Curse of the Spider King, page 20
part #1 of Berinfell Prophesies Series
But they could do no more.
The bulk of the invading force had almost immediately withdrawn back south, and from there would no doubt march west to the Great Hall. They had left behind some four hundred Gwar. There were no more tricks, no more cards to play, and slowly, the outnumbered Elves were losing by attrition. It chafed Travin to the core to think of fleeing from battle. But Grimwarden himself had urged Travin to escape any way possible once the enemy had discovered the ruse.
Travin could not hesitate. The Gwar were advancing, threatening to flank them and, Travin guessed, tighten around them like a noose. . . . Seek the trees and by the hidden ways, at last enter Nightwish Cavern. Whatever you accomplish, do not pursue the enemy back here.
Travin knew the hidden ways, but few of his soldiers did. They’d need a rally point, somewhere in the deep forest. Travin could think of just one place the enemy would not know. “Hearken to me!” Travin yelled. “Make for the Moonlit Crown! All of Berinfell’s faithful, pass the word: ‘Make for Moonlit Crown!’”
He roared until he was hoarse, hoping his soldiers would hear him over the chaotic battle. Dodging Gwar hammers and axes at every turn, he reached every Elf he could find and sounded the retreat. As Travin fled the battle, exhaustion and emotion overtook him. His beloved nation of Elves was on the brink of extinction.
Guardmaster Grimwarden stood with his back to the broken-out stained glass windows and watched the train of Elves moving across the floor of the Great Hall. Clearly Travin and Vendar had done their job. Five thousand Elves had escaped to the underground, but . . . he shook his head. We need more time.
A breeze from the quiet forest exaggerated the chill Grimwarden felt sliding along his spine as he watched a young scout named Fydelf entering the chamber. Fydelf looked from face to face before spotting Grimwarden. The scout ran to his commander.
“They are coming,” Fydelf said.
“How far out?”
“Five miles, no more,” Fydelf replied. “They move as if the Spider King himself drives them here.”
Their feet are swift to shed blood, thought Grimwarden, words from the holy scroll kindling with new meaning. “We must hold them off still,” he said.
“But how, sir?” Fydelf asked. “They bring many Warspiders. They will come through the windows once more. We have no barrier to hold them out, no weapon to deter them, no army to withstand them.”
No barrier . . . no weapon . . . no army . . .
Key variables ricocheted aimlessly in Grimwarden’s mind before at last coming together. He knew he had to act immediately.
“Stay here,” he ordered Fydelf. “Do what you can to hurry our people into the tunnel.”
“Wait, where are you going, Guardmaster?”
“To pick a fight with an irritating pack of arachnids.”
Grimwarden ran for the main entrance to the Great Hall. He called on any flet soldier or able-bodied Elf he found along the way. He assembled the group at the mouth of a side passage near the main entrance.
“You,” he spoke to three Elves, “bring torches. We’re going to need them on the roof directly above us. And I want the five of you—no, make that the seven of you to the refractory. I want every jar of oil you can find. Every scrap of lard. Meet us above in twenty minutes. No more, or all is lost. Do you understand?”
Tentative nods from the soldiers. Fearful stares from the townsfolk.
“Now GO!!”
The ten Elves scattered to their tasks, and Grimwarden turned to the others. “Follow me,” he said, and he continued to speak as he led them back into the Great Hall. “The rest of you I chose because you look more or less strong. I just hope you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.”
“Master Grimwarden?” one of the Elves inquired with a raised eyebrow.
The Guardmaster smiled mirthlessly. “The only thing spiders hate worse than fire is water. Unfortunately, I can’t make it rain. But I have plenty to burn.”
The Spider King’s army swarmed the streets, the walls, and the fortresses of western Berinfell like cinder ants on the carcass of a dead beast. Tyrith, the Drefid high commander, made certain that the Elves’ so-called Great Hall was surrounded. And Tyrith himself led the bulk of his Gwar battalions onto the building’s vast roof. There they came to an abrupt halt.
“I don’t like this,” Tyrith said, his voice the hiss of escaping steam. The large sockets of his eyes became mere slits as he tried to identify the strange mounds piled up along the far edge of the roof. It was impossible to tell. A half-dozen torches forty yards away ruined his night vision for anything on the other half of the roof. Unwilling to investigate himself, Tyrith called on three of his Gwar soldiers. “Mundruk, Jeer, Raspik, find out what that is.”
“Yes, sir!” The three Gwar loosed their axes, spikes, and hammers, then lumbered forward.
Forty paces later, they stopped abruptly. “There is a smell,” Raspik called back over his shoulder.
“What sort of smell?” demanded Tyrith.
“A horrid smell,” said Raspik.
“Worse than the sewage river in Vesper Crag!” cried Mundruk.
“Aye,” said Jeer. “But there’s somethin’ else . . . it burns my eyes.”
There was a momentary pause. Then the three Gwar moved past the torch stands.
“By the Spider King’s beard!” Mundruk exclaimed.
“There are bodies, sir,” Raspik said over his shoulder. “Hundreds of our countrymen.”
Tyrith scraped the bony blades of his hands together, and like the greased gears of some terrible machine the wheels of his mind churned. “Follow me,” he growled to the rest of his troops. Some casting furtive glances at the soldiers on either side of them, others staring anxiously back over their shoulders, some five hundred warriors traversed the roof. The smell hit them as they neared the torches. A grim scene waited just beyond.
“Look at them!” growled Raspik. “They’ve stacked them like kindling!”
“It would seem the Elves wish to send us a message. Did they think they would scare us off?” Tyrith paused. “I think not. The last vestige of the Elves of Berinfell have taken refuge in the Great Hall below.” He turned back to the masses behind him. “Bring the Warspiders forward! We’ll need rappelling webs over the roof ’s edge. Fan out!”
Tarax’s face contorted. “We’re not going to . . . to trample the dead, are we?”
“Come now, Tarax,” he replied. “They won’t feel a thing.”
The Warspiders clambered over the piles. The Gwar soldiers advanced as well, wincing at every squish. The odor became so strong that many became sick, mingling that intense, odd, stinging vapor with the other smells.
One by one, the spiders turned, so that their heavy abdomens hung over the walls, their thick strands of web soon dangling down. Gwar soldiers reluctantly trod over their fallen comrades and began to sling themselves over the edge of the roof.
Tyrith was amazed by the ingenuity of their opponents. The Elves had allowed their escaping citizens to be seen heading north and led the Gwar far away from their real sanctuary. A brilliant diversion. And the Elves had guessed the Gwar’s next move as well, leaving a grim reminder of the toll this invasion had taken on the Gwar nation.
Tyrith looked at the bodies. He’d known some of them from years of training in the catacombs beneath Vesper Crag.
Wait!
Tyrith descended from his spider and drew nearer to the dead on the rooftop. At first, he’d thought the bodies were glistening with blood—there was plenty of that. But there was something else entirely, a yellow liquid dotted with small globs of white.
Suddenly, a strange wet snap!
Tyrith looked up to see several lines of thin rope jerk up from the bodies and then fall back. The ropes disappeared over the edge of the roof like the web rappelling lines. But at first, he couldn’t see where the ropes ended. Once more the rope snapped up, and this time it pulled taut. Tyrith realized all at once what was happening. The other ends of the ropes were attached to the torch stands.
“Stop! STOP!! STOP!!!” he screamed. But the Gwar rappelling down the wall did not understand. They continued their descent, yanking on whatever trip wire the Elves had manufactured. The torch stands wobbled and slid closer to the piles of bodies.
Tyrith leaped back up to his Warspider just in time to see one of the torch stands jerk forward and fall.
FOOM!!
The piles of oil-soaked bodies burst into a raging inferno. Fuel canisters hidden beneath the top layer of Gwar exploded with thunderous fury.
BOOM!!
Tyrith was flung headlong from the saddle away from the fires but crashed into a pillar of stone and lay still at its base. The Warspiders on the roof flared up like dead wood. Gwar soldiers who had been waiting to rappel were engulfed in flames, or ran frantically about on the rooftop until the heat overcame them.
“There goes a Gwar,” said Fydelf as the first bulky form hurtled past the broken-out windows.
“And another,” replied Grimwarden. “They like to dish out the fire, but they themselves cannot bear it.”
Then a flaming Warspider cartwheeled past the window. Grimwarden and Fydelf watched in silence for a few moments. They heard sheer chaos above. The blaze had done its work.
“We’re almost clear,” Fydelf said, looking to the last Elves about to enter the tunnel.
“Almost,” Grimwarden replied, but his face shared none of Fydelf ’s enthusiasm. The screaming faded as the flame’s victims expired, and soon sounds from the rooftop ceased altogether.
“Retreating?” Fydelf proposed.
“Would you?” Grimwarden eyed him. Fydelf shook his head. “They’re coming, just not that way. We have precious few moments left.”
Grimwarden and Fydelf helped Berinfell’s very last soul, one of their most elderly, into the passageway, his first steps to Allyra’s underworld.
The old Elf turned to the soldiers and said, “I will miss the sun.”
Fydelf gave him a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, and then led him into the depths. Grimwarden lingered a moment more. His face was ashen gray and streaked with blood. He wore a blank expression. The Guardmaster wondered if Travin and Vendar were still alive. He uttered a silent prayer that they were, but the pang in his gut told him the odds were low. I ordered them to their deaths, he thought. How many good Elves have died at my word?
He shook his head.
It was foolishness to think of such things. He commanded Berinfell’s entire military. An overwhelming foe had come upon the city without warning, and many good Elves died in its defense. So many. A number Grimwarden would not contemplate for fear that it would render him immobile.
Shrieks and growls snapped Grimwarden back to the moment. Shadows moved in the hallway beyond the main entrance.
Lots of shadows.
Grimwarden stepped into the passageway and sprinted to the first turn. He drew a large master key from his belt and turned it in a panel recessed into the stone. The small door opened with an audible creak. Within was a handle. Grimwarden grabbed it and turned. He heard a faint click.
It was armed.
He took one last look up the passage. He could just make out the ceiling of the Great Hall. He thought it might be his mind playing tricks, but for just a moment, he saw a flicker of sunlight. But then he heard growls and the scrabble of many iron-shod feet.
I too will miss the sun, he thought.
He pulled the lever and ran for his life.
26
Ringing of the Bells
“WHAT DO yu suppose the narrator meant by ‘a multitude of bottled-up memories’?” Miss Finney asked excitedly after finishing a paragraph in the class’s latest text. It was a B-schedule day, which meant she taught reading in the afternoon instead of her normal post at the helm of the school’s library.
Lochgilphead Central School’s pupils were generally motivated and eager to please . . . especially in Miss Finney’s class. A number of hands shot into the air, each student keen to prove his or her reading comprehension prowess.
“Ellie Faust?” Miss Finney pointed.
“Is she talking ’bout past experiences . . . things she hasn’ a told anybody?”
“Good, Ellie.”
“And,” Ellie went on, “she tried to tell someone, but whoever it was wouldna’ listen. Maybe even humiliated her.”
“And thus the tension of the scene,” agreed Miss Finney. “Class, yu’ve come a long way in text analysis. Let’s see if we can go even deeper. Tell me more about the tension.”
As reading was one of his favorite classes, this would have been interesting to Jimmy, had it not been for the dramatic events of the past twenty-four hours, or for the weighty book that sat in the backpack under his seat. He could almost hear it calling his name. That and he was desperate to talk with Miss Finney in private. So consumed was he with his thoughts that he never did hear the question his reading teacher posed to him.
“Jimmy?” The sound of his name snapped him out of his daydream.
“Aye?”
“The tension?”
“I’m tense?”
The class giggled.
Mrs. Finney frowned. “Nay, Jimmy, the tension between our main characters.”
“Right. I—”
The bell cut him off, and not too soon for Jimmy.
“Remember, class,” Miss Finney yelled over the ringing, “chapters seventeen and eighteen for homework! We’re covering them on Friday!”
Everyone filed out of the room except Jimmy. He sat staring at his desk, eager to talk with Miss Finney, but again not sure how to breach the subject.
She walked over to him and sat down in an adjacent desk. “Crazy day?”
“Yu could say that, Miss Finney.”
“I heard the boys talking about gym. Said yu were a wonder.”
Jimmy looked down, face slightly red. “I wouldna’ go that far.”
“Said yu faked out MacBain and scored a basket or two.”
“I got lucky.”
“Then yu gave him a bit of a hand into the condiments table at lunch.”
“It’s not like I have any special power or anything!”
Miss Finney’s face went blank.
Neither of them spoke.
The whisper of a smile formed in Miss Finney’s lips. A very peculiar smile.
“Miss Finney? What are yu smiling at?”
The bell rang, signaling the start of sixth period.
“I suggest yu make time after yur normal studies to study something else when yu get home.” Jimmy saw her make a subtle gesture to the book she had given him in the library.
“What do yu know that I don’t, Miss Finney?”
“Wait and see, Master Jimmy.” She stood up and walked away from him toward the front of the classroom. “Wait and see.”
The rain hadn’t stopped all day, so when Jimmy slipped in the front door of his house, the first thing he did was bolt for his room for a fresh change of clothes. Fortunately no one saw him; if they had, he wasn’t sure they wanted to talk to him anyway. It had become all too clear that he had no real family.
He pulled on a dry sweater and opted for his pajama pants. He didn’t plan on leaving his room for a long time. Sure, he’d miss dinner. But, at this point, he’d rather read than eat.
Jimmy unzipped his drenched backpack and dumped his books onto the floor. He scolded himself as he noticed each volume was also wet, the pages warped, covers blotted. And the book he was most interested in sat amongst the rest. Surely its handwritten pages were now utterly ruined. Jimmy reached for the large, dark-green tome, but to his surprise it felt dry. But the pages will be soaked. He cradled the book, admired its gilded title once more, and then carefully opened it up.
What’s this then? He glanced back at the pile of study books on his bedroom floor, each clearly saturated from the rain. “Not a drop,” Jimmy whispered. He flipped forward a few more pages, each of them just as he had seen them before, perfectly clear and devoid of blemish.
I don’t understand.
He stood slowly and walked to his bed, eyes fixed on the writing within. He flicked off the room light and turned on his reading lamp before slipping under the covers. He dwelt once more on the intricate drawing, the vast bridge ascending across to a tower, and marveled at the detail. Almost photographic quality. How can anyone draw like that? Jimmy wondered. Only this time Jimmy thought the drawing had changed slightly—a different point of view perhaps, or the trees had changed position, or the clouds had moved. Something was different—something he couldn’t put his finger on. Granted, his first glance at the mysterious book had been rushed.
He turned a few more pages until he spotted 9680 Founding of Allyra. “If this be typeset, I’m an aardvark,” Jimmy said to his empty room. Someone had handwritten this text. But who? All the other books he had ever read were merely mass-produced, printed copies. This was one of a kind. And it looked old, smelled old, felt old. Ancient was a better word. For all that, Jimmy thought it best to be much more careful with it. With painstaking caution, he turned every page by pinching the absolute corner of the page. He made sure he never once touched the text.
Jimmy soon forgot about the hour, forgot about his hunger, and never did hear Mrs. Gresham summoning him for dinner. Mr. Gresham had come up and listened at Jimmy’s door, but hearing nothing, assumed the boy was asleep.
Turning pages long after midnight, Jimmy found himself completely consumed with an ancient story of Elves and Gwar, epic battles, and evil plots. He had the oddest sensation while he read . . . a bizarre mixture of feeling as if he’d read it all before and a kind of creeping dread. It was so easy to see himself in this story. Somehow. But that’s crazy!
And then he heard Miss Finney’s voice in his head again. “Crazy day?” If only she knew just how crazy it was becoming . . . or maybe she did.
After all, it was she who gave him this book. Surely she must have read it, or else why recommend it? Better still, it was clearly not one of the library’s books: no markings of Lochgilphead anywhere. So it is her own. Wonder if she, wrote it?
