The single spider was easily larger than all of the others combined. I started to back away from it and it surged through the gap at me. I heard Tower roar something behind me but I couldn’t make it out. Blood was coursing through my ears and made my head pound. I fell backwards and landed on one of the sacks we had filled with stone.
The spider was on top of me before I could roll off of the sack. I felt something from it drip onto my head and chest. It was a viscous substance and made my clothes stick to my skin. The spider let out another noise, but it was so close and loud now that I felt it shake through me more than I heard it.
It reared its head back and I tore away from it. I had no idea which way I was trying to push myself. I just knew, instinctively, that I had to at least try to move. Its fangs came down into the bag of rocks the instant after I rolled out of the way. I collided with one of its legs and its hairs stabbed at my skin. The spider recoiled back after smashing its own fangs into solid rock and squealed in pain.
“Bryce! Get away from it!”
I scrambled to my feet and stumbled my way down the tunnel. I had lost the bottle in the fall but I could make out Tower’s figure in the darkness. I huddled behind him as if he was a wall I could put between myself and the beast.
Tower stretched his arms out in front of him and shifted his feet apart. He looked like a man preparing for a fist fight rather than fending off a giant spider. He opened one hand in the direction of the creature and a beam of light shot at it. The spider hissed and struck at it, knocking it to the side with one of its front legs.
It backed up away from us and Tower tried again. The spider deflected the second ray of light, snarled, and then climbed backwards up onto the wall. The bulk of its body covered the cavern opening completely, and its legs stretched out in all directions along the floor, walls, and ceiling. The white of the spider webs was gone, hidden by its bulk as it protected its young.
Tower thrust both arms forward together at once and sent two streams of light at the spider. They unraveled out of his hands like ropes waving through the air and made contact with the central mass of the creature. The spider began to howl but was eerily cut off before it could finish. It seemed to tense up and then fall forward as a locked up, rigid mass. Its back hit the floor and its body retained its prior position, as if it were a statue that just toppled over.
Tower rushed forward and pulled a fistful of gems from his pouch. He let them drop haphazardly to the floor as he rushed through each one. When he finally found a clear one he dropped all of the others and placed it in the entrance way.
The gem began to spread and fill in the gap. I stepped around the body of the giant spider and watched as it happened. In the cavern I saw the smaller spiders rush toward us, likely stirred to action when it saw the larger one fall. The gemstone sealed into the wall just as they reached us, and I made a face as the spiders clumped over the clear barrier, seeing their furry body parts up close.
In a few moments we could see nothing of the barrier at all. The spiders covered and blocked out their side of it and the darkness returned as if hole had never been made. Tower yanked the bottle of light out from where I dropped it and shook it. The particles of light within burst to life and lit our section of the tunnel.
“We have little time Bryce, and I need to get back down here to seal this wall properly or we’ll be cutting our way through cobwebs for the rest of our lives. Scoop what you can into the bags and then help me carry this upstairs.”
We filled each of the sacks as fast as we could, stuffing chunks of rock into each one. There was no shortage of pieces of stone and gems that littered the floor after the cave-in. After the bags were full I grabbed the smallest of all of them and stood holding it expectantly. Tower looked at me strangely.
“What? Oh, no. I didn’t mean the bags. Help me carry this,” he stated and pointed to the body of the spider.
“What?” I responded. I was so shocked that I dropped the bag. “But it’s dead.”
“No it isn’t. It’s frozen—ah, suspended, like our food. We’re taking it with us.”
I looked at the spider, then back at him. I looked at the spider again. I didn’t know what to say.
“Take one of the legs. Don’t worry, it can’t hurt you. It can’t do anything right now.”
The face I had made at the hundreds of little spiders was back as I grabbed the closest leg. The spider was far lighter than its size suggested and we were able to move it, albeit slowly. I tried not to look down at what we were dragging out of fear that I would scream again.
The back of the spider scraped along the floor of the tunnel. At times Tower waved me ahead of us to clear out some of the loose stones and rocks so we had a clear path to drag it along. Each time I would take the light with me and be ready to dart back at the sign of anything coming up through the other parts of the mines.
I knew that we were almost home when we reached the turn near the cellar entrance. Tower took over pulling at this point, and told me to run ahead and make sure the larger of the prison cells was open and ready. When he pulled the body of the spider in I had the barred door open for him. The caged part of the room was easily large enough for the monster. Tower pulled it inside and then locked the door. It stayed rigid and unmoving.
“I’m going back in to seal that opening. I don’t have time to reapply the ward to this room. Bryce, listen close now, if that spider starts moving again before I’m back then that means something happened to me. If it starts moving then you run. You run up the stairs, straight out the door, and don’t come back.”
He ran back into the tunnels and I watched his image vanish into the darkness. I wanted to scream after him that he forgot to take a bottle of light but fire bloomed to life and illuminated the opening part of the tunnel. Tower was holding the small humanoid figure of fire in his hand and using that to guide his way. Both of them pressed on without me and the blackness threatened to swallow the cellar once more.
It felt like an entire day passed as I kept glancing back and forth between the tunnel and the unmoving spider, looking for any sign that would trigger me to run. I felt like the light was playing tricks on me or that I couldn’t trust my eyes. The legs of the spider seemed like they twitched every few minutes. It looked like something shifted in the shadows of the mines. Was the spider breathing? Did giant spiders even breathe like other animals?
The sound of the explosion woke me from my paranoia. A blast of air and a wave of dust crashed into the cellar. I shielded my face uselessly after the fact and felt the stinging of dust in my eyes. I rubbed them frantically as I stared through tears to see if the spider was moving after the explosion. Its figure was blurry but seemed to be still.
Tower came running out of the darkness, no longer holding the fire to light his way. He slid into the room and turned into the momentum, springing upright to face the door. His eyes were shifting wildly as if his mind was racing through more thoughts than he could keep up. A roar came out of the tunnel with such a force that it felt like a second explosion had smacked me across the face.
“Fucking dammit!” he yelled back and marched across the room to where we emptied out the bags of rocks each day. He grabbed out pieces at random and pelted each of them into the wall, shattering the weaker ones into a spray of gemstones and rubble. His hands were a blur as he sorted through them. Another roar, much closer this time, snapped his attention away for a moment and we both stood staring in its direction with wide eyes.
He grabbed a fistful of gems and dived back at the tunnel just as the monster came slouching in the light. It was the size of a horse but scaly and pale like a lizard. Its eyes were all milky white and lacked both irises and pupils. Its legs were enormous piles of muscle, almost too large for the rest of its body, and it stood tall enough that its head threatened to hit the roof of the tunnel. Its face had an elongated snout and two tiny holes for nose.
It looked too close to a dragon to me and I screamed. The monster shrieked back.
Tower arched his body forward and threw the gems at it. He continued with the motion with his other hand, springing it forward and sending a fireball hurtling after the gems as they all soared into the monster.
The fireball consumed the gems as it seared through them, gaining intensity as it absorbed their power. It seemed to hang in the air as it expanded, as if the energy it was unleashing slowed the fire for a moment. Then, all at once, the ball of fire snapped forward into the monster’s head. There was a flash of light and heat and I fell to the floor.
Chapter Six
When I opened my eyes I wasn’t sure if I had been unconscious or just dazed for a few moments. It felt like the room was moving and something was shaking me, pressing into my back. I thought it was Tower seeing if I was alive and I turned my head to face him.
Two long legs were protruding out of the jail cell and scraping at me on the floor. I recoiled from them and wanted to scream. The spider hissed as I shuffled away and it pressed itself tightly against the bars and stretched its legs out further. I was far enough away that I was safely out of its reach but I was still horrified at the massive limbs reaching out for me. Each of them was easily double the length of my entire body.
The room had a layer of dust on it that hadn’t been there when I had seen the explosion. A quick glance at the tunnel entrance showed me that it had collapsed into the room but the damage of the blast didn’t stop there. Part of the roof had fallen and cracks ran through the rest of it. The floor around the tunnel looked like a gash had been dealt to it. Rocks and boulders laced with crystals and gems had spilled into the cellar, caking everything with dust in the process. I saw parts of the monster that Tower had aimed his spell at sticking out from the rubble. I was certain it was dead but I couldn’t bring myself to check.
I found Tower on his back at the foot of the stairs. I placed my hands on his shoulders and shook him gently at first. When I felt him stir I shook him harder. The spider let out another angry hiss from across the room and the hairs of the back of my neck shot up. I gripped Tower’s shirt and pulled him and then let him drop. He landed with a thud on the stone floor and his eyes flew open.
He inhaled sharply through his nose and sat up immediately. He saw the results of the cave-in around the room and dived toward the sealed off tunnel before he was even steady on his feet. I watched him tumble as he ran. He put his hand on the stacked rocks as if it was something he needed to touch to make sure was real and actually happening.
When he turned around he looked furious. It was the first time I saw him angry since I came to the tower. It was a frightening, fierce look and I backed away from him as he stomped around the room. I couldn’t understand what he could be so upset about. Even though the tunnel had been blocked, plenty of gem-rich stones had been loosened into the room.
Tower opened his mouth as if he was about to say something. He stopped, reconsidered, and then let out a low, guttural sound. It was something between a cry and a growl. His eyes locked onto the spider across the room, at its arms still groping futilely out of the bars, and I saw something in him snap.
Whatever emotion he was feeling had sobered him from the effects of his fall. He stepped gingerly in range of the spider’s legs. The creature swiped at him, and he dodged it effortlessly with a turn of his head. Before the spider could recover from the loss of balance from missing its strike, Tower shot an arm out and grabbed the leg with his right hand. He gripped it firmly, his hand just barely big enough to wrap around the entire width of it.
The spider wailed and took another swipe with its other leg. Tower didn’t have to dodge this one. His free hand met it mid-swing, grappled onto it, and twisted it roughly. The spider cried out and backed up from the bars of the cage until the back portion of it was pressed against the wall behind it.
Tower never let go. His mouth opened to bare his teeth at the spider and he twisted his hands again. I heard something crunch. It wasn’t a loud noise, but the scream that came out of the cage was near deafening. The monster seemed to have given up fighting back and was trying more to pull its legs back into safety. I thought that Tower had made his point but he still didn’t let go. He wasn’t finished.
His teeth gnashed together and I saw the same expression cross his face as he had when he was usually concentrating on a spell. The spider felt its effects before I noticed them, and its cries were now a constant noise in the room.
Tower’s hands were glowing, and it was then that I realized what he was doing. His hands were shock white and the area on the spider’s legs where he gripped, previously a dark green and black, looked red hot. The air around the contact was distorted with the intensity of the heat that Tower was focusing through his hands and into the spider. Its legs were being burned away.
“Stop,” I said. “Tower, please stop.”
He turned his head at me and looked like he didn’t recognize me, as if he had never seen me before in his life. Despite how angry he looked in his eyes I could see that he was also confused.
“No, I don’t stop,” he stated firmly.
The cries from the spider became worse. I thought the noises it had made before were inhuman but they were nothing to what it was making now. There were snarls, snaps, and clicks, all with the undercurrent gasping and labored breathing that sounded like a thick, heavy liquid being boiled away.
“Please stop. This is wrong.”
“It doesn’t matter!” he roared. “I do this! I kill it! I burn it away to nothing but ash. This is what I do. I’ve seen it.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
“My familiar. He died when I went back in there without you.”
Tower turned away from me and back to the spider. I tried to comprehend what the little figure made of fire could have meant to him but I couldn’t. I moved forward and set a hand on Tower’s arm. I could feel the heat radiating from his hands and it was uncomfortably hot even that far away.
“Don’t. The spider didn’t do it,” I said.
I felt the heat lessen slightly but it didn’t stop. I looked up and saw the conflicting choices play out in Tower’s eyes as he glanced between the spider and me. The heat lessened a little more and a look of disbelief crossed his face. Again it looked like something snapped within him and he released the legs of the spider. They retracted back into the cage like a released spring and the sound of its tortured throes subsided.
Tower was looking at me as if he was seeing something impossible. The rage on his face faded with the glow in his hands. Sweat was dripping from his forehead now, as if it had waited until the heat he was channeling through his body stopped before it appeared.
His eyes were closed and he looked like he was trying to work through some problem in his head. A few minutes passed before he marched away from me and to the stairs. I was still trying to process what had just happened. Questions were ready to burst out of me. I rushed up the stairs behind him.
“Tower! What happened?”
He didn’t answer.
“You said he died. How? Was it the monster?”
He still didn’t answer.
His larger height made keeping up with him impossible. When I broke from the stairway and into the main room of the tower he was already at the bottom of the spiral staircase. I saw that it was late evening now. We must have been unconscious for a few hours. The water running through the tower twinkled in the walls.
“Tower!”
He looked at me but didn’t stop climbing the stairs. He brushed a hand through the air toward our dining table and the magic suspension around the roast pig platter vanished. He continued walking like he had done nothing at all.
“Eat what you like and then go to sleep.”
He had not spoken harshly but he hadn’t sounded friendly either. The way he slammed his door shut left me feeling abandoned. I picked at the food until it was cold and unappealing. I knew I should have been hungry but I had no appetite.
Before bed I went up to Tower’s floor. I almost gathered enough nerve and courage to knock when I thought better of it. He had told me to go sleep. My body ached from all of the little injuries I had received that day. I had only discovered them when I finally stopped to eat.
Despite how the day had ended I felt tired. I slowly made my way down the stairs and into my room. Weary and miserable, I lay down on the bed and tried to sleep.
* * *
The next day came and went without seeing Tower out of his room. I knocked on his door but received no answer. I heard him moving and muttering around inside and didn’t dare go in without his invitation. I remembered his warnings well.
I braved the cellar room for water. The spider seemed to regard me suspiciously but made no movement to reach me through the bars. I saw that there was a bucket of water inside the cage and what looked to be food scraps. I guessed that Tower must have came out of his study some time during the night.
Caged or not, a monster was still a monster and made me nervous. I took the water with me upstairs and didn’t go back down for the rest of the day.
The food on the table showed further evidence of Tower’s activities. It was still warm enough to eat and I forced myself to consume as much as possible before it got cold. I had no idea how long it would be until he came out again.
I spent most of the day on the roof of the tower. I had grown to trust that the dragon wouldn’t find me despite being so high. Even so I didn’t dare go outside and leave the tower. The thought of being out alone still frightened me.
Winter was still a few months away but it was already starting to get colder. I enjoyed keeping track of the gemstones shrinking in the water bowl, like ice melting away. Sometimes pieces would crumble away in a show of sparks that lit up the water. The purple gem that completed the cycle poured with water as if it was being drenched in an unseen rain. It was hypnotic and peaceful to look at.
The Wizard And The Dragon Page 6
