Venom and Song by Wayne Thomas Batson Page B

and Ferral found that dragging his burden was harder. The heavy sack slid from one step to the next, each one bringing with it a wet slapping kind of thud, until he reached the top and ducked under an arch to enter the passage.
    Torches lit the right side of the hallway, and Ferral followed them to the Plotting Chamber at the end of the hall. The door was open, and the room was well lit by torches, braziers, and gigantic candle chandeliers. Ferral looked up to the high domed ceiling and wondered whose job it was to keep all those candles lit. No thank you, thought Ferral. He didn’t care much for heights. That’s why he’d volunteered for infantry. “Better get going,” he muttered. “Or it will be my job.”
    It was a vast L-shaped chamber, and between the evenly spaced pillars on either side enormous steer-skin maps were stretched taut. Each of these, Ferral knew, represented one of the Spider King’s victorious campaigns. Many battles against the Elves of Berinfell were there. And the slow, methodical annihilation of the Saer. Ferral had fought in the last battle against the Saer. The Spider King had commissioned the greatest fleet of warships ever assembled, and they’d at last taken the battle to the Saer’s home island. Now that, Ferral thought, was a glorious victory . Having been a part of several such battles galled Ferral even more that his battalion had been ambushed so easily.
    Somehow, his burden seemed even heavier now. Ferral slogged it across the floor, rumpling up several animal-skin mats. He turned the corner and saw the Spider King hunched over a table at the far end. He seemed so riveted, so utterly engrossed, that Ferral thought he might not have noticed he had a visitor. Still, Ferral wasn’t about to break protocol and speak before being addressed. So he stood and watched his king, master of the Gwar race.
    The sickle-shaped pupils of the Spider King’s large half-moon eyes remained fixed, boring down on the map from their red irises. Like all Gwar, he was gray-skinned and mostly bald. But his skin was darker than most, more the slate gray of a tombstone or a thundercloud. And his fierce, dark eyebrows arched and then flared back over his scalp in a continuous strip that stretched all the way down to the back of his neck. A third strip of hair began like a sharp arrowhead above the center of his brow and swept all the way back like the other two.
    Ferral watched and waited. The Spider King stared down at a map of the Thousand-League Forest. He never took his eyes off it but took out a stick of char and drew a painfully straight line, then another. When he was finished, the Spider King had drawn a diamond-shaped region, one of many such areas, Ferral noticed.
    The Gwar ruler grasped a handful of figurines, Warspiders, Gwar, Drefids, and Wisps, carved from volcanic rock, and slammed them down one at a time—each with a sharp thok! —in the sector he had just outlined. Then, his elbows on the table, he dropped his head into his hands and went completely still.
    â€œFerral,” said the Spider King without looking up, “where is your commander?”
    The sudden voice so startled Ferral that he dropped the end of his sack. He bowed low to reach for it and said, “He is dead, my sovereign.”
    â€œDead,” he repeated, still not looking up. “ Mm . . . hum . That . . . is unfortunate.” The Spider King’s voice was not as deep as some Gwar, but carried a resonant weight of its own. Even short responses sounded clever and calculated. To speak with the Spider King was to feel perpetually on edge and cautious, for undoubtedly the trap was already set.
    â€œThere’s more,” said Ferral. “Mobius . . . his plans failed. He even took half of our team for reinforcements. No one came back through the portal except . . . except for the Elves.”
    The Spider King stopped scanning the map. “The Lords of Berinfell