by K. J. Coble
“That was some slick work,” Strayden said, extending his hand to her.
“You boys always find your way into such creative fixes,” she replied, muffled by the torch, and accepting his help and dropping at last into the safety of the first corridor. She pulled the torch from her teeth, spat, and grinned. The grin faded when she saw the Xyxian scowling. “It takes a problem-solver to get you out.”
Kham didn’t appear to get her reference. “You expect the rest of us to crawl along there like that?” he asked sourly.
“Well, I’m not carrying your ass,” Strayen snapped at him.
The climb back took far longer, Asyra supervising as the Vothans and Xass Kham took their turns scuttling along the wall. The Xyxian, himself, showed rather more skill than the huge barbarians, who slipped and cursed and nearly fell into the hissing sand that continued its sluice into nothingness, somewhere far below. She brought up the rear after making certain the line was secure on the far side.
Returned to the other corridor, she found the little party already on the move, their torches fluttered ahead into the hallway, Xass Kham in the lead with daring he hadn’t shown before. She scurried to catch up, elbowing past the Vothans to get to the head of the column, where Strayden prowled just at the Xyxian’s flank, one hand holding a torch high; the other clenched at his sword handle.
The corridor opened suddenly into a wide space. Kham came to a halt, looked all around. Squinting, Strayden held his torch up, waited as its uncertain light crept to the high corners of the chamber. Unlike the dome above, the elements had never touched this place and only a faint dust obscured the details here. As Asyra stood at the Vothan captain’s side and held out her own torch, those details became clear.
They stood at the edge of a high-vaulted, hexagonal room, stone buttresses dividing its faces and meeting at a point lost in shadow above. Five hulking statues faced inward and torchlight revealed not effigies of long-dead men, but weird, stooped figures of strange armor and vaguely arachnoid limbs and fingers. Stepping further into the chamber, Asyra played her torch over the angled walls and beheld hieroglyphs and pictograms like they’d seen during their descent—more scenes of spidery slaughter.
Xass Kham appeared to pay none of this any mind as he drifted towards the middle of the chamber. The flagstones of the floor had been laid in patterns that angled to a central point, occupied by a plinth, upon which sat a stone plaque. As Kham’s torch fluttered over this, the surface gleamed back, seemed made of a marble shined to glassy perfection. Set across this surface, letterings of a purple-hued gold flared out.
“This is it,” Kham murmured.
A growl of pleasure sounded from behind Asyra and she turned to find the Vothans spreading out into the room. Torchlight caught the flicker of gems affixed into the walls, into the statues. Vidar had already gotten out a knife and was working to pry one loose from the wall, a ruby made to look like the cyclopean eye of some bulbous horror.
“Careful,” Asyra began to say, tensing, but Strayden laid a hand on her shoulder and shook his head.
“Let ‘em have their way, now, lass,” he rumbled.
“After what we’ve seen,” she protested, “there could be more traps.”
“Aye,” he agreed, but didn’t relent. “And they’ll just have to learn that lesson themselves.”
Asyra wanted to add that, the way things had gone already, learning that lesson might actually affect them all. But her attention was drawn, along with Strayden’s, to Xass Kham, hovering over the plaque, whispering something to himself. Together, the pair joined the Xyxian before it. The surface was so perfect, his features were reflecting back at him, as was the obvious mania shining in his eyes.
“This what you came for?” Strayden prodded him from the side.
Kham’s face snapped about to glare zealously at the Vothan. “Don’t touch me!” he snapped. A fleck of spittle glinted white at the corner of his lip. “And stand away! This is the critical point.”
Snorting, Strayden backed away with his hands up in mock surrender. “I guess that’s yes,” he rumbled.
Asyra retreated likewise, though she kept her eyes on the plaque. None of the letterings made any sense to her, but seemed to be more of the ancient Xyxian script. Kham’s whispering resumed and he spread his hands over the stone, fingers splayed wide. She wasn’t sure what she saw at first, but as his murmuring continued, the letters seemed to take on a faint, ember glow, one at a time.
Skin beginning to crawl, Asyra turned to the Vothan. “This is your chance.” She nodded around at the bejeweled walls. “You’d better take it. I don’t think we should linger here after our slippery Xyxian colleague is done.”
A single sweat track glimmered down the side of Strayden’s face. He seemed almost hesitant, but nodded, especially as he saw Ivar laughing with a huge sapphire pulled loose and held high. One of the others had climbed up on the nearest statue, was working at a gem mounted in what looked like its face. Sighing, Strayden drifted off to join the plunder.
Asyra made to prowl the perimeter of the room, scanning the floor, the walls, the weird effigies. But her curiosity remained fixed upon Kham and his strange task. His murmur continued, what became clear now as some sort of words of power. She’d heard such from Lyssa enough to know the type. And, sure enough, the glow she’d noticed on the letters spread to new characters, lit the Xyxian’s features like some otherworldly flame that intensified as he intoned.
Out of the corner of her eye, a detail caught Asyra’s attention. Turning away from Xass Kham and the merrily pilfering Vothans, she beheld another pictogram, but this one absent of the spider beasts. A fiercely handsome man sat atop a throne of black, worked with details of skulls and spikes. His headdress and regalia made him royalty and his stare out from the wall affixed the attention like a hypnotist’s charm.
Shuddering, Asyra suspected she knew the identity of the man—the last man to hold power in this terrible place, even long after he was no longer a man. But it was not the visage of Thyss-Mallik that snagged her, held her mind, pricked deeper. At his side stood a jet-haired woman of timeless, stern beauty, the artist of the imagery having caught a sardonic, almost cruel curve of her lip and the cold, cold stare of her eyes.
Asyra knew those eyes, those lips, that presence—had seen it whirling in the sands, had heard its voice in the wind.
She heard it now, again. Time has separated us. No longer.
“Yes!”
The Xyxian’s cackle of triumph burst through Asyra’s mind. She realized she’d been reaching out for the likeness of the woman. Startled—furious—she spun to Xass Kham and whatever nonsense had excited him now. But the snarl ready at her lips withered as she beheld his work.
The plaque no longer glowed; it glared, filled with some internal illumination that made it shine like flame caught in glass. The lurid, reddish light bathed his face, carved fiendish shadows from his huge smile, lit his eyes up like pyres. It didn’t just look like success; it looked like ecstasy. And Asyra knew nothing that could make the viperous Xyxian that enthused could be good for any of the rest of them.
“Uh...” Strayden stepped away from a wall, where he’d been working the point of a dagger under a knob of blue-gold. The increasing intensity of the glow highlighted his scowl of alarm. “Maybe step back a bit?”
“The wards,” Kham almost sobbed. “It worked. They are broken. The power—her power—will be unleashed!”
A jolt went through Asyra. Her power...?
Fumes had begun to rise from the plaque and the glow spread to its plinth mounting. The first hint of uncertainty flickered across Xass Kham’s face and he backed away a step, towards Strayden. Something flashed white on the plaque, dropped off. Another. Droplets. The thing was melting.
“Knew it,” Strayden growled. He turned and shouted to the others, “Finish up! It’s getting weird again!”
The Vothans groaned in complaint until their gazes went to the sagging, smoking plaque,
felt the heat that beaded sweat instantly across their flesh. In a rush, they began to gather their loot, finish their plundering. Strayden put a hand on Kham’s shoulder, began to pull, even as the Xyxian continued his wild-eyed gawk.
You should leave, the voice said in Asyra’s mind, full of urgency. She turned to look at the pictogram again. The image’s lips almost seemed to move, writhing red. Leave them, if you have to. This will be no place for you in a moment.
“Why?” she asked, surprised herself by doing so out loud.
The heat in the chamber was rising and the rest of the plaque slopping down over the sagging plinth. Glowing trails of molten glass traced patterns through cracks between flagstones, revealed shapes like arrows pointing out to the hexagonal walls. The glowing melt reached those with a hiss of stone instantly burning.
Crack!
The hieroglyphs of the upper half of one of the walls puffed dust and began to splinter, crumble, shower down with a hiss of ongoing disintegration. It spread to the other upper-wall panels, the air darkening with fumes that set Vothans to coughing, gagging for breath.
Asyra sprang back just as a section of the wall above her collapsed, obscuring the image of the queenly face and her wicked consort. She retreated a step, had to dodged as a fully-intact peel of hieroglyphs struck before her, powdered, had to skip as she nearly planted a foot in the molten sludge that still left the sole of her boot hot, even though she missed it.
And then a screech from above tore the dusty air. She looked up at noise no human throat could make. By the wildly fluttering light of torches, she saw things burst from the walls, wriggle out, leap, and land with flailing, many-legged motions.
Many-legged...
Asyra saw the horrid shapes of the pictograms come to life before her, and added her screams to the cacophony.
STRAYDEN OF STARAD pissed himself.
It happened sometimes in the shield wall; men unmanned by fear. There was no shame in it, only in running. But he wanted to do that, too, as the things tumbled down around them.
Athelm went down to his left, knocked face first to the floor as one of the monsters landed on him. Hideous, hairy legs floundered for purchase, lifted a bulbous abdomen over the Vothan’s stunned form. He tried to crawl free, didn’t look like he’d realized what had struck him. He looked up at Strayden, helm knocked slightly askew, eyes wide in confusion.
Glistening, ebony fangs emerged from the spider-thing’s face—if it could be called that—and shot down. One slid through the chain mail over Athelm’s shoulder with hardly any resistance. The other punched through his conical helm with a clack of parting metal. The confusion remained in his eyes, even as they fogged over in death.
Strayden shrieked, didn’t recognize the sound as having come from his throat. His mind filled with memories of that hut he’d squatted in with his mother, ages ago in the Vothan hinterlands. He remembered a hard storm. He remembered the thatched roof’s sudden collapse. And he remembered the eight-legged tide that boiled down over him, crawling, biting.
He started to Athelm’s aid, ripping his sword from its sheath. But something thudded to the floor at his side, caused him to spin reflexively. The spider-beast there was still righting itself after its leap from above and wheeling to face him. It looked to be the size of a pony—perhaps an over-sized wolf—the horrid spread of its legs giving the appearance of size it didn’t actually possess. But those legs launched it at Strayden with speed no wolf could match.
Strayden slashed without thought, screaming shrilly. Something tacky and warm greased his forearm and the thing leapt back with a screech even higher than his. It staggered, dragging a cloven front leg with it, trailing slimy ichor across the flagstones. But it didn’t give Strayden time to take advantage of the wound. It tensed and leapt again.
He stabbed straight out—the thing’s murderous speed so great he didn’t have time for anything else. Impact drove him backwards until he slammed against the base of one of the statues. He felt his steel crunch through something hard, like a bootheel on dead insects, then slide into something softer, quivering, and halt. The hideous shape floundered against him, stinking of hair and old, old dust and something inexplicably alien.
But it couldn’t advance further, the sword point buried halfway up its length between bristly pedipalps and quivering, drooling fangs. Strayden gasped, pushed the horrid weight back. It convulsed. Wildly fluttered torchlight glinted off the rows of its soulless eyes. A leg brushed at his sleeve feebly, barbed hairs catching, snagging for a moment before it dropped away.
The thing sagged from him, rolled onto one side, legs twitching, folding in upon themselves. Its expiration freed him to look around.
Athelm was being dragged up the wall by his killer, hanging limply now in its fangs, but his bulk still enough to make it a struggle. A second beast scuttled to his side and pierced him, began to tug from opposite directions, dueling its arachnid kin for the meal as the pair both retreated up the wall on the barbed pads of their legs.
Shrieks and the skirl of steel told the rest of the tale. The others were falling back towards the corridor as the scampered tide pressed in. Torchlight fluttered and fled before it. Strayden’s own brand was guttering down in the corner where he’d dropped it in his panic. The light was falling away and he realized, in a skin-prickling surge of terror, he’d be left behind.
With a tug, he tried to get the sword free. But it’d caught on something deep in the dead spider. He tried again, felt the grip slip in his palm, still greasy with the thing’s gore. He put a boot on the dead carapace, despite the screaming instinct of every nerve, and applied a last bit of desperate leverage. Nothing. Cries from the hallway and the thud of dozens of inhuman feet drove a last squeak of rage and fear from his chest and he released it, fled backwards from the gruesome pile.
“Strayden of Starad!” Durrak’s voice boomed over the din of metal and eight-legged stampede.
He tripped over something, went down hard. Floundering back to his feet, he found he’d stumbled over a severed leg. Trailing streamers of its effluvium, he bounced off a twitching abdomen, rent open and weird innards unraveled like pinkish book folds onto the stone. Torches flashed off steel ahead. He stumbled towards these, reaching over his shoulder for the head of his axe, strapped under his shield, still affixed to his back.
A shape scuttled around from behind a statue to his right, just as he got the weapon at hand. Rows of eyes gleamed out of shadows. Fangs extended.
A two-handed chop and a scream of outrage met these. Vothan steel blasted through the spider-face, shattering a pedipalp and a fang and sending gore-bits fountaining in every direction. Strayden ripped the blade, slopping free from the arachnid bulk, raised it again, and brought it down again with a thock like rotten wood parted. Legs flew away and the monster’s death twitch passed up the handle of the axe.
Durrak shouldered to Strayden’s side, howling, as a spider launched from the other direction. He caught the beast with an under-handed blow, wedged it upright with his axe lodged beneath the thorax, the legs splayed and spasming around him. Fangs twitched and drooled, frantic to find purchase, but the steel forcing them up and away.
Almost sobbing with fury and terror, Strayden spun to his friend’s side, hacking without thought. Legs spun away on gouts of ichor. The skittering thing let out a screech so high Strayden saw double and nearly staggered. But rage powered through. He hacked again, again. The swollen abdomen exploded before his blows and the horrid, stinking interior flooded out across the floor, caused its kin, clamoring anew from the dark, to slip and tangle.
Durrak shoved the slack weight away, freed his dripping axe, and backed towards the door, shoving Strayden with him. “Time to go, Captain!”
As they stumbled and slipped over the chopped ruins of spider, reached the hall, they beheld a fresh tide of the abominations surging from the chamber after them. Torchlight from the hall behind them and dying brands left smoldering on the floor glinted off hundreds
of eyes.
“Keep going!” Durrak urged.
They backpedaled down the corridor, narrow enough that the two of them could bar the way as the rest of the party retreated behind them. The pattering of the monsters’ feet dogged them. Their squirming shapes crowded into the hall entrance, an unspeakable current, writhing to burst free. But they didn’t advance, seemed almost hesitant, as though seeking some higher guidance.
The hiss of the sand still flowing down the trap-hall reached Strayden’s ears and he felt resistance at his back. He chanced a glance over his shoulder to see Asyra there, trembling, spattered in arachnid ooze, but clenching her short sword determinedly. The others were clotting at the exit, some sort of desperate debate going on. Xass Kham had collapsed against a wall, had slid down to his ass and was gripping his arms about himself, murmuring.
Strayden spat out something he didn’t want to think about. Senses were returning, given clarity by his rage. The stench of spider-grue was so vile—a weird, almost chemical odor—that he doubted anyone would even notice his urine-stained pant leg.
“What now?” Durrak asked between tearing breaths, his eyes fixating on the end of the hall and the unholy host massing there.
“Lead them out,” Strayden ordered Asyra. He nodded at her weapon. “That pig-sticker isn’t going to do any good in this kind of fight!”
“I got plenty of the—”
“No one’s doubting your courage, girl!” Strayden snapped. Didn’t she understand? They had seconds. “But the others will follow your lead without question!”
She seemed to accept that, sheathing her sword, turning, and striding through the other to the intersection of the halls. There, she started shouting orders to the others. The Vothans hesitated not at all, gathering up themselves, their gear and plunder, and scrambling to follow as she checked the line pinned to the wall and vanished around the corner. Ivar helped Xass Kham to his feet, the Xyxian swaying uncertainly. Strayden couldn’t tell if it was from shock or actual hurt.