David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

Garric watched Vascay’s body empty like a slashed wineskin. Only when venom had wholly liquified the muscles did the frozen limbs collapse and the head loll forward. Vascay’s features had blurred into shadows on the skin, but his skull still kept its shape.

The Mistress flung aside the carcase of her first victim. Her forelegs played the same silent tune but with a greater verve, nourished for the first time in thousands of years. Garric felt his right leg move.

He’d have held it back if he could, but his body was no longer his own. Compulsion pulled like white-hot wires. A step, then a second step.

The waiting mandibles throbbed slowly, up and down. They weren’t part of the spider’s pattern but rather a sign of her bloodlust. Her hind legs extended with the creaking care of ancient machines beginning to work again.

Garric’s right leg took another step. The broken javelin rolled under his foot. His left leg started to move.

Lord Thalemos screamed; reflex hurled the torch from his hand. It shed sparks in an arc that ended when it went out in the dust. Thalemos slapped at the sleeve of his tunic, burning where a drop of blazing sap had fallen onto the cloth. The chamber was again in total darkness.

Garric picked up the javelin. He couldn’t see for the Mistress to bind him, but her location was etched onto his mind. He lunged forward.

She wasn’t a god. She wasn’t immortal. And though there’d be no one to write his epitaph, Garric knew he was about to die a man and for Mankind.

His outstretched left hand touched the right mandible, just above the fang. The spider’s hair was as coarse as the bristles of a boar’s spine.

The forelegs gripped him from behind. As the mandibles reached for him, Garric stabbed between them—up through the Mistress’s mouth and into her brain.

The giant spider’s convulsions drove her fangs home. In the midst of the burst of fire that devoured all his nerves, Garric felt the poison-spewing points grate against one another in the middle of his torso.

Then all was blackness.

Ilna stepped through the passage she’d opened, into another universe as tightly encysted as the world of the spiders’ exile behind her. Sunlight blasted her, glaring from a point in the pale sky and reflected from the bare, rocky soil.

Alecto’s corpse lay at her feet. The flaccid skin had no shape but that of the bones it draped, but Ilna recognized the ivory pins still decorating the spill of lustrous black hair.

Alecto’s bronze athame glinted some distance away. The wild girl had run for the last time from the danger her anger had called to life.

The Pack turned their heads to view Ilna. Their movements were like those of water or perhaps smoke, a drifting smoothness that seemed to lack volition.

Ilna stepped forward. “You’ll feast well today!” she called, bravado in her voice, and in her hands the knotted fabric with which she’d rent the wall between worlds.

She smiled coldly. She’d created a masterpiece in the truest sense, a work which could be fully appreciated by only herself and the One whose craft had formed the fabric of which each universe was a part. To a degree the spiders could understand what Ilna’d done, but their appreciation would be tempered by other emotions.

For a time. For the time remaining to them.

The first spider through the opening was the black-and-silver giant. That was as Ilna expected, and as it should be. The others were allowing their leader to accept the reward she so richly deserved for the plan she had made.

The brilliant sunlight must have blinded the spider’s lidless eyes for a moment before they could adapt. When the giant saw what glided toward her and the gap beyond, her mental scream was as shrill as rock shearing. She staggered back, clambering over the bodies of her sisters who packed the hillside leading to the doom of their race.

“Ilna!” called Cashel. He stood partway round the circuit of this world from her. The Pack were confined to a mere bead on the fabric of the cosmos, smaller even than the world which held the great spiders; but like the spiders, they had windows of sorts that allowed them to interact with the greater universe. “Get around behind me! I’ll do what I can!”

Ilna gestured toward the gap with her left hand, letting the fabric dangle from her right. She smiled at the Pack. She knew their tentacles would snatch her when they chose, no matter where she stood within the strait confines of their cell. She appreciated her brother’s offer, but his strength and courage couldn’t bring safety.

Besides, Ilna probably wouldn’t have scuttled like a roach caught in the light even if she had thought it could save her life. Life had never been that important to her.

The Pack slid toward her. Their size was deceptive—one moment mountainous, the next no more than three slender poplar trees which nonetheless towered above her. She wondered if the Pack had physical bodies at all. In looking up into their faces, Ilna thought she glimpsed worlds of ice and crystal, each as real as Barca’s Hamlet had been to her as a young girl.

Was the Pack triple or did her eyes see a single being in three aspects, none of them material in the sense that humans understood matter?

The girl behind Cashel raised her left arm to the white sun. The ruby on her finger sent fire from each facet, painting the otherwise-unseen boundaries of this cyst in the cosmos. It woke lambent flames beyond anything natural light could cause.

The leading member of the Pack leaned over Ilna—and bowed, and passed on through the passage she had torn for them to a larder that could last for ages if they husbanded their bounty.

The second bowed and also entered the world where terrified spiders fled in vain for their lives; then the third. The cell which had held the Pack was now empty, save for three human beings and the empty body of a fourth.

Unknotting her fabric, Ilna walked toward Cashel and the girl. The ruby shimmer fell on her and around her, seeming to pass through Cashel’s braced body as easily as it did empty air. Frowning, Ilna turned to look over her shoulder. The gap she’d opened was starting to close.

On the other side, in the world of vegetation and spiders, the Pack ravened like wolves in a sheepfold. The body of the spiders’ leader lay just inside the opening; the breeze ruffled the empty black-and-silver shell. A line of similar husks was scattered down the hillside. The Pack could stretch their enjoyment when victims like Alecto were scarce, but abundance drove it wild with bloodlust.

Ilna smiled without humor. And the Pack had spared her. In gratitude? Or did they think at some future time she would release them again to drown a world in slaughter?

She put the hank of loose cords to her sleeve. She might need the cords again, and perhaps she would need the Pack again someday also. The fabric of the universe was too subtle for even Ilna to read its pattern completely.

Cashel stopped spinning his staff and planted it before him. He took a deep breath. “I’m glad you came to rescue us, Ilna,” he said. “Because I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t see any way I was going to keep those things back from me and Tilphosa.”

The girl, Tilphosa presumably, nodded tightly. She kept her ring raised to the sun. The portals continued to close, the one Ilna had opened and also the one by which she and Cashel must have entered this place.

“Is she a wizard?” Ilna asked, with less warmth perhaps than she’d have shown if Tilphosa didn’t seem to think that her trick with the ring was somehow special. Didn’t she realize that Ilna could’ve closed the portal as easily as she’d opened it?

“No, she’s just a lady who’s been travelling with me,” Cashel said. He turned. “Tilphosa, this is my sister Ilna.”