When the Light reached them they eddied back a little, shielding their sensitive eyes and baring long teeth. There were a dozen of them come to see what the lights were, and one at the back held a long bone staff and must have been one of their dark priest-magicians.
For a moment it seemed that they might not come and brave the Light of Armes, caught in indecision. Harathes took matters into his own hands, then, seizing the initiative before the Ghantishmen could rally. Shield to the fore, he was charging down the hill with his keening battlecry, Cyrene was after him, sword raised to the shoulder preceding her into the fray.
Dion advanced, seeing the lead three Ghantishmen go down before the assault, caught off guard. Their mage-priest raised his staff, and she felt the Dark power gather there. He was not her equal, though, and she hurled the Light of Armes at him. As with the spiders, the Ghants’ fellows in Darkness, the searing purity of her power tore through them. There was a brief moment when their magician held her, staff directed outward, fighting to contain her strength, but then she had broken him, blasted him down with sheer righteousness.
The two warriors were holding their ground now, the momentum of their charge spent. Lief would be skulking at the edges, looking for somewhere tender to insert a spear or a dagger. Dion advanced, the Light springing from her fingers, seeking out the Dark wherever it could be found, demoralizing and blinding the enemy, making openings for her companions’ steel.
Half the Ghants were down before the rest fled gibbering into the darkness. In the aftermath of the fight, Dion realized that all was quiet on the hill above them.
“Penthos?” she asked. For a terrible moment she thought that one of the Ghants might have crept past them to put a knife in the magus’s back.
But no: there he was, standing between those two leaning stones, arms outstretched as though inviting applause.
“Penthos?” she asked again.
“It is done,” he crowed. “Am I not the most magnificent of all magicians?” He kept trying to catch her eye, and she swore he waggled his eyebrows at her. Surely he was sometimes one of the most disturbing of all magicians.
“With what result?” Dion demanded.
“Only come and see.” Penthos made a flowing gesture with his hands, the sleeves of his robe trailing after. “Witness what my power has made.” And then, because that was apparently insufficiently magnificent, “Wrought, rather.”
The four of them trailed up the hill, Dion letting the Light of Armes subside until it was only a soft glow.
Something was crouched atop the hill, something that seemed like a man. It lifted its head.
2: Fear and Loathing in Shogg’s Ford
DION MADE A SOUND. It was not quite a word, or anything fit to come from the throat of a priestess of Armes. The two warriors, Harathes and Cyrene, followed suit. Lief was the only one able to articulate their collective reaction.
“What the fucking arses is that?”
Penthos frowned, still very much in his pose as Ringmaster of the Marvelous. “What do you think it is? I have transmogrified the invertebrate arachnid into the semblance of a man.”
“What man looks like that?” Harathes demanded. “It’s hideous.”
“More so than its native form? I think no—” Penthos started grandly, but Cyrene cut him off.
“It is. Gods help us, but it is. Halfway is worse, Penthos.” Her voice shook.
Dion coughed, still fighting down the shock and revulsion. “Penthos,” she said quietly, diplomatically, “this is the extent of what you can achieve?”
It—he, she supposed, for there was enough evidence to give it a gender—squatted atop the hill, and Cyrene was right that it was the near-miss, that so-closeness that turned the stomach with its almost-familiarity. The skin was grayish in the moonlight, like a Ghantishman’s, and the body seemed close to human, hirsute about the chest and groin, long-limbed but not unnaturally so. He would be tall, when he stood, Dion guessed. There was a lithe strength in that frame, no wasted flesh but not skinny, either. His hands were long-fingered—and definitely a little too long, there. They had no nails, but that was hardly the issue.
The face: the problem was the face, which now stared out at them, and would stare right back into their nightmares later, no doubt. It was not the shape, because Penthos had wrought well there—the basic clay of that visage was well molded, and might have been handsome if all the rest of it had followed something more exactingly human. The marring of that regular perfection was part of what made it so horrible. There was a mouth there, and the teeth it bared were sharp and predatory, with canines like little daggers, elongated enough that Dion could only suppose the creature’s lower jaw had slots to scabbard them. There was a nose, small and sharp. There were eyes, but the eyes . . . There were too many of them, to start with. Two little buttons on his brow glinted back the Light of Armes, and she thought she saw another two pinpoint orbs a little ahead of his ears. She might have taken them for spots or marks or even tattoos, had it not been for those two main orbs that dominated the creature’s blank regard.
They were huge, and they were absolutely round, and featureless—no iris, no white, just great wells of darkness goggling out from that slack visage.
It was hunched, all elbows and knees, looking at—at them, at the world? There was no way to know quite where that all-consuming attention was focused. Now a shudder passed through it, a ripple of muscles that seemed weirdly boneless. Its lips moved over those jagged teeth.
It screamed, throwing its head high and giving off a dreadful, keening wail, and that, at least, sounded almost human. A human in unimaginable torment, but whatever was behind that sound had a visceral connection to them all that spiders lacked. Except it went on and on, until Dion wondered where the breath could be coming from, to power such an unbroken sound of pain and terror and self-loathing.
“What’s wrong with it?” she demanded of Penthos, who was looking entirely unruffled.
“My dear, give it a moment to acquaint itself with its new, ah, surroundings,” the magus suggested. “The wretched monster has undergone a journey that none of you can imagine.”
“Then send the thing back and we’ll dispatch it and find some other way,” Harathes snapped.
Penthos glowered. “Is this it? The thanks I receive for such an unprecedented work of magic? Where would your vaunted quest be without me? Would you even have survived the wood of the spiders without my fire? And a hundred other tribulations upon the road—?”
“Some of which only happened because of you!” Cyrene pointed out hotly.
“I, Penthos!” The magician stabbed a finger at the heavens, and the crack of thunder that followed was too well timed to be coincidental. “I, one of the great masters of the Power Elemental, have reworked the fabric of the world to your bidding, and you presume to complain?”
“We cannot take that anywhere!” Harathes yelled at him. “The spider we could have stuck in a crate, in a cage. That thing looks like a demon. What sort of a—!”
“Harathes!” Dion silenced him with a gesture. “Penthos, listen to me, can your magic, your Power Elemental, not bring the thing that one step closer to human?”
The wizard’s furious expression sagged. “You too?” he asked her. “When I have done this vast act of magic for you, only at your behest?”
“We all know you have done this at least in part because it amused you to make the attempt,” Dion told him firmly. “So tell me, can you . . . refine this magic you have made?”
Penthos spluttered. “It is done. It is irreversible. I, Penthos, set my seal on this. Just . . . buy it a hat or something.”
“It’s stopped screaming,” Lief observed, into the appalled silence that followed the mage’s remark.
They turned to see the thing in the circle observing them. Its lips were moving again, as though imitating their own speech. Their twitching, flabby progress, every minute on the verge of slicing themselves open against the creature’s fangs, exerte
d a horrifying fascination.
Then the sounds began: choking sounds, yowls like a dying cat, spitting, guttural croaks, each one closer to something that might be called speech, until it slobbered and grunted out a recognizable phrase: “What—what have—what have you done—done to me?”
Penthos crowed with delight, argument forgotten. “And speech as well! I admit I was not sure the faculty would take. Yes, they communicate among their own kind, but you cannot imagine the differences, in the senses, in the mind, and yet it speaks?”
“What have you done to me?” the thing in the circle demanded, more clearly. Its voice was accentless, strangely resonant, raw from screaming.
“You are reborn,” Penthos told it, “rejoice, therefore.”
They all saw it bunch to spring, but it seemed to be having difficulties with its limbs, awkward as a newborn faun in those early moments after its transformation. Penthos held up a hand, and the creature recoiled as though slapped.
“It may not cross me, nor may it flee,” he declared. “I am its maker, and it is bound to do as I say. And the Light of Armes will compel it, you may be sure. Its base nature is not altered. You will have to resort to threat and punishment if it seeks to cause mischief or returns to its bestial ways or eats someone, but you shall have governance of it. Stand, monster!”
The spider-creature twitched at the command, and another fluid shudder passed through it, but then it seemed to suddenly come to an understanding of its legs—no doubt rather fewer than it was expecting—and unfolded itself in a smooth motion. It was a match in height for Penthos, and a little taller than Harathes, though not so broad in the shoulders. Now it stood like a man, feet planted firmly on the earth of the mound, Dion felt that there was a fearful strength in that long-boned frame. The creature is dangerous, she thought, and it remained a thing of Darkness, a thing of the enemy. She feared it, because she feared that being its master might corrupt her somehow. But now it stood, it was plain that Penthos had done well to get it even this far, and as he said . . .
“Buy it a hat,” Lief put in, mirroring her thoughts. “Or a blindfold. Eye patches. Maybe some of those darkened glass lenses alchemists use.” He was studying the thing thoughtfully, more recovered than the rest from the initial shock. “You want my pence-worth? I’ve seen worse downing a pint in most cities. There are always magician’s experiments and those touched by some sort of corrupting dark, even in the brightest of places. I mean, yes, we know what the thing is—we know that it’s not some near-human mistake but something brought all the way from being a spider. Others . . . they’ll think it’s a curse, maybe, or maybe a half-spawn of one of the dark races. It happens. We’ll be fine.” He grinned, and Dion hoped that he had not thought of some way to monetize their monster.
“Well done, Penthos,” she said quietly. “Forgive me for criticizing you. As Lief says, we will have to adapt.”
The magician beamed, all ire forgotten.
“What’s his name then, our new friend?” Lief prompted.
“I have no idea,” and truly Penthos was someone who seldom bothered about trivial things like the names of others. “Monster, speak!”
The thing’s throat worked, and it made noises, feet and hands shifting as though it was trying to give voice to a thought that had nothing of the human about it, but in the end it came out with a stammering sound that was something like “nth.”
“Enth?” approximated Lief. “Nerth? Urnuth?”
“Enth,” Dion decided. “From now on you are Enth, creature. Do you understand?” She lifted the disc of Armes a little, and the monster shied away from the divine Light. “Now, follow us. But first . . . someone find it a cloak or something.”
What precisely the “spider’s path” was, the creature had yet to reveal, but Darvezian was a long way off, and Dion reckoned that their unwelcome companion’s knowledge would be relevant only as they neared his lair.
They had been hoping to take the pass to the border town of Isinglas, which for decades had stood as a bastion against what might come across the uncertain and contested territory they now occupied. Travel via Isinglas would be the long road to Darvezian, but the safer for it, through territories where the Light and the church for Armes were still strong.
Within a day from the stone circle, however, word came to them from fugitive travelers and woodsmen that the Ghantish were abroad in great numbers, stirred up from their holes and haunts, and that Isinglas was as good as under siege. There followed a hurried conference of war, with Harathes arguing that they should go to the aid of the embattled town, and Cyrene and Lief urging the importance of their mission and the importance of avoiding large battles respectively. Penthos ventured no opinion, and the creature, Enth, was not consulted.
It had slowed their progress at first. Walking had not come naturally to it, so that for the first few miles the abomination had lurched about like a drunkard, falling over, staggering, hissing in rage at its own ineptitude. Penthos had tried to aid it, but his idea of teaching the thing to walk had revolved around exerting a magical dominance and forcibly shunting forward one leg and then the other, resulting in a weird, stiff-legged stilt-walking where it was obvious the monster would topple the moment the mage left off. Lief finding every second of the business hilarious had not helped.
Then they had broken their fast, leaving the thing squatting, shackled by the invisible chains of Penthos’s magic and mercifully clad in one of the magician’s spare robes. Left to its own devices it had apparently experienced some sort of grotesque epiphany. Dion had seen it stretching its limbs in turn, staring at them as though attempting to divine their purpose from first principles. When they set off, it had found a loping, easy pace beside them, more bestial than human but undeniably fast. Dion had the disturbing impression that, if it had been free to, it could have been off and away at the sort of speed it would take a good horse to match. She could hardly say that she had begun to worry about the creature, because that worry had been present even before its transfiguration, but certainly her worries increased.
She was constantly tempted to draw forth the disc of Armes and expose the monster to her faith’s holy Light, just to reassure herself that she had power over it. Its very presence was exerting a fearful fascination over her, as would a venomous serpent coiled beside her foot. It was all too easy to envisage those hands about her throat, those razor teeth buried in her flesh . . .
But she conquered herself, because fear was a weapon of the Dark. If she allowed herself to be led by her fear, how could she know the righteousness of her actions?
Still, she worried. Still, she feared.
“Shogg’s Ford, then,” Lief suggested. They had been poring over what maps they had, drawing forth recollections of the territory, trying to work out a route that did not involve the busy ground between here and Isinglas.
“Remind me . . .” Dragged from her ruminations, Dion leant over his shoulder and tried to work out where the place was.
“Shogg’s Ford is a place of darkness,” Harathes objected.
“Shogg’s Ford is mostly a place of small-minded vice and bad beer,” Lief replied cheerfully. “Yes, it’s on this side of the line. It’s in the uncertain lands, and we’ll likely find all sorts there. But they won’t be looking for a fight and, frankly, we’ll have more of a chance giving Muggins his civilized debut in Shogg’s Ford than we would have had in Isinglas. They’re used to freaks there, they are.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” Cyrene agreed slowly. Her narrowed eyes strayed over to Enth. “And a lot of trade goes through there. We could certainly get enough to disguise what . . . it is.”
He, it, Dion had already fought over the pronouns. “We will have to be careful, there,” she put in.
“When are we not?” Lief said easily.
Shogg’s Ford.
Memory accreted within Nth’s brain, pieced together from the gift of his Mother. She had been there when Man had not claimed that place. Long ago, she remembe
red the bellowing, stinking shoggs as they braved the water. Gone now, hunted first by her and then by Man, and now no more than a name without a memory, even in a world that seemed written and overwritten with ancient history: Darvezian, Armes, Light and Dark.
At first the new body they had imprisoned him within had dominated his attention. The world had become a shrieking, blinding whirl of unfamiliar senses. He was denied the voice of the ground, that had spoken to him of every twitch and motion within his world, and carried the speech of his people as well. Instead there was a raucous cacophony of sound that battered in through his unwanted ears, out of which, somehow, he could still parse the gibbering that was the way that these Men communicated among themselves. Of all the new abilities that had been forced on him, that comprehension was the one he would most do without. He had never wanted to discover that Men, the destroyers and the prey, could speak, even if their speech was such a painful din.
And his eyes! His eyes had been pleasantly dim things, that could tell day from night, and movement from stillness. Now they were his world, gaping holes that let all of reality in, raw and bright-colored. He wanted to shut them, but they would not shut—they lacked even the fleshy covers that the true Men had, to blot out the searing, garish world. Instead he was forced to stare and stare and stare, to know his surroundings by the uncompromising medium of light and not the comforting subtlety of vibration.
After that, once whatever they had done to him had forced him to come to terms with his sensorium, there had been the body. No more the comfortable scuttle of many legs, secure and low to the ground. Instead, every step these Men took was ridiculously precarious, a prelude to a fall that never came. Nth fell many times at first, until he learned to listen to the alien demands of his new frame. He was bruised and battered at the leg-joints just trying to find his too-few feet. And that was another thing—how tender and raw his skin was now! Gone the armored exoskeleton, so that all of him was one great wound waiting to be opened. He hardly dared touch anything lest he be laid open, innards exposed to the painfully bright sun.
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