The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  Wreaked upon any less loathsome creature than the spawn, the relish with which the witch obliterated his eyes would have been disturbing. The spider-thought surged incoherently, and after, diminished slowly.

  "For this delight, much thanks, oh crook-leg; that you'll now delight me even more is just so uncommonly kind of you! You know of Pompilla, of course? Pam'Pel?"

  Another surge here of spiderthought uncannily suggested recognition in the monster.

  "Of course you do!" agreed Jaundyssa. "Now you are to receive her! You are to be her womb! Her feast, from inside out! Yes! How likest thou that, my fine crookie-wookie?! Eh? Eh? Eh?!"

  The witch was grotesquely drunk on triumph. Even so, an air of ceremony settled on her as she came to what was plainly, for her, an act of sacramental solemnity. She bade Mav and the Nuncio face each other across that sarcophagoid shape, and lift it between then, with its more sharply tapered end presented towards the furred frontal bulge of the abdomen. The witch stepped up to the hirsute globe and lifted the sunder in a two-hand grip:

  "Spawn, receive thy father's foe! Feed her that within ye grows!"

  With one great, smooth downstroke, she hewed a vertical slash through the thick, furred integument. "Thrust her in, strongly now, all the way in with her!"

  Mav and Lagademe jumped to it, thrust in the sarcophagoid out of sight, and drew back their hands black with spawn-blood. The witch raised the slick blade high and sang out:

  "Goddess on thy right prey feed! Let it resurrection breed!"

  Before our eyes, the incision crusted over and was sealed in scab.

  There followed perhaps an hour of something like repose for us. We snaked silently down the forest-walled river, and we grew calm and almost accustomed to the monstrous thing rope-webbed upon our raft. Flowing along so smoothly, we began to feel this mad venture was a sure thing, that it was launched and all but unstoppable. For the water, we knew, was a mask, a muffler of our tread upon the spider-webbed earth.

  Then, as the moon was just edging into our narrow roof of sky, the river slowed and broadened into a marshy tract. Dense mists here cloaked us in their wraiths, even as the moon blazed down the stronger, so that it seemed a milk-white smoke had swallowed us.

  "We are near where Haggardscroft Creek comes down from the lake," murmured Mav. And just then, a feathery faint terror tickled our brainstems:

  Brother where art thou? . . . feel thou'rt in pain . . . how goest thou so quickly? . . .

  It was a probing spider-thought, not near, but none too distant neither. It came wavering out over the waters from somewhere ashore, groping, as it were, for our whereabouts. And as we still stood searching one anothers' eyes—each to see if he alone had heard it, a second, more distant gust of thought came a-tickling our spines—too remote to be understood, but with the same wavery, groping touch.

  "There's the creek there leftwards," hissed Mav. The witch, perplexed fury in her fiery eyes, gestured, and our slavewater wrenched up half way out of its river-matrix, and foaming upstream against the creek's current, bore us upslope, filling the creek's channel bank-to-bank.

  "Was this unforeseen of you, walking-witch?" Mav asked Jaundyssa. We had all climbed onto the spawn's flat midsection, huddling close to hear the murmured exchange. The creek's banks were wooded, but the screen of trees was gappy, and less dense, and under the moonlight we felt all too blatant, perched on our colossal cargo.

  "The water's masking power, I've judged it to the whisker, hill-girlie, I—"

  "We and Pompilla are masked, witch, but old crooklegs isn't," Mav declared. "The spawn have a predator's nose for each other, deep-dyed cannibals as they are. Our prey here's big meat, and his aura declares both his size and his wounded state. If you mean to find covert up on the lake, we'll stay hid well enough, but unless you hide him somehow—" here her heel smote the hideous floor we all stood on "—every spider for five leagues around is going to converge toward us."

  NIFFT VII

  So headlong were our toils, Dear Shag, to lodge Pompilla in "the fane Endon-Thioz," that it has not seemed fitting to interrupt my account of them. Thus I must backtrack now to tell what passed with Paanja Pandagon in Big Quay on that same day and night. If I could have communicated to the Ecclesiarch what the witch had in hand, and withal how near loomed war between North Hagia and her gods, he would have felt less anguish in the decision he had to make that morning.

  His masterful handling had for the moment quelled the panic of the general populace. The Dockmeisters and Masters of the City Watch had, while spreading word of the harbor's general lock-down, informed all foreign mariners that they were to participate in the morrow's vast donative. Meanwhile the municipal criers had studiously disseminated among the citizenry detailed directions for the orderly enactment of said donative. The dwellers of each street and lane found posted schedules minutely specifying the routes and times for their advent to the great largesse in Keelyard Square. Such a concretely orchestrated proceeding was calmative—the prospect of the morrow's gold loomed solid and persuasive. Several wagons of gold specie, drawn from the nearest monastium, stood already on display in the square. All the forces of the City Watch and the Quayside Cadres, assisted by the church's own Bailiffs, Reeves, and mercenaries, were early aswarm down the length of the Quay, bringing captains and crews ashore to free quarters in town, and setting before them free flagons of ale and aquavit.

  But, all this done, Paanja Pandagon confronted a grave tactical necessity. His only confidant, Minim, was already making way down Hagia's coast to the South Hagian port of Skallywode, where many mercenary captains staged their cohorts while a-hunting markets in the bellicose Astrygals. The Ecclesiarch, struggling without the counsel of his lifelong ally, was for a time sorely bowed beneath the gravity of what he was grappling with.

  Because a short time's reflection on old Fursten Major made it plain to the Ecclesiarch that many others belonging to the ranks of the smart, cynical Old Money of Big Quay—with their armed retainers and special resources for bribery and influence—were all but certain to begin bolting in their turn. Pandagon astutely grasped that the general populace, lacking the power to reestablish themselves elsewhere in security, were poignantly eager to believe that the blandishment of the Spider's gold was indeed, as the A'Rak alleged, merely a gesture of grateful reimbursement.

  But deluded by both need and hope as most citizens were, no one was so dense as to be truly unafraid. It only needed to be noised abroad that the old magnates were fleeing their mansions and properties, to spark the panic lying not so deeply buried in every Hagian heart.

  And here came the Ecclesiarch truly up against it: he was sure that the god was offering this donative to fetter his flock for further feeding on—to fat himself for the fight he faced. The hard thing was, the priest wanted just what the Spider did: that no one should escape the imperiled city. He understood that it was vital to ensure that everyone be caught in the monster's toils—for only his whole city, united by mortal necessity, could summon the desperate force necessary to gut the alien monster, and root him and his spawn forever from the hills of Hagia. Dire emergency alone could liberate his nation at one stroke, in one vast, bloody engagement. The priest must court this holocaust, for nothing less could end two hundred years of tyranny.

  The ambition I had seen in the man's clear eyes, in the cultivated muscle of his frame, did not fail, in the end, to steel him to necessity. He could not in any case long hesitate, before the first defectors of the cynical Old Money class would be taking ship.

  Therefore, before the sun was yet an hour high, he dispatched his six most trusted sextons to selected households, to subject their servants to a tactful inquisition; the retainers on these staffs could say much about other households as well, and Pandagon thus shortly learned from his returning spies of fevered preparations for flight even now in progress within-doors of no less that half a score of the most imposing manses of Big Quay.

  These houses were not inhabited by monst
ers; their tenants were not all Fursten Majors. More than half were families who were friends, or at least acquaintances, with Paanja's own kin—people he dined with, had known in the Academy. Notwithstanding, by mid-day, the Ecclesiarch had squads of men-at-arms posted within doors at every one of these manses, and all their inhabitants placed, however apologetically, under rigorous house-arrest.

  The rest of his day was a whirl of business, filled with the dispatching of sacerdotal epistles, and wagon teams, to a dozen Monastia that stood in a ten-league radius round Big Quay. Gold would be a-loading far into the night at these Monastia, and must be conveyed before sunrise into Keelyard Square, where extensive arrangements for the Donative must also be made this same day. Thus Pandagon was not to learn until after the fact, from one of his sextons, that the man had been summoned to the altar pit by the "voice" of the god, and that the god had required from him the details of all these quarantined abodes.

  These divine enquiries had melancholy consequences, only partly known now by reconstruction. Collabris Collaginous the Fifth, for example, warehouse and riverfleet magnate, lay in his vast marbled baths down in the basement level of his manse. Despite the presence of the Ecclesiarch's men-at-arms in his quarters above, the magnate was apparently undeterred from his projected departure from Big Quay, for several of his scribes and secretaries stood round him in the pale obscurity of the scented steam, inditing at their master's dictation drafts on his various 'Count Houses, and instructions to his stablers for particular carriages and teams. The scribes were sweating in full livery, while Collaginous lay waist-deep in the perfumed waters, his face and chest swathed in an aromatic mudpack for his complexion.

  We may confidently imagine the august Collaginous to have been the only one speaking at the penultimate moment. Perhaps he interrupted himself to ask, "What is that?"—for these vast tiled baths so loved in Big Quay were most echosome, and there must have been a noise of steps—many, many steps, all quick and light! His servitors would have paused, and heard it too, that susurrous, scratchy commotion from the adjacent room where the boilers were fed by the water conduits webbing the city's foundations.

  And how quickly thereafter would the fragrant steam have buckled and roiled with the onrush of their fate? Would they have had an instant to guess that fate, before it sprang bristled and fanged from the vapors, and pierced them through gullet and brainpan and spine? We do know Collaginous stirred scarcely an inch before stricken. His remains still sat propped waist deep in the water, his mudpack dried to a solid shell which the shrivelled husk of his body no longer filled, not even by half.

  Phlatulice Grabben-Huggett, whose manse was the loftiest in its row of splendid establishments, made an eyrie of her upper apartments whence she kept a keen eye on the neighboring fortunes. Not given to waste spying time on sleeping, she had witnessed Old Fursten Major's laden wagons waddling Quay-wards in the grey pre-dawn. She'd set her servants hopping the instant she'd wrung from them tidings of the Choosing, and the coming donative. Never intermitting her vigilance, she saw the Ecclesiarch's squads of men-at-arms approaching her neighbors' doors, and modified her tactics on the spot. She made an appearance belowstairs to acknowledge her apologetic jailers, and have them brought refreshments. Retiring abovestairs again, she deputed her two most agile footmen—Binque and Squatulus—to courier duty across the rooftops of her neighbors. These nimble minions footed it all morning on cornice, eave, and raingutter, bearing away her drafts, returning with specie, and then hasting away again to secure vehicles, and various provisions.

  The key preparations were now to be made. Squatulus she sent belowstairs to inquire discreetly of her Chief Footman how to proceed in hiring some men-at-arms of their own, to deliver Dame Phlatulice from her enforced sequestration. Binque, after careful instructions, she dispatched from her window on the mission of hiring a certain daring galley-captain she knew of.

  As Binque clambered once more out the window, his mistress jerked her bell pull and exclaimed, "Squatulus! What's keeping the idiot!? Time is of the essence!"

  And then there was a swift-moving tread outside her boudoir door. Binque, pausing on a parapet, looked back through the window now one rooftop distant. He saw the boudoir door fly open, saw it was not Squatulus erupting through it, and fell from the parapet to crash unconscious in a debris of crushed packing crates which buried his stunned shape, and saved his life. And as he fell he carried down the image of what did come through his Dame's door, and jailed her in its cage of thorny legs, and pierced and pierced and pierced her with its polished fangs. . . .

  By darkfall—by the time I was preparing my entrance of the Haggardscroft Fane—the highways for leagues around Big Quay were loud with hooves and harness, and the outbound rattle of heavy freight-wagons running empty, all of them bound for monastia.

  And around midnight or a bit before—about when we were steering our bizarre cargo out into the middle of Haggardscroft Lake, and harkening with terror as, here and there, faint groping spiderthought flared, sensing our presence—it happened that Prelate Pankard of KlarvKoffert Monastium, in the dark of his bed, began to dream a most vivid and unusual dream.

  Pankard knew with the strangest clarity that he was dreaming, but dreamed with conviction nonetheless, dreamed that he arose, and stepped barefoot and bare-shanked out into the monastium's chilly stone corridors. Though he felt the chill of the stone in his dream, somehow he minded this not at all.

  As he walked on in this strange, knowing dream, he passed one of the clerks' dormitories; the broad chamber was sonorous with snores. He passed the suites of the Proctors, the Senior Brothers, and the chambers of others of the higher ranked eremites. All these chambers, doorless by monastial rule, breathed silence.

  Where was he walking in his dream? Pankard asked himself, and knew at once the answer. He was going down to the basement vaults, deep under the congregational courtyard at the heart of the walled compound. The vaults were the heart, the deep-buried hub of the monastium's octagonal wheel of chambers and offices and corridors.

  Still knowing that he dreamed, Pankard dreamed he was in the vaults themselves, and he found his hands were full of Hagia's gold kolois. Hagia's kolois were a coinage prized world-wide, their gold nigh pure. They circulated rarely—most moved only from vault to vault among Monastia, when investors oceans away tendered drafts.

  As Pankard held these heavy coins someone gently whispered in his ear:

  These were struck from the first gold I showed your people, the first gold I helped you find under these green Hagish hills we share.

  "A'Rak?" Pankard's dreamed self asked aloud, amazed, delighted. His outer self too was delighted, the one knowing this dream for a dream, and just watching it. Both of these Pankards were delighted.

  When they found it where I directed, your forebears cried aloud in their joy.

  "Of course!" beamed both of the Pankards. How easy, how friendly it was to talk to the A'Rak! How had he ever felt fear of this loving god? "Who would not? And who would not thank you most ardently for it, great A'Rak?"

  Yet further I guided you, bade you build warehouses on your goodly riverbank, and told you no wealth in your keeping would ever be stolen.

  "Thus you did, yes great A'Rak! And with those kolois we wooed trade! We bought Kadrash fruit in bumper harvests and sap cake from Kairnheim at times of glut, and warehoused them to sell at Fregor in famine and to whelkers of the Great Reefs when the Tidals had swept the mulch from their whelk-beds . . ."

  Dreaming Pankard's voice shook, as he was swept up in the rhapsody of A'Rak's generosity. "For eastbound or westbound argosies we were easier reached than crossing the Agon, even as you pointed out, great A'Rak! We made fortunes as factors! Merchants left their gold in Big Quay, and weighed anchor re-cargoed from our warehoused hoards!"

  And further still I guided you, and bade you build such cloisters as your own, and rent out your gold to others, and lodge others' gold secure, and told you once more, that no wealth in your holdin
g would ever be stolen.

  "And we then warehoused gold itself, great A'Rak! Yes! Drafts on our monastia were good as gold half the world over! Hills of coins lodge with us now! They lie nigh unmoving save in our ledgers!"

  Have you not lived well here in my lovely, spacious cloister—all of you? Have you not known generations of safety and ease?

  "Yes we have, great A'Rak!" Both conscious Pankard and dreaming Pankard were feeling a tender, almost ecstatic gratitude, but conscious Pankard was mildly startled, for their answer had a chorus of echoes. But dreaming Pankard was not startled in the least by the fact that now in this dream all of the other members of the monastium—from Arch-Monast Geldergrab, down to the lowliest clerk—were standing around him, that in fact the whole cloister stood in the vault with him, all half-robed or naked, all of them apparently called from their beds as he had been. But conscious Pankard, just for a moment, had the distinct impression that he was not only dreaming all this, but that every one of them was in fact standing together down here, just as they did in the dream.

  But the startlement passed quickly. What if this were so? What should he fear? Were they not convoked here in love and amity for great A'Rak, to bask in the warmth of his love? Learn his wishes and fulfil them with joy?

  My wish, dear friends and allies, is to share this wealth with our fellow Hagians—to carry a tithe of these riches up to the courtyard, and to load it in wagons that wait there. Let us now unite in this joyful labor!

  And it was joyful labor! As Pankard toiled among the half-clad monasts, shouldering pots and bags of gold coin, and marching up the long stone flights with them, it seemed he and his colleagues sang a silent hymn as they worked, such unity and harmony did he feel in their work. It was as if the god shared his strength with them, even as he had shared his gold. Here was Pankard bearing carelessly on his shoulder a crock of coin that should have bent him double. It put him in mind of the far smaller satchel he'd conveyed up these same steps but two nights past—how heavy that had been!