands of webbing that surrounded him, and not only exposed the thick wrap of threads that tightly bound his own body, but also the remnants of other beings pinned to the thread. He counted a dozen or more all around him, most of them skeletal remains half-wrapped in mummifying silk. He realized a few were still clad in armor, and spotted a golden roc pinned to the chest of one slack-jawed corpse, gleaming in Ariad’s light. Abelard. He shuddered uncontrollably, his thoughts in turmoil. The creatures had gotten to everyone. Nobody was safe. Were they even now picking off the last of Fallowhearth’s inhabitants? What about Durik and Carys?
Close to the seneschal’s corpse was a smaller cocoon. The only part of the person within that was visible was a snub nose, and the end of one blond braid poking through next to it. It had to be Ulma.
Ariad’s light traveled on, illuminating part of what looked like a subterranean cavern and, as it did so, glittered back from thousands upon thousands of black eyes, infesting the great web all around them. Despite the heat, Logan started to shiver uncontrollably.
“I have waited for this,” hissed Ariad. “A long time.”
“Was there ever a real Damhán?” Logan demanded, trying not to give way to a third surge of panic. “Or has she always been just an illusion?”
The web-clad figure again made a low, ominous ticking sound. Logan found he couldn’t look at that chillingly expressionless mask for any length of time.
“Lady Damhán has served the baroness for many decades. That is what the baroness believes. What all believe. So easily tricked.”
Abruptly, the pallid figure moved, almost blindingly fast. It was at the bottom of the great web holding Logan before he could even cry out, darting up it with a rapid, disjointed gait, any trace of Lady Damhán gone. It snatched him by his bound shoulders, its golden mask inches from his face. Despite its inhuman pose, it seemed perfectly balanced and weightless on its silken trap.
“Long time have I waited, Logan Lashley. I remember Sudanya. Remember the pain. Now you will know that pain. I tried to show it to you in the forest, but you are too strong together. All together like Sudanya. Not now. Now I pick you and pin you one by one. Soon you will see friends again. Soon, you will suffer together.”
Chapter Nineteen
There was a storm building over the glens. Dezra could feel it in her heart as much as she could feel it in the charged air. A scream waiting to tear free, a thunderclap ready to roll out. She had spent much of the day roving back and forth through the tower, snatching up a book or scroll, reading a few lines, throwing it back down again. In her time she had acquired many potent texts, some from the libraries of Greyhaven itself – the powers of Umbros and Mortos, the elemental powers of shadow and death, sat heavy within dusty pages and cracked rolls of parchment scattered throughout the tower. None of it, however, was what she sought.
Kathryn’s ghosts were all around her. She could see her sitting at the table, her expression serious as she read through one of Dezra’s parchments. Laughing by the door as she took in the mud on her dress, fresh from her journey from the town. By the jagged split in the tower’s wall, looking out across the blasted moorland one breezy summer’s eve, the wind in her hair as they shared their first kiss.
Dezra would find her. If she had to rip her own soul from her body and throw it into the abyss, she was going to find her.
The passage she needed wasn’t here. It was in the tome Kathryn had taken from her, the Cadaveribus. One last, cruel irony. She threw the other, useless, books aside and snatched up a dagger from the table, its blade long, curved, and as serrated as her soul. With it in hand she stalked downstairs and out into the night.
/> When she had first met her, Kathryn had hated the dark. Dezra had taught her there was nothing to be feared, nothing inherently terrifying about the cycles of the world. Life and death, summer and winter, night and day, they all had their place. It hadn’t taken Kathryn long to lose her fear.
The wind was picking up outside. It clawed at her cloak, trying to rip it off. She walked down the steep, winding track to the base of the tower crag, her every step assured despite the darkness. Just beyond the bottom of the path her corpse-steed waited with its eternal patience. She whispered it back to its uneasy rest. She had no need of it tonight.
Beyond the carcass was the tree. During summer Kathryn had gathered up its blossom and woven a small crown from it, one she had insisted on Dezra wearing. She’d waited until Kathryn had left before withering it, so she wouldn’t make her wear it again next time. When Kathryn had visited her again Dezra had teased her about it.
The tree was skeletal now, the wind whipping at it as Dezra approached. Its gnarled branches creaked and groaned as she reached up, running her fingers along one low, bent bough. She raised the knife and, hissing black words, began to saw.
With the severed branch in her hands, she climbed once more up the crag’s path, the tower above her pointing like a broken finger to where the storm was coalescing above. Rain began to fall. She felt the first drops on her skin before she stepped inside – icy, stinging, bitter.
She climbed the stairs to the guard chamber and tore the rug from the crack in the wall, letting the wind and rain in, banishing the memory of when she and Kathryn had last stood in that same spot. Her balefire had returned, lighting her eyes beneath the cowl of her cloak and coruscating around her fingers. The bluecrest in the cage had started to go wild, flitting backwards and forwards, slamming against the bars.
She sat, cross-legged, in the center of the chamber, the dagger in one hand and the broken branch in the other. The words she spoke seemed to raise the tempo of the wind, as though it railed against the ancient, cursed language. Scrolls and loose sheaves of paper were snatched up and flung across the chamber, whipping in a circle around the dark sorceress. The volume of her voice rose as the tone deepened, unnaturally so, shuddering the stonework around her and causing loose masonry to cascade from the tower’s flank. Lightning flared and the thunder answered it, crashing above, shuddering the crag to its core. Still Dezra chanted, her eyes glowing like dying stars.
She knew that this time the magic was going to do more than simply drain her – it could break her forever. But there would be no going back. That no longer troubled her. The doubts and fears that had plagued her were being seared away by the icy burning of her anger.
The lightning struck again, slamming the broken tip of the tower. With a crash that rivalled the accompanying thunder, the whole structure finally came down, stone hammering against stone, the Dunwarr foundations giving out with a crack, like the ending of the world. Dezra’s chamber was crushed, its contents pulverized, every book and belonging utterly destroyed.
But by then, Dezra the Vile was far away.
• • •
Before
Light was streaming in between the leafy boughs, a warm summertime glow that made the forest seem drowsy and dreamlike. Kathryn was glad of it – she disliked the dark, especially the blackness that haunted the depths of Blind Muir. Today, as she rode through the trees along the forest’s edge, the woodland’s threat seemed to slumber rather than lurk.
She had been waiting for a day like this, a day when the darkness crept back to the heart of the forest, when it didn’t feel like unfriendly eyes were spying on her from behind every trunk and bough. Growing up in Highmont her experiences of Blind Muir had been relegated to the darker bedtime stories told by her night nurse. She’d gazed upon it often from the keep’s eyrie, when the days were clear and cloudless, exposing its brooding southern border as a dark line on the horizon. She’d known from a young age that a time would come when she would be expected to rule Upper Forthyn, to govern its places and peoples. And that duty would include Blind Muir.
The seneschal had warned her against visiting today. Ever since she’d arrived in Fallowhearth and assumed control of the upper part of the barony, Seneschal Abelard had spoken darkly of Blind Muir. His views seemed barely removed from those of Kathryn’s old nurse – surely, she’d tried to reason, the stories couldn’t be true. He’d had the decency to look embarrassed, but hadn’t ceased advising her against visiting the forest.
She had the power to disregard his warnings. This was her land, and she could go where she pleased. She knew, however, that Abelard would likely report her trip to her mother, and that was the last thing she wanted. She’d come along today, telling Abelard she was riding to Blackfinch, a little west of Fallowhearth, to visit its newly built shrine of Kellos. He’d offered an escort, but she’d been able to convince him that a single servant would be sufficient accompaniment. That servant had, in turn, required only a small sum of coin to be convinced to stay at Blackfinch while she turned south to Blind Muir, alone.
She paused her mount besides a heavy-set old redbark, leaning over in the saddle to place her fingers against its gnarled, knotted trunk. She wasn’t sure why she had felt such an urge to investigate this place. A part of her had always been drawn to the forbidden and the arcane. She supposed it was all part of being the heir of a baroness. In her early teens she had used servants’ cast-offs to disguise herself as a stall seller’s helper and loitered outside the sorcerers’ guild in Highmont. Once she had even snuck into a lecture run by one of Greyhaven University’s foremost lecturers on the elemental arts, taking a screed of notes that were later discovered by one of the castle maids stuffed under her bed. Magic had always fascinated her, and in her childhood she had daydreamed of escaping the duty-bound life preordained for her and enrolling as a student at Greyhaven.
The snap of a breaking twig caused her to draw her hand away from the redbark. She looked around, startled. Clouds had shrouded the sun, leaving the space beneath the trees in a dulled, gray haze. How long had she been lost in her thoughts? Surely it had only been a few moments? Where had the light gone?
She turned her mount, looking towards where the tree line had been moments before. Had she not been able to see open fields between the branches? Where were they now? She realized that her heart was racing. There was something wrong, something subtly off about the forest now. Its malignancy had awoken.
The light returned. At first her hopes leapt, and she almost scolded herself. The sun had simply hidden its face for a few moments behind the clouds, and now it had come back to lead her out. But no. This light was contained, throwing back the creeping gray shadows in in the vicinity behind her, like a torch but without the flickering inconsistency of a flame. She half twisted in her saddle, urging her mount about once again.
There was the light – not a torch but an orb, perhaps the size of a fist, glowing deep and hot, like a tiny star. It bobbed slightly in the air, accompanied by a low, clicking susurration that made her hairs stand up. And it was coming towards her.
She tried to turn away. It was bright, but somehow unwholesome. Her eyes ached to look at it, yet she found her gaze locked into its core, unable to look away, almost blinded by it. She wanted to shout out, to dig her heels in, to race away from that unnatural orb, but she was captive, paralyzed, the clicking noise rising to a storm in her ears. For a moment she witnessed an avalanche of twitching, furred limbs and unblinking, multi-segmented eyes.
And then the light was gone. Darkness engulfed it, not a shadow, but something truly and utterly black. The void closed over the light like a fist, crushing it, snuffing it out before being dragged away into nothingness. When it vanished the light had gone with it, and the chittering had been replaced once more by the soft, low creaking of the forest.
Kathryn sat very still upon her steed, her heart hammering. The sunlight returned, banishing th
e cloying shade that had been creeping in beneath the boughs. The moment had passed, and for a second she wondered if she had imagined it. But that seemed unlikely – there were still eyes on her.
She looked left. There a cloaked figure stood watching, framed by two bent old mirewood trees. Before Kathryn could react, the figure lowered her hood, revealing a pale face framed by black locks and eyes that seemed as dark as the void she’d just seen extinguish the orb.
Kathryn finally found she could move. Her hand went down to the shortsword she had strapped to her waist, hidden from Abelard under her riding cloak before she’d left Fallowhearth. The figure raised a single hand.
“You won’t need that,” she said. “I am not a threat.”
Kathryn left the sword undrawn, but her hand remained on the hilt.
“What was that thing?” she demanded, still struggling to slow her heart and ease her breathing.
“Nothing good,” the figure said.
“And who are you?” she went on.
“Nothing good,” the woman repeated, though this time with the slightest hint of a smile.
“That was magic, wasn’t it?” Kathryn asked, her mind racing. “The orb, the blackness. Where did it come from?”
“On the first count, I wish I knew for sure,” the woman said. “On the second, the blackness was all mine. Did you like it?”
The question caught Kathryn off guard. She frowned.
“It was dark magic,” she said. “I doubt it’s legal in Forthyn.”
“Dark magic that saved your life,” the woman pointed out. She took a step forward. Kathryn’s grip tightened once more on her sword’s hilt.
“Don’t come any closer,” she said. The woman stopped, a placatory hand raised again.
“I mean you no harm,” she reiterated. “Though I can’t say the same for everything in this forest. It isn’t often that Blind Muir gets visitors, especially ones with good mounts, expensive cloaks and fine swords.”
The Doom of Fallowhearth Page 22