Curse of the Spider King (6 page)

As the spiders neared the walls, the infantry and crossbowmen began their slow, perilous march. Cathar's own spider worked its way past the midpoint of the bridge when a haunting, sonorous tone came from one of the many high towers.
The first war horn. The element of surprise has been lost!
Cathar thought. But no other war horns picked up the call.

Elven archers sprang up on the parapets and took aim. Their bows sang as long-shafted arrows surged into the coming ranks of the Gwar. Dozens fell dead. Still more careened from their saddles and found themselves sprawled on the webbing and unable to get up. It had only been a moment, but Cathar had seen enough. He drew back the firing cord, raised his arc rifle, and fired. Even as the black arc stone sped into the night sky, it kindled to a fiery blue. But as it plummeted toward the Elves, the arc stone flared such a bright white that Cathar averted his eyes. The stone exploded in a ball of white flame, which consumed several Elven archers.

Soon it seemed that falling stars filled the sky over Berinfell. The Gwar expected that each blazing stone cast would kill tenfold Elves.

The Warspiders claws delved into thin crevices of the mortar walls, their Gwar riders gripping sturdy tethers. Arrows aimed precisely at the joints of the spiders' legs glanced off or broke on the spiders' armor. The giant beasts clambered up in spurts, pausing to dodge falling rocks and arrows, and reached the parapets virtually unhindered.

But not for long. Elven flet soldiers slung their bows and loosed their siege axes. The first spider to crest the walls lost its forelegs to the lethal blows of the Elves. Their axes bit between and behind the plate armor, cracking exoskeleton and severing sinew. With horrible shrieks, spiders fell away from the walls and plunged into helpless masses of Gwar infantry below.

As the second wave of Warspiders climbed the wall, they released strands of a darker, almost black web from their spinnerets. The web trailed to the ground—where the Gwar infantry, spread all across the base of the keep, took hold, and began to ascend. Swords and axes met as Gwar and Elf came face-to-face. The Warspiders successfully crested the walls in greater numbers, and their Gwar riders directed them through the melee deeper into the city. They were searching for doors, and each they found—be it wood or iron—the Warspiders tore it from its hinges and tossed it away. Gwar infantry surrounded each new entry point and dispatched Elves as they issued forth. But a Gwar horn blast summoned their attention back to the eastern wall above the Gap.

Larger Warspiders with long, red forelegs clambered over the walls. Their riders, hooded and robed, sat impassively in their saddles. For a moment, an eerie hush fell over the area. The huge Warspiders stopped and raised themselves high on their limbs. As one, the Drefids removed their hoods, revealing shadowy figures with long white hair, burning embers in otherwise empty sockets, and knife blades extended from their boney knuckles.

Flet Marshall Brynn stood transfixed in the dancing shadows of torchlight at the top of the inner wall's curving stairway.

Screee!
The Warspiders' talons scraped the outer stonework of the stronghold. Brynn froze, but not because of the battle raging outside. She had seen an Elven warrior, one of her own flet soldiers, draw a blade and strike down another Elf in cold blood right before her eyes.

“Elden!” she cried, rage bursting free at last. “Elden, drop your sword!” Agile, even in full armor, Brynn raced frantically down the stair.

Elden never glanced up at his commander. His cold stare lingered on a more immediate threat. Another Elf leaped over the fallen flet soldier and brought his curved blade crashing down on Elden. Elden blocked, barely. His enemy's sword had come within an inch of his scalp. And before Elden could recover or counter, his enemy slid off the weak parry and drove his sword through the armor protecting Elden's ribs. The blade went deep and up, surely into Elden's heart. But Elden did not collapse.

He grinned at his attacker with a sickly, misshapen kind of smile. Then he brought his sword down hard on his enemy's helmet. The Elf fell away dead just as Flet Marshall Brynn stopped short three steps above. She flashed her rychesword, her movements a blur. Elden countered and attempted to duel for a moment, before Brynn slashed his weapon from his hand. It clattered to the stone, but before Elden could reach it, Brynn wheeled her blade around and carved a gash into Elden's neck. But there was no blood. There was no wound. Elden vanished, leaving only swirling eddies of thin black smoke.

“What devilry is this?” Brynn cried. She stood out of breath on the bottom stair and held her rychesword as if she might drop it.

“That was not Elden.” Guardmaster Olin Grimwarden strode to the foot of the stair and knelt at the side of the fallen Elf. “It was a Wisp."

“A what?”

“A Wisp.” Grimwarden's broad shoulders sagged, and he shook his head. “They are enemies of old. Vapor-beings, shape shifters. We thought they had all died out generations ago. But now they reemerge, loosed by the Spider King to wreck our defenses.” Grimwarden stood, hefted his spear menacingly, and took Brynn by the hand. “The Wisp you dispatched is not dead. He will quickly take on another form. And there may be others within our ranks.”

“Can't they be killed?”

“Only by the two-edged sword,” replied Grimwarden. “Speak the Words as you strike, and the Wisp will be sundered.” He looked with regret at the familiar phrases inscribed along the haft of his spear. “If only we still forged all our weapons as we did of old—”

Grimwarden flinched as bone-chilling shrieks tore through the clamor. Flet soldiers froze in mid stride and clutched their ears. “Drefids have come. That means—”

“Our archers have failed.”

“Then our defenses are undone,” he said. “Fall back, flet soldiers! Fall back to the west wall. Alert the Sentinels! Protect the lords!”

The Elvish High Council in Berinfell was the nerve center of the Elves, who resided across the many continents of Allyra. In the Great Hall of the Western Stronghold, the Elven Lords usually held court—but on this night there was a special celebration. Seven children had been born to the Elven Lords in the same year. It was considered something of a miracle. Now each of the children had reached the first-year mark, and it was customary to have a ullic ceremony.

The ceremony took place in the center of the hall, a grand, white marble room resembling an arboretum. The sweet notes of harps mingled with the music of flowing water passing through leafy tree branches into dappled pools around the wide chamber.

Among the marble columns and living trees that grew in the midst of the hall, more than one hundred guests had gathered. Knights and female warriors, flet soldiers and flet marshalls—all who could be spared from their duties on Berinfell's walls. Among them stood Gwar attendants, those whose families had long ago allied themselves with the Elves. There also stood Berinfell's mighty Sentinels. Descended from an ancient Elvish bloodline, the Sentinels were known to follow the old ways. Their woodcraft was second to none, and their usual missions took them far and wide on tasks considered too dangerous for the typical knight. Sentinels rarely gathered together in one place, but even they would not miss the historic events of the ceremony.

Elrain Galadhon, the high cleric, emerged from the back of the hall. He stepped between the tall white thrones of the Seven Lords and approached a white altar marbled with bright silver. He turned around just as the Elven Lords and their spouses approached. They were dressed in white and gird with ceremonial golden swords. And in their arms, they carried their precious children. All eyes turned to the children.

Perhaps it was the pageantry of the event or the special splendor of the setting; perhaps it was the pristine innocence and beauty of the children; or it might have been the location of the Western Stronghold, almost entirely surrounded by thick trees, two and a half miles—nearly a full league—from the eastern wall and the front gate. For whatever reason, no one in the hall heard the distant sounds of battle. In fact, it wasn't until just after the high cleric had waved the ceremonial scepter over the last lord's child that one of the Sentinels noticed something was amiss.

Elle stepped down from the dais and walked curiously toward the arched entryway of the Great Hall. The Sentinel glanced out the window. The trees outside were still.
Odd
, she thought.

Then she heard a steady cadence of boots on a stone floor. And when the shadows appeared at the end of the hall—broad, brutish shadows, perhaps numbering in the hundreds—Elle knew. She turned to warn the others just as Warspider limbs crashed through the stained glass windows in the back of the hall.

Flet Marshall Brynn and Grimwarden rushed to the long passage leading to Berinfell's Great Hall. But as they neared it they knew something was wrong. “No music,” said the burly Grimwarden, his square jaw taut.

There'd always been sweet music cascading from the Great Hall into the surrounding passages. Brynn turned and signaled to the flet soldiers behind her. They silently drew their short swords and siege axes and approached the Great Hall in formation.

They needn't have bothered. The massive chamber—normally alive with warm light and sparkling colors—was now darkened by smoke and night. Columns toppled, broken, and charred; ancient trees hewed and burned; once-magnificent windows shattered. And everywhere, corpses. Twisted, broken, burned, or bleeding bodies were piled in great heaps and strewn wildly about the vast chamber. It seemed a legion of soldiers had met their fate.

Grimwarden entered the hall and stooped at the smoldering hulk of a dead soldier. “Gwar,” he muttered. “One of ours, by the silver armor.”

“Yes,” Brynn agreed. “Many of our own Gwar attendants were slain. But see, the sable armor is most numerous. Most of these Gwar bodies are from the Spider King's legions.”

Grimwarden nodded as he scanned the carnage. “And yet I fear we will still be counting Elven dead long after the Gwar have been removed.”

“This was not just a battle of iron,” Brynn muttered. “Rarely have I seen such carnage brought by fire.” She pointed to a bulbous shape surrounded by segmented legs, curling in rigor. “Warspiders, too, they came through the windows. They would need such a force to assail the—” She never finished her sentence. Through the smoke and debris, she could just barely make out the white thrones in the back of the room.

“The Elven Lords?” Brynn whispered. “Olin?” She almost never used Grimwarden's first name, but the scene before her somehow made conventions of rank irrelevant. Their entire world as they knew it was about to change forever.

The flet soldiers filed in behind Grimwarden. “Search the room!” he yelled, fighting to suppress the panic rising within him. “Find the Elven Lords!”

The flet soldiers fanned out and began the grim work of sorting through the rubble, made all the worse in that some of the bodies they found were friends. But it was Grimwarden and Brynn who first dared to venture into the back of the Great Hall. They passed by the altar and tried desperately not to think about the horrors that might have occurred during the ceremony. But when at last they stood at the bottom of the wide steps before the dais, their world seemed to spin out of control. The Elven Lords were all seated in their thrones, propped up as if alive. But no breath stirred in their lungs. And there was no sign of the children.