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Any minute now, I thought. Any minute and the rift would shatter into a hundred tiny shards, the way the other portals had, before disintegrating into nothingness. But its energies only kept on swirling and shimmering. Worse: it was widening. Larger than we’d ever seen.
“I thought that your spell was supposed to shut those things down, Carver.” Prudence had called on her own power, her fists covered in blue flames, ready to fight. “And this time you doubled the effect. What’s happening?”
“I don’t understand it,” Carver said, one hand held to his forehead, rubbing at his temples. “This simply isn’t possible. None of the rifts we’ve encountered thus far have resisted the dispelling. Unless – ”
He stroked at his beard, his eyes going distant, and to my chagrin, filling with something that resembled fear. I followed his gaze to the portal, as something that wore the shape of a woman stepped through. No, not a woman, exactly, but the caricature of one.
In place of hair she had a corona of horns growing out of her skull. Her eyes were huge and black, insectoid. The thing-woman wore no clothing, but something that resembled a carapace, like plates of gleaming, white armor.
“That can’t be her,” I breathed. “She’s dead. They took her, they killed her. That can’t be Thea.”
Carver’s fingers dug into my arm once more. When he spoke, his voice was small, and distant.
“Dustin,” he said. “That isn’t Thea.”
Chapter 32
“Yelzebereth,” Carver said. “The White Mother. The womb of corruption. Mother of legions.”
“Could have fooled me,” I hissed back. “She looks a hell of a lot like Thea.”
“That is no coincidence. The Eldest like to twist their servants and worshippers into shapes familiar to them. It stems from sheer egoism – from wanting to make everything in their image.”
A shiver ran up my spine as I watched Yelzebereth cast her baleful glare across the clearing, her eyes cold, unblinking. “Is there a reason they call her the White Mother, then?”
Carver’s lips tightened. “You’ll see. Everyone,” he shouted. “Fall back.”
And we did, just in time, as Yelzebereth walked further out of the portal, her steps careful and precise. As she entered our reality, I understood why her movements seemed so slow, so deliberate: attached to her back was a massive, glistening capsule, black and segmented, like the abdomen of some huge insect queen. She walked, and kept walking, until the heaving bulk of the thing attached to her – about the size of a damn bus – slithered and wriggled along with her body into the clearing.
“Oh, hell, no,” Sterling said.
“Oh God,” I murmured. “Is that why?”
Carver didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t just some bizarre feature of Yelzebereth’s alien physiology, after all. It was an egg sac, used to deliver her twisted children, bringing them into her world, and into ours, across dimensions. So this was what one of the Eldest looked like. The mad being’s slimy belly quivered. My stomach turned.
The White Mother’s lips parted, and I held my breath as I listened for her words. But she never spoke. She coughed, sputtered, then lurched over, her mouth opening wider, ever wider, until her cheeks split at the seams as her jaw came off its hinges completely. The White Mother retched and heaved, and from her perfect mouth spilled the first of what appeared to be wriggling, black snakes.
But I knew that shape. The slithering thing speeding towards my feet looked like just one piece of the shrikes that my allies and I had come to know and hate, a singular tentacle. The White Mother kept up her horrible, guttural vomiting, spitting a ghastly quantity of her spawn onto the grass.
Other Dustin had halted his assault with the blades of the Dark Room, as if to accommodate these new guests. Against the dark green of wet grass, it was incredibly difficult to make out the creatures as they snaked their way through the undergrowth.
That didn’t stop me from launching a fireball at the one closest to me. The flames exploded in a burst large enough to fry five or six of the larvae, but there were more where they came from. The forest was awash with furious arcane energy, flashing blue and green and white as my companions fire spells to obliterate the White Mother’s offspring.
Distant leaves rustled and trees swayed as Vanitas, in blade and in scabbard, came rushing back through the forest, ready to join the fight. Not just join, in fact. It looked like he was interested in ending it as quickly as he could, sailing in a direct, unwavering line towards the White Mother’s head.
“She’s the one who killed me,” Vanitas thundered in my mind. “I recognize her. I’m gonna gut her. Split her open, then cut out her insides.”
“It isn’t her,” I thought back. “But hurt her as much as you want. If you can. And be careful.”
Hah. I should learn to take my own advice. I danced away from another of the White Mother’s larva, vaulting out of its path in time to reposition my dagger in my hand, then falling to my knee to stab the little fucker straight down its middle. It was the kind of slick, surprise move I didn’t even know I was capable of, the kind that made me swivel my head around looking for approval, but everyone was too busy fighting their own quota of monsters to notice.
The White Mother’s stock had run out, though. That, or she was far too busy fending off Vanitas’s attacks with her bare hands, the fingers of which ended in massive, razor-sharp talons. Yelzebereth’s lips were curled far back enough to show her fangs, smeared as they were with the slick black liquid that accompanied the birth of the shrikes.
Surely she hadn’t penetrated our reality just because Other Dustin called for her, just to puke out several dozen mostly harmless ground slugs. And as if hearing my thoughts, the White Mother’s obsidian eyes locked with mine. With black, sharp teeth, she grinned.
“Out the other end,” Sterling cried out. “I am so tired of this shit.”
The White Mother’s enormous abdomen was quivering harder, this time because it was ejecting the fully-grown form of the things it was vomiting out of its mouth. A shrike burst wetly from out of her egg sac, its body glistening in black slime, and it picked itself up off the grass, stumbling, shambling. The White Mother brought her hands to her cheeks in grotesque ecstasy as she birthed another shrike, and another, until the clearing was filled with the shrill, high-pitched ululations of her corrupted brood.
