“She was handed a spear and driven onto the sand, and, before eighteen thousand spectators, she met the greatest gladiator of the era, and she died, Cephas. She died as the last opponent faced by Azad adh Arhapan.”
The prey moved about less than they had earlier, but the vibrations of their steps and sighs and endless prattle still carried along the stone strands. All the scouts felt it, and joined their minds together, then their minds with stone. They agreed. The prey was stuck, their position was fixed, and the fighters would come from the north.
Web and rock, thought the scouts, web and rock.
The demon sent its awareness through the stone strands, obliterating the personalities of all the plaguechanged aranea joined with it. The demon ignored the chaos this engendered in the ranks of his worshipers. The barely discernible individual personalities of the spiderfolk did not concern it, as long as their fighting prowess was unaffected.
The demon moved south over the plain, testing the limits of its leash. It had briefly imagined it was testing the limits of its freedom, but as soon as the concept came to its mind, the torment returned. The human woman was watching closely.
The demon did not consider the possibility of escape. It could not be said to be wise, but the demon was canny, and it knew any such attempt would find its physical body destroyed and its wretched soul sent spinning into the blackest pit in the universe. It had crawled out of that pit once already, and would not risk being cast down into it again.
The sorceress would never free it. She would not even reward it, as the demon doubted she possessed the depravity of imagination necessary to conceive something it would find rewarding. Except that she held the leash, the woman was a poor stand-in for the wizard who imprisoned it in the temple more than a century past. She was not even a pale shadow of the Qysars she claimed as ancestors.
The demon realized the woman might sense this direction in its thoughts, so shied away from them, fearing her psychic lash. But the lash did not fall.
A message coalesced out of the vibrations in the stoneweb. The shamans were joined in their awareness. They were the caste of aranea who believed the demon to be a god, and who had reshaped their warped and forgotten people when the land around them desiccated from nightmarish swamp to chthonic badland. The shamans pooled their thoughts from points scattered widely across the plain, where their naked bodies stretched across the ground, attuned to the tiniest trembles in the earth. They collectively decided on an action, then communicated their will to the vast, immobile eggmothers, who plucked the stoneweb and directed the hunters and scouts and fighters.
The demon felt a warning tug on its leash and turned its attention back to the wailing shamans.
The prey was stuck in the far southern reaches of the web, they told it. The scouts have fixed the particular junction of strands, and the fighters approach. Do they wait for its majestic and terrible coming?
The demon listened, waiting to see if the sorceress would offer direction. Nothing came, and it judged the distance to its prey to be such that it could drag its enormous body there in a moment or two-no farther than a human could walk in a day, certainly.
Send in the fighters, the demon told the shamans. The one that survived receiving the message passed it on.
A bolt of liquid stone shot out of the dark, enveloping Cephas’s head and shoulders and making it impossible for him to breathe. He dimly heard shouts and the rasp of steel clearing leather, then the screams of a wyvern intent on destruction.
A tremendous blow fell, shattering the net covering his face. He blinked rock from his eyes and looked up to see Mattias standing astride him, one of his canes held in both hands like a club.
“Keep your head down,” said the ranger. “We don’t know what they are, but these webs they cast are hard to clear off.”
He twisted his canes together, and the thin gold line of the bowstring shone in the dark. “Surprised the bastard didn’t have them disable it permanently,” Mattias muttered, then said, “Ariella was on watch at our right flank, beyond the balanced rock.”
Before they bedded down, after Corvus promised to explain the WeavePasha’s plot at first light, Cephas had made a long, careful check of his equipment. He turned the double flail over and over, wondering about its age and powers. About its provenance, and about the great value it held for Azad the Free. Corvus saw him and said, “I have no way of knowing, Cephas. He used a flail on the sands. Whether it was this one in particular …”
The kenku had not finished the thought, and now that Cephas heard the sounds of fighting out on the plain, he found that it did not matter. For now-for tonight, at least-the flail was just a tool he would use to help Ariella.
Mattias’s climbing of the rock was a hard thing to watch, but for all his awkwardness, the ranger made the top of the balanced tor quickly. The strength in his arms must be enormous, thought Cephas, as he trotted around the stone. As he went, he shouted over his shoulder. “Where are the others?”
A flaming arrow flew away from the rock. An explosion followed out in the dark, and inhuman screams of pain rose up.
“You will see Corvus and Shan only if you’re in trouble!” Mattias called. “Trill is on the wing. She’s in a testy mood.”
So am I, Cephas realized. It felt good to have implacable anger surging through him, energizing him. Did I become earthsouled again while I slept? he wondered.
But no, it was the wind-force gathering, and the heft of the double flail was different in his hands-not lighter, precisely, but suited for a more fluid style of sweeps and swings than the inexorable crushing blows he usually favored. He was going to fight differently, he sensed, but he was still going to fight.
An alien figure rose up from a cluster of boulders on his left, hefting a crude, stone-tipped spear and chattering from the mandibles that dominated the lower half of its face. Their attackers were like nothing out of a story, and like nothing from Grinta the Pike’s lengthy catalog of past and potential victims.
Cephas flexed his left arm, dropping the distal flailhead and bringing the proximal around high and hard. The spiked steel sphere struck the creature in the face, rupturing one of its enormous faceted eyes. It fell without casting its spear, the eerie chattering dying with the thing that sounded it.
“Another one!” Ariella shouted. “Behind you!”
Even as he turned, her glowing blue sword whipped out of her hand and swung in a wide arc around him, leaving a trailing wake of golden sparks that floated to the ground, guarding the two windsouled in a circle lit by magic. The blade cut through the spear arm of one of the creatures, but another ducked back, only to stop still and sink to the ground with white bile pouring from its mouth. Cephas caught the briefest hint of shadowy movement behind the thing and knew Corvus was near.
Very near, in fact. When Cephas turned to face Ariella, the kenku stood between them.
“Imaginative namers of places, Calishites,” Corvus said. “Plain of Stone Spiders, indeed.” A rushing wind above their heads caused them to instinctively duck, and when they straightened, the motionless silhouettes of three more of the spiderfolk plummeted to the ground, killed and dropped by Trill.
No other threats were apparent nearby, though the steady song of Mattias’s bow did not diminish. Every note his weapon sounded was followed by an answering scream or percussive shock.