Banshee (17 page)

“Look around, Harriet,” Banshee said with an expansive wave. “Nearly
everything
is only a memory, but we will change that, and you will be present to see the first steps. Today’s first order of business is something that we should have done immediately upon arriving.” He punctuated the last with another toothy grin.

“What might that be, my friend?” Harriet leaned against Banshee’s foreleg companionably. The presence of so formidable an ally bolstered her flagging spirit, and a genuine smile warmed her face.

Banshee’s expression went stony. “We shall call a general meeting, and my friends and I will do what we do best. Quell an uprising.” At that, the laughter burbled forth from his center, a deep musical note that intimated an unpleasant experience for Colvin Watley and his would-be rebels.

Underneath: Day Two

They slept in turns, high above the cavern floor on a ledge that provided defensible ground and an excellent view. There was a new scent in the air, and there were no anemones bumping merrily about as they waged their colorful air war. Stretching, Saavin saw French crouched at the edge of their aerie; he studied the oncoming stretch of passage with great interest.

“What’s ahead that has you worried?” she asked, rising on her toes to loosen muscles left tight with sleep.

He pointed to a lazily curling chamber that branched to the left. It was nearly as large as the main passage, but it lacked the vibrancy of the previous areas they’d traversed.

It’s dry,
mused Saavin. There were lichens, but far less than they’d become accustomed to, and none of the telltale gleam from sporadic condensation and water sources. The cave ahead was a wasteland in comparison to the Eden they were leaving. She quirked a brow at French and asked, “Is it a desert?”

“Something like that. The main waters of the cave system are held at bay by a hog’s back. Think of it as a continental divide several hundred feet under the surface. That’s why we’ll be moving at speed. There was a salt ocean here at some point, and the entire area is nothing more than a desiccant. If we stay to the ridge and keep moving, it shouldn’t take more than two hours from here to the first sign of the Chandeliers, but we’re making a stop just before we leave the sands. There’s something that we need to collect.” French punctuated that with an ominous wave of the spear point, which flashed blue in the light of the cavern.

“Does it involve killing, fighting, or trapping something dangerous?” Saavin asked brightly.

“Indeed. All three, in fact.” He smiled at her upbeat reply.

“I was hoping you’d say that.” She motioned that he should lead, and they began to pick their way down the path. They walked in silence along a path that ranged from flat to rolling. Great sheets of buttery flowstone swept down from slagged walls, broken only by irregular boulders that lay strewn casually, as if by some giant hand. Crinoid stems thicker than tow cables serried upward in columns to vanish in the dark, the surrounding matrix eroded by water or the passage of unknown animals. Flowstone covered dung heaps along game paths filled with tracks deep enough to cast their own shadows. Pooled water rested in the broad, three and four toed imprints. Some of the miniature reservoirs were clear, others fetid and covered with algae that pulsed lightly with a purpose known only to the soul of the cave. Fossils were everywhere in a profusion that boggled the mind. French pointed out examples of animals that were known to him, but there were other unknown species frozen forever in the darkened stone, never to be understood. Saavin tapped a whorled shell so delicately formed that her finger collapsed the out chambers into a small cloud of calcified dust.

The cave transitioned from a dynamic ecosphere to something that was unnervingly familiar. If anything, the chamber opened even wider, and the ceiling receding into the gloom of the weak light given off by the sporadic lichens. There was a different color to their glow; it tended toward warmer hues and the roseate gold of Saavin’s home suffused the air, leaving her more at ease than any other place she’d stepped since they went underneath.

There were rolling white dunes carved with the distinct riparian marks of receding waters, yet no evidence remained from this more hospitable time. The chamber was dry. It was also utterly silent, unlike the living sections of the underneath that crackled with life and the businesses of predation and mating. A light, warm wind pushed against their faces as they slipped quietly over the spine of the chamber; a black rock face that punched through the depths of white silica and ran in a serpentine arc before vanishing once more under the weight of the dunes. French kept looking up at odd intervals until they approached the remnants of a small creature that had clearly fallen from the ceiling to its death.

“What is it?” Saavin asked. She poked at the airy bones with her spear. The skeletal remains were light, and held together more from habit than tissue. It had been a lizard of some sort, or perhaps a ferret, or one of a dozen other possible creatures. It was, to Saavin’s eyes, a mystery.

French knelt and began to remove items from his pack. “That thing we need? It’s directly overhead. Don’t look.”

Saavin suppressed a jerk and kept her eyes fixed on French before asking in a quiet voice, “What is it, and how do we kill it?”

French selected a section of lobster meat from his foil, saying only, “We’re going to have a barbecue.” He winked and began arranging a small bunch of twigs that were bone white. She’d seen him pick them from a washout near the cavern opening, wondering what his intent would be for the battered driftwood. With a single match, he lit the wood with a hissing pop. Fragrant smoke began to drift straight upward for several feet before being disturbed by the currents of the chamber. With one of the longer sticks, he pierced the lobster meat and placed it over the fire where it began to sizzle invitingly.

“If whatever it is we’re hunting won’t eat that, I will,” Saavin remarked, earning a low chuckle from French. “What are we expecting, and should I be ready?”

He cut his eyes to the ceiling. “Arachnid. Very toxic, but slow. Use your spear to pierce in the crown of its eyes, and keep it away from you. They’ll begin descending in a moment if I’m any judge of their senses.”

True to his word, French pointed at a globular shape that swung ponderously down on a silken strand. “Ahh, our first customer.” If Saavin didn’t know how seriously he regarded the danger of the cave, she would swear he sounded smug. “I’ll take it. We want a single killing strike so as not to ruin the body.” As he spoke, the creature spread wide, fat limbs and began an audible hiss at the approaching point of French’s spear. With the casual motion of a seasoned hunter, French sent the weapon flickering up into the front of the corpulent shape.

He was rewarded with a jolting squeak, as the legs snapped outward and a death rattle shook every limb with short, violent spasms. When lowering his spear, Saavin got a good look at their prey. It was something between a crab and a spider, she thought, although the legs ended in dual claws that looked to be capable of piercing stone. There was dark reddish hair in whorls over the tight skin, and a ring of eyes identified an arachnid as being somewhere reasonably close in the genetic heritage. There were pale, pink gills that sagged flat against the underside. Saavin’s eyes rounded at that, but before she could examine the creature further, French expertly sliced the abdomen of the pumpkin-sized animal open, revealing a pair of lurid black glands that quivered when he placed the spear point against them.

“Venom. Unbelievably toxic, and thick. Hand me that small bottle from my pack?” he asked, removing the glands with a reverent dexterity. When the two sacs were safely encased in glass, he smiled. “I’m betting that our odds of killing anything we encounter just increased dramatically.” His grin deepened, and then a wisp of silk began to fall between them, like a cable cut away to a long fall. He swatted at the strand and looked up again, seeing nothing, but Saavin’s nerves went to general quarters when she saw several more strands begin to descend, free of their owners.

“What is it?” she whispered. When he shook his head in silence, they both raised their spears toward the cave roof.

“More,” was his simple reply. First one, then three, and then more than a dozen of the arachnids began dropping around them with an economic motion that the previous, and now quite dead, relative had been lacking. “These look bigger. Different colors, too.” He motioned Saavin to stand, and they moved silently toward the dunes that fell away from either side of the hog’s back. The spiders followed them with the gait of drunken sailors, losing their footing and splaying out with nearly every step. The spiders did not stop advancing, and soon Saavin found herself backpedaling with the same difficulties of their clumsy pursuers. The spiders began to hiss low, like a call.

“French, those spiders?” Saavin pointed. He struck with blinding speed at the nearest of the creatures, pinning it to the sand with a ripe splat as his steel paralyzed his target. “Do they seem . . . young?”

The mother arachnid dropped onto French’s back with a whisper, slamming him into the sand and grappling his torso with eight muscular legs. Saavin gasped and lashed out with her spear from sheer instinct, striking the beast in one gilled flank, even as it rode French down the side of the dunes in a shower of sand and flying spittle. She could see the spider’s wicked fangs rhythmically stabbing at French’s whisperskin to no avail, but his arms were brutally pinned by the hairy, segmented legs of the pony-sized predator. It was only simple gravity and the bulbous body’s ungainly ride on the dune that stopped French from being crushed. With a massive leap, Saavin cleared a stray pile of rockfall, driving her spear into the pink gills and then repeating the savage action until the spider’s legs began to open unwillingly. Tissue was cut with each punishing blow, and then Saavin went down, tripped by three of the young who had industriously reclaimed the high ground and leapt at her from the hog’s back. As she whirled and spat the sand from her mouth, a single image caught her eye as French drove his belt knife into the giant spider, opening a rent in the turgid abdomen that shot clear fluids into the dark of the cavern. With a rolling kick, he flipped the beast and slashed at the joints, taking one leg at a time from the fight in a series of mercilessly surgical cuts. Saavin pounded each of her immature foes with feet, hands, and spear, reducing them to squashed sacks leaking their innards onto the sand. French circled the enormous female arachnid and leaned on his spear, driving the point deep into the junction between two of eight eyes. An infantile scream burst forth from the creature, and its gills flared once before deflating as death claimed the stealthy huntress. French leaned against his spear, gasping, and asked Saavin if she was hurt. In between gulps of air she said no, and they both sagged to the rock of the hog’s back after taking stock of their own limbs.

“Were you bitten?” she asked, giving him a look of appraisal, even as her chest heaved with the efforts of combat. Adrenaline still sizzled in her veins, and her hands twitched on the spear, setting the leaf like point to vibrating in the cool air of the cavern.

He shook his head in an effort to concentrate on breathing. A spate of soft clicking rose behind them, and their eyes snapped as one to the carcass of the immense spider. A deluge of young began dropping out of the gloom at accelerated rates, covering the corpse and beginning to visibly rip and tear at the bulk of their mother. Nothing was wasted in the cave, no matter what the pedigree of a potential meal. When the pile of squabbling youth became too many to count, French stood and backed away from their position.

“We’d better leave while they’re occupied. There isn’t enough of
her
to feed all of
them
,” he stated, appraising the rate at which the industrious young were feeding.

Saavin backed away with him, feet sliding occasionally on the erratic conditions of the hog’s back and, when their wind returned, they both broke into an unspoken trot, eager to leave to carnage behind. Their pace quickened when the air turned moist, and the cave bloomed once again into an exultation of life. The distant roar of water told Saavin they were close to the Chandeliers, but the wind drops on her tongue tasted of minerals and secrets. The sense of other penetrated all of her senses and, without so much as a glance from French, she knew that this was the end of anything remotely terrestrial. They were entering the realm of demons. Despite the water, and the riot of life, they were crossing a liminal into hell.

“Ropes first?” Saavin asked.

French knelt in answer. They stood on a raw outcrop of scaled debris that descended toward a watery chaos. Columns of flowstone whirled away in every direction, and there were no less than three moving streams cavorting over and around the erratic landscape. Water splashed and bounded in punishing spumes, throwing the myriad colors of light that spangled from an abundance of lichens. Plants of unearthly design grew in profusion, clinging to every moist surface with roots like desperate fingers. Gravity seemed to have no effect on the luminescent stalks, and French mouthed the word
kelp
over the roar of the water when Saavin raised a questioning brow.

He stood behind Saavin and shouted while pointing, “I’ve got pitons driven already from my first visit. The first part is simple. When we get to the flat table rock, freeze.
Do not move further.
” He turned her face to his and nodded with gravity. “Trust me. We’ll rest at the base. Stay left. We cannot allow the water to push us right.”