The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  “Shut up, you idiot. What in Hilaal’s holy name did you do? Can I not leave you for two days without the whole world falling apart? Can’t you take care of yourself for five minutes?”

  “I . . . I’m . . . I mean . . .”

  “I said to shut the fuck up! I don’t want to hear your sniveling.” Eia turned away. Ipid’s eyes slowly adjusted to the impossibly bright room, and he saw that she had her black robes on again. Her face was hidden inside the cowl, but he could see her mouth curved in a sneer. Her eyes were sharp and cold.

  A glance around the room revealed a blackened space on the wall broken by the charred remnants of a skeleton. On the other side, blood was splattered across the doorway and into the hall. A leg still showed through the door, the rest of its owner hidden behind the jam. “What . . . what happened?” Ipid managed to ask as Eia turned from him and marched to the desk.

  “What do you think happened? I returned to collect you and found these bastards here instead, so I gave them what they deserved. Now, gather your things. We need to go.”

  “I . . . I missed you . . . where did . . .”

  “Missed me,” Eia snapped. “Of course you missed me. You can barely dress yourself. You’re helpless without me. Yet you have the audacity to scorn me! You are lucky I returned at all.”

  “Scorned . . . Eia I never . . .”

  “Enough with your excuses. Get your things before I leave you. Arin can always find another pet. Now, GO!”

  Ipid was almost too stunned to move. He had never seen Eia like this, could not even imagine that she had it inside her, but she hit him with a look that made him truly afraid to be in her presence. He ran in stumbling strides to the stairs, diverting his eyes from the mangled bodies of the looters, and hobbled up the steps to his room.

  “Five minutes and I will be gone!” Eia yelled. Her voice made his hands shake more than they already were, made his whole body tremble so that he could barely unbutton his shirt, wash the wine from his chest, and button a new one. “Three minutes,” she yelled again as he inspected the cut on his foot. It wasn’t bad, just enough to give him a limp, so he pulled a sock over it, slipped his feet in shoes, stuffed a few shirts, pants, and jackets into a bag, and nearly fell down the stairs in this rush. He arrived back in the study completely out of breath, sweating profusely, and foot throbbing so that he thought he might cry. Yet, he had one more task. He ran to the desk, arranged the papers, and shoved them into his satchel.

  “Are you ready?” Eia demanded.

  “Yes, but please, Eia, please do not let us end our time like this. I am sorry if I offended you. I wanted to be with you. I still do. Please, you mean so much to me. I think . . . I think I love you.” Ipid was not sure what he was saying, was so overwrought that the words spilled out before he could think about them.

  “Love me!” Eia threw back her head and laughed. Ipid felt his heart fall into his stomach. He staggered. “You are a fool. Do you think that is what this was? That I could love a toad like you.” She stepped forward, closing the distance between them. Her eyes were so frightful through the hood that Ipid retreated until he was trapped in the corner. Still Eia came until she was almost on top of him. Her hand reached up to him, touched his cheek. It was ice cold.

  “Is this what you thought?” she nearly whispered. “That I, Eialia Oie Alliera, one of Hilaal’s great disciples, might swoon like a girl over you, that your great charms were too much for me, that your greatness as a lover might sway my heart.” She laughed, reached for him with her other hand, made him jump in fear. “No! I wanted something very much different from your cock between my legs, though I was willing to allow it if it would have given me your son. But, in the end, you could not even give me that, so I had to look for him on my own. So are you ready to return to your masters, ready to grovel, ready to serve the Darthur? Because you are of no more use to me.”

  Ipid felt his whole world shake. His emotions gyrated between sorrow, anger, jealousy, self-loathing until he thought he might explode. It all seemed so obvious now. She was using me. Using me to get to my son. I was nothing to her. He wanted simultaneously to strangle her, stab himself, and fall to the floor and cry. Then all the emotions were swept away. He felt a rush of calm, watched uncaring as Eia’s lips moved inside her hood. Her hand reached out and took his in a firm, but gentle, ice-cold embrace, and she led him unthinking through the portal that appeared just behind her.

  After a moment of being torn apart and put back together, Ipid found himself in a courtyard. The walls of a sizeable inn surrounded him. Several black-robed figures strode from those walls toward him. He fell to his knees, felt the emotional torrent return in a paralyzing flood.

  “I am sorry, my love” Eia whispered in his ear. “That was necessary to get you here. It was a great distance to transport you. I needed the full power of your emotions. I am sorry.” She looked up from him. Ran her hand gently along his cheek until he looked into her now affectionate eyes. “I will see you again soon. I promise it, but remember Arin and the Belab cannot know about us. Walk with care, my love.” And with that, Eia stood to her full height, strode across the courtyard, and was gone.

  Chapter 12

  The 20th Day of Summer

  The door was open. Teth stared at it in disbelief. She had tried that door countless times, had tried picking its lock, battering it, prying it, begging it. Nothing had budged the polished wood so much as an inch. And now it just stood open, waiting for her to enter.

  She looked around her, listened to the smack of the Weavers at their looms, the twitter of the birds, chatter of the squirrels, rustling of leaves in the westerly breeze that seemed somehow hotter even than the blistering air around her. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was exactly as it should be for early afternoon. She had waited until now because the Weavers worked the fields in the morning. It was only after their lunch that they took their places at the looms, and she could be sure that they would not see her or interfere with her plans.

  And now that plan was negated by an open door. The length of rope fell from her hands. The hook she had spent the morning fashioning from a hoe smashed a rose, catching its petals beneath its metal expanse.

  A trap, she thought. But why trap someone you’ve already captured? She stepped toward the door, leaned forward, and looked inside without actually entering. There were stairs. The door led to stairs, a line of them that ran to the far wall then doubled back. The ceiling was more stairs, weaving back and forth, rising in flights to the top. Teth drew a knife from the back of her pants and stepped silently onto the first step. She had planned to throw a hook at the top of the tower until it caught. She was going to climb the outside of the structure to one of the large windows at the top, slip through, and find Dasen. It had not been a subtle plan, so her current need for stealth seemed foolish, but she could not help it.

  “Dasen,” she almost whispered as she reached the first landing. Wooden doors stood at either side. She tried them both. They were locked. “Dasen?” she asked their surfaces. She knocked lightly. “Dasen?” She stepped back from the door and looked up the stairs. Each landing was the same, framed by two closed doors. “Dasen!” she screamed this time. “Dasen, where are you?”

  “It is not yet time,” a ragged voice answered. It drifted down to her, barely audible yet clear as the sky outside. “The answers you seek are at the top. Find me and you shall have them.”

  Teth gripped her knife and took a shaking breath. The voice had not sounded threatening – it had sounded like a very old man – but she was somehow terrified. Gathering her courage, she announced, “I’m coming,” and started to climb.

  She stopped at each door to listen, but there was nothing to hear, and she somehow knew that the old man was right, the answers were at the top. It suddenly felt like everything that had happened in the past week was a great machine, like everything had been constructed to bring her here at this moment for this reason. She could see the pieces fitting together
. The Weavers’ routine, the boat, the garden, the open door. It all built to this.

  Focused on what she would find at the top of the stairs, Teth did not see the rock standing on the otherwise spotless stairs. Her foot came down and turned. She recovered quickly, splayed her hands to catch herself, and planted her knife into the only crack that seemed to exist between the perfectly mortared stones. Her hand slipped forward. The blade snapped.

  Teth caught herself with no more injury than a bruised knuckle then glared at the wooden handle she now held and felt the loss as if the blade were standing in her guts rather than lodged between two stones. She kicked the stone down the steps and growled. “So this is how it will be?” The knife handle followed the rock as she stomped to the end of the stairs and another open door.

  “Come in, my child,” the voice beckoned.

  “That was my best knife,” Teth barked. “If you didn’t want me to bring it, why didn’t you just ask?”

  The old man inside the room laughed, a soft, airy sound like the wheezing of a tiny bellows. “You know as well as I that you would not have listened. Now, come in and sit.”

  Teth stepped into a large room. It wrapped around the staircase to either side, taking up an entire floor of the pentagonal tower. Like the rest of the Weaver compound, it was lit only by the light filtering through a tall window high in each of the room’s stone walls. Despite its size, the room was sparsely furnished. The floor and walls were bare stone. The windows did not have shutters. The high ceiling showed wooden beams to support the tower’s final level. A narrow spiral staircase in one corner led to it. The room itself held nothing more than a long table with a single chair pulled away and angled in invitation on Teth’s side. On the other side of that table in a padded rocking chair was an ancient man.

  Teth approached the man, studying him in the sparse light that made it to the back of the room. He rocked at a rhythm that Teth somehow knew matched the pounding of the Weavers’ looms, the slap of their sandals, the flow of their breaths during meditation. He was dressed in a robe like the other Weavers such that only his boney, brown-spotted hands showed from the sleeves. The skin on those hands was as thin as gauze. The bones looked like twigs strung together for an urchin’s doll. The hands looked like those of a man seven days in the grave, but these moved. They rose from the handles of the chair and motioned her forward. Then they shot out, drew back slowly, and twitched.

  Entranced by the movement of those ancient hands, Teth walked slowly forward until she had an angle to see the old man’s face where it was thrown back into the shadows behind him. His face was clean shaven, but Teth had no idea how anyone had managed the feat. The skin was, if anything, thinner than that on his hands, and it was alternately tight over his sharp cheeks and across his bald pate, to sagging from his chin and around his eyes. The man had sharp, thin bones that seemed ready to cut through his papery skin. Teth followed the lines of those bones to the man’s ears and found them missing, replaced by lumps of scar tissue that seemed even to cover the openings. Stopping at the sight, she brought her eyes to the old man’s just as he brought his head forward. There were no eyes to catch. Blank holes stared at her.

  Teth gasped. The man moved his hands at random. His toothless mouth worked, tongue darting in and out like a lizard. And he rocked, always he rocked without even seeming to move his legs or feet.

  “Where’s Dasen?” Teth managed to ask. “What have you done with him? Why are you holding us here?” She wondered how he could even hear her for the scarred ruin that were his ears.

  “Sit,” the old man said. “All will be explained.” His hands moved, gestures as random as the Weavers’ were orchestrated. Teth looked at the table before him as she approached. It was covered with an assortment of seemingly unrelated objects – marbles, stones, a lit candle, a molding piece of fruit swarming with flies, vials of various sizes, papers, a strip of fabric, and a letter knife. The items were arrayed carefully on the desk, within the old man’s reach, but it was the last that caught Teth’s attention and held it as she approached the table and sat in the simple wooden chair. She stayed on the edge of the seat, weight forward, hands ready. She watched the knife and calculated the distance required to snatch it from the table.

  “I am sorry,” the old man said with real regret.

  “For what?” Teth asked, voice catching. The old man’s regret was deeper than that required for any wrong done to her since she had arrived. She braced herself – Dasen, she thought, heart suddenly hammered.

  “For everything,” he said. “Everything that has happened to you has been my fault. It was necessary, it was what the pattern required, but that does not mean I did it gladly.”

  Teth felt a lump form in her throat. Her chest suddenly hurt. Somehow, she knew exactly what the old man meant. “You . . . you mean. . . .”

  “Your parents,” the old man confirmed. “It was no accident that killed them. It was me.” He snatched a marble from the table and sent it flying to the rafters above.

  At the same moment, Teth’s hand found the knife. Her teeth gnashed as her fingers gripped the handle. Her body came forward, positioning her to plant the blade in the old man’s throat.

  A fall of black before her eyes brought them to her hand just in time to see the spider light upon it. She froze. The spider was as big as a saucer. It covered her hand, thick, black legs spread over her fingers where they gripped the knife. It faced her, fangs exposed, hanging just above the tender skin between her thumb and index finger. Teth’s breath caught.

  “You know this spider then?”

  Teth nodded but risked no more movement than that. She watched the old man. He was sitting forward now, rocking stopped, one hand cupped on the table a few inches from the spider. His eyelids covered the blank sockets of his eyes, but he seemed to stare through her.

  “A weaver’s warden. Curious that name since it weaves no web. Have you ever thought about that?”

  Teth shook her head, body frozen, muscles locked so tight that they ached. If that spider’s fangs came down, she would not last the day. She had seen a man bitten only once. The two hundred pound logger had been brought to her aunt in time for her to apply all her craft. It had not been enough.

  “This spider is a favorite of Weavers. The rules that govern it are quite simple, and the outcome of its actions are certain. You see, they are solitary creatures, not the slightest aggressive unless disturbed. They like to stay in high places, so it is easy to make them fall. Like me, they are blind but see everything. They hunt by motion, attacking only things that are close to them that move. And they are deadly, the perfect tool for one who weaves the Tapestry. And here, it has not only saved my life from your vengeance but, more importantly, has established an invaluable truth.”

  Sweat dripped from Teth’s chin. Her body shook from the effort of holding so perfectly still. Her eyes were locked on the spider’s, which were cloudy, worthless for actual sight.

  “You see now that I have denied you two knives. You know that neither that rock on the stairs nor this spider were accidents. I knew exactly where you would step, knew that the knife would be in your hand, that it would end up in that crack, that it would break. I knew that you would reach for this knife, knew exactly what words would make you do so. I knew exactly where the spider was, what size of marble would knock it from its perch, knew exactly where it would land. These are not coincidences. They are carefully planned manipulations of the Order. They are weavings that I have created to control you, just as I created the wind that killed your parents.” The old man had the audacity to smile at that. Teth felt her anger rise, saw the spider twitch, and forced herself to be calm, to stop the shaking in her frozen limbs.

  “Now, you understand my power,” the old man continued. “You know what I am capable of doing. You know that I will do anything and everything that is required to maintain the pattern I have created. And you know the power of that pattern. You see how it controls your life. I am going to tell
you some things now. They will not be easy to hear, but you will know the truth of them because you have felt my power, have seen my weavings at work. Now, would you like for us to talk with that spider on your hand?”

  “Get it off me,” Teth begged. “Just get it off.”

  The old man lifted his hand. A horsefly rose from the table. The spider leapt from Teth, caught the fly, and trapped it in the exact spot where it had been sitting beneath the old man’s hand.

  Teth snatched her hand back, leaving the knife resting on the table. She held the hand and shivered involuntarily. “How could you know . . .?”

  “I know everything.” The old man had returned to his rocking. His hands darted, twitched, remained in constant motion. “I am the Master Weaver, the Weaver, the Master. I am one of a long line descended from the first and greatest of all Weavers, our savior, Xionious Valatarian. Since the time our savior learned to weave the Order and used Its power to exile the Lawbreakers, my line has worked to maintain the pattern he created. Mine is the power to see the Order, to weave it like a tapestry. And because I see it, I have no need for eyes. I have no need for ears. I see everything; I hear everything; I know everything.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Teth whispered. “Why am I here?”

  The old man laughed. He slowly lifted a vial from the table, pulled the cork, and flung it at her. Teth could not react before the liquid splashed across her. She retracted, smelled something strange and musty that she could not place.

  “For the same reason I did that,” the Master said. “Because it is required to maintain the pattern. You, my dear girl, are possibly the Tapestry’s most important thread. My pattern is dependent upon you like no other. Unfortunately, that means that you had to be bent, twisted, stretched.”

  He paused, seemed to consider, then threw several rocks across the room. Only one made it out the window. “The pattern requires that you be who you are,” he said while the rocks were still in flight. “It requires that you be able to do all the things you can do. And so we pulled the threads to create you exactly as you are. We worked for generations, tirelessly manipulating the Order to create the wind, to weaken the foundation, to position your parents, to stoke the fire, to bring together all the pieces that were required to make you an orphan. We made Ipid rich. We made him move away. We left you alone! We made the forest welcome you. We made it easy for you, showed you none of its hardships until you were ready to face them. We gave you a home! We gave you the bow. We made you hunt. We made you climb and run and fight. We made you strong! We made those forest masters find you. We made the boys hate you. We made the villagers shun you. We made you hard! We made Dasen join you. We flung you together. We created the trials that would bind you. We made you feel! And you, my dear, have never failed to do your part.”