Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

Or Kerrigan, which would be a big help.

As he neared the door he picked the dark thread out against the blond wood. That allowed him a touch of relief, then he slowed and dropped to one knee to survey the knots. Two remained black as puddles of ink, but the third had changed. No streaks, as if anyone had stepped on it, but it had a big flat splash of grey in it.

Dust.

Will looked up at the short rafter running across the width of the corridor. The dust up there had to be thicker than the snow in the streets, and it was possible a cat had wandered along that beam, but Will wasn’t of a mind to be considering cats when a thief might be about. Glancing at the wall above the door, he saw a couple of faint marks, the origin of which he couldn’t imagine, but he knew they’d not been there earlier. Which meant someone was stealing his DragonCrown fragment.

Drawing his dagger, Will stepped to the door and opened it. The oil lamp behind him stabbed a wedge of yellow light into the tiny room that had housed Kerrigan. The thief’s line of sight was drawn upward, to the rafter’s continuation in the room, and the figure hunched and huddled in the lurid scarlet glow. What he saw sent two emotions through him, the first quickly being subsumed by the second.

The first emotion was pure elation as he saw that the trap he and Kerrigan had set had functioned far better than he could have hoped. To hide the DragonCrown fragment they searched the room and in that rafter found a rot-hollow right where the beam had been reinforced by two other pieces of lumber. Kerrigan had used magic to strengthen the beam, melding those two sections of wood into the original. At the same time he reshaped the hollow to fit the DragonCrown fragment snugly inside. At Will’s suggestion Kerrigan narrowed the hole a thief would reach through, so it would be too small to let him slip a hand back out when he had the gem in it.

Kerrigan had enhanced this situation further by casting another spell on the fragment that would make it as sticky as a spider’s web, guaranteeing that any thief who wanted to get away would have to leave his hand behind.

Worked like a charm.

The second emotion completely smothered his elation at success. Pure fear poured into Will as he saw what they’d caught. The creature had the bulk of a large dog or a small bear, and its body bristled with four-inch-long hairs on its bare body and head and legs, with a thick down covering its back. Its i shoulders were hunched as it tugged mightily to free its right hand, with its i legs bunched and pushing.

All eight of the legs!

With a moment’s retrospect Will realized he should have recognized the thing as a spider, for the body came in segments and the four pairs of legs from the middle looked like spider’s legs. The fact that the creature was huge beyond all imagining could have fooled him, but it wasn’t the deciding factor.

Aside from being blue, save for the bristles of black hair, what forced away the judgment was the human torso that rose from the creature’s middle. While the chest was smaller than it should have been for the arms and head, and while blue down did carpet that section of the body, it was unmistakably human.

Then the creature turned and looked at him with bubbled eyes and wickedly curved mandibles. The mouth parts worked and Will heard something that almost clicked and growled its way into a semblance of human speech. An angry hiss capped the remark and the creature gave another hard tug on the fragment.

“You’re caught now, thief!”

Will brought the dagger up to his ear and whipped it forward. Though entirely unbalanced for throwing, the dagger sped to its target. The hilt smashed the creature in the middle of the back, wrenched a clicked howl from its throat, then bounced back down onto Kerrigan’s bed.

Sprinting into the room, Will dove and grabbed for the dagger. As his right hand closed on the hilt, something grabbed his jacket right between his shoulder blades. Will twisted around to slash at whatever had him, and discovered the thing had shifted to the bottom of the rafter and had grabbed him with its left hand. Will cut at the arm, drawing blood, but failed to win his release.

The spider-thing hauled Will up and smashed his head against the rafter. Stars exploded, and Will must have blacked out for a moment, because when the world swam back into focus, he found his legs wrapped in webbing and the left arm holding him by the front of his jacket. Black blood oozed from the wound and began to soak into his clothing. It had an acrid scent akin to burning nutmeats.

The creature thrust its face to his and snarled. That close to it, Will caught some hint of familiarity that told him who his captor was. The realization shook him. The Azure Spider !

The young thief’s mouth dropped open. “You are the Azure Spider. You’re one of her things now.”

The sullanciri hissed, then jerked its head to the trapped hand.

Will shook his head. “Not even if I knew how to undo it.” He breathed in through his nose, then spat a huge gobbet of spittle, hitting the creature in the left eye cluster.

The mandibles parted, the sullanciri’s head dipped, and pure fire pierced Will’s neck right and left. His body shook as molten agony poured into him. He tried to scream, but found his throat paralyzed. Then the pressure vanished and he felt himself falling. It seemed to take forever. He watched the sullancirfs left hand get smaller, watched a droplet of that black blood chase him down, and he hoped, somehow, that Kerrigan’s bed was still beneath him.

Then the world began to shift. First Will thought his hearing was going bad because while he caught sounds that had the cadence of speech, they made no sense to him. The spider-thing tried to shift to the left, hissing loudly, but since the spittle had half-blinded it and its hand was still trapped, its range of motion was limited.

Then a needle, silver-grey, stabbed up through the sullanciri . It drove through the center of the legs, emerged, then spitted the manspine. The creature shook once, hard, then the legs released and curled in. The body started to fall, then hung there by one hand as it went limp save for the rhythmic, pumping contractions of the abdomen.

“Will. Will !” Resolute’s face appeared above his. The thief couldn’t see well enough to read any concern in the Vorquelf’s expression, but it came through in the voice. “Will, are you with me, boy?”

Will nodded, or thought he did. Fire burned through his veins and his body bowed as muscles contracted. He tried to open his mouth and speak, but before he could do that, another convulsion hit him and the world dissolved into nothingness.

Nineteen days had passed since the advent of the new Aurolani troops in Fortress Draconis, yet for Erlestoke, it seemed as if the winter had already lasted a year. So many things were different. Since the fall, Fortress Draconis had changed, and well beyond anything ordinary.

Enemy activity had increased and discipline had gotten better. That was due to the new creations, which Ryswin had designated kryalniri based on some distant elven tale of when the world was young, winters were long, and fierce beasts hunted through the snows for game that was trapped or travelers who were lost. Jilandessa suggested that Chytrine might have modeled her new creatures on those legends, so the name fit. But the humans just called them “crawls” for ease of understanding, and the elves took that bastardization without umbrage.

The crawls had replaced vylaens as the leaders of gibberkin, and had proven very effective in tightening up on lax patrols and inattentive sentries. Patrols were doubled in size and frequency, which made setting ambushes very difficult. Erlestoke’s people had taken to setting snares and other traps to make the gibberkin cautious. While their kill rate dropped, the efforts did slow the enemy progress in their operations.