3 Weaver of Shadow by William King Read Free Book Online

sickly-sweet stink of rot in the air. His amulet burned against his breast telling him that strong magic was all around him.
    His skin was numb and his limbs refused to move. His back felt twisted. There was an odd scraping sensation when he moved his head and looking up, he saw to his horror he was looking at the underbelly of a huge spider. Around him massive armoured legs blurred as the creature moved.
    He managed to twist his neck and looked to his right. Jaethro was there, eyes wide with horror, his head almost the only part of him visible. He was cocooned and webbed in place to the underbelly of another giant spider. On its back, balancing easily was a tall, feral-looking elf with a spear in his hands.
    The blighted forest around them was getting worse. Huge mushrooms, the size of small trees rose, their domes glowing with eerie light, their blotched markings resembling evil runes. Tattooed elves moved all around them, smaller spiders scuttling at their heels. The elves did not look triumphant. Their faces had an odd placid calm that was at odds with the wildness of their eyes.
    Some of them had very strange jewellery on their necks. It took Kormak a while to realise that the odd amulets were living spiders with glittering bodies and glowing eyes, their legs wrapped round their bearers’ throats, their mandibles buried into elvish flesh, feeding a constant drip of narcotic venom into their veins.
    They emerged from the tunnel among the trees into a huge clearing. At its centre stood all that remained of a gigantic tree. Once it must have been far and away the greatest living thing in the forest, rising hundreds of feet above the ground, stretching its branches so high it must have looked as if it was trying to touch the sky.
    Mould blotched its side. Its bark had peeled away in places to reveal whitish wood beneath. There was something obscene in the sight, like looking at dead muscle in a corpse after the flesh has been peeled away in an autopsy.
    Looking at it, he did not doubt that this was the source of the corruption in the forest, that this was the centre of evil, of the Blight. The Shadow was very strong here.
    Automatically he began to study his surroundings, looking for any way to escape, for himself and the others. While he was alive he was not going to stop looking for a way out, no matter how dire the situation appeared.
    The ground around the base of the great dead tree was clear of other plants, as if whatever was in it had poisoned the earth so much that not even blighted blossoms could grow there. Webs festooned the tree’s sides and in them he caught sight of other cocoons, where pale faced men, women and children hung and monstrous spiders crawled over them as if tending to their sleeping prey.
    There were a lot of elves here, far more than he would have expected in a single village, and more seemed to be arriving all the time. A drumbeat came from somewhere within the tree, echoing outwards steady as the pulse of a titanic heart. It looked like what was left of the Mayasha nation, and perhaps more, was gathering here in the long shadow cast by the great dead tree.
    In its sides, where the bark had been torn away, were cavern-like holes. Spiders and elves came and went through them, moving on woven bridges of spidersilk between ground and trunk. Platforms were raised on silk ropes to the higher branches. Spiders moved up the sides of the tree, the spikes on the end of their armoured limbs driving themselves into wood and bark.
    More elves watched the prisoners arrive. The eyes of most were bright and mad, the eyes of others were somnolent as if they were entranced or drugged. From somewhere off to Kormak’s right a man started to scream and gibber in horror. No one paid him any mind.
    Kormak tried to move his body. He was bound tight with no room to wriggle and he was securely attached to the underside of the great spider. Looking around he could see that some of the spiders had stopped moving. The