“Everyone up!” shouted Veethar.
I groaned, feeling like I hadn’t slept more than five minutes. I cracked open my eyes, expecting full darkness, but full darkness under a star-filled sky. Instead, what greeted me was the ever-present velvety dark canopy of the Great Forest of Suel.
My legs were stiff, almost numb, and I groaned again. I tried to rub my face, to clear the sleep from my eyes, but my arms felt heavy, enervated. I turned my head to the side, and lurched in the other direction, my pulse slamming in my veins.
Between me and the underbrush crouched a spider the size of a large dog. Its four black orb-like eyes tracked my thrashing movements, its yellow-haired forelegs waving in the air. The fuzzy hair that coated the rest of its body was white with dark purple stripes.
I lurched away from the monster in a panic, and something ripped, and my left arm was free. I hoisted myself up to a seated position, not taking my eyes off the white and purple spider. It separated its forelegs, revealing fangs at least four inches long and dripping with a syrupy, clear liquid that was no doubt its venom.
“Everyone!” shouted Veethar again. “Wake up!”
I couldn’t move my legs—they had that tingling pins-and-needles numbness of restricted blood flow. A ropy, white substance covered my legs and attached them to the ground with thick strands of goo. I grabbed it, and my fingers stuck to it as if I had grabbed a rope made of super-glue. I broke several of the strands, and the huge spider near me hissed and clacked its fangs together. It skittered a step or two toward me, then Veethar was there, kicking it into the underbrush.
Keri and Fretyi growled and snarled, hunching low to the ground between the spider and me, tails rigid and straight out behind them, lips quivering back from their teeth.
“Up! Hank get up!” he yelled and ran to the other side of the camp.
“What are they?” mumbled Jane.
“Spiders, but big!” yelled Sig.
“Get up!” I bellowed. “I’m webbed to the ground, and the webbing contains a numbing agent.”
“Everyone up!” yelled Veethar. “They are all around us!”
I finished clearing the webbing off my legs and got to my feet. I belted on my pistols and bent to retrieve the floppy hat Althyof had enchanted for me. A rope of web came hurtling out of the underbrush and slapped against the back of my hand. The numbness started right away, and I jerked my hand back, pulling the purple and white spider out of the underbrush by its own strand of webbing.
Keri and Fretyi leapt at the thing, snarling, each attacking from opposite sides of the spider as if they’d been hunting all their lives instead of eating scraps out of my hand. The web fell away, and the spider circled to face Keri, forelegs coming up. Fretyi ducked in and bit the spider’s back leg, shaking his head in violent arcs. The varkr pups were almost as tall as the spider but weighed considerably less. The spider hissed and whirled around, pulling Fretyi off his feet, and Keri shot in to grab a leg. I took two steps forward and kicked the spider as hard as I could with half-numb legs. The thing squealed and thrashed its legs, but the pups held fast, growling and grinding their jaws together. I kicked it again, this time angling for its head. When my foot connected with the spider’s head, there was a tearing sound followed by a pop, and it went spinning into the darkness ringing the camp.
Citrine-colored blood coursed from the spider’s neck, and when it hit the ground, it hissed and ignited in a flash of sickly yellow flame, consuming the old leaves there in a blinding flash. The varkr pups yelped and ran behind me, whining. The spider lurched around a few steps, spraying flaming blood everywhere and fell in a heap.
Webbing stuck to the back of my hand still, and an icy numbness was spreading across my hand. I detached the goop and let it fall next to the spider.
“Dad! Help!” yelled Sig.
I turned to where he’d been sleeping. Thick strands of the webbing crossed Sig’s chest and legs, gluing him to the ground, and a spider stood above him. I lurched in his direction, but before I’d gone three steps, Skowvithr was there, silvery blades bared. Keri and Fretyi bolted toward the spider, snarling and barking to raise the dead.
“Their blood ignites in the air!” I yelled.
Skowvithr nodded and slashed at the webbing holding Sig fast. The spider bounced up and down—almost as if it were a petulant child, pissed off that someone was breaking its sandcastle. When his arms were free, Sig batted the spider away—and into the smoldering fire.
The spider yelped and leapt through the air, four feet off the ground. It landed near Mothi, who scooped it even higher into the air with the flat of one axe and then batted it into the trees with the other. “How many of them are there?”
Everyone was on their feet, staring into the woods surrounding us, and everyone but Veethar had web hanging from their bodies. “Get the web off,” I said. “It keeps on numbing you even without the spider. Anyone see any more of the bastards?”
Keri and Fretyi growled in unison—noses pointed toward the woods, tails held stiff parallel to the ground. “Pups! Stay!” I said. Keri glanced at me for a second and whined, but then snapped his eyes back into the forest.
“I don’t like this,” said Veethar. “Arachnids don’t act like this.”
“Or grow this large, but hey, who wants to be picky,” mumbled Althyof, picking webbing out of his hair and beard.
“Have you heard of these before?” asked Jane.
“No,” said Veethar.
“Well, they seem afraid of us, now that we are upright,” said Meuhlnir. “They don’t want to face us awake. At least for now.”
“And how many days must we be in this forest?”
He shrugged. “Three more. Four, maybe.”
“Four days without sleep,” said Jane.
“We can mount a watch. Some of us sleep, and some of us keep the spiders away,” said Mothi.
We set a schedule, and we were not among the first to stand watch, so Jane and I pulled our bedroll closer to the fire. “It had to be spiders,” I muttered.
“Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from the mean old spiders.”
“Don’t joke, I’ll hold you to it.”
We tried to sleep, but spiders tried to get to those of us trying to sleep whenever the watchers drifted more than five feet away. The constant activity made it impossible to drift off to sleep—never mind the spiders.
I sat up with a sigh.
“This will not work,” mumbled Jane.
“No,” I sighed. I glanced around, and no one on the sleep shift was sleeping. “We might as well move out. Maybe the next place won’t allow giant, mutant spider freaks to join the country club.”
Everyone agreed, so we packed up and moved out. Riding through the Forest was like a nightmare in and of itself: the reaching branches, the monotonous quality of the light—or lack thereof—and the constant skittering in the brush of spiders paralleling our course.
“How will we be able to do this?” whispered Jane, riding beside me.
“Look at it this way: it will only take two days if we don’t sleep.”
“But the horses can’t go twenty-four hours a day. And you know what being over-tired does to you.”
“Makes me handsome and irresistible?”
“Don’t make me punch you.”
“Yes, dear.”
“That’s better. Now, answer my question and make it snappy.”
“Yes, dear. I don’t know the answer, but we don’t have much choice, either way.”
“You call that an answer?”
“Yes, dear.”
Time took on a monotonous, unreal feeling, with no difference between periods of alertness and periods of lethargy. We rode where Veethar led us, swaying in our saddles, trusting him to guide us through the foul place. No one spoke much on the first day, and we spoke even less as the days and nights blurred together. The interminable ride was punctuated only by rest periods for the horses, in which we sat around a campfire while lassitude tried to steal us away. We ate mechanically, the food tasteless and textureless.
I never even thought of my dream, and the Svartalf runeskowld it had contained, but the scroll case at my side was ever in my mind, eating away at my resolve.