“Given,” she said. “It would seem neither of us shall follow, Lord Mantrell—I by my choice, and you by the Spider King’s.”
“If ever I meet him, I shall have bitter words to say about this,” Ramon said, his eyes turning glacial.
“Calm your soul,” the djinna advised. “The Spider King is shrewd as well as intelligent, and very, very knowledgeable. If anyone understands what we are fighting, it is he—and if he let the Witch Doctor and the Spellbinder go, it is because they alone have the talents to forestall this rogue priest. We would burden them.”
“How could we?” Ramon asked, frowning.
“Why, by lumbering them with concerns for our safety,” Lakshmi said. “Let them go, my lord, and trust to their own powers. After all, the Spider King does.”
The dazzle slackened, the dizziness passed, and Jimena looked about her in astonishment. She stood in a landscape shrouded by fog so thick that she could see nothing but grayness, though here and there a bare, dark, and dripping branch reached out of the gray wall like a skeletal hand. She shuddered and looked down to find that even the ground was hidden, so thick was the mist.
But here and there a hoofprint glowed, burning away the mist enough to show the bare and barren ground about it.
Fear paralyzed her for a minute, but Jimena called to mind the faces of her grandchildren and stepped forward to brave the fog, following the glowing hoofprints.
She had gone about ten minutes, and knew not how much distance, before the shouting broke out ahead. She stared a moment, then caught up her long brocade skirts and hurried forward, though still with a wary eye on the trail of hoofprints.
The mist parted enough to show her Saul, standing rigid with his fists clenched and face red, shouting verses at a mounted man in midnight-blue robes who chanted in a sonorous tone, gestures weaving complicated patterns as he tried to outshout the Witch Doctor.
Jimena stopped, watching, mind clicking into analytical mode as she waited for the effects of the spells, and for the sorcerer’s companion to show himself.
There he was, sitting his horse a yard or two beyond his master, a darkness within the fog—no doubt also wearing the midnight color of Ahriman. His gestures, though, did not mirror those of the sorcerer, and his voice was a low mutter droning between the sorcerer’s words.
Saul’s final phrase jumped out clearly at her: “… with a scorpion!”
The sorcerer’s form fluxed, flowed, and gelled. He had a shell for a face, with yard-long antennae atop a man’s body—if you didn’t count the pincers where his hands had been, or the tail he had suddenly grown, complete with stinger. His companion blanched and sidestepped his horse away, spell forgotten, but the sorcerer, not realizing anything had happened, finished his gestures with his pincers and chanted the last few words in a high-pitched rasping voice.
The mist thickened, formed into snakes, and swarmed up Saul’s legs, intertwining with one another and tightening. He fell with a shout, and more snakes started on his arms.
Jimena said quickly,
The snakes dissolved; Saul’s thrashing arm shoved him halfway back to his feet. He gave a single wild glance about him, saw Jimena, grinned, and scrambled to his feet.
“My lord, you are transformed!” the sorcerer’s assistant cried.
The scorpion-sorcerer astride the horse looked down at himself in astonishment. He shrilled in anger, lashing his tail. It lashed far enough to come into his eyesight. He froze, staring at it, then turned his horse with a vengeful chittering and thrust the stinger at Saul.
Saul· leaped aside in the nick of time. “Uh, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
The stinger stabbed again. Saul dodged, barely evading it, leaping toward the horse’s head—and the sorcerer swung a pincer and caught his neck from behind. Saul howled with pain, then shouted,
The sorcerer’s pincer suddenly sagged open, as though it had no strength left. He chittered angrily, but seemed to have lost the pattern of words.
His assistant, however, had recovered, gesturing and intoning a verse. He finished with a flourish, and something huge and dark flapped out of the mist to wrap itself around Saul, whose voice gargled off in mid-verse.
Jimena spread her hands, chanting,
The wings shriveled, the central body absorbing them as the creature turned into a giant caterpillar, its mouth probing for Saul. He shoved it away with an oath, then intoned,
Sure enough, a shoot shot and grew, developing into a sapling that budded and opened abundant leaves.
With both hands, Saul forced the creature’s head around. “Look! Dinner! Yummy!”
The caterpillar dropped off him and hurried over to the sapling, as much as a caterpillar can hurry. It climbed up, munching as it went, until its whole length clung to the stout sprout.
Saul chanted,
Then he turned away and forgot the giant larvum. It munched away, busy with its own defoliation campaign.
But the sorcerer’s apprentice had been busy while he’d had Saul distracted with the insect kingdom, and he had his master almost back to human status. The tail with its stinger was gone, as were the pincers and all of the exoskeleton except the head—which chittered angrily, as though to chide the henchman for not giving him back the power of speech. All things considered, the apprentice should have started from the top and worked his way down, but the habits of subordination took their toll.
That left Jimena free to take her time. She crafted the verse slowly, remembering how she’d come into this weird place and weaving explicit instructions. As she did, a multitude of spiders came scuttling out of the mist and up the legs of the sorcerer’s horse to its rider, where they began to spin busily.
The sorcerer, intent upon regaining human form, didn’t notice what was happening right under his nose. Of course, at the moment, he didn’t have a nose, but his assistant was working on it.
The spiders, however, had been working on the assistant, too.
The mist deepened about the sorcerer’s head, then dissipated, showing his face as it had been before Saul had begun work. “Aha!” he shouted triumphantly.
Jimena too shouted her final instruction to the arachnids: “… and pull your webbing tight!”
Spider silk wrenched fast, binding both men’s arms tight to their bodies in gray tubes. They cried out in shock, then tried to lash their arms free—but all they succeeded in doing was weaving their bodies about so sharply that they fell from their horses. The animals whinnied and went.