Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [229]
A thousand spiders, at least, had spun their webs over the loft hole. Bec couldn’t see the spiders, but he felt the webs—sticky strands that stung wherever they touched his skin. When he opened his mouth to shout “Grandfather!” they stuck to his tongue, where they tasted gagging awful. He started crying again—twice in one day!—but he drove himself through the webs, shouting, “Grandfather!” between sobs.
Four rungs from the top of the ladder, Bec got his head into the loft where the air smelled of thunderstorms. Cauvin’s pallet was in the center of the loft, and there was something shaped like a sleeping man stretched across it.
“Grandfather? Grandfather, are you awake? Are you alive?”
A faint voice came from the pallet. “Boy? Is that you, boy?”
“I’m not ‘boy,’ I’m Bec—!”
“Fetch my staff, boy. It’s on the floor between there and here.”
If Grandfather was giving orders, then Grandfather was himself, and Bec was reassured. He found the blackwood staff scarcely an arm’s length from the pallet. He nudged what he thought was a shoulder and leapt away when Grandfather opened strange, fiery eyes. Without thinking, he held the staff crosswise before him.
Grandfather groaned and his bones crackled as he sat up. “Where have you been?”
Bec opened his mouth, but he found himself unable to speak unless he admitted that he didn’t exactly know. “They tied a cloth over my eyes, but I was in a cave and in a temple on the Promise of Heaven when I got out.”
“Who were you with?”
He had to be truthful, perfectly truthful, or his tongue simply wouldn’t move. “A dog. A big dog. He pulled me through the cave tunnels, then he pulled me home.”
“Before that, boy—who tied the cloth over your eyes?”
“I think—” Bec’s tongue grew thick and clumsy but he slowly got the words out: “I think it was the Hand, the Bloody Hand of Dyareela. Leorin was there—Cauvin’s Leorin. She was with Cauvin …” Bec didn’t want to tell Grandfather what Cauvin had said and done, but he had to tell the truth. Had to. “Cauvin stayed with them, with her and the other bad people, but he made me leave. When I wouldn’t leave without him, he hit me—he hit me harder than all the Hands put together—and told me you were dead and the Hand had made a mistake taking me instead of him. I was scared, Grandfather—I didn’t know what to do except run away before he hit me again.”
“And the dog? Did Soldt give you the dog?”
“Yes,” Bec answered truthfully, but there was more. He didn’t know how he could have forgotten, but Grandfather’s questions were like keys unlocking doors in his memory. “I had help,” Bec whispered. “Cauvin told me to keep a hand on the wall, but I forgot which hand and I went the wrong way. I ran into a monster!”
Furzy feathers, Bec couldn’t describe the monster without using his arms to show Grandfather how big it had been. He put the staff down.
“Don’t let go of the staff!”
Bec snatched it up again.
“Now, tell me what you saw.”
“I didn’t see it.” Bec kept his hands tight around the wood. “I ran into it because it was as big as the whole tunnel. And it had arms! Lots of arms—well, maybe arms but maybe legs, too—like a crab’s? They were hard and sharp, kind of cold and wet. They made noise when they picked me up. It had strange eyes—” Bec clamped his teeth together, but the need to tell the truth was stronger than his jaw muscles. “Like yours, Grandfather, kind of. They were sunset-colored and they glowed in the dark and they moved—” Bec desperately wanted to show Grandfather how the glowing spots had drifted apart from each other, but Grandfather had told him to keep hold of the staff, and he was afraid to disobey.
“Did this monster say anything to you?”
Bec thought yes, but “Maybe” was the word that came out of his mouth. “I heard a voice, but—but it didn’t seem to come from the monster.”
“A man’s voice?”
Bec nodded confidently, “Deep,