He tipped his head back now, the way he had then, only to be reminded that there was no sky here, clear or stormy. There was only the ceiling of the cave, so high above it vanished into black.
“Conor?” came Meilin’s voice, over the whispers and the field’s strange melody. That voice was the closest thing he had to a sky—not a stretch of blue, but the steady slate gray of a winter afternoon—and he held fast to it. And when Briggan rested his muzzle against his back, Conor grounded himself in that, too. In the simple weight of a friend’s voice and a familiar’s steadfast calm.
He took a deep breath and continued forward, steady, steady.
And then, just as he was stepping from one strand to another, he felt it. Like a blow to the chest, all the air knocked out of him in a sudden burst of pain. At first he thought it was the parasite, clawing through his nerves, but then he saw Takoda gasp and bow his head, saw Meilin stop and clutch her chest, and realized that whatever it was, they could feel it, too, which meant it could be only one thing.
The bond.
Briggan cowered beside him with a whine, and Conor forced his body down into a crouch to keep from toppling over into the dark, bracing himself for the spine-curling agony that had hit him once before.
But it didn’t come.
In fact, almost as quickly as the pain shuddered through him, it was gone. A passing shadow, a glancing blow.
“What was that?” asked Xanthe, pink eyes wide with confusion. “What happened to you guys?”
“The bonds,” hissed Takoda through gritted teeth. “Our spirit animals … the tree … ”
“That wasn’t … so bad,” gasped Conor, still on his hands and knees.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Meilin, rubbing her chest. “The Evertree is getting worse, not better. The effects of the strain should be getting worse, too.”
“Maybe,” said Conor, trying to suppress the waver in his voice. “But you won’t find me complaining. If I never feel that again, it’ll be too soon.”
He straightened and realized with surprise and dread that the web beneath them was no longer flat, but bowing heavily under a new weight.
Conor looked up and tensed with horror as he saw Kovo standing among them.
Takoda had either summoned the Great Beast, or the ape had been released with the shuddering of the bond. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the massive ape was now standing in the field of silver thread, and even though the web didn’t snap, it warped and bent around Kovo’s weight. Realization rippled through the group, but they weren’t the only ones.
The spiders around the web had noticed, too.
They clicked and hissed, and began to skitter across the web toward the bowing center.
“Takoda,” snapped Meilin, fighting for balance as the ground tilted beneath her. “Put him away!”
“I … I can’t.”
“Try!” said Conor.
“Come on, Kovo,” said Takoda, voice pleading. The ape only bared his teeth and growled. Briggan snarled back, an alpha trying to subdue a member of his pack, but Kovo was no wolf. He beat his chest and made a sound that shook the strings and sent the melody scattering.
“He’s going to break the web!” shouted Meilin as the spiders skittered closer.
“Kovo,” insisted Takoda, trying to keep his voice low and even as he pulled open the collar of his robe and exposed his throat, where the mark of the Great Beast had been. “Please.”
The ape turned his red eyes on the boy, and for a second Conor thought he might actually, grudgingly, obey.
But then something moved behind one of the curtains of silver thread. They all spun as a creature parted the curtains and stepped through. Briggan bristled, and Kovo clenched his fists, and Conor gaped as out came the largest spider he had ever seen. Larger than a spider had any right to be. Its body was as big as Kovo’s, its legs as thick as the cords of silver silk they balanced on. A hundred eyes—some emerald and others sapphire and others amber—stared out from its head. Venom dripped from two fanglike pincers that hung below its jaw.
Meilin actually swayed on her feet, the last of the color draining from her face at the sight of the giant arachnid.
The Webmother, thought Conor.
Kovo had disturbed the Webmother.
And unlike the smaller spiders that, until Kovo’s reappearance, had left them alone, the Webmother hissed and clicked and immediately started toward them.
“Uh-oh,” said Xanthe.
Conor craned his head and could just make out the far edge of the field, the place ahead where silver thread gave way to stone again. They needed to run, but there was no way. The Webmother clambered toward them from one direction, and the dozens of smaller spiders were spilling in from every other side, surrounding the group with eyes and legs and chittering. On instinct, Conor tried to retreat, and nearly lost his balance on the thread.
“Xanthe,” he said, voice tight. “Anything in the legends about what to do now?”
“No … ”
“Great,” growled Meilin, gripping her staff. “I guess we fight.”
“Wait.” The pale-skinned girl actually took a step toward the Webmother, hands raised as if in supplication. “Maybe we can talk—”
“Do you speak spider?” asked Takoda anxiously.
“No, but if she understands that we just want to—”
The giant spider hissed her disapproval, jaws opening.
“Bad plan,” said Meilin, grabbing Xanthe’s shoulder and pulling her backward, narrowly avoiding the bead of venom that dripped from the Webmother’s fangs. It fell to the silver cords and sizzled.
While Xanthe and Meilin had been struggling before the Webmother, Kovo had been signing something to Takoda, and after a second Conor realized what the gesture meant.
Fire.
Fire, fire, fire, signed the ape with urgency, tugging on Takoda’s bag until the boy took out the unlit torch and the flint.
Xanthe spun at the sound of flint striking.
“No, wait,” she pleaded, but it was too late. A spark caught the torch’s head and lit, burning with reddish-gold light against the field’s blue-silver. Takoda held the flame high, and the surrounding spiders scrambled backward in the face of the torch’s heat and glow, their many eyes alight. The Webmother reared up at the sight of the fire, screeching in anger and shaking the web beneath them.
Meilin tore a piece of fabric from her shirt and wrapped it around her quarterstaff, touching Takoda’s torchlight to the cloth until it caught, too. Takoda faced the Webmother while Meilin swung the quarterstaff back and forth to ward off the smaller spiders, her knuckles white around the wood.
They were surrounded. But the fire seemed to be keeping the spiders at bay.
“Now what?” asked Xanthe.
“We move as a group,” said Meilin. “All together, toward the edge of the field.” And for a few steps, as they shuffled forward, with spiders circling, backs together across the strongest threads, Conor thought it might actually work. They were their own beast, a many-limbed, fire-eyed creature, moving carefully, if not gracefully, across the silver web.
And then the Arachane Fields trembled.
A shudder went through the entire cavern, not just the cords of spider silk beneath his feet, but through the vaulting cave above, as the unseen roots of the Evertree tensed and twisted and writhed.
Oh no, thought Conor, just before the pain hit him like a wall.
If the first shudder had been a glancing blow, this was a beating.
The world around him fell away, the Arachane Fields and the silvery light and the spiders vanishing with the rest of Conor’s sight as the pain ripped through him. His body tore itself away from his will, collapsing to the web like a puppet with the strings cut. He curled in on himself as every muscle in his body spasmed and every bone ached. Somewhere, Takoda cried out and Kovo roared with fury and beat his chest, Briggan howled, a wild, wolfish cry, and Meilin screamed and fell to her knees. Conor fo
ught the sickness, fought the pain, fought his body the way he’d been fighting it for weeks, and struggled to his hands and knees.
Through the tears streaming down his face, he saw the spiders on the web frozen like drops of dew, their many-eyed faces turned up toward the suffering roots.
He saw Meilin driving the end of the quarterstaff into the silver cord beneath her, trying to force herself up.
He saw Takoda sway on his feet, and Xanthe, the only one of them immune, catch the boy before he fell.
Catch the boy, but not the torch.
Saw it go tumbling to the field of thread.
Saw the web catch instantly, the silver thread lighting like oil.
Conor gasped, clawing his way back to his senses as the fire licked outward, and the Webmother and her kin recoiled, and Briggan—his Briggan—eyes wide in animal horror, took off at a run across the igniting fields.
“Briggan!” shouted Conor, scrambling, stumbling, forcing himself back up as the wolf sprinted away across the silver web, looking less like a Great Beast and more like a spooked dog. All around them, the threads began to melt and snap. The music they’d made, once sweet, now warbled and fell apart like a melody dropped, the chords tripping out of tune and then tumbling away entirely, replaced by the shriek of the spiders and the crackle of flames.
“Conor!” called Meilin, now up on her feet. She stumbled backward as a cord in front of her caught fire, and through the billowing white smoke, he saw her point to the end of the field up ahead. But all Conor could think about was finding Briggan.
He spun, disoriented by the echoes of pain and the rising chaos, the light and heat and smoke, and then with terror he saw the wolf trapped by a fiery curtain, the world around him going up in flames, the web warping around the wolf’s paws. Briggan turned in a slow, nervous circle, hackles up, cornered by fire. There was no way back. No way Briggan would ever reach Conor, let alone the edge.
But when he reached out, tried to invite the wolf back into his passive state, Briggan did not come.
A tendril of fire scorched the wolf’s tail and he yelped, tried to pad forward, then back, trapped on the unsteady ropes.
“Briggan!” called Conor, pulling on their bond. But it was too weak, and Briggan’s blue eyes stayed wild. He was too much wolf right now, too little spirit animal … but Conor knew it was more than that. Knew that, deep down, he didn’t want to let the wolf come back, didn’t want to tether Briggan to his failing body, because he was scared of the parasite infecting him, too.
More web fell away. Briggan’s paw slipped as the silk cords beneath him melted.
Briggan was trapped, and Conor was terrified, and the world was falling apart around them, but he knew that, whatever monsters he had to face, he couldn’t face them without his wolf.
He threw out his hand and pulled on the bond with all his strength.
“BRIGGAN!” he called the Great Beast back.
And, at last, the Great Beast came.
Briggan vanished from the web just before it crumbled underneath him, and in a flash of light and heat he reappeared on Conor’s skin, a wolf leaping up the arm opposite his wound.
The wolf’s return hit him in a wave of energy and relief. Briggan’s wild strength surged through Conor, and he spun and sprinted with a wolf’s power and balance toward the edge of the field, the place where the silver net stopped and the ground—solid rock—began again. His vision blurred with smoke and tears, but all he could think of was reaching the ledge.
One loping stride, then two, and he was there across the threshold, coughing and stumbling gratefully off the crumbling web and onto solid stone.
Safe.
And then, just as suddenly, not safe.
Because what he didn’t see, not until it was too late, was that the stone ground ended almost as abruptly as it began. The rock was not an expanse but a line, a ridge that gave way suddenly, violently, to nothing. A sheer drop. There was no more ground ahead. No more anything. Conor staggered to a stop on the precipice, so close his toes were curling over the edge, loose pebbles crumbling away and falling down into the dark.
He was the first to reach the rock, and he turned to warn the others, to stop them from barreling forward out of fire and into a fall.
“Wait!” he called as Meilin surged forward onto the ledge, her head down.
Too late.
She looked up at the last minute, her face smudged with ash. She didn’t see the chasm, but she saw Conor’s panic and tried to pull back in time. But she had too much momentum and too little space. The two of them collided on the precipice.
Conor lost his balance, felt the world give way beneath his feet. For an instant, they both hung there, and then they came apart. Meilin dug in her heels, wrenched herself away. She landed on the stone platform, and Conor was falling back, back, into nothing.
A hand caught his wrist.
It wasn’t Meilin’s.
It was Xanthe’s.
“I’ve got you,” she said, breathless. They both looked at the place where her pale fingers gripped his sleeve. Meilin was on her feet again. She grabbed his other hand and the two hauled Conor upright on the ledge.
Xanthe let go, turning back to the blazing field.
“Be carefu—” she called, but she never had the chance to finish. Takoda and Kovo were barreling forward, the world on fire at their back. Xanthe dove out of the way as the boy and the ape crashed onto the stone ledge, colliding with a force that slammed into Meilin, who slammed into Conor, and suddenly they all went tumbling over the side and into the dark.
ONE SECOND THEY WERE STANDING ON THE LEDGE, A field on fire at their backs, and the next, they were falling. Meilin didn’t know what happened, only that she was holding on to Conor, and then something hit her from behind, and the ground she’d worked so hard to reach was suddenly gone.
And she was plunging down through empty air.
Back in Zhong, she’d always enjoyed the rush of sparring with her tutors, the thrill of a challenge, the way her heart leaped into her throat. She did not enjoy the rush of falling. Her heart was still there, in her throat, along with her stomach, and a scream.
Of all the ways to die, this was not the one she had in mind.
But then, too soon, her side hit mud, and suddenly she wasn’t falling so much as sliding down a very steep slope covered in mossy earth and slimy stones.
She reached blindly for something, anything, to catch hold of, but couldn’t get purchase. Her body had momentum, and she couldn’t figure out which way was up long enough to do anything but fall. And then, as suddenly as the world below her had gone from air to mud, it was very briefly air again, and then water.
Meilin broke the surface with a crash, and spluttered and tried to swim before she realized that the water wasn’t deep. She was sitting on the silty floor of a pool, or a pond, or a shore. Whatever it was, the water sloshed around her knees as two other bodies thudded into the shallow expanse beside her, followed by a thunderous crash that could only be Kovo.
“Blech,” said Conor, spitting out a mouthful of grimy water. And he was right. The liquid tasted even worse than it smelled, and it smelled pretty awful.
What had Xanthe called this place, the obstacle beyond the Arachane Fields?
The Sulfur Sea.
She thought she understood why. The air was damp and rotting, and there was a gritty quality to the water, though that might have been the silt they kicked up with their fall. Still, it looked black and brackish as it slid between her fingers. Meilin squinted, straining to see the space around her. There was no light, except for the distant burning of the fields far overhead. It cast strange shadows over everything, turned the world to black and white. At their back was the cliff they’d just descended. Ahead, nothing but a stretch of oily water, trailing into darkness. Meilin thought, not for the first time, about how much she preferred the world above ground.
“Is everyone all right?” asked Conor hoarsely.
Takoda
mumbled something affirmative, and Meilin got to her feet, brackish water soaking through her shoes and sluicing off her cloak. She’d lost her quarterstaff in the fall, heard it break halfway down. She plunged her hands back into the gritty water to search for the pieces, but her fingers found only mud, rocks. Her hand slid over something smooth, and then moved against something that moved back.
Meilin recoiled.
She couldn’t see through the water. Its surface was a dark slick reflecting only the pale planes of her face and, above, the burning field. Maybe it was best, she thought, even as she forced herself to ask.
“Xanthe,” she said, teeth chattering from the damp soaking through her clothes. “What do you know about the Sulfur Sea?”
But Xanthe didn’t answer.
“Xanthe?” Meilin said again as something brushed her shoe. “Whatever the legends are, we need to know.”
But still the girl didn’t speak. Meilin straightened and squinted. In the flickering haze, she could make out the broad shape of Kovo, the narrow one of Takoda, the hunched form of Conor.
No Xanthe.
“Xanthe?” called Conor.
Nothing.
“Xanthe?” called Takoda, voice rising.
Meilin spun in a circle.
There were no pale-skinned bodies floating in the shallows, no girl-shaped shadows standing on the ledge above. Meilin sloshed forward along the shore, heart pounding in her chest. Xanthe knew the way. She was the only one who did.
“Xanthe!” Meilin called out, but she was answered only by her own voice, echoing over the water.
The girl was gone.
ABEKE WAS BARELY ON HER FEET WHEN THE BLAST RANG out, far too low for fireworks.
The ground shook with the force of the explosion. The air, once filled with cheers and music, was suddenly overtaken with smoke and screams.
“Get to the castle,” ordered the masked figure. “Find the girl. Get her out.”
And before Abeke could say anything else, he turned and leaped off the wall, vanishing behind it.