The Warrior Moon by K Arsenault Rivera

Author:K Arsenault Rivera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

BARSALAI SHEFALI

EIGHT

Pain is nothing new—but this infernal stench is.

This is not simply the scent of this place, above even the rot and corruption to which they had become accustomed. There’s something else lurking beneath the surface. Sour milk, perhaps. Shit.

Barsalai Shefali groans. She tries to remember where she is as consciousness returns to her, but it’s difficult to think when that smell is distracting her. Puts her in mind of a ger, for some reason; puts her in mind of—

“Are you awake? What a nap you took, Steel-Eye. I was ever so worried about you.”

That voice.

All at once, the memories come back to Shefali: the pit opening up before her, the earth itself swallowing up the army. The fall did her in—she’d cracked her head against the ground when she landed. What use were her godly powers if she was unconscious?

Spider?

When Shefali forces her eyes open, she sees the demon. Yes, a spider, but also, a woman: the legs and thorax take up much of the room they’re in. A woman’s torso rises from where the head should be. This wave of revulsion—is this what the others feel when they look on her, transformed? The angles of its legs, the gleam of the dim light on its teeth—Shefali cannot bear to look at it for very long. The details are too grotesque: the stitch where skin meets spider-flesh, the mandibles, the legs, the dripping silken threads …

And yet that is not the worst of it. Shefali cannot see most of the spider’s body, but she can see all of the woman, and there lies the true horror. Clad in old-fashioned layered robes, its hair a wild mess, it looks every part the lady. That only makes its grinning maw with its snapping pincers seem all the more alien—to say nothing of the eight eyes now blinking, each in turn, at Shefali.

Shefali swallows. She averts her eyes. Where is she? She does not remember coming here, does not remember arriving in this place, does not remember what this place is. The darkness is no impediment to her, but when she tries to move her head, she finds that she cannot. Something sticky holds her in place.

She curses.

Of course—she sees it now: the silvered threads of a massive web, spun in one of the upper corners of the room. Were it not for the web, Shefali would be dangling several horselengths up in the air, or else dashed upon the craggy rocks below. The spider woman’s silk lines the walls of this place, too, coating it in white like a perverse parody of a ger’s felt walls. Lumps here and there lend the rock some of the texture the webs took away. How many of them are there? Like larvae, Shefali thinks. Are there more of this creature waiting to be born?

And yet Shefali knows there cannot be—it is not how demons breed. And to warp the landscape in such a way—this can only be one of the Traitor’s Generals. Was it

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