The Spider Tapestries: Seven Strange Stories by Mike Allen

Author:Mike Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Published: 2015-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

The sound of her breath was the sound of the wind that rushed past with each terrifying step. She wanted to stop running but could not—the curse the Shangagallu twined around her slender legs would not let go.

She ran from the temple, ran from fourteen years as a child-slave, but this was no escape. She ran faster than any horse or hawk, barefoot over the ancient road—its broken stones jutted like teeth, sure to tear off the soles of her bare feet. She screamed and bounded faster and faster, unable to stop or slow down, the Black Spear clutched to her side, the jagged rocks miraculously doing her no injury.

Oblivious to her horror, farmers on the plain paused behind their oxen to cheer her on, flickers to either side as the tilled fields gave way to mud hut ruins, the road rising into low brambles and tall grass, the sun overhead as blinding and merciless as Abzu, the Serpent that strove to circle the Egg of the World and crush it, the monster she must kill to set herself free.

Laid by the long dead, the Old Road curved and crumbled into the hills, following the easier terrain, but Lassamtu’s enchantment-bound legs hurled her straight ahead, toward the white peaks of the Arratan Mountains and the sea beyond.

She could not even scream, her fear strangling her voice as she hurtled at the thorn-covered hillsides, her body certain to be shredded and broken, a blood offering to these mean lands where she was born, at last joining her mother in death. But even as the spell bore her terror to impossible heights it spared her from harm.

Her right foot came down on an outcrop emerging from a hilltop like a whale’s head from a wave. There was a blur between as she flew; her left foot alighted on the top branch of a tree stretched hundreds of spans above a hungry ravine. Her weight should have snapped it but her next step carried her miles away, her right foot coming down into a furious black-thorned tangle that filled a whole valley, the thorns failing to pierce the sole of her foot as she flew again, not shrieks issuing from her throat but shrill laughter, a laughter not from joy but from hopelessness, an understanding in her blood and flesh that had not yet reached her brain that she could not be hurt. She could not die, until she threw the spear at her side into Abzu’s great eye and slew him, sacrificing herself to save the Egg of the World.

She had never wished to be Lassamtu, She Who Runs.

The Shangagallu had told her she would return a goddess, but his rat-toothed smile had let her know even then that he lied and took joy in it, that her death would bring him the pleasure she had denied him. She vowed, if she could, to resist his design, even as the black mountains approached at impossible speed, flying toward her like the knuckles of a giant.

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