Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (27 page)

Suddenly, the mist was gone.
She stood upon the shore of a great body of water that stretched to
the horizon. The sound of splashing drew her eyes to a disturbance in
the waves not far out from the shore. As she watched, a scarlet
spider, similar to the Spider in the misty room, rose from the waves
and scrambled out of the sea on the delicate ebony tips of its clawed
feet. More emerged. Soon the water was alive with their shapes.
Cheobawn danced on the tips of her own ebony claws as the battle lust
filled her mind. This was her beach, her bit of sand, and she would
kill any who would try to take it from her.

Horrified, she ripped
herself away, refusing to be anyone but Cheobawn, refusing to watch
death, refusing to become a killer, even in this strange land of
dreams. She was Cheobawn of the Blackwind Pack who loved small furry
things and the color of the sky at dusk. She chased that thought back
into the mists and beyond.

She lay in an icy cave, a
white storm raging over her head. Something strange and alien loomed
over her, its arms, gruesomely soft and clinging, wrapped around her.
Two dark orbs stared at her from inside a cocoon of webbing. She
struck at it with the tips of her claws and scrabbled away, but she
had lost most of her legs, the mutilation leaving her with only four
deformed and claw-less limbs. The monster reached for her, sounds
coming out of the cocoon below its eyes. It was a brutal and guttural
sound lacking any resemblance to language. She screamed and tried to
bat the limbs away. Another alien was busy chopping up one of her
babies with a sharp metal rod while three furred and fanged land
beasts circled them in agitation. She was surrounded by enemies,
defenseless.

In the next moment, with
just a blink of the eye, she was Cheobawn with memories that told her
today was the day after Restday, that they had come outside to gather
strays, and the monster in front of her was Connor.

“
By all that is holy,
Ch’che,” he yelled, “I just want to look at it. Give me your
hand”

Cheobawn looked down at her
hand. Someone, probably Connor had taken her leather glove off. The
skin around the bite was red and inflamed. The hand was swelling, her
fingers turning into sausages as she watched.

“
Breyden!” Connor yelled
as he grabbed her wrist in one hand and spread her fingers flat with
the other, “Leave the gods cursed spider. Get your med kit out of
the saddlebags.”

“
Spider is angry with us,”
Cheobawn said through chattering teeth as she looked around at the
scattered remains of spider babies.

“
Yeah,” Connor said,
pulling her mask down and shoving her hood and hat back to better see
her eyes. “Spider will just have to get over it. Breyden! Now!”

“
We must save the eggs,”
she said frantically, grabbing the collar of his duster with her free
hand to catch his attention, “or else bad things will happen.”

“
Empty threats,” scoffed
Connor as he probed the wound in her palm, looking for stingers. She
tried to get her hand back but Connor was bigger and stronger than
she.

Breyden launched himself off
the top of his bennelk, did a perfect three point landing, turning it
into a roll which brought him up against Connor’s side, med kit in
hand.

“
Can’t this wait?”
Breyden asked as he flipped the tin open and began tossing out
bandage packs and suture kits. “The weather is not going to stay
this nice for long.”

Cheobawn looked up at the
thin strip of sky overhead and wondered what could be any worse than
the gale of ice laden wind roaring along the surface of the dome.

“
She’s going into shock.
Give me spider anti-venom and adrenaline tabs,” Connor said, “Then
maybe we can get her on my mount and get her inside to Amabel.”

Breyden handed the yellow
tabs to Connor and then peeled a red tab off its paper.

“
Just try to breath,
Little Mother,” he said as he pulled Cheobawn’s mask down further
and pressed the tab into the vein in her neck, releasing the medicine
with a flick of a fingernail. Oddly, she did not feel the sting.
Trying to breathe was very good advice, as there was a band of steel
tightening around her ribcage making it harder and harder to draw a
deep breath. The sting at her wrist distracted her.

“
What is that?” she
asked. It was hard to talk for lack of air in her lungs. “We have
no antidote for this species.”

“
Stinging spider is the
closest I can think of,” Connor said, pulling a bandage out of its
paper with his teeth. He began to wrap it as tight as he could around
her wrist. Her hand went numb. “Better than nothing. Can’t hurt.
Do you think you can ride, wee bit?”

The adrenaline was making
her heart race and her head spin. The top of Cloud Eye’s back
seemed very far away. Breyden rose and reached for his mount’s
lead. The bennelk snorted and danced away, weaving restlessly with
the other mounts. Breyden tried to catch Kite Wing. She allowed it
but would not draw near nor settle to her knees at the command.

Kneel down, Sister,
Cheobawn said to her own mount.

Ice demons cling to your
mind,
Cloud Eye said nervously.

I have been stung by a
spider. We need to go back to the stables,
Cheobawn said, too
tired to argue.

Herd Mother said not to
listen to the ice demons,
Cloud Eye chastised.

You wanted me to fight
the ice demons,
she said, irritation filling her ambient, perhaps
fueled by the drugs.
This is how it must be done. Be fierce. Let
me up and take me home.

Cloud Eye sidled closer and
then after a moment’s hesitation settled to her knees. Breyden and
Connor pulled Cheobawn to her feet and lifted her into the saddle.
Breyden climbed on behind her to keep her safe.

“
Go find Erin and Meshel,”
Breyden called over his shoulder to Connor as Cloud Eye heaved to her
feet and headed towards the stables without any further urging. “Get
the cattle settled and then come find us at the infirmary.”

Breyden’s tab was starting
to work. The tightness in her chest eased only to be replaced by a
blinding headache. Cheobawn wanted to close her eyes but her heart
was racing in her chest and her arm ached all the way from the
tourniquet to the veins deep inside her shoulder. Breyden crushed her
against his belly, leaned forward and kicked Cloud Eye into a bone
jarring gallop. By the time the wranglers open the gates into the
stable yard she was past caring if she lived or died, as long as
someone took the pain away.

Things moved behind her
eyelids. The strip of dark sandy beach was hot under her claws.

Breyden jostled her
painfully as he handed her down into the arms waiting to catch her in
the stable yard. Her vision grayed out for just a moment.

It was not adrenaline but
battle lust that made her heart pound so hard. The beach seethed
under a mass of scarlet bodies, all of them screaming challenge. She
screamed her own challenge as a large gravid egg bearer raced up the
beach towards her, lusting after her prime spot. Their bodies crashed
together, mandibles snapping, legs dancing out of harm’s way, their
battle cries lost in the din of a thousand similar battles.

It was not the pain but the
fury that made her bare her teeth and roar at Hayrald as he tried to
pull her riding leathers off her swollen arm. She was lying in the
back of a cart racing down a path under the dome. Hayrald pulled her
long knife out of its sheath on her thigh. Her mind was muddled with
images but she knew a threat when she saw it. She fought him.
Cursing, Hayrald caught her good arm and pinned it under his knee
while he sliced the sleeve away from her spider-bit arm with the
blade, being none to gentle in his haste.

She was Spider and she was
beautiful and gloriously strong, from the tip of the spines at the
top of her head to the obsidian claws on each of her dozen legs. Not
just a spider, but all the spiders. That was how it felt; two things
inside one body. She was Spider who remembered all things from the
beginning of time but she was the spider who was not Spider, but
Nnursht of the Blackclaw hive, who stood upon the dark sands of the
warm briny ocean and clashed her legs together while she blew sharp
blasts of air through the chambers in her carapace until they
trumpeted her challenge, the sound echoing through the air for all to
hear.

When she had first emerged
from the sea, her mind consumed with her egg-laying madness, the
spring sun had seemed harsh to her unaccustomed eyes but the
benevolent and blessed sun warmed the sand to temperatures perfect
for incubating eggs. Ridding herself of her eggs had been the first
task, a task worth dying for. Not so easily done. The best spots on
the beach had been claimed first. She had taken this spot from a
slightly smaller egg bearer who had not been as determined as she.
Now, she fought to keep it.

The battles wagged for a day
and a night and well into the next day, but what was time when every
moment became a test to see if one’s children deserved to live. She
fought her sisters, the attacks coming even as she dug her hole and
laid her eggs. Some were more persistent or just more desperate than
others and needed killing. That was towards the end, when the only
egg sites left were already overrun with carrion feeders ready to
steal the newly lain eggs out from under their mothers and drag them
into the dunes to feast upon them at their leisure. Such was the
madness of egg laying.

Empty and exhausted, Nnursht
rested once the eggs were properly buried. Now it was just a matter
of waiting until the sun warmed the sands and woke the children from
their slumber. The largest of the predators would come. Even now she
could feel the hunger of the great lizards as they stirred from their
warrens, alerted by the violence and rage the spiders themselves had
bled into the ambient. They would come to feast upon the eggs of the
lesser and more foolish egg bearers at the edge of the nesting
ground, killing any spider that fell into its jaws, dragging away the
bodies of the dead to crack their carapaces and suck them dry.

Cheobawn, who was Nnursht,
waited, her toes spread delicately around the edges of her egg patch,
ever alert. Thirty cycles it had taken for the babies to make
themselves inside her belly, building the crystal bodies one thin
layer at a time around their tiny crystalline brains. She had sung
all the memories of Spider into those crystals, etching them
indelibly into the matrix of the stones, adding the memories of her
own life towards the end, as the shells hardened uncomfortably inside
her. This was not her first egg laying but in her mind she thought it
might be her last.

Thus she waited for a double
leg-count of days. The nights were the hardest. The great lizards
used the darkness to cover their approach, their minds a void on the
ambient that could catch the unwary by surprise. She stood over her
children and listened in the darkness as her sisters died on the edge
of the nesting grounds. There was little she could do but wait and
watch the sky, while her egg laying organs convulsed uncomfortably
inside her, reforming themselves for the next task. The bits of light
in the night sky eased her mind, their infinite number a balm to her
jumbled thoughts.

Thirty cycles it had been
since she had last stood on this beach. Thirty cycles of seasons that
blended from cold, dark days to the long hot and back again. Thirty
cycles is what it took for the two pale moons and the sun and the
tides and the seasons to come together in one synchronized event.
While the melt of the snows in the high places flushed all the lands,
filling the shallow sea with nutrients for the hatchlings, the fresh
water kept the marine predators at bay and the low tides ensured
plenty of sand safe from the lash of the waves.

Eventually, the time became
right. Nnursht looked up at the sky, his heart beating in
anticipation. It was only now, with both moons hanging just under the
horizon, the sun long since set, that the stars in the heavens burned
their brightest. This absence of both moons was a boon for his young,
granting them a reprieve from the predators who hunted by sight.

This was a fact, dry and
mundane, lacking in any kind of magic. Magic was seeing the moonless
sky as the bits of light blazed brightly, free for just a moment from
the veil of the pale night. Nnursht, who was Cheobawn in another life
and in another time, studied the heavens in the darkest moments of
the darkest night in thirty years and felt himself become filled with
wonder. Were there other places like this, with warm seas and
brilliant yellow suns? Did other places teem with life or did their
hot beaches stay empty, begging to be filled with eggs?

Nnursht could hear the
babies in their shells as one by one they used their egg-claw to
shatter their prison. The warm sand heaved under his toes, his
children digging up towards air so that they might scuttle down to
the sea under the cover of darkness. He hardly noticed. Perhaps he
had grown weary of the cycle of life-giving. He had done this duty
more times than he could count. Leaving the young to their own
devices, he was content to stand and listen to the strange and alien
things imbedded in the ambient of the heavens.