A cold wind whipped her hair across her face, and she brushed it away and squinted at the Phaerie Lord. At seven feet tall, he dwarfed her in comparison. The magnificent sword that had rested by his throne now hung from his belt.
“Why are we here?” she asked.
“I have a proposition for you,” he said, his eyes like slivers of gemstone. “And it would not do to have my people know that I stooped to bargaining with a human.”
“I’m listening,” Poison replied, sloughing off the insult. If it got her Azalea back, she could endure all the insults he had.
“I’m not certain how much you know, so I’ll be brief. The Realm of Phaerie is not the only Realm besides your own. There are many Realms, and each has its own Lord or Lady. Within our domains, we are all-powerful; but outside them, we are vulnerable to the master or mistress of that Realm. The exception, of course, is your own weak land, which has no leader worth speaking of.”
“What has this to do with Azalea?” Poison asked.
“You will complete a task for me,” he said. “And when it is done, I will restore your sister to you.”
Myrrk’s words came back to Poison suddenly, with all the weight of a prophecy: do you think the Phaerie Lord will just give you your sister back? No, there have to be tests, trials, a struggle; setbacks, twists, revelations.
“Why me?” she asked, automatically choosing to question rather than accept what he had offered. “Why deal with humans, if you despise us so much?”
A spasm of annoyance crossed the Phaerie Lord’s face. “Your species’ lack of magick has a useful side-effect. You can slip into and out of the Realms unnoticed. If I sent my phaeries, they would be caught in a moment and it would be plain who had sent them. This task is . . . secret.” He hissed the word as a threat, leaving her in no doubt as to what might happen if she betrayed the trust he was placing in her.
Poison crossed her arms. “Then what must I do?”
Aelthar paced back and forth across the tower top. “The good Lady Asinastra possesses a very special dagger, a dagger with a blade that splits into two prongs, like fangs. It is unique, and very valuable. I want it. You must get it for me.”
“And where is it?”
“In her castle. In her chambers.” He held out a fist and opened it; inside was a small glass orb, the size of an apple, and so black that it seemed made of darkness, eating the light all around. “As soon as you have the dagger, break this.”
Poison took the orb. It was cold as frost. She slipped it into her pocket.
“What does it do?”
Aelthar smiled nastily. “You’ll see. Don’t you trust me, human?”
“I’m not stupid. Tell me what it does.”
Aelthar shrugged. “No,” he said simply. “Use it when you have the dagger, and not before. If you don’t like the terms of our deal, you can always refuse.”
Poison glared at him hatefully. He knew fully well that she had no choice. He was just antagonizing her for the sake of it.
“So how do I get there?”
“I will send you.”
“And how do I get into the Lady’s castle once I’m in her Realm?”
“That,” said Aelthar with a toss of his flaming hair, “is your problem.”
Poison thought for a moment, but her heart had already decided.
“I have your word of honour as a Lord that my sister will be given back to me after I return?”
“I swear it,” he replied, with a smirk.
“Then I accept.”
“I thought you would.”
*
The wind moaned in the mountains, and Bram held his hat on as he looked at the passing-place. Behind them, the Coachman waited, his face obscured by his white cowl. The horses champed and stamped. Peppercorn hugged herself and shivered.
“In there?” she asked.
Poison nodded gravely. “In there.”
They were assembled on a ledge high up on a mountainside, a rough jut of black stone in amidst an endless landscape of rock and snow. It was impossible to see anything else of the Realm of Phaerie from here, only an eternal procession of peaks, capped with white. It was freezing at this altitude, and the wind cut to the bone.
Before them was a narrow gash in the rock, barely ten feet high and only wide enough for Bram to just squeeze into, if he had a mind to. His expression showed that he did not. It was curtained thick with spiderwebs, and spindly black shapes with fat bodies moved with a hunter’s grace along the surface of the sticky veils.
“Aelthar said the Coachman would take us anywhere we wanted to go,” Poison reminded them. “None of you have to come.”
Peppercorn glanced down at Andersen, who was sitting with his tail curled around his legs, looking as miserable as it was possible for a cat to look. He mewed piteously, obviously unhappy at the cold.
“This is like an adventure, isn’t it?” she said tremulously.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Poison said, though the adventurers in the stories she read had always seemed a lot more certain of themselves than she was, and they had usually got at least one magickal item by now to use at an opportune moment. Then she thought of the orb in her backpack. Still, what earthly use was that? Just like the phaeries in Fleet’s stories, to give her something and not tell her what it did.
Peppercorn chewed her lip, her pretty features uncertain. She was like a doll that had suddenly found it had been discarded by the child who used to play with it; having never had to choose her own way before, she seemed vaguely lost.
“What about you, Bram?” Poison said. “You can go back home, if you want.”
Bram scratched the back of his neck. “Hmm. The thing about that is, you’ll still be going on into that place, with or without me.”
Poison tilted her head. “True enough.”
Bram sighed. “Well, until you stop throwing yourself into these things like a fool, I suppose I’m stuck with you. All the sovereigns in the world wouldn’t mean much if I turned my back on you when you needed me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself!” Poison laughed. “I don’t need you.”
Bram gave her a knowledgeable look from beneath his bushy brows.
“What’s that look for? Don’t come over all wise with me, Bram. I can do just as well without you, you know.”
“Of course you can,” Bram said.
“You didn’t mean that!” Poison accused, frustrated.
“Are we going?” Peppercorn said quietly.
Poison and Bram stopped arguing and looked at her. “Sorry?”
“Are we going?” Peppercorn repeated. “Andersen’s getting cold.”
“You’re coming, then?”
“I always wanted to go on an adventure,” she replied simply.
Poison couldn’t argue with that. “You’re not scared of spiders, are you? Either of you?”
Bram grunted a negative. Peppercorn shook her head. “I don’t like rats very much though,” she added.
“That’s all right,” Poison replied. “I imagine the spiders will have eaten all the rats.”
And with that, she swept aside the first veil of cobwebs, and they stepped into the passing-place.
It was dark in the Realm of Spiders. The sky was a mottled velvet colour, wisps of purple cloud drifting across the cold points of starlight, far away. No moon lit this realm, and yet it was as bright as the brightest night in the Realm of Man, for everything glistened here.
Poison, Bram, Peppercorn and Andersen stood on a high, rocky ledge overlooking the palace of the Lady Asinastra. Behind them was the narrow mouth of the passing-place, where they had forged their way through a thousand webs to arrive at the other side of the defile. Strands of spider silk hung from them in tatters, stirring in the faint breeze. Poison’s skin crawled with the memory, and she could not convince
herself that she did not still have some of the foul things in her hair; but she counted herself lucky at least that nothing poisonous had bitten them. Bram, who had gone first, had showed her the numerous tiny puncture marks on his thick gloves, and remarked that he would probably be dead if they had reached bare skin. He seemed surprisingly unconcerned about the whole affair.
The palace of the Lady of Spiders stood inside a great mountain bowl, with peaks rising high all around it. It was set in the midst of a thick green forest, boughs frosted with spiderwebs that must have been massive to be visible from this distance. The palace itself consisted of a dozen towers of varying height, placed in no particular pattern or order, connected by bridges at seemingly random elevations. It was made of what appeared to be black stone, with purple parapets, but much of its shape was disguised by the immense strings of webbing that reached between the towers, and spread out all the way to the rock walls that surrounded it, so that the palace was the centre of a web that encompassed the entire mountain bowl. Huge veils of white, sticky fibre hung between the strands, gently filling with air like sails in the breeze and stirring the web around them.
Nothing moved, except for the vast shifting of the web.
“Should we think about getting down?” Peppercorn suggested, peering over the lip of the ledge to the tops of the trees, hundreds of feet below.
“I think we can climb,” Bram added. The rock face was thick with ledges to rest on, and it was folded enough so that handholds would be no problem. “We can put the cat in my backpack.”
Andersen gave him an offended look, then began licking his paw daintily.
“Not yet,” Poison said. “There’s no hurry. Let’s have something to eat, watch and wait.”
“I’m all for that,” Bram said, shucking off his pack and sitting down.
“I don’t like the look of that forest,” Poison murmured absently, gazing into the web-laden depths of the trees. “We’d never see them coming.”
They ate cold meat, bread and dried fruit on the ledge, considering themselves relatively safe for the time being. They could always dart back into the crack in the rock if anything threatened, and they could see an enemy approaching long before it got to them. Poison was thinking. The route through the forest was both too obvious and too dangerous. If there were spiders big enough to spin webs like that, then they would stand less than no chance in the close, dark confinement of the trees. There had to be another way.
“Look!” said Peppercorn suddenly, pointing. The others looked up to see a beautiful moth-like creature come swooping over the edge of the mountain bowl. Its wingspan was enormous, but its wings were gossamer-thin and almost transparent, patterned in delicate colours. Its body was slender and frail and six-legged, and leaflike antennae waved above its segmented eyes as it tested the air.
“It’s pretty!” Peppercorn smiled.
“Don’t get too attached,” Poison said.
A moment later, Peppercorn saw what she meant. The moth was swooping directly into the web, apparently unable to detect the obstacle with whatever method of navigation it used. Peppercorn sucked in a breath as it glided towards a ropy strand as thick as a man. At the last moment, it seemed to notice something in its path and banked aside, but it was not fast enough; the trailing edge of a wing caught on the sticky fibre, and the rest of its body was pulled back by the snag, slapping into the web where it was caught.
The spider was on it in a matter of seconds. Peppercorn gasped as the vast, bulbous monster darted out of a cave in the wall of the mountain bowl and raced along a thread towards the hub of the palace, then back out again along the spoke where the moth was struggling. It bundled itself around the hapless victim, which shuddered as it was bitten. The moth’s thrashing grew more desperate, and then weakened and ceased. They watched for a time as the spider cocooned its prey, then saw the creature tuck its prize under its abdomen and scuttle back to its cave for a feast.
Bram seemed to have lost his appetite. “They’re so cursedly quick,” he muttered.
But Poison seemed less put out than he was. The drama had given her an idea. “They are quick, which is why we won’t go through the forest,” she said. “They’d catch us in a moment.”
“So how are we going to get into the palace?” Peppercorn asked plaintively.
“We’re going to climb along the web,” Poison replied.
Of all the places Bram might have imagined himself ending up in his middle age, he had never seen himself spreadeagled across a cliff face in the Realm of Spiders with nothing but air between him and a messy death in the trees below. He mumbled and muttered oaths and blew his white moustache, but still he clambered on, working the toe of his boot into a crack, sliding his gloved fingers into a fold in the rock, until finally he put his foot down safe on a ledge, and there before him was the strand of spiderweb.
By happy chance, one of the massive tendrils of white silk was anchored to the wall not far from where Poison and the others had entered the Realm. Poison had outlined her plan to them in detail, but it relied on several factors about which they were not yet certain. One was how sticky the web was; the other was how strong. And there was a third factor, too. Who was more patient, the spider or the flies that sought to evade her?
Bram heartily disapproved of the whole affair, but he had volunteered to go even so.
“I’m the strongest climber,” he said. “And besides, the sooner I prove to you that this won’t work, the better.”
The ledge was wide enough for Bram to relax a little, and was close enough to the strand so he could reach it without stretching too much. He caught his breath, then looked over at where Poison and Peppercorn had been following his progress.
“Touch the web!” Poison called. “Gently! You don’t want to bring the spider!”
Bram swore under his breath. She had to mention that, didn’t she? If he did attract the spider, there wasn’t anywhere he could go. Still, if he remembered rightly some tale an old minstrel had once told him about mandolin strings, they didn’t vibrate so well if they were plucked at the ends; it was only by striking them in the middle that they made a noise. He hoped the same principle applied to spiderweb.
Gingerly, he reached out a hand and laid it on the webbing. At worst, he reasoned, he’d lose a glove. The web was thick and flexible, but he could feel the immense strength in its construction. The glue on its surface oozed between his fingers. He let his hand rest there for a moment, then tried to pull it away. The glue resisted, but it gave up with a little effort. Bram harrumphed to himself. The glue was weak, all right. It was probably designed to catch those winged moth-things, which – large as they were – were terribly frail and probably possessed little physical strength. He glanced down the web, but there was no sign of the spider.
“I think we can climb on it, anyway,” he called. “But it’ll be slow going.”
Poison flashed a grin of triumph. “Now use your knife!” she cried back.
Bram gave her an irritated glance and did as she said, slicing a little way into the web. It took some sawing to get the blade in, but once he had he found he could pull it away as if he were peeling a string of celery.
“How is it?” Poison asked.
“I think it might work,” Bram said grudgingly. “We’ll see if it stretches.”
He tied the narrow string of webbing round his waist and climbed back to the ledge where Poison and Peppercorn waited. Every few feet he had to stop and tug the webbing to unpeel it a little further from the main body of the web, and each time he held his breath in case the movement would bring the spider; but it never came, and eventually he reached his companions, and sat down for a rest while Poison excitedly untied the webbing from him.
“No wild idea goes unrewarded,” she declared, weighing the sticky silk in her hands.
“Only in stories, Poison,” Bram reminded her. “Haven’t you learned t
o tell the difference yet?”
“Is there a difference?” she asked. “Here, come here. We’ll all need to pull on this. And be ready to run.”
“Run where?” Peppercorn bleated.
“Back into the crevice,” Poison replied, as Bram wearily took hold of the rope. Peppercorn did so too. They looked like they were about to engage in a bizarre tug-of-war.
“Now!” Poison cried, and with that the three of them pulled the rope as hard as they could. The strand tore a little further down the length of the web, but it held easily. “Release!” Poison called. “Now pull again!”
They pulled, relaxed, pulled, and each time the shaking of the great strand of webbing that they were attached to increased. At first it was a tremble, then a noticeable swing, and then—
Peppercorn shrieked as the spider burst from its cave, scuttling to the centre of the web before racing outward again, seeming to grow in size with terrifying speed as it hurtled towards them. But they had already dropped their silk and fled into the narrow slash of the crevice, huddled in the darkness there. The creature reached the end of the strand and stopped. Close up, it was truly grotesque. Eight eyes shone a dull red above enormous mandibles, and its bloated abdomen was furred in spiny black bristles. Its legs were spindly in proportion, but they were still as thick as Bram’s arm. Poison did not doubt that if the spider caught them, it could kill them in a flash.
But it had not caught them. It had not even seen them. Instead, it waited, puzzled, processing the anomaly in its arachnid brain. Something had been struggling here; yet now the hunter had arrived, the prey was gone. It was not completely outside the spider’s experience – after all, every so often a moth managed to pull free of the web, usually at the expense of a leg or a chunk of wing – but it was rare enough to be unsettling. Though it sat motionless for a long while, Poison felt it stewing in suspicion. Then, finally, it backed up the thread, scuttled away and retreated to its cave.