Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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 ...