“Maybe as a warning to the others,” said Grogan. “Or maybe they just wanted some fun. Who can tell what the elves will do? They don’t think like us.”
Kormak bent down and sliced the flesh on one of the lumps open with his knife. He pulled out a small, hard leathery object form beneath the skin. It was faintly translucent and in it something squirmed.
“An egg,” he said. The hardened woodsmen standing close turned pale.
“They killed Marla and Toni and let their pets lay eggs in them?”
“Gives them something to eat when they hatch,” said Kormak. “I’ve seen other things do this.”
“Means they must be expecting those things to hatch pretty soon,” said Grogan.
Kormak crushed the egg beneath his heel. It took some effort. “This one won’t.”
“We can’t dig out all the eggs,” said Grogan. “It would take too long. And if we burn the corpses it will give away our position.”
“We can’t just leave them here,” said Jaethro. Kormak took the corpses’ heads off with his blade, then chopped them in two. The woodsmen looked at him appalled.
“We’re in a Shadowblight here,” said Kormak. “We don’t want them rising.”
“Shallow grave, pile some stones on them, and then we move on,” said Grogan. “We need to worry more about the living.”
Jaethro summoned a couple of the other woodsmen to give him a hand, the rest of them moved off.
“This is just getting worse, and worse,” Grogan said. “You think that’s why they’ve been kidnapping people, as food for the pet spider’s babies? I tell you if I get my hands on this Weaver I am going to carve her up with my knife. An arrow is too good for her.”
Kormak could tell that Grogan was shaken. Maybe he was getting old, after all. “If we meet her, kill her any way you can, if you get the chance.”
“I’ll settle for just getting our people out,” said Grogan. Kormak was starting to think that they might have to settle for just getting themselves out but he kept that to himself. The sense of watchfulness all around them intensified. He took a deep breath and extended his senses as far as he could, the way he had been taught by his masters in the Fortress Monastery on Mount Aethelas. He sensed nothing, but that did not make him feel any easier.
“Let’s go,” said Grogan. Warily Kormak followed him.
“What is it?” Grogan asked. Kormak put his hand on his breast. The Elder Sign beneath his tunic was getting warmer. It only did that in the presence of magic. He studied their surroundings closely. The trees were even more warped. The insects were bigger and strangely distorted. Glowing fungus reached the height of his knees.
“The taint of the Shadow is stronger here,” said Kormak. “The Blight is getting worse.”
Grogan grinned. “I would say so much is obvious.”
“There is magic here,” Kormak said. “This is a place that can warp body and soul now. Tell everyone to remember what I said and to be extra careful.”
He sniffed the air. The under-currents of rot were stronger. There was the smell of something worse there as well. The saliva in his mouth was starting to feel oily. “We can’t stay here more than a day or two at most. The less time on this unholy ground the better.”
A moth with a wingspan as long as the distance from his finger-tips to his elbow fluttered past. It glowed in the shadows. Men shrank away from it unwilling to feel the soft caress of its strange wings on their flesh. The carpet of mulch beneath their feet felt sticky. A tick the size of a man’s fist inched across a diseased branch. The leaves of the trees swayed although there was no breeze. There was a sense that the forest was alive and inimical all around them.
Grogan had his bow knocked now and was staring around, wary as a wolf. Kormak held the crossbow ready. A sour wind sprang up, like the exhalation of a great dragon. It carried with it a strong sickly sweet odour of corruption. Kormak froze as if he had come under the eye of some huge monster and all of those around him did the same. He was not sure how the nameless dread communicated itself through their entire party but it had, so much was obvious.
Kormak put his hand on the ground. The rotting leaves were sticky and unclean but he thought he felt a faint vibration there. The image of a hive of gigantic, burrowing insects sprang into his mind. He thought of a giant nest of spiders large enough to make the earth shiver as they moved. He breathed out and performed the cleansing exercises he had been taught on Mount Aethelas when he was a novice. Calmness returned.
Then he heard the swish of something moving through the air. One of the hunters near him fell, a poisoned dart in his neck. Something moved overhead in the branches of the trees. Looking up Kormak saw the glowing green eyes of a huge spider. He fired the crossbow but missed the scuttling creature.
A net of webbing dropped towards him. Kormak dropped the useless missile weapon. His sword cleared its scabbard. The razor edge of the dwarf-forged blade sliced through the sticky webbing, parting it around him. Others were not so lucky. He saw men entangled by rope thick web-strands.
Overhead now he could see the elves moving, swinging from branch to branch with uncanny agility. Their pet spiders scuttled along branches. Grogan had somehow avoided being entangled. He raised his bow and fired. An elf dropped from the tree, chest pierced. Grogan fired again. Another elf fell.
Short of clambering into the swaying boughs there was nothing Kormak could do. He raced across to the nearest entangled woodsman and cut him free, moved on to free another. Arrows and darts traced his tracks. Springing and rolling, he narrowly avoided them. He realised that they had one advantage here. It seemed the elves did not want to kill them unless they had to. They wanted captives if they could get them. Kormak thought about the dead prisoners he had seen. Falling into their hands would not be a pleasant experience.
A few more of the woodsmen had worked themselves free of the webbing and were returning fire with their bows. Screams indicated that at least some of their arrows had found a mark.
“Damn,” he heard Grogan curse and turned to see a new horror had been unleashed. Large spiders were dropping on threads of webbing. They were smaller than the ones Kormak had fought during the attack on the village. Their markings were different, a complex swirl like a strange flowing script. Their eyes glittered with malign intelligence though and a blueish venom marked their clicking mandibles. One of them scuttled towards him with eye-blurring speed. He lashed out with his blade, slicing it in two. Purple stuff sprayed forth from its broken body. Where it hit, Kormak’s flesh felt numb.
He saw more and more of the spiders descending. One of them was on top of a prostrate man. Kormak sprang and slashed it, slicing off armoured legs and hacking through its torso. He caught a brief glimpse of Jaethro’s face. It was contorted like the features of a man having an apoplectic stroke. His limbs twitched. “Can’t move,” he said. His voice sounded thick as if he was having difficulty moving his tongue. “Poisoned.”
His lips moved slightly as if he was trying to say more but only a stream of gibberish came out. His eyes were open wide with horror though. More spiders emerged from the undergrowth. Kormak kept moving. Arrows smashed into the ground nearby. A pack of the arachnids raced towards him. He leapt into the air, bringing his feet down on the back of one, lashed out and split another in two, sprang again as a third leapt at him, rolled to his feet and turned, slicing the spider’s forelimbs. They came off and its face ploughed into the mulch. Kormak struck again aiming at the eyes, slicing through the head, pulling his blade clear, whirling and striking, slaying anything that got within his reach.
He caught sight of Grogan being raised in the air, already cocooned in webs, a massive spider embracing him with its limbs, head near the man’s neck as if it was feasting on his blood. The same thing was happening to other captured woodsmen.
A group of hunters were making a last stand in the shadow of a great tree. Around them packs of spiders moved. Arrows whizzed out the branches overhead. Kormak wondered if he s
hould make a break for it, realised that there was very little chance of winning free of pursuing elves in this blighted forest.
It appeared as if his end had finally caught up with him. Perhaps unlooked for his last day was upon him at last. He commended his soul to the Holy Sun and threw himself into the huge pack of spiders, hacking and cutting with lightning speed, chopping down everything that got within reach of his blade.
Nothing living could withstand the fury of that onslaught. He left a mound of dead, dying and crushed spiders behind him as he cut his way to the men. Seeing him coming on, the hunters gained heart and threw themselves into the fray with redoubled fury, hacking down the creatures that harried them.
Suddenly a sharp pain stung his shoulder. He twisted his head and saw a dart sticking there. Numbness was already starting to spread from the tainted tip. A spider dropped down towards him. He slashed at it, cleaving it in twain, but his reactions were getting slower as icy numbness spread from the wound. More spiders came towards him. Another arrow impacted in his chest. His mail partially deflected it, but once again he felt cold weakness flow into his veins from the point of impact.
He forced himself to keep moving. His sword flickered in his hand. Death came to more of the scuttling monstrosities, but he was getting slower and slower, and the strength had started to spill out of him like wine from an overturned cup.
His legs felt as if they were sculpted from ice. His sword seemed to weigh as much as a tree trunk. He lifted it above his head and brought it smashing down on the nearest spider. It was a poor blow, badly struck, but the razor edge still sheared chitin and removed a limb. The spider let out a strange chittering hiss and its mandibles closed on Kormak’s leg. He felt something being pumped into the wound. It burned for a moment like liquid fire then something smacked into the back of his head and darkness took him.
CHAPTER FIVE
KORMAK OPENED HIS eyes. It was night. Occasional moonbeams broke through the forest canopy over head. Glowing fungus provided the rest of the spectral illumination. There was a sickly-sweet stink of rot in the air. His amulet burned against his breast telling him that strong magic was all around him.
His skin was numb and his limbs refused to move. His back felt twisted. There was an odd scraping sensation when he moved his head and looking up, he saw to his horror he was looking at the underbelly of a huge spider. Around him massive armoured legs blurred as the creature moved.
He managed to twist his neck and looked to his right. Jaethro was there, eyes wide with horror, his head almost the only part of him visible. He was cocooned and webbed in place to the underbelly of another giant spider. On its back, balancing easily was a tall, feral-looking elf with a spear in his hands.
The blighted forest around them was getting worse. Huge mushrooms, the size of small trees rose, their domes glowing with eerie light, their blotched markings resembling evil runes. Tattooed elves moved all around them, smaller spiders scuttling at their heels. The elves did not look triumphant. Their faces had an odd placid calm that was at odds with the wildness of their eyes.
Some of them had very strange jewellery on their necks. It took Kormak a while to realise that the odd amulets were living spiders with glittering bodies and glowing eyes, their legs wrapped round their bearers’ throats, their mandibles buried into elvish flesh, feeding a constant drip of narcotic venom into their veins.
They emerged from the tunnel among the trees into a huge clearing. At its centre stood all that remained of a gigantic tree. Once it must have been far and away the greatest living thing in the forest, rising hundreds of feet above the ground, stretching its branches so high it must have looked as if it was trying to touch the sky.
Mould blotched its side. Its bark had peeled away in places to reveal whitish wood beneath. There was something obscene in the sight, like looking at dead muscle in a corpse after the flesh has been peeled away in an autopsy.
Looking at it, he did not doubt that this was the source of the corruption in the forest, that this was the centre of evil, of the Blight. The Shadow was very strong here.
Automatically he began to study his surroundings, looking for any way to escape, for himself and the others. While he was alive he was not going to stop looking for a way out, no matter how dire the situation appeared.
The ground around the base of the great dead tree was clear of other plants, as if whatever was in it had poisoned the earth so much that not even blighted blossoms could grow there. Webs festooned the tree’s sides and in them he caught sight of other cocoons, where pale faced men, women and children hung and monstrous spiders crawled over them as if tending to their sleeping prey.
There were a lot of elves here, far more than he would have expected in a single village, and more seemed to be arriving all the time. A drumbeat came from somewhere within the tree, echoing outwards steady as the pulse of a titanic heart. It looked like what was left of the Mayasha nation, and perhaps more, was gathering here in the long shadow cast by the great dead tree.
In its sides, where the bark had been torn away, were cavern-like holes. Spiders and elves came and went through them, moving on woven bridges of spidersilk between ground and trunk. Platforms were raised on silk ropes to the higher branches. Spiders moved up the sides of the tree, the spikes on the end of their armoured limbs driving themselves into wood and bark.
More elves watched the prisoners arrive. The eyes of most were bright and mad, the eyes of others were somnolent as if they were entranced or drugged. From somewhere off to Kormak’s right a man started to scream and gibber in horror. No one paid him any mind.
Kormak tried to move his body. He was bound tight with no room to wriggle and he was securely attached to the underside of the great spider. Looking around he could see that some of the spiders had stopped moving. The bindings holding the cocoons to their undersides were being sliced off. The bound prisoners were raised up by elves and spiders to join previous captives in the webs. As this happened, he saw one of the smaller spiders scuttle over them. Mandibles closed on a squirming prisoner and suddenly all struggles stopped, whether through death or the effect of some narcotic venom, Kormak could not tell.
He fully expected this to happen to him, but much to his surprise the spider carrying him kept on, moving into a hole in the trunk of the great tree somewhere among its roots. It kept moving down a long dimly lit tunnel until it emerged into a vast cavern, the ceiling of which must have been the roots and base of the great dead tree.
In the centre of the root cavern was what looked like a masked elf woman. The mask was carved from very white wood and made to resemble the face of a skull. The rest of the elf’s body was covered in a living, armoured carapace from which eight spiderish limbs emerged, as if a huge arachnid wrapped her whole torso. She looked partially devoured, as if only her head and limbs had escaped being eaten. Her elvish limbs were tattooed with patterns that were disturbing to the eye. In one hand she held a staff. Hundreds and hundreds of small spiders ranging in size from ones so small they were barely visible to ones with bodies the size of a fist crawled all over her. She studied Kormak with mad, brilliant eyes behind which the Shadow dwelled.
“Welcome to my home, Guardian,” she said. “I am Weaver. I speak for the Spider God.”
Elves moved forward and cut Kormak’s cocoon free from the belly of the beast. He fell face down on the floor, prostrate before the shaman. He tried to curse but his lips and tongue were beyond his control and only a weird croaking emerged.
A carpet of spiders flowed from the shaman’s body and crawled over Kormak. He was glad his flesh was too numb to feel their tiny feet tickling his skin. He was also glad the cocoon wrapped him so tightly they could not get among his clothing. Two elves pulled him upright.
One of the spider limbs protruding from Weaver’s carapace reached forward. It ended in a spike that reached out towards Kormak’s face. For a moment, it hovered over his eye and Kormak was afraid that Weaver was going to stab him there, then it move
d down and rested against his cheek. There was a strange pricking sensation as numbed skin moved and slowly sensation started to return. Small spiders ran along the limb and landed on Kormak’s face. For a mad moment, he fancied that the pins and needles of returning feeling were caused by the movement of their limbs.
“You will be able to talk in a few moments. You will be able to answer my questions.” Her bright mad gaze fixed on Kormak. A spider the size of a coin crawled over her nose and across her forehead. A smaller one crawled up her nostril. Kormak found it easy to imagine it crawling all the way to Weaver’s brain and injecting it with strange venoms.
“What do you want with me, Weaver?” Kormak said. His words were slow and distorted. His throat felt dry. His skin tingled oddly.
“I wanted to look at you, Champion of the Sun. I wanted to see what this terrible warrior who cut down so many of my people looked like. I wanted to know you and get a sense of what you are like.” Her voice was mocking.
“Why?”
Weaver threw back her head and laughed. The sound was velvety and incongruously lovely. “I am supposed to be asking the questions here. You are my prisoner.”
“You have not asked me any questions yet. You have only talked.”
“It is a weakness, I know. I have always been fascinated by what was different and you are as different from the men of the Woods as a wolf is from a dog. Are all of the members of your Order like you?”
Kormak considered his answer. He could see nothing to be gained by lying, and he felt an odd compulsion to speak settling on him anyway. It was the venom, he realised.
“You can speak of your own free will or I can feed you the milk of the Mother once more. It might drive you mad but then you may wish that before the end. It may be a mercy for your sanity to be shattered.”
“Why?”
“Again the questions. Answer my question and I will answer yours.”
Kormak considered this. Weaver seemed very reasonable, almost pleasant. “No. Not all of my brethren, only the Guardians.”