The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (50 page)

“Save her,” Kavio said. “I’ll play with the spider.”

He ran in one direction and Dindi in the other. He waved at Zithra-Lume.

“Hey you big pile of pus!” he shouted. “Why don’t you come taste some of your own poison!”

Dindi climbed the webs as best she could. She had to slice and cut her way as much as climb, because no strand she brushed against wanted to let her go. Sweat drenched her by the time she reached Vessia. Dindi sliced the cocoon open and ripped the goo away. Vessia, though she had not been struck by the deadly venom, was unconscious. Her hair and clothes slicked against her skin, which was sickly pale.

Dindi stared up through the gloom. All she could see of the sky was a crack of pallid gray, crisscrossed by webs, and dominated by the huge form of Zithra-Lume. How was she to climb past the Spider Queen, through all those webs or else up sheer rock, to take Vessia to safety?

Fresh air brushed her. A Raptor winged into the chasm and perched on a slight outcrop in the rock rather than settle on any of the webs. Dindi recognized Hawk…and on his back was Finnadro.

“Dindi! Is that really you?” Finnadro asked, amazed.

“Yes, and this is the White Lady,” Dindi said. “Can you carry her to safety?”

Finnadro answered by leaping down to her side. He helped Dindi lift Vessia to Hawk’s back.

Hawk flew out of the chasm with the trio on his back. Dindi and Finnadro supported Vessia between them. Dindi was surprised that Zithra-Lume did not try to stop them, until she searched for Kavio and saw why.

Zithra-Lume had captured him and was wrapping him in silk.

It was like being pinched between two stone blades, if stone blades came in the size of aurochsen, and were edged with prongs, claws, and jagged teeth. The spider was relentless in her efforts to bind him in silk, but there she failed. He wasn’t as weak as her other human victims and he didn’t faint from the undead stink of her—bad as it was—as fae did. He slashed the silk strands almost as soon as she could loop them around him. She couldn’t cocoon him, and he couldn’t wrench himself free of her claws, so they were at an impasse. The only problem was he knew he’d tire before she did.

He needed to break the standoff.

She held him in two extremities and used two others to reach under her body and draw the silk from her spinnerets in her posterior. The next time her third leg reached around him, Kavio flipped himself upward on the rope of silk and grabbed the leg itself. Zithra-Lume had her leg halfway back to her spinneret before she realized what he had done. She tried to rub him off with her other legs, but he was already climbing.

The spider’s exoskeleton was covered with fuzz that looked like hair from a distance, but up close Kavio found it was not soft, like mammalian fur. The hairs were chitinous and barbed. The thorny material abraded his palms, but he scrambled up the hooks as if they were rungs in a ladder.

The leg was segmented, and the joints were the hardest to breach. In her rage and attempts to dislodge him, Zithra-Lume climbed vertically up the rock face. This helped him more than hindered him. He waited for the spider to bend its legs, and leaped from one segment to the next. Despite the spider’s attempts to shake or scrape him off, Kavio kept climbing until he reached the spot where the leg met the abdomen. The connection was narrow compared to the rest of the leg.

Kavio stabbed his spear deep into the joint and pried the blade under the exoskeleton, to the soft tissue beneath. Once he opened a hole, he sawed with his dagger.

He hoped for no more than to cause the creature pain, but his slashings met with unexpected success. The entire leg broke away and tumbled into the abyss. Kavio almost fell with it.

For a terrifying moment, he hung onto the abdomen by just his hands, while the whole creature shook like a leaf in a thunderstorm. The keening sound of pain it emitted was so high-pitched it hurt his ears. He pulled himself up hand over hand, reaching for the hook hairs, and clambered onto the spider’s bulging back.

He stood on the sternum. The legs all connected to this, and Kavio debated trying to saw off more of them. Seven-leggedness did not impede Zithra-Lume’s mobility noticeably. How many legs would he have to cut to destroy her?

When he saw that the lost leg was already starting to regrow, he abandoned that plan and searched for another way to inflict injury.

Two black mountains of spider-flesh extended from the sternum. Toward the back was the larger, the abdomen, with the spinnerets. Toward the front was a dome, the head, from which the fangs and feelers projected. That seemed to offer more promising targets.

The sternum, shaped like a shiny dark hill, was an easy jog. He surmounted the bulge, and slid down the far side, to reach the next black, shellac mound—the spider’s head.

Eight glittering spheres were arranged in two parallel lines of four. Two spheres were slightly bulkier than the others. It took Kavio a moment to realize these orbs were Zithra-Lume’s eyes.

Eyes! Perfect.

He speared one of the larger ones. The orb was surprisingly tough, and rebounded his first attack. Meanwhile, the whole body rocked, and the spider tried to reach on top of its head, but its legs did not bend that way, and its feelers did not reach.

Kavio backed up and this time ran forward, flipped and landed with his full weight on the spear, right in the center of the orb. Contact made a disgusting but satisfying squelching sound. Goo spurted in a geyser. He repeated the process until every eye was burst.

The spider shook itself so violently that Kavio was thrown off. Spear still clutched tight in his hands, he hurdled through the air and landed on a web bridge. He ducked under just in time to avoid a jab by the spider’s clawed legs. He squeezed himself into a crevice in the rock.

Destroying her eyes had not noticeably slowed Zithra-Lume any more than the loss of a single leg. All he had done was infuriate her. She now bore all her menace on the task of destroying him. She scrabbled at the crevice, trying to scrape him out, but the space was too small. Unfortunately, it was also too small for him to retreat any further. The spider’s spiky-tipped leg jabbed him so hard it drew blood. He cried out, as much in rage as in pain, and jabbed back with his spear the next time the prong struck.

The tip of her leg wrapped the spear in silk and yanked it out of his hands. He cursed. Too soon, her leg returned, oozing more silk, and this time she wrapped it around his leg. He braced himself against the pull. All he had left to cut the threads was his dagger.

He was beginning to feel dizzy. He wasn’t as immune to the fetid stench as he had supposed. He cursed Zithra-Lume, and himself for crawling into his own tomb. He was going to faint, as the White Lady had, and then nothing would prevent Zithra-Lume from dragging him out, injecting him with her venom and slurping his innards while he was still alive to enjoy every last, agonizing moment.

They flew Vessia to the far eastern slope, where Healers from the Maze Zavaedies army had set up a place for the wounded. To Dindi’s surprise, even the fae were helping heal the human wounded—something fae almost never deigned to do. Others who had been rescued from the path of the rampaging spiders were there too: freed captives from the cages; innocent Orange Canyon tribesfolk; Green Woods warriors; and even Orange Canyon warriors, including the Raptors, who were flying everyone they could to this side.

A snowy white albatross, of a size with the Raptors, yet odd in their company, landed near the Healers. Svego and Gwenika jumped down from its back, carrying an injured woman. Dindi realized the albatross must be Gremo.

Behind her, Vessia moaned. Dindi knelt by her side, and Finnadro knelt on the other. Hawk stood behind him, waiting.

“She lives,” Finnadro breathed in relief. “Hawk and I must get back to the fight. Such as it is.”

Vessia tapped his green and brown tunic.

“No, stay a moment. The Vaedi will need assistance. Since you have both somehow already discovered who she is, it falls to you…”

“I suspected, but…then it’s true…?” Hawk glanced at Dindi, then at Finnadro, who nodded confirmation.

The Aelfae woman looked pale and weak, but her eyes were clear.

“I see you for who you are now,” Vessia said softly to Dindi. “Why did you not tell me before?”

“I did.”

“You did not claim your title.”

Dindi blushed under Vessia’s steady gaze.

“I haven’t earned it yet. I haven’t even kept my promise to help the Aelfae. If I’m really meant to be Vaedi, why couldn’t I prevent all this?”

Vessia looked grave. “I must ask myself the same question. But whether out of humility or caution, you were wise not to reveal your full powers, little hero. Xerpen is still alive, and he is no friend of yours. Mrigana is Lady Death, and she too, seeks the Vaedi.”

“I know,” Dindi said. Which reminded her of Umbral—Kavio—still fighting Zithra-Lume. “Pardon me, but I have a spider to squish.”

Vessia clutched her hand. “Only Death’s Curse can destroy it, and even then, it is only vulnerable if the weapon touches the red star on its underbelly.”

“My Lady,” protested Finnadro. “Even if Dindi is the Vaedi, no matter her potential, how can one young girl do what you ask?”

Dindi stood up. “I can do it, Finnadro. But Vessia is right, I will need help from you and Hawk.” She thought bitterly of Xerpen’s theft. “I have no wings of my own.”

Tell no one else who you really are,
Vessia’s voice whispered in her mind.

Finnadro insisted on arming her with as many spears and daggers as she could carry. She didn’t tell him her best weapon would be a doll. The cold, sharp stones comforted her.

He rode on Hawk’s back behind her. They wheeled over the chasm, which was straddled by the ugly shadow of Zithra-Lume.

“How can we help you, Dindi?” Finnadro asked.

“Can you ask Hawk to fly
under
the spider?”

At once, Hawk dipped and banked, and on the return curve, dove down straight at Zithra-Lume.

The Spider Queen was preoccupied with trying to pry something out of a crevice in the rock, but when the hawk flew at her, she emitted a painful, high-pitched shriek that made Dindi dizzy. Even in Raptor form, Hawk was much smaller than the spider, but some atavistic fear of birds must have triggered her rage, for Zithra-Lume reared on her back legs, pawed the air with her forelegs, and gnashed with her fangs. There are few things as ugly as the face of a spider, except the face of a spider the size of a mountain. And they dove right for it.

Hawk never slowed his dive, but he careened this way and that to evade Zithra-Lume’s arms. Dindi was sure the spider would have caught them, except that purple ichor streaked the ruins of what had once been her eyes. Someone had blinded her! She could still sense Hawk’s motion with her feelers, but she couldn’t pinpoint the Raptor. Her debility gave Hawk the edge he needed. He swept so close to her underside that Dindi could see the blood-red star clearly, like the spatter from a bashed head against volcanic rock.

The red filled her field of vision, and she leaped sideways off the bird, and plunged her spear into the heart of the star. Hawk and Finnadro kept flying without her, sweeping under the spider, deep into the canyon and up again, while Dindi dangled from the spear by one hand. With the other, she lifted the corncob doll, Cursed Zithra-Lume, and stabbed the cob deep into the puckered flesh the spear had exposed.

Dark lightning cackled out from the blister. A paroxysm shuddered through the monster, culminating in a thunderous explosion. An expanding ring of black dust detonated parallel to the cliff, filling the whole crater with light brighter than a thousand suns. Dindi (along with any who must have seen it) was blinded for a gasp-and-a-half of breath, before daylight replaced the stars dancing before her eyes. The ring of dust rippled outward, reaching to the uttermost edges of the horizon, before it dissipated in a rain of ash.

Finnadro and Hawk were temporarily blinded by the light, and then by the dark rain of ash, so if they had not been looking for Dindi, they would have missed her. She was falling into the chasm. There were no more spider webs to break her plummet, since those too had turned to dust, so only the chasm’s great depth gave Hawk the time he needed to spot her and sweep under her.

Finnadro caught her and grinned at her surprise. Hawk angled back up.

“Wait!” she cried. “There! That man, do you see him?”

A man, completely covered in dust, was trying to climb out of the crevice in the wall. Hawk flew close enough that the man was able to leap onto his back, behind Finnadro.

“Hawk, please land a little apart from anyone else,” Dindi asked.

Hawk obliged. He did choose the eastern slope, since it was less damaged by battle than the other side, but he landed behind the War Chief’s compound.

Dindi, Finnadro, and the other man dismounted, and Hawk changed form. The man, covered in dust, walked to a cistern in the courtyard in the compound to wash.

Dindi watched him with an unfathomable mixture of tenderness and fear. Then she turned to them.

“It is good to have a moment to ourselves,” she said, as if she had decided something. “There is something I must ask.”