The Beast Within

A King's Game: Chapter Twenty

The whelp grabbed my hand.

The room was washed in red. The smell of death thickened the air.

Courtiers were thrown about, their bodies in various twisted states of agony.

They were all dead, with eyes and mouths opened in terror.

Crawling over them were thousands of spiders. The hissing came from the sea of tiny bodies as they scrambled in a wave over their feast. They covered nearly every last inch of the room, and as my eyes followed them up the wall I stifled a scream when I saw bodies encased in silk hanging from the ceiling.

On the platform where the king's table normally sat, Interra and Amatha were lounging in gorgeous wedding gowns, unaffected by the arachnids. They moved their arms as if directing the wave, and I could see thick webbing dangling from their fingers, the same material that encased the victims above.

Behind them was the last living human in the castle.

The king was tied to his throne with silk, which held him as securely as the thickest rope and wrapped his body from ankle to shoulder. He writhed and screamed to no avail, and there was blood on his face from a wound sustained somewhere on his head. Above him hung the tapestry, and I realized that the image it depicted was a replica of the carnage in the hall, with every body placed in the exact same position. The only thing missing from it was the multitude of spiders crawling over the court's corpses.

The tapestry itself looked alive, for spiders continued to pour from it in waterfalls of black and brown as their eggs hatched between the threads. When they moved through the weaving, their legs shook the yarn, making it appear as if it were shivering.

The whelp and I stood, awestruck by the horrific spectacle, until attention was called to us by the doomed king.

"Boys!" he cried. "Help your king!"

At once the hissing stopped, and the eyes of the twins and their hoard turned upon us.

This was my death, I knew it in my heart. I would leave the world fighting, but I would never taste freedom again. I would die just like the prince, smothered and hot.

But the twins smiled at me, and the spiders kept their distance. Their eyes moved to the whelp, and Interra and Amatha regarded him with curiosity.

Interra spoke first, and when she opened her mouth there were four sharp fangs nestled among her teeth.

"What do you think of our wedding, Josiah?" She waved her hand toward the savagery. "Isn't it wonderful?"

I swallowed the lump in my throat.

"You look more beautiful than I imagined," I answered with as calm a voice as I could muster.

The twins blushed and curtsied.

"What about our children?" Amatha said. "Are they not precious?"

The spiders appeared to shiver at her compliment.

"They are..." I couldn't find the proper word to lie with. "There are a lot of them."

"They will not hurt you," Interra explained, "as long as you wear our protection."

"Do you still have it?" Amatha asked. "We did warn that you would need it."

"I have it," I said and pulled the vial from under my shirt to show them.

"Very good," Amatha cooed.

"The king was right about it," said her sister, "it's a token of our love. Proven here, I think, to be invaluable."