by Will Madden
Victor heard something moving in the darkness above.
“Today the ride of the Pestilence had four legs,” Bubo explained, “same as a horse. But horses are our people’s past. Spiders are its future. Besides, did you think I meant to carry off an army’s worth of silk on my own?”
Eight coils of silk rope unraveled as eight warriors descended soundlessly from the shadowy ceiling, a loose knot wrapped around one of their ankles. With a deft movement, they twisted and bent until they stood with a foot in a loop like a stirrup. All of them were women.
Victor rose his fists in a battle stance and surveyed his opponents. They wore cloth armor with a kerchief over their mouths like bandits. Their hair hung straight and loose to their shoulders, all dyed to the same shade of blond, regardless of skin tone. Each wore a transparent eyepatch; it kept the dust out but let you see the raw wound beneath, where each woman had made the sacrifice of Odin for whatever power or wisdom they might purport to possess. Their iron skull helms had tiny heifer horns upon them.
“Perhaps you have heard of the Church’s shieldmaidens? Probably not. For she whose virtue is greatest is spoken of the least. But like us knights, they know Dodoville is ripe to be bled. A hundred years in exile, our females have honed their skills up in the Kolkhek mountains where the tyranny of Dodoville could not corrupt them or their freeborn sons. Agile as an avalanche, they move among the most dangerous heights, snatching prey from the mouths of leopards, tearing birds out of the sky above terrifying drops. They are a match for you, Onion.”
He smiled sweetly. “I know you like a challenge.”
That’s a lot of warrior ladies , Victor thought.
In each pair of hands, a different weapon. Meaning he’d need a different battle response to each, and all coming at him at once. Tonight would require a virtuoso performance on his part.
“Ladies, please,” Victor said, “surely you have no truck with these jokers. They think King Arthur was Christ’s middle name. Surely warriors as clever as yourselves don’t buy into any of that?”
“Well, my shieldmaidens,” cried Bubo, “What do you buy into? Inform our raisin-colored adversary!”
The women exchanged sidelong glances.
“Tell him your promise to Odin. Use your voice!”
Quietly at first, then as if emerging below from some secret cavern, a low roar boiled and bubbled around him. It was a cry of defiant agony, of someone trying to speak who could not. They tore the kerchiefs from their faces. Instead of words, dark fluid dribbled from their mouths. He could see why now they didn’t speak: their lips were sewn shut!
“This is a ritual the Church’s shieldmaidens elect to undergo before battle. It signifies that in war, talk is cheap, that action is paramount.”
“Then why are you so chatty?” Victor quipped.
Fanatics , he thought. He didn’t like the mechanical determination in their eyes . . . Eye. If he could run a finger across their minds, he was sure they would squeak, they had been washed so clean.
“I suppose they don’t confess,” Victor mused.
“No,” replied Bubo. “And Horsefolk women don’t cry. So you are going to need to invent some new tactics, Onion. Some new method to bully the free people of the Kolkhek mountains!”
Freedom to continue a war that ended in the nineteenth century. One of the most bizarre definitions of that word Victor had heard yet.
Well, nothing to do for it, he guessed. He would have to fight them over this pit of arachnid horrors with the fate of Dodoville on the line. At least he had Mori’s new weapon for the fight. If only the skiapod had had a moment to explain its special features.
He pulled the short battle rod he wore on his belt and hit the activation button. He heard a low hum as it came online, then watched as it telescoped apart. Compartments opened, components extended, attachments locked into place. Balloons inflated.
Victor stared at the martial absurdity in his hand. It looked like a swiss army knife of clown tricks used to entertain at children’s parties.
Well , he thought, at least nobody will die bored today!
High in Weaver Hall, a partition opened in the wall, and Ariadne stepped out onto her secret surveillance station. Her feet tread noiselessly on the metal grating. Not even light and shadow bent around her.
At a glance, she sized up the situation: ten invaders in her domain. Two males on the catwalk, puffing their feathers. Eight females hanging close to the ceiling—they seemed to believe they were hiding!
Down in the loomworks, hundreds of thousands of tiny eyes, paired to hundreds of thousands of hard-working legs, glanced to Ariadne for instruction. She spoke at a frequency beyond the threshold of human hearing, which only the fine hairs upon the tiny bodies could detect and interpret. Protect the fabric, my daughters. Protect the work.
All at once, spinners, weavers, and spoolers abandoned their posts and assumed defensive footing. In perfect readiness to fight, to die if necessary.
It wouldn’t be. Mostly Ariadne wanted to keep them out of the way.
The cheek of these people , she thought, coming to my den to fight. As if Dodoville’s future was theirs to decide!
The city had just shy of a million human inhabitants. Every ten to twenty years, some upheaval of their own making overturned everything, burying their labors, erasing the lessons of their sweat and sorrow. Damning them to start over yet again.
Here in the Euphorium, two million citizens—industrious, dexterous, dutiful, indefatigable—lived and worked toward a tomorrow of their own design, handing down skills across eons in an unbroken chain, mother to daughter. Everyone here had thousands of mothers.
This enclave of spiders had arrived in the Kolkheks before there was a Sporqia or a Dodoville, before hermits came to the mountains to pray, or horseback marauders to torment them.
Ah, so that’s the Purple Onion, come dressed in our glory, Ariadne observed. I see he favors the mother. If not for her warm blood, she might have made a queen among spiders. For her sake, I choose him now for our champion. He’s impulsive and foolhardy, but under the guidance of the skiapod, a force to be reckoned with. I see the old general has armed him with the taqarhiza , the weapon with which his beleaguered people turned back Alexander of Macedon in the Indus Valley. It will please me to see it do good service in battle again.
Though the Onion had not yet noticed his opponents in the rafters, his body instinctively squared itself toward each combatant in turn, assuming a posture of confidence and strength. His instincts are pure, I’ll grant him that.
Ariadne examined the shieldmaidens next. They were strong and limber, but where she ought to have sensed apprehension, she found nothing: parts of their survival instinct had simply been unwritten.
Unfortunate. When a spider fights, she can afford to cast away fear, trusting her strength and cunning to testify to her worth. Should she fall, she knows her sisters will cultivate her daughters in her stead, and her mind and work will survive in them. Not so for the human. Its body is weak, its mind riddled with error, and when it dies, its existence is lost forever. For that reason, it must rely on fear as its ally.
Yet take heart, shieldmaidens , Ariadne thought, for today the rewards for valor shall be great. Your captors have torn something out of you—but impress me, and the Order of Araneae will make this void a keyhole, which we will use to unlock your true potential.
The little knight gave the signal, and together the maidens spun down on their silk ropes. They descended artlessly, like wrecking balls. But admirable enough for mammalian bodies, she supposed.
[offset] Eight warriors they were. Needle and thread had sealed their voice, so let their weapons name them! Hand-axe, Sword, Pike, Morning Star, Poniards, Bullwhip, Mace, and ah, the Onion’s beloved Quarterstaff!
Now they were just posturing at each other!Why are they wasting time? fumed Ariadne. As if this isn’t a place of work! She found human mouth-noise theater unbearable.
“Shall we to the slaughte
ring now?” she thought, mimicking their hairless ape voices. “Yes, I am much for the fighting of you! Wait, my shoeknot is unstickied!”
The loom spiders, too, waited and watched.
[offset] As two human eyes make reason of three spatial dimensions, a spider’s eight comprehend all nine, fusing together not only height and depth, but darkness and light, effect and cause, future and past.
With one foot, each maiden wrapped a silk stirrup around the other leg, granting her purchase to jump. From line to line the maidens flew, brandishing steel and strong ash, striking the air as they circled.
In the center of the storm stood the Onion, an eye of calm at the heart of the cyclone.
He waited. Surrounded and outnumbered was his element, after all. Make the first mistake, his bearing dared them. The maidens, not unlike the goat-stalking leopards of the Kolkheks, were solitary hunters—accustomed to fighting at dangerous elevations but not together. If the Onion could disrupt their rhythms, their war dance would devolve into a stammering two-step. He could knot their limbs and bind them in defeat.
A first attack! Pike tested him with a thrust and a grunt. The point fell centimeters short of his mask. The Onion did not flinch, did not bat it away. Control, conservation—he’d need them to carry the day against these odds.
The shieldmaidens continued to swirl, leaping from rope to rope. Their weapons cut the air, hoping to draw a blow and leave an opening for another sister to exploit. But the Onion kept his defenses up and waited.
As Sword leaped past him, he gazed into her empty eye socket, lurid and defiant behind its dust shield. In turn, her one good eye saw a gold flash in both his pupils, bright enough to plant a seed of doubt in her mind whether her opponent was a man at all.
Suddenly, a war cry. The ululation, barred at the lips, echoed inside the mouth like a gagged scream.
Hand-axe was swinging boots first into the Onion. He twisted away and slapped her shoulders with the taqarhiza as she passed. She backflipped from the rope and landed facing him on the catwalk, bringing her axe down on his head with wide-eyed (singular) fury. He parried crosswise and kicked. She hopped away to evade while Sword launched herself into the gap. A fruitless exchange between her and the Onion blocked the follow-up from Hand-axe, who smashed the handrail of the catwalk in frustration.
The shieldmaidens simply did not have enough room. The catwalk was too narrow, it was too difficult to coordinate an attack without slashing and battering each other.
Bubo Skymole scurried up a ladder. From this vantage, he began to bark orders in the Horsefolk Old Tongue, to give shape to the maidens aimless assault.
Mostly he’s up there to keep his freckled face from getting bashed open, thought Ariadne.
Quarterstaff signaled Bullwhip and Poniards. On her mark, these nimblest three leaped together. One after the other, they swung into the space where the Onion stood. He parried awkwardly, the trailing tethers of his weapon’s jorlyghul snaking on the catwalk and confounding his movement.
The exchange left him contorted and off balance, but the Onion recovered before Hand-axe could push to the front.
Ariadne cackled. The Purple Onion has never even seen the taqarhiza in battle before! she realized. He’s no more competent with it than the shieldmaidens in coordinating their attacks. Oh, the fools in my house!
It would be a race then. Who would figure it out first?
To tell the truth, Morning Star knew no better than the Onion how to wield her weapon—surely, she had never hunted hawks with this ridiculous thing! (It was not a spiked flail but the mace-and-chain that belongs more to the modern imagination than to history.) Bubo’s fantasy had been for each maiden to wield a different weapon. Offered first pick, she made this absurd choice in hopes he would abandon the idea. Instead, he had cackled in glee at her decision.
Anyway, she was willing to helicopter it over her head for show, but she had no intention of taking a spiked ball to face when it bounced off the Onion’s ugly stick. She landed on the catwalk beside him and hip-checked him to the ground.
He kipped up and drove her back with a thrust.
The bullwhip cracked loudly and wrapped itself around the shaft of the taqarhiza. The Onion yanked its wielder forward as he parried a slice from Sword. As their eye(s) met once again, Sword winked and blew him a kiss with her sewn lips.
Gruesome! She seemed pretty pleased with her own joke.
The Onion swept the legs out from under Bullwhip, who fell back onto the catwalk. She landed hard, driving the air from her lungs. Her nostrils flared as she tried to recover quickly.
Noticing how the Onion turned whenever one of the maidens landed on the catwalk, Mace threw a fire extinguisher behind him as Poniards attacked from the front. He parried Poniards neatly and struck her shoulder, but ignored the loud crash to steady his weapon at Sword, deterring a slash at his flank. The extinguisher rolled over the edge and fell below.
Ariadne rolled her eyes. Bah! Mace is my least favorite of them for sure, she thought.
With strength and precision, Sword sparred with the Onion, but her weapon was too heavy to match speed with the lightweight but sturdy taqarhiza. Fortunately, he was having a hard time not tripping on the jorlyghul, the twin tethers that trailed from the butt of the shaft and ended in air sacks that lay deflated on the catwalk.
You idiot! thought Ariadne. You are holding the classic skiapod weapon. Fight like a skiapod!
When mastered, the taqarhiza was like a conductor’s baton directing the enemy to their own destruction. It worked particularly well while facing hopeless odds. But wielded by the uninitiated, it was about as useful as a pool noodle.
Hand-axe, her balance as keen as her blade’s edge, landed upon one of the catwalk handrails. She leaped over the flailing jorlyghul in a double somersault and landed in a split across the railings, bringing her weapon down viciously at the Onion’s head. The blade fell about a centimeter short. The Onion winked playfully at her.
If battle is your profession, thought Ariadne, always have as many eyes as possible. It doesn’t take Sun Tzu to know that!
Mace continued to pick her way around the outside, looking for an opening. A few of her sisters were faster, the rest had weapons with longer reach. It was up to her then to find the advantages the others were too busy to see. Perhaps she could sabotage the catwalk he stood on, or use the colossal loom mechanisms against him? Or maybe there was a way to unleash the fury of the spiders . . .
If that one doesn’t do something soon, thought Ariadne, I’ll take care of her myself!
The Purple Onion’s usual tactic was to break down his opponent physically until he had defeated them mentally. But that approach was too limited against eight ferocious warriors who gave him little chance to catch his breath.
Seven and a quarter, adjusting for Mace, Ariadne thought.
With his attention divided between Quarterstaff and Pike, Sword spotted an opportunity. Silent as a raptor on wing, her saber curved and sharp as a talon, she floated in behind to deliver a decapitation blow at the base of the Onion’s skull.
At the last moment, he grappled Pike and threw her over his shoulders at Sword, who barely avoided cutting her sister in two!
That Onion had more eyes in his head than a potato.
The two maidens collided midair, dropping their weapons on the catwalk as they fell into the loomworks below. Spiders swarmed to protect the silk.
Before their sisters could vanish into the flurry of tiny bodies, Mace and Morning Star dropped down to rescue them from the skeeving-out of a lifetime. As the four women climbed hand-over-hand back up the ropes, spiders slid off their bodies in sheets.
Even with half his opponents now diverted, the Onion experienced no let up in the fighting. The remaining warriors, having less difficulty keeping out of each other’s way, laid into him more fiercely than before. Not only was he warding off blows on all sides, he had to untangle himself periodically from the jorlyghul!
The taqarhiz
a is a sacred weapon, Ariadne thought. That radioactive brussel sprout is going to fight with it correctly if he likes it or not!
Ariadne opened her mouth and called inaudibly into the darkness. A gray spider dropped from the ceiling and landed on the catwalk where the Onion stood. Speedily, it climbed up and around the inside of his ankle and disappeared inside the purple slipper.
A howl rent the air inside Weaver Hall. The Onion collapsed to one knee. A torrent of swear words so vile followed, it almost made Ariadne blush. He cursed everything the sunlight touched, and he wished a plague of thorny horrors up every orifice it did not.
In agony, the Onion picked up the sword upon the catwalk. He seemed to consider lobbing the foot off.
Instead, he leaned on the taqarhiza and pulled himself back up. The injured limb would carry no weight. Still, he steadied himself and raised the weapon once more, inviting his adversaries to try him as he hopped and bobbed on his good leg.
You are welcome, thought Ariadne.
Along the shaft of the taqarhiza, an array of running lights came on one by one until the instrument hummed in his hands. The leather spheres at the end of the jorlyghul drew air as he bounced in place, and the bobbing action kept them floating on their tethers behind him. With the weapon leveled at Quarterstaff, the trailing jorlyghul blocked the approach of Bullwhip and Hand-axe on his four and eight o’clock. These two maidens circled counterclockwise, but spheres followed, now occluding his six and three. When the maidens batted them aside, the tethers went rigid and snapped back, again occluding their approach with the spheres.
The Onion swung the staff portion to beat back Quarterstaff. The tethers went limp, the stoma opening and deflating the spheres. Bullwhip and Hand-axe rushed in at the opportunity. As the Onion pivoted, the tethers whipped back, the slack spheres smacking them, administering a mild electric shock for good measure.
Poniards watched the Onion bob at the knee like he had to pee really badly. Even with the spheres obstructing her approach, the injury to his foot ought to slow him enough that she could sneak in an attack with her small knives. She waited until he swung with the weapon, and allowed the spheres to pass before insinuating herself behind him for a strike. The two tethers, however, rotated around the axis of the shaft, carrying the forward momentum of the spheres back toward her. The deflated leather caught her under the chin with an uppercut.
