The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (49 page)

The Drover and Weaver Castes took up this cry with enthusiasm. “Overthrow the tyrant!”

But even as they combined and rallied, their efforts were useless. No one, human or fae, could do more than delay the spiders by tossing them back into the chasm. To kill them seemed impossible, since they were neither dead nor alive. Vyfae and Raptors who tried to eat them found the meal was more deadly to the diner than to the dinner. Humans who were bitten collapsed and frothed at the mouth. Fae were absorbed whole. The shadow crawlers engorged themselves on the fallen.

Only Mrigana had any luck against them. Purple-black lightning flashed from her hands, and any spiders she electrocuted exploded into dust.

Vessia did not know what could be worse than the spiders of darkness swarming out of the Black Well, but Xerpen wasn’t finished. He began to weave further magic. Without comprehending its purpose, she still felt the immense power shudder through the earth and air. Nausea convulsed her.

“Vessia!” shouted Mrigana. “We can’t let him complete that spell! He’s trying to raise…”

“She just wants to weaken me, Vessia!” Xerpen disputed smoothly, even as he continued to weave his spell and his song. He had ever had the talent of carrying on two separate conversations at once. “She knows that without me, you cannot defeat her. She’s been manipulating us all along, don’t you realize that? You were angry with me for unweaving your memory once—how many times has she unwoven our discovery of who she really is? She’s using you to destroy me, but she’ll turn on you! She is the source of all darkness!”

“The only darkness I see here is yours, Xerpen!”

“I think you’ve done enough damage with your forked tongue, snake!” Mrigana added.

“It’s time to bring back the light!” Vessia cried. She lifted her arms over her head and spread her wings, spiraling up in her own
tama
just as the moon edged away from the sun. The first new rays hit Vessia and she spread her arms. A cascade of radiance streamed into Vessia from the sun-sliver, and she thrust both hands toward Xerpen, shooting the light at him. He screamed as the full light of the sun shone in his eyes.

He tried to cover his face, but could not, for at the same time Vessia channeled the sun, Mrigana flipped through the air and landed with her hand splayed over Xerpen’s face, forcing him to look directly into the light. He wrenched himself free, raised his staff and slammed it against Mrigana’s head. This knocked her to the ground, but Xerpen was too late to save himself. The double attack had left him scarred.

Vessia drew in a sharp breath. His eyes were pure white…permanently blind. What Mrigana had done was even more grotesque. She had stolen his mouth. Nothing remained between the two snake-like slits of his nostrils and his chin except smooth pale flesh. He tried to scream, but all he could do was clutch his cheeks and claw his eyes.

Rage spiked visibly in his aura. The song of power around him did not cease, despite his lack of a tongue or mouth, for his power was greater than mere physiology. Also, he knew exactly where his enemies were.

Xerpen pointed at Mrigana, and all the spiders on the summit froze for an instant; as one, their red eyes swiveled toward Mrigana; a vast wave of obsidian arachnids converged on her. Hundreds of them stung her. It would have killed anyone else. She survived, but at hideous cost. Her flesh melted away, and what emerged was a living skeleton, black as polished obsidian, yet crowned with white hair… the true and terrible form of Lady Death. The skeletal Lady slew spiders to dust, but more came, and for all her dark power, so similar to their own, she was not impervious to their venom. They gnawed at the very bone.

“Don’t let him resurrect Zithra-Lume…!” screamed Lady Death.

She was buried under the mass. The whole black, writhing blob toppled over the edge of the cliff.

Xerpen rocked back, and though the motion was eerily silent, Vessia sensed he was laughing in triumph. He raised his hands again, and a new shadow rose behind him.

Not thousands of ugly, venomous, hairy chittering spiders this time.

Just one.

The size of a mountain.

One minute, hundreds of spiders pressed in on them from both directions, threatening to overwhelm them. The next minute, all the spiders swiveled their creepy red eyes in the same direction and skittered away.

Dindi and Kavio watched in astonishment as all the spiders piled onto one lone osseous figure, which was lost under the bodies, until all that could be seen was a heap of spiders cannibalizing each other in their desperation to get at whoever was in the center of the wriggling ball. The spider-sphere rolled like a clown’s ball until it fell off the edge of the cliff. At the center of the ball was an explosion, which shot out black dust. The spiders of the innermost swarm were gone. So was whoever had been at the center of the spiders’ manic ire.

Thousands more spiders remained, but it was a start.

“That’s good, right?” Kavio asked uncertainly.

He wrapped his hand around hers. They stood side by side on the Bridge of One Thread, which bounced gently in the wind. Despite everything, Dindi basked in the feel of his warm palm against hers. And surely the dusting of the deathless spiders
had
to be good.

Unfortunately… no.

The remaining spiders reformed the ball, which kept growing. In cannibalistic frenzy, they devoured one another at an accelerating pace. Every spider that gorged on others grew in size, until soon the myriads of crawlers were replaced by a dozen immense, bloated monsters, which tore and bit one another. Soon, there were only two left; one spread its fangs and crunched the other into its maw. 

And now there remained only a single monster spider as large as all the teeming thousands would have been put together.

“Zithra-Lume…” whispered Dindi. “The legendary Spider Queen who defied Death for a hundred generations. She was finally destroyed, but Xerpen has resurrected her!”

“Right. That’s
not
good,” Kavio said. His hand tightened around hers as Zithra-Lume, the undead Aelfae queen, arose out of the chasm.

The horrible stench choked Dindi. She gagged and cringed, wondering how much worse the spider’s venom must be if even her stink made Dindi wilt with the need to vomit.

Zithra-Lume’s exoskeleton was shiny and black, and in places, shagged with coruscant hairs. She lifted and placed each enormous, blade-like limb with delicate precision. Though she moved slowly, it was not because she was lugubrious or sluggish, but because she was in no rush—yet. The care she took with each step showed she would be capable of swift, even lightning, speed when she chose. She climbed right past Dindi and Kavio, and she was so tall they could see her underbelly. The only place she was not utterly black was a blood red star in the center of her abdomen.

Men, women, and fae ran before the monstrosity. Dozens of warriors stood on the backs of the Sylfae, whose tree-like bodies formed bridges across the chasm. The archers shot their bows, but arrows bounced off her. Zithra-Lume reared up on her back legs and with her foremost extremities, rolled the Sylfae and warriors together into cocoons, one after another, like rabbits on a roasting stick. The tangled men who could, bellowed. Others’ cries were completely muffled. At her leisure, she plunged her fangs (each was larger than a man at the base, but as slender as a spear at the tip) into each cocoon and filled it with her venom. The screams of those men made Dindi feel as though someone were peeling her
own
skin off. Their agony was unfathomable as their bones and muscles dissolved inside their skin and were sucked out of them while they were still alive. When Zithra-Lume finished the human meals, she set her venomous fangs into the Sylfae themselves and slurped them up as well. Every human aura or faery being she devoured inflated her with more energy. Zithra-Lume moved with such alacrity that all of this unfolded in less than a handful of moments.

From high on the Bridge of One Thread, Dindi could see the whole battlefield. She recognized many of her friends. There was Tamio, carrying Kemla in his arms—she had been wounded. And over there… was that Vio? And Danumoro? Some she did not see. There was no sign of Finnadro or Hawk or Amdra or Gremo or Svego or Gwenika or Hadi, but so much was chaos, she clung to the hope that absent did not mean lost.

The Aelfae were scattered around the battlefield, except for Vessia, who stood her ground before the giant spider, and before Xerpen. In fact, she ignored the spider altogether, and focused all her rage on Xerpen.

The resurrection of Zithra-Lume  finally convinced her.
Xerpen has to die
.

Vessia had not wanted to kill her friend. Even after he’d released the spiders from the Black Well, some part of her whispered the soothing promise that this whole misunderstanding would end and they would go back to being friends.

Only when Xerpen and Mrigana both physically morphed into monsters in front of her, Xerpen into an eyeless, mouthless deformity and Mrigana, a living skeleton, did Vessia face that she was never going to have her friends back. Then, she was ashamed of herself. This proved she was no wiser than the least magical human, mistaking what was on the surface for what was beneath. So long as Xerpen and Mrigana had shown her a beautiful exterior, she had accepted them, as if beauty were equal to goodness. What a fool she was!

Well, she wasn’t holding back any longer.

She attacked Xerpen with a spear and a mace spiked with teeth. Xerpen fought back, his fury equal to hers, but not his skill. He could have defeated most human Zavaedies at their best, but not Vessia. She drove him to the edge of the cliff. His back foot kicked pebbles into the abyss. His strongest weapon, his golden tongue, had been taken from him. He had other ways to communicate, however.

Mrigana isn’t dead
.
He whittled the thought directly in her mind, along with the fear he wanted her to feel.
She will return, more powerful than ever, and wipe the last Aelfae from Faearth. You need me to help you fight her!

Vessia wavered, and Xerpen stepped toward her, hand extended like a friend. His white orbs bore into hers, unseeing, yet still controlling.

I knew you couldn’t kill me, Vessia.
She could hear the smirk in his thought but stood frozen as his hand reached behind his back.
You NEED me.

He whipped out a dagger and sought to plunge it into her chest. Vessia knocked him so hard in the head with her mace that he lost consciousness and tottered over the edge of the cliff. She spat after the body.

“I don’t need you, fool!”

The eclipse ended and the sun shone full on the world… but only for a moment. A new shadow eclipsed the light, covering Vessia in shadow. She leaned back her head, tracing the shadow up, up, up until she stared into the multi-eyed, fanged and hairy face of the giant Spider Queen Zithra-Lume.

Waves of rancid stench poured off Zithra-Lume. The rot ran deeper than the stink. The reek of death hung like a miasma about the abomination, an unwholesome putrefaction of magic itself, which stung Dindi’s esophagus like acid, screeched in her ears like a banshee, and fractured her magic. Dindi wilted and would have fallen, save for Kavio’s strong grip. He could not shelter her from the Zithra-Lume’s Penumbra, for his Penumbra was a lesser form of the same death magic, but his support helped her straighten her back. She remembered the shield that Mrigana had once created for her, to help Dindi keep her mind from falling into the minds of the Aelfae. Dindi did her best to create a similar buffer now, and that kept some of the decay from battering her aura.

Dindi couldn’t afford weakness, for Zithra-Lume had located a new target: Vessia.

With speed that defied her size, Zithra-Lume brought together her two forearms like pinchers, and captured Vessia. Instead of fighting, Vessia withered in the grip, obviously fighting the same debilitating nausea that Dindi had felt, but amplified by direct touch. Quickly, with long strokes that reached under her body, the immense spider drew webs from the spinnerets in her stern. As if Zithra-Lume anticipated this would be a tremendously important meal, some spider instinct for the privacy of a dank den took over, and she withdrew deeper into the chasm, dragging the cocooned Vessia, to devour her.

“Kavio, we can’t let it eat the White Lady!”

“Then hold on,” he said. “We’re going for a ride.”

He snugged his arm around her waist, and with his other hand, swung his blade. As it met the single Thread of the Bridge, he suddenly infused the obsidian with his magic, and sparks flew. The Thread broke.

Kavio grabbed the loose end.

He grasped the Thread in one hand and Dindi in the other as they swung free into the chasm… straight into the maw of Zithra-Lume. She reared and spread her mandibles. Vessia (cocooned) fell into a dense network of webs. The smaller spiders, before they had all combined to create Zithra-Lume, had filled the chasm with this sticky connective tissue.

At the last moment, Kavio released the Thread and he and Dindi dropped onto another bridge of webs. The fibers were thicker but stickier and more disgusting than the Bridge of One Thread had been. There was almost no light this deep in the chasm, almost as if the eclipse had never ended, and the air was close and clammy.