“That isn’t her,” Dezra said before Durik could answer. He frowned at her.
“How do you know? You’ve never met her.”
“That isn’t someone answering us,” Dezra elaborated irritably, clearly in no mood for explanations. “It’s a mimicry illusion. I can sense it. Someone has enchanted this door to answer questions and ward off attention. It’s a very subtle, complex spell, but a spell nevertheless. Whoever you think is answering you isn’t actually in that chamber.”
“Lady Damhán is Baroness Adelynn’s advisor,” Durik said, thoughts racing. Of all his suspicions involving Kathryn, none had involved Damhán. She’d been an unsettling presence, yes, but he had never conceived of her as anything other than a stern enforcer of Baroness Adelynn’s will. “She rode north with us. She has no reason to deceive us.”
“We’ll see,” Dezra said, planting her hands on the door. “Stand back.”
Durik did so, still disbelieving. The words Dezra chanted made Carys go white-faced with fear. The woodwork began to disintegrate, the iron studs rusting before their eyes. Carys hid behind Durik as the door collapsed in on itself, now-ancient timber splitting and cracking apart under the slightest pressure.
The room beyond no longer resembled the solar of Fallowhearth castle. The furniture within was shrouded in thick strands of webbing, and a hundred compound eyes glittered back at them from the dark.
“I don’t think your baroness’s advisor is quite who she says she is,” Dezra said, deadlights flickering into being around her as she drew a long, serrated dagger. Durik said nothing, hefting his spear. He hadn’t wanted to accept that his own instincts had so spectacularly failed to detect the predator in their midst. But the evidence was right before his eyes now. Damhán was not what she had appeared to be. He looked down at Carys, who returned his gaze fiercely – he already knew what she would say if he told her to wait outside.
“Here,” he muttered, drawing his skinning dagger and giving it to her. As he did so he tried to banish the sudden uncertainties that had beset him. “Just stay behind me.”
The girl took the blade and nodded solemnly. Dezra was grinning cruelly, standing on the edge of the infested room.
“Just like old times,” she said to Durik, and stepped over the threshold.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ronan found Fallowhearth in turmoil. People were stumbling through the dark, wind-lashed streets, dashing to and from their homes as they desperately tried to collect together their worldly goods, family and friends. Ronan shouted for them to make way, hardly slowing his mount as he urged the beast on up to the castle.
He slowed as he approached the gate. It had been broken open – how, it was difficult to tell in the darkness. Two figures stood outside it, their blades bared. Ronan assumed they were the castle’s garrison, and was about to call out to them when his instincts stopped him.
Something was wrong. A flash of lightning lit up the two sentinels, exposing their grinning skulls and magic-infused bones.
“She’s already here,” Ronan said to Pico, drawing his sword. The familiar squeaked in agreement. A sense of grim finality gripped the northerner, stoked by a fiery anger. He had been right to distrust the necromancer. Now, finally, he would break her curse.
He dismounted, striding through the swirling wind and rain towards the broken gates. Torchlight glowed beyond the stone archway. The witch had to still be inside, somewhere.
The two corpses moved in from either side, the lights in their eye sockets flaring as they seemed to take notice of Ronan. He picked the one on the left and charged.
It brought up a pole arm to block his first strike, Ronan’s sword shivering splinters from the haft. It didn’t get an opportunity to deflect the northerner’s second strike – Pico leapt onto its bare skull. These skeletons were more tightly bound than the Blind Muir horde; contact from the familiar wasn’t enough to cause it to collapse, but it weakened the fell magic binding it enough for Ronan to shatter its rib cage with a hard blow of his sword’s pommel, causing it to stumble back.
He turned to the next one as it came at him with a raised sword. The blades clashed, sparking in the rain. Ronan tried to go low, burying his weapon in the body’s rib cage, but the thing seemed unaffected by what should have been a fatal strike. It raised its own sword again, and Ronan was forced to clutch its wrist to stop the overhead swing from splitting his head open. Muscle strained against arcana-fueled bone for a few seconds, before Pico bit the corpse’s bared femur. The magic binding it weakened, and bones crunched and snapped loudly in Ronan’s vice-like grip. He snapped the sword arm clean off and, with a roar, forced his blade up through its rib cage, splitting it in half. It came apart.
The first undead had recovered its pole arm but was still clearly struggling in Pico’s presence. Ronan kicked it into the mud and delivered one, two, three further kicks to its skull, shattering it. Like the first one, it came undone. Panting, Ronan shook rainwater off his blade and stepped into the castle’s gatehouse.
Bodies were waiting for him in the entrance hall – men-at-arms and heaps of bone and armor bearing witness to a struggle between the living and the dead that appeared to have left both sides eternally equal. The northerner cast about, expecting more skeletons to advance on him from the spiral stairs that led deeper into the castle, but all he caught was what sounded like fighting in the higher levels. He shared a look with Pico and started to climb.
• • •
Durik wrenched his spear from the last arachyura’s corpse, kicking its spasming, bloated body for good measure. Dezra stood across the room from him, her serrated dagger hanging in the air before her, dripping ichor. Carys was next to him, Durik’s own knife similarly bloodied.
They had hacked away the worst of the webbing, Dezra’s balefire scorching the last of it from the chamber. A dozen or more dead arachyura carpeted the floor, some still twitching. Durik went from one to another, piercing their skulls with his spear.
“Watch the door,” he told Carys as he moved between the bodies. There could only be one creature behind this, one being he knew capable of weaving so deadly a web of deceit around them. If he was right, he knew it may already be too late to save themselves, let alone any of the others. “If these monsters are in here, they could be anywhere inside the castle. Nowhere is safe.”
Dezra appeared to have no interest in making sure all of the arachyura were dead. She had moved to the corner of the room furthest from the door, where the remnants of the webbing that had once shrouded the whole chamber was still hanging. The strands were wrapped around what Durik realized was Dezra’s tome. The witch engulfed the book in her dirty, cold flames, freeing it from the last of the threads and catching it neatly.
“What now?” Durik asked as he speared the final arachyura. Dezra walked past him, stepping over the bodies without looking down at them as she began leafing urgently through the book. The knife was still floating alongside her.
“Now, you stand in the corner and say nothing,” she said, moving to the center of the room and shoving one of the smaller arachyura aside with her boot. She sat down, crosslegged, the book propped open in her lap. Durik did as she had suggested without question, giving her space.
Dezra began to chant. The temperature in the room plummeted, and the hairs across Durik’s body rose. More deadlights flickered into existence around the necromancer. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, and her body started to tremble.
There was movement in the doorway. A shadow obscured the light beyond it. Durik thought for a second it was just Carys, before realizing the shape was far too thickset. The girl was standing to one side within the solar, eyes wide as she looked from the intruder to Durik. Dezra’s fires guttered and her eyes snapped back into focus.
It was the northerner, Ronan. He was drenched through, and his expression was angry and warlike. His sword was drawn, and his small, r
ed familiar was perched on his shoulder, hissing softly at Dezra. Durik appreciated the fiery gaze of a fellow warrior, but the fact that it was directed at his old companion put him on edge.
“Your reign of terror is at an end, witch,” the northerner said.
“Oh, not this again,” Dezra responded irritably. “Don’t make me hurt you, clansman. I’m in a deadly mood.”
“You can try,” Ronan said, striding into the chamber. Durik moved to intercept him, intending to stop such foolishness before it could escalate any further. Their eyes met, less than a foot apart.
“Stand aside, pathfinder,” Ronan said. “I have no quarrel with you.”
“You have no quarrel with Dezra either,” he pointed out, his voice firm.
“She is a necromancer. She does not deserve your protection.”
“So I have been told, many times before,” Durik said. “In my experience, someone willing to harm a witch would harm an orc too.”
“Ronan,” said Carys. She had followed him into the room, and now clutched urgently onto his wrist. “Do not fight them. Durik is a friend of the clans, and he has vouched for the witch. I trust him, so we can both trust her.”
“Tell them,” Ronan said, looking beyond Durik at Dezra. “Tell them of the legion of corpses that marches here this very moment from the Blind Muir. Tell them how you have massacred the town’s garrison and resurrected them as your puppets.”
“They already know,” Dezra said. “Look around you, oaf. Are spiders this size a common nuisance in the north? Do you often find arachyura infestations in the castles of Upper Forthyn? I am trying to unearth the root of this taint, so that I can rip it all up. If I don’t, then every house and home in this miserable town will look like this chamber.”
“You sit there performing forbidden magics, yet you still expect me to believe you?”
“Believe your girl. She has the witch-sight too.”
Ronan looked down at Carys, her grip still on his arm.
“Is that true?” he asked her. The familiar let out a little screech.
“You rode north with Logan and Ulma,” Durik said, drawing his attention away from the girl. “Where are they now?”
“I thought they would have already returned,” Ronan said, defensive now. “We parted company after finding this witch in the Crooked Tower. I was riding on to the Redferns when I stumbled across her undead horde.”
“The arachyura might have taken the others,” Durik said. “Lady Damhán has also been captured, or is somehow involved with them. There is something dark at work in this town. Far darker than my companion here.”
“Charmed,” Dezra said. Ronan grimaced before taking a step back from Durik.
“You said you would find the root of the infestation,” Ronan said. “So find it. I will be waiting.”
“Get that thing away from me first,” Dezra snapped, glaring at the familiar. Ronan glared back, but retreated with the creature to the far side of the door. Dezra cast a final, withering look at the pair before turning her gaze back to her book.
Balefire reignited around her and swept through the chamber. Durik shivered at its touch, but its flames twisted away from him, coming together to form the flickering phantoms of shapes across the floor. It had been a long time since Durik had seen Dezra deploy her powers in a scrying – he’d forgotten how much he hated the surreal sense of time dislocation that accompanied them. He recognized the shapes formed by the balefire though. They were the arachyura. Dezra’s magics had created shades of the giant spiders killed by the three of them.
Like flickering shadows cast upon a wall by firelight, the phantom spiders rose and began to move. They scuttled under the bed, into the fireplace, into the tiniest cracks in the stone walls. They poured down and away, fleeing the room via a dozen or more different points, their fire-forms dissipating as they went.
“If they move like that, they could be anywhere in the castle,” Durik murmured.
“But they aren’t,” Dezra said hoarsely, taking him by surprise. He had thought she was completely lost in her trance.
“These ones came from the main swarm,” she went on, her voice sounding raspy and dry. Her eyes had rolled back again, seeing far more than Durik’s were capable of. “There is a nest… nearby. In the castle.”
“Where?” Durik asked, tightening his grip on his spear.
“Down,” Dezra replied. “We go down.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ulma spoke, making Logan whimper at the thought of her voice attracting the attention of the surrounding spiders.
“How long have we been here?”
At first, he thought that she had forgotten that his mouth was bound. Then he realized she was actually addressing Ariad.
The spider queen had come and gone from the small sphere of light that continued to burn just above the web. Her motions were even more jerky and scuttling than before. Logan got the impression she was waiting for someone or something to arrive.
Ulma’s words drew her back up the thread. Her golden mask gazed up at her impassively for a while.
“Am I speaking in Dunwarri?” Ulma said. “I asked you how long you’ve been keeping us here. Since the butcher’s shop.”
“That does not matter,” Ariad hissed. “When my children feast, you will miss these precious moments.”
“I’d say it matters a lot,” Ulma said. “For you, for me, for your children.”
Ariad clambered closer.
“Why?”
“Because when you took me, I had just mixed pyrium, colix and vitrolium. The first two are the basis of what I call magi-reducto, an anti-arcana act of alchemy. You will have seen it already, if you really are Lady Damhán. The barn outside the Forester’s Rest, just before we reached Fallowhearth.”
“So?” Ariad demanded. “It is stoppered, and you are bound. Your little metal tricks have no power here.”
“True, it is stoppered, and I am bound,” Ulma admitted. “But I told you, I mixed the magi-reducto with vitrolium. If you knew your alchemy, you’d know that particular ‘little metal trick’ causes whatever elements it’s mixed with to become increasingly volatile as time goes by. Speaking the language of a non-alchemist, I have a vial in my smock that, judging by the vibrations and the heat I can feel against my chest right now, is about to explode into a magic-consuming fireball.”
Ariad hissed and scurried back from Ulma, pointing one gaunt, web-wrapped limb at her. The arachyura flooded in from all sides, some scrambling over Logan as they swarmed the dwarf. He moaned in muffled terror, thinking he was going to be crushed or suffocated. In that moment he was convinced Ulma’s brash plan would only hasten their demise – at the very best, they’d tear him apart before her flames took hold.
Ulma didn’t react to the onrushing tide of spiders. Ariad’s golden light illuminated the creatures as they tore at her cocoon, stripping away the silk they had woven tightly around her. It was immediately clear that she hadn’t been bluffing – a bubbling, purple liquid was overflowing from one of the pockets of her smock, steaming where it spilled down her front. Logan saw her grin.
“By the ancestor’s prized brew, I sure hope I got the ingredients right in this one.”
The concoction exploded. A purple fireball roared over Ulma, immediately igniting the hundreds of spiders, great and small, that were scrambling over and around her. Their bloated bodies shielded Logan from the blast, but he still instinctively flinched away, the web beneath him vibrating. When he looked back, eyes stinging from the intensity of the glare, everything between him and the dwarf was on fire.
Ariad’s arachyura were clearly infused with enough arcana to be affected by the magi-reducto. That, or Ulma had indeed gotten her ingredients wrong. A dreadful cacophony of shrieks filled the air, along with the hideous reek of burning bodies. Arachyura swarmed over one another as they sought to escape
the purple flames, only serving to spread them further. The great web holding them had itself ignited, burning fitfully as the fire danced along each thread in turn, expanding rapidly. Logan twisted and struggled in desperation, trying to claw himself free of his bonds and get away from the conflagration.
Then he saw Ulma. She was rising up in the midst of the fire, tearing herself free of the last of the webbing that had once bound her. She was lit head to foot in flames, just as she had been when Logan had first met her again outside the Forester’s Rest. And she was laughing. Around her the arachyura burned, their body-sacs bursting in foul, stinking geysers of steaming ichor.
The crazed dwarf snatched onto the still burning web and half dragged, half climbed her way to Logan.
Despite the furious shaking of his head, she clutched at him, the flames coursing over her body. The purple fire ignited the cocoon holding Logan, burning through it in seconds and leaving behind only a sticky residue. He ripped his arms free, sword in one hand, then freed his mouth as the fire engulfed him. There was no pain, though, nothing but a prickling sensation across his body.
“This is insane!” Logan yelled, his further protestations interrupted by the dwarf.
“Hold on!” Ulma shouted, clutching his forearm as he tried to get a grip on the burning web around him. He realized why almost immediately – fatally weakened, the last of the threads gave way and they fell, together, still burning.
The impact drove the breath from Logan’s lungs and doused most of the flames that had engulfed him. He rolled and scrabbled against black dirt and cold stone, finally dragging in a mouthful of humid, stinking air. He got onto his knees, looking around in a daze. Ulma was next to him, already standing.
They had fallen to the cavern floor, their descent partly arrested by the last of the burning-up strands of webbing. Ariad’s golden light was high above them now, like a tiny star surrounded by a halo of purple flames, as the magi-reducto ate away the last of the great web around it. Of Ariad herself, Logan could find no sign. It was too dark across the cavern floor to see with any degree of certainty, but the flicker of movement and a rising, rustling sound made him shudder and turn left and right, his sword extended, its point quivering. A high-pitched screech rose and reverberated from somewhere in the echoing space.
The Doom of Fallowhearth Page 27