by Ben Galley
The minotaur snuffled in insult. ‘Katiheridrade is not afraid of anything.’
‘I don’t like the look of it,’ Aspala said.
‘I’m sure the Cult of the Allfather trusted in that very reaction,’ Farden replied, before drawing his second sword and sauntering into the dark.
Waves of light glittered along the wall, throbbing like blood through veins, leading them deeper down. The entire tunnel was crystalline. Sharp spears of the quartz poked at them from the walls. Every footstep cracked like glass. Echoes refused to die, and still the wind blew across Mithrid’s face. Getting warmer. Getting staler.
A clicking sound gave them pause. Weapons were raised. Voidaran sighed next to her ear. She looked back at the minotaur to see her wide-eyed, and her face a stark monochrome in the soulless light.
A corner in the tunnel gave them their answer. A crystalline spider the size of Mithrid’s splayed hand tapped a ponderous path across the wall. It looked half-broken, stumbling on a missing leg. As the others gave it room, Mithrid leaned close to stare at its sparkling hide, but it dashed away from her shadow and scuttled down the tunnel wall.
‘Follow it,’ whispered the mage. They did so with a scuttling of their own, furtive, and barely keeping up with the rapid little insect.
It didn’t guide them far until the tunnel changed. The inhospitable borehole became blunter, straighter, polished, even. Perfect, unmarred crystal lined the walls, so thick and deep as to look as if they walked in a tunnel of glass beneath a dead and empty sea. A floor of fine sand sighed under their boots. More of the spiders clinked across the walls and ceiling, gnawing at the crystal. The walls held the faint echoes of moonlight, and as they passed, reflections emerged to follow them. Everywhere Mithrid looked, her own green, wild eyes stared back. She menaced one reflection with a sword only to have it menace her right back.
‘Only mirrors, Mithrid,’ breathed Aspala.
But as Mithrid turned away, she saw her reflection pause for just a moment. She whirled around, but the murky visage mimicked her perfectly once more.
‘There’s some foul magick at work here,’ she said. It was a guess. Mithrid felt nothing but the ever-present wind, and the eyes of her reflections watching intently.
Farden quickened his pace. ‘I’m inclined to agree.’
Their shadows became maddening all too quickly. Mithrid stared at the others in the mirrors to escape her own, but even they tricked her. Between a blink, she saw Warbringer standing on a landscape of burning marshes. Even she startled at that. In Durnus’ mirrors, a glowing crown of fire hovered above his head. He looked wan even in that cold light. The vampyre gawked, just the same as Mithrid.
She noticed Farden standing stock-still in the middle of the path. He stared at her. Not directly, but via the walls. In his mirror, she saw a man of a hundred winters, bearded and grey, lost in the snow. But Farden ignored his visage. Mithrid turned to see what had stolen his attention, and lost her breath when she saw herself in grand black armour wreathed in shadow, and sitting on a throne ringed with flame. Beneath her, a fortress of white marble burned.
‘What is that, Mithrid?’ Farden barked.
‘It’s not me!’ A city screamed below. Mithrid could hear their cries, taste the char on the wind.
Aspala was hammering on one of the mirrors, trying to reach a woman on a desert of endless dark sand. ‘What’s this place doing to us, Durnus?’ she yelled.
The irascible clicking of the spiders’ crystal claws increased in volume. It became a constant rumble.
‘Gah!’ she reeled away, swatting at her own arms as if she had unwittingly let go of her magick. Mithrid covered her ears, muscling ahead down the mirrored tunnel in the hope there was an end to this hallway of fractured nonsense. Spiders scattered in her path. One she even crunched with her foot.
‘Mithrid! Wait!’ came the shouts behind her.
It was then she saw Malvus, grinning in a mirror, dressed in all his finery and untouched by war or fire.
‘Mithrid!’
But she was already swinging her axe.
The crystal shattered beneath her honed blade. A great crack spread across it. Malvus died away to reveal a shattered version of herself. All other reflections died with it. She wrenched her axe free and held it in two hands, heaving with breath.
‘I do not think that was wise, my dear!’ Durnus shouted. The others swiftly gathered around them as the rumble grew to the roar of a crashing wave.
Spiders, scores of them, spewed down the tunnel. They covered the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Durnus broke the air with a shield of magick as Warbringer roared. Mithrid began to spin her axe as Eyrum had taught her. Aspala stood ahead of her, sword flat and crouching low.
Just as the flood of spiders was about to fall upon them, the light sputtered out. The scarred sister’s light failed them at their darkest moment. Mithrid couldn’t help but yell in sheer panic. She felt the spiders crawling up her legs, their crystalline legs stabbing at her armour. One stabbed at her scalp and she sprang into the dark to get away from it. She swung her axe to and fro through the pitch black, crashing through heaps of them until she staggered on their dead corpses in the dark. The shouts and yells of the others filled her ears along with her own screams. There, covered by a hundred needle-like claws, she thrashed the air with her magick, but to no avail. Hot blood streamed from cuts across her body. Her panic became a blinding red maw that consumed her, and buried her there in the darkness.
CHAPTER 28
UTIRU
The gods and daemons were not all that roamed the primordial aeons. Others creatures were born of the spark of life. Some that glowed with virtue. Others foul, full of trickery. All older than memory.
SOURCE UNKNOWN
Sand filled his mouth. Blood, his eyes.
Farden retched until he could draw a breath without vomiting or choking himself. He reached out to wipe his face and found the claws of a spider beneath his hands. He recoiled sharply, and his body was swift to remind him of every cut, bruise, ache, and pain.
Farden shuffled away with a pained growl, but felt rock at his back. He reached out and groped another wall far too close to his face. In misery, he scrubbed sand across his face. From the resulting sting, wounds scored his scalp and cheek. Chin, and neck, too.
The mage could have cried with joy as he realised the light had returned. Faint, barely enough to see by, but immensely preferable to the pitch black. However, he had somehow buried himself in a gutter of rock.
And spiders. Farden shifted to find another crystal spider lying dead beside his head. Another fell atop him. He forced himself upright, keeping back a yell and brushing more of the foul creatures from his body. He was littered in their corpses, and somehow that had saved him. Almost retching once more, Farden crawled from his pit and looked around. He was still in that cursed hallway of mirrors. All that lay around him were the brutalised bodies of dead spiders. Not a hide nor hair of the others could be seen in the gloom.
‘Mithrid!’ he whispered as loud as he dared and could manage. Only a timid echo answered him. Farden dropped his forehead into the sand and immediately regretted it. He touched his wounds one by one. The Scalussen armour was not completely useless. He had been saved being lacerated to death, at least.
Beyond the dried blood, his head throbbed. Farden had taken enough nevermar and quaffed enough ale in his time to know the difference between losing a bucket of blood and being poisoned. The spiders had a venom, he wagered. In their needle legs or jaws, he didn’t know, but that was the cause of the void in his memories. The last thing he remembered was the rushing surge of horrid insects. Farden knuckled his eyes but the shadows of the nightmare refused to fade. An image of himself as an old and wizened man. Durnus with the crown of a daemon prince. Mithrid as queen of the Arka.
Those ghosts could wait.
Much to the protest of his headache, Farden shook his head as if to shake his mind into sense, pushed himself to his knees, and d
ragged himself to standing. Loki’s knife was still at his side, much to a mixture of displeasure and relief. One sword was nearby. The other, for some reason, at the mouth of the ongoing tunnel. A lone spider tried to scuttle away from him, but Farden sliced it in two with a crunch.
Already, the reflections had returned to follow him. Farden held the handles of the swords by his eyes to block their silent stares. Not this time.
Mirror after mirror tried to show him another taunting facet of his imagination. When that failed, Farden glimpsed scenes of his past. Even a nine-year-old Farden waved at him from one mirror. It was all he could do to shake his head and break into a hobbling run. He felt as though the tunnel had already aged him ten years. He didn’t dare wonder how long he had been unconscious.
Thankfully, the mirrors did have an end to them, yet it came in the form of a void of a cavern. Spiders clicked ponderously across the sand, some tiny as a coin, and others the size of hounds or worse. The walls and ceiling were unseen, vanished by distance and dark. Only a faint glow, leftover from the crystals behind him, cast a puddle of light. It was all Farden needed to see the horrors before him: the single feature of the cavern.
Bodies. A score of them, hanging in midair just at the edge of the darkness. Suspended by their heads and faces, they dangled from silver threads that disappeared into the gloom above. A webbing masked them, but Farden could still tell their mouths were open mid-scream, as if the threads came from within them. Most were emaciated or withered of bone and wax skin. Four were fresh, dangling lower than the rest. Mithrid, Durnus, Aspala, and Warbringer hung there like fresh kills, twitching irregularly.
The mage, throat dry as the sand beneath him, clicked his neck from one side to the other and took a step into the cavern. The smaller spiders scattered from his careful footsteps. Even the larger ones, who Farden attacked carefully and with swords crossed, shied away from him. Their mandibles chuntered. One even screeched before scuttling back into the gloom. By their choreographed movements, he got the impression a deeper, singular mind was behind theirs. Farden groaned as something enormous boomed in the darkness. The sand shook under his boots.
As the mage turned full circle, light scattered about the cavern’s reaches like the glitter of a storm cloud. Farden glimpsed stalactites like towers hanging above him. Great webs spanned between them. And where the light couldn’t shine, he saw the very mind he sought. Black legs bent and curled in the cavern’s corners, thick as Golikan pines. A great void of a bulbous body commanded the darkness. Skeletal, spiny limbs reached above him, and from them hung the bodies.
Farden tried not to flinch as a giant leg slammed into the sand not ten paces from his right side. In truth, his tired body hadn’t the energy. It was a struggle remaining vaguely upright and the swords off the ground.
Another limb pounded the earth on his left. With a sound akin to the cracking of spines, the body lowered itself. A grotesque figure came into view: a vaguely female form, protruding from the very face and mandibles of the spider. Where the enormous spider ended and the figure began, her skin became a milky white, shimmering as if clad in some vile saliva. Six arms spread from her skeletal shoulders and ribs, held in all directions and each holding what appeared to be a mask. Her neck, disturbingly obtruded, held a skull of a head, wrapped in strands of flesh. Eyes of black regarded him calmly. A lipless mouth sneered. Silken strands drifted as hair. As she bent close to greet Farden, the bodies above lowered, like a drooping gallows. In all his life, only a hydra had ever come close to defying her size.
As Farden stared, haunted to his very core by the face, she held one of her masks across her face. One of faded gold, a single eye, and a snarling mouth.
‘Kochika,’ she hissed, filling the cavern with her voice as if every damn spider spoke with her.
Farden did not understand. He pointed a sword at the nearest of his friends. Mithrid, her face enveloped in silk. She twitched ever so slightly. Farden fought the panic back down his throat. He hadn’t been eaten immediately, which was always a good sign.
‘Are you Utiru?’ he yelled. Introductions seemed a fine place to start.
The creature removed her mask and chose another, one of porcelain this time, or so it seemed. It had two eyes and a smiling expression, but otherwise looked human.
‘Utiru,’ said the creature. ‘A name I have not heard in a long time. A name of the new stars.’ There was no wistful sigh to her voice. No tone of any kind. The simple cold statement of unflinching fact. ‘Why do you seek her?’
Farden remembered the guide’s words at the Thundershores: a demi-goddess, he had called her. And he knew all too well the pride of gods, and their need for the power of belief and prayer. It seemed as sharp a weapon as any against a monster as vast as this. ‘Er… we have heard great stories of you! We crossed the world to see if they were true.’
Utiru weaved back and forth, still holding the mask to her face. In the darkness she shuffled her legs with thunderous noise. ‘And now?’
‘Your majesty knows no bounds. Your size is… endless! And yet, for all our awe and wonder, you’ve attacked us and stolen my friends.’
‘All know the meaning of the spider’s web,’ she whispered. ‘To enter it willingly is no fault of the spider.’
‘If you let them go, we will tell your story far and wide. People will chant your name. Sing about your mercy.’
Utiru came close, faster than Farden could recoil. She hovered an inch from his sword, watching through her porcelain mask. Studying. Farden strived to keep to his act. He wracked his mind, repeating the Doomriddle’s last verse over and over. Between every glance he looked for any sign of a key.
‘Utiru cares nothing for mercy. She offers nothing but paradise. The deepest and brightest and most blissful of dreams. Your greatest wish fulfilled. Your friends thank Utiru even now. They will sleep an age in my web. In return for your honour, I will allow you to leave. You are polite for a mortal. Leave now before I decide otherwise.’
‘No,’ Farden said.
Crystal spiders crept from the shadows, clustering around Utiru’s huge, skeletal legs. She rose above him. The creature switched her mask to a third face: another of wood, human still but crinkled in a frown. And yet still, there was no anger to her voice. Cold, she remained.
‘Greatest wish, you say? I bet you can’t show me mine.’
‘You challenge Utiru not,’ she replied. Again, no emotion spilled from her. Her voice remained flat. The bait tangled, untouched.
Farden got down on one knee. He did not let go of his swords. ‘I want that,’ he said. ‘My greatest wish. Give that to me.’
Utiru came closer still. Farden barely resisted the urge to strike there and then. ‘You submit yourself willingly.’
Farden hoped to the very gods he loathed that he was right about this. ‘I do.’
Utiru gripped his neck with her cold and clammy claws. A thread of silk was wrapped around his chin, and then his face. Farden fought to restrain himself as he felt the silk fill his mouth. Before darkness enveloped him, he felt his feet lifting off the floor.
Fresh air struck him in the face. Cold, that morning, sign of winter’s touch. The heat was already fading from the countryside. The leaves were turning golden. Geese flying in their arrowheads made a fuss above as they sought the south. A river burbled nearby.
Farden sighed as he looked across his tangled branches of a small vineyard. He placed his hands upon the fence. His scars were rosy in the early sunlight. His bare arms and chest felt warm.
He took another breath, taking in the scent of soil. A bird trilled in a tree beyond the river. Rain lingered in the distance.
The mage heard a clattering of dishes behind him. He did not turn, he only smiled.
‘Farden!’ yelled a woman. One he both knew, and did not at the same time.
A presence hung beside him. A dark shadow across the vines. He did not mind it.
‘Fine morning,’ he said, voice still raspy from sleep.
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‘Peace and silence,’ said the shadow. Dark arms reached out, one holding his shoulder, the other picking a grape from an ambitiously curled vine. Claws squeezed it. Blood-red juice dripped. ‘To be left alone. Your greatest longing.’
The words jarred Farden. He looked again at the rolling hills of empty grass and found a mist had swallowed half of them. The shadow put another hand on his other shoulder.
‘Is it not? A woman by your side, a hearth and field to tend. And look.’
Farden looked unbidden, down to his bare skin. The skeleton keys tattooed upon his forearms were gone. He felt no fear standing shirtless. He felt the sun’s warmth on unburdened skin.
‘Farden!’ called the voice again. He turned, past the skeletal legs clustered over him to a cottage of thatch and river stone. A willow tree hung over a small garden. The door hung upon. The chimney belched smoke and a figure bustled inside.
For a moment, the mage teetered upon a smile, upon a, ‘yes.’ He remembered a cavern. The bulbous body of a monster crouched in the dark. A blink turned the willow tree to horror. Bodies hung from its branches. Silken webs covered the garden. The shadow’s claws tightened.
‘Do not fight it,’ it whispered.
Farden steeled his jaw. A force willed him to look inside the cottage, but he battled it, once again daring to look down. A sword lay in his hand. His other lay empty.
‘You’re wrong, Utiru,’ he replied. ‘You’ve shown me my fate, not the journey, as a friend of mine once said.’
Claws sank into his skin. An earthquake began to shake the hills.
‘Because if I truly want this,’ Farden continued. ‘Then there’s blood and pain and shit that stands in the way. This has to be earned, not given.’
Fire burst on the hills. Corpses littered the vineyard around him.
The faintest hint of annoyance entered the voice in his ear. ‘You speak madness.’
‘Maybe I do long for chaos, as Mithrid tells me. And what is chaos without a weapon to wreak it? I want the key,’ Farden spat, convincing himself even for a moment. He stretched out his hand, thinking only of the spear and Loki’s limp, lifeless body. Of himself wielding it as a god. A crown of fire upon his head and a blazing throne at his back.
