The leader of their band of scouts was a squat, hirsute man who obviously thought them too doomed to bother with names. He chewed constantly, some herbal business or other, and spoke only when he had to. He had a very expressive face, which he dedicated in its entirety to showing just how little he thought of Dion and her followers.
They passed out of Cad Nereg at dusk, that blind hour when the shadows hid more than plain darkness ever could, and even night-adapted Ghantish eyes were at their worst. The scouts were a dozen in number, cloaked in mottled gray and carrying little recurved bows and short swords, every bit of metal on them blackened and muffled. Out there in the gathering gloom their opposite numbers were probably mirroring them unknowingly. The Dark Lord was profligate with the lives of his servants—Ghantish spies tended to come in numbers, and without much subtlety. The Light could not afford to be so cheap with its adherents. And yet they died, still, those scouts. Every scrap of news about the mustering of Darvezian’s forces was won in blood.
Dion and her band had no intention of skulking about in the shadow of Cad Usgath. Now was where Nth must prove himself. There was little doubt what Harathes would press for, if he could not.
“You must guide us now,” Dion told him, soft but firm. “This is where we must trust your lead, and I swear that if you—”
He held a long-fingered hand up, stilling her words with the shock of his presumption. “I know,” said Nth. No more than that, and certainly he did not go on to point out how close they had come to killing him, betrayal or no. Looking into their faces, though, he found the thought written there, in that language he had been painstakingly learning ever since they took him from his home.
“Well, then, we are where you indicated. From here your Spider’s Path must lead, to take us past the defenses of Cad Usgath and the great host that Darvezian is gathering. For now we travel with the scouts, but you must tell us—”
“Here.” Nth stopped abruptly, crouching. He was not looking around him, but within, his hands feeling out the hard stone of the Bone Vice. Knowledge was trickling into his head, as though a great frozen block of it were gradually melting, as though this place put out a heat only he could feel. “We are close now.” He could not have said to what.
“There’s nothing here,” the scout leader objected.
“It is supposed to be a secret way,” Lief pointed out.
“If there was some way the enemy could creep in here, we’d know it. His spies come from the side gates of Cad Usgath.”
“Unless there are spies you don’t catch,” Cyrene pointed out.
The scout leader looked unhappy at that, and equally unhappily at Nth. “This stinks,” he opined.
“Tell me about it,” grunted Harathes, but Dion shushed him.
“This is not a path of the Dark Lord,” Nth said, forehead furrowed. In his mind that undigested lump of his Mother’s memories shifted and uncurled its legs a little. “This is what my Mother found—made?—in another age, when she dwelled here. Before Darvezian, before the Dark Lord who came before him. Before she went abroad, here she dwelled, in a crack in the rock, in a cave, in a maze of caves. Here she supped on the blood of Ghants, the juices of men, of eyeless tunellers, of . . .” He realized that they were looking at him in that way they had, even Lief and Cyrene, and brought the litany to an end. Not long ago and that would have been all he had to say, but now he could read too much of them. Now he was moved to add wretchedly, “This is how it was, when she was here. I am just—”
“Enough,” Dion said sharply, making him flinch. “I don’t care. Just lead us.”
She let the scouts go on with their own mission, blessing them with a touch of the Light, and Nth felt a spark of pain in him every time she did it. It raised in him all his scrabbling, resentful fear of her—of all of them, their entire kind and their vaunted Armes, too. And yet, it hurt him more now. Because it was another wall just like all the walls that Penthos had placed about him. It was a boundary he could not cross. It marked him out as unclean, filthy vermin, and nothing he could ever do would rub that out. He was starting to see himself through their eyes. He wished, he devoutly wished, that he could unlearn everything they had ever taught him. It had been simpler when he had just been their prisoner.
And yet: drinking, discovering what a joke was, the company of Lief, Cyrene. Surely he would give these things over as well, in a heartbeat, to be cleansed and returned to his former self. He would give them all up. He would turn on them in a moment. He was not like them.
They were making him weak. Not their hate, but all their other welter of emotions and thoughts and ideas. They were making him weak and they were making him want to be weak.
He realized that Dion had spoken to him twice since the scouts left, and his head jerked up hurriedly. The memories had thawed now, all the annals of a long life spent in predatory darkness, the inner ways of the mountains. The path that even Darvezian did not know.
“Yes,” and he stood. I will do their bidding. I can do nothing else. These bonds they put on me are a blessing. Otherwise I would have to choose, and what would I choose? And these were human thoughts, and he hated them, but they were his; they were him. Give him the keenest blade in the world, he could not have cut them out of himself. And since when did I need blades?
In his mind was a path, but it was harder to follow than he had anticipated: a path for a creeping thing for which a sheer wall was no obstacle, not a path for this fumbling near-human form. Still, he could climb better than the rest, a coil of rope slung over his shoulder. He scaled and he scrambled, hauled and scuffed, knowing only that, in ages past, his Mother had passed this way, had left this place to seek a new home. Why? The why was not within his mind yet. Only that the path still existed.
He saw ahead of him the crack within the rocks that she had emerged from those generations before. She must have been young, then, half the size of her present bulk, to fit through that opening. He waited for the others to catch him up: four of them sweating and straining, with Harathes in his armor little more than a weight at the rope’s end. Penthos had simply ascended, floating into the air like dandelion seed.
“There,” he told them. “Your path is there.”
“And inside? Does it branch? Are there many caves?” Dion asked him, getting her breath back.
He nodded. “The way is known to me.” In saying the words he made it so.
“What’s in there?” Lief asked, and when Nth shrugged he put in, “Want me to take a poke then?”
“Go,” Dion agreed, and the thief began closing the last distance toward the cave mouth, the movement of each hand or foot a careful study in silence, plotting a curving course to bring him unobserved to the opening.
Nth moved before his mind had quite registered what his eyes had seen. Afterward, crouched over Lief with the thief’s terrified eyes staring into him, he identified it only as that instinctive prey-lunge he had once known, in another form. When the lines had been tripped, when the sense of struggle had come to him through his feet along the web, it was almost impossible not to follow that twanging lure and strike.
He had stuck, even in this shape. His mind had been transported back to that simpler age, and he had lunged for Lief and slammed him back against the rock. The others were shouting. Dion was commanding him to back away. For a moment he lacked sufficient control of his body to obey, but then he crept back, with Lief still staring, utterly bewildered.
“What happened?” Cyrene was asking one of them, and: “I told you,” from Harathes. Nth was asking himself what it was, why he had . . .
“Do not move,” he said, loud enough for them all to hear. Loud enough, because stealth would not work here, and sound would not be heard.
“If you hurt Lief we’ll—” Harathes started and Cyrene told him to shut up.
“What, Enth?” she asked.
He reached out one arm, with Lief’s eyes following his every move in horrified fascination. He touched the thread. Moving it, pluck
ing it like a string, made it visible to them. And spoke to those inside, though in a language his body could not form true thoughts in anymore.
Lief had been about to trip the line, to cry out to the denizens of the Dark that he was there—that he was prey—springing the trap of wire-strong strands that would have caught him up. They were laced everywhere between the rocks before the cave mouth, gleaming in Nth’s sight, seemingly invisible to the humans. And, seeing that line, that trap, Nth had struck. But his old pure instinct was corrupted. He had struck to push Lief back from the brink.
He felt a confusion of reactions. He was glad he had saved Lief. He was bitterly disappointed in himself.
“When your—when she left here,” Cyrene said softly, “she left something behind, then?”
It had become crowded. Now the knowledge came to him. And these lines were fresh. No doubt some of the scouts from either fortress had fallen victim to something other than the enemy.
“Simple enough,” Lief put in suddenly. “We just happen to have brought our own native.”
Nth found that all eyes were on him. “I am no native to this place,” he told them uncertainly.
“More so than any of us,” Dion stated. “Go to the—” She visibly restrained her speech. “Go to your people. Tell them we do not come to make war. Tell them to let us pass, and they shall not be harmed.”
Nth stared into her serene, terrible face. “It is an intrusion. An invasion of their territory.” He had to reach to find each word, supplementing his vocabulary with deep-buried ideas that had come from Penthos. The concepts were light-swift and obvious to him, but humans had so many words, which all together amounted to so little.
“And we are capable of driving our way in with faith and fire,” Dion said calmly. “You know this. So: you will convince them.”
Nth looked from face to face, but even those who might be his allies were obviously in favor of this plan. At the last, he turned back to the cave mouth.
He caught movement there, and could imagine the rounded bodies, the clutching legs: at least he was being sent somewhere cleaner and more wholesome than a festering human town.
He approached carefully, stepping over or hunching under each trip-line, not ready to enter the world of their speech until he was closer. Their eyes were on him, though. Perhaps they were wondering what he was.
When he was close—enough to sense the ratcheting tension from within, he reached his long fingers down to the closest threads, those that fed directly into the shadows of the cave. He touched them lightly, holding Dion’s words in his mind, trying to find a translation of them that would be true enough to the original to comply with Penthos’s strictures of obedience. His hands hovered there, like a man with his mouth open but nothing to say.
He touched; he plucked.
Noise. Just noise.
He tried to still the twanging threads hurriedly. The idea was in his mind, of how to put his ideas to them, but between brain and fingers those thoughts became nothing but the moanings and gibberings of an idiot.
He hissed between the teeth they had given him, and tried again, blundering and fumbling, broadcasting nonsense. Then he saw a sudden shift from within and practically fell backward as a large spider rushed at him, raising its front four legs high in the air, brandishing its fangs like hooked daggers. He retreated hurriedly, feeling many eyes on him—the clean and gleaming orbs from the cave, and the pale, narrow regard of the humans.
“What was that?”Lief demanded. “Or is that just a really aggressive way of saying how’d you do?”
“I cannot speak.” Nth stared at his hands, feeling a trembling shock course through him. “I could not make the words.” His recent life had been a study in estrangement but now he felt it all again.
“Well, that’s just great,” Harathes spat. “So what good is he, then?”
“If that is the way forward,” Dion said grimly, “then that is the way we must take. If the denizens will not allow us passage, then we must show them they cannot obstruct the servants of the Light. It will be as it was in the forest. We will have to kill them until they learn to avoid us, as with any beasts.”
“No!” Nth got out. He remembered the forest all too well. Except, now he tried to picture it, he found himself within the circle of burning light watching his own people as they fled and burned. He could not imagine himself as one of the forest-dwellers. He felt his heart speed, panic running through him, and even that sensation was uniquely human, distinct from its spider equivalent. The very organs by which his body talked to him were wrong.
“Then speak to them again,” Dion told him, and not for the first time, from her exasperated tone.
“I can’t,” he said desperately. “This—body, these,” he held up his hands as though they were dead meat. “I—cannot talk anymore. You took it from me!”
Dion’s face darkened, and Nth was already quailing back from whatever verdict she would pass, when Penthos put in, “Well, I suppose I could just give him his shape back for a bit. Would that help?”
Everyone was staring at the wizard, Nth included.
“That . . . ,” Lief started. “That’s a thing you can do, is it?”
Penthos looked exasperated. “Am I not the grand master of the—”
“Power Elemental, yes, yes. But you can—”
“Do it,” Nth said. He had not realized, until he saw them staring at him, how forcefully he had spat the words out. “Do it. I will do whatever you wish.”
Dion nodded guardedly. “If it is safe.”
“Safe?” twinkled Penthos as though it were ever the watchword of his magic, as opposed to “incendiary.” “Now, creature, hearken to me.”
Nth hearkened. Every ounce of his concentration was bent on the wizard.
“I shall transfigure you back into the semblance of the creeping thing that once you were,” Penthos said grandly. At the sound of the others grinding their teeth in frustration, or perhaps at the audible sound of the night wasting away, he hurried himself. “Well, you shall negotiate with your foul siblings truly and loyally, and argue our cause, that we may get through this benighted passage and to Darvezian. Are you ready?”
“Yes!” Nth got out even before the man had finished. He braced himself, feeling acutely the lumpen weight of his human flesh on him. Yes, yes, to be free, to be myself once more . . .
And he stared on, stony-faced, as Penthos pulled out a candle from within his robes. It was greater than the stub that the Doomsayer used, but it was a candle nonetheless.
“While this flame burns,” Penthos exposited, though Nth knew it already, “you shall hold the form I give you. After that, you shall be like this once more, so be quick about your business.”
Nth did not trust himself to speak. To his surprise, Cyrene did it for him.
“Why not just break your spell and make him a spider. That’s what he wants.” She seemed to have difficulty with the words, but got them out anyway.
“You have no concept of the higher magics,” Penthos said dismissively. “Such would require a grand ritual as did his creation, a place of power to draw from, a night’s work. And besides, the bonds placed on his mind might not survive such a thorough reversion, leaving him free to indulge in inevitable betrayal. This is but a temporary transformation. I could do it to Harathes just as easily but he wouldn’t know what to do with all the legs.”
And with that, he turned and thrust his hands out at Nth as though trying to shoo him away. The man-spider jerked back in shock, and then—
Agony. Utter agony. Hearing the thin, squalling sound that came from a throat being reworked in blood and searing pain. Feeling every limb, each muscle, sinew, and organ melted in a furnace and cast anew: cast into maddeningly familiar shapes, and yet not his. None of it was truly his. What the magician made him into was a travesty, for all a human would never have known the difference. It was a flimsy shambles of a work of magic.
But he was close to the ground now, as he was used t
o, and he had the legs he remembered, the number and the articulation. He had his fangs rather than the clutter of feeble human teeth. He had his senses again. The humans were speaking to him, and he could barely feel their words in his belly, but the world’s language was plain: every footfall, every shuffle coming to him clearly.
He turned on them, seeing them dimly, seeing them all take a step away, consciously or not, save for Penthos. Nth’s many eyes made out Harathes’s disgust, and a tightening of Dion’s features. He saw Lief and Cyrene eyeing him unhappily. Then the thief lifted a hand and waved, just a little flourish of the fingers. His lips moved, and the sensation came to Nth through his feet: “You in there?”
He still had their words. He was still human inside, or as much human as Penthos had made him. He wished heartily he did not have their language to anchor him to their world.
And at the same time, he felt a shiver of loss, at the thought that he might one day escape from that world altogether, and return to this shape for real. All those complexities and stupidities the humans practiced . . . he would not miss them, no. The very thought was . . . was human. And yet his.
He turned from them and scuttled up to the cave mouth. He gave his attention to the matter at hand because confusion and wreck lay in letting his mind chew over such ideas.
Within the cave mouth they were waiting, many of them. He could feel them massing, ready to strike or to repel an incursion, and for a moment the thought of those bodies pressed together in there made him feel strange, uncomfortable.
But he was at the strings, and he must play. He reached forward with his first limbs and stroked them gently. He felt as though he were starting up a dialogue with another side of himself.
9: Trailblazing
HEAR ME, for I have words for your Mother, he strummed, and he knew that they would tap and pluck his words back and back into the dark until they reached the inner chambers, the brood caverns where the eggs and their layer rested.
Wear the shape all you wish, the answer came back, we know what you are, Man.
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