Curse of the Spider King (15 page)

“What's this?” Cathar blurted aloud. He watched the fleeing Elven soldiers split like the parting of a curtain and scatter into alleys and side streets. “Do they think they can hide fro—?”

Then he understood. It was just as Tyrith had said.

Cathar looked again to the Elves dispersing into the side streets. “They seek to divide us . . . to take our attention from their escaping kin.” Cathar loosed a blast on his war horn.
Fools!
he thought.
Divide us all you wish, but
conquer nothing. Our numbers are staggering.
Cathar sounded his war horn once more and yelled to his generals, “Rax, take your group of Warspiders left! Gorim, take the right! All other forces, FOLLOW ME!”

Flet Marshall Vendar grinned when he heard the clamor of the pursuing Warspiders and Gwar. He'd led his soldiers into a winding alley where he knew the Elves would have the advantage and could decrease the enemy that would cut into Travin's defenses at the northern tree gate. But the enemy caught up with them quicker than Vendar had expected.

“Take to the high points!” he yelled. Those who heard sprinted into tight side streets or found ways to clamber up the sides of buildings.

Vendar wasn't quick enough. Three Elven warriors were thrown crashing into him. Vendar fell beneath them with a grunt. Two of the soldiers rolled off, but one was dead. Vendar heaved him over to the side. He looked up just in time to see the pointed leg of a massive Warspider plunge down at him. Vendar threw himself out of the way as the clawed limb crashed onto the stone beside him, sending up sparks and debris. The other two Elves were not so fortunate. The spider crushed one and impaled the other.

Vendar screamed in rage. He leaped to a crouch and thrust his spear up into the exposed thorax of the Warspider hovering over him. The beast let out a terrible, keening screech. Three flet soldiers ran to Vendar's aid, and together, they finished off the creature.

Vendar sneered, wiping globs of spider innards off his breastplate. “To think I started this day off with clean armor,” he muttered.

Vendar rallied those nearest him, and they went to the walls. Fortunately, Elves could climb with even the slightest handholds: a crevice between stones, a drainage pipe, or a low-gabled roof. When he and the others reached the highest rooftops, they joined the rest of the Elves and opened fire with their bows. In a storm of arrows, Vendar's archers took out ten times as many Gwar as the other archers.

Dead Gwar carpeted the street, but more kept coming. And while the Gwar couldn't climb very well, their spider-mounts could. Each one now bearing two or three soldiers, the Warspiders began to scale the walls.

Vendar nocked and fired at the first Warspider he saw crest the roofline.

The shaft went straight and true but sprang uselessly away.
Armor. The
Spider King has covered his beasts in some new armor!

“The eyes!” Vendar yelled to his archers. “Your arrows cannot pierce the armor! Aim for their eyes!”

Vendar took aim but could not get a clear shot at the creature's eyes. He watched helplessly as the Warspider swept a young Elf soldier off the roof. Then it turned in Vendar's direction. He pulled back on his bowstring, even past his ear . . .

Shoonk!

The arrow buried right through the spider's eye and deep into its braincase. Immediately, the Warspider went limp and slid off the roof, taking its riders with it.

But that was just one.

More and more spiders came. And the Gwar riders drove them into the Elves or leaped off and assailed the Elves with their Gwar-made hammers and spikes. The well-trained flet soldiers fought back relentlessly, but were overrun.

And so it went on, Elves with the enemy pursuing at their heels, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Many Elves wielded their siege axes to cripple the spiders but were struck down before they could finish their tasks.

Two Gwar leaped down from their mounts and came at Vendar. The flet marshall was wise to their methods. He rolled inside one hammer blow and dragged his sword swiftly across one Gwar's stomach. The huge warrior crumpled. Vendar stepped up onto the doubled-over Gwar and dove, spear first, at the second enemy. The Gwar was slow to react, and Vendar's spear punctured the center of his breastplate. The Gwar fell to the roof like a rag doll.

But as Vendar loosed his spear from the enemy's chest, a Warspider came from behind. Its clublike foreleg sent Vendar sprawling near to the edge of the roof. As he rolled over, a hammer fell on his right forearm. It was a sharp, stunning hurt that shivered up into his shoulder and rendered his arm useless. His spear tumbled off the roof.

Vendar somehow got to his feet and found himself in the unpleasant company of three Gwar. He took his sword in his left hand and tried to keep his attackers at a distance with jabs and quick thrusts. He ducked a blow that would have taken his head, and sliced his sword into the throat of that Gwar. But the other two attacked. Vendar could not deflect a hammer blow with his sword. It spun him sideways, and he began to slide. The other Gwar seized the opportunity and thrust Gwar spikes into Vendar's upper thigh. Vendar grunted, crumpled, and with a desperate scream fell backward off the roof.

“Autumn!” Johnny shook her, holding the shut book in one hand.

“Autumn, it's time to go.”

“What?” She was in a daze. Astonished. Confused. Sorrowful.

“It's almost seven. Mom's going to be furious with us if we don't get back before sundown.”

“Sundown?” Autumn snapped out of it. The thought of walking away from this cave in the dark was enough to motivate anyone.

“We gotta go, now!”

“I know,” she said, standing up. Both of their feet were freezing from their wade through the water. “Hey . . . where's Sam?”

15

Eency Weency Spider

“ATTENTION, MISS Yuen!” A conductor's wand rapped against Kiri Lee's music stand.

“Pardonnez-moi, Madame LaMoine.” Kiri Lee's attention snapped away from the open window. The fall day was much too beautiful to be stuck in the apartment practicing Beethoven's Cello Sonata No. 5. She'd much rather spend it roaming around the palace in the Jardin du Luxembourg, smelling the flowers, and watching the ducks move across the grand pond.

“Alors, measure twenty-three,” Madame LaMoine continued in her heavy French accent. “And. . . .” She waved her baton.

Kiri Lee blew a long strand of straight, black hair out of her face and began to bow the notes before her, wishing for a moment that she were not a child prodigy. At times it felt liberating . . . exciting to have such skill, but now it had become a cage, one that she desperately wished she could escape. Hour upon hour of endless practicing, moving from professor to professor, concert to concert. It was never enough. She watched all the other kids playing in the grand square behind her family's apartment. Just playing. She wanted to be like them. Carefree.

But it was not meant to be. Kiri was the adopted daughter of two aspiring musicians who pushed her relentlessly to reach some standard of expertise they never defined exactly. Kiri Lee knew it was somewhere between the clouds and perfection. She knew because her parents were never satisfied—not with her practice, not with her compositions, not with her performance. Never. She was bound for the great orchestras of the world whether she wanted it or not.

Kiri Lee's music lesson stretched on into the afternoon, taking up most of the precious few hours of remaining sunlight until at last Madame LaMoine stuffed her baton into her leather satchel, rose, and went to the door. On her way out she turned and asked, “I will be seeing you tomorrow?”

“Oui, tomorrow at one,” Kiri Lee said, wincing as she did.

Madame LaMoine paused. “You know”—she said with a pensive tone—“there might come a day where you grow to love the music as your parents do.”

“The music,” Kiri Lee looked back out the window. “The music in my head is not the music here.” She blindly poked her bow at the pages on the wireframe stand.

“But first you must learn the music—”

“I know. I know. I must first learn the music on the page”— reciting Madame LaMoine's too-often quoted verse—“so I can play what's in my heart.”

Madame LaMoine sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “Miss Yuen, you are completely hopeless. Never have I met a child so gifted, and yet so . . .”

“Unhappy?” Kiri Lee finished her thought.

“Oui,” her teacher sighed. Silence hung between them. “Bonsoir,” Madame LaMoine said and left the apartment.

In a flash, Kiri Lee traded her cello for her violin, and her slippers for a pair of low-cut boots. She put on her jacket, quickly wrote a note to her mom to tell her where she would be, and counted to ten, giving her teacher enough time to walk out of the lobby . . . and if she timed it right, she'd miss her mom coming in. Then she rushed out the door.

Outside, the late-afternoon Paris traffic clambered down Rue Boissonade, each car trying to squeeze past the next on that skinny road. Kiri Lee never understood why people would struggle for one more car length only to be halted a moment later, no better off than the previous vehicle. She turned right down the sidewalk and headed north for the Jardin du Luxembourg.

The restaurants were reopening for the evening, their delicious smells filling the street around her. The aromas of coffee and warm bread wafted by, making her wish she had grabbed a baguette before leaving so hastily.

She continued up Avenue de l'Observatoire, passing the colonnades of trees and statues to her right, until the park entrance gates welcomed her onto the beautifully mowed terraces. Once on the grass, she slipped her boots off and allowed her bare feet to feel the cool grass slide between her toes. No one else would have taken their boots off on an October day, but Kiri Lee took every chance she could to enjoy the beauties of nature.

She turned left and ventured into one of the many manicured folds of trees, following a meandering pavement path to a playground. Among the many children playing on slides, swings, and jungle gyms, Kiri Lee spotted her friend Sophie. Younger than Kiri Lee, Sophie was born in Paris, spoke French, and was fluent in English. Like Kiri Lee, Sophie was a prodigy, but Sophie's gift was in art. Sophie had taken to drawing with colored chalk as a toddler. After one of Sophie's early chalk landscapes had fetched more than five hundred euros at auction, her parents enrolled her in the famed Académie des Beaux-Arts.

“Bonjour, Sophie!” said Kiri Lee.

The young artist with bouncy brown pigtails looked up from her latest sidewalk creation. “Bonjour, Kiri Lee!”

“The Notre Dame Cathedral?” Kiri Lee asked, looking at the drawing.

“Uh-huh,” she replied. “Like it?”

“Like it?” Kiri Lee beamed. “How could I not? C'est magnifique!”

Bright green eyes, rosy cheeks, dimples—Sophie's whole face lit up with joy. Then she went back to her drawing.

Kiri Lee left the playground and followed a meandering path to her favorite spot . . . the mysterious Medici Fountain.

The long rectangular pool seemed as though it were cut off from the rest of the world, covered by arching trees and bordered by carved stone vases. Plants overflowed into the water, and lily pads speckled the surface like tiny islands peacefully ignorant of their neighbors. At the far end was the fountain itself, a massive stone edifice adorned with statues in smooth coves and intricately sculpted terraces. If they ever moved back to the United States, Kiri Lee would miss the fountain more than anything else in Paris.

She leaped to her favorite chair, amazed at how long she could stay airborne. Then she sat, thinking of how this place was almost four hundred years old, the rock green with algae and weathered with age. Four hundred years was a long time. It outlived kings, wars, revolutions, plagues, . . . even the modern age. The very fact that this work of art had endured so much gave Kiri Lee great comfort.
Some things
, she thought,
don't change
.