Mord’s spear stabbed into its open mouth, Lif’s piercing its head. A gush of fluid as they ripped their blades free and the spider crashed to the ground, twitching.
The ravens went back to their web-ripping, the trapped one freeing a wing. A spider dropped upon its head, but the free raven skewered the spider with its beak and threw it through the air to splatter against a trunk.
There was a thud of spiders dropping to the ground around Orka and the brothers, three or four of them, forelegs raised, fangs twitching. Lif leaped in front of Mord and stabbed, but two more jumped at Lif, forelegs lashing out, throwing him to the ground. Mord screamed and lunged with his spear, and Orka stepped in close, sliced through a leg with her seax and buried her axe into a cluster of eyes. It collapsed, jerking and hissing.
A scream came from Lif, on one knee trying to stand, a spider on his back, fangs sunk into his shoulder. Mord bellowed, rising in pitch, but he was slicing and stabbing his spear at two spiders as they spread about him, hissing. Lif’s eyes bulged, his limbs turning blue and stiffening, and he toppled to the ground, shivering violently. Frothed ice dribbled from his chattering jaws. Orka darted in, chopping into the abdomen of the spider on Lif’s back, the creature’s legs jerking, and it fell away, hissing and frothing, liquid pouring from the rent Orka had made in its body, thick like soup.
Then something slammed into Orka’s back, throwing her to the ground. She kept hold of her weapons and tried to roll, but a great weight pinned her down. A foul stench swept around her, of death and decay and putrescence. She twisted, thrashed with her blades and felt the seax bite, a malevolent hissing in her ear, something wet and ice-cold dropping on to her cheek. A glimpse of a huge, curved fang, green-white poison beading its tip, and many, many eyes.
And then the spider was gone, the weight lifted, and Orka spun over and scrambled to her feet.
One of the ravens was flapping above her, the spider grasped in its talons, its many legs thrashing. As Orka watched, the raven’s talons constricted and the spider burst apart, an explosion of skin and cartilage and fluid. The other raven was free, and it was flying at the spiders around Lif, claws raking their backs, thick slime erupting in the talons’ wake.
“MUCH THANKS, MUCH THANKS,” the raven squawked at Orka and then the two giant birds were beating their wings and rising, crashing through the boughs in a burst of pine needles and sunlight.
A handful of spiders were still moving in the boughs, two more on the ground. Mord stood over Lif, his eyes wild, movements stuttered and jolting as he thrust his spear at any spider that moved.
Orka heard shouts in the woodland and saw the flicker of figures through the trees.
“Bollocks,” she muttered. “We need to get away from here,” she snapped at Mord.
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard from you in a long while,” he snapped, a tremor in his voice, stabbing his spear at a spider scuttling in. He looked at Lif, still shivering and convulsing on the ground. “My brother, will he live?”
“Not if we stay here,” Orka said.
There was a hissing, spraying sound and Orka looked up to see a spider hanging from a bough above her, spinning and turning a web between its legs. Orka shouted a warning as she leaped away, the spider casting the web into the air, floating down to drape over them.
It grazed her leg, sticking like pine tar to a ship’s hull, and Orka fell, hacked and sliced at it, cutting it free, though some still clung to her calf, burning and numbing even through her wool winnigas and breeches. Mord was stumbling, web clinging to one arm and leg, waving his spear over his brother’s twitching form. He was screaming. Spiders ran at him.
Orka heard the sound of hooves drumming on the pine-needle litter, growing louder, and two riders burst into the glade: a tall, blond-haired man with an ash-knotted staff in his hand and a woman in mail behind him. She was leading a third horse with a bound form unconscious and draped over the saddle, and a large chest strapped to it.
Orka felt a thumping in her head, like an extra heartbeat.
The woman raised a horn to her lips and blew on it, ringing out through the trees.
The blond man took one look around the glade. He drew a small seax and sliced it across the top of his hand that gripped the staff, blood trickling between his fingers on to the wood, then he raised his staff and shouted.
“Starfsfólk valds, forn aska, brenna tessa frostk?ngul?r, tessar f?lsku álfar.”
Flames erupted on the tip of the staff, as if it were a torch, and the blond man spurred his mount at the spiders, stabbing his staff into them like a spear. The first spider trembled and shook as the flames touched it, the blue veins that ran across its abdomen turning orange and then red. The skin on its back began to bubble and melt away, flames bursting and erupting. The spider screeched and hissed as it died.