by Tara Maya
One of the Raptors would probably snatch her up before she could hit the bottom. Three or four of them were always in the air, by shifts, endlessly circling the mountain citadel like vultures waiting for a beast that refused to die.
Besides, she did not want to fall into the canyon. A foul darkness, a fog or cloud, hid the bottom, so all she could see when she looked down were shifting coils of gloom upon gloom. The mist, blacker than soot, roiled restlessly but never dissipated. It was too low to be a storm cloud, and seemed too unclean for healthy rain or snow. The reek burned the inside of her mouth. Vessia forced herself to stare into the fog, trying to understand it, but she could not do so for too long at one time. It nauseated her.
There were only seven huts on the East Peak on the far side of the chasm. Five were built from tawny wedges of rock, fitted together without mortar. The only humans moving between those huts, on nameless errands, were slaves in loincloths. They were so gaunt and pallid they looked like living skeletons. Only black hollows showed where their eyes should have been. Yet they never groped or stumbled, but scurried along their paths without hesitation.
The sixth hut looked like the others, at first glance, squat and square, except instead of angular stones, it had been built from round, white stones, which were weirdly isomorphic, and which, at times, seemed to radiate with a ghastly and unnatural ruddy luminescence.
The final building was also different from others. It had been built with towering slabs of shining white limestone, leaned up against one another for support, an older and altogether different construction from the rest of the human settlement. It was taller than the other houses, and instead of a thatched roof, further slabs of limestone formed a flat cap. Vessia knew as soon as she saw it that it antedated every human thing in the tribehold. She suspected what must be inside.
There was one other tent-like structure, directly across the chasm, pitched too close to the edge of the cliff for any sane person’s taste. The tent ropes wrapped around a thick tree stump, as if the whole thing might teeter off the edge if it weren’t tied down.
Why has Xerpen brought me here? Vessia wondered. Just to gloat? Will he take me to the Blood House, or lower me into the maw of darkness below? Even if he believed he could convince me to help him, why would he need me? He has plenty of fae allies, plenty of human fools to grovel at his feet.
Vessia tried again to force herself to look into the blackness. This was no Aelfae or human magic she knew. What is it?
Amdra came to stand beside her, probably to make sure she did not sick up.
“It’s called the Black Well,” said Amdra. “He keeps it fed.”
A scream curdled the air.
It came from the weird, rudescent house. The blind, skeletal slaves dragged a naked man, barely alive, hideously mutilated to the cliff opposite the spot where Amdra and Vessia stood on the other side of the chasm, beside the tent. The slaves pulled the leather trappings off the “tent” and now that it was uncovered, she saw it was actually a cage, lashed together from human bones. The slaves pushed the naked captive into the cage.
He screamed again. Not a plea. Not a curse. Just hopeless, animal pain.
The slaves shoved the cage off the edge. They heaved on ropes, to unwind them from the stump, and lowered the cage into the black mist.
The Black Well.
He screamed all the way down, until the moment the dark swallowed him. The silence that followed chilled Vessia more than all his howls.
When the bone cage was pulled back up, out of the slithering dark, nothing remained. Nothing.
“He wanted you to see this,” said Amdra.
“I’ll bet he did.”
“It used to be only our enemies, captured in raids, who were fed to the Black Well. More and more, it is our own people. The Raptors have begun to raid the camps of the Drover caste. The Weaver caste and the Eagle caste still think they will be immune. But I think, in the end, it will eat us all.”
Even him, Amdra thought. That’s my one last hope.
Vessia shook her head.
“Why do these humans allow him to be their War Chief? He doesn’t even have his flute! He’s old. He’s weak. He’s clearly insane. Don’t they know who he is?”
“No one is allowed to call him by the old title. We only use ‘Great One.’ But yes, all the elders know. Most of them were from Rainbow Labyrinth originally, his Morvae followers who never abandoned him. The Orange Canyon Eaglelords are just as fanatic. They despise the Drover caste anyway; what do they care if a few dozen must die now and then? As long as the Great One can make Orange Canyon the greatest tribe of all, greater than Rainbow Labyrinth. They live for the day our Raptors will fly over the skies of the Labyrinth and rain rocks of fire upon their heads, take their riches and their women and their land and their power and their pride. Always Orange Canyon has been second, and always the Morvae have been second. No one hates First like Second.”
As humans had always hated the Aelfae, Vessia thought. As the Bone Whistler now hated the humans.
The baby cried, unseen, in the lodge behind them. Coos followed. The Healer must have comforted the infant.
Amdra glanced toward the sound, but made no move to leave the cliff edge.
“Is he Hawk’s son?” Vessia asked.
Amdra stiffened; Vessia wasn’t sure if she would answer.
“I don’t know the truth myself,” Amdra said at last.
“The other possibility?” Vessia asked. She recalled that Amdra had owned other Raptor slaves before Hawk.
Amdra’s lips curled. She made no accusation; but her eyes darted to the Chief’s Hall. Then she changed the subject.
Pointing to the Black Well, she said, “It’s on the rise. Do you see?”
Indeed, the roiling blackness had seemed to thicken a little even during the short time Vessia had observed it, but she’d told herself it was just her fear of it that grew stronger moment by moment.
“That’s the other reason everyone obeys him,” said Amdra. “If we don’t do what he says, if we don’t keep feeding the Black Well, the darkness rises. Before the Eaglelords agreed it would be acceptable to feed it our own people, there were months when the Riders couldn’t bring back enough war prisoners to feed it every day. The black tide rose so high in the arroyo that it almost reached the top of the cliff. Animals at the edge of the canyon that walked into the dark never returned. Everyone was terrified what would happen if it overflowed the mountain. We are at the parting of the waters, you know. From our mountains, the rivers run both directions, west toward the sea and east toward the desert. What if the dark tide flowed both directions as well? What if it never stopped? How many could it kill?”
“But the sacrifices make it subside?” asked Vessia skeptically. She would have thought the reverse.
“Only if there are enough of them, and if they are done with the right dances,” said Amdra. “Which only the Great One and his blind slaves know. He kills those off every few moons and trains new ones. I don’t know why he lets them dance with him anyway, they aren’t Tavaedies. They are nothing but placeholders in the tama only he seems to know. As if he…”
Amdra bit her lip. What she would not say? As if he had created the tama himself? Surely he had. That was how Aelfae danced. Amdra had blasphemed the Great One, spoken of those he tortured and killed, and even wished for his death, but to accuse him of creating a new dance was so taboo to her it seemed worse than all of these things. Humans, Vessia thought in exasperation, could be absurd.
“The sacrifice is over,” said Amdra. “It’s time to cross the Bridge.”
They had to walk a way along the cliff to reach the Bridge. Vessia knew they had reached the crossing when she saw Xerpen, in his headdress and feather cape, waiting on the other side.
Where, then, was the Bridge?
She saw nothing, only the empty gulf.
A glint of light was her first clue. Examining the space closely, she finally saw the Bridge. It was a fine thread ind
eed, as thin as a single strand of a spider’s web. The fierce winds that buffeted the tribehold were worst here, over the arroyo.
Vessia stepped out onto the thread and crossed the emptiness. She willed the wind to lift her away, but though it beat her, she did not fall. When she reached the far side, Xerpen held out his hand to her, though of course she skipped to the dirt without touching his fingers.
He was more cheery than usual, which was always a bad sign.
“Have you seen the Great Loom yet?”
“I didn’t have good view of it from my cage.”
“You brought that on yourself.”
He smiled at her. Once, it might have been disarming. Time had not been kind to him, however, and none of the physical charm he had possessed as an immortal fae lord distinguished his old age. Instead, he’d seemed to shrivel into a repulsive toad, as if his outer self were inexorably contaminated by the ugliness inside him. She studied the gaunt skeleton of a man, trying to find the handsome young singer she had once known and loved, but too little remained.
“It’s not as powerful as your Windwheel was, but the Windwheel is lost and the Loom is here. Come, let me show you.”
Xerpen took her to the tall limestone structure, the ancient Aelfae house. It was even taller inside than from the outside, because the floor was sunken into the mountain. The entire room was taken up by the immense wooden frame of a giant standing loom, as tall as the sequoia of Yellow Bear.
In front of the Loom was a stone altar, like a giant stone stool.
No one sat at the Great Loom, nor could have. The scale was inhuman. Yet a shuttle sailed the weft, leaving a wake of pure, shining light. The patterns went by so fast that all Vessia could see was a twinkling, a shimmer, as of sunlight glancing off water, before a new pattern took its place.
“It’s said that every event in the world, down to the flutterings of the tiniest ladybug is reflected somewhere in the Pattern on this Loom. Thoughts and emotions are recorded here too, every thread in the aura of every man and woman, fae and mortal, in all of Faearth.
“I have a very special tama planned,” said Xerpen. “Once you see it, you will understand everything. The Loom, the Black Well, and your own role. You will understand and you will join me.”
“If you are so sure of yourself, give me back my wings, and let me join you freely.”
“I will.”
Vessia raised her eyebrows.
“When the time is right,” he said.
Slaves bound her hands and feet to a stone slab. Panic threatened to best her. She feared torture only a little compared to the gut-twisting terror she felt at the thought of being fed to the Black Well.
He won’t do it. He wants you alive. For something. He just wants to frighten you.
Unfortunately, it was working. Her body creaked as she moved. She knew it was worn down by aging, one of the more horrible tortures of mortality. Who needed tortures when her own body was a prison, surrendering like a traitor before a blow landed?
“Vessia, I apologize for the rough invitation. But this ritual is for you. You’ll thank me for it soon.”
Six prisoners, blindfolded and bound, were brought in and tied to posts around the room.
“Don’t worry, their deaths will have nothing to do with you,” he said. “That’s another hex, a side project I meant to finish a long time ago. I’ve tried over the years, and never gotten it quite right. I think I know the right steps now. For you, though, all I will need is the Loom…and the Black Well.”
“You will feed me to the Black Well?” asked Vessia.
“Just the opposite. I will make the Black Well feed you. And me. And the others if my other hex finally works.”
“How can you link the Loom and the Black Well?”
“They’ve been linked from the start. We like to think our memories are set in stone. But they are fluid, like water in a looking bowl. They can even be changed, like threads of an unwanted pattern pulled out off the weft of a loom and rewoven to a more pleasing design.”
Xerpen stood above her with his hand cupped around something small, too small to be a knife. He opened his hand over her chest.
A small orange and black spider fell onto her breast. It crawled over her, toward her face. Vessia’s skin prickled from revulsion.
“I’ve made quite a study of Deathsworn magic in the last twenty-one years,” he said. “We Aelfae were foolish to dismiss their arts for so long. They’ve powers we could learn to use. The poison of this spider, for instance, loosens the threads of memory. Together with the Loom, which can re-weave those threads, even to patterns from long ago…” He leaned close to her. “I will restore you, Vessia, to your former glory. And then, together, we will restore our entire people.”
Lights of all six Chromas filled the room. The High Fae had arrived. Not just the Vyfae, but all of them. Xerpen had convinced them all to join him in this perversity. Who knew what lies he had told them?
“No!” Vessia shouted at them. “The humans will retaliate if you do this! You cannot start the War again. Faearth will not survive it!”
Xerpen and the High Fae ignored her. What if Xerpen was right? What if the War started again…and this time, the Aelfae won?
Xerpen slit the throats of the six human sacrifices. One after the other.
She didn’t want her people back at that price.
Xerpen and the High Fae danced in a circle around the Loom and the table where Vessia was bound. The dance was pure fae: the pure beauty of patterns that arose from chaos. The High Fae each brought their respective Chromas to the spell, but Xerpen brought something else. Dark threads of Nothing coiled around his body, his arms, and eventually, at his command, into the warp and weft of the Great Loom.
Her body began to tingle. The sensation was not painful, though it itched so fiercely, she cried out. She could feel strength and power pour into her. Looking down at her body laid out on the slab, she saw her skin tighten and smooth, her hair grow brighter. The old skin that had imprisoned her cracked and flaked away, leaving baby-tender flesh beneath. She shed age the way a crab shed an old shell.
Xerpen too, shed his withered wrinkles like a snake rubbing free of old skin. He scratched off the ugliness, and the handsome young fae lord she had once loved appeared out of the flakes.
It felt so wonderful to be young again. She could not help it; when he grinned at her, and laughed for joy, her lips parted into a smile. Then he reached down to her and drew strands of her aura, and tossed them up into the Loom, where they shimmered into the pattern.
The black threads from the Well touched the threads from her aura. A jolt rippled through her. She felt sick.
“Xerpen… no more…please…” she begged.
“This is the best part, Vessia. I promise.”
The spider bit her and Vessia screamed in agony.
Dindi
Dindi felt the memory threads of Spider Woman guide her steps. At the same time, Dindi poured her own memories into the dance. She remembered how it felt to be chosen “Duck” by her cohort during her year of Initiation, the terrible shame and loneliness. The feeling she would never live down her reputation as the failure everyone despised. She had not been locked in a literal pit, but there had been days she had lived in a black pit just the same. Now all that ugliness welled back up and amplified the dance of Spider Woman, becoming, like her weaving, something beautiful.
Lume (Spider Woman)
Long ago, before the War, when the humans and the Aelfae lived, if not in peace, then at least without the relentless obsession with mutual destruction that later consumed both peoples. Humans in those days lived little better than beasts. They had no bows, boats, baskets, blankets or stone houses. They lived in caves, clothed themselves in unsewn furs and armed themselves with spears. They kept no beasts, sowed no corn or potatoes. Little wonder the Aelfae scorned more than feared them.
It was during this generation that to the Aelfae who lived in the canyons a daughter was born with
out wings. Her name was Lume, but the other Aelfae called her, “Human!” and teased and tormented her. Her own parents felt ashamed of her, and made her practice over and over again to try to manifest her wings. The most Lume could ever do was to make herself extra arms and legs. She could make herself into a monstrosity with four arms and four legs. But she could not make wings. She could not fly.
At last, the Aelfae decided Lume was a monster, and should be locked away, so no other Aelfae need hurt their eyes looking upon her wingless ugliness. They hollowed out a mountain and locked her inside with just one sheep for company and just one hole, far above the rocky floor, to let in light and rain.
Immortal and alone in her prison of stone, Lume amused herself by spinning wool into thread and stretching the thread between the graceful rock formations of her prison. Every day, every year, she stretched her threads a little further up the pit, until at last, she reached the tiny hole in the ceiling. She emerged into a cave where a human clan lived.
Knowing she was amongst her enemies and knowing her own ugliness, she expected them to fall upon her with sticks and stones and beat her. So great was her loneliness, however, that she did not care. She walked amongst them just to be with other people, even if they should hate her.
To her amazement, the humans knelt to her and kissed her hand. None of them had wings, so they did not find it strange that she had none either. To them, she was beautiful. Her perfect face, her long flowing hair, and the strange, smooth gown she wore, all were wondrous. They begged her to tell them the secret of the strange “fur” she wore.
So Lume the Spider Woman stayed with the clan and taught them the secret of weaving. She married a human man and taught her daughters, who taught their daughters, down to the present generation.
Dindi
Dindi danced the story of Lume the Spider Woman to the beat of a handheld drum at the appropriated intervals. At the end of the dance, Dindi gestured to the loom behind her, declaiming: