by Philip Reeve
I gaped at him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Jack does not care about Myrtle. He hates her. They never stopped arguing. He wouldn’t do that for her. Anyway, he would have said something.’
‘He thought we would not follow him if he told us it was for her sake we were coming here,’ said Nipper. ‘He thought we would laugh at him if we knew that he loves her.’
‘What?’ I said, quite confused. ‘He loves Myrtle? But she wears spectacles, and snaps at people …’
Outside the hatch, Mr Webster seemed to have finished considering Jack’s offer. ‘Sounds fair enough,’ he said.
Glancing at the rest of us to make sure that I was out of sight behind Nipper and the rest were ready with their weapons, Jack unlocked the hatch and heaved it open. The huge white spider poked his front end into the Sophronia and considered us, his many eyes a-glitter.
‘Where’s the key then?’ he asked. ‘After all, I’ve only got your word that it’s here at all.’
Jack held up Myrtle’s locket, which floated on its golden chain like a tiny, tethered moon.
Mr Webster’s banks of eyes gleamed greedily. ‘So that’s it, eh? Very tasty.’ Squeezing a limb in through the hatchway he reached out to take it, but Jack snatched it away.
‘I want Myrtle safe first!’ he warned.
‘Oh dear,’ said Webster, all mock dismay. ‘I’ve just remembered. She ain’t here.’
‘Then where?’ cried Jack. ‘What have you done with her? If you’ve harmed her I shall …’
‘Last time I noticed, she was on Mars,’ said Webster. ‘I think the cacti finished her off, although I had to leave before I had a chance to make certain. She caused us no little inconvenience, your Myrtle. But it’s of no account. Things are moving now. The trap’s been set, and nothing can stop it being sprung. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of traps …’
Webster shot out his foreclaw and snatched my sister’s locket from Jack’s hand. In the same instant, through every hatch, his spider-warriors came storming in at us. I saw Jack draw his pistols and discharge them both into the eyes of a spider who came whirling down through the entry port above him. I saw the Tentacle Twins’ crowns flashing with electric fire, and Grindle laying about him with his cutlass, and the pale slime bubbling from severed spider legs, but the whole cabin was filled with legs by then; a forest of twitching, scuttling spiders, and however many my brave shipmates cut down there were always more behind.
It was Ssil who saved me. Snatching me from behind, she dragged me towards the wedding chamber. Behind us Jack was shouting, and the Tentacle Twins were frying attacker after attacker with their electric haloes, filling the ship with the stench of roasted spider skin. In all the confusion no one noticed Ssil and me as we plunged into the darkened wedding chamber. Shivering, whispering softly to herself, Ssil heaved up a brass plate in the floor and pushed me down into a tight, sulphur-smelling place beneath. As she climbed down after me and pulled the plate back into place above us I understood that we were in one of the exhaust-horns of the Sophronia’s alchemical engines.
‘But –’ I protested.
‘Shhhh!’ hissed Ssil, her claw touching my mouth. I shhhhed. Around us, above us, we could hear the scratch and stamp of the battle, the bark of Jack’s pistols, the crackle of Yarg and Squidley’s tentacles. But the hissings and screeching of the white spiders were louder. Soon they were the only sound, and we guessed that our friends had been beaten. There was more scrabbling, and the scratching of claws, and the sound of things breaking. Then silence.
We edged together along the exhaust-horn until we reached its broad mouth, where the brass was still warm, stained green and blue and other, nameless colours by the exhalations from the great alembic. Peering out into the aether, we saw that we were moving. The spiders were hauling us through their worldwide web much as horses tug narrow boats along the canals of England, except of course that there were more of them, and they had more legs than horses, and the ropes were made of web, not hemp.
‘Where are they taking us?’ I asked.
‘Sssssshhhh!’ said Ssil again.
On and on they dragged us, for half an hour, an hour … I began to find it hard to breathe in the thin aether. Around us the webs grew denser. I could see more and more wrecked ships snagged in them, wound about with mummy-shrouds of web. Some looked to be of Jovian design, some were more like the ancient Martian aether-ships whose images have been found in the ruined temples of that world, and others were like none I had ever seen or heard of – ships from other stars perhaps, or from long-dead Mercury or the frozen outer worlds.
Soon the Sophronia’s progress began to slow. More webs enwrapped her, tethering her tight in a great cat’s cradle of gossamer. We were in a place where the strands were woven so dense that they blotted out the face of Saturn entirely, forming one of those planetoid-studded tents which I had noticed on the way into the rings, except that this one was far, far larger than the rest, and somehow brighter, as if it were being lit up from within by many lamps. After a while we heard Mr Webster and his myrmidons making their way off the Sophronia, and a while after that we saw them creeping away along a bridge which led to a gaping entrance in that castle of web, carrying a number of bulky, white parcels between them. Some of the parcels were still struggling.
‘They have captured Jack!’ whispered Ssillissa. ‘They have captured everyone! Everyone but usss!’ Tears drifted from her eyes and wobbled away into space.
I found that I was crying too. ‘Oh, why did he come here?’ I asked aloud. ‘Is it true what Nipper said? Does he love Myrtle?’
‘Jack loved your ssisster from the inssstant he sssaw her,’ said the lizard-girl. ‘How could he not? She is ssso sssweet and pretty …’
‘Myrtle? Sweet?’
‘How could Jack fail to fall in love with her? As soon as I sssaw her I knew that he mussst.’
She waved her skinny hands about, as if she were trying to draw diagrams of love in the aether. As for me, I just crouched there staring at her and feeling foolish. Jack Havock, in love with Myrtle? At first it seemed impossible, but then I began to remember things. Certain things that Jack Havock had said about my sister. The way that he had looked at her on that headland, before the spiders came for her. How he had bought those hoverhogs to clean the ship up. And I had to admit that it might be true. After all, Jack had lived a long time without human company. He had probably never met a girl before. Maybe, to someone as lonely as him, Myrtle might seem sweet and pretty …
And if what Mr Webster said were true, she was lying dead upon the planet Mars at that very moment, and she would never know what Jack had felt for her!
‘My poor Jack!’ sighed Ssilissa. ‘We musst go to him. We musst sssave him from these ssspidersss.’
‘But how?’ I asked. ‘They are so strong, and we are not strong at all. We don’t even know where they have taken Jack and the others …’
But as I looked out at the towering walls of the cobweb castle I realised that it did not matter. The spiders had taken Father from me, and Myrtle too. I could not let them take Jack without a fight. Somehow, Ssillissa and I would have to enter that fortress of web, and bring him and our other shipmates safely out.
Chapter Sixteen
In Which I Enter the Great Fortress of the First Ones, and Make Several Intriguing Discoveries.
Ssil unlatched the plate above us and heaved herself out of the cramped tube. I followed. All was still. The door of the wedding chamber stood open. The hold beyond was shadowy, lit only by the twilight glow of Saturn pouring through the portholes. All sorts of objects turned and tumbled there – discarded swords, spent pistol balls, plates and beakers from a smashed-open chest and the clenched, twitching corpses of dead spiders. The hoverhogs pooted about on the end of their strings, still tied to the wall, but happy enough, for the battle had overturned lockers and upset biscuit barrels and all manner of morsels were pirouetting about in mid-air. The attackers had left the hatches open when they departed. We
shut them and refilled the ship with air, and breathed deeply, refreshing ourselves after our time in the thin, oxygen-starved aether.
‘We shall require firearms,’ I decided. And so we busied ourselves upon that melancholy battlefield, finding pistols, blunderbusses, powder and shot, and securing them about our persons.
I was just heaving aside a swag of tarpaulin that had fallen across the cover of the shot-locker when a movement in the shadows beneath startled me, and brought Ssillissa to my side, snarling fiercely. But I stayed her hand before she could bring her cutlass down on the twitching white thing that lay there. It was not a spider, as I had thought at first, but one of the Tentacle Twins.
‘Yarg!’ cried Ssillissa. She cast her weapon aside and went down on her knees to comfort the injured anemone. Yarg’s crown of tentacles stirred softly, like a bush in a gentle breeze, and a few mournful colours flickered there.
‘Is he very badly hurt?’ I asked nervously.
Ssillissa shook her head. ‘I think he was stunned in the fighting, nothing more. But he is without his twin. Oh, poor Yarg. He and Squidley have not been apart since they were spawned.’
She stroked Yarg’s tentacles, and the poor creature made plaintive, twittering sounds and little mews. I felt desperately sorry for him. After all, I knew how painful it felt to lose a mother, or a father, or even a sister. I could only guess at the grief Yarg must feel, bereft of the twin he had known all his life, whose very thoughts were linked to his.
That gave me an idea. I shook Ssil by her bony shoulder. ‘Ssil, he can find the others for us!’
She looked round at me with a lizardy frown. ‘What do you mean?’
‘On the Moon he and Squidley found Myrtle by sniffing out her thoughts! And Myrtle hardly thinks at all. Surely Yarg can sense his own brother’s thoughts up in that web-palace, and the others too, maybe. He can sniff ’em out like a bloodhound!’
Ssil saw at once that I was right. She stared at me with what the poet Keats calls ‘a wild surmise’, and Yarg must have picked up our thoughts, because the colours flashing through his crown became more hopeful – red and pink and flaming yellow. He twittered urgently at us, as if to tell us that he could already sense the minds of Squidley and our other shipmates, away among the spiders’ webs.
We helped him up, and finished arming ourselves. Then, creeping out through a hatchway, the three of us began our assault upon the castle of webs.
We began by climbing a steep strand which led to that bridge across which we had seen our bound and shrouded friends conveyed. We had barely gone twenty feet before a spider came running down to see what we were about. I trained Mr Grindle’s favourite blunderbuss upon it, and when I pulled the trigger the brute flew to pieces in a most gratifying manner. Cheered by this reminder that our enemies were not invulnerable, we climbed onwards, and were not troubled again. It seemed that the spiders, imagining that the whole of Sophronia’s crew were in their power, had not troubled to leave any sentries on guard about the abandoned ship, and that the brute I had shot had been no more than a straggler, left behind by the main force of spiders as they withdrew into the castle with their prisoners.
We crept on, and made our way to an opening in the castle’s side which looked old and somehow disused. Thin wisps of web trailed from its edges, thick with space dust. Yarg leaned in, his tentacles quivering warily.
‘He can hear them inssside,’ said Ssilissa. ‘Or feel them, I mean …’ She frowned and touched her brow. ‘It is strange, Art; I can almosst hear his thoughtss. Just fragmentsss of them. They come apart like dreamss when I try to ssseize upon them.’
‘Does he think it’s safe?’ I asked.
Ssil concentrated, as if Yarg’s thoughts were a distant whispering she would hear if she strained her ears hard enough. ‘There are no ssspidersss near. They are few.’
‘There seemed quite enough of them earlier,’ I replied with a shudder, remembering the horde which had poured aboard our ship.
‘But not like other racess,’ Ssil insisted. ‘Yarg can only hear the thoughtss of a few hundred ssspidersss. That is all that are left. Very few, and very old.’
‘Older than all the worlds of the Sun,’ I whispered, recalling something that Thunderhead had told me.
Yarg turned towards us, beckoning with his tentacles, and we crept to the entrance and made our way inside. It was warm in there, and soft, like a maze of cotton wool, and I felt the gentle tug of gravity, perhaps one-tenth of British Standard. Thin filaments of web, no thicker than the finest silk thread, were strung along the winding tunnels. I touched one to test its strength, and at once my hand leaped back, and I felt as if someone had struck me hard upon the elbow with a hammer.
‘Ow!’ I complained, rubbing my numb arm, and Ssilissa put her own hand close to the thread and said, ‘Electrical currentss run through thiss one … Through all these thin onesss. They are clever, these ssspidersss.’
We went on warily. There is not room in this little book to tell of all the strange sights we saw in that place. Many of them I could not explain anyway, like the objects which we found woven into the strands sometimes, as if placed there by the spiders as trophies or ornaments – a six-eyed skull, a curious sword, a great many glass bottles of all shapes and colours, and once, surprisingly, a jar of Mr Keiller’s Celebrated Dundee Marmalade. Sometimes we found ourselves in great open spaces, floored and walled and roofed with web, where lamps hung overhead, casting a bright, white light. We had passed through several of these marquees before I noticed that the lamps were also spiders, clinging to strands high above us, with light shining from their fat bodies.
As we crept on, and hid, and crept on yet again, I started to see that the spiders came in many forms. There were the great brutish soldiers we had already met, who trooped about in bony battalions, and the living lamps, who seemed brainless and rooted to one place, but we also saw swift-moving servant-spiders, who scuttled along on their back sets of legs, using the front ones to carry heavy, web-covered packages and parcels. Twice we saw pairs of these strange creatures bearing litters on which crouched smaller spiders – tiny by the standards I was now used to – their bodies no larger than a man’s fist, their legs like many-jointed fingers. I began to wonder if the First Ones were like our earthly ants and termites, whom God has made in different forms, for different tasks.
And yet there were not many of them, just as Ssilissa had said. Often we passed through vast halls which seemed deserted, apart from the patient lamp-spiders clinging on in their high posts.
Yarg seemed to know where he was going, and Ssil and I were quite content to follow him, feeling certain that he was homing on Squidley’s thoughts. Sure enough, after a half-hour or so, we found our way in through a triangular opening near the top of a chamber shaped like a funnel. Its floor was many feet below us, a red-brown, lumpish thing which I took to be the surface of an ancient planetoid which the spiders had incorporated into their web-castle.
‘He iss here!’ hissed Ssil, sensing another of our bloodhound’s thoughts, but I did not need her to translate. Yarg had began to bounce up and down excitedly, and cheerful glimmerings of orange and maroon flickered across his crown.
It was not hard to clamber down the funnel’s sloping wall, for the webs which formed it were soft as lambswool, and we kicked footholds in them as we went. Below us, rows of dark shapes showed among the pallid webs. Ssil, who was nimbler than yours truly, was the first to reach one. She looked up at me and said, ‘Art!’
I hurried to join her. The dark shape was a sort of alcove or basin woven in the web, with a thin veil of gossamer stretched across its mouth, like a dusty window. Behind this gently stirring veil, also enveloped in a thin wrapping of web, lay a man’s body. He was a short man, with bushy grey hair sprouting around his ears, dressed in a rather expensive-looking frock-coat and a brocade waistcoat. He looked familiar, though I could not at first think why.
Yarg hurried straight to another of the alcoves, and his little ch
irrup of joy told us that he had found his twin inside. Ssil moved on, peering into one alcove after another. There were about ten of them in all, and she looked into each one and then said, ‘They are all here but Jack! Where is Jack?’
Slower than Ssil, I followed her, and peered as I passed into the second alcove. The web which covered this was dustier, so that I had to push my face close to it before I could see inside. Even when I did discern who lay there, I did not believe it.
‘Ssil!’ I cried, too loudly. Echoes of my voice went bounding away up the web-funnel, making Ssilissa shush me furiously. But I could not help myself. You would have cried out too, gentle reader, if you had been confronted, in that awful place, with a face so dear to you, which you had not expected to see again before the Last Trump sounds.
For in that sarcophagus of web, pale and beautiful and lifeless, lay my mother!
Then Yarg, who had been trying to awaken his twin, suddenly straightened up and flashed a bitter green.
‘Sssssomeone issss coming!’ warned Ssilissa. Fright made her hiss more than ever; we both knew that what she really meant was, ‘Sssssome thing isss coming!’
Yarg darted in beside his sleeping twin. Lizardy-quick, Ssillissa hid herself in an untenanted alcove, drawing a veil of web across herself and hissing at me to do the same. But I could not tear my eyes away from Mother’s face, nor move a muscle in my body, even though I knew I risked discovery. Was she alive, or was she dead? I kept wondering. She looked as cold and pale as a crusader’s marble wife upon a tomb. But if she were dead, why would the white spiders have taken all the trouble to bring her to Saturn and keep her in this curious cabinet of trophies?
I was still pondering these questions when the webs about me began to bound and lurch with the scuttling fall of feet, and I turned to find myself facing Mr Webster and a pair of spider-servants.