Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This was commerce, where the metal served as a memory for past services in some way, so that Lief’s historical actions were somehow remembered to the woman, to be rewarded with the two wooden mugs of Something Suspect that he had now been given.

Abruptly Cyrene was sitting down, head in her hands. “I just wanted . . . I mean, is it too much to ask . . . ? That there might be people who think that just because I take up a bow and fight, and don’t just sit in a kitchen with my hair bundled up, that I might not actually be a fucking whore as a sideline? That I have to be giving it away?”

As the strength of the church grew, the walls had become less a defense against the Dark and more an architectural corset, hemming in growth and strangling change.

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.

“And we feel the Light, we priests, and we draw upon it, and its power against the Dark is undeniable. At least we have that, eh? Can you imagine if all we had was Armes’s assurance, without proof of the might that backed up his promise? Would there even be a church, if it was all based on faith?”

“Look, I am not playing shoulder-to-cry-on for a man who can make whole villages explode. Just drink.”

And it took him aback. It made him stop and think about precisely what he was doing. Even he, a creature of sin as he no doubt was, had never thought of himself as having gone to the Darkness. He had never quite committed such an irredeemable act of cruelty or madness or willful ambition so as to take that step. Unlike Dion he could never claim to know the wiles of evil, nor to own to the piercing sight of one who wore the mantle of the Light. For all that Abnasio had seemed a self-important thug, he was also a man who wielded that golden power. He was, in that great cosmic war, a force for good. And Enth . . . Enth was a creature of Darkness. There was no getting round it. And what if Dion is wrong and Abnasio is right? Am I really about to rescue a monstrous servant of evil from the hands of the righteous? Enth whimpered. It was a human sound. Lief knew it: he himself had once or twice been beaten and broken just enough to make that sound. Fuck the righteous.

“My child, you know not what you say. You cannot torture a thing of the Dark. It has not the sensibilities of those raised to the Light.”

Behind them all, Penthos stood with the utterly serene expression of a man who will set things on fire the moment the word is given. Lief thought about being in an enclosed space full of monks on fire. It seemed to offer few advantages to the nonincendiary version, and several drawbacks.

“Lust? It is not lust!” He was on his feet again, kicking to get free of the wreckage of the chair. “I love you, woman!” And there he was, the big, bluff, handsome knight, broad as a barn door and shallow as a puddle.