by Michael Shea
"Do you tell us," I gasped, "that you have enlisted us in the killing of . . . ?"
"Yes!" There was a mad fire in her tawny-gold eyes. "We have come to slay and gut great Grandfather A'Rak himself! Yes! Even such is the glory I have contrived to employ you in! And are you ignorant of the strictures placed by the Sisterhood upon all candidates for an Opus Eponymous? The severely restricted budget of thaumaturgy allotted us? Do you wonder at my contrivances and improvisations, the humiliating indirections and homely stratagems I have been driven to? How dare you scowl? Why are you all not mad with pride and gratitude!? At the very least, be silent till I have instructed ye!"
In truth, none of us could have spoken just then. On she ranted. "I will tell you that the path I've come to be standing here now was a bone-grinding hard one to walk, and I flinched not from one of its rigors! In accomplishing the Opus, one's limits are cruelly austere, as all the world knows. The barest modicum of sorcery's permitted—all else must be contrivance, ingenuity and artifice. I have never faltered in sacrifice. For the cash to engage yourselves, I sold my beauty—though even in this did I deal so cannily that I forced the old shylock to leave me my lovely complexion!" (I could not tell if this was jest, though she seemed, like many fanatics, devoid of any humor other than a kind of rabid glee.) "All my plan's thousand details," she raved, "the subtle shifts of my inexhaustible wit! Each delicate feint, each subtle confusion sown abroad in the adversary's mind, each perfect, dear-bought link in this chain is of my own forging and every link thus far has vindicated my conception!
"How it galls me, then, that my Docenta in the exploit, Strega Eel Writher—I say this of course with all respect for her august academic standing—is an ophidian bitch bent on nitpicking and precedent-poking and deviling me a dozenfold ways every inch of my progress! Why is genius always under the thumb of peevish mediocrity!? I'm shut of her now at the last, though—for the real pith of it all, the jump into the jaws of it, I'm free of her! Henceforth, things will move lively indeed, my friends!"
Her furious rodomontade had cast a mild spell, and her sudden silence now rather jolted us. It was Mav who answered her, after a pause, seeming rather to muse than to seek a reply. "Unless I mistake me, Jaundyssa, Endon Thioz, where the cargo's bound, sounds a bit like High Archaic, which, if so, could be rendered: inside the god. . . ."
"You noticed that, did you?" smiled orange-eyed Jaundyssa the Fat. I decided that she was far more unpleasant when she was being quiet and sly than when she was ranting. But Mav had the air of thinking about something else entirely.
"Do you hear that?" she softly asked, ". . . and there, again?"
"Yes. A cottage door banging in the wind."
"Just so. And there . . . and again—a lambkin bleating for teat. . . . There's Smattering Hamlet just downridge there. But the flocks should all be a-pasture with the sun this high."
"Smattering Hamlet's indeed just ahead," crooned the witch cryptically, with less glee in her eyes, though no less strange fire. The note of fear in Mav's words woke me up. "Honest Jaundyssa," I said, not struggling to hide my irony, "are we to advance? Mav is not bound to you, but I and my crew, counting her a friend, would help her in seeing what's amiss ahead."
"On with it!" cried the witch, "our paths are the same!"
We had advanced for some few moments before I was able to hear what Mav and the witch had caught: a faint, clapping percussion conveyed on the morning breeze; a creaking, a flat smack of woody impact.
"Is an unlatched door in the wind so sinister hereabouts?" I gently asked Mav. I already guessed the reason for her growing abstraction: she was thinking of her own highland hamlet, of her two little girls.
"We're tight and tidy in the highlands," she said vaguely. She was listening hard as we advanced, and fighting down fear. I shared her unease. Though these highlanders lived plain and austere enough, I'd seen nothing slattern or slipshod about them. A banging-loose door hereabouts did feel sinister. Then the highway wrapped round a last fold in the hillside, and dove toward the vale below and there, in a nook between two hilltops, was the village of Smattering Hamlet.
A healthy-sized hamlet in its grassy cove, above a score of cots and crofts, thatch-roofed, and along its outskirts, bulky three-walled barns of bleached plank, and shearing-pens with neat little fieldstone walls. The cleanly flagged lanes that webbed the dwellings were empty. The sun, middling high now, strewed the hills with rich light, and the place was half golden and half shadow. "You see how the stone walls are kicked through here and there?" Alarm was swiftly awakening in Mav's voice now. Once shown I distinctly saw what she meant: the little fieldstone walls of lots and pens—they'd been randomly kicked through here and there, the little spills of strewed stones all scattered towards the hamlet.
Just then our three surviving yapps reappeared, who since sunup had been out again scouting our van. Mav, reading them at a glance, did not pause for their message, but bolted ahead—what a sprint she had! She passed Olombo and Nifft before they even heard her coming, so they both jumped, then ran to catch up. We all ran to catch up except for Jaundyssa the Fat, who, still in her brief fit of taciturnity, did not hasten with us but nodded us darkly on.
There to the left was the house with the banging door, among the first outliers. It was the front door that was banging, which seemed the more ominous. Across the highway from this house was the open-walled hay-barn next to a pen of full-uddered gleets. In the hay-barn's shelter, corded bales of hay were stacked neat, like a wall of blocks, except for a collapse of this straw wall at the end nearest the highway; here bales were tumbled like bricks a mason's spilled from his hod.
"Holla!" Mav was crying, "who's home in Smattering!? Ho ye townsfolk, we are travellers seeking ye!"
Olombo pointed. "See there—isn't that someone they've toppled on? Under that bale there, that arm there . . . is it an arm . . . ?"
It did seem to be a childsize arm, dark-skinned, hooked over one of the bales. We hastened near. Not dark skinned—but a blackly shrivelled arm and hand it proved. The bones in it were of adult length, but this might have been some millennial mummy's arm, the skin like leather shrunk tight to the bone as if centuries of desert sun had tanned it. Olombo reached forth his spearpoint and levered a fallen bale off the top of the arm's owner.
The man half buried amid the bales proved all of a match for his arm. He was a black horror, shrunk skinny as a monkey, wearing a night-dress now far too big for him, with two big holes punched through the back of it. You could count his teeth through his hard-shrunk cheeks; his sockets held little dabs of black snot, the residue only of eyes, but we could all picture plainly in our own minds' eyes the last vision those luckless eyes had seen.
Oh that little hamlet of tormented sleepers! It will live in the saddest region of my heart until my life is done! Their poor diminished bodies, vilely vandalized, most of them still in their beds, taken in the deep of night! Long was our searching out of them, house by house, and long was our assembling of that black, contorted host upon the straw bed of its funeral pyre!
At her first glimpse of what had passed here, Mav would have been away like a shot, back to her own Haggis with not one more word for us, but Jaundyssa obstructed her and proclaimed: "Haggis is unscathed!"
"You are a lying witch!" In her furious pale eyes I saw Mav was near fighting pitch.
"Thou ninny, plainly I'm a witch, I lie with gusto, yet Haggis is unscathed and your girlies safe, and both town and tykes will stay so! I believe you have boasted your wish to slay A'Rakspawn. Perhaps I should ask you, before putting the sword of this divine crusade in your hand, just how much spiderblood have you the gullet to spill, and if indeed you meant what you boasted?"
Put in the form of that question, the witch's persuasion worked on all of us most effectively. We had been criminally defrauded by her, for she had only incidentally contracted us as deliverers of her consignment, while intending to use us as soldiers all along, a cold-blooded violation of Nuncial diplomati
c neutrality, one of my guild's bedrock tenets. But in our hearts, now we had met and understood the gods of this place, we none of us wanted our neutrality in the least, and positively craved to butcher these brutes, one and all.
So we gathered and burned the dead of Smattering Hamlet, and as we worked, Mav's tears streamed down, but not a sound escaped her. Seventy-three souls had been plundered, man, woman and child, and with torches we sent after these souls the pitiful, pithless, twisted tenements of flesh that had housed them. They burnt like cured wood, converted almost wholly into black smoke that climbed the wind into the wide noon sky.
We searched each other's faces across the hot, crumbling coals. "Some of these houses' doors," Olombo mused, "had ruptured frames, and the walls broken round them, while others were burst by smaller intruders."
"A hunting-pack of big and small together. They were pack-hunting down in the valley last night as well," said Mav, looking at the witch. "I have never heard of the like of this."
"The A'Rak is busy in his own defense," the witch said. "What say I wager you something, hill-girlie? I wager you that without going far we could lay the sword of vengeance on the very pack of bugs that did this slaughter here?"
"Encounter them and kill them, you say?" I could not help but ask.
"If they prove killable, Nuncio, yes. Do you not realize, none of you, what a great feeding on human flesh has transpired this night just past? Had you no sense of it in the air, at the least?"
"Say where to find them," I cried, "and let us be after them!"
"Call back your dogfolk then," smiled Jaundyssa unpleasantly.
Mav gave her earsplitting two-fingered whistle. The three yapp survivors of last night came loping into view impossibly fast. We realized they were already pell-melling back with a report before Mav had summoned them.
"Spider-find, spider-find, spider-find!"
Mav wheeled them round and sprinted off with them downslope through the broken walls of fields and pens, and into the high grass. We followed slower, with the 'shaw to manage, till the witch told us to leave it to her, and then we went quicker, I with my steel pulled, the trusty old blade's heft limbering the muscles in my forearm, and in my heart a kind of rising song of eagerness, thinking of spidergut strewn copiously across the tawny grass . . .
We caught up to Mav where a steep meadow opened out, and we plunged into the waist-high grass. We fanned out and, at a stealthy crouch, followed the yapps into the thicket.
Oh, freezing thrill of terror and bloodlust blended! In a clearing within the thicket we confronted a whole group of A'Rakspawn, all of them sleeping, seemingly, all lying low and still, so that to see them was in the same instant to charge, to seize the lucky moment. . . .
Until we all were brought up short, coming to various staggering comical halts, as we comprehended just what it was that confronted us in the sun-washed glade.
Some of these spawn were huge, with legspans broad as cottage roofs—but all of them were shrunken, crooked husks of A'Raks, with flat, deflated abdomens and twisted, bunched legs. Every one was as dead and drained as their prey up in Smattering Hamlet. The sun glinted on their hellish eye-globes, their extruded fangs, their nightmare faces all emptied of the power to harm.
Jaundyssa strolled out of the trees with the 'shaw softly creaking behind her. "Now you'll note by the size of these," said the witch in a smug, insufferably droll tone, "that, as you might put it hill-girlie, a mickle big one of their older brothers found them. And you can be sure, all of you, that yet bigger will come for those big brothers, and so on, and so on. On the face of it, I was homicidal, putting you in the field during this feeding frenzy which—I promise you—is still in progress. Indeed, that slithering bitch my Docenta carped as much! But it was inspired! What else could as effectively distract them from detecting Pompilla, once her 'shaw wheels were off the water and rolling on Hagian soil? What else but their own blind gluttony itself, their fever for the hunt, be cover enough for your progress inland?! Especially at the pitch the feeding would rise to, once A'Rak sensed her coming, as he could not but do?! I read it brilliantly, used my own partial detection as my cover!
"But I tell you all to be warned now, for what follows from this point on must be done on the run, flat out. Draw breath now, for we now plunge to the killing work itself, and there'll be no safe rest for us till it's accomplished!"
Nifft spoke up here. "Before we do take such a . . . harrowing and headlong plunge, I for one would like to ask a question or two. You have called your Docenta Ell Writher. Is she related to—"
"She is Eelritter of course, your balladeering Dame! She helped me acquire your services. You above all, thief, should be joyous at my having dragooned you! Look to what an opportunity you are brought, if we bring it off! Look what an opening my ingenuity will make for your greed!"
Nifft replied, stiffly, "A number of perfectly noble motives actuated my voyage here, my Good Witch, though of course I must decline the indignity of enumerating them."
"Of course!"
"Another question concerns me. Ah, she there, on the 'shaw. . . . Is it she who is going to kill the A'Rak?"
"Absolutely! What else have I been telling you all morning long now?"
"Do you tell us also," Mav asked, "that she will kill him after we put her inside him?"
"Thank dark powers that it's not that hard. She need only be lodged inside a god, not the god, to be resurrected. Mind you it will be a sizeable god that we'll need for the job. One about as big as the one that devoured all these, in fact. One that big is likely to be the resident monster of an established fane, so we'll indeed be going to a fane—this instant in fact, we head for the nearest one handy that offers the right terrain."
"And in this sizeable resident A'Rak of this fane," I asked, wanting, like the Ephesionite, to be perfectly clear, "inside this A'Rakspawn we are to lodge Pompilla here?"
"Right as rain! Tuck, plant, insert, entomb, inter within! And soon after doing so, we will be armed to rise up and make war on the spidergod and all his crooklegged, man-killing spawn, and exterminate the brutes!"
It was only when we were once again sprinting down the highway that I noticed that at some point during our work in Smattering Hamlet, the witch had gathered and lashed to the 'shaw's undercarriage some few provisions from the slaughtered town: coils of extra line, some martels and a keg of spikes, half a dozen axes, some hunting bows and extra spears. . . .
NIFFT VI
( . . . )
( . . . )
Before turning, then, to what the witch had in store for us on that same day, I have to say candidly that I found my position most vexing, once I had grasped what it was. I had come to Hagia a newsbringer of cataclysm who meant to get right to work on harvesting the fortune that might arise from that same cataclysm. That I should so summarily find myself, as the witch rightly put it, dragooned, into the actual perpetrating of the cataclysm (if I may phrase it so) galled me in a twofold way: it tortured me with impatience to begin the practice of my art, and it filled me with mortal terror for my life, our foes in the endeavor being what they were.
Jaundyssa the Fat, though as arrogant as most walking witches I've met, was not too proud a commander to discuss her strategies with the troops—in fact the problem was to prevent her from gloating over them at tedious length. But we were reassured when Mav pronounced the witch's thinking to be sound. A spawn sized to slay and devour a half score such monsters as these in the thicket would indeed likely be a fane-spider, resident in a cavern beneath the local church, and probably the nearest temple since, as Mav put it, "The mighty ones stick to their parishes. They're shy to irk their equals in size. But have you also considered"—this to the witch—"that their great Daddy is likely out in his deep tunnels even now, surprising and devouring these same mightiest ones? For that's his quick way to collect the takings of scores of lesser spawn, all at a stroke."
"In this," snapped Jaundyssa, "we're at the luck of the draw, hill-girlie. Exploit
s that aren't half hazard are none of them great exploits. So! You'll confirm that the nearest-lying fane is Haggardscroft Fane?"
"I will," Mav answered.
"Then just confirm me a few things further, dear girlie—the Haggardscroft River, I'm told, is a goodly flux that runs a fathom or two deep most places? And this is because the Haggardscroft Lake up in the northern valley is a sizeable lake, and feeds into the river by a creek that is also a substantial run of water?"
"All that is so, witch."
"And maybe, to clinch it, you know this as well; the Haggardscroft Fane stands moderately near the riverside woods?"
"It stands some score of rods from the woods I think, yes. . . ."
"Splendid, not that I really doubted my researches. Nuncio, you'll find your map already shows you our route. The Haggardscroft's the next valley north, and if we run for fair, we can reach the woods below the Fane with two hours of daylight to spare."
We did indeed "run for fair." We ran the sun up to the zenith and, never pausing, ran it down again. When we plunged into the Haggardscroft Valley, we found it marvellously empty of folk. I believe between the ridgeline and the river we saw but one small, lonely figure scything early hay in a far field; I thought he or she had a dazed air, seeming to work with a kind of stunned sloth—perhaps his mind had snapped with what had passed the night before. . . .
Then, late in the day at Upper Bridge—the village straddling the Haggardscroft—we saw as we trotted across the span a handful of folk down on the little docksides, where but three or four gondolas were moored to unload their wool and cheese. With these people, seen thus close, there was no mistaking the signs of stunned horror. Their tottery gait spoke of friends and kin devoured in the night. Dame Lagademe has reported the outrage which the sight of Hagia's spider-haunted villages kindled in her, so closely environed as they were by the invisible tyranny of fear. I felt that same anger, beholding Upper Bridge. Endangered and inconvenienced though I was by my drafting for this enterprise, I cannot pretend that I did not feel a certain relish for it at the same time.
