The Aeronaut's Windlass (48 page)

The silkweaver screamed again and rushed at the old man.

Gwen found herself in motion.

She seized a glass bottle of the most potent liquor in the tavern in her right hand and flung it toward the empty space between the silkweaver and Master Ferus. Then, as the bottle tumbled, she raised her gauntlet. There was no time for careful sighting. Instead she relied upon the hours and hours of practice she had put in to sense the precise moment to blast the tumbling bottle.

She triggered her gauntlet, and white light leapt from the crystal on her palm across the room to the bottle. It exploded at once into a rapidly expanding shower of blue flame—a shower that fell directly onto the silkweaver’s back and head. Fire suddenly wreathed the creature, burning skin and blackening armored hide, sending it staggering, thrashing and bucking in pain.

“Master Ferus!” Gwen shouted, and sprinted toward the old man. It seemed to take an endless amount of time, but could only have been a few seconds. She reached the etherealist’s side just as the silkweaver shuddered and its wild contortions ceased. Still aflame, it spun toward the etherealist again and once more rushed forward, making a horrible, hissing sound as it came.

Gwen pushed Master Ferus behind her and raised her gauntlet. The burning silkweaver was coming fast, its agonized body still contorting strangely, its small head thrashing. Gwen would have only a single chance to kill the creature, and she dared not waste it.

She planted her feet firmly, straightened her back, squared her shoulders, and took a steadying breath. Then she sighted carefully between her fingers and waited.

The silkweaver came on, hissing and charging, burning and smoking, its mouth and clublike limbs smeared with blood.

When it was no more than five feet away, Gwen loosed the bolt from her gauntlet.

Then there was an impact so vast that she could scarcely credit it as anything but a delusion, a sense of rapid, brutal motion, and a blossom of agony in her skull.

And then nothing.

Chapter 38

Spire Albion, Habble Landing, Ventilation Tunnels

B
ridget stared for a moment at the remains of the silkweavers, then turned on her heel and walked decisively down the passageway—back toward their nest.

“My goodness,” Folly breathed. Bridget had helped her collect her scattered crystals, most of them smeared with fine ash, some with more gruesome remains, and the girl had refilled the mesh bags in her holsters and was fixing the lid back onto her jar. “What is Bridget doing?”

“Hundreds of little silkweavers didn’t just pop out of the air,” Bridget said back firmly. “They hatch from eggs, do they not? Something must have laid the eggs.”

“She is of course correct,” Folly whispered to her jar. “But it seems to me that is an excellent reason for us not to go back in that direction. Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”

“If there was a mother present, would she not have attacked us as well?” Bridget asked. “Rowl?”

The cat, prowling along at Bridget’s side, paused to flick ashes off of one paw, his expression irritated. “It stands to reason, Littlemouse.”

“Then the mother is not present,” Bridget said. “We should look at the lair. It could be that we will learn something.”

“Or be webbed up. Or poisoned. Or eaten,” Folly said in a small voice. “Eaten all up.”

Bridget paused and looked back at the etherealist’s apprentice. “Folly,” she said, “I understand that you’re frightened. I am too. But we were sent out to get information—and what do we have to show for it?”

Folly didn’t look up at Bridget, but frowned down at her gently glowing jar of crystals.

“If you don’t want to go,” Bridget said, “then we can walk back to an illuminated hallway and I’ll go myself, if you’ll lend me your jar.”

Folly clutched the jar of little crystals to her bosom and bit her lower lip. “Oh, no. No, no, I couldn’t do that. That would be a violation of trust.”

“We have a mission,” Bridget said. “We’ll need the light.”

“We?” Rowl asked smugly.

“Oh,” Bridget said, scowling down at the cat for a moment. Then she looked up at Folly. “Please, Folly. We’ll do just a little more, and then we’ll go back.”

Folly took a deep breath. Then she nodded, very quickly, as if eager to get the motion over with.

*   *   *

C
limbing the ropes was difficult, and it was made no easier by the fact that Rowl insisted upon riding up on her shoulders.

“Why do you breathe that hard?” the cat asked her curiously. “Does it help in some way?”

Bridget made an incoherent snarling sound, secured her feet on the too-narrow length of ethersilk wedged between them, and strained to push her arms up another foot or so.

“Your shoulders are shaking,” Rowl noted. “It isn’t very comfortable for me. Are you sure you’re doing this correctly?”

Bridget ground her teeth and kept climbing.

“It’s perfectly simple,” Rowl said impatiently. “Watch.”

And with that the cat seized the length of ethersilk with his forepaws, taking it firmly in his stubby grip. Then he hunched up his rear quarters, lifted his back paws, and sank his claws into the ethersilk line. He slid his front paws up, and with effortless grace shinnied up the last three feet of line and disappeared into the opening in the masonry ceiling.

“You see?” his voice came down. “You should be more like that. It’s faster, and one need not puff like a steam engine.”

This time Bridget managed to growl, “. . . kill that cat . . .” putting as much threat as she could into the words. Then she hauled herself laboriously up the last few feet, heaved her upper body over the edge of the hole, and tried not to panic at how exquisitely vulnerable she felt, lying on her belly in what was presumably a silkweaver nest.

There was a strange, acrid odor thick in the air, a scent that made her skin crawl, and she could see almost nothing in the darkness. Had a foe been present, Rowl would have warned her—that was, after all, why he had proceeded into the nest first, bless his fuzzy, arrogant heart—but even Rowl couldn’t sense everything, every time.

Bridget wasn’t sure she wanted to come any farther up. If a silkweaver should leap at her, she wanted to be able to drop back down at once. Of course, if she did so, and lost her grip on the lines, she would fall twenty feet to the spirestone floor. Statistically, she had heard, surviving such a fall was a toss of the coin. Granted, the chances of surviving the poison of a silkweaver were worse.

Bother, she didn’t need mathematics. She needed to look and get it over with, and get
out
of this horrible place.

She primed her gauntlet, and the crystal on her palm glowed and crackled with power, sending a wash of tingles up her arm to the elbow—but it hadn’t really been designed for illumination, and the light from it seemed to spread out and accomplish nothing practical. All it really did was to leave her blind to anything more than a few feet away. But at least, she supposed, its glow managed to make her into a much better target than she’d been a moment before.

“Folly,” Bridget called, trying to keep her voice steady. “Send up the light.”

Bridget expected the etherealist’s apprentice to tie the jar to the line of ethersilk so that Bridget could haul it up. Instead she heard Folly open the jar. Bridget grunted and pulled herself the rest of the way up, so that she could turn and peer back down through the hole at the other girl.

Folly took the end of the ethersilk line in her hand, closed her eyes for a moment, and then slipped it into the jar of gently glowing crystals. She said something quietly, speaking in the same tone of voice one might use when addressing small children—and then there was a flickering of light amongst the crystals, and their quiet luminance abruptly spread into the ethersilk line and up it, like water flowing through a pipe.

Bridget watched in amazement as the light spread up the line, branching out into the other strands of ethersilk it crossed, until it passed into the silk at the edge of the hole and beneath her, and then on into the silk-covered chamber beyond, until the entire thing pulsed with a muted, aqua glow.

Rowl let out a quiet sound, an expression of pure emotion Bridget had heard only a few times in her life, when a cat was impressed but did not wish to acknowledge the fact.

The nest was covered in ethersilk. The walls, the floor, the roof, like some vast cocoon, spreading from the hole in the floor up to the height of the spirestone roof above, with walls composed of more silk—it was, Bridget thought, stunned, the fortune of a commoner’s lifetime, the silk representing enough value to buy her father’s vattery whole, a dozen times over.

She gave her head a small shake and forced herself to look past the treasure the silk represented. She scanned the nest again, straining to see details. There were tiny nodules of silk all over the floor and lower walls of the nest, each the size of an adolescent’s fist. Some sort of . . . cradles for the little silkweavers? Each bore a similar funnel pattern, where the silkweaver would obviously have eased into the cradle.

High above the floor of the nest was a much, much larger cradle, one seemingly large enough to host three or four of Bridget. The silkweaver matriarch’s bower?

And between the enormous bower and the tiny cradles were more funnel shapes, much larger than those below, yet smaller than the one above.

None of them, as far as Bridget could see, were occupied.

“This is why the Nine-Claws were all huddled together,” Bridget breathed.

“This is what Naun wanted us to see,” Rowl said, his tone that of a teacher correcting a student.

“Also that,” Bridget said quietly. Then she nodded. “Let’s go back. Master Ferus must know of this at once.”

Chapter 39

Spire Albion, Habble Landing Shipyards, AMS
Predator

G
rimm spent the evening filling in for the ship’s cook, who had been given leave along with a quarter of the ship’s crew. Unfortunately, Journeyman hadn’t bothered to inform the cook or his assistant that he’d brought an extra twenty men aboard to labor in the engine room. Journeyman was a simple soul, and the length and breadth of his universe could be described in precisely the same terms as the area of the ship’s engineering spaces. The evening meal had therefore been woefully inadequate, and someone had to step in.