by Layton Green
He took the bark in his hands, concentrated, and his palms glowed red. As he held the bark skyward, twin rays of moonlight-colored light shot from his palms and into the canopy above.
Alexander waved the beams of light around for long minutes. Finally they illuminated a patch of red light on another tree branch, twenty feet from the first one and about the same height. The party moved underneath that branch, then found another spot of red light a few trees away.
“By the Queen,” Mala said, staring upwards. “It’s traveling in the canopy.”
It was slow-going, but whatever they were following seemed to be moving in roughly a straight line. Alexander and Allira led the way, Alexander searching with his magic, Allira pointing out probable limbs and branches. Hashi and Fochik ranged out to the sides, guarding their flanks.
Val felt the familiar coldness settling in, the dispassionate clear-headedness that always aided him in times of crisis. It was one of his greatest strengths. At times his temper would flare, such as when one of his brothers was kidnapped in the middle of the night by a terrifying and unknown entity, but for the most part Val thought calmly and quickly under fire.
Unfortunately, there was not much he could do at the moment, except stay aware of the big picture. He helped Allira scan for telltale traces of red light, kept an eye on Caleb, tried to piece together what might have happened. Anything to keep his mind off Will.
He also maintained a constant and futile effort to unlock his magic. Even if he learned to use it, he couldn’t imagine how hard it must be to access magic in the heat of battle.
Val moved next to Mala. “Any idea what we’re tracking?”
“Allira thinks the substance is residue from some type of web,” she said.
“As in the web of a spider?” Caleb asked.
“I’ve no idea.”
“Are there spiders that could . . . do that?”
“There are a few species large enough, but no spider I know of possesses this sort of intelligence.” Her mouth was grim. “It’s possible we’re dealing with the creation of a Menagerist. A hybrid.”
“Explain to me what a Menagerist does,” Val said.
“In the old days, whatever they wished. In modern times it’s unlawful to create intelligent creatures, but it’s common knowledge the Southern Protectorate harbors renegade Menagerists. Another explanation could be that we’re facing a creature that’s survived from the Old World. Those, too, are rumored to exist in the Southern. Neither is something we wish to face.”
“So Menagerists breed different types of creatures?” Val asked. “Why?”
“The reasons vary: utility, protection, scientific experimentation, curiosity. But Menagerists don’t breed, or at least not initially—they fuse. I hear the process is incredibly involved and difficult, and at times takes . . . multiple attempts.”
Val gritted his teeth.
The forest dragged on forever. Val had the brief thought that whatever had taken Will might have . . . disposed of him . . .along the way. He shook that thought away as if it were a slug crawling on his face.
Two hours into the chase, they entered an eerie, shallow swamp filled with bare cypress trees. The prolonged whoooo of a great horned owl announced their presence, echoing as they splashed through the water and stepped over and around the maze of gnarled roots rising just above the surface. It was a vast sunken forest, a home to things that lurked and slithered and crawled. Grim and silent, the party waded through the pea-colored soup, breathing in the smell of decay.
“Shouldn’t we be worried about gators?” Caleb asked.
“Yes,” Lance said.
Marguerite was knee-deep in the brackish water. “The noise’ll scare most of ’em off, if they aren’t too hungry. And it’s too shallow for crocosaurs.”
Her words did little to ease Val’s mind. They were hours from camp in the Southern Protectorate, pursuing an unknown creature deep into a sprawling swamp that was growing creepier with each step.
Val jumped when Hashi and Fochik emerged out of the darkness. Hashi held a finger to his lips, and Alexander dimmed the light to a ten-foot cone of illumination. Hashi’s finger curled, motioning everyone forward, and Val crowded behind Alexander and Mala.
They crept in silence through the swamp, following Hashi as he navigated a huge root system and then squeezed between two dead oaks. When Val saw what lay beyond the fallen trees, a shudder of fear swept over him, and he clenched his staff.
Deep into the moonlit swamp, as far as Val could see, glistening strands of silk spread between the trees and down to the roots, masses and masses of sheet-like webs and ropy connective tissue, swathing the fen in a silver cocoon.
Spaced at intervals throughout the labyrinth of webs, like cans of food in a pantry, were silk-wrapped bundles lying on their sides, some of them as long as a human being. Val could see the fabric of one of the bundles stretching from the inside out, a victim trying to escape.
His face white, Lance pointed out the exposed top half of one of the bundles. Inside was a human corpse in a state of advanced decomposition, as if something had gorged on the fresh meat until full and then left the body to rot.
“Jesus Christ,” Val said, trying not retch.
Caleb wasn’t so successful. When he was finished, he wiped his mouth and choked on his next word. “Will . . . .”
“He’s here, somewhere,” Mala said, her voice hard. “Let’s hope he’s still alive.”
Val took a long, shuddering breath. “Alexander—can you fly above this thing and look for my brother?”
Alexander nodded, face pale, and rose into the air. Mala put a hand on his cloak. “Not yet,” she said. “You’ll be too exposed. Let’s draw out the proprietor.”
Alexander descended. “How? It’s too risky to ignite the web. I might burn Will.”
She unsheathed her sword and sliced through a long strand of mesh. It snapped and fluttered to the ground. “No creature likes its home destroyed.”
Everyone with a blade started cutting through the web, Val swinging more viciously than anyone. It was slow going and his thoughts were dark. Maybe this obscene lair belonged to a different creature altogether, and Will was miles away. Maybe the entire swamp was infested. Val focused on slicing through the inch-thick strands, grunting in satisfaction with each blow.
Before they had advanced twenty feet, Hashi was jerked straight into the air and flung into a vertical, carpet-like section of the web. Val looked up and saw a thing from his worst nightmare standing high above them, palm extended in Hashi’s direction, retracting a whip-like silken cord into a hole in its palm. The creature was a humanoid-arachnid hybrid that had a large sac on its back and pincer claws protruding from its cheeks. It looked at them with four eyes set in a row above its malformed mouth, then skittered across the web on two legs.
Fochik fired an arrow. It bounced off the rounded carapace. The creature discharged another strand, then swung into darkness.
“Light!” Mala yelled.
Alexander filled the sky with moon-colored light, exposing a vast network of webs and dozens more of the silk-wrapped bundles. The creature was nowhere in sight. Val worked to control his growing terror.
Hashi was struggling in the center of the web but couldn’t free himself. Mala pointed at him. “Alexander, see if you can free him. Keep aware.”
Alexander flew towards Hashi, knife in hand. As soon as the geomancer took to the air, Val heard a noise to his right. He turned in time to see the same monster land on a tree branch not twenty feet away. It shot twin webs from its palms, attaching to Allira and Caleb. Before it could yank them backwards, before Val had time to blink, Mala whipped her sash through the air. It spun around the creature’s head and made a dull thunk as it took out one of its eyes.
The creature let out an inhuman screech. Its silken cables retracted, releasing Allira and Caleb, and it hopped straight into the air and caught a branch above its head. Fochik fired another arrow, this time at the front of
its chest, but it clanged off again.
“Exoskeleton,” Mala hissed. “Go for its face.”
Fochik released another arrow, Allira a boomerang, but the thing was too fast. It shot ropy strands from its palms and swung through the trees, then darted across the surface of the web, disappearing into a tunnel of silk.
Val turned in time to see Alexander hovering above Hashi, working to cut him loose. Just as he freed Hashi’s arms, another of the creatures, even larger and with an ominous blood-red sac on its back, dropped down behind Alexander.
Val screamed to warn him, but it was too late. Twin bolts of silk burst from the thing’s palms, smacking Alexander in the back and thrusting him into a cypress tree five feet away. The geomancer’s head slammed against the trunk and he slumped to the ground.
Fochik let out a fierce battle cry and hacked at the web with his hatchet, trying to reach Hashi. Val was closer. He sliced through the thick strands with his staff, yelling to distract the creature. It turned and hit Val in the stomach with a baseball-sized projectile from its palm spinneret. Val flew backwards into the web, stuck to the powerful adhesive.
The first creature dropped down behind Marguerite, greenish ichor oozing from its eye, and jerked both Marguerite and Caleb into the web. Val roared in frustration. Mala took out another eye with her dagger, but this time the thing thrust its palms towards her while it screamed, encasing the gypsy adventuress in silk before she could advance. It spun her around and around, like a mini-tornado, then let the mummified package fall to the ground.
Lance moved towards Mala, but Val watched in horror as a third and smaller creature hovered in the web above Lance, attaching twin ropes of silk to Lance’s head and lifting him into the air.
Fear grasped Val by the throat. He had just watched their best fighters put out of commission in seconds.
Fochik chopped his way towards Hashi, but the creature with the red sac met him halfway. Fochik’s hatchet slammed into its chest but couldn’t penetrate the exoskeleton, and the spider thing lunged forward, attaching its maw to Fochik’s face. The pincers closed around Fochik’s head, causing him to scream and convulse in pain.
Val gave the magic everything he had, poured every ounce of will-power into making it work. Nothing. He snarled in frustration. Everyone was injured or caught in the web, and it was only matter of time before the creatures wrapped them in silk and devoured them one by one.
He saw a light in the corner of his eye. He whipped his head around. Mala’s cocooned form glowed red and then her shell exploded outward. She rolled forward, sword and dagger in hand. This time she dove under the silken missiles, coming up beside the first monster and slicing off its left hand. At the same time, Lance and the smaller creature plummeted to the ground next to them, splashing into the swamp. Lance was clinging onto the thing’s sac with a crazed look on his face, one hand gripping the top of its head, the other hand ripping his war hammer out of the cracked carapace. He swung again, tearing an even larger hole in the sac and then jerking his hammer free as the thing toppled to the ground, ichor spilling out of the crushed shell.
“Crush the sac!” Lance yelled. “Spiders keep their vitals inside!”
The creature facing Mala went berserk when it saw the fate of the smaller creature. Its face contorted and it tried to leap, but Mala thrust her short sword into its sac as it left the ground, slicing right through the exoskeleton. The creature shrieked and stumbled, then crashed to the ground next to the smaller one. Mala cut off the heads of both spider monsters with vicious swipes of her blades.
With a burst of strength, Hashi finally managed to pull free from the web, rolling to avoid a bite from the largest creature. The Chickasaw leapt to his feet, faster than Val would have thought a man that size could move, then whipped his cudgel with incredible force at the monster’s crimson sac. The cudgel smashed through the carapace, collapsing it like a deflated beach ball. The spider thing shriveled and curled, dead before it hit the ground.
Val didn’t waste a moment. “Find Will!”
Mala gestured towards the web as she cut Val loose. “Allira, see to Fochik and Alexander. Everyone else spread out and check these cocoons. Quickly. I’ve no more fire beads, and the Queen knows how many of these things are here.”
No one needed any prompting. They rushed through the web, checking the ghastly cocoons one by one. Just as Alexander’s artificial moonlight began to dissolve, Val and Caleb found Will by his screams, encased in a silken bundle in the middle of the web. When they cut him loose, he was shaking uncontrollably.
Alexander managed to stand on his own, Lance was limping, and Hashi used strands from the web to lash Fochik to his back. The party fled into the swamp, Will ghost-white and silent, Fochik’s shrieks of pain ringing in Val’s ears.
-34-
The flight back through the swamp was terrifying: splashing through the muck in darkness, constantly afraid more spider people would drop down behind them. Though to Will, the nighttime journey paled in comparison to being cocooned as living prey, without sound or sight or hope.
When they broke through to higher ground, Will had never felt so relieved. They returned to camp, gathered the horses, and left. Mala made them march until the light of dawn seeped into the sky.
They stopped beside the ocean again. Fochik’s skin and mangled face had turned a sickly bluish color, his breathing labored and uneven. Allira hovered over him with a worried expression Will had never seen from her. Alexander had a giant knot on his forehead but otherwise seemed fine.
Everyone collapsed in a tight circle to sleep. Everyone except Mala, who chewed on a root as she sat cross-legged facing the forest, and Val, who sat by the water’s edge, staring intently at the leaf in his left hand.
Mala woke them a few hours later and declared they were pushing through the Southern Protectorate. She estimated they would clear it by nightfall. Will would do anything not to spend another night inside that godforsaken place.
He ignored his brothers’ attempts to soothe him, and rode alone behind Mala and Alexander. Val and Caleb were behind him. Lance and Hashi had fashioned a stretcher on which to carry Fochik between their horses, with Allira hovering behind.
By midmorning the scenery opened up into more of a forest and less of a jungle. A few hours later, Will heard the patter of approaching hoof beats. Neither Mala nor Alexander looked surprised, so Will swallowed his apprehension.
A group of Chickasaw appeared out of the trees to the north. One of the riders wore a feathered headdress and body paint. Hashi rode out to meet them and, after a brief discussion, led the two horses carrying Fochik to the new party. The warriors set him on the ground while the medicine man bent over him.
Hashi rejoined Will’s party without a word, and Mala signaled for the journey to resume.
“Do you think he’ll survive?” Alexander asked Mala in a quiet voice.
“The poison was very strong,” she said. “But their healer might know of a local antidote.”
It was not discussed, but Will found it curious Hashi had stayed with their group.
By early evening, the path curved to the Northeast and the forest thinned even further, allowing the horses to canter. Lance rode up beside Will. His bald head, kept shorn by a straight razor he had picked up at the general store on Magazine, had bronzed during the journey. His arms bulged out of his sleeveless leather jerkin, his leg had healed preternaturally fast, and he looked even more fit and imposing than usual.
Lance gave Will one of his easy smiles, though Will could see the wary tension behind it: a soldier-ready-for-battle look that had tightened Lance’s face ever since they had entered this world. “Hey buddy.”
“Hey,” Will replied, in monotone.
“Mind if I join you? I feel like we haven’t talked much on the trip.”
“That’s because we haven’t.”
Lance rode in silence for a few moments. “It’s okay to be afraid,” he said finally. “We all get scared, at least those o
f us with a soul. Scared and horrified and unbearably sad.”
It wasn’t what Will expected to hear. He hadn’t thought he wanted company, but he realized how relieved he was to talk to someone, especially Lance. Sometimes everyone needed to be around that friend who loved you no matter what, despite your colossal, irreversible character flaws. Not family, he thought, because they have to love you, but a friend dealing with the absurdities of life just like him, and who had chosen him to share them with.
Will looked straight ahead as he spoke. “When that thing carried me to the web, it took me to the center and left me lying on my back. Stuck to the web. There was another spider creature, the one with the red sac. It was hovering over a cocoon. The top half had been sliced off, and I saw a Chickasaw woman inside, with her head and torso exposed. She looked . . . decomposed. I watched the two spider people bend over her with those awful mouths, one attached to her arm, one on her face. They made these awful sucking sounds and when they raised up, parts of that woman were gone. They were feeding on her, Lance. I thought that was the worst thing I’d ever seen in my life . . . and then she moaned.”
Lance’s eyes widened.
“I don’t know how she was still alive, but I think they keep their victims in the cocoons, decompose them with their venom, and eat them alive over a few days. When they finished feeding, they came over and cocooned me.”
Lance’s Adam’s apple bobbed before he spoke. “I can’t even imagine what you were feeling, waiting to die like that.”
Will balled his fists. “We shouldn’t have left them.”
“What? Who?”
“The other people in there. The other victims.”
Lance looked away. “We didn’t have a choice. Who knows how many more of the creatures were around?”
“We should have tried,” Will muttered.
“How many others did you see?”