Page 131 of Vasmora

Empty.

When he turned around, a scritching sound drew his attention to the other cocoons that wobbled on the floor.

A scream snapped his attention to where King Jeret lay beneath his wife, her fangs lodged in his arm. The queen reared back and let out a choked sound. She collapsed to the side of him, and hundreds of tiny spiders exploded from her mouth, dissolving into black sludge across the stony floor. Gasping, she reached a hand out to her husband, and he scrambled backward, his back pressed against the wall behind him.

“Please! Help me!” The segmented legs withered and broke away from her body, the carapace crackling and crumbling to the floor.

As if the infection were dying inside of her.

Kazhimyr approached with careful steps and knelt beside Jeret. The wound where he’d been bitten sizzled and bubbled, black ooze leaking over his arm as it sealed itself.

“You let … our children … die!” The queen dragged herself closer, fangs slipping out of her mouth onto the floor.

“Lies!” From a holster at his leg, King Jeret yanked a blade and scrambled toward his wife. “I didn’t let them die!” he bellowed, and stabbed the knife into her skull, black fluids splashing up at his face. “It wasn’t … my fault!”

Her body seized and trembled, until it finally stilled.

Hands trembling, the king yanked his blade loose and lifted his arm again, examining the healed wound. “I can’t be infected. The mortucrux … the plague cannot infect me.”

Unmoved, Kazhimyr rolled his eyes and shoved to his feet. “Good for you,” he said, and made his way further down the corridor to another door of the small keep that stood ajar. It creaked and groaned as he pushed it open on a room that felt like winter lived inside. Clusters of webs twinkled around him, the soft plinking of water drops the only sound.

He swept his gaze over the glistening strands and found a cocoon tucked beside a shelf of jars. A hand stuck through, as if the person inside had tried to escape.

Kazhimyr stepped closer, examining the ring on the finger that bore the Sagaerin signet.

Dorjan.

The Letalisz yanked his blade and strode toward it. Unlike the sticky webs in the mortal lands, these were thin strands of ice, wet to touch, but as he ran his knife across them, they didn’t snap free. Surprisingly resistant to his blade, as he fought to cut through.

Gods, what he wouldn’t have given for Zevander’s flame right then.

With quick strokes, he managed to saw into the tight sheath of webs and dragged his blade down the front of the cocoon.

Dorjan fell forward, collapsing into him, his exposed skin coated in a waxy, white substance. A mildly sour odor somehow breached the stench of rot, one that reminded him of liquid vivicantem when heated. Breath ground in and out of the prince, as if his lungs were filled with glass, his face gaunt and pale, cheeks sunken. Wide, black pupils swallowed the usual pale blue of his eyes and skinny black veins branched across his sclera. “Kill … me.”

“I’m getting you out of here.” Kazhimyr wrenched the prince out of the cocoon, catching sight of the black pulsing veins along his arms.

“I … feel them … inside. Kill …” His words choked on a coughing fit, and as Kazhimyr rolled him to the side, black fluids spilled from his lips onto the floor.

Grumbling to himself, Kazhimyr lifted him into his arms and carried him out of the room to the corridor, met by what he assumed were King Jeret’s youngest children, given their small size. Bodies covered in that tessellated carapace, eight long segmented legs sticking up from their backs, they stared back at him through those lifeless eyes. One tipped his head, studying. Black filtered in from the fringes of Kazhimyr’s vision.

One.

Two.

Three.

Seconds later, his eyelids flipped open to the children turning around and scampering off in the other direction. Away from him. He frowned, watching them retreat, and let out a long exhale. Then kept on.

Dorjan lay limp in his arms as Kazhimyr exited the castle, passing through the courtyard and gatehouse, then back over the bridge, where he found Dravien waiting with two horses.

“Is he dead?” he asked, wrapping his arm beneath Dorjan’s and helping Kazhimyr hoist him onto the horse.

“Not yet.” Kazhimyr swiped up the reins and climbed onto the horse’s saddle behind the prince, letting him lean against him, back to chest.

“Is it back to Nyxteros, then?”

“I’m fine to go alone.”