Cobweb Empire

  She had no idea that the heavy charger could move so fast!

  Letheburg, with its streets and snow-clad rooftops, was a blur of buildings and alleys, occasional bright golden dots of lampposts, corners and crossroads.

  Somewhere out there, getting closer with each galloping stride they made, was the overwhelming pull of the thousands of the dead. . . .

  Percy held on with her mittened fingers gone numb, one hand on the saddlehorn, the other, she realized, was clutching the knight’s iron vambrace on his lower arm. “We’re going too fast,” she whispered through gritted teeth, the side of her shawl-wrapped face pressed hard against the metal of his chest, while the preternatural sense of the infinite dead pushed upon her mind. “I can’t see the streets! Was that Rowers Row?”

  “It doesn’t matter, we’re nearly there. . . .” His voice in her ear mingled with the ice wind. “Look! The walls are just ahead. . . .”

  In the dark of the moon, they had come out to the final section of buildings that ended before a wide strip of pomoerium, the clearing turned into a roadway that lay parallel to the great outer walls and circled the city like an inner moat. Here, there were no gates, and the walls themselves rose massive and fifty-foot tall all the way to the battlements. A few soldiers with pikes and muskets patrolled the battlements overhead. More pikemen paced on the roadway below, while a slow overloaded cart with lanterns attached in the front on both sides of the driver to illuminate the way was moving along the rutted snowy ground, carrying munitions to the walls closest the gates.

  They burst into the roadway and Beltain made Jack take a left turn, and ride swiftly past the company of pikemen alongside the walls. The soldiers gave them casual glances, but did not hail yet another knight on horseback.

  “What now?” Percy asked, turning her face away from the sudden wind that blew freely in the open here, and still clutching his arm.

  “We look for gaps in the wall. . . .”

  And they did not have to search for long. A few hundred feet later they came into a ghostly place, where the shadows from turrets and parapets above created a zone of darkness below. It was hard to tell what lay before them, but in the next breath, the moon shone silver through the overcast, and they could see it, a place of pure vacant darkness where there should be massive stone, a spectral gap of nothing.

  “There!” Beltain uttered, his breath coming in a burst of warmth against her right cheek. He pulled up Jack just before the opening, and the warhorse almost reared with an angry snarl, but paused obediently. “Now, I will need the use of my arm, so put this hand on my waist instead, hold on by the faulds, yes, the iron rings here next to the belt.” And with those words he gently disengaged her hand in its mitten from his vambrace-clad arm and she instead took hold of the ringed armor pieces at the side of his belt.

  As she did thus, Beltain gathered the reins in one hand and reached to the side with his free right hand and drew forth his long sword. It glinted once in the moon pallor of the night.

  Percy felt her breath catching in her throat. And now, oh how the pull was building in her mind, calling her. . . .

  “Are you ready?”

  Percy nodded wordlessly.

  “Hold on tight!”

  Some instinct made her draw even closer against him—press against his metal breastplate until it pushed painfully against her cheeks, shoulder, and ribs—and close her eyes.

  Because she could really feel them now. Just out of reach. Just beyond the wall, on all sides, an infinite sea of the dead, stretching out for leagues in all directions.

  “Oh, God in Heaven . . .” Percy barely mouthed the words on her breath, as they plunged forward into the dark place of nothing, and she squeezed her eyelids shut in sudden overwhelming terror.

  They were out through the ghostly breach in the walls of Letheburg and emerged outside the city.

  The moon cast its pallor upon a wide snow-covered plain with remote settlements and sparsely forested hillocks in the distance. However, in the closest vicinity there was nothing but thick churning darkness of human shapes—some upright, others hunched over, many of them swaying like ebony stalks of wheat to maintain a strange mechanical balance and remain standing. They were unnaturally quiet; not a human word, not a breath, only the constant creaking of stiff limbs, the clanging of metal and striking of wooden parts like grotesque wind chimes.

  And their death shadows—oh, they were a quavering boundless sea, filling the plain to the horizon. . . .

  The moment Percy and Beltain emerged through the opening, she felt them blast at her mind with their need. And in the same instant, they felt her.

  Percy whimpered, unable to hold back the sound, stunned by the sheer force of the onslaught of so much negative power, an anti-force that sucked at her, pulled, clawed at her.

  “Don’t be afraid, girl . . .” the black knight’s baritone sounded in her ear, close and hard and ringing, and it momentarily distracted her enough to clear her mind.

  “Not afraid . . .” she said, opening her eyes. “It’s just too many—too much!”

  But she was lying. The panic and terror redoubled, coming at her from all directions, because the dead had seen her and they all turned to her, like one.

  A wail arose, low and humming on the wind.

  Beltain raised his sword arm before him at chest level, blade pointed to the side, ready to sweep. With his other hand he unfastened the long shield, and placed his gauntlet through the grip, holding it in a protective position at Percy’s back.

  The dead were coming. . . .

  The closest ones to them were only a few feet away—close enough to reveal their broken shapes and frozen eyes, sunken and fixed in their sockets. Faces stilled in a rictus grin of death, gaping wounds, flesh revealing pale bone, gleaming ivory in the moonlight. They all started moving, a wave of swaying limbs, holding upright halberds and pikes, brandishing wicked spiked morning stars and studded maces, their own bodies bristling with lengths of metal permanently lodged in torsos. Everywhere one looked there was something stained with black dried blood—blood, frozen and frosted over at the ragged edges of wounds with a perverse beauty of crystalline symmetry made iridescent by the moon. . . . Meanwhile, on the metaphysical plane, their death shadows rose in smoke-stacks, writhing, spiraling in a morass of darkness throughout the plain. . . .

  “Go!” Percy exclaimed in mindless panic.

  And the black knight spurred his charger, bursting forward.

  Thus again they flew.

  It was different, this time. Beltain had to cut a path before them, and he swung his great sword widely, putting his immense force into each sweep, and letting forth a battle roar, while using the shield to punch and block.

  In that instant that his berserker voice sounded, many feet behind them now, on top of the city battlements, someone must have heard him. Percy saw, in a hasty backward glance, that torches started to flicker on top of the walls, and there was the sound of soldiers on alert running, and barked command yells. What did they think was happening outside Letheburg walls, just below? No doubt they assumed the enemy was on the move. . . . Or have they discovered the gap in the wall?

  But, it occurred to her, it did not matter what the city soldiers thought. They were too far back to offer proper assistance, even if they understood what was going on below.

  Percy held on for dear life, cringing away, wanting to make herself small. . . . Oh, how she wanted to squeeze her eyes shut and hide her face in his chest! But there was only the cold hard armor, and she felt the endless pull, pull, pull tearing apart her mind.

  Meanwhile, the physical world was in chaos. . . .

  Shapes of once-living men fell upon them, hands clawing at the sides, crawling up at the flanks of the warhorse, for they had massed in numbers and grown thick like an ocean. Thus, inevitably the charger had to slow down, for it was impossible to move any faster through an endless thicket of human walls wrought of the dead.

  The warhorse advanced, moving
through churning black molasses, screaming in fury.

  Beltain swung his blade like a scythe through the limbs, blocking their deadly bludgeoning strikes with his shield, hacking and cutting off arms, fingers, kicking away others that had reached for them—reached for her.

  And then the thing that was building, the pressure, the pull—something burst inside Percy.

  A dead man touched her by the knee, grabbing her in an attempt to pull her down, and it acted as a catalyst inside her mind.

  The black churning power rose up in an avalanche, and her head rang with it. A thousand cathedral bells were insufficient to fill her with their rumbling force to match what was inside her, and what exploded forth at one dead man’s touch.

  Beltain cried out, because even he could feel it, something happening all around them. . . .

  Percy opened her eyes wide, and she reached out to the death-shadows—all the infinity of them—like a great spider casting forth a web of self, feeling in one fractured moment the unique death of every man for leagues around.

  And each death she felt, she took with her mind, handled it with a myriad fingers of power, and she held them all, like marionettes on infinite strings in the palm of her hand. In the holding, she could tell apart each entity from the other—delicate individual threads of gossamer death, each one a billowing shadow on the other end, connected to her through the invisible string of her churning force. . . .

  Some of them had been lonely, immediately clinging to her metaphysical lifeline with bottomless hunger. Others struggled like flies in her arachnid grasp. A few regarded her in slavish resignation.

  All she had to do was pull, and they would all come to her, or come to do whatever was her bidding.

  One of the death shadows in the distance she recognized somehow, as belonging to the man called Ian Chidair, Duke Hoarfrost. How she knew, she was uncertain—maybe because he was Beltain’s father and she could feel the common signature of their blood—but he was the strongest one among them. Like a great stinging wasp caught in her net, he struggled wildly, enraged by her control over him.

  With a mere flick of my mind, I can take them all unto me. . . .

  And yet, Percy paused, seared into a moment of timeless impossibility.

  A choice to wield infinite power was before her.

  Was it hers to take?

  Take us all!

  The temptation was before her, sweet, thick darkness—oh, to take it all unto her, to take their ghosts and suspended soul sparks, their very oblivion and make it hers, and together with it all to gently sink. . . .

  Dissolution of will.

  To do that would require all of her.

  And Percy exhaled suddenly, while a strange deafening serenity came to her. She loosened the web of power with her mind, so that the outer edges of her touch, the pulsing threads of connection near the horizon were gently released, while the ones closest to her she still held, like a weaver differentiating the colors of string, based on their proximity.

  And calling upon the weaver, she became Arachne, and she pulled subtle individual puppet strings unto herself and into their personal final silence.

  In a radius of about twenty feet in their immediate surroundings, she took each dead man and his death-shadow, and she pulled them together without any physical contact, except for the one dead man still clutching at her knee. She glanced at each one and touched them with her thought; guided each one of the individual billowing essences of death into their own physical vessels, forcing them down and inward. The dead men she chose collapsed in a small perimeter around them, mannequin bodies piling like logs and growing still and inanimate.

  The anonymous dead soldier at her knee let go and immediately slipped away underneath the feet of the warhorse.

  “Dear God! Are you doing this?” Beltain exclaimed, breathing hard, pausing his sword strikes, for the way before them was suddenly clear—a narrow path just enough for a horse to advance.

  “Yes!” cried Percy, and her vision swam with the intensity of her focus, and the inexplicable welling of tears. “Ride!”

  “Well done, girl!” Beltain’s hoarse-voiced response was filled with grim exuberance, and he spurred Jack onward.

  They picked up the pace once more and started to move forward over piling bodies, faster and faster, until they were again in a gallop. Percy cut a swathe before them, clearing the way, making each man connect with his death in a split-second embrace as soon as she glanced at him.

  Her head was growing heavier and heavier, becoming an anvil of power, and she had the strange sensation that she could barely maintain it on her shoulders. She was stuck in a loop, performing a function—her eyes did not stop to blink, but instantaneously fixed the details of each man-shape coming toward them in the field, and her mind methodically executed the final act.

  Barreling forward, they thus advanced several hundred feet, and the pressing onslaught of dead men around them rarified. It was apparent they had at last passed the bulk of the dead army and emerged on the other side into the empty snow-covered fields around Letheburg.

  Bodies rendered suddenly lifeless continued to fall on both sides of the warhorse, but there were fewer and fewer of them, and they no longer held an immediate threat of physical contact. A small number of dead stragglers continued to turn their way, but now Percy did not bother to reach for them with her killing thought. She swayed, having fallen against the iron breastplate of the knight, and the dark ocean of power in her mind was clouding her vision. . . .

  She blinked, letting go of the infernal focus, allowing her eyelids to relax at last, feeling nausea rising in her gut. Her extremities had gone numb, while her limbs felt leaden with weakness. She slipped forward, to the side—she no longer knew—and again the world was tilting while the moon overhead slipped forth from the clouds yet again, filling her vision with soothing silver, while all the world’s cathedral bells tolled in her mind.

  “It’s over. . . .” The black knight’s deep voice sounded in her ear. “You did it, Percy, you kept us alive, as I knew you would. . . .”

  “How—” she began, but her lips were dry and lacking sensation, like cotton. “How did you . . . know?”

  “Hush now,” he replied, and she felt an iron gauntlet holding her up, then gently repositioning her against his armored chest.

  “South . . .” whispered Percy with her last strength. “Please . . . keep going south!”

  And then she sank into unconsciousness.

  Beltain watched with rising concern the very pale, sickly face of the girl lying back against his chest, her head wrapped in her familiar woolen shawl lolling against his plate armor. She had slipped away in a peculiar faint, moments after what must have been a feat of impossible power, because her normally rounded, puffy cheeks and reddened nose appeared grey and lifeless somehow, as though she had been sapped of all energy.

  They now rode hard through the open field, headed in the vague direction where, he knew, lay the main road leading south. But Beltain was not sure if to proceed forward this night was a rational choice under the circumstances.

  The wind was picking up around them, biting in fierce icy gusts, and the overcast thickened, while the moon started to sink lower on the black horizon. Snowfall was expected, and soon the flakes would start coming down, amid dropping temperatures.

  He was afraid she might not make it through such a night—not like this, open to the elements, and not in such a weakened state. In truth he barely understood what was wrong with her, why she had lost consciousness, except that on some level in his gut he knew it had to do with the unnatural power.

  His plan had been headstrong and, in hindsight, part-insanity. The Infanta had agreed and given him her honorable orders to take the girl onward against the will of the King of Lethe, and Grial had figured out the clever details of removing her from the Palace, and a way out of Letheburg.

  The rest of it—the part that consisted of getting her past the dead army—was entirely his. And Bel
tain, the madman, had thought his berserker prowess would be enough to cut through their ranks and to deliver her safely back on the road. However, the moment they came out through the breach in the missing section of wall, and he actually saw the extent of the enemy army, their sheer numbers, a cold grim feeling came to settle upon him.

  No, he was not afraid—fear had never been his weakness. But he was on some level a realist, and guilt at his own hubris manifested itself. What he saw before them was a hopeless thing.

  Still, he had spurred Jack forward, taking all of them into certain death—rather, there would be no death, only mortal damage to their bodies, and ultimately pain and horror of becoming undead. Was it his pride alone that allowed him to take such a terrible risk? Or had he known on some level that Percy, this strange girl with her fat cheeks and pensive eyes and nondescript peasant looks, would manage to do something miraculous?

  Beltain frowned, angry at himself, at his own willingness to take that risk. And as the devious moon once again disappeared in the haze overhead, he made a firm decision. They would stop for the night, and he would seek them shelter.

  Because he could not bear to have her die in the storm. . . .

  And thus, Beltain strained his gaze in all directions about them, and not too far away he noted the dark specks of possible settlements against the white snow.

  There, he directed Jack, and they flew onward, riding on their last reserves, a solitary moving object in the plain. They had left all the dead behind them, and Letheburg also.

  As they approached the outlying buildings, the structures resolved themselves into a medium sized farmhouse with several lesser buildings, sheds and barns. The houses were half-buried in snow, thatched roofs gleaming pristine white, and there was no smoke in the chimney, and no watchdogs to bark at their approach.

  Beltain guessed that the place was abandoned, most likely recently, since every living soul in the neighborhood for leagues around had fled from the onslaught of the dead converging upon Letheburg—either the residents of this homestead were safely ensconced inside the city walls, or they had fled as far away as possible.