Venom and Song (13 page)

“You mean a decision will be made by the council, don't you?”

Grimwarden turned his back and as he walked away said, “Of course.”

7
Paying the Price

FERRAL DRAGGED his burden past six gates. None of the Gwar sentries offered to help. “Where is he?” Ferral asked. “The throne room?”

One of the guards emitted a wet snort. “Bah, throne room? Not hardly.”

“Haven't seen him in the throne room since last Norander, heh-heh,” said the other guard. “He's in his Plotting Chamber . . . practically sleeps there.”

“Foul mood today,” said the first guard. “I hope you've brought him good news.”

Ferral inwardly cringed. He'd spent most of the long journey back from the Dark Veil thinking about how he'd break the news.
What does it matter? What is the worst the Spider King would do? He could lock me up and make me work in the pits. He might kill me
. Ferral shrugged. After what he'd been through, he was ready to die . . . if need be.

Ferral cast a derisive look at the two guards. “Lazy, the lot of you. After the leagues I've trod, you'd think one of you might lend a hand.”

“What? And leave my post unattended?” asked the first guard.

“Perish the thought,” said the other, laughing harshly.

Struggling for a better grip on the huge sack he was dragging, Ferral snorted and continued down the corridor. Just before he passed out of range, he heard a final exchange between the guards.

“He smells overripe, that one,” said one guard. “Horrible.”

“Yeah,” the other replied. “Smelled like he'd been struck by a bolt in the Lightning Fields.”

Ferral was half-tempted to go back and twist both their heads off, but he refrained for he had more pressing business. He traversed a tall arched hallway and found the stairwell he needed. It spiraled up, and Ferral found that dragging his burden was harder. The heavy sack slid from one step to the next, each one bringing with it a wet slapping kind of thud, until he reached the top and ducked under an arch to enter the passage.

Torches lit the right side of the hallway, and Ferral followed them to the Plotting Chamber at the end of the hall. The door was open, and the room was well lit by torches, braziers, and gigantic candle chandeliers. Ferral looked up to the high domed ceiling and wondered whose job it was to keep all those candles lit.
No thank you,
thought Ferral. He didn't care much for heights. That's why he'd volunteered for infantry. “Better get going,” he muttered. “Or it will be my job.”

It was a vast L-shaped chamber, and between the evenly spaced pillars on either side enormous steer-skin maps were stretched taut. Each of these, Ferral knew, represented one of the Spider King's victorious campaigns. Many battles against the Elves of Berinfell were there. And the slow, methodical annihilation of the Saer. Ferral had fought in the last battle against the Saer. The Spider King had commissioned the greatest fleet of warships ever assembled, and they'd at last taken the battle to the Saer's home island.
Now that,
Ferral thought,
was a glorious victory
. Having been a part of several such battles galled Ferral even more that his battalion had been ambushed so easily.

Somehow, his burden seemed even heavier now. Ferral slogged it across the floor, rumpling up several animal-skin mats. He turned the corner and saw the Spider King hunched over a table at the far end. He seemed so riveted, so utterly engrossed, that Ferral thought he might not have noticed he had a visitor. Still, Ferral wasn't about to break protocol and speak before being addressed. So he stood and watched his king, master of the Gwar race.

The sickle-shaped pupils of the Spider King's large half-moon eyes remained fixed, boring down on the map from their red irises. Like all Gwar, he was gray-skinned and mostly bald. But his skin was darker than most, more the slate gray of a tombstone or a thundercloud. And his fierce, dark eyebrows arched and then flared back over his scalp in a continuous strip that stretched all the way down to the back of his neck. A third strip of hair began like a sharp arrowhead above the center of his brow and swept all the way back like the other two.

Ferral watched and waited. The Spider King stared down at a map of the Thousand-League Forest. He never took his eyes off it but took out a stick of char and drew a painfully straight line, then another. When he was finished, the Spider King had drawn a diamond-shaped region, one of many such areas, Ferral noticed.

The Gwar ruler grasped a handful of figurines, Warspiders, Gwar, Drefids, and Wisps, carved from volcanic rock, and slammed them down one at a time—each with a sharp
thok!
—in the sector he had just outlined. Then, his elbows on the table, he dropped his head into his hands and went completely still.

“Ferral,” said the Spider King without looking up, “where is your commander?”

The sudden voice so startled Ferral that he dropped the end of his sack. He bowed low to reach for it and said, “He is dead, my sovereign.”

“Dead,” he repeated, still not looking up. “
Mm . . . hum
. That . . . is unfortunate.” The Spider King's voice was not as deep as some Gwar, but carried a resonant weight of its own. Even short responses sounded clever and calculated. To speak with the Spider King was to feel perpetually on edge and cautious, for undoubtedly the trap was already set.

“There's more,” said Ferral. “Mobius . . . his plans failed. He even took half of our team for reinforcements. No one came back through the portal except . . . except for the Elves.”

The Spider King stopped scanning the map. “The Lords of Berinfell . . . they have returned, then?”

“Yes,” Ferral said in a half mutter, half growl. “It was by their hand that Mobius was laid low. We chased them to the Dark Veil, cornered them, and fought. But their powers were too much.”

“Powers?” The Spider King swiped up one of the Gwar figures from the map. “
Hmmm .
. . they've reached the Age of Reckoning, then. Are you sure?”

“Certain, my king.”

“Certain. Really?” With a flick of his thick thumb, the Spider King snapped the head off of the figurine. It bounced onto the tabletop and off onto the floor. “
Certain
is such a profound word. How can you be so sure?”

Ferral whisked out a tarnished dagger, slit the rope tie, and then upended the sack. The charred thing that rolled out onto the stone floor had once been a Gwar, that much was clear from its broad frame. But the figure was burned beyond recognition, a blackened husk.

“One of the Seven, the firehand, he sent forth streams of flame, flame that adhered to whatever it touched and would suffer no effort to extinguish it.” Ferral growled under his breath.

“I have seen that sort of fire before,” said the Spider King. He stood up straight at last, shrugged his massive shoulders, and—with a sudden twist of his pointed chin—cracked the joints in his neck. His eerie eyes fell on Ferral. “It is a devastating weapon. Tell me, Ferral— how then did you escape?”

“I hid,” Ferral replied honestly, “in a cleft of rock beyond the reach of the flame. Someone needed to return to Vesper Crag, to bear you news.”

“Did they now?”

“But I watched from that height. And I saw many things.”

“Tell me.”

Ferral smiled inwardly. He knew his information would prove valuable. How valuable? He had no idea, but he wasn't going to throw it out all at once, but rather let the Spider King ask for it. “One of the Seven is injured, perhaps mortally,” he said. “A girl . . . she was carried the entire time by the Berylinian lord.”

“If she dies,” said the Spider King, “the whole group will be diminished. I suppose that's too much to hope for. What else?”

“The Elves have compromised the Dark Veil.”

“Yes,” said the Spider King. “That is how they defeated your battalion.”

“What I mean, my king, is that the Elves had a garrison of archers hidden within the Veil.”

“They did not alert our border guards?”

“No, they were there already . . . waiting for us. And when they were convinced that we were finished, they disappeared with the Seven into the canyon.”

The Spider King's eyes narrowed for a moment. He stroked his dark goatee all the way down to its carefully trimmed point. He looked down at the map of the Thousand-League Forest. “Of course,” he said. And then he began to laugh. The chiseled muscle in his upper chest flexed as he laughed, deep, hearty guffaws that filled the room with sound. He arched his head back and roared with laughter. His mirth stopped abruptly, and the Spider King swept his hand across the map, sending figures skipping across the table and tearing three-jagged rifts in the animal skin.

“My king?” said Ferral tentatively.

“My good Ferral,” said the Spider King, “you have just solved the greatest mystery of this age. Where have the Elves of Berinfell gone? Thousands fled the city, this we knew. But in eight hundred years of searching, we were never able to determine their new location.”

“And . . . now you know? Surely not the Veil?”

“No.” He laughed out the words, “Not the Veil. Underground, Ferral. There are catacombs beneath the Dark Veil, running far to the west. Did you know that?”

Ferral shook his head.

“Yes, we used to mine a dremask vein there . . . before we found a better source. We never did explore those twisting passages beneath the ground. That was a miscalculation. We all believed the Elves would go to their strength—into the trees. There they could oppose us with some success or . . . lose themselves for hundreds of years. No . . . instead, they went to their weakness.”

“I still don't understand,” said Ferral.

“The Elves cannot bear to part with the sun . . . it will kill them, if they remain secluded in darkness long enough. But they have gone beneath the surface . . . and they have access to this place via the huge storehouses of water—aquifers—beneath the Veil. I will send a thousand scouts to investigate. But in the meantime I must alter the scope of our search.”

“How so?”

“We must catch them in the sun,” said the Spider King. “They must come up. They must. As they have been for quite some time, it seems. We need to search the clearings in the forest, shelves of rocky mountains, the high branches of the tallest trees. Anyplace where they might soak in the sun.”

“But we have not wings,” said Ferral.

“No,” said the Spider King. “Not yet. But we will.”

Ferral scratched at his own briar patch of beard. “I am not sure what you mean, my king, but we may not need wings after all. There's one more bit of news.”

“Go on.”

“There is a Wisp among the Elves.”

The Spider King tilted his head to the side and raised an eyebrow. “A Wisp? How could you possibly know that?”

“I saw one of the Elves dissolve into smoke and then re-form.”

“You saw this . . . in the Dark Veil? Even with the ambient gloom in that place?”

“There was a great fire behind him. I could see him plainly. The Elf stumbled, dissipated into smoke, and then re-formed. He, in Elven likeness, ran off with the others as if he were one of them.”

“The beauty of those creatures,” said the Spider King. “And how useful. They can vanish as fast as thinking only to materialize moments later in the guise of anyone. For all you know, Ferral, I might be a Wisp.”

Uncomfortable silence hung between them. A flickering shadow fell over Ferral, and when he turned to look, he nearly jumped out of his skin. A hooded Drefid stood behind Ferral.
I am going to die,
Ferral thought as he looked up into the Drefid's cold white eyes.

“Good to see you, Asp,” said the Spider King. “I hoped you'd come today.”

“I have much news,” he said, his voice like ice scraped across rough stone. Asp lowered his hood. From Ferral's angle it looked like the Drefid was crowned with fire. But it was only the candle chandelier hanging behind him.

“There's been quite a lot of news shared here today,” the Spider King said, gesturing at Ferral.

“You know about Mobius, then?” asked the Drefid.

“Yes, and much more,” said the Spider King. “But I have many things to discuss with you. The muster on Earth proceeding as planned?”

“Of course,” said Asp.

The Spider King nodded. “As I thought.” He came around the table and stood beside Ferral. “Wait here then, would you?” he said to the Drefid. “I have some things to show Ferral. He has been of great service to our cause.”

Asp nodded. “As you say.”

The Spider King led Ferral out of the Plotting Chamber and down a dimly lit auxiliary hallway toward the rear of the fortress. It smelled of old metal and something else, a pungent, stinging aroma. In silence, they came to a large arched door made of blackened iron. The Spider King reached into the collar of his tunic and pulled out a thick key. He held it up for Ferral to see and then slipped it into the keyhole and turned it. There was an echoing metallic click.