We took a shallow keeled boat to reach Vel Zerav. It wouldn’t have taken long, if we could take a direct path, but it was low tide, and a labyrinthian coral reef stretched just under the waterline, from the shoreline all the way to a craggily break water a mile out.
As a group of servitors rowed us over the vibrant labyrinth of coral, I spotted Marvale’s galley rocking in the deep water bay on the other side of Port Sadrine. What was his reaction going to be when he found me gone? What about my father? The thought almost managed to make me smile. I might have been nothing but a curiosity to Vertale, but at least I could savor the taste of schadenfreude.
I’d been expecting a bleak spire of slate, but my new home, Vel Zerav, was by far the most colorful building I’d ever seen. The tower was a line of vibrancy spearing up out of a small, lush island no bigger than a few farm plots jammed together.
The tower of Vel Zerav loomed over a small hamlet of neatly built huts and tidy houses. The grounds were crawling with undead, including a dozen vellum knights in crimson plate armor, each of them made from towering men, easily over six feet tall. Servitors worked a small field, prepared fish, cooked meals. A group on the small pier had begun lashing the ship into place the moment we pulled in.
I only saw a handful of the living—a group I was no longer a part of—as I hurriedly disembarked behind Vertale. They were all in carroty orange clothing. My hair had been that same color when I was a kid.
A primly dressed, matronly woman met us in a garden courtyard nestled into the shadow of the tower. “Lord Arbiter, I see you have a guest.”
“Just a deadslave,” Vertale said casually.
Slave. A deadslave, no less.
So that’s what I was. Perhaps I should have understood my situation earlier, but it wasn’t until I actually heard the word that it sank in.
“Ah, delightful,” the woman said. “Does she have any skills?”
“I’ll trust you to find that out.” Vertale turned to me and motioned at the woman. “This is Barza, the Tower’s Stewardess. Obey her.”
Obey her, because you are nothing but a Deadslave. I clutched my hands behind my back to control the trembling. “Yes, Lord Arbiter,” I whispered.
He nodded, and stalked off through the Tower’s mural painted doors, leaving me with Barza, and a courtyard full of flowers and undead.
“You have a name, girl?” Barza asked.
“Aveline,” I said.
“Well, at least there’s that. You good for anything?”
“I can cook; my parents owned a tavern and—”
“We don’t need that. We already have a cook. Anything else?”
“I… I didn’t just cook. I was tavern maid for years.”
“Magister Zoivan already someone serving his meals, and she’s not a walking corpse.” Barza looked me over, gaze lingering on my hips and waist, my breasts and face. “Although I suppose the girl isn’t worth looking at, so there’s a chance he’d prefer you. The man is odd, bless his soul. Heavens, but you really are gorgeous for a cav, aren’t you?”
I smiled and curtsied instinctively at the mention of my appearance. “Thank you, my Lady, you’re far more charitable than I deserve.”
Cav. For cadaver. She called me a cadaver, and I still curtsied like a fucking idiot.
Barza snorted. “Life sure trained into a demure little thing, didn’t it? What did they use on you, girl?” Barza snatched my hand and twisted it about like she owned me—which, I suppose, wasn’t too far off from the truth. “Adder’s Poppy?”
I kept the smile locked on my face as she snatched my chin and twisted my jaw. “Pale syrup, my lady.”
“Call me Barza. I’m no lady. And obviously they used pale syrup on your hands. You wouldn’t be this supple otherwise. That might be useful, if you’re any good with your hands. But what did they use on the rest of you?”
“Only pale syrup.”
“You’re serious?” When I nodded, Barza cackled. “What a hilariously absurd waste of money. Well tell me, for a corpse that’s worth a fortune, are you good for anything else? Because I’m still not seeing much.”
I scraped my mind in search of another marketable skill. “I’m not bad with a needle, and I also know my numbers and letters. I kept the ledgers for the tavern and—”
“No.” Barza cackled like a witch. “As if I’d hand our ledgers over to a deadslave. So you’re not good for much, are you?” She sighed. “Well, we’ll find something fitting for you, don’t worry girl.”
I did not like the sound of that. They were going to get a use out of me no matter what. I was in the shadow of a necromancer’s tower. I didn’t want to think how terrible those uses could get.
“Come to think of it,” Barza said, “I might have something for such nimble fingers.” She absently bent back my right index finger. Terrifyingly, I didn’t feel anything but warm stretch, even as she bent it all the way back to lay flat against the back of my palm. I couldn’t take my eyes off the horror of seeing my body contort so unnaturally. What the hell did they do to me?
“Girl. I asked you a question.”
I tore my gaze away from my hand. “I’m sorry, could you—”
“Are you scared of spiders?”
Absolutely terrified.
“Not at all,” I lied with a forced smile.
***
I hid behind a smile, trembling while the pair of maneater spiders hissed and tangled their limbs together in a dominance contest over the goat. A goat. The spiders were so enormous we fed them goat.
And guess who was holding the lead while it bleated in terror? Supposedly it was a way to “make them get to know me.” Like they were dogs. If they weren’t right there in front of me, the absurdity of it might have been enough to make me laugh. And they were going to come even closer to me.
Their bodies were larger than my torso, glossy exoskeletons scratched and dinged, legs like curled urchin spines, grasping and scratching at the floor, moving in skittering jolts. Eight droplets of ink for eyes, fangs thick as wine bottles. They were experimental horrors made by some mad necromancer—and we were supposed to milk them for venom?
“I do not need some dead harem doll down here, Barza. We do serious work.”
The nestkeeper was relentless. Gexelle. She had snorted in derision the instant she laid eyes on me, and it hadn’t gotten any better since. She wasn’t the first person to hate me off a single glance, but she was the most essential to my life thus far, because if I failed in the web entangled hell, I couldn’t imagine what horrific pit they’d throw me into next.
So if she loathed me on principle, that just meant I had to find some way to win her over.
Gexelle was an intimidating prospect, almost as much as her spiders. She was a brawny woman with a full half foot on me in height, thick forearms, and deep set, eternally glaring eyes. She’d wrangled her ash gray hair into a severe bushy ponytail that was startlingly unflattering on the hard rectangle of her face, but I doubt she’d appreciate fashion advice from a “dead harem doll.”
“They used pale syrup,” Barza said, “and they used it everywhere, Heaven only knows why, but it means she’s flexible for a cav. Flexible for just about anyone, actually. It’s a little disgusting, honestly, but it should be useful.”
That stung. A little absurd the things we take personally, but that casual disgust made me want to curl up.
“So she’s got flexible fingers; so what?” Gexelle said. “We going to start an embroidery shop down here?”
Maybe we should. Or at least a tailor. There had to be some use for this much webbing. But I wasn’t going to say anything.
“You’re telling me you can’t think of any uses for another embalmed body the spiders will ignore?”
“Like the last corpse you foisted on me was any use,” Gexelle said.
“Aveline is surprisingly sane for a revenant; nothing like Nocken.”
Barza and Gexelle were both safe on the other side of the bars splitting the nest off from the catacombs. The only light we had was torchlight from the other side of the bars. As if this jungle of webbing needed to be any more intimidating. If I actually had any sanity, I’d have come up with some way to be on that side of the bars with them. Instead, I was in here with the spiders and the dead. Four mindless servitors in oiled robes that were made not to stick in the webbing, and Nocken, one of three other revenants I’d seen since arriving at Vel Zerav a few hours back.
Nocken twitched at his name. The fact I was even in the same category as this thing standing beside me was a sign of just how thoroughly inhuman I was to these people.
Nocken might have been a fine enough fellow at one point—but now his head was caved in, and all he could do was gurgle. He had a linen bag over his head, cinched tight under the jaw. If it was there for modesty, it was a poor choice. The fabric draped into the concave dish of his shattered skull.
The spider’s dominance display ended with the darker of the two spiders skittering away into the warren of webbing. I had to clench my jaw to hold in a scream at the way it disappeared into the tunnel dug through the web. Old bones twitched in the webbing as it moved.
I smiled idiotically as the dominant spider turned on me. If that didn’t prove I’d been raised to be a useless trophy on a man’s arm, I couldn’t imagine what would. I couldn’t control the trembling terror.
“At least Nocken has an excuse to be a brain dead fool.” Gexelle said, then yelled through the bars, “Hey! Cav! You ever going to get around to feeding her, or you plan to just stand there pissing yourself in fear until we all rot?”
Right. Right. I was supposed to step forward. I had to, or they’d know I was useless—and then what? These people owned me. They’d purchased me. They were going to get a use for their money. So do it, Aveline.
But I couldn’t even move my toes. Panic had paralyzed me better than any spider’s venom ever could. Those skittering limbs. Those inky voids for eyes. It was all too much. My idiotic smile splintered. If I still had to breathe, I’d probably have fainted from how frantically I was hyperventilating.
The spider clicked and shifted impatiently. It let out an almost inorganic hiss, like a dull blade scraping slowly across on steel.
“MOVE GIRL!” Gexelle yelled.
That idiotic smile still frozen on my face, I jolted and stumbled forward onto the thick webbing, yanking the bleating goat along with me. Its hoofs caught, and I had to wrench it forward. The goat screamed as the spider stalked forward.
It wasn’t the first time I’d brought out food. It was okay. This was no different than bringing someone a meal at the tavern. No different at all.
I fell back on my ass with a scream when one of the spiders legs brushed against my stomach. As it bit the struggling goat and entangled its twitching body in webs, I scrambled back in a screaming panic. If I weren’t wearing treated robes, I’d have been as entangled as that goat.
I couldn’t stop mindlessly fleeing until I’d gone so far I hit the bars. With those iron bars against my back, I finally wrenched back some semblance of self control, and pinned a gloved hand over my mouth to hold in the scream. A feral whine still slipped out of me, but at least I’d stopped squealing.
“Blessed heavens, this idiot girl,” Gexelle said just behind me. “They’re not going to eat you, you moronic cav. You’re dead and pumped full of poison.”
You’d think I was being unreasonable to find this whole situation a little unsettling. The spider feasted on the still twitching goat.
“What the hell are you expecting out of me, girl? Comfort? Go get her venom while it’s pumping! If you can’t handle it, you’d better tell me now, because we’ll lose the chance, otherwise. Heavens, Barza, even the servitors are more effective than this cav.”
The servitors were gathering bales of webbing from the tunnels and walls with twisting tools that looked vaguely like short handled, two pronged pitchforks with detachable heads.
A third, unfamiliar maneater spider stretched its legs like long feelers out of a dark tunnel beside one of the servitors. Its movements were quick and aggressive until its legs brushed up against the servitor. At which point it promptly lost all interest in the mummified corpse.
I took a long breath. I wasn’t in any danger. I was a walking corpse—and right then, that was exactly what I wanted to be. Come on, Aveline. You’re blowing this. Get yourself together. Still trembling like an aspen leaf in the breeze, I miraculously managed to find my feet. More spiders crawled from the walls, observing their feasting matron, ignoring me entirely.
“Okay, Nocken,” I said. My voice was a full octave higher than usual, and I had a high voice as it was, so it was almost a squeak. At least the words were clear enough that Nocken twitched at his name. “Bring up that wheelbarrow full of jars, and let’s start filling them up.”
It took hours, and my fear was utterly wrung out by the end. You can only keep up a panic for so long before you just go numb, and I’d gone far past that point. That first day in the nest left me a vacant shell. We went through three goats, two chickens, and a particularly violent hog, but when I finally left the nest and locked the cage doors behind me, I was able to hand Gexelle a wheelbarrow full of venom.
“Huh,” she grunted. That was all the praise I got, but at least she wasn’t still trying to get rid of me.
As she wheeled it away, I flashed a smile at Nocken, on instinct trying for some moment of companionable bonding the way I always used to with the cooks at the end of a particularly rough shift. All he did was twitch.