by William King
He opened his eyes and looked around blearily. He was still in the great cave, beneath the roots of the great dead tree. His mouth was dry, his throat felt parched. He knew he had been dreaming but he knew also that in part what he had seen was real, had happened. No, that was not quite it. Might have happened. It was as if he was reliving the memories of something else. They were in the air here, imprinted on the magical energy surrounding him. Perhaps they had come from the tree or its ghost.
His eyes closed once again. He felt spiders running over his body, through his mind. He drifted over the forest once more, looking out through the eyes of an elf. A thought drifted into his mind. The elves communicated with the Great Trees and through them. They left their memories in the minds of the trees as did the birds and other creatures that served them. The memories of a Great Tree were a composite of every creature that had been touched by its web of magic, of the Tree’s vast slow thoughts and its dreams and nightmares. He felt on the brink of a greater understanding but then his consciousness submerged once more.
He saw a Gate open. He saw spiders come through from somewhere else. A distant memory told him there were many such Gates scattered through the Sunlands and elsewhere. Most were dormant but sometimes one opened and things came through from other lands, other worlds, other times.
The spiders were not really spiders but a sentient arachnid race. They used the stuff of life as humans used metal and leather and wood. There were hundreds of different types, each with its own caste and function. They burrowed their cities, spun their webs and hunted through the great forest.
Their Gate had opened inside a great pool of Shadow magic and slowly it warped them, causing mutations, making the spiders more savage and strange and horribly cannibalistic until their civilisation fell into anarchy and they became little more than wandering predators of the forest. Only small groups held a grip on some of the magic that had made them what they once were.
More elvish memories flickered through his mind. He was hunted through the forest by the blighted spiders until he was overcome, and the last thing he did was open his mind to the Elder Tree before his body was devoured. His memories flowed out to join its.
He woke again and wondered how much time had passed. He felt hungry now, hollowed out and weak. He knew if he dangled here long enough his muscles would atrophy and his mind would break.
What was going on?
Was this all part of the Shadow’s effort to corrupt him? It did not feel like that, but then it need not. The Shadow could be very subtle. He thought about what he had seen and what it meant, tried to fit it together with his knowledge of the world.
He had met Old Ones who had claimed that theirs was the most ancient people in the world. He had met scholars who claimed that the elves or the Giants or the Kassandri had been here even before the Old Ones. He had been taught there were kingdoms of men before the Age of Shadow. These events all could have taken place in those ancient times, before the coming of the First Empire and the Age of Light. It was hard to sort out all of this information in his confused state.
Something crawled over his face, a large soft spider with a pattern like a skull on the bloated underbelly of his thorax. Its furry legs stroked his face. Its tiny mandibles dug into his flesh, hallucinogenic poison swept through his mind again. He tumbled down into strange dreams.
He saw the Shadow settle on the forest heart, the blights begin to corrupt or kill the forest. He felt some of the great trees kin become blighted. He saw huge wars fought by the followers of each tree, the Nations of the Elves and their sometimes allies among the humans and Old Ones were enlisted by both sides. He saw the old community of shared intelligence torn apart. He felt the vast world-mind of the forest disintegrate and fall into insanity as it lost its wholeness and various parts of itself.
He knew who he was now, the tree Mayasha. He felt his roots extend deep into the earth, looked out through the thousands of dreaming eyes of his elf people, relayed their thoughts to each other across the leagues, lent them parts of his own great power to let them work their small mortal magics. He shared their memories and those of the great white owls and the intelligent hunting cats who were linked with him.
He recalled the wars he had fought with his corrupted brethren and the armies of the Old Ones and their human servants. He felt as if he understood some small part of the thoughts of a huge, slow god. He watched centuries and millennia pass, and witnessed the births and deaths of generations of elves and humans and beasts and trees. He sensed the spread of the Shadow through the land.
He saw the Blight spread through the great trees of the forest heart and the wars between their peoples. He mourned the slow death of the elvish race as the wars and diseases and dark magic took their toll. Some of the elves left the forest entirely and passed beyond the reach of the Elder Trees becoming the Lost. Others turned their faces from their former gods and looked for new divinities to save them.
And all the time he felt the growth of the Blight passing through the roots of the continent, a great poisonous pool, coming ever closer, tainting everything it could, killing everything it could not, a cancer in the flesh of the living world, a thing out of control, almost impossible to excise.
He warred with it, did his best to contain it, turned its agents from his lands but in the end the struggle was too much. The disease reached even him, settled in his roots and slowly over the centuries weakened him and drove him mad. The Great Tree knew that he was dying and the elves too began to die or leave. Madness stole over him and it passed to his children who lost themselves in drugs and dark rituals and communing with the Taint in the Green.
While all this was happening the humans came, driving Mayasha’s people from the lands they had seized, further disrupting the balance of nature.
The Weaver came with drugs and sorcery, a magic which at first seemed to help the Elder Tree but in reality simply made the madness more subtle and less detectable. A Spider Queen came too and made her nest in the roots of Mayasha and provided her children and the narcotic pleasures of their venom to the service of the Elder Tree’s people. Weaver began to tap into Mayasha’s power and knowledge and use them to her own dark ends, hastening the Blight of the woods, warping the minds of his people.
In moments, of lucidity, knowing what was happening to itself, Mayasha willed his own death and slowly a bit at a time it stole over him. His consciousness dwindled, his memories faded along with his power, and as this knowledge crept into his mind, Kormak realised that he was indeed communing with the ghost of the Elder Tree, all that remained of its spirit that dwelled within what had once been its great body.
He saw too that the process of corruption had not just been one way from Weaver to the Tree. The last remnant of the Tree had been able to subtly shape the Spider Priestess’s thoughts, had Kormak brought here so that he could be told the truth, and shown the magnitude of the threat. He was shown how to destroy the last remnants of the Great Tree so that its power could not be used by the Shadow. He had been shown where his blade lay and how to find it in the maze beneath the roots and he had been shown what he must do with it.
Into his mind was thrust the knowledge he needed to destroy the last and final ganglions of the Great Tree’s mind and knowledge of what defended them.
He looked at that and was afraid.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SPELL FELL from his mind. He opened his eyes and for the first time in a long time felt fully awake. He considered his position. He was bound in the heart of the Great Tree’s root system, cocooned and stuck in a web suspended above the cavern floor, watched by spider eyes and those of mad, diseased elves.
First things first, he needed to get his hands free. His arms were bound across his chest by the webbing. He flexed his muscles; the spidersilk gave way slightly but not far enough. He tried writhing his body but to no avail. The Elder Sign was warm against his chest. He fumbled at it with his numbed fingers and managed to clutch its metal edge. Painfully slo
wly he moved it, turning the edge so that it rubbed against the silk.
Moving it backwards and forwards he managed to abrade the fabric until the edge of the sign was through it. He widened the slit until he could get his fingers free and kept rubbing away until the gap was wide enough to allow his arms free movement. He paused when it looked like anyone was paying any attention to him. His wriggling in the web caused one of the spiders to come closer. He held still as it stroked his face with its legs. He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep once more. The last thing he wanted now was to be injected with narcotic venom.
Eventually the spider scuttled away.
Kormak reached through the tear in the webbing. Once again he used the edge of the Elder Sign to rip the cocoon. It fell open. His body partially fell out. The spider this time definitely released he was awake and scuttled towards him. He tumbled forward to the ground, a drop that knocked all breath out of him and sent stars dancing across his vision.
Desperately he wriggled free of the silken restraints surrounding him. The drugged-looking elf raced towards him, an envenomed spear held in his grip. Kormak reeled upright, his legs still numb, his reflexes slow. He barely managed to parry the spear point with his hand. He leapt forward, grabbing at the hilt of the spear. He found himself breast to breast with the elf, wrestling for the weapon. He butted the elf in the nose. Bone crunched. Blood flowed. The elf’s grip weakened for a moment and Kormak used his superior strength to tear the spear from the elf’s grasp. He hit the elf in the throat with the butt of the weapon, smashed him on the side of the head, sending him tumbling to the floor then drove the stone point into its chest, ending its life.
Another elf cast its spear at him. It flashed through the air towards him, dazzlingly swift. By reflex, Kormak ducked beneath it. The elf drew a stone knife in each hand and raced towards him. The elf’s blades wove a glittering web of obsidian. Greenish poison paste dribbled from their points and Kormak knew that if it once touched his flesh, he was doomed. He stepped back, pulling the spear free of the corpse then lunged forward, forcing the elf to keep its distance, hoping that strength and feeling would return soon to his numbed limbs. He moved more slowly than he was capable of doing, hoping to lull the elf into a mistake.
The elf smiled, sensing his weakness, feinted with the left hand blade and struck with the right. Kormak knocked the blow aside with the shaft of the spear and then stabbed as the left hand blade came in, taking the elf through the throat. The elf gave a dreamy, drugged smile that slowly twisted in anguish. The ecstatic expression remained even as it writhed on the floor. A shadow fell on Kormak, warning him and he stabbed up with the spear as the spider dropped from above, impaling itself on the blade.
Kormak tossed the spear into the wall, leaving the spider pinned there, legs kicking feebly until it expired. He bent over and picked up the elf’s knives and the other spear. His lungs felt as if they were on fire. His skin felt clammy. He knew he needed to find his sword if he was to have any chance to survive down here.
Dizzy and weak he reeled towards the exit of the cave, praying that the vision he had of the tree’s heart was true and not simply a hallucination brought on by the narcotic venom and the tortures of imprisonment.
Greenish light emerged from the fungus on the walls, the glow of decomposition, of rot, of the gathering strength of the Shadow. It illuminated a long twisting tunnel that ran through the root system of Mayasha. Large segmented things scuttled away at his approach. They reminded him of slaters he had once seen when he turned over a rotten log in the forest. Long, long feelers twitched obscenely as they moved. A massive worm’s head emerged from the wall and then retreated. He felt like he was being given a view of all the monstrous things that lurked beneath the dark places of the world.
Slowly feeling and strength returned to his limbs. He felt like himself again. He was free and he had a weapon in his hand and, under the circumstances, that was about the best he could ask for.
He moved on, following the vision that had appeared in his narcotic dreams. It seemed like the only thing to do. He had no idea where he was in this vast underground labyrinth so the path revealed to him seemed as good as any other. So far the path was as he had been shown. At least part of his vision seemed true, then again, perhaps that was not so good, if what was waiting at the end of the trail was also true.
He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, repeating the old breathing exercises, and sinking into others that would sharpen his senses and quicken his reflexes. He wanted to be aware of any threats coming up on him and he felt sure that the elves and spiders both could see better in the gloom than he could.
He thought about the vision he had seen and was alarmed. It seemed something had invaded his mind to provide him with the information, bypassing his amulets, his own resistance and all the safeguards that had been placed there by the priestcraft and sorcery of the Order of the Dawn. He knew he was vulnerable here and the sooner he got out the better, but somehow his legs carried him on into the depths below the world.
It was not exactly that a geas had been laid on him, at least he thought not. That was something to which he should be immune. It was just that Mayasha, if Mayasha it was, had shown him the route he must take to perform his duty, to help oppose the Shadow, to prevent its complete victory here. He knew he needed to escape and bring word of what was going on here back to the Sunlands. Given time Weaver could build an all but invincible army in these blighted woods and spread the Shadow’s corruption far beyond them.
There was another truth. There was no other path for him to follow. He could leave it but the chances were that he would wander lost in the depths until he was recaptured. He doubted that this time he would escape so easily. What Mayasha had revealed to him was his only hope of recovering his dwarf-forged sword and he could not leave this place without it.
He wondered where the others were now, whether any of them had escaped from the elvish ambush or whether they had all been captured and were hanging cocooned, being corrupted by the Shadow and the Spider God.
He thought of the elf girl who had warned them out in the forest. She had been right. He thought of Grogan who had foreseen the ambush was likely but had gone forward anyway.
He thought of the long mazy roads that had brought him to this point, the wanderings across three continents and scores of kingdoms, the wars and battles, the women he had perhaps loved and the Order he had served, and he knew it was all a distraction to keep him from thinking about what he had to do and what he had to face next.
He thought about the Great Tree surrounding him, not dead yet, trying to extinguish the last remnants of its life and consciousness in order not to fall to the Shadow it hated and feared.
A sense of futility settled on him. Mayasha was older than many of the kingdoms of men, had seen generations of long-lived elves come and go, had in its time been as powerful as any living being on the face of the world, and even it, in the longest of runs, had fallen. What chance did anything as tiny as a man have of opposing the Shadow?
He entered the chamber he had been shown in his vision. Ahead of him lay a huge mound of coins, helmets, carved objects, like a heap of offerings piled in front of the altar of a wicked god. Atop the pile lay a familiar scabbard, thrown there by those who had captured him. He raced forward and picked up the weapon, breaking all custom and training by drawing it, to make sure it was his own weapon. He felt the familiar weight of it resting in his hand, looked upon the glowing runes and knew them to be true. He felt whole again.
A long time ago as men measured their lives, if but an eye-blink to the gods of Shadow, he had taken up this weapon and he had sworn an oath. While he lived he would keep it. He had spent his lifetime walking into the dark with this sword in his hand. He was a Champion of the Sun. Whatever he could do to oppose the ancient evil here, he would do.
Ahead of him, deeper in the chamber, the green glow intensified, a vast bulk shifted, a demon woke.
Kormak stepped forw
ard, deeper into a vast cave-like chamber. The walls seemed to be made of an interlocking tangle of roots, covered in a carpet of sticky webbing. At its centre, was a stump of wood that looked like any other save that it was covered in a pulsing, brain-like nugget of fungal growth. Next to it, watching it like a dragon watching its hoard, was the largest spider Kormak had yet seen. It was big as a house, bloated and evil. It considered him with glittering green eyes from which shone boundless hunger and boundless malice and an ancient inhuman intelligence.
The body was so huge that he doubted that even its massive columnar legs could have supported it without the aid of the vast cables of webbing that suspended its body from the ceiling. It lay on a carpet of broken bones and shattered skulls. Its mandibles looked big enough to decapitate a bull. A swarm of smaller spiders scuttled around it and over it, tending it, picking small parasites from its carapace, grooming the furry hairs of its abdomen, feeding her morsels of something.
How long had this thing been down here, Kormak wondered? How long had it been growing bloated on the power of the Shadow and the flesh of the living?
The stench of rot was strong. The oily taste of the Shadow’s presence was on Kormak’s tongue. He met the spider’s gaze and felt an immediate sense of contact, of a hungry alien presence trying to force itself into his mind. The Elder Sign burned on his chest. He muttered prayers of resistance to the Shadow, and worked the rituals of cleansing. A wave of nausea passed over him and was gone.
The ground shook as the Queen spider raised herself up. There was a creaking sound as if her legs could barely support her weight. A flick of her limbs scattered bones and sent a skull rolling to Kormak’s feet. It looked up at him mockingly with empty eye-sockets. Smaller spiders tumbled off the greater one as it moved; some regained their balance, some lay on their backs, spindly legs kicking in the air.