Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
“ I don’t trust these critters.” Ava used some grease from the little lamp and a piece of wool from the plaid to wrap around and reignite the burned-out torch, which she handed to Tasgall. “Let’s light up the dark places before we go into them.”
He took hold of her hand and held up the torch to illuminate their path up the stairs. Although they had just appeared, they looked as if they had always been part of the castle, and even had cobwebs and soot stains on the walls.
“I would sure like to know how a pile of stone like this comes alive and starts building on itself,” she mentioned to the laird as they drew close to the top of the steps and another arch with a plain wooden door.
“We may look back through a window scroll to the first year we spent in the trap,” he assured her. “’Tis likely an effect of the enchantment.”
“I don’t think so.” All the magic involved in the trap seemed to be keeping everything the same, which wasn’t what had happened down in the dungeons. “I think the stairs were built to help us get out of there without going the way we came in, so we could avoid those critters cocooning everyone. That’s something a friend does, not a magic spell. It might be our way out of this trap, too.”
“I shall hope you’re right,” Tasgall said, and then pressed a finger to his lips before he opened the door a crack and peered outside. Closing it again, he said, “We’re one passage east of the great hall. We but need go right and then left. ’Tis all in darkness.”
“Those giant caterpillars have been doing everything in the shadows, and not just to hide from us. I bet light hurts them.” She took the torch from him. “I’ll swipe at them from the front. You guard our backs. Ready?”
He pulled open the door, and she entered the passage at a quick trot, turning right and peering ahead of her. She saw dozens of cocoons lining the walls, and then something enormous and pale green slithered out into the light. She drove it back by swatting the torch at it, and did the same to another that reared up on her other side.
The second caterpillar lanced her left arm and leg with two thick strands of webbing, making her drop the torch. Tasgall cut through the sticky stuff before he brought up his sword and decapitated the creature, immediately causing it to soften and then dissolve.
“Hold onto me, love,” he told her, encircling her waist with his arm as he lifted her up against his chest.
Ava clung to him with her right arm, as her left limbs had gone numb, and saw the passage ahead of them filling with shadows. Something caught hold of her right ankle and tried to yank her away from the laird, but she managed to free herself by kicking hard against it. Suddenly a huge blazing torch came hurtling from the other end of the hall, making the monstrous creatures cringe back, and Tasgall ran the gauntlet, ducking and turning to avoid the webbing shooting out from both sides.
“Thank the gods,” Farlan said as he dragged both of them into the great hall before Alec and several other clansmen pushed a barricade made of wood, trestle tables and benches back in front of the arch. “We reckoned you cocooned by those nightmarish slugs. Ben.”
Tasgall carried Ava over to the healer, who immediately removed the remnants of the webbing from her skin before washing the different spots with soap and hot water.
“The numbness wears off once the webbing is removed,” he assured her, and then frowned as he saw the blood on the bottom of her trousers. “What did this?”
“I don’t know. Something with a nasty bite.” She winced when he pushed up her pant leg and revealed a series of deep puncture wounds around her entire ankle, as if she’d been caught in an old-fashioned animal trap.
“So they’ve started to grow teeth,” Ben muttered as he pulled over a basin and dipped a cloth in it.
Alec came over and gave her a narrow look. “Why didnae you return from your search of the dungeons until now?”
“’Twas so cold below I fell prey to my mortal weakness,” the laird said before she could answer him. “Agent Travars kept me warm and safe through the night.”
“That’s one way to put it,” she murmured, amused by the war master’s shocked expression as he looked from her to Tasgall and back again. “The critters have been stashing cocoons down there.”
Alec seized her hand in his.
“Forgive me, my lady,” he said, something like love in his eyes now. “’Tis never easy for me, trusting outsiders with the care of my lord and my clan.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong, sir.” She understood him a little better now. “I do think we’ve got more trouble to contend with now.” She looked down at her wounded leg. “Seems like those critters are growing teeth. They might start eating their victims.”
“If they eat fast, then there might not be any way to come back from that,” Ben put in.
“I ended one of them by cutting off its head,” Tasgall told the other men. “The body and the head fell onto the passage floor and began to melt.” He regarded Ava, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I must leave you here.”
“That’s fine, but you come back, you hear me?” She didn’t care if anyone was watching, so she reached up and pulled his head down to kiss him.
“Let’s go kill these facking things,” Alec said, and gave Ava a wicked smile before leading the laird, Farlan and the other clansmen to the barricaded arch.
The ruckus they made out in the passage made her want to chase after the men, but she knew she’d only be a liability now.
“Looks like our war master finally approves of you, which hardly ever happens with outsiders,” Ben said as he started washing out her wound. “I guess you and the laird got busy while you were keeping him warm and safe last night?”
“I know for sure that this is a spell trap now,” she said, wincing as the soapy water stung. “Everyone in here has nothing better to do than gossip.”
“Here.” He stopped long enough to hand her a steaming mug of dark brew. “Polly just made this,” he said, nodding toward a girl standing by Elspeth near the hearth. “It’s pretty good and should help.”
“Thank you,” she said, holding the warm cup between her hands as she took a sip. The taste of the healer’s idea of a helping draft made her grimace a bit and she set it down, glancing back at Polly. She hadn’t seen her before now, and she wasn’t dressed like the other maids. “Do you know that girl?”
“Not very well. Her name is Polly Carter, and she was a housewife in our time. I think she works in the gardens.” The doctor dried off her leg before he reached for a roll of linen bandages. “She came into the trap after getting lost on the castle tour like I did.”
Ava studied the back of Polly’s head, where her dark hair showed paler roots. “Did Miz Carter arrive with you?”
He frowned. “No, she came a couple of months after me. Why?”
“No reason. I just haven’t run into her before now.” When he finished bandaging the wound, she asked, “Will I be able to walk on this leg?”
“Sure, but it’ll probably hurt a lot.” He helped her to her feet. “Tomorrow morning you’ll wake up and the wound will be gone, and you won’t have a single scar. That’s one of the beauties of being trapped here, you know. Complete recovery is always by sunrise on the next day.”
Ava tested her leg by gingerly placing her full weight on it, and standing that way until she was sure her ankle wouldn’t give out. “Thank you, sir.”
A guard called for help from outside the hall, and Ben hurried over as the men shifted the barricade enough to allow two men partly covered with webbing inside. She debated on going over to ask how the men were doing with fighting the critters, but then she saw Polly Carter squeezing her way through another barricade made of stacked benches.
“Oh, no, you don’t, Marianne,” she murmured, hobbling over just as the other woman wriggled through to the outer passage.
Ava grabbed a lantern but hesitated at the gap in the barricade. Going out might allow one of the caterpillars to come in and attack the people sheltering in the hall. Stepping through it, Ava pulled the barricading benches back in place before she held up the lantern and looked to her right before turning left. In that moment something knocked the lantern out of her hand, spilling oil that ignited on the stone floor of the passage.
Ava punched the gardener as she came at her, but her head began to spin, and then her wounded leg gave out and sent her sprawling. She rolled away from the burning oil and got her hands braced to push herself up, only to fall again as a stronger wave of dizziness came over her. She thought of the faintly bitter taste of the herbal brew Ben had given her and reached for her dagger.
“Best enjoy your snooze, bitch,” Marianne told her as she drew her boot back. “’Cause you sure won’t be waking up again.”
Instead of stabbing her, Ava clutched the blade until she felt it slice across the skin of her fingers. The black widow landed her kick, making her head explode with pain that sent her into the black.
S lipping inside the spell trap so soon after being expelled helped Bodach discover a curious aftereffect: the residual power clinging to him seemed to blind the trap to his presence, and that power did not belong to him or the red crystal.
It had come from the armorer.
He flew back to the tower where the big man had been cocooned, then landed a short distance away and shifted into his true form. A faint, dark green glow encased the big man’s flesh. He first guessed it to be melia magic, but it would not respond to him or join his own power when he tried to absorb it. That meant it was not Fae-created.
“What are you?” Bodach muttered as he crouched down over the enormous cocoon. “And why do you now protect me?”
A diaphanous, dark green tendril of power slid out through a small gap in the webbing, rising as if it wished to caress his face. At the same time a sense of being inspected came over him, as well as a coldness that made it impossible to move or defend himself. It was neither power nor enchantment, but something wholly different and utterly outside his experience. It had no thought or speech, only will, which meant it had not come from the armorer himself.
Bodach summoned from his depths the dark, terrible magic he had inherited from his goblin parents, and fed to it his precious crystalline power. That freed him from the grip of the thing protecting the armorer. Shaken by the bizarre experience, he retreated downstairs to see what progress his children had made in incapacitating the clan, and nearly blundered into a pack of his caterpillars, which had grown to a monstrous size. Since he’d created them with the same power he’d used to curse the clan, that meant only one thing.
My magic here must be feeding them.
He admired his ghastly creations, until a pack of clansmen rushed into the passage and began hacking off their heads. That forced him to fly off out of sight, and then he saw a trail of blood on the stones. He followed it through the stronghold until he caught up with Marianne, who was dragging an unconscious Ava Travars toward the forge.
His bloodthirsty wife had chosen her first victim, it seemed. Perhaps he would go and watch her murder the FBI agent–
Get out of here, you vile swine.
Small pebbles that were scattered on the floor rose into the air and began pelting him, forcing him to flee again, but then torches began jumping out of their brackets and swiped at him. One flame touched the green glow that protected him, which turned orange before vanishing. That was when the trap’s enchantment immediately grabbed and hurled him back out of the trap.
Bodach pushed himself up from the cold floor on which he had landed, angry but also baffled. He’d always blamed his own magic for throwing him out of the trap, but never before had a voice spoken to him like that. He closed his eyes to recall what he had seen of the passage through his insectile eyes, which had been almost all of it at the same time. There hadn’t been anyone in there with him except Marianne and Ava Travers, and they had been at the other end. The words he’d heard hadn’t been spoken aloud, either, but inside his mind.
No mortal or halfling could enter his thoughts, and whatever had spoken had not been pure blood Fae. Or could it have been?
“No.” He had cast the curse over the clan; if one of his own kind had been present he would have sensed it. It had not come from the armorer or that thing protecting him, either. It had to be his treasure; that could be empowering the big man with greater powers than his halfling blood bestowed on them.
His limbs trembled as he regarded the spell trap entry. He had grown too drained and weary to attempt a third incursion. He would have to return to the cave to rest and absorb more power before he could try again.
Get out of here, you vile swine.
Who had known he was there?
T asgall flipped his sword to shed the greenish ooze covering the blade after dispatching another caterpillar, and glanced over his shoulder to see the trail of decapitated monsters they’d left behind them. Like all the others they’d slain, the remains had already begun to melt into an odorous muck. He had never seen anything living in the spell trap die except insects that came in from the outside. Since no caterpillar in the mortal realm grew to such gigantic size, he suspected they had been created unnaturally, and perhaps warded to prevent the trap from killing them. But why send them here to attack the clan? What purpose could it serve to paralyze all those trapped inside?
More questions, Tasgall thought bitterly, for which he had no answers.
“I count twenty-seven dead,” Alec said as he kicked aside the headless body of the creature he’d just ended. “The vassals that escaped them said they attack together in a pack, like wolves.”
He wanted to believe they had killed the last of them, but until they searched the entire stronghold and all the outbuildings, they couldn’t be sure. At least the enchantment would have prevented them from breeding more of their kind.
“Send one team back to the great hall to stand guard and take another through the dungeons. The rest shall go with me and check the passages and towers.” He saw his war master scowl. “You cannae serve as my bodyguard every moment we’re in danger, lad.”
“Aye, right.” Alec rubbed a hand over his sweating face. “Dinnae leave your men behind again, my lord.”
The war master divided the men into three groups, sending one back the way they had come before leading his out of the passage.
Tasgall had his men pair off and light torches before he moved to the front and headed around the corner. He stopped at a pile of cocoons, tempted to try and free those inside, but since they would not die, such could wait. Outside the armory, however, he found one especially large cocoon, and another, smaller one fastened to it.
“Go on searching ahead,” he told the men as he stared at the familiar-looking boots sticking out of the smaller cocoon. As they looked at each other he added, “Alec’s commands dinnae outweigh mine. Go, now, and I’ll follow soon.”
Once his men had trudged off, Tasgall drew his dirk to cut away the top of the smaller cocoon. That revealed Darro’s white, still face, and made him hack the rest of the cocoon apart to free him.
“You couldnae help yourself, I expect,” he told his younger brother as he wrenched the pieces away from his body. “After we vanquish these monsters, you and I must speak on how you’re to obey me proper, eejit.”
“One of the maids said she saw a colossal cocoon,” Darro whispered, looking up at him through reddened eyes. “I suspected ’twas Rory, and I made to free him. You ken how much he hates being confined.”
“And yet here I find you, dolt, glued to him instead.” He pried the dagger out of his pale hand and sheathed it on his belt before taking his own dirk to the larger cocoon. “I should begin giving regular beatings to my kin. The stubborn arses who claim full-blood kinship especially.”
His brother clumsily flapped his hand. “I’m your only full-blood kin, Brother.”
“Shut up.” Removing the hardened webbing from their armorer took another few minutes, but Rory didn’t attempt to move or speak. “Lad, wake up. I’ve rescued you. Rory, answer me now.”
“He cannae die here,” Darro reminded him, and managed to roll onto his side to stare at them both. “What covered his face looks gnawed on the inside.”
“He likely did thus while he tried—ah, fack me.” He tugged down the big man’s jaw and revealed the mouthful of webbing he’d chewed through. Scraping it out, he put an arm around Rory’s shoulder and eased him into a sitting position before he pounded his back.
The armorer suddenly heaved in a huge breath, and coughed out a small cloud of webbing fragments before he brandished his dagger and tried to stand.
“Easy now, lad.” Tasgall plucked the blade from his fist and passed it to Darro before he made Rory look at him. “You’re safe. Dinnae shout.”
Fear shimmered in the big man’s eyes for a moment, and he bent his head and coughed again before he uttered in a thready whisper, “Polly Carter.”
He eyed Darro, who shrugged. “What about Polly, then, lad?”
“I protected her, but she left me to die and told no one, I imagine.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “She cut and dyed her hair soon after Ava came to us. I reckon she’s the murderess your lady seeks.”
Tasgall shifted him so that the wall braced his back and handed the torch to Darro. “I must return to the great hall. She’s there now with my lady.”
“Go.” His brother inched over to sit beside Rory.
Tasgall ran back the way he’d come, but just before he reached the hall, he smelled the strong scent of burning lamp oil and followed it to a scorched patch on the stone floor that still burned with a few low flames. Using one of the buckets of sand to extinguish the blaze, he glanced around and saw fresh blood spatter leading from the fire into the shadows, as well as one of Ava’s shoes.
“No, by the Gods. She cannae kill her,” he told himself as he followed the wet crimson trail to the end of the passage, and through another. The trail grew lighter and then heavier, as if someone had been wounded many times.
“Or she cut herself over and again to leave the trace,” Tasgall muttered under his breath.
The trail wound through the keepe until it reached one of the back passages filled with cocooned victims yet to be freed. The last of the blood thinned and almost disappeared there, just outside the closed doors of the forge.
He ran over and resisted the urge to yank open the doors as he heard two voices coming from inside.