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1: Mirkwood Blues
THE WORDS THAT TWANGED and thrummed their way to Nth said, New food coming, and he stirred, resettling his legs to take the measure of the message: how far, what direction, who originated it. Mother’s Brood was large. Some of her children were more reliable than others.
New food. Different food. That had everyone’s interest. Across the span of the web, that was strung in mistlike sheets from tree to tree across their forest, he felt the others rousing, rising from their torpor. There was always food, even for so many bodies as Mother’s Brood ran to, but variety was welcome.
In the dark wood, the deer ran in their many herds, feeding in the clearings under the shadow of the webs, and being fed upon in turn. Mother saw to it that there were always clearings, where the great trees had been poisoned and weakened. There would always be deer aplenty.
In the trees there were monkeys, and they were clever and often escaped the hunt or the web, but this, too, was Mother’s plan. The monkeys were just clever enough that there would always be enough monkeys. They were aware enough to realize their fate, when they were caught, and that gave their juices an extra savor.
There were no wolves, no stalking cats. It was not that the flesh of these things was unpalatable, but they were wasteful. They consumed too many deer and monkeys for their presence to be tolerated.
New food, though. Nth waited for the words of the web to tell him that this prize was taken, so that he could beg Mother for a taste.
More speech came from the hunters, a constant commentary as they shadowed the intruders into the dark wood, hurrying above them while their siblings wove traps and barriers to channel them and funnel them.
New food. Man.
Men sometimes strayed into the wood. Nth had an understanding that there were places beyond the wood that were Man places. Those of the Brood that strayed beyond the wood frequently did not return, and this was placed at the door of Man. Those Men who strayed in the wood were served similarly. As now.
Nth felt the trap primed, a score of the best hunters of Mother’s Brood hiding among the branches, ready for the ambush. The weavers were already retreating, broadcasting that they had done their work well.
Then the web was ringing, dancing, and he could not find words in it, just a roaring of undifferentiated noise coming to him through his belly and his feet, so that he scuttled from roost to roost, trying to rid himself of the cacophony, trying to understand.
Fire! came a word that stopped him. Fire was friend to Man, no friend to Mother’s Brood. Then another sibling had found a secure post to speak from and the message jumped and bounced to Nth: We die! They come to prey on us! Protect Mother!
Instantly Nth was moving, by web and branch, surefooted and swift, scurrying toward the source of the disturbance. His very tread told those nearest him, I am coming, and the same words came from all around. Mother’s Brood was mobilizing to crush these intruders, these Men.
As he ran he felt the quick, fierce words rattle beneath him:
They have severed the web. They have destroyed the trees.
Many?
Few. But they have much Fire, and a light that burns worse than the sun. They can strike from afar.
Destroy them! Protect Mother!
Protect Mother!
And a dawning horror even as Nth crept and reached from tree to tree, stop-start, stop-start, because the Men were pressing deeper into the forest; because they were slaying many of the Brood. Because they were headed straight for Mother.
Ahead of him another swathe of web crackled and parted, shriveling to nothing in a sudden burst of heat. His clustered eyes caught the glare of it, little more, but he changed course. The Men were traveling faster than word could keep up, leaving the Brood constantly off-balance. Every time their fire flared they were striking Nth’s siblings dumb by destroying the lines and nets that they spoke through.
Then he was close to them, seeing only the pattern of their movement, the knot of Men like a single many-limbed entity to his weak eyes. At the fore it had metal claws, and those of the Brood that attacked them, mad with their fear for Mother, were pierced and cut, limbs hacked from their bodies, innards spilled and strewn and trampled as the Man-creature moved on.
There was a tremble in the ground that spoke to Nth, and a wave of his siblings caught up, a tide of gray-haired, bulbous bodies and arching legs, fangs gaping, furious at the deaths of their kin, at the damage to their home, at the sheer temerity of these trespassers. Fire roared from the Men—not one of their small fires that guarded them as they slept, nor the smaller ones they held by hand, but a great deluge of it that seared across the Brood, boiling them in their skins, setting them briefly ablaze before they broke open from the heat, writhing and twitching in momentary agony that the ground took straight to Nth and all the others.
Together! one of his siblings drummed, and they were all rushing—more of the Brood in once place than Nth had ever known, drawn from all over the wood. He braced himself for the fire, telling himself, It cannot kill us all, and that if he died for Mother it would be worth it.
He had forgotten the light they had spoken of. From the center of the Men there issued a golden radiance—not heat, not force, but pure light, so bright that his poor eyes were blind instantly, but more than that. There was a mind behind that light, and it despised him. It punished him. He felt its vast and potent displeasure crush him to the ground, sweep him away, so that he was running, they were all running, and the Men pushed on, horrible, unstoppable, unbearable in their desecration of his home.
The Brood rallied, and now he was among that wave running after the Men, catching up—and there was another gout of flame that crisped the hair on his legs, and another half-dozen of his siblings died screaming.
And Mother.
The Men had broken into her lair, a clearing in the heart of the wood that was so hung with centuries of webs that it was like a cave, and there they faced her, and the Brood had come from all around, thronging the trees, blackening the ground behind them, to either side, climbing the webs overhead, ready to descend and sacrifice everything to have some hope of saving she who had given them life.
She had raised herself on her limbs, a giant ten times the size of the largest of her Brood, her largest eyes bigger than the head of a Man, her fangs as long as their metal claws.
But the Men had fire and light, and so many of the Brood were dead to prove it. They could kill Mother. They could end it all. Nestled amid his siblings, Nth trembled, hearing the messages of fear and confusion and anger from all around him.
Then Mother spoke to them, even as she took a few careful, stalking steps forward. Be still, my children. Hold your fangs. They speak.
“Steady!” Dion called. The disc of Armes in her upraised hand bathed them in radiant light that brought confusion to the great host of spiders all around them. She could see its purity burning the monsters’ eyes, driving back their Dark nature. In her white tabard over the bronzed scales of her mail, she positively glowed with reflected light: a figure from leg
end, indomitable. But there were so many of them.
There were five who had braved the forest. Dion led them, infused with the radiant power of her faith. Each of them had sworn to her cause to bring down the blight on the world that was the man-god Darvezian but they were a disparate lot who followed for their own reasons. Cunning Lief thought there would be profit in it. Vengeful Harathes the shieldman loathed all creatures of the Dark with a passion, while the archer Cyrene served to expiate some long-hidden guilt, some action or inaction of hers that had driven her to this bloody and dangerous atonement. Of Penthos, the fifth member of their desperate band, whose hands even now crackled and roared with ethereal fire, Dion had no idea why he had come. Right now she was only glad he had.
“We’ve been in worse places than this!” she reminded her fellows.
“Penthos, what’s a word for something that’s all over covered with spiders?” Lief asked, crouching virtually at her feet. He held his spear close to him as though loath to get it filthier with spider ichor. His dark leathers were crusted with the blackish residue, his bare arms coated to the elbows with it where he had been forced to resort to his daggers.
“Arachnidous, probably.” Parts of Penthos’s robe were smouldering from his own flames, but he plainly cared not at all. No doubt his magic would mend everything, when this was done. His small, steely eyes were constantly roving about the great host that surrounded them. He had that mad little grin on, which always meant trouble. At least this time it was trouble they had all sought out.
“Well, then we’ve not been in more arachnidous places than this,” Lief said hotly. “Look at the bastards! There must be thousands of them.”
“Hundreds, possibly,” Dion considered, but that was still a great many giant spiders. And they were never still, none of them, constantly crawling over one another, heaping up, running up and down the trees and skittering over the vast sheets of webbing there as if they weighed nothing. And before them . . .
Before them was the reason they had risked all this.
The other two participants in this suicidal venture had their swords outstretched. Red-haired Cyrene gripped her long, narrow-bladed weapon in both hands, almost rigid with tension. Her bow was holstered at her back, her quiver empty. On the far side of Dion, big-framed Harathes crouched a little behind his shield, obviously working himself up to charging the colossal monstrosity before them.
Yet that great host of spiders was holding back, and Dion knew that Penthos’s fire was not achieving that, nor was the sacred symbol of Armes she bore. If the things descended now then many of them would die, but sheer numbers would overwhelm Dion’s little band. But their matriarch, that great, bloated monster, she would surely die as well.
“Come on,” Harathes spat. “Now’s our chance. We’re looking straight at what we’ve come here for.”
“We’re here for more than that. Hold fast,” Dion ordered. This was a dark, terrible place, a mass grave of all the luckless fools who had trod this path before them and whose bones now cracked underfoot, but there was nowhere that the Light of Armes could not penetrate.
“Sod me, to think I offered to come here alone and just steal the fucking things. I didn’t think the prophecy was so literal,” Lief complained.
“Quiet now,” Dion told him, laying a hand on his shoulder. “It speaks.”
“What do you mean, it speaks?” Harathes demanded. “They can’t speak. They’re animals.”
“Anything that grows old and large enough must approach wisdom,” Penthos intoned. “And approach evil too, often enough, but time suffices to bring wit even to such creatures as this, and Madam Spinner here is many centuries old.”
“Then killing it will do the world a great service,” Harathes snapped, but he held back at Dion’s order, grinding his teeth in frustration.
And she heard it in her mind, opened by Armes’s wisdom.
What do you want? A resonant, female voice, but that was just her imagination gifting humanity and character where there was none.
“We are here because we are sworn to destroy a man—a magician who has styled himself a god, and done much evil,” Dion declared, staring down her companions until they understood that she had not just been speaking rhetoric for them. She guessed that their cause would mean nothing to this creature, though. She doubted that “evil” meant much to a spider. The spinners of webs kept no mirrors, after all.
“Darvezian, he calls himself, a wielder of Dark power, a man given over entirely to that Darkness.” The same Darkness that this spider matriarch was born of, but everyone knew that the things of the Dark fought among themselves. “Darvezian, who has inherited the works of those Dark Lords who came before him, to become a terror to the world.”
I know of him. A cautious answer, but of course this creature knew Darvezian. The tales told of their meeting, two products of the same ancient evils. There had been a time, decades before, when the man-god had amused himself by sending his enemies into these woods as offerings to the matriarch and her host, but he was a thing of whims, and had moved on to other punishments.
“Then you will have heard of the prophecy,” Dion forged on. “Many have sought to bring Darvezian low. All have failed. But there is a prophecy, conditions and requirements to pass his wards and protections, and to slay him. Particularly to slay him.” None knew from where those precious words had come, but with each Dark Lord who gathered the powers of the Dark to himself, somehow there was always a prophecy to bring about his ruin. Dion took it as a sign of Armes moving subtly to bring Light to the world.
The great old matriarch of the spiders was silent, shifting its footing. Around them, the boiling, scuttling host continued to seethe. They held back for fear that their queen would be harmed, and Dion’s friends held back because to strike a blow here would see all of them dead. An impasse.
“A tooth of the great mother, the prophecy says,” Dion said carefully. “And those who would come to Darvezian must do so by the spider’s path. So we are here, because Darvezian swallows souls and corrupts minds and twists the very land, and we must brave any chance to bring him down. A fang, and a map. Do you understand me?”
Those fangs flexed as Dion watched, sword-long, curved, and filled with venom. This monster was older even than Darvezian, as was its poison. Even the man-god was not proof against its foulness. It was hardly the path of Armes, but other, holier methods had failed to even break the man’s skin.
What will you do?
“I will have one of your two fangs, and your bound word that we shall leave unmolested, and for this, we shall let you live, and continue to fill this place with your brood.”
You have slain my children.
“I cannot bring myself to be sorry,” Dion stated flatly. “Armes guards his mercy for those that deserve it. But we shall depart without harming more if you let us take what we need. Or otherwise, we shall content ourselves with ridding the world of you, even if some other must fulfill the prophecy. Once you are slain, your teeth shall lie here until another comes to claim them.”
The great spider shuffled again, agitated, lifting and lowering those deadly fangs, and Dion tensed, wondering how much this beast truly understood what she said, whether it was close enough to human, in its mind, to even grasp what was being offered.
But then it was quite still, clearly the moment that would mean life or death for a great many, and the voice came. Take it.
“Your bound word first,” Dion reminded the creature. “And Armes’s Light shall consume you if you break it. Your word that, once we have what we wish, we shall depart untouched by you or your host.”
You have it. Take what you have come for and go! At last something relatably human: frustration and anger seething in the words.
“Lief, go take a fang,” Dion said.
“Sod off,” came his quick reply.
“Do it.”
Swearing under his breath, the man moved forward, laying down his spear and drawing one of his big kniv
es. He crept almost on all fours, constantly flinching back from the matriarch’s slightest movement. The colossal spider reared up, front four limbs outstretched, fangs displayed, and Lief fell back with a yell.
All the spiders shuddered at it, and for a moment Dion thought that they would attack despite it all, but although they redoubled their agitated, bustling movement they held back.
“Lief, go!” she instructed.
The thief stared up at the matriarch, the great spread fan of her crooked legs. “I can’t . . . ,” he whispered, edging backward. “I’m sorry. I really can’t.”
“Oh you fool.” Cyrene spat. The warrior-woman strode forward, sword in hand, kicking at Lief to drive him back to Dion’s feet. The matriarch remained motionless, although her offspring were working themselves up into a frenzy.
“If this hits the latrine, it will be when she strikes,” Penthos observed with detached amusement. “I’ll set everything on fire. Doesn’t that sound like a fine plan?”
“It sounds like the plan you usually try for,” Lief got out raggedly.
Cyrene took a wide-legged stance and lined up her blade, swallowing. The eyes of every living thing there were fixed upon her.
She struck, and the great spider recoiled, staggering and weaving on its eight legs. Dion winced, hand to her head, trying to fight away the sound of its scream, which could almost have been human.
One fang was severed from that monstrous visage, and Lief, newly bold, lunged forward and grabbed for the raw and ragged end, holding it high and keeping the hollow tip as far from himself as possible.
The matriarch was limping sideways and backward, waves of its pain washing over Dion.
You have what you wanted. Now go.
“We have part of what we sought,” Dion stated. “We have the fang to strike the blow. But we need the path, the spider’s path by which to approach Darvezian. We need the map so that we can reach him without having to fight our way through his armies, his fortresses, and his traps.”
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