World Weaver (The Devany Miller Series Book 4) (18 page)

I hooked us to Vasili’s and sure enough, Medusa-head was bent over a tome, his finger tracing the words on the page. How he could read with smoke for eyes, I didn’t know. “Knock knock.”

He sat up and glared over at me. “What now?”

“You know me so well.” I leaned over his shoulder. “What are you reading?”

“Stories about Originators meddling with witches and Wydlings.”

“Oh. Have you found anything useful?”

He shook back his hair, the tendrils curling and moving like snakes. “Only that Originators find the pairing of witch and Wydling to be endlessly fascinating and completely unattainable.” I opened my mouth to protest and he held up a hand. “Present company excepted. Ravana was ahead of her time, but she didn’t share her knowledge with anyone as far as I can tell. She took the secret to making something like you to her grave.”

“Except her experiments weren’t so secret after all. Or some other Originator had the same idea and similar luck.”

The tentacles on his head whipped wildly about. Did that mean he was excited by the news, or freaked out by it? “Do tell.”

Excited then. “I met someone in Bayladdy who looks Skriven to me. And witch, and Wydling. He wasn’t born that way, though. Someone made him, piece by piece.”

“Fascinating. Could you bring him here?”

“Not yet. I promised to help him figure out what he is when I have my daughter back. I’ll let you meet him, when the time comes.”

“Excellent, thank you.” He looked as excited as I’d ever seen him.

“No problem.” Something squirmed on a string near my head. It looked like a squirrel, but I knew better than to touch it. Many of the things in his home were poisonous or explosive. “I don’t suppose you have ever found anything useful about the Riders, have you?” I asked, my attention still on the squirmy squirrel-like creature.

“I thought you’d taken care of that little menace.”

“I thought so too, but there are more—a lot more—crawling to shore. Whatever had been holding them back has fallen.” I paused. Had fixing the Omphalos freed them? Sure, one had managed to find its way into Sharps, but just one and somehow I thought Leon had played an active role in that. This, though, this was an invasion.

“Hmm.” He continued to scribble and I waited patiently until I realized he wasn’t pausing to think, he’d completely dismissed the conversation.

“Vasili,” I said. “Pay attention. Your Originator speaking.”

That did it. He sat up straight and gave me an almost hurt look. “I’m busy.”

“I’m sorry. I need help. Please.”

The please worked. He’d suffered rather cruelly under his former boss Amara and I’d saved him from her. “I do not know much about the Riders. There are no histories or legends about their origins. Midians talk about the infections, they talk about driving them back or killing the parasite, they talk about how the infection spreads but there’s nothing that says how they were created.” He rose and crossed the room to a bookshelf where books and scrolls were stacked higglety pigglety. He plucked one from the pile and turned his back as several more fell to the ground. “I’m guessing that means it was an Originator’s experiment turned loose on the world. Have you read through Ravana’s papers?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t even looked at them but once and what I’d seen was horrifying. “So was she the Josef Mengele of the Slip or what?”

He grimaced. “One of many. She liked to dabble with your world and Midia. There are others who prefer one over the other or other worlds altogether. If I were you, I’d search her papers.”

“Would you do it for me?”

“I would kill to get my hands on those.” Seeing my expression, he said, “I wouldn’t be able to read them. They are for Originator eyes only.”

I sighed. “Fine. What about the Spider Queen? What do you know about her?”

“Why are you always asking me about Midia?” He handed me the scroll he’d been holding and retrieved another. “Lucky for you, she travels between worlds too, so I have more information on her.” He opened the scroll, his smoke-filled sockets boiling as he stared. “She acts as a stabilizer for the magic on Midia. Her web holds the magic in place and distributes it across the world evenly. At least it did. It has been breaking for centuries, ever since she lost her egg sac.”

Something in his face annoyed me. “The egg sac is the Omphalos, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t that obvious? I mean, no mere witch could have made a
rashn
that powerful and they don’t occur that big in nature, as far as I know. I’m surprised it took you this long to figure out.”

I yanked the ponytail holder out and raked my fingers through my hair. “Are there any other things I need to know? Things you think are obvious? Because it would be great to have all the information ahead of time for once.”

“I couldn’t even begin to figure out where to start. ‘You know nothing, Jon Snow.’”

I gave him the same look I gave my kids when they were pushing every single one of my buttons. “Really.”

“Hey, you guys have good books.”

“So the Omphalos is the egg sac,” I said, trying to get the conversation back on track. “Did I hurt it when I fixed it?”

“No. See, the Spider Queen repaired it the same way after every hatching. Sealing it up would allow the babies to grow in strength and size before breaking free. The problem is, it hasn’t been fertilized this time around, so there aren’t any babies to hatch from it.”

Since it didn’t sound bad, it was probably cataclysmic. “And?”

“Well, you sealed it, the power grows. That’s what it was designed to do. Problem is, without babies to break free of the sac, the power can’t leak out, it keeps building and building until …” He spread his hands outward and made an explosive noise with his mouth.

“Shit.”

“Oh yeah. That kind of power will flatten everything for miles and miles around. It rushes out, tears into the fabric of the web, breaks it. Chaos.”

Bethy and Liam were both on Midia and both in peril. Sick at heart, I asked, “How much time do I have?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d say you had a while because it had been draining for a long time, but it’s also not been used in a long time. The power coming off it is tremendous.” He handed me the other scroll and sat back down at his table.

I turned to Nex, who’d been silent this whole time. “Oh my god. Tell me it’s going to be okay.”

“You will kick all the ass and take all the names,” he said. “I’m sure if Midia perishes, you could make a comfortable home here,” he added and I groaned.

“Oh god.”

***

The first time I tried hooking to Krosh I ended up in a bog, ankle deep in water that smelled of rotten grass, leaves, and sulfur. The smell was atrocious and I heaved, my stomach protesting the stench. I opened a hook again, my hand gripping the necklace tight as I pictured Krosh’s face, his eyes. I fell through to sweet smelling air, breathing deep. Krosh was nearby and I walked into his arms. He was good enough to wait until I could talk without gagging to ask, “What’s wrong?”

“The Omphalos is going to explode.”

His eyebrows rose.

“Destroy the world, explode. End of the world as we know it, explode.” I pushed away from him and turned to Tytan. “Did you know that the Omphalos was an egg sac?”

He shrugged. “I did, but didn’t think it mattered.”

“You didn’t think it mattered? What about letting me know when I said we were going to see the Spider Queen? Or when I fixed the damned thing, maybe you could have said something?”

“To what effect, Devany? You would still have to visit the Spider Queen.” He slipped his hands into his pockets. “I didn’t know that you would fix it, though I should have guessed.”

I made a face at him and said, “We need to talk about what will happen when the Spider Queen gets her egg sac back. I don’t want to get caught with my pants down again.” I turned my back on Ty. “We should get going, set as fast a pace as we can maintain. I don’t know how long we have. It might be years, it might be days. Vasili didn’t know.”

Kroshtuka nodded. “Tonight I will Dream with Lizzie to ask her to send someone to the capitol. We know a few witches sympathetic to our cause. They can monitor the Omphalos and let us know through Dreams if anything changes.”

“It’s something,” I said. “Is it safe, though? Won’t the Riders be haunting Dreams, dropping potential into Wydling skulls?”

“They would need a personal connection, don’t forget. I will not linger long.”

I nodded. I could have hooked back to the Dream Caves, but this wasn’t as urgent as warning Lizzie about the Riders had been; it could wait until Krosh slept tonight. In a few minutes, we were back on the road.

Twice that day we saw movement in the distance and Kali scouted it out. Once it was a group of witches that had fled witch lands. They were hungry and thirsty, so we shared some of our food and water with them, then Krosh sent them north to Air Clan. Another time it was a lone Wydling, infected with a Rider, staggering north. I didn’t have to ask if she killed him when she pulled out the cloth to clean her swords.

The landscape gradually changed from densely packed scrub to less vegetation. Near Null, the ground had been golden or dark brown. Now it was the color of old iron left to rust in the sun and the further we got, the darker it got, until it glistened reddish black under the heat of the blue sky.

Our water was getting low, even with the supplementary jugs I’d brought. Kroshtuka said we would find water at the end of the next backroads and after a long day’s hike, we came upon the shimmery magic of one of the short cuts. At the end, sure enough, was a small oasis in the blasted landscape. We refilled our jugs and our canteens and drank our fill. Krosh brought down an animal that looked like a deer. After making sure it wasn’t a Wydling trapped in the guise of an animal, he killed it and we ate well that night. He used magic to dry the rest of the meat in strips that we packed up in spelled containers to keep it fresh. Better, he explained each step, guiding me in using my magic. He didn’t berate me for mistakes or lecture me on the moral uses of magic. His lesson was practical and specific, but it also expanded my knowledge of the way Midia worked.

He was a much better teacher than Arsinua or Jasper.

That night as we lay together in the silence of the night, I thanked him with soft, quiet kisses. I didn’t want to go further than that, not with the others so close and Tytan able to drop into my mind when he wished. The tender intimacy brought me closer to Krosh in a way that sex didn’t, anyway.

“Tomorrow is the Solstice. We will leave out the aventurine tomorrow night and ask for the Spider Queen to come to us.”

My head was resting on his arm and my eyes were heavy. Still, I asked, “Why do you think she hasn’t taken back her egg sac before now? The witches have had it for centuries.” I’d already told him what Masette had told me, that the Witch King had taken the Queen’s eyes and scattered them. “She’s only missing one. Surely she could see well enough with seven to reclaim the Omphalos.”

Krosh’s fingers brushed against my skin, making me shiver. “She is a magical creature. I imagine her vision and power are not complete without all her eyes. The Witch King wouldn’t have wanted her coming for the Omphalos and destroying the illusion of his strength. He knew what he was doing when he stole from her.”

“Just like that tricky witch knew what she was doing when she took your daughter,” Tytan said from the darkness. I didn’t bother looking around for him either. It was true.

“Stop being creepy and eavesdropping,” I returned, and he laughed.

Without talking about it, Krosh and I both put up a protection bubble around us, blocking out Tytan and the rest of the world. Forgetting my previous romantic notions, I asked, “Can we make this opaque and soundproof?”

Krosh laughed and magic spilled around us again as the bubble filled with color, blocking out the rest of the world. I didn’t ask if it was soundproof; his hands were on me, under my clothes, and I didn’t care about anything at all.

***

There were Riders surrounding the oasis when we woke. I didn’t know why they weren’t charging us, but something held them back. One of them was in the body of an eight-year-old boy and my heart ached to see him used so. “Where are they coming from?” I asked as I dressed.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Jolla said, her eyes bruised from crying and lack of sleep. “I think that when the Omphalos regained its power, it broke the magic keeping the Riders on Ketwer Island. All those who were driven there long ago are now free to spread across the Wilds.”

“How are we going to get out of here? There are too many to fight,” Lorath said.

“I will draw them off,” Kali said, freeing her swords from their sheaths. “Distract them while you move forward.” She burst from the oasis with a scream of challenge and at once all the Riders turned toward her, tracking her movements with jerky bodies. It was like a zombie movie, all lurching monsters and brains-hungry mouths.

We waited until Kali lured the beasts a few hundred yards away and then ran out the backside of the oasis, keeping a steady jogging pace until we crested a hill of red sand. Beyond was a gigantic arch made of black stone. Inside the arch squirmed grey and yellow lights. “What is it?”