Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (26 page)

Cheobawn sat up and peered
before her. She could not see anything clearly but she got a sense of
something massive in front of her by the way the currents of air
eddied around her. She reined Cloud Eye to the left.

So it is,
she said,
Thank you, sister.

The wind had begun to howl
in earnest by the time they set the last cow down the icy tunnel of
snow along the eastern verge of the dome. Inside the protection of
the walls, the roar of the wind quieted, giving them the feeling of
having gone deaf after the perpetual assault to their ears out in the
open.

Cheobawn pulled Cloud Eye to
the side and let the lead cow go by her.

“
I don’t want to do that
again anytime soon,” Connor said as he reined Kite Wing in beside
her. “Are you alright?”

“
Tired,” Cheobawn said.
“Cold. I could use another sauna.”

“
Oh, yeah,” Connor said
with feeling.

“
Move it,” Meshel said
as he rode by. “The sooner we get these miserable beasts into the
long house, the sooner we can put something hot in our bellies.”

Connor and Cheobawn
exchanged good humored glances as they nudge their mounts back into
motion. The cattle had paused to rest and needed a bit of
encouragement to move on.

They had just begun to
relax, thinking the worst was over when Connor’s danger clicks
surprised them all. They all turned to see what it was that had
alarmed him.

Listen
, he signaled,
using finger sign.

Cheobawn drew Cloud Eye to a
halt and held her breath, straining to hear over the whistle of the
wind. Ramhorn Pack drew up and did they same. She heard something
strange in the tones of snow and ice hitting the dome. What was that?
It was like the soft ting of crystal water glasses as they brushed
against each other in their storage box. She looked around, trying to
track where the sound was coming from and cursed the acoustic
qualities of the tunnel that made the sound seem like it was coming
from everywhere.

Meshel clicked. They turned.
He was pointing upward. Cheobawn shivered and looked up towards the
place where the dome disappeared into the formless whiteness of the
storm. The sound grew louder. Whatever it was, it was rapidly
approaching.

Cloud Eye chose this moment
to go crazy. She squealed as she rose on her hind legs, slashing her
antlers at the sky. The other bennelk danced about, equally agitated.

What?
Cheobawn asked,
burying her hands in the ruff at the base of her mount’s neck.

Ice demons come
,
Cloud Eye declared.

Something round, pale blue,
and twice the size of a human head slid down the panels of the dome,
skittered across the frozen ground, and rolled up the curved face of
the great snow dune before it rolled back again. Another and then
another followed the first.

The bennelk squealed in
alarm, dancing away as the balls rolled underfoot and threatened to
trip up their four-legged stances.

Cloud Eye was the first to
attack. She chased after a translucent ball, ears laid back, tusks
extended, while Cheobawn pulled back with all her might on the reins.

No, no, behave
,
Cheobawn seethed,
it is no threat.

Ice demons must die,
Cloud Eye screamed, images of tooth and claw heavy on the
ambient. She cornered a ball between the dome and a patch of rough
ice and rearing up, crushed it under her great clawed feet. The egg
shattered with a high, thin sound like ice breaking underfoot.

“
Stop, you great idiot,”
Cheobawn shouted, reining back hard. “You will cut yourself.”

The sound of squealing
bennelk and breaking shells echoed in the tunnel as the other animals
finished off the eggs. Convinced the danger had passed, Cloud Eye
settled and consented to be directed once again.

Stand still,
Cheobawn
ordered firmly as she threw her leg over the saddle horn and dropped
to the ground. Wrapping her arm around Cloud Eye’s knee, she
pounded on the armored shin bone with her fist.

“
Lift your foot, you great
lummox,” Cheobawn shouted. “Honestly, you have no more sense than
a flutterfly.” Cloud Eye hung her head, looking quite abashed, as
she shifted her stance and lifted the foot for Cheobawn to inspect.
Holding the leg steady against her chest, Cheobawn pulled a mitten
off with her teeth and used her fingers to probe the soft places
between the toes and the tough pads. She did this for both front
feet, muttering imprecations about bennelk mental capacity as she did
so. Both paws, though abraded, seemed to be sound.

“
You are lucky,”
Cheobawn sniffed, mollified. “Vinara would have had my head if I
brought you back lame, after all we did yesterday.” She looked
around for the discarded mitten. The thin leather of her riding
gloves was no barrier against the cold. Already, her fingers were
going numb.

I killed it. Now it is
dead
, the bennelk said petulantly, as if she thought she deserved
a reward instead of a scolding.

Did you?
Cheobawn
asked as she walked over to the broken shell and shifted the pieces
with the toe of her boot. A small jumble of clear glass tubes rolled
free and unfurled with a sound much like the glass wind chimes
hanging over her bed in her old room. Curiosity filled her. She
squatted to inspect it more closely. It was really quite beautiful.
She wanted to count its legs and inspect the little scarlet beads
hidden inside the clear carapace of its body.

“
Leave it, Little Mother,”
Breyden cautioned from atop his mount. She looked up. Meshel and Erin
had gone on, in pursuit of the tail-end of the herd. Connor had
finally sorted Kite Wing out and got her pointed in the right
direction. He kicked her into motion, coming back to see what his Ear
was up to.

“
Cloud Eye says she has
killed it,” Cheobawn said, nudging at the legs with a leather
covered finger. The legs clicked together, the air ringing softly
with their subtle harmonies. “It would be a good trophy. I could
hang it over my study station and make it sing when I grow bored.”

“
I do not think the Elders
will let you bring it into the dome, Little Mother,” Breyden said.
“Come, the weather is growing worse and Meshel cannot get the
cattle into the long house with just Erin to help.”

Cheobawn smiled up at Connor
as he brought Kite Wing to a halt next to Breyden’s mount.

“
Look, Connor,” she
said, putting thumb and finger around the body of the dead spider and
lifting it by the ridges on the edges of the carapace. “They sing.”
Cheobawn held it up and blew on the legs until they rang like little
bells.

Was it Connor or Breyden who
shouted first? The legs kept moving even after she stopped blowing.
She snatched her hand away but it was already too late. Something
sharp stabbed through her leather glove into the palm of her hand.

The world fell out of her
mind. Cheobawn blinked in surprise at the sudden transition. The
white room with the walls of mist was back. How could this be? How
had she gotten here? She was nowhere near a bloodstone. Why was she
dressed in only her nightgown? Had she lost track of time? Was she
lying in bed, dreaming?

Something skittered softly
behind the mist.

“
Who’s there?” she
called, backing away from the sound but the sound came from
everywhere and there was no escaping it. She spun around. “Show
yourself. Talk to me. I do not like this game.”

Her hand throbbed. She
looked down. The place around the bite had turned to crystal. Even as
she watched, a new row of crystal scales added themselves to the
expanding circle of jewel bright stone. The clear scales grew,
spreading down her fingers and up towards her wrist. She pressed her
other hand into the arteries of her forearm, trying to stop the flow
of blood that threatened to carry the infection to the rest of her
body.

“
What have you done to
me?” she asked. The sounds in the mists started to sound faintly
like bells. If she concentrated on them hard enough, they almost made
a certain sort of sense. She closed her eyes and listened harder. It
was not just random noise; there were harmonies, there were small
songs that ran through the whole body of sound like bright lines of
gold thread through a weaving; there were songs laid atop other
songs, tangling and untangling themselves, disappearing into the
background only to rise again in one synchronized note before fading
again.

Cheobawn opened her eyes and
peered into the white mist.

“
I know this place,” she
called to it. “It does not frighten me. You can stop hiding now.”

She glanced quickly at her
hand. The crystal contagion had consumed her fingers. She clenched
her fist and watched as the tendons moved over the bones inside her
transparent skin. She should have been terrified but her brain was
not totally convinced that this was real. Was she dreaming? Would she
wake soon and laugh about this with Connor over breakfast?

“
I will listen,”
Cheobawn called out to the thing behind the mist, “only make this
stop. I do not want to become stone.” Stone. Crystal. She knew who
was out there. “Making me into a Spider will not help your cause.”

The mist took form and
became a monster. Cheobawn swallowed the scream in her throat as she
backed away. For a few disorienting moments, she could not make her
brain sort out the pieces of its strangeness. Then it moved and the
jumbles of crimson and umber crystal reformed in her mind into a
dozen many jointed legs and a great head from which sprouted hard
frills, spiked horns, obsidian mandibles, and milky white fangs. It
towered over her, very easily as tall and as long as a bennelk. A
pair of short, almost atrophied legs moved spasmodically against its
mandibles until either the legs or the mouth parts began to hum.
Somehow, her ears heard music but her brain heard thoughts and ideas
and images that might have been language. She held her breath and
listened as hard as she could in and out of the ambient.

At long last,
the
song said,
the seed planted has finally grown. Long have we waited
for your coming. Welcome, child of our longing.

What
a very curious thing to say, Cheobawn thought to herself. Was it
perhaps a form of Spider greeting? Had she misinterpreted the sounds
somehow?

“
You are mistaken,” she
said. “I am not your child. I am human.”

Are you? I think not,
it said.
You can talk to us. No other human has ever done that
before.

“
I am an aberration. One
of Amabel’s experiments gone wrong in the Making,” Cheobawn said
firmly. “My existence is none of your doing.”

Is it not?
the Spider
said with a sound that might have been laughter if bells could be
made to laugh.
Your hand tells me otherwise.

Cheobawn looked down at her
hand. The skin of her wrist was now hard crystal scales. It itched. A
thousand prickles shivered deep inside the bones of her fingers.
Cheobawn studied the transformation, her lips pressed together, a
worried frown on her brow.

“
I do not like this. Make
it stop,” she pleaded.

They are your memories.
Control them as you see fit,
Spider said patiently.

What did that mean, she
thought in exasperation? Oud had said that the form she took in the
misty room was the one she was most familiar with. Everything after
that was just dress up and play acting. Cheobawn studied her
crystalline hand. As she watched, the bones inside her crystal skin
turned to obsidian.

“
These are your memories,
not mine,” Cheobawn said, shaking her head, trying not to feel
afraid.

Are they? Have you not
inserted yourself into the fabric of the world, ever questing with
your curious mind? Have you not absorbed the thoughts of the
universe, that you might better understand them? Did you think this
would not change you irrevocably? Now you have touched Spider and
Spider has touched you. These are your memories. Make them be a part
of yourself, just as you have done for all else.

Cheobawn sighed in
resignation. Was it that simple? Like learning to speak to bennelk
while remembering you were human? How dangerous could it be? She had
not lost herself inside Sam’s Lowlander mind and, as crazy as he
was, she had come away relatively intact. She cocked her head and
listened to the ambient inside her strange hand.