Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “It says there’s no map,” the priestess declared.

  “It lies. The prophecy’s clear,” Harathes returned. The cretin. Dion was one thing, but how Penthos loathed having to deal with his inferiors, the merely prosaic and human. Except Lief had a sense of humor, so he would be worth keeping perhaps . . . And there I go drifting off topic again.

  “There’s no such thing as a clear prophecy,” Penthos decided to point out. “And it’s not as if spiders are natural cartographers.” There was an interesting thought. Perhaps they were, at that. Had anyone ever looked into it? Perhaps if I fed one of these beasts purely on maps and map-makers for a year . . . ? Distraction, once more, but this standoff was boring him. Raising this much power and then just standing around with it always resulted in headaches and sometimes vomiting later. I need to do something with all this. In truth he had expected a bigger fight, and probably for some of the others to die. It had been a bit of an anticlimax, honestly. Not that he bore Cyrene, Harathes, and Lief any ill will, but stumbling out of the forest carrying Dion in his arms, barely victorious and mourning their comrades . . . well that was proper legend material, wasn’t it?

  And there I go again, always letting my thoughts run away with me . . .

  “So what’s the spider’s path?” Cyrene was asking—at least quicker on the pertinent questions than her male counterparts. “Is it a place? A pass? A tavern?”

  “A drug, maybe,” Lief suggested. “Maybe you have to be stoned out of your mind to go fight him. Makes sense to me.”

  “Quiet, Lief,” Dion told him. “The spider says . . . it says it knows things, paths, ways. It can hardly write them down for us, though.”

  “Can we take its brain or something?” Cyrene suggested. Thankfully it was only Dion’s words that the matriarch could understand, or that might have snapped the stalemate.

  “Just have her come with us?” Penthos suggested. The expected laughter didn’t come, reminding him that his elevated sense of humor was not shared by most others. And it was true, he did tend to catch them off guard with some of his more innovative solutions.

  “Shut up, Penthos,” Harathes snapped at him, which would earn the man another week of impotence once they got back to civilization, not that he’d ever suspect who was behind his intermittent problem. Oh it’s good to be a magus.

  “It says . . .” Dion wrinkled her nose, and Penthos sighed for her silently. How was it that such a gifted and beautiful young woman ever ended up in the service of such a dull religion? “It says it will send one of its brood. She will impart her knowledge to it. Penthos, is that even possible?”

  “Easily—her link to her offspring should be very strong. Good idea, actually.”

  “Whoa, whoa, do you remember just how much ground we need to cover from here to Dervazian?” Lief complained. “How many, you know, towns, and people, we have to go by. How do you think they’re going to react if we’ve got a sodding giant spider with us? It’s not as if we could put a leash on it and disguise it as a dog!”

  “Of course not, it wouldn’t have a neck,” Penthos said. Again, not a chortle. Some people just would not see the funny side of a situation. Everyone was so tense and angsty all of a sudden.

  “If we need this knowledge, then I can’t see that we have a choice,” Dion told them. “We will have to rely on my assurance that the creature is performing the will of Armes.”

  Lief’s thoughts on that: “That doesn’t even work for Penthos, let alone one of these buggers.”

  Now that was funny, and the magus barked out a rich laugh at it, only to find from the ensuing silence that apparently it hadn’t been meant as humor at all.

  He could see that nobody was going anywhere with this, and his earlier words about a spider not having a neck were rattling around in his head demanding his attention, and he thought, Could I . . . ? Abruptly the challenge had hold of him, because while he had heard of similar tricks being pulled before, none of them would be as interesting and audacious as this.

  “Let’s give it a neck. Then we can put a leash on it,” he declared.

  “’The hell are you talking about?” Harathes demanded.

  “I don’t think a leash is going to . . .” Cyrene’s voice tailed off. “No, he’s right. What are you talking about?”

  “Penthos?” Dion prompted.

  “Let’s take one of the little vermin with us,” the magus declared grandly. “I’ll disguise it.”

  “As fucking what?” Lief eyed the crawling host of hairy, round-bodied monsters. “A novelty candelabra?”

  “As our new best friend. I’ll transform it into the very semblance of a man. I can even splinter off a little of my mind for it, so it can speak to us and know enough to go behind the bushes to shit. I see no downside to this plan.”

  “You . . . that will work?” Dion sounded pleasantly impressed. Or horrified. Always hard to distinguish, those.

  “By my reckoning it will be a better human than Harathes by the time I’m done,” Penthos declared. Lief snorted, which was annoying as this time he hadn’t meant it as a joke. What is it about this “humor” business I keep getting wrong?

  Dion held up her free hand for his attention. “No, seriously, Penthos, will this work? Because a great deal is resting on this. This isn’t just an opportunity for you to play little gods with the world.”

  “You wound me.” He tried to make his genuine hurt sound in his voice, but he suspected that it was just his usual sardonic drawl. “I can do it. It will be my pleasure, Dion. Not here, though: some place of crossed power—” He almost suggested her temple but thought better of it, for all that those leaden monstrosities hogged magical nexii wherever the priests of Armes were permitted to build them. “There is a set of the old stones not a mile beyond the wood. We can do it there.”

  The face she made did not betoken confidence, but she shrugged. “Well, I see no other option, and my arm’s getting tired.” Her next words were for the matriarch of the spiders alone.

  Nth crouched amid his brethren. He understood that the Men were talking with Mother somehow. He could feel the faint tremors through his belly as they made their sounds, but it was beyond him how such vague sensations could possibly convey anything. Still, Mother was wise.

  When they had taken her fang he had been about to launch himself at them, and so had all his siblings, every one. Only a great shout from Mother had stopped them. It was a humiliation, a bitter shame to bear, but she wished to spare her poor children more harm, and a new barb would grow back in time. Hold, she had said, and despite their frantic, fevered rushing back and forth, they had held.

  More muted buzzings from the Men now, and he had the sense that they were speaking to each other, but they were such a homogenous group that he could barely tell even how many of them there were, clustered close like that.

  Then Mother spoke to him.

  Nth, what would you do for me?

  For you, Mother, anything. Let me fight these Men. I would die if it would serve you. The answer was automatic, needing no thought.

  I have a task that will be harder than dying, Mother said. I will give you some of my wisdom and understanding, and then you must leave me. You must leave the wood for the wide world, and go with the Men where they bid. This is their price, that no others must be harmed by their fire and light and claws. Will you do this for me?

  Nth crouched low, knowing only that the Brood who left the forest were as good as dead. This was their place. They had made it their own. The world beyond was the domain of Men and worse things.

  I moved in the world once. There are other colonies of my children where I have dwelt. Once I dealt with magi and demon-callers and forgotten, dark gods. And each word brought with it a knowledge, a merest hint of meaning to enlighten him. I do not ask this lightly of you, Nth, but one must go, if these Men are to leave without more cost.

  And he saw that part of the cost, if the Men could not be induced to go, would be a risk of harm to Mother herse
lf, and he danced with fear and dread and beat out, Of course I will go. I know I will never return, but I will go, for you.

  Then step forward from the Brood. Show yourself to the Men, and I shall give you what understanding I can.

  He crept cautiously from among his siblings, seeing the knot of Men edge back a little. He braced his legs against their fire, expecting the worst. There was more of that maddeningly meaningless sound to wash over him; he waited, and waited.

  Then came Mother’s gift, a great, clogging mass of images and thoughts and memories, her former haunts, her careful travels at the edges of the world of Men: battles, meals, curious bargains. He could not take it in. It sat within him, an indigestible lump, and only over time would it dissolve to piece out its secrets to him. It was enough, though. He was committed. He waited for the Men to go, knowing that he would have to follow in their wake.

  I am sorry, came Mother’s comforting voice. You will suffer, but there is no better choice.

  Then the blot of Men was retreating, and the Brood cleared a path for it, and Nth followed, reluctantly, fearfully, the caustic clot of Mother’s knowledge burning a hole in his innards.

  The Dark promised power, Dion knew. When Armes had returned from the divine realms he had the message that mankind was meant for the Light, saved from oblivion to claim the world for the forces of good. There would always be those who would cast away that priceless gift, though. There would be those who would wilfully seek their own corruption and reach out for what the Dark could offer. Worse than spiders or ghoul-men or any of the things that sprang native from the Darkess were those who were born to inherit the Light, and betrayed their own kind.

  Such a man was Darvezian.

  In an ideal world Dion would simply have gathered together some heroes of the church, tracked down Darvezian, and destroyed him for the abominable traitor he was, all using the tools of righteousness. There was a simple reason, though, that she was forced to countenance such tools and methods as the prophecy spoke of. The Dark kept its promises. Darvezian had power enough to make good his claim to be halfway to godhood.

  Since he came to power, the armies of his creatures, the slaves of the Dark, had spread and conquered, corrupted and suborned. Some kingdoms had fallen to his hordes, their gallant armies smashed. Others had bowed the knee, their rulers bought or tempted or threatened, or replaced by evil doppelgängers. The world that Dion had once known was fast being overturned, the lights extinguished, the temples of Armes sacked and despoiled.

  She would never have chosen this path: not the spiders, not the deal with their matriarch, that shameful accommodation with Darkness. Others before her had tried and failed to bring down Darvezian, though. It pained her to admit it, even to herself, but the Light of Armes did not seem to be enough.

  The old stones that Penthos had mentioned were almost all fallen, just mounds of mossy earth atop a hill, save for two that leant drunkenly together as though for mutual support. The hill was a lone hunched heap of higher ground, some barrow raised by ancients to wicked powers long before the coming of Armes and the message of the Light. Those ancients had known power, though. Their time-lost feet had tracked the lines of the world’s magic, and they had raised hills and forts and monuments wherever they had crossed one another.

  Beyond the hill, the country was uneven and broken moor, boggy in the low places, rocky where the earth’s weathered bones had torn through the matting of grass and scrub. The forest of the spiders was a shadow at their back.

  “This is grand magic,” Penthos announced. “This is high magic.” He was doing his pompous face, Dion noted, as he usually did when he had wrestled for the center of attention. She worried about Penthos. Mostly it was the unleashed power and the setting things on fire, but at the moment it was more that his desire to show off could compromise their quest. There was no denying that he was a notably powerful magus, and given that breed’s notorious disinterest in the affairs of men she was lucky to get him, but he had the attention span of a five-year-old. Worse, she had a strong suspicion that he wasn’t particularly committed to their task, which raised the question of why he was here at all. The possibility that he was a pawn of Darvezian plagued her thoughts, and though she sought relief in prayer the worries always returned.

  “If someone would prod our experimental subject into the middle?” Penthos asked, adjusting the sleeves of his shimmering robe with great ceremony. Lief directed his spear at the spider, which had followed them from the forest with a sullen, forced obedience. Looking on the loathsome thing, Dion was struck again by doubts about the whole enterprise.

  “Penthos . . . ,” she murmured.

  “My dear?” His troublemaking grin was out in force.

  “This plan . . . I am not convinced that it is the proper course. This is a thing of Darkness. I fear we will taint ourselves, our venture, in making use of it.”

  Penthos tutted. “Magic knows not light or darkness. It is the Power Elemental, that predates any such concerns,” he told her archly, somewhat sabotaged by the smug smirk that always crept onto his face when he was pontificating. “Besides, what need we fear the Dark, when we have you to show us the way to the Light?” For a moment he was trying on a new expression as he looked on her, that was something almost as grotesque as his experimental subject, and that she could not in any way read.

  “Well . . .” She was ashamed of her doubts. A priestess of Armes should just know the right path. Look for the brightest light, her teachers used to say to her. Well, it was night, now, and the forest had been dark, and this battered old clutter of stones was dark, and the spider was very dark indeed, but . . . but the prophecy was sufficiently unambiguous to show that these horrible creatures were the key to Darvezian’s defeat. And she believed in the prophecy, didn’t she? Or what had it all been for?

  “Now, my own focus will be most entirely upon the vast works of magic that I shall enact,” Penthos explained airily. “Moreover, this magic shall not go unnoticed across the world. For miles around those who are sensitive to the powers elemental shall know some great work is afoot. Hedge wizards and wise women shall wake with splitting headaches. Necromancers shall dream ill dreams. Sages and sorcerers shall look anxiously at the stars, or whatever it is those amateurs do when they know they’re outmatched. Moreover, the things of the enemy will take note, and I think it rather likely we shall be disturbed. To you, my companions, I give the task of ensuring that nothing disturbs my all-important concentration.”

  Lief, Harathes, and Cyrene looked less than enthusiastic about this, but Dion nodded. “Fear not,” she told the magus. “We will defend you, just do your work.”

  By now the increasingly agitated spider had been corralled and herded until it crouched in center of the jumble of stones, and Penthos turned to it. “This is going to hurt,” he told the creature, although Dion suspected it could not understand him. “However, you’ll be paralyzed almost immediately, so . . . that’s . . . something.” Penthos, rhetoric stumbling, scowled a little. “Let’s just get to it, shall we?”

  “If you would,” Dion confirmed, and then winced and staggered, because the magus had taken hold of the native power around them and just yanked on it, gathering swathes of it into his hands, tearing it from the earth. She was used to the exercise of his power—coarse, unsubtle, but staggeringly strong—but this was Penthos giving his all. Some small part of her was awed that all that almost brutal might was actually on her side. A rather larger part of her simply marked up one more reason to fear his betrayal. Magi had never seen eye to eye with the church of Armes. Oh certainly, the world was full of men and women of ambition, but magi sought to place themselves on a level beyond human—a level, therefore, that approached that of the divine Armes himself. Neither Armes nor powerful magi much liked the competition. History was full of men like Penthos who had been brought down by the justice of Armes before they could become something like Darvezian.

  And yet the Dark Lords keep rising up. We always mis
s a few. Perhaps Penthos will be next to take that mantle and cast his lot entirely in with the Dark.

  She turned away as the magic began snapping and sizzling about the magus’s hands. Seconds later it must have begun its work on the spider, because she heard a thin shrieking from it, a hissing and a rattling of its chitinous body, all too reminiscent of those hectic minutes within the forest.

  She wondered if spiders actually felt pain, or anything that a human might conceive as pain, or any finer feeling. It seemed unlikely. What, then, would they get from this ritual? Some puppet or echo of Penthos with the spider’s vital knowledge seemed the best they could hope for.

  The others had their weapons to hand, all facing away from the searing flashes of greenish light and gouts of flame that accompanied almost all of Penthos’s major works. When Dion considered the world, her chief question was, Is this of Light or Dark? Penthos’s main interest was usually, Is this flammable?

  She wished she’d asked how long this was going to take. For all she knew it could be days. Men like Penthos tended to lack a human frame of reference for things like time.

  Clutching the disc of Armes to her for comfort, she lowered herself to her knees and prepared herself for a long vigil.

  The night was well advanced when Cyrene of the keen eyes called out an alarm. As Penthos had warned, works like this attracted attention, and one would hardly need to be magically sensitive to spot the visible display of power that the magus was lighting up the hilltop with.

  “What have we got?” Harathes demanded.

  “I think it’s Ghantishmen. A warband, raiders maybe.” Still out of arrows, Cyrene readied her sword. “Dion. Light, please.”

  “My pleasure.” Dion opened herself to the power of Armes, holding the disc high to spread a golden radiance over the stones and beyond. By that time, the Ghantishmen had reached the foot of the hill.

  They were much like men in many respects. The color of their skin was unnaturally grayish and pale, and she knew they could see in the dark like a cat. They wore hauberks of yellow-white scales, bone treated somehow to become metal-hard, and they had axes and maces each made from a single piece of the same material. Their faces were manlike, though. They could and had disguised themselves to seem human, but Dion would never be fooled. Man, after all and despite so many faults, was a race of the Light, blessed by Armes and destined for great works. The Ghantishmen, as with so many other things that had a man’s shape without a man’s soul, were of the Dark. If they were not minions of Darvezian then they did his evil work anyway, beasts in human form.