Hunched forward, spindly legs bowed and wide, there stood a man in a purple pinstripe suit and matching bowler. Beneath his unkempt locks of sandy hair sat two brilliant and gleaming amber eyes. With a demonic grin upon his lips, the Cheshire Man hissed a euphoric sigh. “At last. Oh, I have waited so very long for this moment. At long, long last!” A serrated laugh scraped its way up her spine and then stopped abruptly. He raised his chin and looked down his nose at Spinneretta, his smile filling her with a grotesque loathing. “I suppose I owe you a word of gratitude, young one.” His eyes betrayed a frightful hint of sincerity. “I cannot say that you did as I’d planned, but your improv fell within the margin of error I’d accounted for.”
Spinneretta’s lips shook. What the hell is going on? What is . . . ?
Him! It’s him!
The voice splashed off her confusion and fear, breaking into a hundred shards of vague and horrible recollection. Staggering back a step, she clutched at her head and blinked at the purple-suited specter, hoping it would all vanish like the illusion it must have been. But he just stood there, like a blotch of magenta paint splattered upon Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
“Well now,” the Cheshire Man hissed, “if you will not acknowledge my gratitude, then I am wasting it on you. There is no reason to further delay the climax.” He snapped his fingers, and the air grew darker, heavier.
Streaming from above and beyond, great plumes of smoke appeared and flowed toward Mark from all sides. Like slithering serpents, they collapsed and coiled around him. Another water-voice, like a howl of pain, emanated from where the smokes met. The black, gaseous streams swirled about him, growing thicker and more violent. The storm concealed flashes of spellwork within, and the epicenter began to lethargically drift upward, lifting Mark into the air. The Cheshire Man floated up behind the smoke sphere, immune to gravity’s edicts.
“Well, Mark,” the Cheshire Man said with a venomous cluck, “it certainly has been a rough act, hasn’t it? Indeed, I was beginning to think you’d see your little friend to her grave before breaking your precious corpse-promise. I am overjoyed you have at last come to your senses.”
Spinneretta’s whole body was shaking. The man in the purple suit. The smoke. The ethereal being. It was too much. She couldn’t follow what was going on; jigsaw images and vivid unrecollections locked and clashed within her mind, and from between their collisions grew spiderweb fractures of madness and denial.
The Cheshire Man crossed his arms and legs as though reclining in an invisible chair. “At last, Mark, it is time to release the power of the Jailers and throw wide the gates of A’vavel!” He spread his arms, and the same smoke that enveloped Mark swirled up his legs and arms until he disappeared into the maelstrom. With the sound of a rumbling earthquake, the smokestorm snaked through the air, twisting toward the terraced tower on the other side of a distant rampart—toward the shrine of A’vavel, tomb of Raxxinoth. The column of smoke collided with the side of the structure, ejecting a red plume into the air.
The ground under Spinneretta’s feet trembled. As she watched, she could once again feel the myriad legs scraping across the fabric of her mind. Each scratch seemed to send its own cacophonous whispers directly into her thoughts, where the voice of her haunted subconscious screamed at her. What are you doing? the voice demanded of her. Have you learned nothing?
The smoke vanished behind the walls of the tower, chunks of maroonstone raining from the silent heights. Tremors of terror seized her shoulders and arms. “How many dead stars will ignite? How many dead stars will ignite?”
Stupid girl, you had one thing that you had to do. Only one thing.
DO NOT LET HIM OPEN THE GATE. DO NOT LET HIM OPEN THE GATE.
“Spins! Spins!”
Almost too scared to follow the sound, Spinneretta looked over her shoulder. Arthr was nearly at the bottom of the rampart wall, his descending steps cautious and calculating. She snapped her head back to the temple, as though to confirm what she already knew. The scraping against her mind was intensifying, multiplying. An ageless energy had been unleashed into the air, and verdant sparks shimmered through the fissures in the tower’s stonework, growing brighter and brighter.
“Spins! Are you alright?” Footsteps, racing toward her, pattering against the fine sand. “What the hell is happening?”
Do not let him open the gate, demanded the voice in her head.
DO NOT LET HIM OPEN THE GATE, demanded the scratching from beyond the threshold.
Paralyzed, she couldn’t answer. She just stared at the luminous slats of light dancing and fulminating within the temple-tower. Pale sparks licked at the outside of the structure. A hand fell on her shoulder with an insistent force. But the entirety of her mind was drawn toward the seal, focused upon the immense power building within those walls.
Something whipped across her face, bringing her out of her paralysis with a sharp bite. “What the fuck are you doing!?” Arthr shouted at her. “Stop muttering like a fucking lunatic and do something!”
She grabbed her hot cheek, still shaking. “What is there to do? It’s over. It’s all lost.”
His mouth gaped. “What?”
“The Gate to A’vavel,” she said, her pulse accelerating. “It’s the prison of Mother Raxxinoth. It can only be opened by the power of an Outsider.”
He stared at her. “Mother Rax . . . What in the name of fuck are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” she said, a jagged pain ripping through her head. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!”
Get down!
She snapped at once to attention. “Get down,” she spat with a phantom certainty. “Get down!” She leapt at Arthr, tackling him to one side and pinning him against the sand in the shadow of an octagonal dwelling nearby.
His arms and spider legs resisted and tried to wrestle her off him. “Wha, Spins, what’re you—?”
An impossibly bright flash burned away the sky, birthing a shuddering fireball of green-blue light. The land heaved, and a deafening roar filled the air. The shock front ripped through the scattered structures of the city, tearing apart the weaker buildings. Arthr and Spinneretta held fast to one another, their spider legs digging into the ground, their bodies pressed as close to the outer wall of the hovel as they could. The wind stripped loose bricks from their shield and sent cobbles flying like bullets. Great clouds of burning dust and sand billowed past them on all sides while the storm hurled shards of metal and stone like artillery shells.
Just as the winds seemed to die down, a second great tremor kicked the ground from under them. Spinneretta hit the sand hard, and the breath burst from her lungs. When the roar of the firewinds and the vibrations of the earth at last subsided, she crept trembling to the edge of the building and peeked out.
The carnage was at first hard to discern through the curtain of dust and pulverized stone hanging in the air, but as she adjusted to the new contrast she saw that the rampart nearest the explosion had collapsed completely, and a huge section of the city had been flattened. The ruins that had been clustered between the two giant walls were now little more than sand and rubble. It looked as though a hydrogen bomb had gone off, utterly leveling everything in its path. The thick sands that had covered the skeletal city had been blasted away, revealed the carved and smooth stonework substrate, untouched by light for centuries. And at the epicenter of the blast, where the towering shrine had once stood, was a gigantic crater.
Near the crater, the sand and bricks and stone had been peeled away, revealing a strange surface that must have been twenty feet beneath the paving of the ruined streets. That subsurface had a dull sheen about it, was covered in blocky extrusions spaced at regular intervals, and had angular grooves running radially in all directions from the center. And in the center of the crater, a slender silver needle rose to half the height the shrine itself had once stood. That needle flashed and crackled with vibrant currents of electricity.
A prismatic flame burned, floating n
ear the point of the needle. And just beside it, a purple speck. Spinneretta’s mind was blank. She was unable to interpret what she was seeing. All she could see was that the flickering, multicolored flame—Mark—seemed to be the source of the electricity now racing along the needle and sparking through the grooves of the crater’s metallic rays.
Before she could even venture a theory, the ground began to quake once more. It was a low rumble at first, but it soon grew to another violent upheaval. The tremor threw her onto her face again, and Arthr fell only a few feet away. She dug her spider legs into the cracks in the ancient brickwork, panicking. The voice in her head was now a scream of awakening horror. Rumbling, crunching, churning, echoing deep under the ground—each vibration was a technomagic death miracle.
A deafening crack tore her attention behind them. The towering rampart they’d escaped along shattered, crumbling apart like it was made of Lego bricks. A mammoth cuboid structure, made of that same dull-gleaming, colorless substance, arose from the ground beneath the wall, sending boulders and massive chunks of masonry raining in all directions.
Spinneretta gasped in awe. The cube-thing rose and rose until it was a sky-scraping obelisk nearly as tall as the King’s keep. In the distance, several other metal cuboids grew from the foam of the city-sea and the wastelands surrounding it. They awakened in every direction, forming a great circle that seemed to surround the crater and its needle.
Phantasmal sparks danced up the nearest structure’s side along a deep, geometric groove. The top fifth unhinged and, with a deep droning sound, began to rotate independent of its base.
As Spinneretta stared upon the bizarre objects, she at last understood what was happening. That shrine-tower had not been the entrance to A’vavel as she had at first thought—it was merely the keyhole. When the Yellow King had first sought the grave of Mother Raxxinoth, he had settled and built the fortress city of Th’ai-ma upon the true gateway: a gigantic machine hidden beneath millions of years and dust and abandon.
“Spins, what the fuck is happening?”
She stared at the spinning cap of the metallic tower. As its speed wound up, air began to rush out of it—no, not air, merely pressure—in time with its surfaces’ realignments. A bolt of light spat off the tower’s cap, and she was monetarily blinded. The blistering crackle made her jump. As the towers in the distance completed the same ritual, they too began to discharge, firing jets of electric light at the keyhole needle.
The smell of ozone burned the air. Despite the pain, she kept staring at the dazzling display as the shaking in the air grew even more violent. The sparking bolts, at least a dozen in all, gradually solidified into constant, blazing streams of power more brilliant than the sun.
The ground gave a final cataclysmic shudder, and a flash washed away her vision. When it returned a few moments later, the bolts and rays had vanished. All the power that had burned the air and scorched the sky now buzzed within the keyhole needle. Iridescent energy flowed across its surface, arcs of lightning drawn to the floating sphere above it. Sphere. No, it was nothing so tangible or geometric. It was nothing more than a black, roiling stain in space, so deep that its boundary warped and darkened the air around it.
When the next set of shrill thoughts played across Spinneretta’s mind, it took all of her self-control to stay on her feet and not to scream. Those scraping sounds—those legs—were now louder, starker, more urgent. Whereas they were once suggestions, traces of communion, they were now a thousand times louder and clearer. Deafened by the screaming thoughts pouring out from the hole in space, she knew beyond any doubt that the black blotch was the true gateway to A’vavel. Beyond that seething black gap in time, the voice of Mother Raxxinoth stabbed at her thoughts like a choir of grating horrors in cacophonous discord.
Near the crackling magics that fed the portal, the strange green-gold flame from before drifted, nearly unmoving. The purple speck had vanished. She knew for certain that the Cheshire Man had disappeared into the black void beyond, into the prison. Questions assailed the surface of her mind, and the only thing she could think to do was to call out to him. “Mark?”
Her own voice echoed back from the distant ruins. As though responding to the sound, the flame-like shape flickered and then faded into what resembled a standing position without even a hint of transitional movement. And just as soon as Mark’s shape began to shift again, Arthr gasped. Spinneretta would have ignored it, had she not caught something in her peripheral vision: a yellow spark.
Hands shaking, Arthr once more fished her pendant from his pocket. The warm glow from the Sigil had returned. “Spins, it’s happening again!” The mist expanded in whirling coils as the portal once more started its formation. This time, he dropped the pendant to the ground and stepped away from it. The tendrils of mist were broken only for a moment before the swirling strands coalesced into a stable portal. Arthr looked up at her, eyes wide with fear or wonder. “Holy shit, this means we can go home, right?” He edged a step closer to the swirling wreath, as though afraid it would swallow him and spit him out as a red paste.
Spinneretta stared into the white core of the portal. Kara. She’d come through for them, just like Mark had said. They could escape the nightmare she’d pulled everyone into. They could return home and . . .
And what?
The scraping along her brain grew more severe as the thought of returning ran through her. The voice in her head let out a violent hiss, and a wave of anger hit her bloodstream. “No. No, I can’t go. I . . . ” She turned back to the blackened rift twisting and shuddering in the air like a jellyfish. “I have to stop him. I have to . . . ”
Arthr sputtered. “What? Stop who?”
“The Cheshire Man. He’s going to release Mother Raxxinoth, and I’m . . . ”
The only one who can stop him.
Those words froze her thoughts and brought a pounding headache along with them. How could she be the only one? What did that even mean? And how could she know that even if it were true? There was no logic—no meaning—to the revelation, and yet her heart now surged with the certainty that it was fact, that she’d been born for this moment alone.
Beneath the black sphere of the A’vavel portal, Mark’s form shifted again.
Another mental voice came upon Spinneretta’s mind. This time, it was not the confusing strains of her own other voice, nor was it the discordant scraping of the thing beyond the veil. It was warm and comforting. She knew at once that the voice belonged to Mark.
“Spinneretta,” he said, “Forgive me. This is not what I expected to happen. This is my fault. Leave this place. I shall shoulder the burden of the Cheshire Man.”
Confused—and yet bizarrely certain—she stomped a few steps toward where the kaleidoscopic fire blazed at the needle. “To hell with that!” she yelled, fervor carrying her voice over the epicenter of destruction. “I’m not letting you go alone! I’m the only one who can stop him! I understand that now!”
“I am happy that I got to see you one more time. Even if it was under such circumstances.”
“Don’t you fucking ignore me! I said I’m not letting you go alone!”
Mark’s thoughts grew sad against her mind. “Goodbye, Spinny.”
From nowhere, a wall of force slammed into her. The impact flung her from her feet toward Arthr and the seething mist portal. She tried to fight back, to grapple her way back into control, but some profane gravity drew her straight into the mist. As the nether swirled around her, she screamed. She saw Arthr falling into the void behind her, terror stretching his face thin. She reached back toward the receding world on the Web, desperate not to let Mark do what he was surely planning. The sound of her voice was washed away by the vortex. The dizzying ether overcame her, and the last thing she saw before losing consciousness was a syrupy shadow following them as the portal closed.
Mark floated there beside the great metal spindle, gazing at where the mist portal closed. He thanked Kara in his mind, praying his magic would carry h
is gratitude back to Earth. He regretted having to force his hand to send Spinneretta back, but there was no other way. He’d allowed this to happen, and so he had to take responsibility for it. He had to stop the purple-suited demon from releasing the thing within A’vavel, as he certainly planned.
But more than that, he needed to protect Spinneretta—no matter the cost. He focused his mind to a single point, bringing forth an incredible font of power from the depths of his core. The magic flowed just as easily as it had when he killed Golgotha. As he concentrated, summoning a greater spell than he ever had before, a spinning globe of strange emptiness formed within his ghost-hand. It grew in hyperbolic volume and magnitude until it felt like it could swallow the whole world if given a chance.
And as his mind wove the sealing spell, he felt the whole Web come alive with a hissing aura that ran over the ground and through the strands splitting the black sky. The sensation was bizarre, queerly familiar. The Web had been sealed once, of that there was now no doubt. He himself had felt it in the essence of Spinneretta’s carvings. But that barrier was only one-sided, so as to seal the Yellow King and his forces here, forever. Now, he would complete the barrier. He would ensure nobody could ever return to this cursed land, least of all a zealous spider-girl eager to risk her life for hopeless ideals.
The orb collapsed, and bands of interlocking spellforce rippled outward along the ground and through the air. The magic weave spread until the entire Web was covered in a great spell-lattice. The seal seethed and hummed. He probed at it with his mind, testing the seams and trappings. The formation of such a seal was an incredible spell, easily the greatest he’d ever worked. It was a spell capable of repelling any attempts at breaching it. He knew from experience that it would work, as Spinneretta had failed to pierce that barrier from the other side during their stay. That he could wield such power now was a testament to how much he’d grown since he’d used the ascension’s power to the shallow ends of murdering Golgotha.
Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3) Page 62
