by Michael Shea
In sum, we had the better part of a league's toilsome footwork just in returning to a point some hundreds of feet below where our consignment had been—in the Ephesionite's term—'ejected,' and the sun hung much higher before our work of retrieval had even begun.
And it was hellish work. The green canopy that choked it had masked the depth of this gorge, and the cruel pitch of its walls. And steep though these were, they grew as thick with gnarl-rooted trunks as a beast's hide with fur, while prickly vines and thorny shrubs bewebbed what little groundspace lay between.
But first we must work our way to the gorge's floor, for it was possible that a waterway or a bog had been what silenced our coffin's plunge. Our swords became bush-axes, and all our speech became the curses of prickly, slippery toil as we hacked and slithered our way down into this vile green crotch of hypertrophic vegetation—but whispered curses, muttered curses, for this was spiderspawn terrain, and our ears were as alert as ears could be.
The ravine-floor offered a moderate little tunnel of open space, evidence that a sizeable stream ran here in the rainy season. At present, a meager, spring-fed ghyll gurgled down the rocky course.
"If it had struck this bed, we would have heard it shatter," Mav murmured. "It's hung up in the canopy somewhere anear above us here—it must be. It dove in near center-wise to the gorge, a shade more upslope than here perhaps, but not much, and its impact might have thrown it lateral amidst treetops lower down. Let us move upgully a bit to make sure, fan out up either slope here, and start working downhill a-studying the treetops. The sun will help more as it climbs."
But so dense was the puzzle of bough and leaf above us, that the sun seemed to add little more than a shifty bedazzlement, as we struggled with the impossible footing, peering and squinting overhead, our ears a-quiver all the while to the mutter and whisper of the green hell engulfing us.
We were at it an hour, two hours, three. Time became a quagmire we sank in, each hour we'd spent making the next seem less real, less conceivable. We combed fully half a mile of ravine, then combed it again retracing our steps.
Mav, working just within sight of me, received a communication from one of the yapps, who were patrolling our perimeter with an ever more visible unease. She signalled me with a fierce "Sssst!"—a communication whose wordless eloquence we relayed up and down our line, all of us freezing dead still, and remaining so through long, long minutes that stretched towards yet another hour's duration.
In that green delirium of shifty, whispery jungle, it was at first impossible to disentangle fancy from actual sensation. But in the course of that long paralysis, a clear sense of my own body's boundaries evaporated, and a sensation of otherness, stealthily on the move, began to filter down to me. Things were ticklishly, tiptoeingly afoot—not far off, and on all sides of us: a sneaky, skittery scuttle, almost inaudible, as here, there, and yonder, alien presences advanced.
What at length made me certain of the reality of these subtle stirrings was how clearly I felt it when they had passed and gone: a sense of deliverance from terror, delicate but piercing, marked the departure of the last of the godspawn from our vicinity. I convoked our party in the ravine bottom to confer.
"They weren't mickle close," Mav told us, "or they'd have sensed us here. It was their manyness made them so palpable. I must tell you, it's not their way to move in the mass like that—almost in formation they seemed, a-seeking together for something . . . hsst!"
But we'd all heard it: a weighty slither, a rustly shifting of something quite near.
"It was overhead," whispered Nifft, and so it proved. For when we had scanned the canopy for but a moment, there, a hundred feet above us, brought by its slippage into a little beam of sunlight which threw in sharp relief a little patch of the carving that adorned it, hung our lost coffin, delicately poised in the support of a forked bough.
Our toil was far from ended. Stout line we did not lack, and agile Bantril, lightest of our crew, climbed most limberly aloft with it. But a good two rods below the prize he found the boughs too supple to withstand his added weight, and he must needs painstakingly attempt the lassoing of the casket from below. His perch was awkward in the extreme, and clear space for the cast almost nonexistent. Again and again he tried with more than human calm and concentration, and at long last snagged his loop around the coffin's narrow foot-end.
How gently he tugged to secure the ligature! It made no difference. The box, more delicately poised than we had guessed, was instantly dislodged, slid free, and plunged. Bantril desperately anchored his line, but its slender grip on the casket sufficed only to pull it short for an instant some fifty feet above the ground, whence it broke free and was set a-tumbling for the rest of its fall. The box split lengthwise on impact, like a seedpod, and something pale and slender rolled out of it handily and skittered along the watercourse, coming to rest upon a tangle of dank roots, enigmatic, of course, as were so many other aspects of our journeyings. I do not think any of us were more than mildly surprised.
We gathered round it where it came to rest: not an embalmed businessman, purple and pungent with spices. The thing was as big as a big man, but what it most resembled was an artfully carven sarcophagus, a slender ellipsoid, gracefully tapered at both ends, apparently seamless, and fashioned of a smooth, lustrous material. Its color was rich and various, a grainy mottling of hues suggesting the whole spectrum of polished woods, but the material itself was not wood, was rather slightly flexible to the finger's pressure. A graceful, symmetrical ribbing circumferenced it, molded—or carven?—with high art.
It fell to me, of course, to articulate our duty at this strange pass. "That we were deceived, my friends, we knew. Even had our mishandling"—I said "our," but spared a glance here at Nifft, who met it blankly—"not put us in the wrong with our client, I would still adjudge us beholden to discharge our delivery of the supposititious `deceased' according to our contractual terms. Our nuncial honor, gentlemen, is a thing apart from the honor of our clients. Need any more be said? Speak, whoso thinks it."
It was Mav who spoke. "Will you consult your chart once more before I speak my mind, good Nuncio?"
The map had changed yet again. "Once more it directs us to make our eastward crossing here, through the Ribbonrill!"
"Indeed, I thought it might!" said Mav, a strange excitement in her pale blue eyes. "I'll not say all I think—it's still unsure. But I will wager, though you're lied to in some matters, that your mission is very far from ill or unworthy. Nor do I think it pure accident—or rather, pure mishandling—that your cargo here was perched so high above the earth, and yourselves hid so deep in the greenery, just when that wave of spawn should pass a-seeking something. Finally, you'll note they passed up-valley. Now, with the sun a-westering so fast, and dark again anear, and the vale cleared as it were, are we not after all safest to quickfoot it cross the Ribbonrill here, and be working upslope again by the darkfall? That map and its maker are still bent to your safety, I'm saying, and I believe we should gently box this back up and be footing it fast."
And so we did, though it took the best part of another hour to re-casket our strange consignment, bandage the broken box together with ligatures of line, haul it from the ravine, reload it on our 'shaw, and make our way back to the cross-valley highway.
By the time we had pavement again underfoot, the sun hung scarce three spans above the western hills.
We flew, winged with our urgency to reach and cross the valleybottom woods before dark fell. Thickets and copses, outliers of the forest zone ahead, threw long shadows, pointing darkly towards the gloomy boskage we must traverse. When travelling with the "widow" two days before, we had encountered valley-folk enough abroad at this same hour. Now we saw not a soul in fold or field, and the farmsteads we passed in close view of were shut and shuttered up tight. We passed only one man driving a laden hay-wain, and he was whipping his plods to a lather to get his load to the barn and himself inside his own four walls.
The western r
idgeline had just swallowed the sun as we came to the edge of the forest proper. Now the trees crowded up to the highway, and their crowns leaned close to touching overhead. We began to hear the river ahead, and feel the humid breath of it. We ran the faster, so strong was our impulse to recoil and withdraw.
In moments, the forest canopy made an unbroken roof above us, and wrapped us in its green gloom, in its fragrances and its whispers, in insect-song and the fine-drawn, woven cries of dusk-hunting birds. The forest chill seeped through our sweated clothes, and as the sun's afterglow swiftly paled, a creaky note of frogs and crickets grew shrill in the wood-song.
And there, after a curve, was the river, a broad stream of sinewy black water hastening between the forest walls, bridged, as it happened, with a structure clearly rudimentary, and very old, but haply sound enough. The gap in the forest was wide enough that a narrow strip of open sky roofed it, and the sky's iron gray told us that full dark would fall on us before we had quite cleared the woods' farther fringe.
We had put bridge and river, and a half mile of forest behind us when, just as the light was failing, three of our yapps, who had been running scout before us, came stumbling back in a panic. Slobberingly, they crowded round Mav with their news, which sounded like: "Took-under, took-under!"
"Don't pause, but go wary, I'll catch ye!" Mav cried, and indeed we had not paused, but kept running, as one does in nightmares, with the dark terrain one toils to escape eerily expanding about one. It was madly illogical to haste toward whatever recent catastrophe the beasts were retreating from, but no amount of deliberation would have changed our duty to advance, nor have changed the overall need to gain higher, clearer ground and emerge from these jungly ambuscades while some iota of light still remained. On we ran, and in two turns Mav and the yapps had vanished behind us.
We ran, wheels gritting over fog-wet flagstone, ran through wraiths of river-mist ghosting slowly across our path, ran as the darkness congealed to a tarry blackness—still ran, and—lo!—felt the grade a-rising underfoot, and found the forest thinning out to either side. Here at last were the clear slopes opening out ahead, their rolling breadth faintly limned in the light of the earliest stars, and by a silver premonition in the east of a near-full moon's rise from the ridgeline above us.
"Lively," I sang out in my relief. "We will rest up on yonder heights!"
And relief winged us all. Our feet flew, and the 'shaw's wheels sang. From the trees behind us the river-mist thrust out in irregular tongues and fingers that lay across the highway, and through these we tore and emerged, trailing tatters of fog from our shoulders and spearpoints. On we sped, shedding the horror of the dark woods with each stride.
Then, just ahead, from a thicket of vine-shrouded trees enmeshed in the ghostly vapors, a billow of mist bulged out across the road, a slow gust of fog unmistakably displaced by some massive movement just within the grove.
And with this swell of mist came a word, an utterance. Not a spoken word. More like a thought, a whispery pressure that touched my spine directly with its meaning:
Stop.
Nifft and Olombo, at point, stopped hard just short of the grove, and the rest of us froze behind them. And out of the fog-cocooned trees it came dainty-footing: a shaggy black spider twice the size of a war chariot with its team in the traces. The fog wet its tiered black eyeknobs oily-bright, and covered its shaggy black fur with dewy diamonds; its palps made finicking little fussings round the glossy, dire sabres of its fangs. Again its thought muscled through the air and inhabited our minds:
Travellers, your tread pains me—you weigh strangely heavy on my Father's earth. What folk are you? Say your errand here.
I marvelled at my own voice's steadiness. "We are a Nuncial party, and make lawful delivery of our charge, a deceased Hagian citizen, to the A'Rak-Fane Endon-Thioz."
I know not this fane, but this man, this man here. . . .
The spider lifted its palps and tickled the air towards Nifft. Its delicate little gestures were curiously expressive of dawning indignation, an emotion which appeared to swell into outrage even as we watched, for now the spider reared up all four of its forelegs, and its thought came with a tremor of wrath: You! You come defiant of our primal law! You are a thief! Your aura blazons it! A thief plain and simple! A thief to the bone!
Nifft was stepping back off the road, and spreading his arms protestingly, disarmingly, his spear seemingly forgotten in his hand. "You wrong me, godling!" he cried. "You wrong me utterly! You wound me and wrong me with these ungenerous allegations!"
I cannot err in this came the spider's inexorable murmur in our minds. You are a thief . . . and the rest of your party are . . . something worse than thieves, besides. . . . The creature's mist-wet fur glinted as it stole a little closer to all of us.
Nifft, backing another careful step upslope, cried, "I must confess the truth, I see!" He opened his arms wider, as if to demonstrate how strenuously he embraced the truth, and incidentally, I noticed, cocking his spear back a bit higher above his head. "Elsewhere, Godling," Nifft urged in earnest tones, "it is true that I have cultivated the art of felonious appropriation, which closely resembles what might loosely be termed `thieving.' But that was another life, in other places! Surely your divine sense of justice forbids—not thieveries past and elsewhere—but only thieveries practised here in Hagia. And all intent of such I do most strenuously disavow! The bare thought of stealing anything here—"
And just here, Nifft made his cast. It surprised even me, who expected it, with its smooth power. Even the godspawn's inhuman quickness failed to save it, for though it launched its counter-leap in the very instant of Nifft's cast, before its hooked feet could leave the earth his spear had pierced its bristly maw just underneath the fangs, and sunk on through to bury half its length in the turf beneath. Olombo's lance thrust through its eyeknobs a half breath after, and here was I, a beat behind, with a sweep of my sword that sheared its two fangs off at the root.
Its great arched legs still pumped and struggled, but the two spears held it pinned while we began to shear those legs off one by one. Soon its huge, obscenely swollen abdomen flopped impotently upon the gore-spattered grass. Just then we heard Mav's voice, nearing fast, high with glee:
"Well done and better than well done, oh peerless, princely nuncials! Leave me a killing stroke, I beg you, leave me the finish, there's something to be done to kill it proper!"
We made way for her and she leapt upon its flat foresection to which all its legs—now bleeding stumps—were jointed. "See how near dead it is?" she exulted, kicking its flaccid abdomen. "Gods? Ptah! They are alien monsters merely, and oh, what joy it is to slay them!"
"Let's make for the ridgeline now," I urged, "and quick about it. I want no more of such work as this tonight."
"First," said Mav, "let's free at least what stolen life we may, for if this brute's brothers, or his sire, come on him, they will devour him, and possess those stolen lives." Her sunder glinted as she unsheathed its cruel hooked blade but, looking then from one to the other of us, her hand paused. "I see you have come to our land knowing less than naught of the monsters that rule it. List you then:
"Grandsire A'Rak is supreme in power. He spawns without breeding. His offspring bud from his great frame and fall off him like leggy fruit to scuttle out into the valleys, and hunt and feed and grow on their own. The use of these spawn to old Grandsire, is that all they devour, and all they learn, goes back to him when he devours them—which he does, every one of them sooner or later, once they grow large enough to begin to amount to a threat to him. One this size here would be due in a dozen summers more I ween. This and his like all go back to augment Grandaddy's huge flesh, and feed his knowledge of his wide domain.
"But now, ruined as this one is, he would be devoured by the first of his brothers that found him—and all the gathered ghosts of his prey that now fill his sacs, these would be taken into another monster's guts. It is this we can prevent, by doing thus!"
&nb
sp; She leapt then from the amputated carcass, and hurried round to the great abdomen's caudal tapering. Here her sunder glinted repeatedly as she hacked the furry bulb wide open, splitting the spinnerettes and releasing a great spill of intricate, whorled innards, among which big translucent bulbs of white were nested—the monster's silk-sacs.
Mav held her dripping blade aloft. "Be free, ye hoarded spirits!" she shrilled, and with two mighty strokes, slashed the sacs open.
An invisible turmoil filled the air—it bulged and roiled, a turbulent nothingness muscling the breeze about us. We cringed within this swift outwelling, for it smote us with bursts of thought and sensation that blotted our minds out. Within this welter I was not I, but I was a wintry moon watched rising over a frosty forest, was a childbirth pang in a bed of sweat and joy, was a line of song in a tongue I do not know, was a lingering kiss, was a knife-fighter stabbing a stranger his deathblow, was a child in her loving father's arms, was a city viewed in purple dusk all jeweled with lamps, was a shout in the street, was a sweetly remembered gust of summer breeze. . . .
And then we stood, ourselves again, all stilled by awe and sadness, till the Ephesionite (curse him, I had guessed him for a thief, yet would not credit it!) said the strangest thing, in a quiet, bemused tone:
"Let the A'Rak's web be woven, the ghost-web he's been wont to weave. . . ."