Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “We can’t hold them!” Cyrene yelled.

  Then there was a creature that had sprung past Lief’s spear to leap onto his back, fangs up. Dion saw Cyrene desperately try to reverse the motion of her sword so she could swat it.

  Enth took the spider and hurled it away into the midst of its fellows. He did not smash it or tear it apart, as he surely could have done. His movements were almost fastidious, practically delicate. He cast the creature away with care, as some benevolent soul might have shuffled one of its smaller brethren away out of a window.

  There were more now, though, and they were growing bolder. Enth was put to evict another couple almost immediately afterward, and as much as Dion shifted and shaped the Light of Armes, she could not keep them away.

  And then Penthos was calling out, “Gather close! Close, all of you! There’s only one way!”

  Gratefully she pulled back, and pulled Harathes back too, until her back was to Penthos’s shoulder, until she was jostled in with Lief and Cyrene and the man-spider; until all six of them were pressed into a space barely wider across than her outstretched arms.

  And Penthos let out a fearsome yell—something of savagery, something of elation, and something that owed nothing to a merely human throat. And he made fire.

  She had said to him, at Cad Nereg, that he was one of the greatest wizards of her knowledge. He had many tricks, did Penthos. His transmutation of Enth was only one of them, for he was a magician’s magician, a man who had mastered many of the realms of magic, and perhaps all of them.

  But he was a child at heart: he loved setting things ablaze. It was here that his most ardent studies were concentrated. And within the nest of the spiders, he called forth a weight and width of fire such as none of them had ever seen before.

  Dion had a hand up, for the feeble protection it might grant her, but there was no heat turned inward. A shell of shimmering blue-white surrounded them, swirling like circling clouds. Beyond was only the inferno. She had a vague sense of scrabbling, blackened legs, of cracked bodies burst by the boiling of their own innards, of many-legged dances of agony that were mercifully brief. These were only shadows within the light.

  Penthos’s face was that of a man caught at the edge of ecstasy or madness, or death. As his feats were so far beyond the human, so what he must feel in exercising those powers was surely no more suited to a human face than the desires of his creature Enth.

  And at last Dion forced herself to look on Enth’s face, because to do otherwise would be cowardice, and a failure of her leadership.

  His eyes boiled and flared with the energies that shone back from their depths. His mouth was a tight line, and she saw the muscles of his jaw clench and ripple asymmetrically. His hands were knotted fists, and every muscle she could see was taut and tensed beneath his gray hide. At any moment she thought he must fly at Penthos to break the spell, so fierce—so human—was the rage that roamed up and down his body. But the strictures held, and so he was stiff with fury and yet unable to vent it.

  Can I feel sorry for him? What a time for such a thought, when the firestorm raged on every side! And yet, though she could not find a human being anywhere in that manlike frame, she felt a stab of sympathy nonetheless. Better to kill the creature and put it out of its misery. Better to turn their backs on what they had done. And yet those were the coward’s way too; nothing more than an abrogation of responsibility. She had caused this miserable monster to come into being. She must live with what she had done.

  And then the fires were dying, ebbing, for all the force Penthos was still apparently cramming into their creation. Moments later, shockingly swiftly, they had guttered and died, as though the whole vast blaze had been nothing but a candle, magnified to outlandish size. They were left only with the faint bluish swirls of Penthos’s shield, and her own softly glowing disc.

  The magician let out a long sigh, and Lief was already moving out, passing through the shimmering field with his spear ready. A moment later he staggered, eyes bulging, and dropped to one knee. His spear clattered away and his hands went to his chest. In a move swift as striking, Enth had snared him and yanked him back.

  “Augh!” the thief gasped, choking. “The air’s poisoned!”

  “Smoke,” said Harathes dismissively, although Dion could see precious little of it.

  “It is not smoke,” Penthos intoned solemnly. “The wise know that there is that within the air that sustains life: remove it, and though there is air—and not poison air—no living thing can prosper within it. This same quality sustains the fire. When it is gone, so the flame perishes as any living thing. This shield you see about you is not to save you from the flames, but to save that part of the air that the flames would otherwise devour.”

  “Then . . . what’s out there?” Lief asked hoarsely.

  “Dead air,” was Penthos’s sepulchral reply. “Stay close to me and we shall pass through it sustained by the breath of my magics.”

  And they had no choice, then, but to advance, because Penthos was certainly striding onward and their continued existence in that place was tied to him. Dion considered—and not for the first time—how lucky they were that the minutiae of most human interactions passed the wizard by. Had he decided to hold them to ransom over demands of his own—and she could think of a few he might own to without stretching her imagination overmuch—then he would have had more than one opportunity to do so.

  Then they had passed over the floor of that great chamber, that crunched and fragmented under their feet with its charcoal burden of incinerated spiders. Enth was looking at none of them—looking at nothing, she suspected. Whatever thoughts were stewing in that gray head were nothing she wanted to consider, but she would probably have to. They had slaughtered the monster’s relatives. No doubt it was seething with revenge, and she would have to be on the lookout for any chance that might come its way.

  Then they broke out through another narrow passage, that was stubbly with the charred ends of old webs, and entered a further chamber. Here again there were dead spiders, but these were not burned. There was a whole mound of them at the far end, piled up one on another as though some infernal cleaner had gathered them all up into a heap for later disposal. They were intact, for the most part, and Dion realized that they must have suffocated when Penthos’s fires drew all the goodness out of the air. They must have clawed and scrabbled and crawled over each other and up the wall, seeking some air that might sustain them, until at the last they had reached the farthest extent of the chamber and found no succor.

  A great many of them, she saw, were far smaller than those that had fought. She saw, also, that the floor of the chamber was stippled with lumpy mounds, some burst open, the nearer ones scorched. Eggs.

  Cyrene made a noise, and Dion saw her move partway toward Enth and then stop, held back by the creature’s sullen solitude.

  “Enth . . . ,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry. These must be the young, the . . .”

  Don’t say “children,” Dion asked silently, because of course they weren’t children. Humans had children, just as dogs had pups and horses had foals. Spiders had . . . well, as far as she was concerned, spiders just spawned more spiders.

  Enth glanced at Cyrene. “They are just hatchlings,” the creature said blankly. “They have not learned anything or experienced anything. They are not the loss that the nest has suffered.”

  Dion found herself nodding. Of course the monsters did not value their young. The thought was almost reassuring. It was just one more ready and convenient way to find them sufficiently alien as to be below her consideration.

  She listened to the run of her own thoughts, knowing them riddled with logical defects. And yet she had the trump card to send all her qualms packing, of course: whatever they might be, whatever Cyrene and Lief might think, these things were of the Dark. Ridding the world of them was a holy duty.

  They crossed the nursery-turned-morgue and were just about to exit when the great pile shifted slightly.


  They all of them recoiled—Enth as much as anyone—and Lief let out a yell of horror. The great stack of arachnids rippled as though even smaller spiders were charging about underneath it, and then stiff dead bodies were cascading down, breaking or rolling as they struck the floor.

  Everyone had their weapons ready now, crouched close to Penthos still. Beneath the clumped mass of the dead was something pale and mounded, something of dense webbing.

  “It’s a plug,” Enth said, but Dion did not understand him.

  Cyrene did, in the next moment, “A door. They made a door to keep the fire out. Could it keep the good air in?”

  “That’s an interesting question,” Penthos began. “It would depend on the—” and then the webbing plug expoded outward, and vomiting forth from the chamber beyond came a vast spider the size of four horses: the mother; the queen.

  The monster barrelled for them instantly, moving far faster than anything that size should have been able. It was as big as Enth’s own Mother, who had donated a fang and a son so unwillingly to their quest, but Dion guessed there would be no patient negotiation with this beast.

  She got her disc out, throwing a wash of divine Light at the creature. Armes’s holy force struck and seared the spider queen without slowing her. It let out a screech that might have been a voice, or might have been its fluid boiling in its joints.

  Harathes met the monster, not a head-on charge that would have flattened him, but ramming it from the side with his shield, deflecting it slightly. Cyrene darted forward and got a solid strike in with her blade, shattering one of the queen’s forelimbs, but the answering spasm knocked her across the floor. Dion found herself facing into the thing’s plate-sized eyes, seeing herself and the Light she placed her faith in reflected there, multiplied and in miniature.

  It reared up, scythe-long fangs cocked back to drive into her. Penthos flung his arms forward, but achieved only a feeble scattering of fire that did nothing but singe the monster’s hair.

  There was a scream of fury and Harathes slammed his sword into the monster’s underside with all his strength. The fangs rammed down and struck his shield, knocking him flat to the ground and piercing through the steel.

  Lief drove his spear into the spider’s bloated abdomen before falling back to Penthos’s side, and Cyrene was cutting at it as well, but the monster was so vast they seemed all pinpricks to it. Dion drew together her certainty of purpose—a battered and abused organ of her mind these days—and threw forth all her digust into a cutting sword of the Light that raked across those many eyes as though she were trying to blot out the sight of her own reflection.

  The spider reared up a second time, one fang shattered to splinters already, and Harathes wedged his mauled shield under its belly and stabbed and stabbed past the rim, greenish-yellow ichor spattering him from every hole he punched in the creature’s shell. A wild swing from Cyrene cut the remaining fang in two and buried her blade deep in the thing’s body.

  Abruptly some malign purpose was gone from the vast hulk, and Dion darted forward and dragged Harathes out from under its shadow before the monster collapsed.

  In the silence that came after, Penthos gradually let his bluish shield fade, as the rank-smelling air from the queen’s chamber was evidently still replete with that goodness that sustained life. Harathes was staring about himself almost rebelliously, his ire fixed mostly on Enth.

  “I see it didn’t help us.”

  “He helped before,” Lief pointed out.

  “He warned us about the ambush,” Cyrene added.

  “Listen to the pair of you,” the warrior spat. “Or are we going to be terribly sorry now, that we killed these monsters? Is this creature going to be giving me its angry looks, because I defended us from the Dark? I suppose this is all our fault, is it? Are we going to tut and sigh and say they were only defending themselves?”

  “No,” Enth said, unexpectedly enough that everyone jumped. His round black eyes gleamed in Armes’s Light as his attention skipped from one to another. “I told them. I told them you would do this if they gave you an excuse. They could have hidden. They could have listened to me. It was their decision, to attack us. To attack you. You. Us.” His hands twitched and flexed, and abruptly his whole face convulsed, an expression forcing its way into being from the very depths of his Dark heart. “They were stupid!” he got out through clenched fangs. “Stupid and blind and limited! And I tried to tell them! I said everything I could to show how murderous and merciless and terrible you—we—you are! But they thought they knew best. They had to challenge you. They dared encroach on the world of humanity. And that means death. I know that now. It always means death.”

  Which was not entirely how Dion wanted to think of things, and she knew that there were surely gaps in the creature’s logic somewhere, but just then she could not muster the mental resources to think of them.

  And, besides, Harathes was coming back with, “That’s right, and don’t you forget it,” and for a moment Dion found herself regarding him as she saw Enth, as an inhuman and repulsive specimen of some alien species.

  “Let’s just move on,” she said quietly.

  There was a light touch on her arm: Penthos, regarding her with recognizable human concern.

  “I’m fine,” she said, with more force than she felt. “Let’s just move on. We’ve got a job to do. We didn’t come here to kill spiders.”

  It was Enth who led on, from that point, with Penthos conjuring good air when necessary—less and less as they neared the far side of the caves. They passed many more spiders, but they were all of them dead, their subterranean home become their tomb. We got them all, Dion considered. We wiped out the whole nest of them. It should have been a deed of song and story, a great Darkness cleansed from the world. Right then she just felt empty. Not guilty, not sorry that the monsters were gone, but not triumphant, either. She felt as though the whole trek onward to Darvezian was something that she must endure, plodding ever on and on, until it was done. And then? And then at least, whatever else, it would be done. Time enough to think then what she would do with herself.

  Sooner than she would have believed there was a faint grayish light ahead, and she realized that it must be the predawn, which came weakly even to the skies over Darvezian’s tower. Harathes let out a bark of triumph, and the mood of all the rest was instantly brighter—save for her and save for Enth, each of them locked in their own rigid worlds: priest and spider; spider and priest.

  The rest tumbled out into the open air, leaving only Harathes at her side. Dion was bracing herself, as though when the sun touched her she might just burn up, all her doubts and sins flaring into instant white-hot fire when they were exposed.

  “Now’s the time,” Harathes told her softly.

  She looked at him without understanding. “What do you mean?”

  “The monster, the spider-creature. This is it. It’s accomplished what we needed it for,” he hissed urgently. “You and me, we’re the ones who understand. We should get rid of it. It’s a liability.”

  Still she stared at him dully.

  “Dion, the monster has brought division into our very ranks. If we release it here, it will warn our enemies. If we keep it, then we’re nursing a scorpion—a spider—something poisonous. It’ll sting when we least expect it. Perhaps it’s been working for Darvezian all this time, as is its nature. Perhaps Darvezian can undo Penthos’s magics. We need to destroy it, quickly and surely.”

  “So it can’t sleep with Cyrene again, you mean.” She hadn’t meant the words, but she was abominably tired and now they were said.

  Harathes goggled at her, and his hurt look was a beat late in coming to his face, and another awkward moment dragged before he put in, “That’s not it. We need to be rid of the thing for, for many reasons, you’ve heard my—”

  “You really are a . . .” She managed to bite down on what she had been about to say. A shit. He’s a shit. I never saw it before, but he really is. But he’s our shi
t, and a child of the Light. Which is ever so reassuring when I’m here trying to convince myself of the rightness of my cause. “We’re not killing it,” she told him. “It would be wrong. We have used it, and it has served us, despite its nature. And that’s an end to it.”

  Harathes scowled at her. “There’ll be no better time, no other time than this,” he warned.

  “No doubt.” She forced herself to push past him, stepping out under a dawn-colored sky.

  Ahead of them, past a jagged rubble of barren rocks and crags, a tower jutted into the sky. Dark it was, and crowned with spikes, and its edges were spined like the back of a reptile. At its peak a greenish beacon burned, a rallying point for all that was vile and evil in the world. There it was, and they were within an easy hour’s walk of its dread portals. They had reached the domain of Darvezian, the end of their quest. They had followed the spider’s path, followed the words of the prophecy, and now all that remained was to confront the Dark Lord and end his reign.

  Hooray for us, thought Dion, but inside she felt only empty.

  10: Fear of a Dark Tower

  LIEF HAD EXPECTED the clear ground before Darvezian’s tower to be a litter of tents, a great and unruly host of Ghants, wicked men, and monsters camped under their master’s eye, ready to go storm Cad Nereg and devour the free world at a moment’s notice. Instead, the place looked oddly abandoned. I mean, yes, he thought to himself, desolate, windswept, bleak, all these are good words, but where the pits is everyone?

  There were a few huts at one end of the valley of the tower, a little village of Ghantishmen scratching out a living somehow. Of the anticipated Great Evil Horde there was nothing. Lief—on his own recognizance since Dion had sent him to scout—ghosted from shadow to shadow across the uneven rocky floor of the valley, closing on the tower that loomed so high above. Somewhere up there is Darvezian, he thought, and his mouth went dry. The Dark Lord, the actual Dark Lord himself. And yes, there had been other Dark Lords, a string of them back through history as various evil men discovered the true power of the Dark and rose to dominate the evil creatures of the world. But Darvezian was their own Dark Lord, Lief’s and the rest. Previous generations had, with great struggle and loss, cast down their tyrants. This one was for him and Dion, Cyrene and Harathes and Penthos. They had followed the twists of their quest; they had fulfilled the terms of their prophecy, and now here they were.