“Whatever your plan is, please hurry,” he hissed at Ulma. “They’re coming.”
“Hold them off, then,” Ulma said urgently as she upended the front of her smock and dumped the contents in the dirt. She knelt and started frantically unstoppering bottles.
Logan didn’t have time to argue. The first arachyura flung itself at him from out of the dark so hard it impaled itself on his sword, running itself through. Logan kicked at it repeatedly, its writhing limbs still trying to claw at him as more of its kin swarmed forward from all sides. He got it dislodged and thrust hard into the open maw of another, right between the pincers, ichor gouting across his sword. He withdrew the blade and turned the movement into a slash that burst the eye clusters of a third. He felt a surge of exhilaration as he fought, an angry defiance he hadn’t known in a long time. He wasn’t going to die here, in the dirt and the dark, down among these monsters. He’d live, as he always did. This would be just another story for the fireside.
Then he saw Ariad. Her orb had descended down over her head. She strode across the cavern floor towards them between a scuttling tide as her children parted around her. Golden power coursed like liquid brilliance around her body and made her mask shine radiantly. She extended both hands, claw-like, towards Logan. His sword faltered.
Daylight was on his face, a warm desert wind. He felt a hand grasp onto his shoulder, tight and insistent. He turned around and found Dezra beside him.
“Why are you here?” he stammered, trying to focus. His thoughts had turned sluggish and slow, the edge that his anger had given him bleeding away. He looked around, almost blinded by the heat and the light. “Where are we? The arachyura…”
“This is an illusion,” Dezra said. “A web for your mind. I’m not here. Fight, or you will die.”
“Dezra, I’m sorry,” Logan began to say, but her grip tightened, painfully, making him flinch. He tried to pull his shoulder away, but couldn’t free it.
Dezra was gone. An arachyura had latched onto his shoulder, its pincers digging into his flesh. He cried out, trying to shake it off, desperately switching his sword over to his other hand so that he could stab it. The angle was bad – all he could manage was a glancing slash across its skull, but it clung on, its mandibles locked. His arm was going numb.
He could still feel the heat on his face, and the light. It poured from Ariad, from her golden visage and the corona of power that crackled around her. She was right in front of Logan now, reaching out to snap his neck and turn his body into a husk for her feeding young. Another arachyura had clamped onto his calf, a third, smaller one hanging off his left forearm.
“I bring you my light, Logan Lashley,” Ariad hissed. “Embrace it.”
Something slammed into his back, almost thrusting him forward into the monstrous queen. Roaring in Dunwarri, Ulma threw herself between Logan and Ariad, a vial of broiling alchemical liquid in each fist. She flung them straight at the arachyura queen, barely a foot away.
The vials struck and shattered, their volatile contents splashing over her. The reaction was instantaneous. The liquids combusted, and a roaring fireball exploded between Ulma and Ariad.
Logan was blinded by the flash and thrown backwards. Ulma, directly in front of him, took the worst of the blast. She was flung into Logan, driving them both into the dirt. Arachyura bodies snapped beneath them. Logan tried to roll over, gasping for breath, the afterglow of the explosion seared into his vision. He found his hands on Ulma’s shoulders and managed to free himself. All around the arachyura were twitching and shrieking, the force of the detonation breaking the swarm’s coherence. The space directly ahead had been reduced to a crater, splattered with the devastated remains of spiders. Some were on fire, the flames adding filthy smoke and hellish light to the chamber. Others, hideously wounded, were trying to drag themselves away from the devastation. Ariad was gone.
Logan realized Ulma was on fire. She was sprawled next to him, semi-conscious. The corner of her smock was burning. It was only as Logan beat out the flames that he saw how badly she’d been hit by the explosion. Her goggles were shattered, one eye bloody, and part of her stomach was charred and exposed. She coughed as Logan tried to extinguish her, spitting blood. Logan felt an upsurge of horror as he realized the extent of her injuries, coupled with the urgent need not to let her see. He tried to still his shaking hands.
“Did I get the bitch?” she grunted.
“I think so,” Logan said, glancing around the chamber. The arachyura were scrambling all over one another, their predatory instincts and swarm intelligence apparently gone. Logan wondered if their sensitive eyes had been blinded by the blast.
“I never knew what would happen if I mixed the liquid drakesmetal and vitrolium,” Ulma said, grinning bloodily. “I do love a good explosion.”
“We’ve got to get out,” Logan said, trying to apply some focus to the dazed, injured dwarf. To himself as well. He had to keep it together now, for both of them. They could still get out of this. “Do you think you can walk?”
“What do you think, you dumb bastard manling,” Ulma said, looking down. Logan realized that much of the upper thigh on her left leg had also been burned away. It was a grisly sight.
“Guess that wasn’t the wooden one?” he asked. Ulma slumped back, closing her one good eye.
“Leave me,” she said, her voice firm and clear despite the undoubted pain of her injuries.
“Absolutely not,” Logan said. “Either we both leave, or neither of us do. I’ll carry you out if I have to.”
Ulma scoffed. “Well that would make a change.”
“Hold on,” Logan said, shifting his stance so he could get his arm in under Ulma’s shoulder. She hissed with pain.
“I thought you’d really lost it earlier,” she managed to say. “You just stopped. I was about to get my mallet out and bash the back of your skull.”
“More of Ariad’s illusions,” Logan said, trying to shake off the memory of the monster’s tricks. He felt like a fool, as though all this was his fault. If he wasn’t so weakwilled, perhaps Ulma wouldn’t have had to save him. He forced himself to stay focused. “Dezra pulled me out of it.”
“You’re really obsessed,” Ulma said before spitting more blood.
“Stop talking. Save your strength.”
“Convenient for you to say.”
Logan didn’t answer. Ariad’s golden light had returned.
• • •
Dezra said nothing as she descended through Fallowhearth castle. Her eyes were as white as those of a freshly raised corpse and her movements were sluggish and dream-like. Her book floated seemingly of its own accord before her, the pages turning in a wind none of the others could feel. Durik had seen her in a similar state before, during a desperate flight from the Uthuk Y’llan through Thalian Glades, guided only by the necromancer’s death-scrying. She was spirit walking, drawn on by the whispers of the dead.
Apparently, they had much to tell her. She took the steps to the dungeon, Durik and Carys behind her. Ronan followed a dozen paces further behind, so that his familiar’s nullifying aura didn’t interrupt the trance. Durik could still sense the hostility radiating from the northerner.
As Dezra passed, the braziers lining the walls ignited with her balefire, one after the other, casting their descent in a pallid corpse-light. Durik heard noises rising from below – voices. They became silent as the group stepped through an open grate out into the single, subterranean chamber that constituted the castle’s dungeon.
To Durik’s surprise, they found the dank space already occupied. Dezra’s lights lit a dozen white, terrified faces that stared back at the group as they entered. It took him a while to recognize them as the castle’s complement of servants. Mildred stood before the rest, staring at Dezra with undisguised terror.
“She means you no harm,” Durik said, realizing how ridiculous that claim must
sound. “How did you come to be down here?”
“We heard fighting at the front gate,” she stammered. “The servants’ quarters are right above. We didn’t know where else to go.”
“You may be in greater danger here than anywhere else,” Durik said as Dezra advanced towards them. “I would advise you to stand aside.”
The servants hurried to obey, throwing themselves out of Dezra’s path. She passed between them seemingly without even noticing they were there and came to a stop right in front of the rough-cut wall. Her deadlights strengthened, illuminating the rock face.
“They passed through here,” she said in a deep, unnatural tone, like a dozen voices speaking together. The death-tongue. She was channeling spirits, multiple ones. Durik moved closer to peer at the rock. It was riven with cracks, fissures that he supposed were large enough for an average-sized arachyura to crawl though sideways, but impossible for a biped to traverse.
“If they had Kathryn, she couldn’t have fitted through any of these,” he pointed out.
“She did not come through here,” Dezra said. “But that does not mean she could not have. The entire town is riven with enchantments and illusions. This place is no different.”
She made a series of scything motions with her hands and the pages of the tome still floating before her rustled. Her deadlights convened at a particular point in the wall, just one of the slender cracks that ran through the rock. As Durik looked on, the wall seemed to run and melt like candle wax. The servants gasped and muttered fearfully as Dezra’s orbs ate away the stone, until what had been an unassuming split was a narrow passage, leading away into the dark.
Durik peered into it, eyes straining. Without Dezra’s magics there was no way any of them could have located the illusion-cloaked entrance. The air was dry and still, with an underlying stink that made his hairs bristle. A part of him was afraid, he realized. He suppressed it, as he always did. There were others counting on him. He didn’t have the luxury of fear.
“They are close,” Dezra intoned and, without so much as a glance back at Durik, advanced into the opened earth, her deadlights bobbing ahead. Durik looked back at Ronan, who was holding off with Carys. The northerner’s expression was impassive. Durik nodded to him. There was no turning back now. They had to press on and tear out the root of the evil that had lodged itself in this place, before it was too late.
They followed Dezra in.
• • •
A golden light transplanted the glow of Ulma’s flames. Logan groaned as he recognized it.
Ariad had returned. She had risen back up from amidst the arachyura and was limping towards them. Ulma’s blast had fused and melted the webbing that clad much of her left side, and her golden mask was split, a crack running like a lightning bolt from her left temple down through the eye to the chin. Her left arm hung uselessly at her side, but her right was outstretched. Wicked black talons had burst from the webbing cladding her fingertips.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got any more tricks in those pockets?” Logan asked Ulma urgently as she bore down on them. With some effort, the dwarf shook her head.
“I’m all out.”
“I’ll be honest,” Logan said, testing the arm and the leg that had been bitten by the arachyura earlier. “I don’t think I can stand up on my own, let alone with you.”
“Useless right to the end, you old rogue,” Ulma said, grinning at him with red teeth. Despite himself, Logan laughed.
Ariad was upon them. The swarm had rallied in her presence, moving with purpose once more as they surrounded Ulma and Logan. He managed to get up onto his feet, slowly, Ulma still lying beside him.
“You know, I’ve just realized something.”
“What?” Ulma asked, her one undamaged eye now closed.
“I’m not scared of spiders any more.”
He’d barely spoken the words before a flash of lightning bolted from the darkness around the edge of the chamber and earthed hard into Ariad’s right side. The arachyura queen stumbled back and hissed a flurry of un-words as the pale energy coursed over her. It flickered and died out, just in time for another burst to hammer her. A fresh wail rose up from the arachnid swarm.
More light was growing in the far corner of the chasm, yellow flames tainted green, as though a form of necrosis had somehow infected the fire. It burned from a crack in the jagged wall, writhing fitfully around the figure who had stepped through into the underground chamber.
“Dezra,” Logan said, as much for his own benefit as for Ulma’s. He hardly dared believe his eyes any more.
The necromancer hurled another blast of ethereal corpse energy that slammed into Ariad. The queen was reeling, her swarm churning around her in fresh disunity. Dezra continued to advance, an open book floating at her left hand, her long knife at her right. Balefire blazed about her feet and the orbs of deadlights danced around her head, deathly energies arcing between them. Despite the salvation she represented, Logan still felt a cloying, primal fear at the sight of such dark powers unleashed. In all their years together, he had never seen her so naturally embody the terrible majesty of Nordros.
Durik was moving forward in her wake, the pathfinder’s spear levelled. After him was the clan girl, Carys, clutching Durik’s knife, and then Ronan with his sword drawn, his familiar perched on his shoulder.
“We’re going to make it,” Logan shouted exultantly as he saw the group pushing towards them, Dezra’s flames rising up to illuminate the whole cavern. “By all the gods, Ulma, I knew we’d get through this!”
The dwarf didn’t respond. Ariad seemed to have rallied, the golden glow of her mask intensifying once more as she turned from Logan to face the new threat. He only wished her children had done the same – the arachyura around him hissed and lunged in once more, a rising flood of bristling black bodies. Teeth gritted against the effort of forcing his own numb muscles to obey, Logan raised his sword once more.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“The queen,” Dezra’s unnatural voice intoned, booming through the cavernous space. She was marching towards its center, her energies lashing at a web-bound, humanoid figure in the golden mask, surrounded by the largest arachyura Durik had ever seen. Malice oozed from the creature, a weight of dread that conjured up dark memories. Sudanya. A warren of stone ruins and temples, baking in the borderlands sun. An impenetrable web of tunnels below, infested with horrors ruled over by a masked predator. He remembered what Carys had said in the tower. A beast that wore a human guise.
It was all clear now. It was Ariad.
Durik had feared as much. The arachyura infestation, the web of illusions. It had been so long he’d refused to countenance that the ancient creature had survived and escaped the labyrinth, much less entrapped them all these years later. But the evidence was right before his eyes. Some predators were truly patient.
Dezra seemed intent on destroying the arachyura queen singlehandedly. Still in her trance, she pressed onwards, her flames igniting every spider that tried to block her path. All Durik could do was follow, spearing the shrieking creatures as they shriveled up in the necromancer’s unnatural fires.
He cast a glance back to the fissure they’d struggled through from the dungeon, hoping Carys and Ronan were holding back from entering the cave. They weren’t. Ronan was slaughtering arachyura seeking to rush in behind Dezra’s advance, fighting with a controlled, brutal efficiency. Short chops of his blade severed limbs and stabs burst swollen abdomens, his face a stony mask of concentrated effort. Durik found himself admiring the northerner’s fighting style.
Carys stayed in his shadow, guarding his back. The familiar was perched on her shoulder, aiding the thrusts of Durik’s borrowed knife – the arachyura recoiled from its presence, legs twitching frantically as they struggled in the arcane void it created.
“Keep the passage back to the castle clear,” Durik shouted at them, signaling to
the crack in the wall behind. Ronan offered a nod of understanding as he continued his butcher’s work.
Ahead of Durik, Dezra had nearly reached the brood of giant arachyura protecting Ariad. The burning glow being emitted by the queen clashed explosively with Dezra’s deadlights, searing away the darkness of the chasm and throwing great, struggling shadows across the uneven walls. Durik saw Dezra stumble. The competing energies blew out in a shockwave that scattered the nearest spiders and almost knocked Durik onto his back.
Dezra fell to her knees, her book and dagger tumbling to the ground on either side of her. Durik rushed to her side.
“She’s powerful,” the necromancer gasped, her voice her own again, eyes refocusing as she looked up at Durik. “Even more powerful than she was in Sudanya.”
“We can still beat her,” Durik said firmly, helping Dezra back to her feet. She clutched at her book with one hand, pointing with the other.
“Logan,” she said.
Durik followed the gesture and realized that balefire wasn’t all that suffused the cavern’s darkness. More natural flames were burning beyond where Ariad was still marshalling her monsters, picking out a frail, human figure beset by another wave of arachyura. He was standing over a prone body that Durik assumed had to be Ulma.
Hope leapt in Durik, combined with a surge of resolve. Logan was still fighting, and Ulma may yet be alive. Someone had to try and reach them.
The arachyura nearest to them had recovered from the sorcerous backlash. They rushed in, a chittering carpet of fat insectoid bodies and snapping maws. Durik speared one with a grunt, his tusks gritted, body burning with fresh adrenaline.
“Get to them,” he shouted, nodding to Logan and Ulma as he disentangled his weapon. “I’ll buy you time!”
The Doom of Fallowhearth Page 28