Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Her own dagger was out on the instant, and it was very much within her mind to find out whether the chosen of Gamograth had the same arrangement of internal organs as other men. In a life colored by a number of wicked acts that she was trying to atone for, she had never yet killed one of the clergy of Armes. Right then she fully intended to remedy that score.

  She lunged in, and an acolyte blundered into her way, knocking aside her thrust and getting viciously backhanded across the face for his pains. Abnasio only noticed her at that late stage, and his eyes were wide as he raised his hands to stay her.

  “You fools! We do the work of Armes—!” he got out, and then her next slash hacked across the palm of one hand and knocked the golden disc out of the other.

  It occurred to her belatedly that the disc might have been doing them all a service, for Enth was abruptly moving, sinuous as a serpent, and had his hands about Abnasio’s throat in an instant, shockingly quick. Cyrene opened her mouth to stop the monster—because it was a monster, and because Abnasio was still a man, and of the Light, despite everything—but something in her rebelled. Something wanted to see the man-spider pop the priest’s head right off his shoulders.

  Then Dion was there, her own holy device searing with radiance, and Enth dropped away with a wretched sound of pain and frustration. Abnasio scrambled away, shouting, “To me! To me!” in a hoarse voice.

  Dion dropped to one knee beside Lief, fumbling for his hand. “Armes is with you,” she said fiercely.

  “Where was he . . . a minute ago?” came the thief’s croak.

  “The power of Armes will let me absorb your pain and hurt. Armes will let my strength heal your flesh.” Dion looked up. “Harathes, keep them off me. Penthos, clear a way to the stairs. Cyrene, take the creature out of here. Take it out of the city. We will find you when we’re done here.”

  Cyrene opened her mouth to object, because if there was fighting to be done she wanted to do it, and if there was nursemaiding of monsters, then she wanted no part of it. Then she saw Dion’s face, set into hard, stern lines: not a woman to be crossed, not at all.

  In the next moment, Abnasio’s people had regrouped, those that remained ambulatory and conscious, and were rushing for Dion’s little band. This also cut off the sole means of exit. Cyrene leant close to Enth and made herself say very clearly, “Just follow me,” knowing that it would have no option but to obey her.

  She already knew it was hopeless, that the monks would have plenty of opportunity to get between her and the stairs, and that they would overwhelm her in the end, but then Penthos gave a whoop—a child’s gleeful cry—and a line of fire seared its way across the floor of the cellar, drawing a wall of flame that drove the monks back and gave her a clear run at the way out.

  She cast one glance back as she got to the foot of the steps. Harathes was neck-deep in monks, and she saw Penthos summon his powers and start twitching his fingers contemptuously at them as though flicking drops of water, save that each flick struck the monks like a strong man’s punch. Even so, he was looking drawn, burning through his reserves of energy, exhausting himself not by excess but by the restraint that Dion had imposed on him.

  And Dion herself was still kneeling by Lief, giving of herself to try and save his life.

  Cyrene desperately wanted to go back and pitch in. More than anything else she did not want to leave here and not know how it ended. Neither did she particularly want to leave in the company of Enth: the creature was right there at her shoulder, where terrifying monsters traditionally lurked.

  Yet it was obedient to her commands and nominally on her side. Her brief glance took in that lean gray physique, laid bare ready for Abnasio’s ministrations. Its eyes glittered in the lamplight.

  Then a pair of late monks turned up from who knew where, clattering down the stairs eager not to miss the party, and ran straight into her.

  She had been going up, and the sudden impact sent her skittering back down the steps just far enough that the two new arrivals realized that a fight was going on inside their holy of holies. They caught on fast and one of them was practically on top of her, a fist cracking across her cheekbone—more by luck than judgment—that rang the back of her head against the stone.

  The other sat on her legs, and got a knee to the crotch when he failed to do it very well. She was halfway back onto her feet when she got another fist in the face, which seemed to unlock some secret bolt that had held the world in place, because abruptly everything was wheeling around her. Except Enth. Enth was just standing there.

  She focused on the monster, even as her hands and the monk’s hands were fighting for possession of her throat. It was tense, straining, but held back by . . .

  “Just follow me,” she had said.

  “Fight them, you moron!” she got out past the clutching fingers, and the sudden release reminded her of flying a hawk from the glove. The second monk, still slightly doubled over, had a cudgel out from within his robes and even managed to get in a solid swing as Enth came in. The monster thrust an arm out that served at once to deflect the blow and to plant a palm in the man’s chest with enough force to spill him halfway back up the stairs. Then Cyrene had forced the hands of her own assailant away, throwing him off her neatly into Enth’s grip.

  She saw his jaws gape, the monster’s. She saw exactly what was about to happen, which vital parts of the monk’s anatomy were about to get torn out by the roots. The words “No killing!” came out of her in a convulsive spasm, and Enth was left there, hands purpling the monk’s body with the strength of their grip, fangs bared, staring at her. It was not that she cared about the monk’s life, she realized. It was that death by Enth was a foul end not fit for anyone.

  And yet there was a part of her that told her otherwise, that Lief’s shed blood meant the gloves were off. She fought it down, but only after a moment’s wrestling with the conscience she had been trying to grow since meeting Dion.

  “Just . . .” But she didn’t have the words. Instead she took out her frustration with a vicious hooking punch under the monk’s ribs, and then a smack of her dagger pommel across his head, and if he was still conscious after that then he was at least unlikely to come after her to complain.

  “Drop him. Follow me. Defend me or yourself if necessary. No killing.” It was like trying to manage a child, she thought: a grotesque and murderous child of superhuman speed and strength.

  The other monk, the one who was now most of the way up the stairs, saw the pair of them ascending and fled. Cyrene didn’t feel she had the energy to chase him down, and she didn’t want to let Enth off the leash either. Instead she just made a straight line for the front door.

  It was locked. Some conscientious monk had come across it standing open and, no doubt, tutted over the carelessness of his peers. And closed off her easiest escape route. She looked around for a window, or . . .

  “Can you break this down?”

  Enth regarded her stiffly, his hands twitching. Perhaps he was looking from her to the door and back, but his black button eyes had no movement in them: they just stared.

  “Break it down,” she instructed, because she was running short of a lot of things, and patience was one of them. Enth gave a businesslike nod—it was Lief’s nod, she recognized, which the creature had somehow come to adopt—and then took hold of the door. She was about to explain that, no, one broke down a door by charging at it, but then his fingers dug in, splintering the wood. Across his back and arms, the smooth interplay of his almost-human musculature convulsed, and then the door was out of its frame, still with the jagged stumps of lock and hinges dangling from it. Only then did she think what a picture this thing would make, naked and on the streets of Armesion.

  She had always felt ambiguous about divine providence, but when the fled monk reappeared at that precise moment, wielding a wood-axe over his head in exactly the sort of way that a warrior wouldn’t, it seemed a fairly plain sign that Armes had sent his servant to her aid. Or at least his servant�
��s clothes. She moved to duck under his stroke, but the axe-blade had already embedded itself in a ceiling beam, leaving the jarred monk utterly open for the punch to the throat that she gave him. That didn’t exactly shut him up, and so she hit him a few more times, and then eventually just shook him out of his robe as he struggled and yelled and cursed her, because her hands were swollen and sore from the rigors of monastic life, and knocking someone out was far more difficult than people always thought.

  Getting Enth into the robe was almost as difficult. He did not seem to understand what it was for, or why she wanted him dressed in it. She had to order him, and even then his ability to dress himself would have been risible under any other circumstances. All the time, though, Cyrene was wondering how many people were in the neighboring houses, and who had sent for the no-doubt-efficient watch. Too much to hope for, surely, that the activities of the Brotherhood of the Dawn regularly included screaming and breaking things.

  Then the two of them were out and on the streets of the holiest city in the world: a man-monster and a woman who punched monks.

  She got them away from the house first, and then the locality, until they were holed up in the Heathen’s Quarter, crouched in the darkest alleyway they could find. Even there, even in night’s most moonless pocket, Cyrene felt the presence of the Light against her skin like bright sun. It was as though Armes himself was casting an eye over the city to look for them.

  “Stay here,” she told the creature. “Hide yourself as best you can.”

  A human would have demanded to know what she was about, but Enth just hunkered down in the darkness, contracting into as small a space as it could, elbows and knees jabbing out at sharp angles.

  What Cyrene was doing was an attempt to plan ahead. All very well to say “we’ll find you,” but she didn’t know the country around Armesion so well, and she reckoned that if Dion could track her—or Enth—then so could Abnasio should he come off better. And what then, eh? Do I drag this monster all over the country with me? What am I supposed to do if we lose? She couldn’t just traipse along all the roads that led from the Heart of the Light and blithely assume that Dion would just be there at her fire one morning.

  She was trying not to think about the suggestion that Dion could simply track her down—especially if it was indeed Enth, that blot of Darkness, that the priestess would be locating. Because that would mean that she and Lief had never needed to trail the monks to their lair before fetching help. That meant there had been no need for Lief to go in alone.

  So she went to the sole tavern that the Heathen’s Quarter boasted, or at least confessed to under questioning, and she talked to people. She was aware that an air of desperation must cling to her, and that a heathen in Armesion was probably still holier than a priest anywhere else, but she needed a destination—close and potentially defensible.

  She picked out the lousiest and shabbiest drinkers she could find, men and women who looked as though they still had the dust of the trail on them. Gathering information had never been her strong point—Lief, again—but she forced herself to smile and to banter and to seem terribly, terribly unconcerned by it all.

  The man who finally gave up what she wanted had an assaying air to him, a stare that weighed and valued, but didn’t judge. She didn’t like him on principle, but the whole point of the exercise was to avoid the eye of the virtuous. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  “There’s an inn,” he told her. “Out of the city on the north road, left takes you into a wood, an old wood, you know?” His gaze assessed her again, checking its figures. “Not much traffic, but there’s an inn. Quiet, there. Not a road that many pilgrims take, you know?”

  Taking his advice made her skin crawl and her hand itch for a knife, but going somewhere that Enth would not draw too much horrified attention, somewhere they didn’t ask questions, that seemed the best place to hole up and await . . . await whatever might come.

  But first she had to get out of the city.

  Cyrene had considered briefly the gates of Armesion: big, obvious, guarded. And yes, perhaps she might be able to talk her way out: companion of Dion the Savior and all that. But could she talk Enth’s way out? It seemed unlikely, and the creature was plainly ill-suited to perform the task itself.

  “We need out of here,” she hissed. “Any bright ideas? Penthos give you any useful magic powers?”

  “Out of here?” the creature hissed.

  “Out of this city.”

  New life jerked in his corded limbs. “Yes, yes.” Then a pause. Its head was lowered, although it was still presumably watching her with at least one eye. It was thinking, though—genuinely engaging in a recognizable human activity.

  “We climb,” it declared.

  She stopped herself just asking, “Can you climb?” because it had been a spider: surely it thought it could. But . . . “I’m not sure you climb as well as you think.”

  For a moment all its eyes stared at her, uncomprehending. Then her meaning bit in, and its shoulders sagged, forlorn. But the jut of its chin remained defiant: “I will try.”

  They found the nearest stretch of Armesion’s wall: rising high above them, its stones smooth. Cyrene could probably have made it with spikes and rope and a lot of time and noise. Time was something they didn’t have, and noise they could not afford.

  She had some rope on her, silk for minimum bulk and weight. At least, she thought wildly, letting down a line of silk was something the creature must be used to.

  Enth flexed its long fingers and wriggled its toes. For a moment it regarded her with that stare. She had taken it for an expressionless mask when she saw it first, but by now she knew that it held all manner of expressions, just not ones she could read, or perhaps not even ones she had names for.

  “Go,” she told it, and it reached out for the walls of the holy city and began to ascend.

  She had half been expecting just a flurry of skittering speed that would take the creature all the way to the top, but Enth climbed more like a man, albeit a man who seemed to need no handholds. His movements were measured, careful, limb after limb. She wondered at it: Penthos never taught it how to use its human body thus, and so somehow it had converted its innate talents into something its changed form could use.

  She shook her head: no doubt it was something that magical theorists could spend a pleasant evening wrangling about, but not her.

  Still, and despite herself, it was an impressive sight. It was hideous in its form, frightening in its speed and power. Past those things, it had a strength to it, and now even a kind of grace. If she tried hard, then familiarity meant she could observe it almost dispassionately.

  Him. Could she think of it as him? Lief had managed, but then Lief was used to all kinds of lowlife in his line of work. Perhaps he didn’t draw much distinction between metaphorical and literal vermin.

  Enth paused, and Cyrene watched a couple of guards pass by on the walkway at the top, taking their time. The man-spider just hung there, seemingly tireless, utterly still, until they had gone.

  A minute later and it had gained the top and let her rope down in a cascade of pale silk. She had to pause to muster her courage before trusting her weight to it, with only the hold of the creature above to keep her from falling: apparently something that spiders and Penthos had in common was a lack of facility with knots.

  Penthos’s strictures meant that Enth could not harm her. She could only hope that he could also not assist the ground in harming her, by the simple expedient of letting go. I would, the thought came to her with unwelcome clarity, about halfway up. If I was trapped and forced into service, I’d take any chance to turn on my captors. But perhaps Enth lacked the imagination for that, or perhaps Penthos had wrought better than she feared; either way she reached the top of the wall without incident, and the descent down the other side was quicker.

  Because the good people of Armesion were all tucked up by nightfall, there was little nocturnal traffic on the roads leading from it. She loca
ted the north road readily enough and, with her hood up, and with Enth’s purloined robe, the two of them could just about pass for a brace of pilgrims heading home so long as nobody examined them too closely. All it would have taken was one overvigilant knight of the church or suspicious priest—or even a well-meaning vigilante with a magic lodestone like Lothern—and they would have been lost. Enth must practically reek of the Dark, after all: a real and actual monster of evil, within spitting distance of the Heart of the Light.

  And yet, for that very reason, nobody noticed. Had they been trying to sneak about near the borders, or in the disputed lands where they had found Enth, then any traveler might have had cause to fall back on trinkets and divination to check up on his companions of the road. People assumed, this close to Armesion, that those they met were not owned heart and soul by the Dark.

  When the man in the tavern had mentioned a wood, somehow she had expected something like Enth’s home, dark and close-grown and haunted. Instead it was just a forest, thinned by the axe but still expansive. If the road through it was not favored by pilgrims, then that was presumably because it was a rutted track, and winding, and there were better, straighter paths for most to take.

  So Cyrene set off into the trees, wondering fitfully what had happened to the others, Enth trailing unwillingly in her wake.

  “So, perhaps you should explain what happened next?” Artaves was a man who had been a strong warrior in his youth, but had gone somewhat to fat since becoming the Lord Commander of the Order of the Sacred and Vigilant Shield, also known as the Armesion city watch.

  This was an awkward position for him to be in. He knew there were precious few ways that he was going to come out of it looking good. On the one hand, the woman across the table from him, nominally under both guard and arrest, was the chosen savior of Armes whom he—and everyone else in the city, just about—had turned up to cheer just the day before. On the other hand, there had been an incident of shocking violence involving an attack on one of the minor holy orders, and Dion had been at the heart of it.