Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

THE WORDS THAT TWANGED and thrummed their way to Nth said, New food coming, and he stirred, resettling his legs to take the measure of the message: how far, what direction, who originated it. Mother’s Brood was large. Some of her children were more reliable than others. New food. Different food. That had everyone’s interest. Across the span of the web, that was strung in mistlike sheets from tree to tree across their forest, he felt the others rousing, rising from their torpor. There was always food, even for so many bodies as Mother’s Brood ran to, but variety was welcome. In the dark wood, the deer ran in their many herds, feeding in the clearings under the shadow of the webs, and being fed upon in turn. Mother saw to it that there were always clearings, where the great trees had been poisoned and weakened. There would always be deer aplenty. In the trees there were monkeys, and they were clever and often escaped the hunt or the web, but this, too, was Mother’s plan. The monkeys were just clever enough that there would always be enough monkeys. They were aware enough to realize their fate, when they were caught, and that gave their juices an extra savor. There were no wolves, no stalking cats. It was not that the flesh of these things was unpalatable, but they were wasteful. They consumed too many deer and monkeys for their presence to be tolerated. New food, though. Nth waited for the words of the web to tell him that this prize was taken, so that he could beg Mother fo...

None knew from where those precious words had come, but with each Dark Lord who gathered the powers of the Dark to himself, somehow there was always a prophecy to bring about his ruin.

The old stones that Penthos had mentioned were almost all fallen, just mounds of mossy earth atop a hill, save for two that leant drunkenly together as though for mutual support. The hill was a lone hunched heap of higher ground, some barrow raised by ancients to wicked powers long before the coming of Armes and the message of the Light. Those ancients had known power, though. Their time-lost feet had tracked the lines of the world’s magic, and they had raised hills and forts and monuments wherever they had crossed one another.

The others had their weapons to hand, all facing away from the searing flashes of greenish light and gouts of flame that accompanied almost all of Penthos’s major works. When Dion considered the world, her chief question was, Is this of Light or Dark? Penthos’s main interest was usually, Is this flammable?

At first the new body they had imprisoned him within had dominated his attention. The world had become a shrieking, blinding whirl of unfamiliar senses. He was denied the voice of the ground, that had spoken to him of every twitch and motion within his world, and carried the speech of his people as well. Instead there was a raucous cacophony of sound that battered in through his unwanted ears, out of which, somehow, he could still parse the gibbering that was the way that these Men communicated among themselves. Of all the new abilities that had been forced on him, that comprehension was the one he would most do without. He had never wanted to discover that Men, the destroyers and the prey, could speak, even if their speech was such a painful din. And his eyes! His eyes had been pleasantly dim things, that could tell day from night, and movement from stillness. Now they were his world, gaping holes that let all of reality in, raw and bright-colored. He wanted to shut them, but they would not shut—they lacked even the fleshy covers that the true Men had, to blot out the searing, garish world. Instead he was forced to stare and stare and stare, to know his surroundings by the uncompromising medium of light and not the comforting subtlety of vibration. After that, once whatever they had done to him had forced him to come to terms with his sensorium, there had been the body. No more the comfortable scuttle of many legs, secure and low to the ground. Instead, every step these M...

For a long time he let their babble wash over him, his attention only on the misery of his new being, but eventually he found sufficient equilibrium that the words started falling into place, no matter how much he resented it. His ears were as perpetually open as his eyes, and he wondered if true Men could close those as well. Surely they must be able to. Nobody could live happily with such chaos continually intruding into their skulls. A moment after that thought, he was struck with a wave of nausea at his own changed self, because the word “skull” had come naturally to his mind, and it had no place there. He did not want to own a skull.

He was just finding a tenuous balance within himself when they reached the place called Shogg’s Ford. He had no idea. Perhaps even Mother had not known. She had not been abroad in the world for a long time, after all. It was a nest, a crawling nest of Man. Here they had grown filthy fungal-looking excrescences in profusion, and then they had bred and festered until the entire hideous hole of a place was overrun with a scurrying tide of four-limbed, flabby-skinned Man-creatures. Words burrowed into his mind, all-unsought: hovels, huts, houses, a village. “So many.” The voice was strange to him. It was not from any of the Men he traveled with. He realized they were looking at him with those arrangements of articles on their faces that were expressions. Expressions were used to show the attitudes of Man toward the things their eyes rested on, he discovered. The “expressions” of his jailers and tormentors—which he would rather have remained a mystery—were uniformly hostile. He realized the voice had been his. One of them looked less fierce than the others. “It’s just a village,” the small male Man said. “You should try a city.” The meaning of the word “city” followed unbidden a moment later, and the concept horrified Nth beyond any bounds, simply because of what it said about just how many of these Men there must be. The female Man who commanded the agonizing light, and seemed to be like a Mother to this little brood of them, broke in. “Lief, go on ahead and find something to ...

He had been trying to think of his captors as just “Man,” the homogenous mass he had perceived in the forest, but part of his transformation was a forcible induction to humanity, with all that entailed. They were individuals, each with different things to fear and loathe about them. The one who had just gone was Lief, and he seemed least offensive. There was a furtive nature to him that was at least comprehensible to Nth, who had crept through his share of shadows in his time. The others were even less pleasant than he. Two were plainly of greater power and authority. The male who had contorted Nth into this shape was Penthos, and it was his mind that had granted an understanding of human speech and the human world. At first he had seemed the very acme and exemplar of what it was to be human—a God-Man perfect in every line and motion. Nth had been in awe of him to start with, but as soon as he had begun to follow the speech of his captors he had realized that this worship was not in any way universal. Indeed, the expressions of the other Men when gazing upon Penthos could be read as annoyance and exasperation rather than adulation. With that realization, something had fallen from Nth, and he had understood that the awe he himself had felt was an artificial construct, something given to him by Penthos along with everything else. It was a trick played by creator upon creation. However resistant Nth might be to understanding the world of Man, it was that revelation—of the fal...

Lief himself said nothing, because he was thinking about all those powerful men and women of the Light sitting on their hands for decades, knowing that Darvezian was out there, and defeatable, but feeling no particular inclination to go do it, because they knew that someone else would eventually take up the slack. Which is exactly the problem with prophesies.

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, someth...

“I just . . . I need to make a decision, you know that. So help me, Cyrene. Tell me what the creature did.” “Nothing.” “Very evidently not true.” “It’s just . . .” Cyrene put her head in her hands. “It’s just . . . he was there.” Dion frowned at her. “We go to face the Dark, and it was late, and I was . . . I wanted . . . You won’t understand. You can’t understand. I was lonely, Dion. I was lonely and I wanted to reach out to someone. And he was there, and he’s . . . there’s none of the complications that there would be with . . . well, you know how Harathes is. One ride and you’re in his stable, as far as he’s concerned.” “He’s a knight of the church.” “He’s a prick. He’s an insufferable, scheming prick. And it’s always the same. You’re all right. You’re a priestess. That means people don’t think of you the same way. But believe me, most of us basically can’t talk to a man without him looking us over and deciding whether or not he wants to give us the shaft. And if he does then, whatever else we are, whatever else we do, it’s always there, somewhere in his mind. And if he doesn’t fancy us, then that’s a judgment too, writing us off as a thing without value. You can’t get rid of it. And either way it means you’re always a woman, first. You’re not a warrior, or an archer, or even just a friend to drink with. You’re a woman, and that means you’ve got a place, and a use.”

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...

Against his will, Nth was forced to consider another difference between the way humans spoke, and the purer communication of his true people. Humans were deceptive. They were born with a lie on their lips. They told untruths to each other every moment, and they lied to themselves just as often. But in the close-knit families of spiders there was less use for deceit, and it was practiced by actions, not words. Their language was a tool for transferring information: warnings, battle plans, commands from Mother. Then let them come in, the spiders had told him, and he could sense the quivering subtext through the lines. He was left with nothing but to return to the others. To return to the humans. They were waiting for him expectantly, each of them deaf and blind to all that had passed. Nth had no doubt that the spiders within intended defiance. They were pretending at acquiescence, but he could imagine himself standing in their place, leg for leg and foot for foot. He and his kin would never have willingly permitted any human to enter their domain and live. And yet he tried to find hope. Hope was not a solely human thing; even a spider can dream of tomorrow. What was building a web but a gustatory expression of hope? He hoped that his words to them would bounce and dance about the strings of their nest, vibrant with the desperate sincerity of his message. He hoped that with the sight and feel of the humans—Penthos whose power made all Nth’s hairs stand on end, Dion who reeked...

“Stand forth and face me, monster, and pay the price for all you’ve done.” “What took you?” Darvezian asked idly. “I’ve been waiting here since all that racket in the kitchen. Did you take the scenic route?” Dion was left wordless, finding herself not apparently meeting the rigorous standards a Dark Lord expected in his enemies. Unexpectedly, it was Harathes who came to her aid. “We have disposed of your servants, Dark One. Eight of your Doomsayers lie dead, that might have aided you.” “Consider me inconvenienced,” Darvezian growled, with a great shrugging sigh—trackable in the dark only because of that single pauldron. He stood abruptly, no obvious human motion, just a serpent-smooth transition. “Well, then, Champions of the Light, I salute you for getting this far, but you have no idea of my power and my provenance. I will have to make you die in agony over a long period of time now, but don’t take it personally. You really have done very well indeed.”

“HAVE IT, YOU TURD!” the thief yelled as he struck. It was, Cyrene considered, a battle cry unlikely to make the sagas. The bravado of the shout was also belied by the fact that Lief got as far away from Darvezian as possible the moment after, leaving the fang embedded in the Dark Lord’s back. Darvezian dropped to his knees with a gurgling choke, and the seething silvery power that had wreathed his fingers a moment before was abruptly dissipating into the gloomy air. Cyrene loosed, sending her shaft thudding into the Dark Lord’s shadowy chest, rocking him back and eliciting a hollow gasp. “What have you done?” Darvezian choked. “What is this sorcery? My wards, my protections—! How have you done this to me?” He clutched at his throat, choking and gurgling horribly. “This fate you brought down on yourself . . . ,” Dion started, but uncertainly, because the character of the Dark Lord’s garglings was changing even as she spoke. From rasping and gasping, Darvezian veered inexorably into laughter. In context, it was the least pleasant and welcome sound Cyrene had ever heard. “What’s this?” the Dark Lord cried, springing to his feet nimbly. “Someone’s done their homework! Is this really . . . ?” Ignoring them, he reached back and, after some awkward twisting and fumbling, yanked the spider fang from his back with a ripping sound. “Don’t tell me . . . It is!” He brandished the gory memento aloft. “Well done, you, look what you brought me. An actual tooth from a spider matron! I ca...

Then Enth said, “I want to kill him.” “Join the queue,” Lief muttered. “You?” Harathes looked from Armes to Enth and apparently found the latter a target he could safely strike against. “This must be music to your ears.” “I want to kill him,” Enth repeated. His knuckly fists were clenched. “How touching. Does it do any other tricks?” Armes asked, approaching Enth and staring into the black orbs of his eyes. “Why even bring this thing? Even had I been no more than Darvezian the Dark Lord, it would have been mine for a word. Of course, you weren’t to know who I really was, and that everything is mine for a word.” He examined Enth’s face, then grimaced. “It’s disgusting, really. You’ve surpassed nature in making something even nastier out of a spider. And does the little monster want to kill poor old Armes?” In a grotesque stage whisper, with an eye for Dion’s reaction, he confided to Enth, “It’s all right, I’m not really of the Light. Light and Dark are just things I made up, back when I was trying to help. Does that set your little arachnid brainstem at rest?” Enth was shaking with a captive rage Cyrene could entirely sympathize with. “My Mother was hurt,” he hissed out. “My people were slaughtered. I was taken from my home. I was remade. All for your prophecy. All for your Light and Dark. And it was a joke. And it was because you were bored.” “And I never did like spiders much,” Armes added carelessly, peeling back Enth’s lips to look at his teeth. The man-spider shook him...

“Have we just about exhausted your capabilities?” Armes asked them pleasantly. “I want you to feel you’ve had a good run, but really, I have a heroic procession to be attending in your names.” He raised a hand—whether to make a point or blast them into dust, Cyrene couldn’t guess—and then Enth tackled him about the waist and knocked him off his feet. It was the same artless move he had used on the old Doomsayer, just a desperate attempt to bear his enemy down so he could get to strangling. Enth, like the magician who had reworked him, was not one for subtlety in a crisis. Armes hit the ground hard—the stone cracked beneath him, though the impact did not seem to hurt his flesh—and hurled Enth away. The man-spider landed on hands and feet, skittering sideways across the floor in a stomach-twistingly inhuman way. “You as well?” Armes got to his feet, and he was doing his mummery again, pretending that the whole business was just too much effort for him. Cyrene saw the very moment that he stopped, putting a hand to his side. There was a moment’s puzzlement on his face that was not feigned. By then, Enth was already charging him again, on two legs, then on all fours, then two again, and Armes looked at him with contempt and said a word. Spider, Cyrene understood. All of Enth’s being summed up in that single dismissive utterance. Enth leapt and struck Armes hard. Cyrene braced for the sound of him splintering off the man-god’s invulnerable hide, but instead Armes went reeling ba...

“Hooray,” the thief said in a small voice. “The Dark Lord is dead. That’s going to be our story, is it?” Dion looked up at them, red eyed. “More than the Dark Lord is dead.” “He . . . was lying. It was a trick of the Dark,” Harathes suggested improbably. Even he could not muster much conviction, and a moment later he put in, “Nobody must ever know. Nothing needs to change.” “What do you mean?” Dion demanded. “The church, nothing needs to change. We can just go on. We didn’t know Armes was still, ah, with us. Now he’s not. Things can be as they always were. You still have the Light?” Dion turned the disc of Armes over in her hand. It glimmered and flashed. “What changes Armes made to the world have not been undone,” she confirmed. “Then nothing needs to change. We can just go on,” Harathes insisted. “And the Dark? The Ghants? Him?” Cyrene challenged, with a look at Enth. “We need an enemy to fight. Or what would bring people to the Light,” Harathes said earnestly. “Yes, Armes turned out to be a monster, but some of what he said was—” “No more,” Dion stated. The words were quiet, but they shut Harathes up straight away. “It was a lie,” she added. “No . . .” “It was a lie,” she repeated. “But there is a truth there. There are good people in the church, even as there are bad ones. There are those who have sought wisdom and compassion and generosity. If the Light was a lie, then that makes those people all the better for living as they have. And the Dark . . . Being born to Lig...