From the cave, the source stalked into view on long jointed legs. It was the size of an ox, only with armored plates across its back. It dragged a long bulbous abdomen behind it. Segmented antennae swung through the air toward them. Each stalk ended in eyes that looked like faceted black diamonds.
As the creature raised its front carapace higher, a triangular head gnashed the air with sharp mandibles. It crawled to the stair and blocked their way.
Frell moaned as he backed them all away. “It’s a skriitch queen.”
31
KANTHE LET THE others retreat behind him. He knew there was only one path open to them, one way to go.
Straight through that fecking monster.
He dropped to a knee, bow held out, and fitted an arrow to the string. He fought down the horror of the sight before him. Half spider, half wasp, it looked like some creature cobbled together and dredged from the depths of an Iflelen crypt, or maybe a daemon conjured by their dread god, ?reyk. It hissed at their group, while some noxious gas escaped from puckering pores along its oily flanks. He didn’t know if that pall was poisonous, but it smelled of the rotted bowels of a sun-bloated corpse.
It trundled toward their group, stabbing rock with its skeletal legs, the backs of which were lined with rows of sharp chitinous hooks.
Kanthe held his ground. He pulled the string to his cheek, the arrow’s fletching tickling his ear. He cast his gaze toward its dark triangular head, half-hidden by the edge of its crowning segment, and loosed the string. The bow sprang, and the arrow flew. As if anticipating the shot, the queen tipped the edge of its crown, and the bolt’s steel point glanced off the armor shell.
But Kanthe was no inexperienced hunter. He remembered a lesson from the Cloudreach scout who had served as his first teacher: Often it’s not your first shot that kills, but the one already in the air after it. He had been taught to never count on the first arrow, to never stop to savor his marksmanship. Once an arrow was loose, it was best forgotten.
As the bolt tinged off the carapace, he already had another arrow nocked and pulled. He let it loose, so when the queen lifted its crown, the next bolt was there and struck it square in the center of its head. Still, he didn’t stop to relish that strike—especially as the creature screamed and charged.
He kept his post as another arrow flew and another.
All striking true.
Still, it came at him.
He leaned his cheek, fixed the point, and thrummed the string.
The next bolt swept through its jaws and struck into its dark gullet. Mandibles snapped the haft in two, but a second arrow followed the first.
Have another taste.
The queen’s charge faltered, its legs wobbling like a mummer’s stilts on cobbles.
He continued to unleash his fury, peppering its head, a few aimed at its exposed chest, searching for its blasted heart, if it had one.
Finally, the beast crashed to the steps, skidding toward him.
Only then did he push off his knee and retreat. Still, he reached over his shoulder for another arrow, but he felt no feathers. He had emptied his quiver. He yanked out a dagger instead, ready in case it showed any sign of life.
Thankfully, the mountainous bulk remained unmoving. Even in death, noxious gas steamed from its bulbous abdomen, forming a cloud around it.
Kanthe fled from it.
Frell joined him, drawing the others. Kanthe expected praise and cheers, but all he got was a worried look from his mentor. The other two stared back across the river. From the mists, the low drone of the skriitch had risen to a furious whine. Focused on the kill, he had failed to notice the change in the horde’s timbre.
“They’re coming,” Jace said.
Whether drawn by the scent of their queen or its earlier hissing screams, the skriitch plainly intended to avenge their fallen ruler.
“Run,” Frell said. “And keep running.”
The group sped away from the river, giving the steaming hulk a wide berth, and continued up the ancient steps. Kanthe led—so he was the first to see their mistaken assumption.
Ahead, another four or five webbed tunnels branched off the foggy stairs. Large dark shadows clambered into view.
Kanthe glared back at Frell, scolding his friend for not knowing the truth, an ignorance that would kill them all.
The skriitch didn’t just have one queen.
They had many.
* * *
NYX GAPED AT the dark shapes piling onto the stairs ahead of them. Behind her, the furious droning of the horde rose toward a dreadful crescendo, shivering the mists with their approach. She felt that buzzing on her skin, in her bones. She shook her head as the noise became a hornet’s nest in her skull.
Only then did she realize it wasn’t the skriitch who plagued her so, but something more familiar. Her ears sharpened on a keening that sliced through the feverish whirring of the skriitch.
She looked up as a winged shape dove through the branches and sped past overhead, then shot skyward, as if trying to draw her up and away—and succeeded.
She still felt the rock under her boots, but she also flew skyward. Images lapped over one another. She still saw the forest around her, but she also watched the chasm open up under her as she skated high above. Even the mists failed to challenge her new sight. Her acuity stretched the breadth of the chasm, carried by the keening, which sharpened every nook, branch, leaf, and cranny. She saw the skriitch sweeping over the river. With focus, she could pick out individuals among the many.
She remembered a similar moment like this, during her frantic flight away from Byrd and his cohorts at the Cloistery. She recalled how for a brief time the ringing of the school’s bells had somehow revealed a gauzy map of her surroundings. She had used that sight to flee more surefootedly across the revealed tier.
Now she suspected the truth.
Maybe it wasn’t the bells.
Had Bashaliia already been there? Had he been the one who summoned the larger bat who killed Byrd?
But she had no time to dwell on this.
Through her real eyes below, she saw the dark queens stalking toward her and the others. Panic pounded her heart, pulling her out of the mists, down to her body. But she never made it. The keening grew sharper in the air, erasing the view of the steps, drawing her back up. She fought it.
I must help them.
She was ignored. Instead, her gaze was forced toward the swamps. She felt power in the air, like before a thunderstorm. Its strength gathered and coalesced around the fiery mountain of The Fist, shadowing the swamps around it. Then it surged toward the chasm, flooding up its length, sweeping faster and faster toward her.
Through her other eyes, she saw Frell pulling them all back down the steps. She heard him say something about a cave, a place to flee the approaching horde.
She knew that would not work.
Viewed from on high, she watched the black wave thundering toward her. Out of the depths of that darkness, a pair of eyes shone back at her. She quailed from that gaze, sensing its immensity, its unfathomable nature, its abiding agelessness.
She wanted to flee from it.
But something whistled and pinged in her ear, the tiniest spark of that vastness, something tangible and comprehensible. Bashaliia. She fell back to the taste of warm milk, of another sharing her warmth. Here was something she could grasp, maybe even love.
She clutched to it as the storm fell upon her. She was cast about like a twig in a flood. The current spun her out of the sky and back into her own body. Even then, power continued to pour into her, flowing through Bashaliia in the sky and down to her.