Venom and Song (60 page)

The new Spider King had six eyes, two of them large, deep set, and slanted. The other four were smaller and spread back on his scalp. But they were all red, red as if the normal pigmentation of Gwar eyes had been stoked to a radiant flame by utter malice. Where Navira had had a nest of whiplike strands in place of hair, the Spider King had just three. They curled back over his bare skull, one from each corner of his brow, and the third bisecting his forehead from the bridge of his flat nose.

“Kind of you . . . to wait for me,” he said. His voice was deeper and had an odd hiss, and massive fangs jutted from the corners of his misshapen mouth.

“Now for it, lads!” The surprising command came from Jimmy, and he charged down the mountain toward the enemy.

“Everyone, go, now!” Tommy yelled. “All as one! Endurance and Victory!”

Kiri Lee leaped into the air and drew her rychesword. Johnny ran beneath her, pulled fire into his palms, and began to run to his right. His fireballs hit the Spider King across his entire body, and Johnny walked them up, launching four directly at his fanged face. Autumn's axes sang as she darted in and out of the creature's legs. Kat circled around below him to the left, and Tommy stayed at a distance, waiting to take his shot.

Johnny's fire was only an irritant, a blinding cover, but it did no harm. The Spider King swiped with a club hand, missing Johnny but spraying him with volcanic rock. Johnny cut off his flame and covered his head, and that gave the Spider King an opportunity to charge. Johnny wouldn't get up in time. Tommy nocked and fired one arrow at the creature's eye, then another. But the Spider King clubbed them away and kept climbing toward Johnny.

Kiri Lee ran across the air and dropped down toward the monster's head, but he perceived the attack and leaped. His sudden upward thrust caught Kiri Lee off guard. The hump on his back crashed into her like a battering ram from below. Kiri Lee was knocked head over heels fifty yards down slope, but she managed to right herself and slow her descent.

The Spider King leaped again, this time for distance. Autumn sped upslope to the place she thought he would land and, remembering a scene from a favorite movie, tried to position herself so that when he landed, he would impale himself on her sword. But as he plummeted toward her, he drew his six legs to a point aiming right for Autumn. If she didn't move, she'd be killed.

“Run downslope, Autumn!”
came Kat's thoughts. Autumn raced out just in time.

“I hear your thoughts,” said the Spider King as he landed. “You have no hope.”

“You can't fight us all at once!” Tommy yelled as he fired a flurry of arrows.

“Yes,” said the Spider King, capturing the arrows with his claws. “Yes . . . I can.”

A streak of lightning blasted the rock just fifty yards below where Tommy stood. He gazed down in dismay as he saw a myriad of warriors charging up the mountain far below. Using his telescopic vision, he saw that Gwar, Drefids, and Warspider were racing to the Spider King's aid. But the Elves, and even some Gnomes, were climbing after them, hewing at their heels from behind. Tommy couldn't stare for long, and a warning from Jimmy saved his life. He dove and rolled ten yards before coming to a rough stop in a mixture of ash and broken stone. The Spider King snarled and withdrew the tip of one of his segmented legs from the puncture mark where Tommy had been just a moment before.

Johnny laid down a wall of flame, hiding Tommy from the Spider King's view. Jimmy raced behind it and helped Tommy to his feet. They ran for cover, finding a cleft in the rock where they could hide on the southern side of the peak.

“This is ridiculous,” said Jimmy, panting. “We trained to fight Warspiders and Gwar, not some mutant mixture a' both!”

“Don't give up,” Tommy implored. “The prophecy said we'd have power unmatched and victory assured. He's got to have a weakness.”

“If he does, I'm not seein' it.” Jimmy wiped the back of his neck. His hand came back with bits of black rock and a smearing of gray ash and blood. “Wait!” Jimmy straightened his posture. “When he killed Navira—”

Tommy finished the thought, “He got her by the neck.”

“
Right
,” said Jimmy. “
Bah!
If only Jett were still here. He could leap up on the beast's back and snap his neck.”

“We don't have that brute strength anymore,” said Tommy. “But maybe we can still cut him there. Come on!”

“Where's, what's . . . huh?”

“Just stay with me, warn me every time I'm about to get clobbered!” Tommy ran out and raced toward Kat.

“Aye,” said Jimmy, chasing after him. “I'll try.”

While the Spider King was busy with Kiri Lee's air attacks and Autumn's hacking away at his legs, Tommy had given Kat his plan and grabbed Johnny to circle back twenty yards below the Spider King. Now it was their job to utterly distract the beast. Maybe, just maybe, he would be so engaged in the brazen frontal assault that he wouldn't be able to focus on reading thoughts. If Kat could tell Autumn and Kiri Lee what to do without the Spider King learning, they'd have their best chance, perhaps their only chance, to defeat him.

Better hurry,
Tommy thought, glancing down the mountain. The enemy forces were still climbing, fighting the Elves all the way.

“Jimmy, you got our backs?” Tommy yelled.

“AYE!”

Tommy squinted. Waited. Then, “Now, Johnny!”

Johnny split off to the right and opened up the floodgates on his flame. He put his wrists together and sent a dense stream of fire directly into the Spider King's face. The Spider King was not burned, of course, but it did cause him to maneuver. He ducked and bobbed, sliding left and then right, getting dangerously close to Johnny.

Tommy had just a handful of arrows left . . . seven at most. It was time to spend them. He nocked the first and aimed. This was a far cry from the Thurgood Marshall Middle School gym on Falcon Day. And he wasn't shooting at straw-filled targets with a few hundred students looking on.

No, Tommy was lining up to shoot a dangerous, darting, constantly moving target. He glanced down the mountain: the warriors—both enemy and ally—had arrived. And inexplicably only a few of them were still fighting. They stared at the combat above them, the Spider King and the Elven Lords of Berinfell. It was the Battle of Generations, and would be heralded as such for generations to come . . . if any of them survived to recount it. It suddenly seemed that the weight of history pressed down on Tommy. Seven arrows. He'd need to make every shot count.

Tommy fired the first arrow through the fire directly at the spot where the creature's left eye should be. But the Spider King smacked it away. Another and another Tommy fired, each from a different angle as he changed positions. He loosed all his arrows but one, and still the Spider King blocked.

A good thing,
Tommy thought,
. . . means his thoughts are on the inbound arrows, not behind him
.

At that split second there came a freezing, sudden fear. The Spider King hesitated just a moment. Tommy knew what he'd done. He'd just given up the plan in his thoughts. But as the Spider King started to make a move, Tommy fired his last arrow. It flew straight through Johnny's stream of fire and—

“No!” Tommy cried out.

The Spider King had caught the arrow in his claw. But when Tommy looked closer, he saw that the claw held only the back half of his arrow. The creature had reached up a moment too late and clipped the arrow in two. The other half was buried in the Spider King's right eye.

Greenish liquid oozed from the wound, but the Spider King did not seem the least bit troubled by the arrow in his eye. He reached up with his claw and plucked it out without uttering so much as a growl of pain. At that moment, from above and behind the Spider King, Kiri Lee climbed the air—and she was carrying Autumn. In a flash, she dropped Autumn onto the Spider King's humped back. Using her supernatural speed, Autumn used both axes and hacked away at the Spider King's neck. Tommy couldn't see her strokes—they were a blur. She'd have felled a redwood in three seconds with such a flurry. But . . .

There wasn't any blood.

The Spider King shrugged his massive shoulders, propelling Autumn into the air. At the same time, the Spider King clubbed Kiri Lee, not a full-on blow, but enough to send her spinning.

Johnny awkwardly fired himself in the air to grab Autumn. She smacked into him, and as much as he tried to stabilize their fall, they hit the ground, sending up a plume of fresh ash, and rolled toward the surging mass of warriors just below.

Tommy dropped his bow. There were no more arrows. He shook his head in disbelief.
We're supposed to be the saviors of Berinfell . . . of Allyra—foretold by the prophets, trained by the elite, branded as heroes before we'd ever swung a sword
. But it was more than that. The Seven had held powers . . . unimaginable powers! They'd found the Keystone and now possessed the Rainsong. If anything, their powers should be amplified, but they'd tried and now all their powers seemed useless against the Spider King.

Covered in blood and ash, Johnny and Autumn charged back up the mountain. The Spider King turned to their advance and leaned forward. Tommy watched in sick fascination as little white strands appeared around the strange sockets in the creature's humped shoulders. More and more collected there as if a throng of ghosts were trying to escape. The Spider King grunted, and the tiny threads formed into a milky white stream that sprayed out toward Johnny and Autumn. It hit them hard and knocked them backward. But they didn't roll. This liquid webbing adhered them to the mountain. They were stuck fast.

“Help!” Autumn cried out. “Cut us out!”

“It's spreading, going to suffocate u—uh—glguuh—help—h—!”

The Spider King reared up on his hind legs and roared. The Drefids and Gwar on the slope below cheered with shrieks and grunts.

When Tommy and Jimmy got to the place where their friends had been stuck in the web, they found Kat already there. She'd managed to cut the spreading white muck away from their faces. With Tommy and Jimmy's help, they set Johnny and Autumn free.

But what did it matter?
Tommy thought as he looked up at the approaching Spider King. They were all sick to their stomachs. They'd taken their best shot. They had nothing left. And death was inevitable.

“What do you know of power?” asked the Spider King. “You are children born of a weak race, raised in an even weaker society.”

Thunder rumbled. It seemed to be right on top of the mountain.

“Your elders put too much stock in you . . . no, too much stock in the old ways . . . myths.” He held up his claw. “Look, look behind you. See my armies, my fortress, my lands? I KNOW power, real power! Power to create life, power to take it . . . even power to wake the dormant volcano to vomit up FIRE!”

Tommy did look, and at first he saw only what the Spider King told him to see. But then he saw farther out, beyond the reach of the Spider King's six eyes. Tommy saw a train of beings trodding slowly across the Lightning Fields north of the volcano. It was not a precise military march.
Slaves,
Tommy thought.
Grimwarden, Goldarrow, Charlie
. . . they'd succeeded.
Well, if nothing else,
Tommy thought,
we've bought them some time.