Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Nth.” It was the same mangled sound that Cyrene had first heard, the spider trying to transliterate his native appellation into human speech.

  “And you’re with her, are you? You’re, what, eloping? How sweet.”

  Enth just stared. It was oddly reassuring to see that his sullen, silent treatment was not just reserved for servants of the Light.

  “This is weird. Something funny’s going on. Hey, friend, you want to be here with her, do you? You’re a pal of hers?”

  Enth shook his head wordlessly.

  “You brought her here, maybe. Bit of rapine in the world’s least salubrious guesthouse? You like her, eh?”

  Another shake. Cyrene, still utterly locked in place, had the sense that the man-spider didn’t understand much that was being said.

  Feyn frowned and called up his magic eye again. “Ah,” he noted. “There’s something binding you, isn’t there, my friend? You’re compelled. Why would a servant of the Light be trolling around with a creature of the Dark on a leash?”

  “Ask her, ask her, yes, yes,” suggested Visler.

  Feyn rounded on him. “Well, I would, you moronic twat, only your poor sensitive stomach can’t take all the screaming and shrieking when you carve them up alive, so you wanted the poison to shut them up as well as paralyze them. So until it wears off, he’s the only one doing the talking.” His shoulders sagged. “I swear, I am going with barbarian warlords next time. You are the worst decision I ever made in my life.” Feyn took a deep breath. “Anyway,” he said pleasantly to Enth, “you can tell us, can’t you?”

  For a moment there was only more silence from that direction, but then Enth gave a shuddering sigh, perhaps finding that the laws placed on him did not prevent a frank confession. “They took me. They changed me. They bound me.” There was a misery in his voice that cut. Cyrene found the raw sincerity there surprising: perhaps it was that she had no choice but to sit and listen to it.

  Feyn was grinning. “Yeah, they’re mean like that. But you could come home with me, couldn’t you? You could come and meet Uncle Dark Lord Darvezian. He’d be all over you. He loves new toys. We’d get you some neat robes like mine. You like that?”

  Enth squirmed and glanced toward Cyrene.

  “Her? Oh, don’t mind her. I guess I should let Visler turn her into sausages the hard way. He’s due a pat on the head for coming through for me, however inadvertently.”

  “No . . .” Enth’s body twisted unnaturally, as though trying to break away from Cyrene but failing.

  “Oh, I see.” Feyn grinned unpleasantly. “Yeah, all those compulsions. Hard to know what you’re allowed to do, with those bars fencing you in. Don’t want to get bit by them, eh? I imagine that would hurt.” His nasty smile widened. “Let you into a secret, though. I’d take them off you, if I could, but it looks as though they’re top-notch strong—not neat or well laid, but strong. But you know what? I do have a little trick up my sleeve, just a tiny little loophole.”

  He reached into a pouch and came out with a misshapen yellow candle stub that he slapped down on the table. “Had this for a while, just on the off chance,” he explained. “A little spell for all those souls who want to be free to break oaths and commit evil deeds no matter what’s weighing ’em down.” There was a spark that flashed between his fingers and the candle was lit. “Now, I reckon there’s a couple minutes of the good stuff left in that. And while that’s going, you know what? Sky’s the limit, friend. Whatever they bound you with, it’s off your mind for just as long as that fire’s going. And then when it’s out, well, if she’s not here to be your moral compass, then what’s keeping you from having a fine old time with me, eh?”

  Feyn had a dagger out and threw it point first into the table before Enth.

  “Go on, friend. Be free,” he encouraged.

  Enth’s soulless black eyes found Cyrene.

  He reached out and grasped the hilt, levering the blade out, staring at her.

  7: Border Crossings

  “I HAVE DELIBERATED,” the Potentate stated solemnly, “on what to do with you and your followers, Dion.”

  “I am prepared to meet whatever punishment or penance is decreed,” she replied. She knelt before him in his chambers, wearing nothing but a plain robe: a priestess stripped of all office.

  “And your followers?”

  “If I ask them to, but I have—”

  “Pleaded for clemency, taken the burden upon yourself, yes, I know.” The Potentate sighed. “I’ve made my decision. I will not be argued with.”

  That snapped her head up, shocked. “I would never—”

  “Silence. You will leave Armesion. You will recover the balance of your followers. You will go to confront Darvezian and, if possible, you will destroy him. That is all.”

  “But this is what we were—”

  “That is my decision.”

  “But that is no punishment!” Dion exclaimed.

  “I have said I will not be argued with,” the Potentate stated sharply. “This is my judgment. If you wish to feel bad about what you’ve done, then it seems to be the simple lack of a formal penance is going to eat at you like nothing else.”

  “Your Potence, I killed—”

  “Please believe that I am well aware of your actions. And yes, they are deserving of all manner of punishment, probably even your being cast from the service of the church, stripped of the powers of the Light. As though that hasn’t been the preeminent way of manufacturing evil magicians for the last century. But we need you, Dion. It’s that simple. We need hope, and you’re it. I’m going to put it about that Abnasio was corrupted by the Dark.”

  “But that’s not true. He was misguided, surely, but he was—”

  “No doubt when the time comes I shall do such penance as you cannot imagine for abusing my office, but nonetheless. Now get out of my city and do your job.”

  There was still something of a crowd willing to pitch up and cheer them out of the gates of Armesion, seeing the heroes on their way. It was all Dion could do not to scream at them, to try and hammer the truth into their heads like a fistful of nails. Their faces were so open and worshipful, full of faith and trust. She was a criminal, and still they cheered. Perhaps they cheered all the more.

  Even the horse beneath her seemed to chide her with its presence, a gift of the church for its least deserving daughter.

  Penthos seemed happy, anyway. He never had understood the vicissitudes of a conscience, and Harathes had the smug look of a schoolboy who has escaped a whipping. She took no consolation from either of them.

  Then Lief kicked his mount until it was close beside her, and leant in to tell her, “I just wanted to thank you.”

  “There’s no need.”

  “You saved my life.”

  She should take some solace from that, she knew. If she had not acted as she had, he would be dead now. But he was a thief and a reprobate, and Abnasio had been a servant of the Light.

  “Dion . . .”—Lief shifted awkwardly in the saddle—“tell me what it cost.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I always want to know what I owe. Doesn’t mean I ever pay it back, but I like to keep score.” He mustered the ghost of a smile.

  She gave him a look so frank and without masks that he flinched back from it. “To bring you back from the jaws of death, Lief? Perhaps ten years of my life. And more: when I look on the world, now, something is gone from it, some joy in its colors and wonders that was burned from me when I caught your life and hauled it from the brink. I will not savor tastes as much as I once did. Some sounds or sights or thoughts that once made me smile will cease to connect with my soul in the same way, and leave me cold. If I had it in me to love, to truly love, then perhaps that is blunted too. In every way, in some small measure, I am lessened.” She almost finished with, “Add that to your score,” but she was enough herself to know how that would hurt him, and to hold the words back.

  Lief opened his mouth a few ti
mes, no doubt trying to find a flippant answer to all that, but even his powers of invention failed him, and he let his horse drop back behind.

  Enth stared at the dagger in his hands. Everyone else stared at Enth.

  His gray lips moved. “And you will take me from here.”

  Feyn grinned. “Oh, Uncle Darvezian is going to be all over you like a fungal infection, never you mind,” he confirmed. “You’re going to be the favorite son of the Dark Tower. He’ll never have seen anything like you before.”

  “I am sure,” Enth agreed. Those round, dark eyes seemed to Cyrene to be fixed on her, but as always it was impossible to tell where he was really focusing.

  “Come on, candle’s burning,” the Doomsayer prompted. “We need to be gone from here before anyone turns up looking for the pair of you, eh?”

  Visler the Vintner shifted uncomfortably. “Feyn, you need to do something about that. Yes, yes. I need protecting—”

  “Don’t get me started on what you need, you shit,” Feyn snarled. “But mostly, you need to face the music when we’re gone. I’m done with you.”

  It came to Cyrene in that split instant that Enth didn’t really know what to do with a dagger. He had never needed weapons to kill before. The finesse of using them was alien to him. When he moved, it was the sort of awkward, amateurish stroke that she would have laughed to scorn if she had not been too paralyzed to either laugh or defend herself. And, of course, had it not been delivered with Enth’s formidable speed and strength.

  He struck with the dagger held underhand, and while there were circumstances when that could be advisable, for him it was just the standard beginner’s error, that any weapons trainer would have corrected. He swung the weapon sideways, just as if he were striking with the blade of his hand, a clumsy, bludgeoning stroke that drove the point into Feyn’s leer at around nose level and ripped most of the lower half of his face away with the sheer force of its impact.

  There was a second’s appalled realization in the Doomsayer’s eyes, though the rest of his expression was all over the tabletop and spattered across Cyrene. Then he was down and Enth had followed him silently, striking and striking and striking. She saw only the raised blade, over and over, but Feyn’s awful sounds cut off very quickly. Still Enth raked away at him with the dagger until she heard the clear, sharp sound of the blade breaking from the hilt as he drove it through the brutalized corpse and into the flags of the floor.

  Visler had frozen in utter astonished horror but, when Enth arose gore-slicked and terrible, he bolted for his cellar and Cyrene heard him bolt the hatch after him. As though that would help.

  But Enth did not pursue. He just sat calmly at the table, where he had been before, and stared at the candle flame as it guttered and danced. It sparked kindred reflections in his several eyes. She could try to read all manner of thoughts there: whether he was considering taking off while Penthos’s conditioning no longer bound him; whether he was agonizing over his lot, what he had been and what he had become; whether he was simply staring vacantly at the flame without a thought in his head. She tried to read him and failed, because she could not read that face, not the human parts of it, nor the rest.

  She found that the only conclusion she had come to was that he was not going to kill her, though the opportunity was still there.

  The candle had burned out, the flame attempting one last despairing leap for freedom before drowning in the hungry pool of wax that it had created, and he sighed. A small sound; such a human sound.

  There was a noise, a croaking and wordless sound. She realized it came from her own throat, forced through stiff lips. The poison was beginning to wear off. She fought and fought, trying to reconnect with muscles that had been severed from her, and at last she managed to force out the word, “Why?”

  Enth stared at her mournfully. “I listen. You all think I am stupid, like an animal. I know what is said. I know what I am.” And then, because apparently he understood that was no answer, “There is a prophecy. I am part of it. Your leader and the other one both agreed, though in different ways. The prophecy is to destroy this Darvezian. Do you think the Dark Lord would not know? He would kill me, to be safe from me.”

  Cyrene had not considered that logic, but she could not refute it. She even managed an infinitesimal nod.

  “And he would not give me back what I was,” Enth added. “I do not know what you will do, when you have made use of me, but I must think Penthos can do it. Turn me back. Take me back.”

  She made an encouraging noise.

  “And it hurts.”

  An iron hand, that had been gripping her so hard she had not been able to feel it, released her in a rush, and abruptly every joint was burning, shrilly insisting that she relieve it from its enforced stillness. And she couldn’t move much, although every part of her was trembling, but she had already been working at her tongue and lips, and she was able to say, “What?”

  “What has been laid on me. The oath, the bonds. When I come close to breaking it, it burns like fire. And I don’t know what will make it burn, until it is too late. I am afraid.”

  With a choked sound, Cyrene was on her feet, pins and needles searing across every part of her. For a moment she could only stamp and rub at her limbs and curse, while Enth watched her blankly.

  “I—” she started, and then cursed and stamped some more. “I will argue your case, I swear. I will get Penthos to turn you back, if that is what you want. When we’re done. I’ll take you back to that forest you came from myself, if need be. I owe you.”

  His expression suggested the concept was meaningless to him, but she felt it was important to make him understand.

  “Look, you could have killed me. Maybe you’d have suffered for it later, from the geas, maybe not. But you could have done me instead of the Doomsayer. Or as well, even. You could be a mile away from here, right now. And I admit, I’ve never been fond of you, and I’ve never trusted you, and I . . .” She stared into that face, trying to see it other than it was: human; monster; monster; human, until she found some squinting way of looking at him that did not make her stomach curdle. He could never pass for human, and it was trying to see him as that—as something as human as a Ghantishman even—that caused the queasy disconnect. If she looked at him as something entirely other, then he was still alien but a layer of horror was taken from him. As a singular thing unto himself there was a completeness to him, a sureness of movement, a comfort in his own frame that surely had not been there a few days ago. He had the lean and admirable lines of a hunting creature, a thing well made. Not a man; not a monster; just Enth.

  “I will try,” she finished lamely. “I swear to the L—I will try. And now we must leave.”

  He stood again, willing to follow her lead without questions because that was what he had been doing all along.

  “A Doomsayer has been killed,” she told him, though. “Other agents of the Dark Lord will know. They will come here for vengeance.”

  A nod from Enth. He understood. Then he spoke, of his own accord and just as though he were a companion engaged on a common mission. “What about the other one?” His hands were still, head cocking to indicate the hatch to the cellar. No doubt he could haul it from its fittings without straining.

  “You want to kill him?”

  “He is not threatening you. I am not defending myself.” He spoke precisely, hunting through the maze that Penthos had set about his mind. “Are you instructing me to kill him?”

  It would, she considered sourly, set a poor precedent. “I’ve a better idea,” she decided. “Because, like I say, the Dark One’s servants will be all over this place soon enough.” She was pitching her voice loud enough for Visler to hear. “And they know just who runs it. Or the agents of the Light will come, ’cos I’m sure as anything telling them over at Armesion what’s been going on here.” And she took up one of the tables, and without being asked Enth had the other end, and then had turned it over onto the cellar hatch between them. She had won
dered if the little weasel had another way out, but from his horrified shout at the sound she guessed he did not. “So we’ll leave him to his vintning for now, let him take stock of the contents of his cellar. Until they come for him. Until whoever comes for him. Sweet dreams, Visler.”

  They left, then, and Cyrene set off into the woods, close enough to watch the roads, but far enough that they could hide themselves among the trees. Enth kept his own counsel, mostly, although he had one question that she could not answer, but filed away for later use. When he intruded into the edge of her vision unexpectedly he still made her skin crawl, but it was old habit. When she caught the reins of her feelings, she could look on his silent, crouching form and see something more of a blank slate, perhaps even someone with virtues as a traveling companion. He was quiet, after all, and he was obedient, and he was strong. She had known dogs who had no more to recommend them. And that meant he was already a step up from Harathes.

  She laughed at that, unable to stop herself, sensing those baffled eyes on her, like dark reflecting pools.

  Dion found them soon after, following after Penthos as though the magician were a tracking hound, able to sniff out the reek of his own magics no matter what the distance. They came down the forest path, and Cyrene saw that there were four of them, and two spare horses, and felt a quiet joy.

  “What kept you?” she called out, emerging from the trees. She was grinning, but Dion’s expression took some of the edge off that. “What happened?” She had to glance once more at Lief, because the priestess’s looks suggested someone had died.

  “We’re fine,” Harathes told her, though she hadn’t been asking him. “We thought we were in trouble, back at Armesion, but they saw the necessity of our quest, and let us go.”