Small tendrils of ice-crusted snow nested inside of cracks, on the shadowed side of boulders, of ridges and trees. The giant, frozen webs of mountain spiders glistened back in the deeper clefts, some of them spreading out a net that would have laid over Gaud’s lodge hall. These ones, at least, long abandoned. Occasionally an old strand of webbing, thick as Kern’s forefinger, stretched across the trail, encased in ice, connecting boulders or scraggly, stunted fir, and pine.
Easy enough to see, the warriors simply ducked beneath. But Valerus’s mount took each across its neck or barrel-strong chest. Ice snapped, rained down across the trail in a short, bitter shower of splinters.
The cavalryman finally looked askance at Kern, who nodded at a magnificent, dead alder tilted against a rocky outcropping. This one had an abandoned carcass dangling from an upper branch. A buzzard hawk, or perhaps a small eagle. Trussed up in a spinning of ragged, yellowed silk, lowered from the side of the tree. Crusted with ice, it still had the semblance of that which had given the pass its name.
A noose.
Valerus smiled sickly and kept a closer eye on the tree line after that.
Kern as well. The feeling of being watched, hunted, was never so strong with him as now.
But the danger, when it came, fell first off the side of the nearby cliff face. Near a bend, where the trail narrowed up to a gray outcropping and a deadfall of old, shattered trees pressed in too close. Kern trotted near the front of the line, with Ehmish and Daol ahead in a competition for honor to see whose strength flagged first, the others strung out over several hundred paces and falling behind.
He saw the web, layered across the deadfall like a thin cord tying it all together. Sharp strands. Pale, milky white. Dangerous. But far enough off the path that he didn’t worry about it—his senses dulled from the hours afoot, mind wandering.
Then Daol hit the first strand of webbing stretched taut across the path.
Low, near his knees. And slightly translucent. But fresh. Catching around his legs as he stumbled forward, the one strand pulling up others that had been spun out over the ground in a strong mesh until his lower legs were wrapped and bound in the trap.
Daol yelled a warning, snatched out his sword and hacked quickly at the entrapping web. Ehmish faltered his next few steps, caught unawares as well. Looking for danger to either side, ahead and behind.
Never thinking to look up.
Kern, farther back, saw it move. The outcropping of what he had taken for grayish shale, or a light granite. There were footholds and fissures aplenty in the cliff face. Even a few small ledges. Any Cimmerian worth his honor could have scaled such an easy face at six years of age. No trouble for a giant spider, certainly.
Dark, mottled gray with chitinous armor and long, hook-shaped legs, the creature unfurled from its perch and stretched its forward limbs out in a kind of terrible dance. With a rusty screech, it turned and dropped halfway down the cliff side, catching itself one last time before it angled around and leaped at Daol. Massing eight-stone weight, easily, it bowled over the hapless warrior before he could even think to raise his blade at the threat. Grappling atop him. Mandibles striking down in their poisonous bite.
Hard.
And again.
Which was when Ehmish jumped up and over the treacherous webbing stretched out over the path, and with an earsplitting yell came down with both feet against the spider’s broad side. Kicking it off his friend before falling into the web strands himself.
Hardly more than two dozen strides behind, Kern had never known each step to take such a long time in coming. Dropping his sack of foodstuff, he pounded up the trail while calling for help from behind. His mouth ran bone dry as he caught a shadow of motion from the corner of one eye, spotting a second spider cresting the top of the deadfall, forward arms waving ahead of it as if feeling its way, and then a third and fourth rushed down off the steep slope to his right, chittering, screeching, ebony black mandibles clacking at empty air as they hastened to bite into fresh prey.
Nahud’r and Aodh had not been far behind Kern, and the two of them shouted him after Daol, even as they veered aside to head off the spider scrambling down the deadfall. The gray on its body was lighter, more the color of the aged wood, and the hairs tufted up around its joints and across its back finer. But it was larger, and moved with deadly intent.
“Daol!”
Ehmish struggled to sit up, drawing a few strands of webbing off the ground as he did so. Kern already had his short sword in hand and was just as worried for his lifelong friend as the younger man. He’d heard the mandibles strike. Tearing through flesh and . . .
Leather.
The beast had latched on to Daol’s back, biting into his quiver of arrows. Ehmish’s kick had rolled the monster away before it could dig into real flesh, it seemed, though it had sliced through the leather wrap and smashed most of his arrows into tinder by the looks of things. A small miracle, then.
Sensing a lack of body heat, or perhaps simply the lack of struggle from its captured prey, the spider dropped the lacerated leather pack and came again. This time for Ehmish, who was still slow to extract himself from the ground-anchored web. Daol sliced at one leg as it brushed past him, doing little more than chipping a slice out of its chitinous armor.
Yelling, trying to draw it off, Kern danced in at its other side, hacking and slashing his way past a blur of long, spindly legs, gouging at its bloated abdomen but having no more luck than Daol at slowing the beast.
That fell to Ehmish, actually, who had given up freeing himself. Instead, from all fours, he speared out with his broadsword, thrusting into the spider’s head, cracking the thinner armor on its face and wedging his sword between its poisonous mandibles.
The creature’s screech grated on the nerves, and it danced back and thrashed around as if struck with a palsy.
It brushed up against Daol, knocking him back, and over. Fearing the spider might turn on him again, Kern swung around behind and struck a defensive posture over his friend. He felt more than saw Daol scramble backward, clearing away from the creature. Making some choking sounds at the foul stench rising off it.
It choked Kern as well, raising his gorge, which burned at the back of his throat. Standing his ground, though, he reined in his fear and cursed himself for a lack of wits. Following Ehmish’s lead, thrusting forward this time as Wallach Graybeard had taught him to use a short sword, Kern skewered the spider’s side, slicing through armor and into the softer mess of the bloated abdomen.
The spider wailed a demonic cry, quivering, thrashing about wildly now as it sought to escape. Kern twisted his sword, goring the creature. Ehmish thrust again for its head, missed. Then struck true. And again.
Another stab, Kern thought. Not much more to it than that.
But before he could yank his sword free of the carapace, a loop of white cord dropped over his head from behind and above, followed by a sharp rap to the back of his head as the noose pulled tight, and something else cracked against his skull, lighting off sparks of pain.
Couldn’t breathe. That was his first fear as the noose choked him.
His second was for Ehmish, as the cord yanked him backward, off his feet and away from the giant spider.
Dragging him around the trail’s bend.
18
FOULED IN THE webbed strands laid out over the ground, his legs tangled and one hip anchored down by a thick, viscous rope, Ehmish propped himself up on one arm (careful of sticking his hand in more webbing) and thrust his broadsword again into the spider’s face. And again.
This time the loathsome creature clamped down on the blade. By reflex, if not some maddened attempt to kill the offending weapon. It was all he could do to hold on to his prize, the silver-chased weapon he’d taken off a Ymirish after that winter battle over the Pass of Blood. To wrestle with the verminous creature, to try and close his ears to its horrible screeching, and to curse himself for getting everyone into such a danger.
His fault.
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Ehmish could have warned someone. He had smelled the trap, running up on the deadfall. A bitter, caustic scent that called up a memory of rotted eggs. Or that sulfurous stench from the rock flow plains east of Ben Morgh . . . but not quite. A waft of decay and evil, stinging his sinuses as he paced—pushed—alongside Daol, gasping for breath, wiping sweat from his brow.
But then Daol had pushed ahead on their run, with a longer stride and deep, deep reserves it seemed, and the only thing left in the younger man’s thoughts had been to catch him. Catch up, keep up, and show the veteran hunter that he had skills to offer.
Looking, of course, to earn more of a man’s honor.
He knew they all still thought of him as the boy. The youth who had stubbornly, even stupidly, cast his lot with Kern Wolf-Eye, giving up clan and kin for some hot-blooded thirst for vengeance. Vengeance against the Vanir who had killed his friend and stolen Maev from the clan.
At the time, he was certain that it was what a man should do. Looking back, he now knew he’d made the right choice, but for the wrong reasons. If a man would swear himself to a leader, it should be one who upheld that trust of honor. Cul Chieftain had made some hard decisions, and whether or not they were right for the clan at the time, Ehmish knew he had not believed in them. And there had been Kern. Standing up for himself and never once apologizing for who he was.
Wolf blood, they said. Winter spawn.
This, the man Ehmish had come to look upon as no one else in his life save his own father. Not that he’d ever say so to Kern and sound even more the youth. It was enough that he knew. He knew.
But when the giant spider had first skittered down the rock face and leaped at Daol with that terrible screech, he had forgotten everything. That Kern ran not too far behind him. That he really was so young and so dependent on the others. He forgot everything but the fact that he had smelled the trap and not warned anyone, and that Daol was about to die for it.
Cimmerians don’t fear death. They wrestle with it every day. And they win, by Crom. They win till the day they die.
His father’s words. True to the end.
He did not fear death.
Ehmish did not even bother to consider the danger as he leaped forward, vaulting the web strands lifting up off the ground, clinging to Daol, and kicked out as hard as he could into the spider’s swollen abdomen. Throwing it off his friend. But he landed hard, on his side. His breath rushed out between clenched teeth, and he felt a sharp snag yank at the back of his head. His hair, long and straight as it fell back behind his shoulders, now tangled in a spider’s webbing.
Yelling against the pain, Ehmish tore himself off the ground, leaving long strands of dark hair and a small patch of scalp behind. Twisting about to get at his broadsword, ignoring the strands of web wrapping about his legs, he managed to get onto his side and up onto one arm in time to jab his blade right into the creature’s face. Feeling with some satisfaction the crack of carapace and cartilage. The spider’s pain-filled shriek grating through his ears and piercing his brain.
And the stench. It nearly knocked him flat again. More than spoiled eggs. There was a pungent, diseased touch to it that reminded him of a horribly decayed corpse, the kind of carrion that not even the most desperate of scavengers would approach.
By swallowing back the oily, rancid taste building at the back of his throat, Ehmish kept to his senses and kept the heavy blade between himself and the nightmarish creature. Finally, ending up in the tug-of-war contest, as Daol scrambled back and away, then Kern was apparently brushed aside to stagger back toward the bend in the trail.
It was several shallow breaths before he realized that he was alone.
The spider flailed and thrashed about, releasing his sword as it went into a series of violent convulsions. Screeching. Giving off the Crom-cursed odor that made him nearly vomit. His vision had narrowed with battle fever, focusing down on the threat to his life, but Ehmish was sound enough to hear the calls of support, of encouragement, that chased up at him from the trail behind.
A glance in their direction. He saw Reave and Desa chasing another of the gray-mottled nightmares back into the trees. Nahud’r sliced and danced around another one, much closer, his scimitar slicing shallow grooves into its flailing legs, driving it back up the side of the deadfall.
And Gard leading a charge, with Ossian and Brig Tall-Wood right behind him, running up with weapons bared and ferocious snarls twisting their faces as they rushed to save him. Save the boy.
Too late. The giant mountain spider, wounded and maddened beyond any instinct to escape, rose up on its four hind legs, screeching, waving the other four hook-shaped limbs in the air in some kind of challenge. Then it fell forward, rushing Ehmish, its long limbs scrabbling about the bloated, mottled body.
He hadn’t much strength left to fight it off. And its mandibles dripped with fresh, yellow poison.
Ehmish never flinched. In one long slash, he circled his broadsword back, up, and around. Near the top of the blade’s arc, he arched his body up as high as he could, bringing his other hand off the ground. Gripping the hilt with both hands as he put every last ounce of strength into bringing the broadsword over the top. And crashing down.
Splitting the creature’s head open.
Driving it into the rocky trail in a final, abrupt stop.
Ehmish panted shallow and uneven. Eyes open but unseeing for a moment. The world came back slowly, centered first on a burning pain. A spray of poisoned spittle had splashed along the blade, and a few drops stung against the backs of his hands.
But pain was fine. Welcome, even. It meant he was still alive.
The shouts and pounding of feet against rocky earth helped rouse him. The sharp, acid bite of the stench rolling off the dead spider nearly put him back out.
Lying full along the ground, Ehmish stared up past his outstretched arms, past the blade. He ignored the spasmic twitching of eight great legs and stared into the ruined, gaping horror of the spider’s face. Black ichor mixed with venom. A reddish pus oozed out of the top of a great, terrible gash he had cleft into the creature. The rancid taste in his mouth was strong, and overpowering. And he did the only thing he felt a man could do under the circumstances.
He vomited.
Then he passed out.
GARD FOEHAMMER’S WORLD still had a fine gray veil drawn across it. Just enough to dull the edges and deepen the shadows. He lived in perpetual twilight, and at times he was almost used to it.
Almost.
Sliding down off the slope which he and Desa and Ossian had climbed, hunting the spiders, he kicked through some dead skyberry brush and jumped the last drop-off. Pike held across his body for balance, he landed in a crouch beside a thin patch of crusted snow. Just behind the deadfall where the spiders had set their traps, he could see around the trail’s bend, but not the way they had originally come.
Behind him, Desa and Ossian were more cautious in their descent. Taking a surer, slower footing.
“Anything?” Finn called over. The old man waited on the other side of the turn, with Danon and Garret, standing watch over Ehmish. Despite the constant pain in his knees, Old Finn stomped about, pacing a tight circle, sword in hand and looking ready to charge the dark abyss itself.
Gard held an arm out to one side and slashed downward. Once.
Nothing.
The old snow crunched underfoot, like stepping on dry cinders in a cold fire pit. Nothing wrong with his hearing. Stepping back, he crouched and stared at the crust he’d disturbed. From directly above his footprint, he could hardly see it. The blanket was a dull, unyielding, and dingy white. Leaning to one side, he caught enough shadow to make out the barest outline of the crushed surface.
What use was he in searching for Kern and Daol?
It was a bitter question, and unfair. He knew his limitations, and knew as well that the partial blindness had done nothing to interfere with their search up the mountainside. There simply had not been anything to find. No trail sig
n. No blood.
No bodies.
No human bodies, anyway. The number of animals wrapped up in cocoons, swinging from the branches of tall fir and pine like a hundred swaying nooses, had not sat well with him. That, or the silence. Forests were not meant to be quiet places. Not even on top of a mountain, where winter rarely released its hold. Forests were living things. Full of life and sounds.
This one was a graveyard.
Ossian slid down the final length. Desa after him. He stomped his feet against the hard earth, knocking some hard, clumping mud off the side of his boots, and the three of them walked over to join the nearby group. Everyone else had scattered farther up the trail, trying to uncover any sign of how, or where, Kern and Daol had disappeared. Everyone but the Aquilonian soldier, Valerus. After recovering his spooked warhorse, he had ridden back down the trail to scout the way they’d come. Just in case.
The giant spider’s death scent had nearly cleared away, and once around the bend it had all but vanished. Still, Gard rubbed at his nose and took to breathing shallowly through his mouth. Ehmish, seated on the hard ground with his back to the rock wall, glanced up with a questioning look. Wanting more than a wave.
“Nay sign,” Ossian said. The others didn’t know whether to look disheartened or happy. The Taurian had obviously made up his mind, though. “If they weren’t dragged away by the spiders, they could still be alive,” he reminded everyone. Smoothed a hand back over his shaved head. “I nay want to be cutting Kern or Daol out of a cocoon.”
“Tracked one to a tree lair,” Desa said. “Nothing up in the branches large enough to be a man. The other had a hole in the ground not far up the side of the slope there. We didn’t go knocking, but it was obvious that nothing fresh had been dragged through.”
Garret scratched at the scars beneath his eye patch. “Brig and Wallach gutted the other one,” he said, “so that’s all.”
“All we know about,” Finn muttered, and stomped off down the trail to join a small group of the others, who returned after scouting farther along. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say to that. Singly or in pairs, the others began to drift after him, certainly hoping that something could be found.
Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Page 20