by DB King
“That’s right!” Baldir cupped his hands around his mouth, addressing the Spider Queen. “This is the one, Shema! Him and his elf friend and his demon, killing all your precious babies!”
All the while he’d been fighting waves of spiders, Alec had considered them mindless beasts. Now, it seemed, at least one creature cared about those monsters. And it was angry.
Baldir’s hands moved in a complicated pattern, tracing symbols in the air. The courtyard thrummed with energy, the very air warming until it was oven-hot around the purple-robed mage. Baldir released the spell, and it cascaded over the Spider Queen’s scales.
The effect was more horrible than Alec could have imagined. The creature expanded like a balloon, its bulbous abdomen growing to the size of an ox cart. Its fangs were as long and sharp as swords, the webbing around its legs making the appendages as thick and impermeable as towers. Despite its size, the creature was fast: so fast that it crossed the distance to the table in the blink of an eye.
“Enjoy your meal, Shema,” Baldir called, disappearing into the shadows.
He hadn’t even untied Eleira and Alec. Both of them struggled helplessly in their chairs, staring up at the monstrous spider.
Totally helpless.
Chapter 23
“There’s been a mistake,” Alec groaned, staring up into the Spider Queen’s multisegmented eyes. “I didn’t know those spiders belonged to you!”
Whatever powers of speech the Spider Queen may or may not have had, it clearly chose not to use them. Two of its eight legs slammed into the side of the table, piercing the wood like a sharp knife cutting through an end of bread. Webbing flowed from its broad, flat beak, piling on the table until the mound went over Alec and Eleira’s heads.
Alec swallowed hard. It wasn’t just that the Spider Queen was going to kill them. It wanted to play with them first!
As he stared up into those cruel, black eyes, facing certain death, the fear fell away from Alec. Strangely, the idea of his own mortality didn’t phase him in the least. He’d been an honorable man in life, and whatever fate met young men like him in the regions beyond couldn’t possibly be more horrible than the likely next few minutes of his death. Instead, he felt a very strange sensation.
Anger.
He didn’t know the history between Baldir Diamondspear and Uriel, but he knew that Uriel was a man of honor. If Baldir had required caging in the House of Doors, then it was for a necessary reason—and it had been done with all the grace the Archmage could muster. If he and Eleira died here, no one would know Baldir had escaped.
No one would know about the secret society of mages planning to take over the world. And neither he nor Eleira would ever become masters of magic, nor would they ever get the opportunity to use their great powers to defend the innocent and defeat evil.
It was unfair. It was wrong.
It needed to be corrected.
“Trystara!” Alec roared. He’d made a deal with the demoness before—he could again. “If you let me die, woman, you’re not going to get any spiders!”
His yell stilled the Spider Queen. Its gaze flickered from Eleira to him, as if the great beast was confused by the sudden display of ferocity. It bought him precious moments to bargain with Trystara.
“It seems to me you’ve already brought me one nice, big spider,” the demoness purred within his brain. “You’re doing a fine job so far…”
He laughed. “You want to eat it? Free me from my bonds. I’ll kill that spider and let you have the whole thing!”
The Spider Queen’s confusion wore off. It lowered its fangs to the table, punching holes along the wood, kicking up splinters as it tore its way toward the two helpless pupils. Alec felt Trystara deliberating inside of his skull, the sensation of her mercurial temper like liquid silver in his veins.
“Alright,” the demoness said with a mental shrug. “Why not?”
As the Spider Queen advanced, a shimmer formed in the air just ahead of her. Trystara slammed into existence, her claws raking the invisible bonds holding Alec to his chair as the Spider prepared to pounce. The demoness retreated back into his mind, waiting for her meal, but her work was done for now—Alec was free.
Magic flowed through Alec’s fingers as he pulled the Element of Wood through the table. With a grunt, he sent splinters through the magical bonds holding Eleira hostage. They strained, groaning like a cask filled with too much beer—then the bonds burst, shattering invisibly. The elven magician let out a soft cry as she dropped to the dirt, just barely avoiding the Spider Queen’s fangs.
“Eleira, you’re alright!” Alec dragged her backwards, out of the Spider Queen’s range. “Are you hurt?”
“Just my pride,” the elf girl said, brushing dirt off her face. “I can’t believe Baldir charmed me so easily!”
“I can’t believe he’s Uriel Diamondspear’s son,” Alec said, drawing his weapon. The Diamondspear sang in his hands, proving that if the weapon had ever belonged to the wicked Baldir, it was truly Alec’s weapon now. “We’re going to have to warn everyone that he’s free.”
“Yes,” Eleira agreed, sizing up the Spider Queen. “But first, let’s kill this monster, shall we?”
Together, they leapt into battle, roaring as one.
The Spider Queen, finding not two helpless targets but two angry ones, had to choose who to attack first. Evidently it found Alec the greater threat, as it turned away from Eleira and charged at the young man. Alec dropped to the ground, his fingers digging into the dirt as he cast the spell Maimonides’s drills had made second nature.
His skin turned to stone. The Spider Queen’s fangs closed on his shoulders, but left only cracks in his transformed flesh. Alec laughed in the creature’s face, stunning it with his bravado.
“Grab it!” Eleira suggested. She’d tugged a book out of her robes—the Leafwalker Grimoire—and was flipping through the pages, looking for the right spell. “Use the stone to weigh her down, keep her in place!”
Good idea. Alec nodded and gripped the Spider tightly by its head, trying to anchor it to the earth. Its fangs flashed again and again, ripping off chunks of the stone armor Alec’s body had become. For a moment, worry filled his mind—those attacks looked as if they might do some serious damage…
His feet dug deeper into the stone, and something shifted. Suddenly far, far more energy coursed through Alec’s veins than should have been possible. In the past, drawing anywhere close to this much magic would have left him doubled over in agony, clutching at his guts. But now he drank it down like water, pulling more and more into him as if there was no limit to how much he could hold.
As the Spider Queen bit, Alec grew taller. Stone armor pushed at his shoulders, arms, and legs, leaving him looking like a golem from a fairytale. Spikes emerged from his gauntlets, vicious and sharp.
“Wow, you must be seven feet tall!” Eleira cried. When he looked over, he could see a gleam of interest in the elf girl’s eyes. “Knock her out, Alec!”
Grinning, that was exactly what he did. All those petty boyhood squabbles on the practice yard had prepared him for this moment. He delivered a swift right hook to the side of the Spider Queen’s head, yelling in triumph at the soft crunch of her carapace collapsing inward. Ichor poured from the wound. Alec followed it up with an uppercut that would have left a human opponent nursing his jaw for days.
The Spider lurched backwards, fearful before this new assault. It skittered across the courtyard, putting as much distance as possible between itself and Alec. He had it on the run!
Eleira’s lips moved silently, reciting the words of a spell. As she finished it, shouting the final syllable, a wave of flame poured from her outstretched hands. It swept the Spider Queen in a torrent of magical fire, sending it shrieking to the ground.
“You got it!” Alec yelled, giving the elf girl a jaunty salute with his stone hand. “Keep burning it—that’s got to be its weakness! We’ve almost got it—”
Just as the Spider Queen seemed
doomed, a bolt of lightning struck the courtyard.
It was Baldir’s final joke. A ward the mage had set, just in case his two delicious morsels proved more dangerous than they looked. A bolt of pure power suffused the Spider Queen’s body, allowing it to shrug off the flames. As the lightning arced, splitting into angry forks to strike and blacken the grass around, each impact crater filled with horse-sized, chittering spiders.
“Oh, Gods,” Eleira groaned. “There’s more of them!”
Alec jumped into the fray, smashing them right and left. Behind him, Eleira weaved a protective spell around herself, giving him space to go to work.
He had his work cut out for him. Dozens of spiders swarmed over his stone armor, piercing it in hundreds of tiny pinpricks with their glossy black fangs. He moved with all the speed and ferocity magic could give him. But with every spider he killed, three more took its place. The Spider Queen summoned more and more of her brood, until a tidal wave of arachnids threatened to spill through the courtyard.
Alec tipped over. His stone form gave him incredible strength and defense, but robbed him of balance. His bottom hit the grass, and a hundred angry spiders chittered in tones that sounded like laughter as they climbed on top of him, snapping and biting.
Alec’s vision began to dim. One bite’s poison was nothing to his stone skin, but a thousand added up to something fierce and dangerous. Next to his head, a small patch of grass flickered and smoked, burning from the remains of Eleira’s spell. The spiders kept on biting, but Alec could no longer feel it. The world went dark.
“Oh no,” Trystara growled in his head. “You’re giving me those damned spiders, Alec!”
“I don’t know how,” he muttered, half-conscious. The fact of his imminent demise no longer bothered him—it felt like slipping into a deep, warm bath.
“Ugh! You’ve already done it, you fool! The Greater Elementals!”
“The what…?”
“Your upgraded stone skin! You can do that with every Element, you idiot! Grab the flame! GRAB IT!”
As Alec’s eyes closed, he reached out and thrust a stony finger into the blaze. Fire energy filled his palm, doubling and redoubling within him. The spiders on top of his chest and back froze for a moment, like feeding birds startled by a noise that could be or not be a predator.
Then the courtyard exploded.
A pillar of flame erupted from Alec’s body, burning the spiders clinging to him to cinders. The swarm shrank back from him, startled into silence as dozens of fireballs flew from his fingers. Each sailed across the courtyard like a flaming arrow from a trebuchet—and each hit its target as unerringly as a seagull diving to catch a fish. Each ball of fire claimed a spider, roasting it into a charred mass that only Trystara could love.
“Oh hell yes!” The demoness giggled in his head. “Oh, I’m eating well tonight!”
Alec let her laugh. The fire sang in his veins, so much inside him he felt he should have been a human bonfire. Flames covered the stone mass of his arms and legs, adding fire damage to his strikes as he swept any spiders unlucky or foolhardy enough to charge. Behind the pack, the Queen Spider watched on, its beady eyes filling with murderous rage.
“I need to cool off!” Alec laughed, spitting twin jets of flame through the mass of writhing spiders. “Eleira, how about passing me a little water?”
An incantation rattled off the elf girl’s lips with a speed normally reserved for auctioneers. As she finished, a wall of water ripped through the courtyard, dousing the flames and sending the rest of the spiders rolling backwards in a single mass. It was exactly the energy Alec needed.
He pressed his palms to the soaking wet grass and absorbed the Element of Water. Through it, he sensed something cold and dark on the other side of the courtyard. Behind him about fifty yards lay a fetid pond, and at the bottom of that pond, the skeleton of a young man in golden armor lay rusting.
Alec was intrigued. Could this have been some friend of Baldir Diamondspear entombed with him? A rescue attempt gone wrong? Alec had no idea—and he didn’t have time to ask. He pushed as much of the Element of Water as he could into the pond, pulling the suit of armor and its long-dead occupant from the pool.
Tendrils of water wrapped around the mummified warrior, moving it like a marionette. It charged at the remaining mass of spiders, its rusted two-handed broadsword slicing arachnids in half with every cleaving strike.
The Spider Queen’s rage boiled over. A hideous, high-pitched shriek tore from its beaked mouth as it threw itself into the fray, no longer able to stomach the wanton destruction of its children.
A massive, web-covered leg slammed into the ground next to Alec. He twisted away just in time, as the Spider Queen’s opening salvo was strong enough to shatter bone. While the enchanted warrior destroyed the last of the Queen’s children, it could do nothing about the monster bearing down on Alec’s fragile, all-too-human body.
The Diamondspear flashed in his hand, cutting again and again at the webbing around the creature’s feet. If he could sever it completely, strike the limb beneath the thick strands of beastly fiber, he could take the monster down. But it refused to give him the chance.
Alec got the Shield Ring up just in time. Even with his enhanced, stone armor, the Spider Queen’s fangs were long and sharp enough to pierce his heart if it got a clean bite in. Magical plates slammed into place before the monster’s face, stopping its attempt to skewer him.
The overlapping plates creaked. They buckled inward before the force of the Spider Queen’s anger. Alec’s eyes widened as the magic within him wavered, threatening to wink out completely. He stabbed as hard as he could with the Diamondspear, holding it before him like a dinner knife, but too much webbing remained around the creature’s limbs.
It’s going to eat me, Alec realized. He’d fought so hard, left a battlefield of slain arachnids behind him, and all for nought. He’d never get the chance to explain what had happened, to tell Uriel Diamondspear everything—to warn him his wayward son was both free and on the loose.
“Eleira,” Alec yelled as the creature’s jaws closed, “get out of here—”
But Eleira would do no such thing.
Lightning exploded against the Spider Queen’s back. Pins and needles cascaded over Alec’s skin as he caught the aftershocks of the blast, thrown from the Spider Queen’s grip. The monster’s beady eyes rolled in opposite directions, shocked senseless by the force of power flowing from Eleira’s spell. For a long moment, Alec couldn’t believe what he’d seen.
Smoke poured from the Spider’s wounded body. It let out a terrible shriek, turning from one target to the next. Eleira stood like an avenging angel in the center of the courtyard, her Grimoire clutched in her hand.
“The Greater Elementals,” the elf girl howled, a savage triumph in her eyes. “I did it, Alec! I’ve mastered what Uriel Diamondspear wanted us to learn!”
The Spider Queen recovered its senses and pounced. Only to get a rolling wave of fire right in its back.
Flames coursed through Alec, the Elements he’d absorbed combining and recombining within him as he slung spell after spell against the massive spider. Such a maelstrom of magical potency should have overwhelmed him, burnt him to a crisp like those who’d tried to harness the Archon’s power in days long gone.
He pulled in more energy. And more. The magic flowed through him until he couldn’t tell where he ended and it began. He felt like the Archon himself.
Somehow, he’d crossed the courtyard. Alec and Eleira stood together, tossing form after mastered form at the Spider Queen. The fearsome beast howled and whimpered, chittering madly as Eleira’s lightning mixed with Alec’s flames, his water spells cascading over the Spider Queen. The enchanted warrior got in on the act, hacking away at the great arachnid’s limbs like a lumberjack trying to topple a particularly stubborn tree.
Finally, both Alec and Eleira raised their hands. Her right gripped his left as their arms lifted toward heaven. Magic passed between the two o
f them, overflowing both of their potential while combining into something even more powerful. Alec had never felt a greater sensation in all of his life.
All of the Elements combined, like a rope formed from every strand imaginable. It was a blast of pure Magic, conjured from the aether like the power of the Archon himself.
Before it, the Spider Queen could do nothing but scream.
The blinding light arched from the place where their fingers twined, as if they clenched the sun between their trembling hands. Only a silhouette of the great arachnid could be seen—then pieces began flaking off, like frost from a rapidly melting snowman. The light went supernova, ripping the Spider Queen to shreds so small the creature blew away like dust on the wind.
When the light cleared, only Alec and Eleira remained standing. Their legs shook beneath them, their bodies no longer able to hold the cataclysmic amount of energy coursing through them. Together, they’d done for a brief moment what only the Archon could.
They’d mastered Magic.
Eleira sank to her knees, groaning. Alec quickly joined her, his senses reeling as the remaining power stored within him leached into the ground. For what felt like an eternity, the two of them lay there next to each other, unable to move or speak. The air above their head sizzled like one of the portals in the House of Doors, charged with magic that took long minutes to dissipate.
When Alec finally opened his eyes, a figure stood above him. He found himself looking up into the kindly, worried eyes of Archmage Uriel Diamondspear.
Chapter 24
“Archmage Diamondspear?”
The words came out as a croak. Alec felt as if he hadn’t used his voice in weeks—as if every part of his body had become somehow new. He blinked rapidly, willing the blurry figure far above him to sharpen. “Is that you?”
