Easy enough to see, the warriors simply ducked beneath. But Valerus’s mount took each across its neck or barrel-strong chest. Ice snapped, rained down across the trail in a short, bitter shower of splinters.
The cavalryman finally looked askance at Kern, who nodded at a magnificent, dead alder tilted against a rocky outcropping. This one had an abandoned carcass dangling from an upper branch. A buzzard hawk, or perhaps a small eagle. Trussed up in a spinning of ragged, yellowed silk, lowered from the side of the tree. Crusted with ice, it still had the semblance of that which had given the pass its name.
A noose.
Valerus smiled sickly and kept a closer eye on the tree line after that.
Kern as well. The feeling of being watched, hunted, was never so strong with him as now.
But the danger, when it came, fell first off the side of the nearby cliff face. Near a bend, where the trail narrowed up to a gray outcropping and a deadfall of old, shattered trees pressed in too close. Kern trotted near the front of the line, with Ehmish and Daol ahead in a competition for honor to see whose strength flagged first, the others strung out over several hundred paces and falling behind.
He saw the web, layered across the deadfall like a thin cord tying it all together. Sharp strands. Pale, milky white. Dangerous. But far enough off the path that he didn’t worry about it—his senses dulled from the hours afoot, mind wandering.
Then Daol hit the first strand of webbing stretched taut across the path.
Low, near his knees. And slightly translucent. But fresh. Catching around his legs as he stumbled forward, the one strand pulling up others that had been spun out over the ground in a strong mesh until his lower legs were wrapped and bound in the trap.
Daol yelled a warning, snatched out his sword and hacked quickly at the entrapping web. Ehmish faltered his next few steps, caught unawares as well. Looking for danger to either side, ahead and behind.
Never thinking to look up.
Kern, farther back, saw it move. The outcropping of what he had taken for grayish shale, or a light granite. There were footholds and fissures aplenty in the cliff face. Even a few small ledges. Any Cimmerian worth his honor could have scaled such an easy face at six years of age. No trouble for a giant spider, certainly.
Dark, mottled gray with chitinous armor and long, hook-shaped legs, the creature unfurled from its perch and stretched its forward limbs out in a kind of terrible dance. With a rusty screech, it turned and dropped halfway down the cliff side, catching itself one last time before it angled around and leaped at Daol. Massing eight-stone weight, easily, it bowled over the hapless warrior before he could even think to raise his blade at the threat. Grappling atop him. Mandibles striking down in their poisonous bite.
Hard.
And again.
Which was when Ehmish jumped up and over the treacherous webbing stretched out over the path, and with an earsplitting yell came down with both feet against the spider’s broad side. Kicking it off his friend before falling into the web strands himself.
Hardly more than two dozen strides behind, Kern had never known each step to take such a long time in coming. Dropping his sack of foodstuff, he pounded up the trail while calling for help from behind. His mouth ran bone dry as he caught a shadow of motion from the corner of one eye, spotting a second spider cresting the top of the deadfall, forward arms waving ahead of it as if feeling its way, and then a third and fourth rushed down off the steep slope to his right, chittering, screeching, ebony black mandibles clacking at empty air as they hastened to bite into fresh prey.
Nahud’r and Aodh had not been far behind Kern, and the two of them shouted him after Daol, even as they veered aside to head off the spider scrambling down the deadfall. The gray on its body was lighter, more the color of the aged wood, and the hairs tufted up around its joints and across its back finer. But it was larger, and moved with deadly intent.
“Daol!”
Ehmish struggled to sit up, drawing a few strands of webbing off the ground as he did so. Kern already had his short sword in hand and was just as worried for his lifelong friend as the younger man. He’d heard the mandibles strike. Tearing through flesh and . . .
Leather.
The beast had latched on to Daol’s back, biting into his quiver of arrows. Ehmish’s kick had rolled the monster away before it could dig into real flesh, it seemed, though it had sliced through the leather wrap and smashed most of his arrows into tinder by the looks of things. A small miracle, then.
Sensing a lack of body heat, or perhaps simply the lack of struggle from its captured prey, the spider dropped the lacerated leather pack and came again. This time for Ehmish, who was still slow to extract himself from the ground-anchored web. Daol sliced at one leg as it brushed past him, doing little more than chipping a slice out of its chitinous armor.