Cyrus had been a sheltered royal the first time he’d stepped foot in this cave,and he’d paid a tall price for the timidity of his heart.
He’d been careful never to make that mistake again.
Now he took a steadying breath and, very carefully, made his first move since arriving in the antechamber. He looked up.
It was like activating an alarm.
A swarm of sound enveloped him as he stared skyward, clocking the presence of several thousand bats hung like so many pendants from a neck of darkness. Their disembodied eyes watched him closely as they screeched, the eerie cacophony soon overtaken by the harsh, echoing skitter of small, hard legs rushing toward him. Cyrus, who’d experienced this spine-chilling phenomenon many times, knew he was being crowded on three sides by a clutter of arachnids and was careful to remain calm. A whisper along his spine alerted him to the growing presence of one in particular and, slowly, he turned to face his appraiser.
A spider roughly the size of his face peered at him fromits perch in midair, the gleam of a silk thread barely legible in the light. Her long legs writhed not unlike the last, grasping reach of a man in need, several glassy eyes glinting in his direction as she assessed him. She spoke without precisely meaning to, relating her thoughts in a fractured communication that was never meant to be parsed by humans.
You are? You are?
No danger to you, said Cyrus soundlessly.
The spider only stared at him.
He held out his hand, palm down, and, after a brief hesitation, the massive arachnid lowered herself, then climbed aboard his body with an eager scuttle of legs. She investigated his fingers before climbing up his forearm, pausing at his elbow to consider his face more closely.
You are? Before?
Yes.I’ve come before. You are in no danger from me, I swear it.
In response, the spider scaled the incline of his shoulder, then his neck, the prickle of her hard, lightly-furred pins raising goose bumps along his skin. Cyrus conquered the impulse to recoil from the unnerving sensation, holding still as she cautiously boarded his cheek, lifting her forelegs slightly to better study his eyes.
It was a torturously long moment before she said –
You are? Sad. Sad. Sad.
Cyrus swallowed. “Yes,” he whispered.
The spider regarded him a moment more before scurrying from whence she came. She stepped off the plank of his arm and into the unknown with a final judgment:
No danger.
The young king shook off a lingering unease as he waited for the path before him to clear of arachnids. It was always an unsettling business, being psychoanalyzed by spiders. He did not want to ponder that the creature was able to dismiss him with three words of shrewd observation; neither did he did want to wonder how else he might’ve survived these trials had he not trained for so many years as a Diviner. If he’d been unable to communicate with living creatures, if he’d been unable to wield magic to fight for his life. It bothered him to think of it as anything but coincidence;he didn’t like to imagine he’d been born for this role, brought into the world only to endure this misery.
Fate, he thought bitterly, was only romantic when one was destined to be the hero.
Once his safe passage had been granted, Cyrus did not tarry; he thundered up the steep incline of the endless staircase, taking the steps two at a time. He was eager to be done with this hateful, infinite night. He reasoned that the sooner this fresh hell commenced, the sooner it might end – and before long, his destination came into view.
Towering above him was a colossal black archway suspended in midair, the structure as tall as a castle and half as wide. At the base of the ornate passageway spilled forth a herd of ominous gray clouds, within which Cyrus could make out only the spark of a familiar orange light. He headed toward this thick haze, pounding up the last few steps before launching himself, like a bird, into the rift.
SEVEN
WIND BATTERED HIS FACE, SOUNDSscreamed in his ears. Cyrus spun until his flesh was wrung out, his face chapped by the currents, cheeks ablaze with color. He landed on his feet with a heavy thud that rattled his teeth before he straightened slowly, regaining his balance by careful degrees. The stench of rotting matter struck him swiftly, and he fought the impulse to gag, nearly doubling over as his eyes burned.
Before him loomed a curtain of charred flesh.
Iblees had never presented himself to the young king as anything but a whisper – a force transmittable from anywhere – and yet, too often Cyrus was summoned here.Here, the scene of every great missive and every great castigation, this decomposing suite of rooms separated only by patchwork veils of scorched human skin, was the devil’s preferred place of communication.
It was, in Cyrus’s approximation, a parallel to purgatory.
He closed his eyes now and braced himself, fighting not to inhale the putrid air as the familiar whisper blew through him, a voice like smoke pooling in the hollows of his body, curling around his joints, and tugging him downward – a suggestion that he fall to his knees. Cyrus fought this compulsion,snapping the connection with a violent jolt and straightening to his full height. He felt the haunting impression of a laugh, and then –
Clay King was once a little boy,
and he would often cry
