Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles by J.D. Lakey Read Free Book Online Page B

flower
petals, and insect carapaces were woven into cloth, the cloth turned
into clothes, wall hangings, rugs, and blankets. The small mountains
of long needles, reeds, and grasses gathered over the summer were
turned into baskets, mats, and wide-brimmed sun bonnets. The sheds
full of dried lumber were put to carving knife, plane, and lathe as
the craftsmen filled the season’s requests for musical instruments,
furniture, weapons, or artwork.
    The furnaces and the kilns
roared nonstop, melting the sands into glass and the ores into metals
with the excess heat vented through the dome to keep the winter
gardens in bloom and the pools in the bathhouse hot.
    Epic poems were written and
polished in front of the captive audiences at evening meals in the
Common Room. Musical plays and dramas were performed and the best
were chosen to be part of the entertainment for the first spring
Trade Fair.
    Training continued but the
jousting matches and combat tournaments were replaced with quieter
games that encouraged strategy, organization, and precision.
    The patrols went out but
only as far as the last warded circle. Cheobawn thought it was more
of a formality than a security measure. There was nothing to guard
against, really, with all the domestic animals inside the wards; but
the bennelk needed reminding that their lot in life was not merely
standing about in the stable yard with nothing to do but grow fat on
summer hay.
    Life inside the dome
mirrored that on the outside. The bhotta and all its lizard cousins
detested the snow. They would sleep until spring, their minds filled
with the memories of hot summer days and fat, crunchy prey. The
stinging spiders, like all the arachnid species, had sealed their
silk-lined burrows at the first hint of cold, putting themselves into
cryogenic suspension, their minds a liquid placeholder in the ambient
as were the minds of the buzzers and the croakers who had buried
themselves in the mud of the bogs.
    Not everything slept. The
little warm blooded burrowers buried deep under the snow woke from
dreams of the green shoots of spring to raid their larders, nibbling
on their secret stashes of seeds, nuts, and dried blossoms before
curling around their newborn young, nursing them through the winter
using their own fat reserves garnered in the last frenzied days of
fall. They were safe from all the predators except the bat eared
foxes and the small hunting cats who could sense their motion under
layers and layers of powder snow and who had perfected the art of
snow diving as a winter hunting skill.
    The wild herds had long
since retreated from the high meadows of the Dragon Spine, seeking
cover in the dense groves of the southern forests where they would
stay for as long as the storms howled out of the Waste. The sky
hunters, all their prey gone to ground, had flown south off the
Escarpment in search of warmer places to raise their young. Great
flocks of strange things flew out of the Waste at the start of
winter, driven south by the cold. A few settled to rest for a moment
in the trees around the dome before continuing south. Her teachers
said they flew until the land gave out, half the world away, which
was a wonder to Cheobawn, who had never gone further than the
Escarpment.
    There were still great
hunters in the forests. Tree bears and dubeh leopards followed the
wild herds and would try the wards if hunger pressed on them hard
enough, but winter culled the herds and killed the weak, turning the
predators into carrion feeders. They were disinclined to exert
themselves in a real hunt and shied away from the spears of men.
    Humans had other worries.
There were a thousand ways to die, each more scary than the last,
most of them involving snow and ice. There was pack snow, the safest
kind. It settled into a solid floor that supported all the walkers
except the fenelk who were massive enough to plow through it instead
of over it.
    Slab snow was the kind that
clung to the mountainsides in massive sheets