The Kormak Saga

  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 should 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.

  A
utomatically 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 moved 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.”

  Kormak was shocked to find he had spoken. The elf nodded in a kindly fashion. “And they will come against us.”

  “Yes, once word of the Shadowblight spreads, the Order will call a Burning. All of the nobles will be roused against you. Armies will come to burn the forest.”

  “Plenty of prey,” said one of the elves holding Kormak upright. Weaver pursed her lips thoughtfully.

  “Plenty of new worshippers,” said Weaver.

  Kormak stared at her. He thought about the cocooned bodies he had seen hanging outside, hanging in the midst of a Shadowblight, exposed to its warping energies. He suddenly felt as if he understood what was going on here.

  A sardonic smile played across Weaver’s lips. A vision flashed across his mind as if it had leapt from her to him. He saw the slow corruption of the woods and their occupants and the Shadow becoming so powerful that eventually it would spread to the neighbouring lands and devour them as well. He saw armies of tainted humans and elves gather, to swarm outwards carrying their taint with them into new lands. Such things had happened in the past.

  “Yes,” she said. “Uran Ultar welcomes all who would follow him, human or elf. All who bring him prey are welcome. All who feed him souls may join the pack. In his web of shadow, elves turn their back on the Green, humans close their eyes to what you call the Light.

  “You see we are not as cruel as you thought. Some of those we have taken, the weaker ones provide food for our young, but those of you who are strong are welcome here. You yourself will be a great champion of the cause once your eyes are opened to the truth. Who knows, perhaps I will even send you out into the world to find more such as yourself. You have the look of the hunter. You will enjoy serving the Spider God.”

  “The Holy Sun will destroy you,” said Kormak. Even to himself he did not sound very convincing.

  “He has not done so yet,” said Weaver. “Take him to the crypts! We’ll speak again. A few days in the embrace of Shadow will give him something to think about.”

  The elves took him deeper into the darknes
s.

  Kormak hung there in his cocoon, in the middle of a huge web, watching a large spider crawl towards him. He had to remind himself that this was not a nightmare, not a fever dream. The venom was taking its toll on his mind and body. Hallucinations came and went. Even as that thought occurred to him, sick dizziness swept through him and the world rippled and changed.

  He hung in the sky, dangling from thin threads of silk. Far below him, he saw a great forest, like and unlike the one he had passed through earlier. It was green and bright and the sun shone down on it. In its midst were titanic trees, scores of leagues apart. They resembled the dead tree in size but in almost all other respects were different; some resembled oaks, some pines, some dragon-trees. All of them were taller than many keeps and so broad that the population of entire towns could dwell amid their boles and branches. He knew that in its own way, each of these trees was sentient in a vast slow way and communicated with its brethren by a tangle of magical flows that ran from root to root through the seemingly endless forests. The air was bright and clean, the mountains seemed taller, the Holy Sun brighter.

  In the morning of the world, the elves came and they worshipped and served the great trees, sharing their magic, acting as their agents in the world. They were long-lived and peaceful and their intelligence worked at a different speed from the trees, letting them deal with problems that happened too quickly for the giant vegetable sentients.

  He saw Old Ones, the immortal former rulers of this world visit the trees. Some stayed and became followers. Others left and returned with armies and tried to enslave the forest lords and their supporters. War came. Gates opened. Spells of enormous power were invoked. Tremendous energies were unleashed blasting swathes of the forest, reducing some of it to ashes, leaving pools of dark magic, of Shadow behind. Parts of the continent-spanning wood became warped and twisted.