The young thief’s mouth dropped open. “You are the Azure Spider. You’re one of her things now.”
The sullanciri hissed, then jerked its head to the trapped hand.
Will shook his head. “Not even if I knew how to undo it.” He breathed in through his nose, then spat a huge gobbet of spittle, hitting the creature in the left eye cluster.
The mandibles parted, the sullanciri’s head dipped, and pure fire pierced Will’s neck right and left. His body shook as molten agony poured into him. He tried to scream, but found his throat paralyzed. Then the pressure vanished and he felt himself falling. It seemed to take forever. He watched the sullancirfs left hand get smaller, watched a droplet of that black blood chase him down, and he hoped, somehow, that Kerrigan’s bed was still beneath him.
Then the world began to shift. First Will thought his hearing was going bad because while he caught sounds that had the cadence of speech, they made no sense to him. The spider-thing tried to shift to the left, hissing loudly, but since the spittle had half-blinded it and its hand was still trapped, its range of motion was limited.
Then a needle, silver-grey, stabbed up through the sullanciri. It drove through the center of the legs, emerged, then spitted the manspine. The creature shook once, hard, then the legs released and curled in. The body started to fall, then hung there by one hand as it went limp save for the rhythmic, pumping contractions of the abdomen.
“Will. Will!” Resolute’s face appeared above his. The thief couldn’t see well enough to read any concern in the Vorquelf’s expression, but it came through in the voice. “Will, are you with me, boy?”
Will nodded, or thought he did. Fire burned through his veins and his body bowed as muscles contracted. He tried to open his mouth and speak, but before he could do that, another convulsion hit him and the world dissolved into nothingness.
22
Nineteen days had passed since the advent of the new Aurolani troops in Fortress Draconis, yet for Erlestoke, it seemed as if the winter had already lasted a year. So many things were different. Since the fall, Fortress Draconis had changed, and well beyond anything ordinary.
Enemy activity had increased and discipline had gotten better. That was due to the new creations, which Ryswin had designated kryalniri based on some distant elven tale of when the world was young, winters were long, and fierce beasts hunted through the snows for game that was trapped or travelers who were lost. Jilandessa suggested that Chytrine might have modeled her new creatures on those legends, so the name fit. But the humans just called them “crawls” for ease of understanding, and the elves took that bastardization without umbrage.
The crawls had replaced vylaens as the leaders of gibberkin, and had proven very effective in tightening up on lax patrols and inattentive sentries. Patrols were doubled in size and frequency, which made setting ambushes very difficult. Erlestoke’s people had taken to setting snares and other traps to make the gibberkin cautious. While their kill rate dropped, the efforts did slow the enemy progress in their operations.
The Aurolani forces certainly seemed to have some very specific goals in mind. The vylaens had been reorganized into little cadres of magickers. Each one had a crawl in charge of things. The fortress’ ruins had been gridded off, as nearly as the prince could determine, and a full-scale magickal survey was under way.
He had to assume they were looking for a fragment of the DragonCrown.
Once their survey indicated there was something in the area, work crews of human captives and gibberkin were brought in to excavate. The digging would last for as little as a couple of hours to a maximum of two days. He’d inspected some of the abandoned digs, and the effort seemed to be pretty well focused at the start, then developed into a broader, more systematic approach that opened a hole in layers.
It did strike the prince as bizarre that their magickers were having trouble locating the fragment they wanted. While Erlestoke himself was completely unable to work magick of any sort, he did have an understanding of it. Somehow the search parties had something that allowed them to focus on the item they were searching for. They worked spells based on the link between that thing and the target, and the magick revealed a location to them.
The link between objects had been made quite apparent to him the first day he’d seen a crawl. In his haste to get to Castleton and to get the crawl’s body away for examination, he’d abandoned Malarkex’s sword in the ruins. They’d left their headquarters and plunged deeper into the undercity but, somehow, when he awoke the next morning, the saber was once again in his scabbard. Jilandessa had cast a couple of spells and detected some sort of a link between the blade and the scabbard, and while Erlestoke really didn’t like the sword, he could see the virtue of having a weapon that returned to him.
He’d smiled at her and extended his right hand. “Would be much nicer if it would come to my hand when I commanded.”
The elf had nodded. “It would, but do you really want to be linked to that blade that way?”
The prince agreed he did not.
The appearance of the crawls was not the only adjustment of Aurolani forces at Fortress Draconis. A sullanciri had been left in charge with Chytrine’s departure. Ferxigo had actually spent time at Fortress Draconis with the urZrethi garrison before she joined the Aurolani tyrant. Her knowledge of Fortress Draconis was dated, but having an urZrethi in charge of operations that involved excavating a mountain made perfect sense.
Between her and the crawls a new layer of leadership appeared. Erlestoke had seen one and Ryswin the other: two tall, humanoid creatures that wore thick woolen cloaks of red with massive hoods that hid their faces. No one who had seen them was sure what they were, but the bumps and spikes concealed rather poorly by their cloaks suggested that either they were very tall men wearing unusual armor, or yet another new concoction of creature. They had been seen giving orders to crawls at various digs, but nothing provided clues as to their true identities.
The mystery of what they were would doubtlessly have consumed Erlestoke’s time, save that Fortress Draconis itself was proving to be a challenging enigma. Erlestoke, in the five years he had spent in the garrison, had learned everything he could about the place. The Draconis Baron, Dothan Cavarre, had been quite generous in providing him with information. Erlestoke had even gone so far as to imagine that Cavarre might be grooming him as a replacement—though he also assumed that only death would sever the baron’s association with Fortress Draconis.
The prediction had proven true, and his body had been hung from the Crown Tower’s dragon skull until picked clean by carrion birds. Aside from the pangs of his friend’s death, Erlestoke regretted the loss of the Draconis Baron’s wealth of knowledge about the place. While the baron had told Erlestoke much of the fortress’ secrets, he clearly had not told him everything.
In vacating their hideout, Erlestoke and his people had moved deeper and discovered a variety of chambers, both worked and natural, where they could take refuge. They’d chosen a likely one that first night and the sentries reported nothing unusual on their watches. Erlestoke’s had passed uneventfully; but when they gathered to move on, they discovered that the passage they’d used to reach their haven had been cut off with huge blocks of stone.
Magick was the only explanation for how the stone had moved, but Jilandessa had a hard time identifying the spells used. “Shuffling blocks that big and so silently would take an incredible amount of power. I don’t know of a sorcerer capable of doing that.”