The Spindlers (22 page)

The web was spun with silver thread that glinted and glittered and seemed to give off its own, cold light.

Up and up and up: loops and curlicues, spun silken strands.

She took one step toward the web, and then another. It reminded her of being very small and going with her parents to New York City: the terrible towers of metal and glass! The rivers and waterfalls of concrete! The enormous tongues of stone and brick, wagging from the sky, as though ready to swallow you.

The Web of Souls was like that, but bigger and more terrible.

And what made it most terrible—beautiful and frightening all at once—were the souls, the hundreds and hundreds of souls, glowing and pulsing among its sticky strands. She
knew
that was what they were, immediately and without question, although the souls did not look exactly as she had imagined they would.

They were colored, first of all. Each soul was wrapped in a cocoon of silver thread, which bound it tightly to the web: But even so, the colors showed through, faintly, a haze of different hues. Some souls glowed bright orange, others were the shade of dusky twilight, others were a pure blue, others shone in colors Liza did not have a name for, so the whole effect of standing before the Web of Souls was like staring up at the world's largest Christmas tree.

The second surprising thing was their size. They were small. Even the largest was no bigger than a softball, and some were closer to the size of a Ping-Pong ball or smaller.

And yet, out of all the hundreds of souls that Liza could see—so many, Liza did not see how she could possibly carry all of them Above—she recognized Patrick's soul right away. She did not even have to think about it. She just knew.

(How do you explain this? It is a great mystery, and one that the lumer-lumpen might perhaps know how to answer. But the lumpen are not speaking, so a mystery it will no doubt remain.)

Patrick's soul was about the size of a lumpy softball, and it was for the most part a comforting maroon color, like the color of the well-worn fleece blanket at the foot of Liza's bed, although in tiny places it appeared much closer to a fire-engine red, and in others a deep ink-purple. It was hanging just off to Liza's left, a little bit higher than eye level, and as she approached it a great feeling of relief and joy swept through her. For the first time since coming Below, she let a single tear fall to the ground.

“Hi, Patrick,” she whispered, and it seemed to her that just for a moment the soul flared slightly brighter. “I'm here to take you home.”

That was when the ground underneath her gave a gigantic heave.

Liza stumbled, cried out, and unconsciously grabbed the web to steady herself. Pain ripped through her palm, and she withdrew her hand quickly. The strands of the web were hard, and hot, and very sharp, like razor wire. There was now a long, thin cut across Liza's palm, dotted with bright red beads of blood.

Fear yawned open inside her as the ground continued to buckle and roll, as though the whole underworld was a wet dog trying to shake itself dry. Across the cavern, an enormous stone came crashing down from the ceiling, splintering to pieces and sending another shudder through the ground. It made Liza's teeth rattle in her head. Her heart was a constant hum, a tremor....

And then she felt it, beating there under her heart: the black brush-tip of wings.

Hello
, said her nocturna, quite calmly, and for a moment she saw its wise black eyes hovering in front of her face.

“You found me!” Liza was so relieved, she nearly let another tear fall.

Of course I found you. I told you I would be watching
.

But how?

I am always with you, Liza
.

The ground heaved enormously, sending Liza tumbling, hard, onto her backside. “What's happening?” she cried out.

Listen to me, Liza. There isn't much time
.

Another rock, the size of a boulder, came hurtling down from above; Liza watched in horror as it took out a whole portion of the web, burying a dozen souls in rubble and debris. More rocks came raining down; the cavern was filling with a gray, choking dust.

I don't understand. Is this an earthquake?

It's the queen
. Her nocturna's voice was grim.
She is furious that you made it past her traps. She is tearing down the nests
.

For a moment Liza's heart stopped beating entirely, and in that moment she could feel the nocturna's vibrations, which were nestled like a shadow on the other side of her heart.

What do you mean?

I mean she is planning to bury you here, at the Web of Souls
.

Crash!
Another boulder landed not four feet away from Liza. Panic rose inside her and she scrambled to her feet, tipping and dipping as the floor continued to sway.

Quick, Liza! You must work quickly
.

Liza sprang forward and reached for Patrick's soul. Her hands were shaking as she tried to detach the tiny glowing shape from the threads encasing it.

But it was like trying to pull an egg through the narrow bars of an iron cage without breaking it; the spindler web bit painfully into her fingers and hands and would not allow her to wrestle Patrick's soul free. Rocks continued to crash down all around her, tearing holes in the web, crushing souls beneath their weight.

Hurry, Liza!

“I can't!” Panic and terror made Liza shout out loud, and turned her clumsy. The next buckle of the ground sent her tumbling away from the web. She landed on her right wrist and felt it twist painfully underneath her. “His soul is stuck! They're all stuck!”

We have to go!
More rocks; more red dust.
You'll have to leave him!

“I can't leave him!” Liza was screaming now, over the echoing and the crashing and the sounds of splintering rock. She crawled back toward the web. The ground was a bull trying to buck her off its back, and she could barely climb to her feet. She tore at the web, trying to break apart the strands, mindless of the terrible pain in her hands, but it was like trying to rip apart pieces of metal. She could not hope to break through it.

And then there was another rumbling: a tumbling, swelling sound, as of distant thunder, terrifying, growing louder.

Liza! We have to go
now
!

I. Won't. Leave. Him!
She continued to work fumblingly to tear Patrick's soul from the web, knowing it was hopeless.

Liza …
the nocturna's voice sounded warningly, as the thunder grew louder.

No—not thunder. Feet. Something—many somethings—were coming toward her, and Liza allowed herself one fearful look over her shoulder.

And then, suddenly, the rats came swarming out of the darkness. Thousands and thousands of them, a roiling, mobile mass of black: and at the front of the herd, wearing not a single stitch of clothing, or a single spot of makeup, was Mirabella.

“Mirabella!” Liza, amazed, stepped back from the web. The rats rushed past her. They sprang onto the web; they swarmed it, they leapt and climbed and swung up its steep architecture. They nibbled and tore at its strands with their sharp teeth and their claws, and the cavern was filled with snapping and cracking, as the web began to come apart, and the souls began to loosen from their cocoons.

Mirabella paused briefly in front of Liza. Her eyes were full of regret.

“I was a terrible friend,” Mirabella whispered. But now that she was without the odd clothing and the face powder, the strangeness of her voice did not seem so strange; she sounded just the way a rat should. “I am sorry, Miss Liza. Will you forgive me?”

She did not wait for Liza to answer. She sprang for the web, heading straight for Patrick's soul. And she set to work chewing and nibbling her way around it, so that the strands encasing it, keeping it locked into the web, began to break away.

Crash! Crash!
Liza ducked as more stones came raining furiously from above. A rock the size of a grapefruit hit her on the elbow, and she felt the impact through every nerve in her body. The nocturna's whirling had become so fast, and the pounding of Liza's heart such a furious echo of it, she was sure she would have a heart attack and die right there.

“Call up the nocturni!” Mirabella yelled. “The souls are coming loose!”

They're coming
, Liza's nocturna said.
They don't need to be called
.

As the enormous, vaulted cavern fell to pieces around them, and the rats worked to free the souls in the web, and Liza stood amazed and terrified, and the ground continued to heave and roll as though the stone had been turned to frenzied ocean, from all over the dark corners of Below, the nocturni heard the sounds of souls released from their webbed cages, and they came.

They came out of the mist and the shadow—they
were
shadow—and in the middle of all the chaos and destruction even the rats stopped to watch. The nocturni floated and glided and seemed to materialize out of nothing; and as the souls began to drop from the web, like apples shaken from a tree, they were quickly taken up by their nocturni: eternal pairs, bonds that would never be broken.

Nocturni swooped through the air, carrying souls of different sizes and colors on their backs, between their wings. They disappeared into the mist again, so the air pulsed with the twinkling colored lights of souls receding into the distance. The nocturni would bring them home, Above, where they belonged.

Snap!
Mirabella tore through the last threads keeping Patrick's soul pinioned to the spindlers' massive web, and his soul was released. Liza stretched out her arms to catch it as it floated—surprisingly gently, as though it weighed no more than a feather—toward the ground. Before she could grab it, however, a nocturna materialized out of the air and swept Patrick's soul neatly onto its back. Patrick's nocturna was slightly smaller than Liza's, although its wings were larger, and shaped almost like palm fronds.

Patrick's nocturna turned a circle around Liza. She could hear its voice beating to her through the air, but only faintly.

I'm sorry, Liza
, Patrick's nocturna whispered.
I should have been keeping watch. It will never happen again
.

“That's all—,” Liza started to say, but broke off as another rock came hurtling toward her from above. She fell to one side, rolling to safety, coughing up dust.

Let's go!
Liza's nocturna screamed, as from above the remains of the web began to teeter, and groan, and tip, like a great metal tree about to be felled. Boulders continued to crash on all sides of them. Liza scrambled to her feet.
The web is falling! The nests are caving in!

Liza could no longer see the way out. The rocks had made everything unfamiliar, and she could not remember which way she had come, or see any kind of door. She ran blindly, panicked, as black shapes swooped around her head and bits of the web—sharp and thin as needles—began to splinter off and crash all around her, a terrible, piercing rain. She went tumbling to her knees again as the ground gave another tremendous buckle.

“Here, Miss Liza.” Mirabella was next to her then, and holding out a paw. “Get on my back. We'll move faster that way.”

Liza took her paw gratefully and slid onto Mirabella's furry back, keeping her arms and legs locked tightly around the rat's body so she would not fall off. The other rats were a moving, pumping blur of bodies around them; and above them, the dark cloud of nocturni swept through the air.

Hurry! Hurry! She's coming down!

With a thunderous noise, the remains of the web came crashing to the ground, sending daggers of hard thread spinning in every direction. Liza felt them whizzing through the air like arrows. An enormous rock was blocking their way. They would never make it; they would be pierced to death by sharp metal points.

“Hold on!” Mirabella cried.

At the last second the rat leapt. Liza grabbed her fur tightly, and then they were soaring, skimming over the rock, and slamming down on the other side, sliding into a dark, narrow tunnel. The cavern receded behind them as the last bit of the Web of Souls came crashing to the earth.

Liza looked to her left; Patrick's nocturna was flying next to her, with Patrick's soul nestled safely between its wings; and she could feel her own nocturna flying close to her right shoulder, its wings just brushing her skin. They were surrounded by black everywhere: rats, nocturni, all in a panic, drumming through the tunnel. This, too, was shaking and trembling and coming down around them; Liza knew the queen did not intend to let her leave the nests alive.

“Light!” roared Mirabella. And then, “For lumpen's sake, this is no time for formality! Illuminate! Illuminate!”

Greenish light filled the twisting tunnel, as the lumer-lumpen began to emit their pulsing radiance. In the light, the black backs of the rats looked like a tumbling river of oil.

That was when the moribats came.

They came screeching, filling the tunnel with their terrible noise, talons extended, eyes bloodshot and glowing red against the pallor of their featherless, beaked faces. Liza saw that they were diving for the souls; they clutched at the glowing, colored shapes, swatting at the nocturni with their enormous wingtips. Liza watched, horrified, as one nocturna was sent, skittering, against the cavern wall; the soul it was carrying fell and cracked on the ground like an overripe fruit, revealing a glittering purple interior. Then it was stomped to pieces as the rats swarmed over it.