Sonder skated over the exact details of the conversation, which I have to admit I was morbidly curious about. Once they’d gotten past their mutual mistrust, though, it didn’t take them long to strike a deal. Cinder wanted to find Deleo, Sonder wanted to find me and Luna, and there was only one place to start looking. Sonder led Cinder to Arachne’s lair and the rest was history.
“There was another guard outside,” I remembered.
“Yeah,” Sonder said. He looked uncomfortable, and I noticed he was carefully avoiding looking at the bodies. “Cinder … dealt with him.”
“Well.” I looked at Cinder. “I guess I’m not who you were hoping to find, but thanks anyway.”
“Where’s Del?” Cinder rumbled.
“Belthas has her.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.” I looked at Cinder. “We team up until Belthas is dealt with or either of us quits. No hostilities until twenty-four hours after that. Deal?”
Cinder nodded. “Deal. How do we find Del?”
“By finding Belthas.”
“Is Luna back there?” Sonder asked.
I sighed. “No.” I hated having to admit it: Even though there was nothing else I could have done, knowing that I’d left her behind hurt. “Belthas took her.” Sonder’s face fell.
“So where is he?” Cinder said.
It occurred to me that Cinder was going to be difficult to deal with. He was brutally straightforward and would remain steady only as long as he could see what to do. Now that Belthas’s men were dead Cinder had no obvious direction, and if things stayed that way he was going to get frustrated quickly. “They worked for Belthas,” I said, looking at the remains. “Maybe they’ll have something that’ll show us where to go.”
Cinder thought about it for a few seconds. “Fine,” he said grudgingly. “I’ll loot the bodies for you.”
Sonder looked at the smoking scorched things that had been Belthas’s men and flinched visibly. “You mean …”
“Relax, Light-boy,” Cinder said, already turning away. “Don’t have to get your hands dirty.”
“Sonder, I need you to look back at what happened,” I said. “Belthas was here, along with Luna and Martin. Find out what they talked about and see if you can track them.”
Sonder nodded and turned away, his eyes unfocusing. Reluctantly, I turned towards Arachne. I needed to figure out how to help her before Cinder’s patience ran out.
Odds are you’ve never tried to give a giant spider a medical checkup. In case you’re wondering, it’s really hard. It’s not like you can take their pulse, and dealing with the fact that they have their skeleton on the outside of their bodies is weird enough on its own. After ten minutes’ examination, I’d managed to conclude that Arachne was alive, which I’d known already.
Figuring out what Belthas had done was easier. There was a short rod embedded at the back of Arachne’s body in her … neck? Back? Thorax? Whatever it’s called. The thing was about twelve inches long and made out of some iridescent purple metal that caught the light. It was a powerful focus with an active spell working through it. As far as I could tell, it was linked to something else, probably an identical focus with a similarity effect joining them. At the moment the spell was stable. It wasn’t draining Arachne’s magic or life force but she wasn’t getting any better either.
I ran my hand along Arachne’s back, feeling the stiff hairs brush against my fingers. There was something terribly depressing about seeing her like this. Ever since I first met her, Arachne’s always been one of the few stable points in my world, wise and strong. Having her still and lifeless felt wrong, and I couldn’t help wondering if this was my fault. If I’d dealt with Luna better, figured it out earlier …
“Hey,” Cinder called. I turned to see something flying towards me and caught it one-handed. I’d been standing on a battered sofa to get a better look and had to sway to keep my balance. I took a look and saw that it was a touch-screen phone. “What’s up?”
“Password.”
The phone had a password lock. I took thirty seconds and cracked it, then skimmed through the call and message history. The phone had belonged to Mick, aka Michael, and had apparently survived the blast that had killed its owner. I put it in my pocket.
“So?” Cinder said.
“Belthas took my phone. I need a new one.”
Cinder gave me a look.
“There’s nothing there,” I said. “Any luck?”
Cinder gestured at the pile of guns at his feet. The five men had been carrying enough weapons to stock an armoury: submachine guns, pistols, grenades, clips and boxes of ammunition, knives, radios, coils of wire, and what looked like plastic explosive. It was enough to fight a small war-unfortunately, at the moment, it was also completely useless.
I looked at the iridescent metal rod. “Know what this is?”
Cinder walked forward and squinted. “Yeah,” he said after a moment.
“You and Deleo got them from that mage, didn’t you?” I said. “Jadan or whatever his name was. The guy who came up with this bloody ritual.”
“Yeah.”
“How do they work?”
“Dunno.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Got his materials. Didn’t know how to use them.”
I sighed. “It’s just like last time, isn’t it? You guys never understand what you’re messing with but you do it anyway.”
“Would have been fine if you’d let us kill that enchantress.”
“Yeah, well, maybe if you and Deleo had done a bit less collateral damage I wouldn’t have gotten involved.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“Wasn’t why you were helping her.”
I looked at him. “How would you know?”
“She acted sexy and vulnerable and made you feel good,” Cinder said. “So you trusted her. Right?”
I was silent.
Cinder shook his head contemptuously. “Idiot.”
The sound of footsteps made us look up to see Sonder emerge from the tunnel out onto the Heath. Cinder walked away. “Sorry,” Sonder said as he approached. “He made a gate but I couldn’t see through the shroud.”
I nodded. “And in here?”
“They left three hours ago,” Sonder said. “Belthas, twelve men, Martin, and that woman. They had Luna.” He didn’t look happy. “Martin was dragging her.”
I thought about Luna and how she must be feeling. She’d trusted Martin and thought him a friend, probably in the hope he’d become a lot more, and he’d betrayed her in the worst way possible. Then there was the question of what Belthas would do with her or if she was even still- I shook my head and pushed the thought away. I needed to focus.
“Can you take it out?” Sonder asked.
I looked up to see that Sonder was pointing at the rod in Arachne’s back. “Not without killing her,” I said. “And even if I could, I don’t have the first clue how to fix whatever Belthas did.”
“I think it was a paralysis spell,” Sonder said. “I only saw bits of it but …”
I nodded. Ice mages are good at that sort of thing. Sonder looked at Arachne’s motionless body. “Could we get someone to heal her?”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. I stuck my hands into my pockets. “We’d have to-”
I stopped. There was something in my pocket and I drew it out. It was the fang of some enormous creature, made of some kind of grey stone, heavy and warm and eight inches from base to tip. It was a magical item and a powerful one. I’d never seen it before. I’d checked my pockets just after escaping Belthas and they’d been empty. How had it …?
“Wow,” Sonder said. He was staring wide-eyed. “What is that?”
“A gate,” I said. I realised I knew the command word. And it would take me to … “Holy crap,” I said quietly. “It was real.”
“Where does it lead?”
“To someone who could fix her.” I looked to see what would happen if I used it and saw that the fang would cut through the gate wards easily. For a one-shot item, it was incredibly powerful. “It’s designed to take two people,” I said. “User and one other … Crap.” As I looked at the consequences, my heart sank. The spell on Arachne was tied into her life force. Gating her would break the spell and sabotage Belthas’s ritual-but it would be fatal for Arachne.