Royal Bastards

by Andrew Shvarts

  I closed my eyes and strained my ears, trying desperately to hear any sign of the mercenaries. I could just barely make them out: footsteps, padding softly toward us down the shaft. No Sunstone for them. The mercenaries were coming in the dark, or with what little light was filtering through the reopened entrance. I tightened my grip on the dagger and steadied my hands….

  Only to hear a sudden commotion. One of the mercenaries cried out. There was a thumping sound, like something heavy hitting the ground. A scream, then another, then a choked gasp. Feet scrambling. Sizzling liquid splattering on stone. And a strange clicking, a sound I couldn’t explain, like a dozen fingernails drumming on glass.

  Then there was only silence.

  “What was that?” Jax whispered.

  “Shut up!” Zell whispered back. I didn’t like this. I mean, I hadn’t liked waiting in the dark for them to walk in, but at least I’d known what was coming. Now I had no idea. I felt a sudden cold chill, a dry sweat. I had missed something, I realized, something very important.

  “Maybe they’re messing with us,” Miles chimed in. “Or maybe they turned on each other. That sounded like a scuffle.”

  “I said shut up!” Zell replied, but there was a hint of confusion in his voice. He didn’t get it, either. That worried me more than anything else.

  A dusty wind blew in from the well in the middle of the room. The air was musty, thick, but there was something else in it, too, a smell of rot. I shivered. This was bad. Very bad. Something was wrong here, something even worse than mercenaries. What was this place? Who abandons a perfectly good mine shaft, anyway?

  I backed up, and my foot kicked something hard and round, the size of a ball. It rolled against the wall with a brittle scrape. I twisted my Sunstone on for just the tiniest bit of light and found myself staring into the hollow eye sockets of a pockmarked human skull.

  “Tilla!” Zell hissed. “Turn off that…” But he trailed off midphrase, as his eyes went wide with horror. As badly as I didn’t want to, I followed his gaze, toward the well at the center of the room. A sound was coming out of it, a skittering, clicking sound, like someone running their nails on a pane of glass.

  The cobwebs draped over the well shuddered and rose, not from the wind but from something pushing up on them from below. Lyriana let out a shriek and clasped a hand over her mouth. A single limb broke through the cobwebs first, a skinny, fleshy leg that looked just like a human finger, except it was a foot long, with five barbed knuckles and a sharp, dirty nail at the end. It hooked around the side of the well, its nail digging into the cracks between the stone, and tensed as the rest of its body pulled up through: five more finger-legs, clutching at the edges, and a flat, round head on top of them, like two fleshy dinner plates stacked together. It lifted up, maybe as tall my knee, and stood over the well, its head rotating slowly as it scanned the room.

  “What. Is. That?” Zell asked.

  “Skarrling,” I choked out, though technically, it had many names. Skin-spider. Cave-biter. Miner’s bane. Every child in the West grew up hearing stories about the clicking, venomous monstrosities that lurked deep in our caves and mountains. I’d never actually seen one before, of course. No one I knew had. Some people thought they were just a fairy tale, something adults made up to give kids nightmares.

  Well, the thing standing right in front of me was sure as hell real, though I’d still probably call it a nightmare. It reminded me of the jellyfish that sometimes washed up on Harken’s Beach, but instead of being soft and translucent, this thing was hard, covered in a leathery gray skin pulled taut over its bony frame. Its head spun around in a full circle while the legs held still, and it made a wet, mashing noise, like an old man smacking on his porridge. As the back of it spun toward me, I saw where the sound was coming from: the thing had just one hole in its head, a nasty-looking round orifice framed by bristly black hairs. It suckled the air, in and out, like a baby’s lip crying for a nipple.

  The old rhyme popped into my head: Children, children, fear the cave / Or a skarrling’s kiss will be your grave.

  I’d been afraid of the mercenaries, but now I was absolutely terrified. I wanted to run, to scream, but my legs stayed planted, too scared to listen. Jax and Miles had pressed themselves against the room’s walls, as far from the skarrling as possible. Only Zell stood in the middle, his sword now pointed at the creature. I don’t think he had any idea what he was dealing with.

  “Nobody. Move,” Miles whispered. “Skarrlings are blind and have basically no hearing, but they see with an evolved sensor in their skin that lets them detect any kinetic activity.”

  “Can you speak like a person?” Jax hissed. “Just this once?”

  Miles closed his eyes. “We run, it strikes.”

  With a particularly mushy smack, the orifice in the center of the skarrling’s head puckered open, drooling a yellowish gunk that sizzled against the stone. Four spindly tendrils shot out. They were thin, transparent tubes, no wider than my pinkie, but impossibly long, spindling out of its hole like unfurling intestines. The tendrils slid out across the floor like serpents, tapping along with glistening, jagged barbs at their ends as they searched for prey. The very tips were slick with a liquid as blue as the ocean on a clear day. Their venom.

  A skarrling’s claws might scratch you red / But its fangs’ prick will kill you dead.

  Zell was the closest. He stood firm, not moving, even as one of the tendrils probed the ground near his boot. “I can kill it,” he said. “I can kill it in one strike.”

  “Maybe,” Lyriana whispered. She looked absolutely terrified. “But can you kill those?”

  She pointed up, her finger trembling, her Rings burning yellow. We all looked up. There they were, at least a dozen more of them, clinging upside down to the ceiling ten feet above us in a huddled mass. Now it was my turn to grab my mouth, silencing a scream. That was too much motion. The skarrling over the well swiveled toward me with a throaty, rasping click.

  The ones above us had been dormant, sleeping or whatever the hell skarrlings do. But now they stirred, twitching, shoving, chittering softly among themselves. One of them, a big reddish one in the middle, started descending, its knuckles cracking as it crawled over the others. It reached the wall just between Lyriana and Miles and, with a slurping suck, opened its hole, drooling more of that steaming yellow ooze. It hit the stone between them with a sizzle, and a rank, acidic steam bubbled up.

  “The skarrling uses its venomous tendrils to paralyze its prey,” Miles recited. His face was white, his eyes wider than I’d ever seen them. His chest heaved with every breath. “It immobilizes the body, then slowly dissolves it with its acidic bile, before absorbing the nutrients of the liquefied flesh.”

  “We have to run.” Jax eyed the door.

  “We move, we’re dead,” Miles repeated.

  “Well, we sure as hell can’t stay!”

  The skarrling at the center of the room, meanwhile, still had its sights set on me. Its tendrils slithered away from Zell, probing at the floors and wall around me. I sucked in my breath. Could that barb poke through my boot? It could almost certainly go through my pant leg.

  Above us, more and more skarrlings were stirring, slowly creeping down the walls. A few let out their tendrils, and they dangled loosely down the wall, like twitching, poisonous streamers. One of them touched the tip of Zell’s sword and began slowly wrapping around it, the venomous barb sliding down the shaft toward his unwavering hands. The big red skarrling had made its way over to Lyriana, and one of its fingertips was hooked through her hair, its dank, puckering orifice pointed right at her head. Her eyes were shut, her lips pursed, her hands clenched tightly together. The center one’s tendril was now right along my foot.

  And should you earn a skarrling’s ire / Hide fast, hide fast, behind the fire.

  Fire.

  Holy shit.

  Fire!

  “I know what to do,” I whispered. Maybe it was the insanity of desperation, or maybe I was
so scared I’d somehow crossed back over into brave. In that moment, the only thing I felt was clear, focused resolve. “Skarrlings hate fire. That’s what the old rhyme says. So we’re going to give them the biggest fire they’ve ever seen.” I turned my hand around, just the tiniest bit, showing the others the Sunstone Miles had given me. The one he’d turned into a bomb. “Miles. You sure this thing will work?”

  He stared at it, then nodded as he realized what I was planning. “Yeah. It should. Just crank up the gas and break the glass.”

  “Good. I’m going to throw this at the one in the middle, so it breaks on the edge of the well. Lyriana, I want you to Grow that flame as big and tall as you can. These things should scatter like a startled flock of birds.”

  “And then?” Jax asked.

  “Then we run.”

  There was no time to discuss the plan, no time to argue over it. This was what we were doing. I tightened my grip on the Sunstone and ignored the scratching of the tendril against the side of my boot. “We go on three. One…two…”

  Lyriana screamed as the red skarrling lunged forward and scraped its dirty nail along her cheek.

  I twisted the Sunstone all the way, bathing the room in hot white light. The skarrlings jerked back with a collective hiss, and then I threw it, in a perfect arc, right into the stone lining on the side of the well. It shattered explosively, glass and leather flying in all directions, and a burst of white fire blossomed out.

  Lyriana didn’t hesitate. She shot out both hands and twisted them up, Growing the tiny ball of fire into a massive pillar of white flame that shot down the well and up along the ceiling. We all jerked back from the heat. My face burned. Zell hurtled himself to the ground, the ends of his long hair sizzling.

  The skarrlings all scattered, moving so much faster than they had before, shrieking as they scrambled up to the farthest corners of the room. “Now!” I screamed. We sprinted out the doorway and stumbled into the shaft. Zell, Miles, and I burst out first, then Jax, and then Lyriana, bringing up the rear, her hands still circling as they kept the fire roaring.

  The shaft was bright now, between the daylight flooding in from the entryway and the white fire raging behind us. There was something in the way of the exit, though, something on the floor at about knee-height, moving and clicking….

  More skarrlings! Two of them, it looked like, their backs turned toward us. But these seemed different, distracted, hunched over some gooey wet shapes on the floor and making sick retching sounds. My stomach roiled as I realized what the shapes were: the bodies of two of the mercenaries, halfway liquefied, like people who’d been jellied and melted. They smelled horrible, vomit and blood and sickly sweet citrus.

  There was no time to think, just act. Behind us, the fire was dying, and the skarrlings were scrambling back down. Zell raced forward, let out a rumbling war cry, and swung his sword in a low, horizontal arc. He caught one of the skarr-lings right in the side of the head and sliced clean through it, severing the disk from the legs and sending it flying across the room. The other skarrling turned toward him with a throaty rasp, and he kicked it to the side, crushing it against the wall with the sole of his boot. Its carapace cracked, like the shell of a crab, and meaty brown gunk sprayed out.

  The path was clear. The mine’s entryway never looked more inviting. I sprinted harder than I’ve ever sprinted, bounding over the mercenaries’ gooey remains. Zell, Miles, and I hit the doorway first, bursting out into the light of the day, the warm, safe, wonderful light of day. I turned back to see Jax tearing after us, and Lyriana just behind him.

  Then Lyriana slipped, her foot sliding on a bloody stretch of mercenary, and she fell to her hands and knees.

  “Lyriana!” I yelled, but it was too late. That big red skarr-ling lurched out from behind her. Its maw puckered wide open, and four glistening tendrils shot out, aimed right at Lyriana’s back.

  “No!” Jax roared. He spun around and dove back into the shaft, back toward the monsters chasing us. Right as the tendrils were about to strike the Princess, he grabbed her up and jerked her to the side, blocking her with his body. One grazed off his shoulder, not breaking through his heavy fur coat, and the other three slashed harmlessly by, scraping off the walls. Behind them, the red skarrling let out a phlegmatic, wet roar and lurched forward, but Jax dove down and grabbed something off the ground, something long and sharp with a black tip: the mercenary’s arrow, straight out of his quiver. Jax thrust forward just as the skarrling lunged, and he plunged the arrow right in its orifice, up to the tip, with a slick crunch. The skarrling gurgled and rasped, its limbs and tendrils flailing wildly, then crumpled and lay still.

  The two of them rushed out of the shaft, just as the rest of the skarrlings dared to peer around the corner after us. They’d go no farther; skarrlings feared sunlight almost as much as they feared flame. We all staggered out into the sloping valley, gasping, panting, and laughing. I’d never felt so exhilarated in my life.

  “Holy shit!” Jax screamed at the top of his lungs. “That was…that was…”

  Zell kept his calm, like always, but even he was breathing a little heavy, and had a smile.

  “I think I found our third mercenary,” Miles said. We followed his gaze toward a body lying facedown just a few feet outside the mine’s entrance. The back of his shirt was torn open, and his bare skin was marked with three round holes, the veins around them pulsing an icy blue. A bloody foam stained his gaping mouth. The skarrling’s kiss.

  “Damn.” Jax shook his head. “Not that I had much love for those guys, but it’s a hell of a way to go. Makes you almost feel bad for them.”

  “I don’t,” Zell said.

  “Yeah, well, you basically don’t have emotions between ‘gotta kill’ and ‘yay, I killed,’ so that’s not really a surprise.” Jax laughed. “Still, though. That move with the sword and the kick…taking out two of ’em…Pretty badass, Zell. Pretty badass.”

  “You didn’t do so bad yourself, stable hand,” Zell replied. “It was very brave to run back for the Princess…and then with the arrow…”

  “Let’s all give credit where credit’s due.” I grinned. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Miles’s amazing exploding Sunstone. Right, Miles?” He didn’t reply. “Miles?”

  “Uh, guys,” Miles said, but his voice was all wrong. He didn’t sound happy or excited. He sounded terrified. We all turned back to him, but he was staring at Lyriana, who stood bolt upright just outside the mine’s entryway. There was something off about her: she looked too stiff, frozen, only her hands shaking at her sides. Tears streaked down her cheeks.

  “Lyriana?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, Tilla,” she replied, then crumpled down in the dirt. Even from a distance, I could see it: her pant leg was torn, ripped off in the chase, and there was something sticking out of the back of her left calf, a black stinger in her skin, the veins around it throbbing a haunting, unmistakable blue.

  “SHE’S HOT,” I SAID, MY hand pressed to Lyriana’s sweat-slick forehead. “She’s burning up.”

  “Her body’s fighting off the venom,” Miles muttered. He was sitting on a mossy log, his head resting in his hands. “Or doing the best it can.”

  We were in a small, damp grotto a ways off the Markson, hidden behind tall reeds and the canopy of a majestic willow tree. After Lyriana collapsed, our first priority had been to get the hell out of that valley, to find somewhere safe to regroup. Our horses had run off and Muriel had died, poor thing, but the mercenaries’ three horses were still there, so we were able to ride fast. I’d held Lyriana the whole time, pressing her between my body and our horse’s neck. She’d at least been lucid for most of the ride: whispering softly that she was sorry, telling me that she felt cold, smiling weakly at my reassurances that she’d be okay.

  That was an hour ago. Now she lay on a bed of mossy grass in front of me, shivering and writhing, unable to even speak. Her eyes were shut tight, her mouth locked in a pained frown. Every now and again, s
he let out a horrible, weak whimper, and I don’t know if that was better or worse than the silence.

  I did know one thing. I would lose my mind if Lyriana died. She deserved so much better than this. I thought of her holding that girl in the cottage, arms slick with blood, trying so hard to keep her alive, working and praying even as life left the girl’s eyes. Lyriana would fight to her last breath to help a person in need.

  I couldn’t let her die here. I wouldn’t.

  The canopy of the willow tree parted, and Jax came in, carrying a leather flask plucked from one of the mercenaries’ bags. “I’ve got some clean water for her. Like you said.” He knelt down next to me and pressed it to Lyriana’s lips. They parted for just a moment, swallowing a single sip, and then she spat it all back up with a hacking gag. Jax turned away, like he didn’t want me to see the pain on his face. “She’s getting worse, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Miles said. “Rapidly.”

  “Is she going to die?” I’d known Jax my whole life, but I swear I’d never heard him sound so young, so scared.

  Miles hesitated, but only for a moment. “I think so.”

  “Dammit!” Jax slammed his boot into a nearby stump. I could tell it hurt him, and that he didn’t care. “If I’d just moved a little faster…I could’ve gotten to her in time….”

  “It’s not your fault, Jax,” I said softly. I didn’t share his anger or his guilt. Looking at Lyriana, I just felt a horrible, numb ache. It was just so unfair, so wrong. This couldn’t be happening. Not when we’d gone so far. Not after everything we’d been through. Not to her. “How long does she have?”

  Miles walked over to us. He crouched by Lyriana’s leg and turned it over very carefully so he could see where she’d been pricked. Back at the mine, the ring of blue infection under her skin had been just an inch or so in length. It had doubled since, her veins pulsing blue halfway to her ankle and her knee. “I don’t know,” Miles said. “Normally, an untreated skarrling sting will kill a person in six hours, tops. But the venom usually spreads through the body much faster, like it did with the mercenary back there. She’s really fighting it.” He glanced at her hands, where her Rings were all glowing a vibrant green. “Maybe her magic is somehow helping her.”