Power of the Lost Page 2

  He blushed as Shy chuckled richly at his expense. "Promises promises, Euryale," she said. "You didn't tease me with your hair like you did Laina. I'm a bit jealous."

  Laina's face darkened several shades and she twisted her hands around the long haft of her ax. Euryale didn't help as she took a quick step toward the minotress and several strands of her hair playfully struck her butt and side.

  "What can I say?" the chirpy gorgon asked. "She inspires me."

  The four of them bantered as they retraced steps that — the first time — had been made in the dark and under threat.

  Now the sun was shining, and even beneath the canopy there was a soft breeze. The scents of the forest filled Terry's nostrils and though he no longer had supernaturally enhanced senses of smell and hearing, he'd never needed them to enjoy the woods.

  As Terry got the sense that they should be close, he started seeing spiderwebs. Big ones. Everywhere.

  "Hold up," he said, stopping as he glanced around. It was clear he wasn't the only one who'd noticed the change in woodland decor, and Euryale asked, "You want me to walk forward without the mask?"

  "No," he said it without even thinking. When his thoughts did catch up, he blanched as he realized just why he'd said it. He rubbed at the star-shaped scar between his eyes and then ran his hand up and over his short black hair. He kept it practically shaved on the sides and only a little longer on top.

  He glanced around and then said, "Just ... walk slowly and try not to disturb anything. Maybe we can get in and out with—"

  "Nope." Euryale cut him off, pointing. "They're here."

  Spiders were slipping toward them across branches in the treetops. As he noticed this, his eyes tracked to the ground only to see more coming that way.

  "Christ," he muttered. "Let's back up-and-oh-my-god!"

  His voice rose to a near shriek as several spiders leapt for him, sailing down through the canopy to land on his chest, shoulders, head and arms. He flailed, spinning in an effort to fling them away. Some fell off, but most stayed, and he froze, but not because of the spiders. He was staring with wide eyes at Laina, who held her ax like a baseball bat, its blades gleaming in the light filtering down through the treetops as she stared at him.

  "Laina?" he asked. Spiders were skittering all over him and it made him want to crawl out of his own skin, but that ax managed to occupy most of his attention. The weapon was legendary among the tauren, and he had seen her literally cut zone beasts in half with the thing. "Some tools just aren't the right ones for the job. If you'd refrain from taking my head off, I'd appreciate it."

  Laina nodded slowly and lowered the ax, glancing around nervously. The spiders had stopped when they reached Terry. Shy was standing in the midst of them, but Euryale and Laina were still in the clear.

  "They aren't biting you," Shy observed, watching the spiders as they settled across Terry's shoulders and arms, as well as clinging to the dark traveler's cloak he wore.

  He nodded slowly, skin prickling and heart racing as he struggled to contain his panic. He tipped his chin toward her as he asked, "Are they biting you?"

  "Several have bitten me, yes," she conceded, glancing down at the ground, then at a spider who sat on her shoulder, now very still and looking at her with its foremost legs up in a threat display that she clearly didn't mind.

  "However I have no blood, and I taste like what I am: a tree. Their venom is harmless to me and they are too small yet to penetrate my barkskin armor. They've stopped trying."

  "Okay, so now what?" Laina asked, still eying the spiders covering Terry's shoulders.

  'Would you like me to sweep the spiders off of you, Master?'

  Prada's voice inside his head reminded him rather forcibly of his familiar's presence. She masqueraded as a red silk sash at his waist most of the time, though the bulk of her substance was actually infused into his body. She called herself a sanguine devil, though most of the people who knew of her called her a ruby slime. It was a term he knew she didn't care for, but she'd yet to bother correcting anyone.

  She could assume a seemingly infinite variety of shapes, and served him in exchange for being 'fed' a measure of his blood — along with the power that suffused it — periodically.

  "No, Prada, but thanks for the offer," he said, speaking quietly so as not to upset the arachnids clinging to him. He could have answered her in his mind, but he wanted everyone else to know his familiar had joined the conversation.

  Several seconds passed, and nothing further happened. Terry's thundering heart calmed somewhat, and he looked around. The spiders were all around in front of him, far too numerous to count, watching him with glimmering eyes.

  "On the off chance they really don't intend to bite me," he said, still speaking slowly, "I'm going to keep going. I suggest the rest of you wait here."

  "Master, we had this talk, remember? The one about you taking stupid risks?" Euryale said, her voice carrying that overly sweet note that was beginning to serve Terry as a warning that she was about to flip her shit.

  "These are just spiders, Euryale. Prada can handle them if it comes to it."

  "So, why aren't they biting you?" Laina asked as she took a slow step back toward Euryale to put a bit more distance between her and the swarm.

  "Probably," Shy said, the faintest hint of a smile creasing her lips, "because he's responsible for them being here in the first place."

  Euryale wasn't nearly so delicate. She raspberried and said, "You mean because he's Daddy? Most spiders eat their sire, presuming mommy doesn't beat them to it."

  "Not helping," Terry said as he took a few steps. The spiders already clinging to him stayed where they were, but those directly in front of him scuttled out of the way to keep clear.

  He took a few more steps, passing Shy, then turned back to see that they'd closed in behind him, and most of the ones on the leading edge were now facing Laina and Euryale with their forelegs up.

  "Prada? Can you take care of me through this if shit goes sideways? Please answer verbally."

  "Yes, Master. I can absorb toxins from your blood as necessary and keep you mostly clear of spiders as you run. You will be bitten though. Probably often, and painfully."

  "You did worse when we met," Terry said. "I'll manage."

  He looked back at Euryale, who was staring at him with lips compressed almost into invisibility on her vaguely serpentine face, and said, "This shouldn't take long."

  "You don't trust Prada," the gorgon said, gesturing at the sash Prada was currently masquerading as. "Why should I trust her?"

  "I trust her self-interest," Terry said evenly. "She'll keep me alive because I'm her meal ticket. That hasn't changed."

  "It's so good to be properly appreciated," the slime said, the words fizzing up through the knot at his side like carbonation, each bubble bursting into a syllable. Despite her amorphous, viscous body, her tone was dry enough to serve as a desiccant.

  As had become his habit, he ignored Prada's irritation at him. They had a contract, not a bond. They had met when she'd attacked him, and had only barely managed to avoid destruction by offering to contract with him. Since then, she'd saved his life several times, but her motivations remained her own, and though she'd claimed an interest in deepening their relationship, her manipulative nature held Terry at a distance. Lately, he'd even gotten in the habit of controlling his idle thoughts around her, and forced her to dissociate from him in the evenings and when he slept so he could have some time alone in his own head. While connected physically to him, she integrated with his flesh and had no trouble reading his thoughts and speaking directly into his mind.

  "What is it you need in there anyway?" Laina asked, pointing past the spiders. "That thing wasn't exactly packing a lot of treasure."

  Terry shook his head and said, "It's something Cecaelia told me to get, so I'm going to get it. She called it a death seed."

  Euryale threw up her hands and started to stomp forward, stopping only when he held up a hand and s
aid, "Love? Trust me. It's not going to kill me. I can use it against the zone."

  At least, so Cecaelia tells me.

  "I swear by mother that you're going to give me issues if you keep doing stuff like this," the gorgon said, folding her arms and glaring at him. "Why do you care about these things anyway? They're just spiders!"

  His lips twisted as he bit back an impulse to question her on the issues she already had. Euryale had been alone for thousands of years, and she didn't have much of a filter left.

  "They're all that's left of Ephe," he said instead, dropping his hand. "I owe it to her not to kill her last brood."

  Euryale frowned, staring at him in consternation, but eventually she nodded and sighed. "Fine. Come back soon, Master. If you're not back in fifteen minutes, I'm coming in killing. Fair warning."

  He didn't waste time. He knew Euryale wouldn't hesitate. Killing for her was just something she did, like breathing. The only difference was that for Euryale, killing was literally easier.

  The remains of the behemoth were only another hundred yards or so through the trees, but the webbing got thicker and more profuse as he made his way toward it. The spiders grew more agitated, but not in a way that threatened him directly.

  Periodically, a spider on the ground or in the trees would leap at him, and one of the spiders that already rode him would launch itself at the aggressor. The two would fight in a furious tangle of limbs, and then the victor would resume a place on Terry.

  After the third such conflict, Terry stopped pausing to see what would happen. He just left the scuffling arachnids behind. He was out of his depth, and on the clock. Sweating the details was something he didn't have time for.

  Cecaelia said it would be about the size of a clenched fist and look like a walnut. How in the fuck do I find something like that, in THIS?

  He was standing a few feet from the monstrous corpse now, and the area was swarming with spiders. He'd expected flies, but realized that he probably shouldn't have. The spiders were clearly eating the massive body, and anything else that got near it. Several other bodies were scattered in and around the clearing, all belonging to forest scavengers or zone beasts that had wandered too close. The spiders ranged in size from an inch counting the legs to a few that were almost the size of full-grown tarantulas. All of them were a uniform black, with slim rather than bulbous bodies and very little hair.

  What had in life been a terrifying monstrosity was now just a lump of meat and discarded chiton plates that had once served as armor. As he contemplated the mass, an idea of how to get what he wanted came to him and he said, "Prada, I'd like you to go find the death seed for me. Find it and bring it as quickly as you can."

  "Doing so will leave you defenseless against the spiders," she pointed out, still answering verbally rather than in his mind.

  "We've pretty much established they won't attack me. Get going, I've got a time limit here."

  "As you wish, Master."

  As she slipped from him, the exact details of the conversation he'd had with Cecaelia came back to him and said, "Wait! Don't touch it. Just find it, and call me over. I'll be the one to pick it up."

  "Is it dangerous?" Prada asked as she formed up as a blob about knee high and three feet across. Terry shook his head and said, "Not to me. Just find it."

  The spiders scuttled away from the blob as Prada slid effortlessly across the ground and stretched out, sinking into the corpse until she vanished without a trace.

  Minutes passed, during which Terry was treated to countless spectacles of arachnid mortal combat. Even the largest spider — who'd claimed the top of his head as its personal perch — launched itself into battle at one point, only to pointedly reclaim its spot after successfully killing its opponent.

  Though he was fully dressed, the spiders were crawling all over him, and more than a few had infiltrated his pant legs, making him wince as he struggled to hold still. As the minutes passed though, his shivering eased.

  This is so surreal I can't even stay scared, Terry thought as he watched. The feeling of innumerable small bodies scuttling across his clothes and skin was unsettling, but he'd never had any particular fear of insects. He desperately wanted to shake them off anyway, but the simple realization that if he pissed them off he'd be dead and rotting before Prada could do anything about it from where she was helped keep him still.

  Perhaps five minutes passed before a crimson blade leapt up from amid the rotting carnage and sliced toward him, cleanly bisecting the meat between Terry and the source.

  "It was buried deep inside the body," Prada said, her voice faint from only ten feet away. The fact that her speech was essentially fizz left her without much in the way of volume. "I have not touched it, per your instructions, Master."

  "Thanks Prada," he said as he stepped forward, lips curling at the nasty sounds his boots made as they sank into first wet ground, then rotting meat. The smell wasn't as bad as he'd have guessed it would be, but he wasn't about to question that now. He spread his hands to keep his balance as he walked out onto the corpse, keeping to the groove Prada had cut for him.

  A thought occurred and he said, "If this blood is any good, you can take what you want before we go."

  Prada quivered, then molded herself into a shape that reminded Terry of an amphitheater as she said, "I'd better not. What I feel here is tainted. Not nearly as powerful as Euryale's curse, but definitely malign. I don't know what it would do to me if I took it in."

  Centered in the open space she made was a gore-spattered black walnut, about the size of an adult man's fist. It was precisely as Cecaelia had described it.

  Terry had a pair of gloves that he wore when handling the Rod of the Heart, an artifact with a mind of its own that he'd been given to help him deal with the dragon attacking Florence. Both the gloves and the rod were stored in a black backpack sewn with red thread that he wore on his back.

  It was enchanted, or magical, or whatever people on Celestine called such things. In his own mind, Terry had taken to calling it the bullshit bag, because the volume of material it held was complete bullshit. The thing pretty much seemed to ignore the laws of physics and anything that would fit in one of the various pockets would disappear without a trace inside, leaving the pack seemingly empty and adding only a little weight. It did have limits, or so he'd been told, but so far it held easily a hundred pounds of books and a staff a few inches taller than he was, yet felt like it weighed no more than ten pounds all told.

  He reached into one of the side pockets as he thought of the gloves, and they came effortlessly to his hand.

  He put the gloves on, then picked up the death seed. When he touched it, even through the gloves, he felt something strange. It was as though he'd dipped his hand in a bucket of liquid TV screen static. It was an impossible thought, but it was the only thing he could think of that even came close.

  He pulled one glove off, inverting it around the seed, then put all of it back in the pack as he said, "All right, let's get out of here."

  3

  Friends and Companions

  Boss made it out before his fifteen minutes were up, but as they started to walk down the slope toward the road, Laina said, "I don't mean to be ... ah ... well shit. You've still got spiders all over you."

  He shrugged and without looking back said, "Pretty much all of them fought for a place, and at this point my give-a-shit-o-meter's flat busted. Just leave them alone, hon. I'm sure they'll leave when they get tired of following me around. It's not like I plan to feed them."

  Fought for a place?

  Laina exchanged glances with Euryale, but the diminutive woman just shrugged and pointed. The minotress looked back at Boss in time to see one of the spiders scuttle into the open main pocket of the magical pack he'd been given by the Viceroy before they left Florence.

  "Would you, um ... tell them not to bite the rest of us?" she asked. "You know, just in case."

  "I don't speak spider," he said, glancing back at her. She saw in
that look that what he'd just been through had taken more of a toll on him than he was willing to admit. That he'd been able to do it at all was amazing as far as Laina was concerned, so she wasn't about to fault him for being a bit short.

  Shy tilted her head as she paused and glanced back at Laina, then she turned her eyes on Boss and said, "You don't speak our language either, Tee. Why not give it a try?"

  He blinked, eyes widening slightly. Finally, he tilted his head to look at one of the spiders on his shoulder and said, "None of you are to bite or bother anyone I travel with. Got it?"

  The spider held still for a few seconds, then scuttled out of his line of sight, disappearing into his bag. Terry glanced at Shy and shrugged, then moved on.

  "Did you at least find what you were looking for?" Shy asked.

  "Yeah, I got it. It's in my pack. I'll deal with it later," he said, sounding tired. "Let's just get to the road, okay? My boots are covered with nastiness and Mila has a spell I'd really like to ask her to use on me."

  "You can cleanse yourself now if you care to try, Master," Prada fizzed at his side. "Lest you forget, you are a theurge."

  "In name only. A week of research and reading and I understand some of the basics, but not much else," he answered absently as he walked. "I'd have to stop, haul a bunch of books out, read through them, then try and get the circle just right and by then it'd be fucking dark. Let's just get to the rendezvous. I'll take efficiency over showing off how little I know, thanks."

  "I could supply you with the missing bits of what you need," Prada insisted. "You have read it and could recall it if you cared to try. You are just uncertain. You could also skip most of the intermediate steps if you use the Rod of the Heart."

  "No. Leave it," he snapped, clearly losing patience.

  Prada's reply was so studiously bland that it made Laina wince. "As you wish, Master."

  Laina's brow furrowed as she looked at Boss' broad shoulders. He was being unusually taciturn, and without even asking she could tell that he had a lot on his mind.