Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “There’s a lot of Dark territory between us and the Shadow Canyons,” Lief pointed out unhappily. “Ghants and blight-wolves and Murgl-wyrms and all sorts.” His finger traced a line from Shogg’s Ford, showing the route. “Not convinced that the power of prophecy’s going to get us through all that.”

  “It will be an epic journey,” Harathes said potentiously. “A worthy quest, through monsters and the servants of the Dark one, past evil forests, marshes, and jagged rocks . . .”

  “Mm.” Lief grimaced. “You’re not selling it to me.”

  “Prophecy is silent as to how we get to where the spider’s path begins,” Dion said slowly, considering the map. “Yes, the direct route is across the darkest of Dark territory, through all manner of hazards, ill country, and the lairs of vile things. So let us not take it.” She smiled, a brittle expression. “Here, we will go past Shogg’s Ford through the Eningsmire and there pass into the lands of the Light at Ening’s Garth. A greater distance, yes, but better roads and little to oppose us. We shall travel north in safety, and cross the border once more at the fortress of Cad Nereg, which stands closest of all the Light’s bastions to Darvezian’s lair. From there, we turn aside from the path and meet the Shadow Canyons. All agreed?”

  “And this?” Cyrene prompted, indicating Nth. “We travel through all the lands of the Light with him, do we?” A moment later she plainly heard her own choice of pronoun, but did not take it back, merely regarded Nth doubtfully.

  Dion toyed with the disc of Armes as though wondering how far her status would take them, if questioned. “We must have faith,” she told them faintly, doubt leaking out between the words.

  Ening’s Garth, their first port of call, was not exactly a bastion of righteousness, Penthos knew. He had been given cause to visit the place before, two or three times, arriving in one of those guises that wizards traditionally adopted in such circumstances, but which he gloomily suspected fooled nobody. After all, while an aged wanderer with a staff and a hat should have been a relatively innocuous thing, the roads were so dangerous these days that any genuine old fool just pottering about on his own between cities would find his possessions in a bandit’s pack and the rest of him inside a bear before he completed the first leg of his journey. Any aged wayfarer turning up at the gates of Ening’s Garth was almost de facto a wizard, and the guards had met Penthos with the sort of exaggerated and fearful courtesy he suspected they would not have reserved for someone’s dotty grandfather out after curfew.

  He had been hunting magic, of course. Ening’s Garth straddled the borders: here the Dark-minded smuggled things of value out of the lands of the Light, and the adventurous brought them back. The shadow markets of Ening’s Garth might hold anything.

  Unfortunately, the same basic failure of disguise that got him through the gates also tipped off any sellers, so that Penthos had never been to Ening’s Garth without being thoroughly ripped off by various merchants of the obscure. He had no warm feelings for the place.

  Getting to Ening’s Garth would be another matter, of course. There was plenty of disputed territory between there and Shogg’s Ford. The Eningsmire was treacherous, ruin-haunted terrain where the roads shifted daily and were watched over by unpleasant eyes. Darvezian had many spies, but most of them were sadly lacking in imagination. Because they searched hawkishly for travelers on the road, cross country was usually the sounder trail despite the bogs, dark woods, and a miscellany of beasts. After all, now that their party had a dead Doomsayer to their credit, the agents of the Dark Lord would surely be seeking for them on all the usual paths.

  Penthos, personally, would rather have taken the road and answered force with force when the opportunity presented itself. There were magicians among the Doomsayers who would be quite the challenge, and he would be able to show off his power and finesse to Dion. He had even suggested as much, but she had talked at some length about collateral damage and innocent lives, and so apparently he had got it wrong again. His comment about there being no innocents having any business traveling between Shogg’s Ford and Ening’s Garth also failed to go down well, and he had made matters worse by trying to pass it off as a joke after rather too much of a strained pause.

  All in all, Penthos was feeling at a low ebb, exacerbated by the fact that his usual recourse—to set things on fire—seemed likely to make things worse. He trudged along at the back of their party as they headed over the rugged gorse and briar-ridden terrain, feeling sorry for himself. Is there any creature in the world more woebegotten than I?

  He spared a glance for his creation, the man-spider Enth. Probably it was in even worse straits. No doubt it would complain, if its nature was sophisticated enough to allow it to do so. For a moment, Penthos toyed with the idea of making the monster attack his fellows so that he could rescue them. But no. Doubtless any rescue, however magnificent, would be obscured by their casting blame on him for not managing his monster, and besides, his rescues tended to be a source of collateral damage in and of themselves.

  Life was hard. Life was complicated. That was what these people did not understand. Everyone assumed that genius-level wizards such as he were all for complex schemes and plots of surpassing intricacy, but Penthos longed only for simplicity. Simplicity and Dion, anyway.

  Cyrene had been scouting ahead, an arrow to her bow. Penthos had considered volunteering for the duty, perhaps with an eye to manufacturing some sort of ambush or emergency that would allow him to show his worth. However, he was uncomfortably aware that, without constantly drawing on his magic, his sense of direction was notoriously poor. The one time he had tried to lead the fellowship across country, long before the Wood of the Spiders, he had managed to guide them into the same nest of troll-men three times, to the exasperation of all concerned, not least the troll-men, who had grown increasingly jaded about being set on fire and having their limbs hacked off.

  Now Cyrene was coming back, he saw, and not alone. For a moment he had the optimistic thought that this newcomer was a threat of some sort, and that, for once, setting the man on fire would turn out to be the proper course of action. He reluctantly had to concede, though, that Cyrene seemed easy in his company, and there was no suggestion of coercion or enchantment. Still, he glowered at the stranger, purely for form’s sake.

  He was a tall, lean, weathered man in a gray-green cloak, with a longbow slung over his shoulder, and he bowed respectfully before Dion.

  “This is Lothern,” Cyrene introduced him. “He’s a Ranger of Elwer.”

  They were some wandering order of Dark-hunters, Penthos recalled vaguely: not followers of Armes, but border skirmishers constantly on the watch for incursions of evil. The odds of being allowed to incinerate the man were receding swiftly.

  “You know him?” Dion pressed.

  “We’ve worked together before.” Cyrene put a companionable hand on Lothern’s shoulder, and Penthos noted with interest that Harathes was instantly standing differently, making himself look bigger, muscling closer to the man. In a rare moment of insight the mage wondered if there was some manner of jealousy at work.

  “Lothern has been abroad in the mire this last month,” Cyrene told them. “He’s agreed to lead us on the best hidden paths to Ening’s Garth.”

  “You told him what we’re about?” Harathes growled.

  Cyrene frowned at his tone. “Just where we need to get to.”

  “I have faith that Armes guides you.” Lothern’s voice was musical. “I shall but play my small part in your venture, and aid you in any way I can.” His arm slipped about Cyrene’s waist rather familiarly, and she smiled at him—perhaps a little fixedly—and disentangled herself.

  “Well, then, your help would be welcome,” Dion pronounced, sparking a fresh scowl from Harathes.

  “Moreover,” Lothern went on, almost speaking over her, “I am so fortunate as to carry a blessed lodestone that glows when agents of Darkness are near. So, we may be forewarned of any ambush!” He looked terribly pleased about that.
Penthos, for whom that sort of thing was a parlor trick at best—albeit one he seldom remembered to perform—found himself siding with Harathes in his apparent assessment of the woodsman as an annoyingly smug prick.

  But now there was nothing for it but that Lothern must get out his magical lodestone and show them it, and . . .

  The ranger’s eyes went wide. “Beware!” he hissed. “Evil is near!” for the lodestone was glowing with an eerie greenish light, such as was known to Penthos as “ghostlight number seven,” a favorite with the magical artificers and gimickers of Ening’s Garth who so overcharged him on every visit.

  Needless to say, the lodestone did not actually point to any evil, but just hung there, spinning and glowing. “We must be away from this place, and travel with caution,” Lothern announced pregnantly. “Follow me.”

  Amazingly, nobody else seemed to realize what was going on, and Penthos trailed at the back, waiting for the other shoe to drop, as they crept and sneaked through the uneven, damp countryside. Then Lothern bid them halt, and produced his talisman once more, and gasped.

  “The Darkness is still close!” he whispered hoarsely, eyes boggling about him. “We are beset!” Harathes, Cyrene, and even Dion had their weapons out, ready to fight off the hordes of Darvezian whenever they should appear. Now, though, Lief had twigged, and nudged Penthos with an elbow, eyes flicking to Enth.

  The mage nodded, dreading the inevitable announcement. Would this count as some sort of black mark with Dion? Should he have found a way to hide the Darkness in the transformed spider? Was that even possible?

  They moved on, at a painfully cautious pace. Every half-mile, Lothern would pull out his lodestone, more and more agitated each time as it glowed and danced at the end of its string. “The evil must be all around us!” he declared, horrified.

  By now they had all worked it out, but it seemed not to have become one of those all-too-common “it’s the wizard’s fault” situations. Instead Dion and Cyrene were exchanging embarrassed looks, ever more so as Lothern grew almost feverish with alarm at each new indication of the presence of the Dark powers.

  Lief appeared to be choking, Penthos noted. Or at least, every time that talisman came out, the little man put his hands over his mouth and turned away, shoulders shaking helplessly. Was he ill, or . . . ?

  He met the mage’s eyes, and abruptly his feelings communicated themselves. It was a revelation for Penthos, to find himself sharing a joke, wordless and silent, with another human being.

  His lips quirked, as he watched Lothern panicking, dashing off into the reeds with bow in hand to look for tracks, dashing back, babbling about invisible monsters, flying enemies . . .

  “Can we not tell him,” Lief got out during one of his brief absences, “that we’ll just go on without him?”

  “He’ll want to track the evil down,” Dion said out of the side of her mouth. “And if we leave him, he’ll track it to us. He’ll know we’re escorting a thing of Darkness.”

  “No he won’t,” Lief told her. “Because he’s a moron.”

  “How dare you!” Cyrene hissed. “He’s a brave man, a hero.”

  “A moron,” echoed Harathes with some satisfaction.

  “You . . . !” Cyrene glared at him. “Dion, tell him—!”

  But at that moment Lothern was back, leaping into their midst with his great heroic strides and declaring, “My friends, alack, the Darkness is still nigh, but hidden from me! I swear my eyes are sharper than any man’s, but no trace of it can I find!” He looked so terribly earnest and desperate to please, or at least to please Cyrene, to whom his eyes kept drifting.

  Dion raised a hand, as if in benediction, and then she sat down, turning away from him to hide her expression.

  “Alack,” said Lothern bewilderedly. “I have failed in my service . . . ?”

  “Aha,” Dion got out. “Oh Armes help me.” Her voice trembled, and to Penthos’s delight she was plainly on the very edge of giving in to hysterical laughter. “Lothern, pray just . . . take us to Ening’s Garth, right now, forget the evil, no more stops, and that will be enough . . . service from you.” And although her voice wavered perilously on the brink, she was able to finish her sentence without laughing in the man’s well-meaning face.

  The sight of Dion letting go of her holy authority enough to actually smile—and for once at a joke that Penthos himself was able to understand—brought a moment’s much-needed levity to the magician. A moment later, he caught sight of Enth again, standing dumb and oblivious in the midst of all this confusion that he was, all unwittingly, the cause of. Something about that blankly hostile face soured his enjoyment of the moment. The creature was plainly aware that something was going on, but would never be able to comprehend what it was. There was a hole in Enth where humor was supposed to sit, and Penthos wondered glumly whether that was due to the thing’s essential dour nature, or whether it reflected some similar failure of his own.

  From that point on they began to make respectable progress toward Ening’s Garth, although Lothern kept feeling frettishly for his talisman. Penthos was able to observe a peculiar dance between him, Harathes, and Cyrene, as the big warrior constantly tried to walk between the other two, or at least uncomfortably close to them, while Cyrene was constantly moving off, frequently with Lothern tagging after her. In the end, the cumulative delay caused by all that maneuvering was, Penthos reckoned, a greater drag on their time than any spurious evil-detection.

  When the pass of Ening’s Garth was visible, Cyrene stopped their progress altogether, dragged Harathes off, and had a muted but furious argument with him behind a rock, giving the rest of them the chance to rest their feet. Although the two of them strove to keep their voices low, it was plain that Harathes was demanding that she banish Lothern, and that Cyrene was telling him that it was no business whatsoever of his. Listening, the ranger’s face darkened incrementally, while Dion and Lief looked anywhere but at him, and tried desperately to pretend that they could hear none of it.

  When they did finally reach Ening’s Garth, they were all glad of it. The walled town squatted in its rock-walled pass like a toad, and under normal circumstances even those who lived there were not particularly keen to see it. Their journey had become, for various reasons, a training ground for awkward silences, however, and the chance for various of their band to avoid one anothers’ company for a short while obviously outweighed the generally insalubrious nature of their surroundings.

  The chief difference for Nth between Shogg’s Ford, of unfond memory, and this new place, was that Ening’s Garth was mostly built of stone, was larger, and contained far more humans, all of which contributed to his feeling even less welcome there. It was an unnatural place, and he had no sense that a single inhabitant particularly wanted to be there. They were all packed inside the grasp of those high walls for incomprehensible reasons relating to commerce, or so he gathered from the conversation of Lief and the others. Ening’s Garth was a means to an end.

  Penthos had announced himself as an intimate of the place and located, after a few false starts, an inn he lauded as not being too filthy, and catering to discerning magical visitors such as himself. Nobody else found this description overtly endearing, but they filed into the place nonetheless. It was built into the side of the pass, with the majority of its rooms entirely windowless and illuminated by pale orbs that floated unsupported near the ceiling.

  “Like a bloody cave,” was Lief’s assessment, “and it stinks of magic.”

  Penthos gave him an arch look. “And you’d have a sensitivity for magic?”

  “It has floating lights, and that bloke over in the corner is wearing a crown of glowing ice, and his mate’s got the head of a parrot. I don’t think you need to be Grand Archmage Woddleflot to pick up the delicate scent of magic.”

  The magician stared at him for slightly too long for any spontaneity, and then came back lamely with, “And are you implying that there is something disagreeable with the smell of magic? I’d war
rant it’s practically fragrant compared to some.”

  “Enough,” the priestess, Dion, said, shutting them both up. She seemed weary and short-tempered, which made Nth nervous because, of all of them, she could cause him the most pain and harm. “Penthos, secure some rooms, at least three. I need to go and lie down. And try not to mention our quest.” She rubbed at her forehead. “Lothern . . .”

  The bowman, who was still engaged in some incomprehensible jostling contest with Harathes, stepped forward. “Yes, Priestess?”

  “Thank you for your assistance. You have aided the cause of Armes, and you have my thanks.” Dion plainly expected the man to take off at that point, but Lothern bobbed and smiled and went nowhere, despite pointed looks from Harathes. Nth could not parse what was going on, or whether this was perfectly normal for humans, or some peculiar ritual. For himself, he discovered that the magic Lief had alluded to was entirely evident to him, making every hair on his body prickle uncomfortably. He found himself wondering if that was a natural facility he had always possessed, or whether it was an unwanted gift of the process that had reworked him.

  “This must be just like home for you.” Lief jogged his elbow, gesturing at the passageways that fell away into the depths of the rock. “Just like a cave, eh?”

  Standing there, in that oppressive, human-filled-up place, cut so unnaturally out of stone and severed from the sky and the trees, and bristling with enchantment to boot, Nth could only stare at him.

  Lief seemed to recognize something of his expression. “Let me get you a drink,” he offered. “Poor sod, you don’t fit in anywhere, do you?”

  The words were just a throwaway remark, and Lief had turned and was gesturing at the brooding, birthmarked fat man who seemed to have control over comestibles there, but Nth found himself suddenly weak with self-pity, bitterly missing his home and his kin and his Mother. No, he didn’t fit anywhere. No, he never would. He knew full well that Penthos would not spare the effort to restore him to his true shape, nor would these questing heroes care to return him to his forest home. They would use him, and cast him off or kill him, and probably the latter. The only place in the world he knew was lost to him, and if he was somehow transported there, right then, his own people would not know him, and would take him for prey.