Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (26 page)

“Then we’d better hurry up and get them back. Lead us to this waterfall.”

Luce stood, and checked her knives in their sheaths. Toko rose too, a look of distress on his face.

“Please reconsider. There is nothing to be gained, and only death to be won, by meeting the jorogumo in the dark.”

“We’ll think of something,” I said, with more confidence than the situation perhaps warranted. I’d been in some tough corners lately, but I’d never dealt with a rampaging spider-woman before, and no great ideas were presenting themselves. Better get it over with, though. Time was ticking away.

Luce moved to a chest tucked in the corner and began rummaging through the kimonos and other belongings folded inside.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for Daiyu’s perfume.” She pulled out a small glass bottle and uncorked it. “This smells like it.” She passed it to me and I dabbed it on sparingly. It had a pleasant jasmine scent, but it was very strong.

Toko pounced as Luce was repacking the chest.

“Take that.” He indicated the shamisen inside, the Japanese three-stringed version of a guitar. “Perhaps we can soothe the jorogumo with music.”

“Does she like music?” It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing.

Toko sighed. “Not as much as she likes killing people.”

Toko led the way down smooth paths, past austere rock gardens where the sand was raked into decorative swirls and nothing stirred. I was glad I’d packed my thick jacket; our breath fogged in the night air. He carried the shamisen, a resigned slump to his shoulders, clearly unhappy with the whole idea. A guard on the wide verandah had watched us slip on sandals without comment. We saw no one else as we meandered through the dark garden.

Luce and I hung back as we left the rock gardens and entered a section where mature rhododendrons towered overhead. We crossed an arched wooden bridge painted red and hung with lanterns, while beneath us fat carp slid lazily through the cool water of a small ornamental pond. The air was bitingly cold.

“You know,” said Luce, “I’ve heard rumours about the secret component of du.”

“Oh?”

Du was the only poison that killed dragons apart from bane leaf, and the secret of its manufacture was known only to the Chinese queens. I’d always supposed that bane leaf must be at least part of the lethal formula.

“Yes—that the recipe involved milking the fangs of a venomous shifter.”

“Oh, great.” I stopped and stared at her in the faint glow of the distant lanterns. Somewhere an owl hooted, while nearby something small rustled around beneath the rhododendrons, probably hoping not to become an owl’s dinner. “You think it’s from a jorogumo?”

“How many venomous shifters do you know?”

“Apart from wyverns, you mean?”

She smiled, her teeth white in the dark. “We don’t have fangs. And I think I might have heard if our venom had such an … interesting … use. I know whatever it came from, the venom could only be gathered at night.”

“And here we have a shifter who only takes her monstrous form at night.” I sighed. Nothing was ever easy. “It certainly looks possible—assuming they have jorogumo in China?”

“Well, we don’t call them that, but we do have something similar. This one could be related.”

“I guess it would explain why Daiyu is so careful around her.”

That had been bothering me. A dragon had little to fear from any shifter, however fast or crazed they were.

Toko noticed we’d stopped, and looked back hopefully. “You’ve changed your mind?”

“No.” I waved him on. “Keep going.”

The gardens were huge. Even at night they were lovely, filled with evergreens and artfully arranged shrubs. To our night-seeing eyes, a new vista opened up around every bend of the path. It must have been spectacular in the daylight. We passed through a less-manicured section, almost like a mini forest, and emerged on the top of a slight rise, with a beautiful lake laid out before us. A teahouse modelled after the famous Golden Pavilion of Kyoto jutted out over the water to our right, and on the other side of the lake a small waterfall emptied into the water below after splashing prettily over rocks. Each one looked carefully placed to give the most pleasing arrangement.

“That’s it?” I asked.

Toko turned pleading eyes to me. “Wait until morning, great lady. A few more steps will take us into the jorogumo’s domain. We would be fools to go any further.”

The man’s fear was infectious. I had to remind myself of the risk of delay before I could take another step.

“You can stay here if you like,” I said gently. “But we’re going on.”

He accompanied us a little further down the path, then chose a boulder a safe distance from the water’s edge.

“I will sit here and play, and hope that the jorogumo is soothed.”

He set the instrument on his lap, and soon its atonal music floated across the still water. The night was calm, the only other sound the gentle splash and gurgle of the waterfall emptying into the lake. It was beautiful, but I wasn’t fooled. Toko didn’t seem the type to jump at shadows.

Luce drew two of her many blades and strode forward with one in each hand, her gaze constantly travelling over the quiet landscape, searching for danger. I watched the waterfall: its rippling movement seemed designed to mislead the eye. At any minute I expected a giant spider to leap out of it.

In fact, I almost wished she would. The waiting was the worst part. Luce and I slowed right down, trying to watch every direction at once. Whichever way I faced, I had the uncomfortable feeling that something terrible was sneaking up behind me. My nerves were wound so tight I cried out when the music cut off mid-note, followed by a thump as the shamisen hit the ground.

I whirled, and saw Toko straining against a rope wrapped around his leg. The other end of it disappeared into the water. I ran to him, but Luce was faster. She hacked through it with a few blows of her knife, and Toko scrambled away, his face a mask of horror.

Luce caught at the rope before it retracted and looped it around the boulder Toko had been sitting on. She had trouble pulling her hands away, and I realised it was sticky.

That was no rope—that was spider’s web.

Holy shit, the spider that it came from must have been
enormous
. I backed away from the water, dragging a shaking Toko with me. Just as Luce managed to free herself from the sticky stuff the boulder twitched, then it flew into the lake, jerked on the end of the web as if it weighed nothing.

I stared, open-mouthed, at the ripples spreading across the dark water, making the dried reeds in the shallows shake and shiver, the only sign that the boulder had ever existed. Miyako would be disappointed to find rock was the only thing on the menu.

Luce hurried back to join us where we stood, a considerable distance from the water’s edge. Clearly my original estimate of what constituted a safe distance had been off. The shamisen lay abandoned on the shore, but none of us felt inclined to go fetch it.

“Miyako!” I shouted. “Come out! It is I, Daiyu. I need to talk to you.”

The boulder exploded out of the water, and we leapt out of the way as it crashed into the spot where we’d been standing.

I drew a shaky breath. “I guess we wait for sunrise after all.”

“Good decision,” said Luce.

“I will warn the other kitsune to be ready,” said Toko, already beating a hasty retreat back up the path.

We followed him, not much slower. Luce still had her knives out. She looked as shaken as I felt. Okay, so maybe there were some things dragons should fear. I fretted over the delay, but I’d hate to come this far only to become a spider sandwich. I’d just have to wait a little longer. Lachie was counting on me.

I passed what was left of the night chasing sleep on a mattress unrolled on the floor. Luce didn’t seem to sleep at all: every time I woke, trying to find a more comfortable position, she was up, silhouetted against the soft light coming through the screens from the passageway.

“Is it morning yet?” I asked a couple of times, until she told me sternly to go to sleep and that she would wake me in plenty of time before dawn. But knowing you have to get up at a certain time always makes sleeping hard. I kept rousing, worried that I’d overslept.

When she finally did shake me awake, I was lost in a complicated dream involving hundreds of tiny spiders and a giant can of fly spray, and I felt groggy, as if I hadn’t slept at all.

“Time to go,” she whispered. “The sun is rising.”

I don’t know how she knew. When I staggered outside the cold slapped me in the face, but it was still dark. No stars peeked through the heavy cloud cover. Looked like Tokyo might be in for snow.

We trudged back down the path to the lake, our footsteps crunching on the frosty ground. Luce carried a sword that she hadn’t had last night; she must have found it among Daiyu’s things, or “borrowed” it from one of the displays we’d passed in the house.

By the time we crested the rise that looked over the lake, an orange glow had appeared in the sky to the east, in the small clear space between the horizon and the thick grey clouds. My breath made billowing clouds of my own in the cold air when I spoke.

“Let’s hope she’s in a more receptive mood this morning.”

We entered the ornate teahouse that jutted over the lake. Its large windows were open to the elements, allowing an unobstructed view of the pretty waterfall across the lake, everything washed to grey in the dim light.

“Miyako,” I called. “Show yourself.”

Luce stood beside me, her sword drawn, watching the dark water below us. Nothing stirred except the hairs on the back of my neck, which were insisting we head back to the safety of the house
right now
, dammit.

What was wrong with me? I was too old to be afraid of the dark, and too powerful a shifter to be afraid of another. The temptation to take trueshape and be sure of my invincibility hovered, but I couldn’t risk it. Miyako might be too blind to tell the difference between my trueshape and Daiyu’s, but who knew if Blue’s seeming would survive the transition to trueshape and back? I couldn’t risk losing the protection of my disguise before I had to.

“Miyako! Come out. I need to talk to you.”

A shivering among the reeds had Luce bracing for action, but no boulders appeared this time, only a woman’s head, rising from the water like the birth of a Japanese Venus.

“Who calls?” She spoke English, as I had, and it only then occurred to me that I probably should have used Japanese. Oh, well, I could use Luce’s supposed inability to understand as an excuse, as I had with Akira.

“Daiyu,” I said.

She glided closer, more of her body rising from the lake as she did. She wore a soft pink kimono, and looked the picture of Japanese beauty—until she heaved herself up onto the bank, and I saw that her bottom half was still in spider form. She reared over us, even though the teahouse was raised above the lake, and I stepped back.

The spider body was huge, coated in thick dark hair that dripped water. Each leg ended in a vicious claw the length of my hand. It seemed all the more hideous for coming out of the bottom of that pretty pink kimono with the lovely dark-eyed face on top. If Shelob ever played dress-ups, this is what she would look like.

“Your voice sounds different.” Her eyes looked in our direction, but there was a vagueness to her gaze, as if we were unclear to her in the shadows of the teahouse. No one else had noticed my voice was wrong for Daiyu, too taken in by the evidence of their eyes. But the jorogumo didn’t rely on her eyes.

“I have a sore throat.” Okay, it was lame, but it was the best excuse I could come up with at short notice. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Luce wince, but the jorogumo didn’t pursue it. She sniffed at the air—probably checking out my perfume—and seemed satisfied.

She settled her bulk on the lake shore, and I was glad she didn’t want to share the teahouse with us. At least, with the spider head gone, I didn’t have to worry about poisonous fangs, but those hideous claw-tipped legs were enough to give me a whole new set of nightmares, and I didn’t want to get any closer to them than I had to.

“Who is your companion?”

“This is Lucinda Chan. She is helping me with the Australian situation.”

“Ah. I was hoping you had brought me a snack.”

I shuddered. The light was growing, though the sun hadn’t yet topped the horizon, but better illumination wasn’t doing Miyako any favours. The sooner she could take full human form, the happier I would be.

“No. No snack.”

“Another time, perhaps. It has been too long since I have felt live prey squirming in my grasp.”

She sounded wistful. Clearly here was a shifter who had never adapted to modern life. I wondered how old she was. Her human face had the unlined beauty of youth, but that told me nothing. Toko had called her “old and crazed”. She could be centuries old, if jorogumo were one of the more long-lived types of shifter.

Not that I was interested enough to prolong our charming interview with personal questions. Miyako yawned, delicately covering her mouth with a dainty hand. Soon she’d be too tired to be any use.

“I need the hoshi no tama you guard for me.” No point beating around the bush.

My abruptness didn’t seem to bother her, despite the famed Japanese preference for indirectness. Daiyu was a dragon: I figured she didn’t bother with chitchat.

“Which one?” she asked.

“All of them.”

“Really?” Her face became more animated. “Are you finally going to kill the meddlesome little foxes? A kitsune or two would make a tasty treat.”

“My plans need not concern you. Only my wishes.”

She bowed, a sullen look on her face. “I was only asking. I don’t have many opportunities for conversation down here.”

She hulked to her feet, and Luce’s sword arm twitched reflexively, but she only lowered herself back into the water and headed out into the lake. I watched until her dark head disappeared under the water, but I saw no movement at the waterfall. The entrance to her cave must be below the waterline.