From the Earth to the Shadows

by Amanda Hocking

  “Valeska,” I repeated, slightly louder this time.

  She continued staring for another second, then jumped down off the garnet.

  “Was that your mother?” Oona asked softly, falling into step beside her, as the four of us headed back on our way.

  “It was,” she replied curtly.

  “Why didn’t you say anything to her?” I asked.

  “She’s helping to take down Zianna,” Valeska said. “She’s working with everything I’m fighting against. What’s there to say?”

  I felt a rush of air behind me as the final wall began to fall, and the loud cheers of celebration from the impious nearly drowned out the roar of its collapse. Valeska never looked back. She just kept walking.

  Unlike most of the walls, which were gems or stone, the one directly in front of us was made of platinum, so it didn’t fall the same way the others did. It was torn in some places and bent down in others, making it resemble shredded paper. That’s how strong Gugalanna and his monsters were. They made metal crumple like nothing.

  Because parts of the platinum wall were still standing, we had to walk farther down to find a gap to slip through. I kept glancing back over my shoulder as we walked, at the flood of impious streaming into Zianna.

  “Hello again, little Valkyrie,” a familiar voice purred, and I looked ahead to see a beautiful woman stepping out from the shadows behind the metal wall. I blame the stress of everything for not recognizing her, not immediately. It took a second, but when she smiled at me—her smooth skin peeling back to reveal a mouthful of growing fangs—I knew exactly who she was.

  It was Amaryllis Mori, the Jorogumo. The spider woman who tore a hole in my calf before I killed her.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Remember me?” Amaryllis asked as her voice distorted from something lyrical into a deep monstrous growl.

  Her transformation was already well under way. The delicate features of her face tore open as multiple red eyes sprouted across her forehead and cheeks. Her legs ripped, shedding blood and skin, to make room for her long spider legs.

  Seeing the venomous setae on her, sticking out of her legs like a thousand deadly needles, gave me flashbacks of the agonizing pain she had left me in.

  “Who is this cýka?” Valeska asked, sounding disgusted over the audible sound of Amaryllis’s stomach distending until it tore open, to allow for her bulbous arachnid abdomen.

  “Oh, just an old friend,” I said as I reached for the dagger on my hip.

  Amaryllis took a step toward me, her long spindly legs moving lightly over the crumpled wall. “You should’ve let me go when we were on earth. You could be making your escape right now.”

  “There’s still time,” I replied, taking a step back from her.

  I definitely did not want her setae getting anywhere near me, but my fear had actually begun to abate. That was the thing that happened when instinct took over—I lost any real sense of my body or normal mortal fears and emotions. And I became a weapon. As the buzzing intensified around my heart and a pressure built at the base of my stomach, it calmed me some to know that all of my dread and panic would be gone in a few seconds.

  “Valeska, get them out of here,” I said, wanting them to get clear before things got really bad.

  “Um…” Oona sounded uncertain, so I looked at her from the corner of my eye. “Valeska already flew off.”

  “What?” I asked, and Amaryllis threw back her head and began to cackle.

  I suddenly became all too aware of the fact that I couldn’t see either Asher or Valeska from where I stood, with the monstrous spider woman encompassing most of my vision. Oona was the only one lagging beside me, and it didn’t really matter where the others were, as long as they were out of the long reach of Amaryllis’s venomous legs.

  “Get out of here,” I told Oona without looking away from the Jorogumo. Then, more emphatically, because I knew Oona wouldn’t want to listen: “Go!”

  “Your friends are already deserting you?” the spider woman asked. “You’re going to die alone.”

  “Well, I did kill you once before by myself,” I reasoned. “I think I can defeat you again.”

  Her smile fell away, as her skin twisted around her fangs into a ragged scowl. “You had an unfair advantage. But down here, this is my turf, little Valkyrie. We’re all growing more powerful than you can imagine.”

  “You should be thanking me!” I argued, taking a step back every time she stepped forward. “Because I returned you, you got a spot fighting right next to Ereshkigal. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  I kept talking because I didn’t have a plan, not yet. Without Sigrún I felt naked, and I wasn’t sure how effective my Valkyrie abilities would be at tempering Amaryllis’s otherwise superior strength and venom.

  My only goal was to keep everyone safe until I saw an opening, and then I would take her down. Waiting for the right time, unfortunately, was at odds with everything else I was feeling. My entire body was longing to fight. I felt like a coiled spring, the pressure becoming almost unbearable.

  But I couldn’t kill her—she couldn’t die here—so I had to wait until I had the best chance of landing the most damaging blow possible. I had to get her down long enough that I could make a run for it.

  “I was fighting for Ereshkigal up there!” she bellowed, and as she leaned toward me, saliva dripped off her fangs. “I wanted to stay free, instead of being trapped in a dank, dark cellar!”

  Then she straightened up so she towered above me. Her beady red eyes blinked in unison, pulling her pale flesh into eyelids and stretching her already taut skin even more. When she smiled, blood dripped down from her lips onto her fangs.

  I crouched, making myself into a tripod with one hand, a knee, and a foot. In my right hand I gripped the dagger at my side, and if she took a step closer, and I kept myself low enough to the ground, I could run underneath her and slice her open from end to end.

  “But I won’t be here for much longer,” Amaryllis said, almost bragging as she took one small step forward. “It’s already begun. The dead won’t stay dead for much longer.”

  I needed a little more from her—one full step—and I would be close enough that I could dive between her legs before she had a chance to stab me with them.

  “I’m going to leave soon, go back to the surface and the sun,” I taunted her. “You’ll still be down here, and I’m going to see to it that you never escape.”

  Amaryllis snarled and lunged at me. I dove forward—tucking and rolling under her legs—and then I was directly underneath her. The red hourglass marking on her black exoskeleton was like a bull’s-eye, inviting me to take a jab.

  So I did. I drove the blade into her abdomen, breaking through the skin like it was a thick eggshell. Her black gooey insides started to spill out like a demonic yolk, and she howled and bucked backward.

  Unfortunately, my dagger went with her—stuck in her as she staggered back, crying out in anger and pain. It was all I could do to scramble out from under her without getting trampled.

  “How dare you!” Amaryllis yelled. She was weakened, swaying from side to side as she hobbled toward me, but she was relentless.

  She had backed me into a corner—literally. I was trapped between a pile of rubble and the platinum wall. There was nowhere for me to go.

  “Incoming!” Valeska shouted, and I looked up in time to see her flying high above us as a giant chunk of black opal fell in our direction.

  Amaryllis was looking up, too, her many eyes locking onto the massive gemstone before it smashed into her. I held up my arm, shielding myself from the splatter as her abdomen exploded into a mess of disgusting goo and guts.

  She cried out in pain, because she was still alive. There was no release of death here for her, which meant that her plans for vengeance hadn’t stopped yet, either. Slowly, she began crawling toward me, tearing her humanoid torso off her spider body and using those arms to pull herself forward. The sound coming from her mouth was complet
ely inhuman. A guttural mutation of a scream.

  I stood up, preparing to stomp her into submission if I had to, when Asher appeared on top of the rubble holding a sword made of bones. The blade itself appeared to be made from a gigantic femur—maybe a centaur’s—with one edge sharpened to a razor-thin blade.

  When Asher walked over to her, she hissed and tried to spit her venom at him, but she only succeeded in causing herself to cough up black blood. He raised the sword, and with one fell swoop, he sliced off her head.

  “That oughta keep her immobile for a while, right?” he asked, looking over at me.

  “I hope so, but I don’t know how long it takes for her body to regather itself.”

  Asher wiped her blood off his brow with the back of his arm and said, “Let’s go, then.”

  “Where’d you get the sword?” I asked him as we walked away from Amaryllis’s squished body, toward where Valeska and Oona were waiting outside the walls of Zianna.

  “One of the skeleton soldiers lost it when an exousia ripped off his arm.” He gestured toward where the impious and divine were colliding. “I figured I ought to have a weapon.”

  “Sorry it took me so long,” Valeska said as we reached them. “I was looking for a rock big enough to squish her that I could lift while flying.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to ease the growing tension inside me, and I told her, “Thank you.” My words came out flatter than I meant them to, so I forced a smile at her.

  As grateful as I was for her help, my body still craved the release of a kill. And my fight with Amaryllis had done nothing to alleviate that.

  “We should hurry, before anyone else recognizes you,” Valeska said.

  “How many immortals have you returned?” Asher asked, cocking an eyebrow at me as he wiped the Jorogumo’s blood off his new sword. “Do we have many more of your fan club that we’ll need to face off?”

  “I don’t think any of the rest of them should give us any trouble…” I trailed off as my attention was diverted by the sound of pounding hooves.

  The herd of unicorn-like kirin was running toward us, bounding over the fallen walls to escape the escalating conflict. An ogre reached out, grabbing for one, but the kirin narrowly dove out of his grasp.

  “I think I know how we can get away quickly,” I said, watching them come toward us. “But we’re going to have to move very fast.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  The kirin, like everything else that was allowed to live in Zianna, were instinctively good and kind, and after centuries of living among the immortals here, they had become semi-domesticated. Or at least that’s what I hoped as I stepped in front of the stampeding herd.

  At first they only slowed, then parted so they could run around me. But one of them stopped right in front of me. He was a large stallion, with hints of blue in his long mane that parted around his smoky gray antlers. His long tail twitched behind him, like a cat about to pounce, and he leaned down and chuffed at me.

  “We only want to get away, just like you,” I told him calmly, and I slowly reached out to pet his nose. His fur felt soft, and the iridescent scales mixed in with it were warm and smooth, like a snake that had been lying out in the sun.

  While most of the herd continued running, a few other kirin had stopped with the stallion, inspecting us. Oona was the first to move closer to them, gently petting them and cooing words of encouragement.

  “I know it’s been a rough day for all of us,” I said as I went around to the side of him, running my hand along him as I walked. “But we need to go.”

  The stallion hadn’t moved yet, so I took that as a good sign. With the sounds of fighting raging on, I cautiously reached up and took hold of his mane to steady myself, and I put my other hand on his back. Then I jumped up.

  It wasn’t elegant, as I lay on my stomach, splayed across the kirin, but I was up, and he wasn’t freaking out. He brayed, but didn’t move as I sat up and swung my leg over. I had successfully mounted a kirin, and he didn’t seem to mind.

  Asher climbed onto a kirin beside me, using the same inelegant technique that I had, while Valeska was able to fly up and land gracefully on a kirin’s back. She could fly all the way, but hitching a ride on a kirin would save her energy for what lay ahead.

  Since Oona was so short, she didn’t even try to get up on her own. She came over to me and I grabbed her hand and pulled her up. She got situated behind me and held on to my bag for stability.

  “Where do we go from here?” I asked, looking at Valeska.

  “Follow the herd.” She pointed to where the herd of kirin were racing on ahead so the worst of the fighting and the army from She’ol lay behind them.

  “But that’s the opposite of where we came in through the Eshik Mitu geyser,” I said. “Shouldn’t we go back?”

  Valeska shook her head. “No, that was only an entrance. We can’t get out that way. We have to exit through the Gates.”

  “I don’t understand,” Oona said. “How do we get out?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Valeska said with a sigh. “We’ll end up in a lake outside of the ossuary.”

  “That’s where Gugalanna pulled me through,” Asher said wearily. “I only remember the water as we went through, but the first thing I remember of Kurnugia is being bound and carried by skeletons, then we followed Gugalanna through a dark, hungry forest. The kirin are going in the general direction of that forest, so we can follow them for now.”

  “That can’t be right,” Oona argued. “We’ve gone so far from the entrance. The geyser and the ossuary have to be what … half a mile from each other? Without all the twisting maze, they may be even closer. But we’ve traveled for hours, covering miles and miles away from the geyser already, and you’re saying that we still have a lot to go until we’re underneath the ossuary?”

  “Kurnugia isn’t like a vast cave that exists just below the surface of the earth,” Valeska reminded her. “This is another realm. Distance and time move on a separate plane here.”

  The stallion I was on brayed again and stomped his foot, growing restless.

  “So you’re saying we should follow the other kirin?” I asked.

  “For now,” Valeska said. “But I don’t know where they’re going.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t think you had a psychic connection with the kirin. I was just saying that we should leave.”

  “Let’s go, then.” Valeska barely had the words out before she was spurring her mare on, and she bolted ahead, racing after the rest of the herd.

  Without waiting for me to signal him, my stallion took off. I gripped his mane tightly to keep from flying off. Even though I had watched them run—I had felt the wind as they rushed past me—I still was not prepared for how fast the kirin could go. I leaned into the stallion, to keep from blowing off, and my bag strained at my shoulders from Oona hanging on to it.

  Soon we had caught up with the herd, and soon after we actually passed them. My kirin was leading the way now, bounding over fallen logs and gulleys like they were nothing. He never seemed to tire, and he didn’t even slow, not until we got to a clearing alongside the Huber River.

  We seemed far enough away from Zianna, and the kirin clearly needed a break, so we dismounted. There were a few trees on our side of the river, but mostly around here it was drab green grass that the kirin began to graze on. A few taller, angrier plants were dispersed among the clearing with bright red flowers that snapped at anything that moved by, like a Venus flytrap on steroids.

  The ankle-grabbing ground ivy was here, too, with its olive-green leaves and long tendrils that tried to wrap around my feet, but fortunately the kirin seemed to scare it away. I watched as long vines started winding around their hooves, only to be mercilessly stomped into the dirt, and the ivy began to retreat back into the ground.

  I went over to the river to wash off the black blood from my run-in with Amaryllis Mori, and also because the riverbank was free of any plants that wanted to eat me. I fi
gured there were probably plenty of monstrous creatures that lived in the water that would happily take a bite out of me, so I went to the shallow narrow bend in the river.

  On the other side of the river was a dark forest, filled with thick, tall tree trunks with black vines wound tightly around them. Dark green moss and hornworts appeared to blanket every surface, but it was hard to see under the heavy fog that hung over the forest.

  As I crouched down, rinsing my hands in the dark blue water, Asher sat down next to me, resting his bone sword in the dirt beside him. His arms hung loosely around his knees as he watched the water coursing by, but his expression was unreadable.

  “Ash?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  He blinked, then looked over at me. “What?” Then he shook his head and his brow furrowed. “Sorry. I was lost in thought.”

  Behind me, Oona was stretching her legs and pacing the shore, and she asked, “Should I make a cloaking spell?”

  “Probably,” Valeska said. She stood a bit farther down on the riverbank, her arms folded over her chest as she stared into the dark forest. “I mean, we’re going to have to go through that.”

  “What?” I looked sharply at her. “We have to go through there?”

  Valeska nodded. “Yeah, that’s the Cryptomerian Forest. It surrounds the portal out, but it extends for miles, and it’s full of all kinds of horrible crap to dissuade anyone from going through.”

  I should’ve known when Asher said he’d traveled through “a dark, hungry forest” to get to She’ol, but I had been hoping for an easier path anyway. Not that any of this had been easy. I sat back on the bank and let out an irritated sigh. “Great.”

  “We made it this far.” Oona set her bag down beside me, then knelt next to it so she could begin pulling out what she needed for the cloaking spell. “We can make it a little bit farther. Once we get to the exit, we’re practically home free.”

  “Practically,” I said under my breath and steeled myself to tell them my realization about the cloak: that I didn’t know how all of us would escape. “There’s something that we need to—”