Academ`s Fury

Chapter 39

"Come on," Tavi said. "We've got to go."

"Not yet," Kitai said. She turned to the entry of the tunnel and slipped down into it.

"Crows," Tavi muttered. He set the bottle aside and followed her, hissing, "It drops off on the right. Stay to your left."

He followed Kitai back into the ledge above the alien chamber, and crouched beside her as she stared down at the croach, the slow-moving wax spiders, the motionless Canim.

"By the One," she whispered, her eyes wide. "Aleran, we must go."

Tavi nodded and turned to go.

A wax spider appeared over the rim of the ledge, between them and the way back, and moved with lazy grace down the stone ledge toward Tavi.

Tavi froze. The wax spiders were venomous, but, more to the point, they worked with others of their kind. If this one signaled its companions, they would all come after him together-and while he might escape the slow-moving spiders, he would never outrun the bewitched Canim. He might be able to kill the spider, but not without its alerting the rest of its kind.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Kitai. She could only stare back at him, her eyes wide.

And then the spider's front leg touched lightly down on Tavi's hand, and he had to clench his teeth over a scream.

The spider stopped, luminous eyes whirling. It touched his hand with one forelimb for a moment, then used two of its front legs to gently run over his arm and shoulders. He remained rigidly still. The spider's limbs traced lightly over him, darting from his skin to the underside of its head and back several times, before it simply moved forward, stepping on his hand, elbow, then shoulder and crawled over him without attacking, without raising its whistling alarm cry, and without seeming otherwise to notice him.

Tavi turned his head slowly, only to watch the spider repeat its performance upon Kitai, then glide over her and down to the end of the ledge where it crouched and vomited out a patch of pale green croach, which it then began spreading over the ledge.

Tavi traded a long stare with Kitai, perplexed, and wasted no more time in heading back into the tunnel and away from the croach-filled cavern.

"Why did it do that?" Tavi blurted as soon as he had left the tunnel. "Kitai, it should have raised a warning and attacked. Why didn't it?"

Kitai emerged from the tunnel a second later, and even in the sullen light of the Canim lamp, he could see that she was pale and trembling violently.

Tavi stood absolutely motionless for a second. "Kitai?" he asked.

She rose, her arms wrapping around herself as if cold, and her eyes did not focus upon anything. "It must not be," she whispered. "It must not be."

Tavi reached out to her, laying his hand upon her arm. "What must not be?"

She looked up at him, her expression fragile. "Aleran. If… the old tales. If my people's tales are correct. Then these are the vord."

"Um," Tavi said. "The what?"

"The vord," Kitai whispered, and shuddered as she did. "The devourers. The eaters of worlds, Aleran."

"I haven't ever heard of them."

"No," Kitai said. "If you had, your cities would lie in ashes and ruin. Your people would be running. Hunted. As ours were."

"What are you talking about?"

"Not here, Aleran. We must go back." Her voice rose in panic. "We cannot stay here."

"All right," Tavi said, trying to sound soothing. "All right. Come on." He took up Varg's lamp and headed back up out of the Deeps, looking for the markings he'd left on the walls at intersections as they walked.

It took Kitai several moments to slow her breathing again. Then she said, "Long ago, our people lived elsewhere. Not in the lands we have today. Once we lived in a manner like your own people. In settlements. In cities."

Tavi arched an eyebrow. "I've never heard that. I didn't think your folk had any cities."

"No," Kitai said. "Not anymore."

"What happened to them?"

"The vord came," Kitai said. "They took many of our people. Took them as you saw those wolf-creatures in that cavern. They, too, had been taken."

"Taken," Tavi said. "You mean controlled? Enslaved, somehow?"

"More than that," she said. "The wolf-creatures you saw have been devoured. Everything within them that made them who they were is gone. Their spirit has been consumed, Aleran. Only the spirit of the vord remains-and the taken are without pain, or fear, or weakness. The vord spirit gives them great strength."

Tavi frowned. "But why would the vord do such a thing?"

"Because that is what they do. They spawn. Make more of themselves. They take, devour or destroy all life, until there is nothing else under the sky. They create themselves into new lives, new forms." She shuddered. "Our people have kept the tales of them. Dozens of horrible stories, Aleran, preserved over lifetimes beyond knowing. The kind that make even Marat stay close to their fires and huddle shivering in their blankets at night."

"Why keep those stories, then?" he asked.

"To help us remember them," Kitai said. "Twice, the vord all but destroyed our people, leaving only small bands running for their lives. Though it was long ago, we keep the stories to warn us should they come again." She bit her lip. "And now they have."

"How do you know? I mean, Kitai. If the Marat have worked so hard to remember them, why didn't you just point at them two years ago, and say, 'Oh look, it's the vord'?"

She let out an impatient hiss. "Am I speaking only to myself?" she demanded. "I told you, Aleran. They renew and reshape their forms. They are shapechangers. Each time the vord destroyed my people, they appeared as something different."

"Then how do you know it's them?"

"By the signs," she said. "Folk going missing. Being taken. The vord begin their work in secret, so that they are not discovered before they have a chance to multiply and spread. They strive to divide those who oppose them so that their enemies may be weakened." She shuddered. "And they are led by their queens, Aleran. I understand it only now: That creature, the one from within the heart of the Valley of Silence, the one you burned-it was the vord queen."

Tavi paused to look for the next marking. "I think I saw it. Here."

"In the cavern?"

"Yes. It was covered in a cloak, and issuing orders to a Cane who had not been… been…" He made a vague gesture.

"Taken," Kitai said.

"Taken." Tavi told her about the conversation between the cloaked figure and Sarl.

Kitai nodded. "You saw it. The vord plans to kill your headman. It wishes to create enough chaos to increase their numbers without being noticed. Until it is too late."

Tavi found his paces quickening. "Crows. Could they do such a thing?"

"The second time they ravaged my people, we were not able to stop them-and we had faced them before. Your people know nothing of them. So they seek to weaken you, divide you."

"The vord queen is using Sarl," Tavi murmured. "Divide and conquer. He provided her with soldiers to begin her work, and his caste has been hurling storms at Gaius in order to weaken him and force him to spend most nights in his mediation chamber, so that they have an idea of where he will be when they try to kill him. And the queen knows that if Alera is weakened, the Canim will attack us. She wants the Canim to attack and weaken us further-and in the process they will take losses as well. They'll leave themselves more vulnerable to the vord."

Kitai nodded. "In our tales they turned our peoples upon one another in much the same way."

"Crows," he swore quietly. Tavi thought of the long stair down to the First Lord's meditation chamber. After the first guard station, there were no other entrances or exits from the stairwell or the chambers below.

It was a death trap.

Tavi walked even faster. "They know where Gaius is. Twenty Canim might be able to fight their way to him. We have to stop them."

Kitai kept pace. "We will warn your warriors, lead them here, and destroy the vord."

"Sir Miles," Tavi said.

Kitai looked at him blankly.

"He's a war leader," Tavi clarified. "But I'm not sure he'll attack."

"Why would he not?"

Tavi clenched his jaw and pressed ahead, in a hurry but not stupid enough to go sprinting through the tunnels until he was hopelessly lost. "Because he doesn't like me very much. He might not believe me. And if I tell him I got the information from a Marat, I'll be lucky if he only storms out of the room."

"He hates us," Kitai said.

"Yes."

"Madness," Kitai said. "The vord are a threat to one and all."

"Sir Miles will understand that, too," Tavi said. "Eventually. I'm just not sure there's enough time for him to be stubborn." Tavi shook his head. "Maestro Killian is the one to convince. If I do that, he'll order Miles to do it."

They reached the last marking Tavi had left on the wall and entered familiar tunnels again. Tavi picked up his pace to an easy run, mind racing over what he had to do, how best to get it done.

He registered a sudden motion in front of him, and he flinched to one side just as a hooded attacker with a heavy truncheon appeared from behind a veil of furycrafting and swung it at him. The club glanced off his left arm, and Tavi felt it go suddenly numb. Kitai snarled somewhere behind him. Tavi hit the wall, stumbled, and barely managed to keep from falling. He drew his knife and turned to confront the attacker, just in time to see the truncheon in motion only inches from his face.

There was a flashing burst of bright lights, then everything went black.