World Weaver (The Devany Miller Series Book 4) (19 page)

“The hook that will take us to the Wastes,” Krosh said.

I dredged up the memory of the globe Krosh had shown me. Tempest Peaks sat on the far southern coast. Across the sea was Ketwer Island and beyond that, the Wastes. The idea of hooking to another landmass made me nervous, though I wasn’t sure why. I traveled between worlds without a thought. Why was I so worried now?

We trudged to the hook and through. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see on the other side, but it wasn’t the tower that loomed in the distance. Brilliant blue sky abruptly stopped and darkness took over. The tower punched a hole in the heavens and where it touched, black, inky clouds stole the light.

My first thought:
Why would a spider live in a tower?
My second thought:
I so don’t want to go near it.

Kroshtuka nudged me. “We must keep going. The Riders can follow us through the hook.”

And so we ran, over sand that shifted under our feet and into wind that scoured our skin. A mile felt like ten and I was wheezing long before I’d like to admit. Even with Neutria’s help, the slog drained me, it drained all of us and we stopped long before it was probably safe. Tytan, I was happy to see, was winded. Side effect of his new soul? I wanted to laugh but didn’t have the breath for it.

“She’s laid traps,” Krosh said, his voice low. He had to pause between words too, but he was getting his wind back faster than I was. “Exertion traps, to wear us out.” He tapped on my forehead and I went into my Magic Eye. I gasped.

A glowing web stretched out before me as far as I could see. The strands were green here and orange there, with yellows and blues farther away. It was beautiful and terrifying. “She knows we’re here.”

“If she’s listening, she does. If not, then any minions she’s set to watch the boundaries of her land know something has plucked the web strings,” Tytan said. He took a finger and thrummed a green strand that vibrated long past a distance I could track without binoculars. “We won’t need that aventurine after all.”

Jolla straightened, her cheeks reddened from her exertion. “It will let her know we are here to talk to her, rather than cause mischief.”

Tytan snorted but didn’t disagree.

“So we wait here or move forward?” Lorath asked.

We all looked back at the way we’d come, the arch a faint smudge behind us. “Move forward,” I said, unwilling to stand around waiting for the Riders to find our trail and follow. “Is there a way to shed the exertion trap?”

“Put up a protection bubble,” Ty said.

I did, covering the entire group. The minute the bubble went up, my fatigue drained away. I heaved out a breath, relieved beyond measure I wasn’t as out of shape as I’d feared. “Can everyone see the web?”

They nodded and so together we continued on, stepping over or ducking under the strands. It made the going both slower and less onerous, since we weren’t dealing with spider-made distractions that would hinder our progress like the endurance trap that stole our air and stamina.

There was a buzzing in the back of my head that grew stronger the longer we walked. I rubbed my skull absently, wishing it would desist, wondering if it was due to me staying in my Magic Eye. Then Krosh put a hand on my arm and gestured off to my right.

Spiders. The gumball spiders that we’d freed from the pit while rescuing Ellison.

“Neutria? What’s going on?” I asked, dread pricking my skin.

We go to face an enemy.

“No,” I said, well aware that I was speaking aloud and worrying the others. “She is not our enemy. Call them off.”

No,
she said.
We will not be weak. They make us strong.

“Don’t fuck this up, Neutria. I need her to retrieve her egg sac and stop the damned thing from blowing up. She can fix it. If you piss her off, she won’t do jack for me. Neutria. Neutria!”

The spider inside me was silent, but she was there, waiting, plotting.

I wanted to scream, to rip her from my head. “She’s going to mess it up. She’s going to mess up my only chance at getting Bethy back.” My skin tightened, my breath came in shallow bursts, and I worried my head might explode.

“Does she pose a threat to a goddess?” Tytan asked, his tone not quite mocking.

Yes,
Neutria hissed.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But she could make her mad. Mad enough to kill us all.”

FIFTEEN

Either we didn’t pose a threat to the Spider Queen or she was out of minions, because despite a day’s walk, we didn’t see any living thing but each other.

That night, we made camp inside a polygon made of magical web strands. Ty and Kali volunteered for first watch and the rest of us settled down into an uneasy rest, the aventurine set out in the middle of our bedrolls.

Long after everyone else slept, I lay awake, staring up at the night sky. Anxiety nagged at me, a low hum of discomfort that made my muscles ache and my joints burn. Krosh woke as I sat up, his beautiful golden eyes on me. “Is everything all right?”

“Can’t sleep.”

He slipped his fingers in mine. “Do you need some help with that?”

I laughed quietly. “Perhaps in a while. I need to move.”

He was instantly more alert. “What is it you sense?”

“I don’t know. I have to get up and walk or I’ll scream.”

He rose with me and I didn’t protest. The eerie darkness bothered me in some indefinable way. My night to be vaguely disturbed, I guessed.

We stepped over the webbing and walked toward the tower, though we didn’t make any decision to do so out loud. I expected to see Ty or Kali, but the two Skriven were nowhere in sight. Surely they hadn’t gone too far away from the group considering they were our lookouts. “Do you think we should find them?”

Magic rose around us, filling the air with static electricity. My scalp tingled and I feared a lightning strike. It wasn’t until Krosh tapped his lips with a finger, then pointed up, that I figured out I wasn’t about to be struck dead. Not by lightning, anyway. My breath stilled. A shadow loomed above us, an incomprehensibly large shadow. One with eight legs.

The Spider Queen descended on a thin, shimmery thread that glimmered with magic. Bigger than a semi truck, bigger than a house. Her eyes glinted with power, her gaze pressing upon me like doom. My admiration for Masette grew as I took the Queen in. Ten-years-old, she’d said, and she’d ridden the Queen to the tower to fight the spider mummy.

I shivered.

Deep in my mind, Neutria hissed.

The Queen’s legs were multi-jointed knives, stabbing into the sand as she dropped to the ground. I could hear Kroshtuka breathing and my own frantic heartbeat, but the Spider Queen didn’t make a sound.

We stood without speaking. What would I say? ‘Hi! I’m here to help you get your egg sac back. I know where it is.’

“Do you?”

Her voice boomed in my head and beside me, Krosh twitched.

“Yes.” I pictured the Omphalos in my head in all its glory after I’d sealed the crack.

Excitement, fury, sorrow. Her emotions filled me, as big and overpowering as she was and my legs shook under the weight of them. I leaned into Krosh. He was shaking, too.

“It does not matter. I cannot claim it without my last eye.”

I licked my lips—they were so dry—and wondered how the hell Masette had talked about her adventures with the Spider Queen without quivering. “That’s why I’m here. To find the eye so you can get your egg sac.” I pictured Bethy, my lost child, gave the Queen my fury and fear. It wasn’t as vast as hers, but she understood that we were alike, two mothers whose children had been taken from them.

“The Chythraul in your soul-space is challenging me. Is it your friend?”

Dear lord. ‘Neutria!’ I said. “Shut the hell up!”

She hissed at me, and pushed herself forward. I tensed, ready to fight back, but instead of taking me over, she went through me. Through and through, stripping me of my insides, stripping me clean, raking me bloody.

I collapsed on the ground, shivering all over as if in the throws of the worst flu in the universe.

“You think to challenge me, bug?”

Oh shit. Neutria hated to be called a bug. Wait.

Wait.

I patted myself as if that helped me understand what I was seeing. Neutria was there, outside me. “I’m here, aren’t I?” I asked as Kroshtuka helped me up from the sand.

“She separated her from you,” he said, his voice low.

I closed my eyes, searching my mind. The spider that had been my companion for these long months was gone from my head.

The Spider Queen didn’t react when Neutria raised her legs in threat display. When she, the Queen batted her away as if she were inconsequential and, to such a giant creature, I suppose she was.

She tried attacking the Queen four times before giving up, retreating into the distance with a speed I’d always been in awe of.

Like that, she was gone.

I was bereft, even though I’d spent many a time wishing she wasn’t in my head. I felt lesser without her, which would please her to hear, I was sure.

I clutched Krosh’s hand harder still and turned back to the Queen.

“It would not do to have the Chythraul in my tower. If you wish to be reunited with her, I can place her back inside you.”

There was a long silence during which Kroshtuka stared intently at the giant spider, nodding every so often. Then the Queen lowered herself down, down, down, until her great belly touched the sand.

“Now we ride,” Krosh said.

“What did she say to you?”

“She was talking to my soul. It was both terrifying and beautiful.” And that’s all he would say about it.

He led me to her leg—as wide as a good-sized tree trunk—and climbed up. I followed, the rough hairs scraping against my palms. I wasn’t as agile as Krosh, especially not without Neutria, and my mind dithered over whether to bring her back inside me once all this was over.

‘If I survive,’ I reminded myself. Then a mental argument with myself ensued:

She’s a pain in the ass.

She’s strong.

She’s getting stronger and pushier.

She feeds me courage when I lack it.

The argument waged on in my head as I reached the top, Krosh grasping my hand to help me settle behind him on the back of the spider queen. My legs spread painfully wide, and I had to wiggle to find a comfortable way to sit.

From here, I saw the Queen’s eyes. They ranged in color from silver and purple, to brown and green. One eye socket stood black and empty. My quest. I felt unequal to the task, whatever it turned out to be.

Warm, sticky web wrapped around us, squashing us together.

“What’s going o—” is all I got out before we rose with alarming speed. My stomach dropped to my toes and fell out onto the sand we left behind at NASCAR speeds.

We climbed and then we climbed some more, higher and higher, impossibly high. My hair streamed out behind me, settling against my back when the Queen crawled onto an orange strand of gleaming spider silk. We didn’t slow so much as change direction and after I finished freaking out over how high we were, I started enjoying the ride.

It was an adventure. That’s what I always told the kids when we ended up somewhere we hadn’t intended, doing something we hadn’t planned on doing.

It fit well here.

It wasn’t until we got to the tower that the worry came roaring back. And then we dropped.

***

I screamed, I’m ashamed to say. I screamed even though I’d been on eighty thousand carnival rides. Krosh yelled too, his shout of surprise of a more masculine variety. I clung to him, praying our magical seatbelts wouldn’t give way as we plunged. I didn’t want to splat on the ground, not one little bit.

The abrupt stop jarred us both and we spun for one horrible, dizzying moment before the Spider Queen swung over to her tower and crawled the rest of the way down. I don’t know how we got inside; I screwed my eyes shut and didn’t open them until Krosh whispered it was safe.

We were in a stairwell traveling ever upwards, ducking through ruined doorways, the doors themselves so much wreckage. Dust floated down from the ceiling and covered the floors but for the skittery tracks of bug feet. We crawled through a room full of musical instruments held by skeletal remains. Another room stank of the Swamps, the same pale, milky water covering the floor. I stared hard at the surface as we crawled across the ceiling, watching for fleshcrawlers. The gills on my neck ached, as if yearning for me to dive into the water and swim.

The Queen lowered herself to the ground outside the last room. Krosh and I plucked away the web she’d secured us with and slid off her back. I brushed off my pants, my gaze lowered to my hiking boots, finding myself fascinated with the laces, still dusted with red sand. For some reason, I didn’t want to look through the doorway ahead.

Krosh had his back to it, too.