Aurora's Rift, page 17
part #1 of Celestial Arcanists Series
Sasun charges with her sword, but the spider runs up the wall out of range, lifting its abdomen to point its spinnerets right at us. Shit. Nope.
On pure instinct, I reach through the fire in the torch and link it with my mana, making a flamethrower out of the light source that makes the entire room blaze orange with the sudden brightness and a flash of dry heat.
The spider makes a noise like a thousand metal nails dragged down a chalkboard, and the sticky webbing it tries to throw at Sasun strikes the funnel of fire I’ve improvised. The fire incinerates most of it, and Sasun dodges the rest, catching only a few strings on her sword with a grunt of disgust.
I haven’t seen Ferelthin use many spells besides lightning, and certainly not this one.
He sends a bolt of silvery-purple energy at the spider, which is trying to skitter backward on the wall away from the flame. When Ferelthin’s spell hits it, the spider’s eight legs all straighten like one of those fainting goats, and the enormous arachnid tips over, toppling off the wall to hit the ground with a too-loud thud I feel in my feet.
“Try ice!” he yells to me.
I cast Aura of Deigith at the spider. Frost blossoms at its cluster of eight eyes, spreading out and down each of its legs.
Sasun takes her moment, stabbing the thing through the eyes just as Ink plants three arrows in quick succession into its head.
It spasms once and dies.
“Well,” Ink says cheerfully. “We have a better idea of how to kill them now.”
You have gained a point in the ability Fancy Feet. Gain points in this ability by using your sense of touch in a slightly unorthodox manner—with your nearly-bare feet. The ancients used to use this ability to listen to the movements of the earth, of animals, and even invading armies. Gain points in this ability by successfully noticing changes in the ground beneath you. As you increase in skill, points will be awarded only for more difficult uses.
I almost stumble when the text pops up as I’m lighting the next torch. I don’t remember adding to the ability points I’ve started, which makes me wonder. But I felt the spider’s approach before it ventured into the light, and I think I’ll recognize it again if it happens.
If anything, it puts me even more on my guard than I already was.
The tunnel has widened, but we haven’t reached anything resembling a chamber yet, and no other tunnels have branched off the side.
This time when I feel the ripple in the ground, I’m ready for it.
“Spider,” I say, hating the word. The ground ripples again. “Ugh. More than one.”
This time I cast Aura of Deigith the second the first spider skitters into view, and Ferelthin hits the second with his petrify spell, whatever that is. It’s a little better when we’re prepared. Or it would be if I didn’t catch the corner of a web cone on my staff and elbow at the tail end of the fight and almost set myself on fire trying to get it off.
I clumsily fling Sudden Blaze at both of the spiders, which finishes them, but my heartbeat is shallow and far too fast, and my breath is not wanting to sink into my lungs where it would be useful. Panic. That’s what this is.
I’m barely aware of Ink crouching by the spiders and gathering something into vials. Venom, maybe. I don’t know, and I don’t care.
The webbing is sticky, clinging. It’s not slimy or gooey like a huge fly trap. It feels like the way a cat’s tongue sticks to a sweater. Whatever makes it work just makes it hug any surface.
Everyone’s staring at me.
“Easy,” Ferelthin says gently. He takes my staff from me and holds it lightly over the nearest torch.
I can…feel him pull on his mana. I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s working. The flames from the torch burn through the webbing without damaging the staff. When he holds out a hand to me, I go to him, and he does the same for my elbow. It makes me understand the old saw that fire is purifying. I feel cleaner.
“Ma taingil,” I say gratefully.
The elven thank you springs so readily to my tongue that it startles my mouth shut. The game’s gone and unnerved me again with the knowledge it packed into my mind somehow.
“Da’atha sa.” Ferelthin meets my eyes.
For a long moment I can’t look away. It’s Ink who draws both our attention then.
“Unless you want to move in, we should get going.”
Moving deeper into the tunnel, I have to fight my own feet to keep them moving. The rhythm of our footsteps in the ground is a comfort, but I start flinching from any variation in it.
The dread that settles over me is heavy.
Cave full of spiders, Ink said. Sure, great plan for an arachnophobe.
I’ve gotten so much better in my daily life, but the spiders I’m going to encounter at home are no bigger than a bottle cap usually. My mouth won’t seem to moisten, and I don’t actually have any water.
I need to distract myself somehow.
“Why on earth would Feld keep stuff here if there are giant spiders everywhere? How would he get in and out alive?” I ask.
Ferelthin looks at me thoughtfully.
Sasun, who has kindly refrained from drawing attention to my obvious unease, glances over her shoulder. “Keeps out most prying eyes.”
“Right, but even if he stealthed in and out, that seems like an awfully big risk for someone of his position to take.” Something isn’t right here. Well. A lot isn’t right. Why do games always have to make pony-sized spiders?
“Indeed,” Ferelthin says. “I think perhaps the Speaker had secrets.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Ink chimes in. “Winkling out secrets is what changelings do best.”
That doesn’t make me feel much better. It is probably also total bullshit.
As if reading my mind, Sasun mutters, “And here I just thought that honor belonged to talking out your ass.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Ink sings, running their fingers down the side of the wall as they walk.
“Did someone just fart?” Sasun asks.
Ink’s peal of good-natured laughter resounds through the tunnel.
The sound is different than we’ve been hearing. Hollower. More echo.
“I think we’re approaching a chamber,” I say, and Ferelthin nods.
Excitement blends with my underlying fear. When I light the next torch, sure enough, the light pool extends far enough to see that the path we’re on curves to the right, the way directly forward ending in a sharp ledge marked by a crude rail.
There’s also the sound of water running.
“Keep your guard up,” the serpentus cautions. She draws her blade again, holding it at the ready as we walk up to the ledge.
The light is changing too, which I’m not certain is a good sign.
Up ahead, the tunnel opens into a wide cavern that extends out and up.
The ceiling reaches high up along the sides of the mountain, and soaring above our heads is the reason for the change in light—it’s open to the sky.
It’s not a huge hole, and it’s partly covered by vegetation and vines that dip into the cave like ribbons far above us, but a trickle of sunlight gets through. Water burbles and splashes off to the left, spurting from a hole in the rock into a small cascade that pools at the cavern’s center.
If that were all, it would be beautiful.
But of course, that’s not all.
Unmissable amongst the few underground trees and bushes are the webs.
More unmissable is the constant, fine tremors of the ground under my feet.
Twenty
“Does anyone else feel that?” I ask, dread pooling in my belly.
The looks they give me are a distinct no.
Except Ferelthin, who frowns as if only just recognizing a background buzz and placing it correctly with the thing making it.
“Do you see that?” Ink points downward from the ledge. Half-hidden behind an outcropping of stone is an unmistakably hand-made structure of stone, roofed with turf and clearly long-established.
Great. The Speaker of Viathan made himself a hobbit-hole for an office in a cave full of spiders.
I am hating this guy a little more every second. I wouldn’t mind the chance to kill him again.
The tremors aren’t stopping. While the cavern is pretty well lit, there are enough crevices in the rock for spiders to hide in, and there is little I hate more than the idea of a horde of arachnids descending on us from above.
Nope. Nope.
Except I don’t have much of a choice. We’re here, and we’ve just tramped through this tunnel to get here, and we can’t leave until we find out what’s in that hut down there.
“For the record, I might never forgive you for this,” I tell Ink. “I really, really hate it.”
“Oh, you’ll forgive me,” Ink insists. “Just wait.”
“If I get eaten by a spider, I’m coming back as a ghost and haunting you until the next rift,” I mutter.
“Deal,” Ink says.
They weren’t supposed to agree.
“You’re not getting eaten by a spider,” Sasun says. “I’ll never understand what’s so scary about them.”
“That’s fine. You don’t have to,” I tell her. “Doesn’t mean it’s any better for me.”
Sasun appears to consider that.
“The sooner we venture down there, the sooner we can leave,” Ferelthin says finally, with a glance at me. “Anyone object to getting this over with?”
The three of us shake our heads.
“I think we’re going to have company,” I say. “Lots of it.”
Walking down the sloped path to the bottom of the cavern is anticlimactic, however. In spite of the trembling I feel in the ground, just irregular enough not to be caused by the waterfall, nothing jumps or skitters out at us as we descend.
Ferelthin is looking more uneasy than everyone else but me.
“What is it?” I ask him.
“Magical residue. Someone has used a lot of power here, over time.” He holds up a hand as if running it through falling water. “If I had to guess, I’d say there was a sustained spell set up that had to be reinvoked every so often. Whatever it is, it’s starting to fray.”
“Magic,” Sasun says. “The elf can see magic.”
“It’s more feeling than anything,” Ferelthin says. “You could learn to do it.”
“Not the point.”
“Speaker Feld wasn’t a mage, though—was he?” I ask, skepticism overriding my nerves for the moment.
“Plenty of rogues use magic without really calling it that. How else do you think stealth works? It’s not like the average non-magic user can just disappear at will,” Ink says helpfully. “We all like to make out that we’re just that sneaky, but come on.”
“That’s—a good point,” I say. “But not what I meant. As the Speaker of Viathan, Feld being a practicing mage would have been frowned upon to say the least. Even though the humans use magic, they’re so strict about how and when it’s allowed that I can’t imagine them letting someone in charge of a city cultivate the art.”
“Perhaps he simply had help,” says Sasun.
The simplest explanation usually is the right now.
The tremors beneath my feet are suddenly quakes.
“Look out!” I yell. “Coming from the right!”
You have gained a point in the ability Fancy Feet.
I dismiss the notification without reading the rest of it, my staff whirling in my hands. I can’t even see what’s coming at us through the bushes yet, but I can feel where it is, and I cast Aura of Deigith at it.
You have gained a point—
“Ugh!” I feel when my spell hits, and Ink looks quickly between me and the direction I cast, loosing an arrow so fast, I can’t for the life of me figure out how they did the trigonometry.
Ferelthin’s spell flashes by me on my left, stunning a spider that seems to have appeared out of nowhere barreling toward us. It stiffens and collapses, and Sasun goes for that one with her sword.
The ground is still shivering under my feet. There’s at least four or five more coming at us. My gaze shoots involuntarily upward, and not a moment too soon.
Several spiders are descending from the ceiling above us, and those ones I wouldn’t feel in my toes.
“Above!”
Arrows fly upward from Ink’s bow, the snap of their bowstring echoing through the cavern. One of the arrows slices through a spider’s silk, and the impact of the creature falling fifty feet onto the ground splats it like an egg, sending spider guts splashing outward from it and shocking through the bedrock under my feet.
But then the ground shudders again. And again. The smaller tremors are still there, but amid them, growing faster, is a pounding rhythm.
Oh, no. Oh hell no.
“Incoming!” I holler at the same time Ferelthin yells, “They’ve got a queen!”
It appears with the fading echo of his last word, the size of an elephant with legs big enough that the four of us stacked on top of each other wouldn’t quite equal the length of one. Its fangs are folded inward, but twitching, shining in the light with a substance I know damn well is pure venom.
I can’t move. It shouldn’t be that fast at its size, but its stride is long enough that it has halved the distance to us from one breath to the next.
The others have downed another trio of the smaller spiders, and even Sasun makes a distressed noise at the sight of the queen. There are more waves of the smaller ones coming at us. I can feel them.
“Take out as many as you can!” I yell it through the cavern, seizing my mana and the chords of the rift above us to cast Aurora’s Beacon.
The light fills the cavern, illuminating the flash-back of what seems like hundreds of eyes surrounding us.
I cast Sudden Blaze on the spiders closest to me, then Starfire at the queen’s front leg, hoping desperately it doesn’t snap her out of the stun.
“They shouldn’t all be attacking like this!” Ink shouts.
“We can argue about why they are later!” Ferelthin is working through the spiders I’ve already injured with another spell I can’t identify.
Ink is going to run out of arrows at this rate. The changeling leaps forward as soon as Ferelthin finishes off the new group of spiders, yanking arrows out of them and firing them again without hesitation.
There’s another small crowd of them behind us, starting to break out of the stun. I whirl, casting Orbit at them to keep them grouped. My mana won’t hold up much longer, and I wish lightning did more than tickle these creatures. Sasun strides forward, sword at the ready, and as I feel the resonant pulse of the queen beginning to move again, Sasun slices through the clustered tangle of flailing legs and shining eyes without a second thought.
“Lithrial,” Ferelthin’s voice is heavy with warning, and I hurry to him.
The queen is hanging back a little, free from the stun but clearly calculating her next move as her probable children die around her.
“Thoughts? Quick thoughts?” I hiss to Ferelthin.
“Legs,” is all he says.
With the last of my mana, I cast Starfire once more on the same leg I hit before. The queen lets loose an ear-curling shriek magnified by the echoes of the chamber so loudly that even Sasun flinches.
But Sasun doesn’t lose much time. With a quick upward jerk of her chin at us, she sprints at the spider, aiming right for the leg both Ferelthin and I are targeting.
Behind us, Ink is moving more like Tinkerbell than Peter Pan, lighting on a piece of ground long enough only to pull arrows free and send them flying again, this time toward the queen’s eyes.
I see her move an instant too late. “Move!”
I dive out of the way just as the queen lifts her spinnerets, sending a massive net of webbing shooting out at all of us.
I’m too slow. It hits me in the stomach, the weight of it startling, enough to push me backward onto the ground.
Legs land on me, and something hot drips onto my neck.
My mana is too low to do anything but a basic attack, creeping back too slowly. My body revolts, moved somewhere beyond terror.
The skin of my throat burns with the spider’s venom, and I can feel the movement of the ground in my whole body as the queen advances. The smaller spider is on me. It’s on me, and I can’t get it off.
Desperately, I hit it with attack after attack, time slipping away from me even as my mana slowly regenerates.
The spider is faltering, but not fast enough. I can’t see what the others are doing or if they’ve been pinned like I am.
I react with pure instinct when my mana tips over sixty. Sudden Blaze pours out of my staff, scorching the webbing that is keeping me glued to the floor with a sickly-sweet odor of charred rancid syrup.
The spider on me shrieks and dies, and I scramble to my feet, feeling the venom dripping down my throat under my armor and onto my chest. It leaves a burning trail of pain.
My mana is barely enough, but I cast Ela’s Touch on myself, thankful for the upgrade that lessened its casting cost.
Compared to before, the effect of my healing spell makes it feel like my mana is pouring back into me instead of trickling.
The spider I just killed is still burning, and Ink is pinned by webbing ten feet away, stabbing their last remaining arrow repeatedly into the face of a dying spider.
I do what I did with the torch in the tunnel, turning the corpse of my fallen foe into a flamethrower to burn away the threads holding Ink down.
Ferelthin and Sasun are battling the queen, and Sasun bellows a challenge through the cavern when the queen looks to the elf mage instead of her. The ground shivers with more of the smaller spiders responding to the taunt.
“Ink!” I call out.
“I’m up, I’m up!” The changeling flings their bow over their shoulder, producing a pair of daggers from their knee-high boots.
