The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  This recollection had a strange and powerful effect on him. The crock on his shoulder suddenly became so much heavier he staggered under it and almost fell, and his bare feet suddenly felt the painful cold of the stone. Now the stream of his toiling, half-naked fellows all round him became a terrifying reality—his sense of the dream had shrunk, as it were, to a dim voice murmuring a tale in his inner ear.

  In fact, were they not all mesmerized? Were they not all sunk in a vision imposed on them from without?

  An instinctive terror made him, with immense effort, sustain his burden and maintain his tranced gait, as if their controller were literally watching them. Indeed, the warm insulation of the dream fiction remained, as it were, near at hand—he felt it quick to rise and warm him if he but assented the least bit to its comfort.

  But conscious Pankard, once snagged awake by an accident of recent memory, remembered more of his mission for the Ecclesiarch, in another instant had unearthed a memory that would not let him slip back into sleep. It was a remark of the Ecclesiarch's, seeing him off home again after the delivery of the cull and the military funds. The robust Pandagon had helped his feebler old schoolmate into his coach, and while he was leaned thus near he had said, reverting to the tone of their schooldays,

  "Listen, Pankie old fellow. Our god is a hungry god, and he grows hungrier still of late. A staunch employee like yourself would not be remarked upon, if you took a bit of a sabbatical from your monastium? A sabbatical abroad?" When Pankard had blinked uncomprehendingly at this, Pandagon, after a brief air of inner struggle, patted his shoulder and bade him good night.

  Now, staggering into the moon-drenched central courtyard of the monastium on his frozen feet, under his crushing burden, something very close to comprehension dawned upon the timid Pankard. He staggered with his neighbors to the nearest wagon—ringing spills of coin sang on the planks; moon-silvered dunes of gold rose in the wagons.

  Back to the vaults, beloved allies! There we will render services still more glorious!

  Pankard joined the stream of monasts returning down the endless stairs to the vaults, but now he moved with conscious dissimulation. The dream fiction was no more than a strange warm numbness in his legs, an anaesthetic glow that would perhaps have re-engulfed him readily enough, had not terror's blade of ice been now firmly planted in his heart.

  Pankard had always thought of himself as a man absolutely devoid of physical daring, but now, amid the half-clad ecstatics flowing down the stony flights, Pankard slowed, and maneuvered, and began to fall back in the stream—a terrifying act, if this entranced host were being followed by one of the gods. . . . As he neared the tail of the column, he dared not look back to learn the truth, but, eyes frozen forward, slowed, and slowed, and felt his dreaming fellows jostle past him.

  Until cold, empty air on the backs of his legs and his neck told him he had only empty corridor behind him.

  Still he dared not stop completely, dared not make his consciousness plain to anything that might lurk farther back. In dread of revealing himself, still he followed the tail of the column.

  And then the great brazen door of the vault was in view below, and those heading the line were already ecstatically filing inside. Pankard, still up on the last flight of stairs, had an angled view into the vault, such that he could see something which, after a moment, finally made him stop, and stand frozen.

  It was the god's crevice he saw, the black fissure in the stone whence, so recently, the god's thought had welled out to him during the Rune Reading. . . . But what had happened to that fissure? It had grown so big! Yes, there, and there, its stone margins were newly broken. How it yawned now! Ten men might enter it abreast. . . .

  And did so! For the column marched unhesitatingly into the ebon aperture.

  Onward, my dear devotees! Advance to our glad gathering-together, to the harvest of our amity, our harmony! Oh hasten ye hither!

  Like wind off a desert, the spiderthought's whelm had a warm, potent push to it—Pankard almost hurried forward, fearful he would be late, that the vault door would close and seal him out of that glad harvest of amity and harmony. . . . So near did he come to this that the strength of his recoil made him stagger backwards, and fall upon the steps behind him.

  Thus he lay low, up near the turning of the stairwell, as the last of his cloistermates poured into the vault. Full half of them had vanished through the crevice already, and the others strode rapturously towards it, when from either side of the doorway of the vault, thorny black legs dropped like crooked prison bars over a dozen men at a stroke, and polished black fangs fell stabbing and piercing and poisoning, again and again and again.

  Now they were everywhere in the vault, the bristly jagged legs jailing, the soulless eyeknobs glittering avidly as they settled to the feast, while the cries that filled the vault were echoed by other, similar cries from within the black fissure: the half-conscious shrieks of dreaming men who did not quite believe that the agony that clove them was real, nor that their guts and their brains were melting, dissolving indeed in the caustic flux that filled them.

  Prelate Pankard found his feet then and no mistake. And thus it happened that he was the sole survivor from all of the half-score monastia which on that same evening contributed to the A'Rak's golden donative that took place on the morning that followed.

  LAGADEME VIII

  We circled the rim of Haggardscroft Lake, looking for shadow enough to hide from the moon under. Our monstrous cargo, slipping into the dark and out again into the moonlight, assailed my sight like a recurrent nightmare—its vandalized eyes, its fangs all burnt and fused together, the shaggy spheroid of its abdomen. . . .

  We were in dread of the shore, now that we knew our captive, though paralyzed, was sending out an impalpable but powerful summons to his brothers, drawing them and their hunger hitherwards with each passing moment. At length we found a cove rimmed by grandfather trees where we could moor in the blackest moonshadow while still a good two or three rods off the bank.

  Across the lake, which was perhaps most of a mile in breadth, moonlight limned the slate roofs and fieldstone walls and docking floats of a modest fishing village, but not the least glimmer of candle or murmur of voice reached us across the black pane of water. Not even a breeze woke the lakeside woods to a whisper. In this stillness, without the comfort of the least distraction, our captive's pent sentience, the roil of muddled spiderthought like a subtle silken stir in its hideous frame, tortured our nerves.

  Here was the Ephesionite, sitting on one of the clear corners of raft unencumbered by the monster, hugging his knees and gazing up at the moon with an appearance of calm I found inexplicably irritating. I approached him, not aware of what I wanted with him, but finding, once I opened my mouth, that I had plenty to say to him.

  "You know, Nifft, discounting for everything—for our manipulation by forces outside us, for happenstance and mishap—discounting all that, I find myself still powerless to understand how you could have done it in the first instance?"

  "Done what, good Nuncio?"

  "Signed on with us at all, knowing this to be the spidergod's country, and yourself to be a thief."

  "I am no different from folk of any other profession, Dame Lagademe. I assume that if I encounter the worst, I will survive it. Your reasoning, forgive me, is specious in the extreme! Applied to yourself, how could you engage me, knowing as you did that the post—especially in a country such as this—involved danger to my life?"

  "Forgive me in turn, oh Ephesionite felon, but the risks of the Nuncial trade are incurred in the service of an honorable endeavor, and arise from the wickedness of the world around the Nuncio. Our perils do not arise from our own felonious practices!" Our companions were making shushing noises, but my blood was rather up, I am afraid. Nifft made a great show of dignity.

  "I must tell you, Nuncio, that I find the terms `felon' and `felonious' rather offensive."

  "Then what of `felony'—for all thievery is felony!"


  "Only in its criminal aspect."

  "Its criminal aspect?" (I was trying to whisper and shout at the same time.) "Thievery is criminal! Purely and simply and completely!"

  "Thievery from a thief is only technically criminal, but substantially innocent, for the guilt of the victim cancels that of the thief! I have never stolen from any but the rich and powerful—that is to say, other thieves. I have stolen at will from demons, of course, but surely you will not call that a crime!"

  "What I call a crime is just such crooning cant and sophistry as you are spewing forth!" Both Olombo and Bantril had laid gentling hands on my shoulders, but I was fair launched, and the darkness looked red through the flush of my rage. "Oh, smooth as cream you are, you vile, plausible foot-pad! Foolish youth would lap up your swill and judge it sweet, but serve me none of your slops! Alas my dear son, to have fallen prey to such suave swine as this!"

  "Your son . . . ?"

  Who is that with you, Brother, and how is it you seem to stand upon the water?

  This mute surge of spiderthought swept over us, as the breaking surf rolls over the seaside bather. From the dense lakeshore woods it whelmed—so close and clear! We were jolted, and I felt a flux of terror that the spawn had actually leapt upon our raft, till I heard the wet hush of our slavewater, and realized our raft was in motion, skimming smartly along, away from shore but at a diagonal, as the witch tried to keep us in treeshadow while we fled.

  Are you hurt? Who are your human company, and why are they uneaten. . . .

  We skirted nigh a mile of lake-rim, the moonlight avalanching down on us now and again, drenching us in visibility, but no further alien salutation touched our nerves. The witch was gesturing us all aboard the monster's flat fore-section. We crouched there, an arm's length from the great scabbed incision in the swelling abdomen, that monstrous vault wherein we'd laid Pompilla.

  "Mark you close now," growled the witch, her eyes almost phosphorescent. "They scent the wounded meat and will be coming thicker. The food-scent's already assembling them, but very shortly, they'll sense Pompilla too as she comes awake. The water masked her tread upon their earth while she was still enchrysallized. But now, as she nears her eclosion, and they draw nearer, there'll be no hiding her presence—buds of their Sire, they are all born with a keen alertness to her scent. I know not how long she will need to emerge, but until she does, she can be slain and devoured by the least of the spawn that begin, even now, to encircle us. Once we're known, hiding won't matter, and we must make for center-lake and stand siege. It's our luck they swim poorly in open water."

  "How do you mean we'll be standing siege, witch?" asked Mav.

  "It will involve more thaumaturgy—bless me for having been so frugal of it thus far! You've no more to do now than stand ready to discharge my orders on the instant."

  The witch made some gestures in the direction of the fishing village. Nothing happened.

  In the long silence that followed, the witch stood fixed and mute as stone. All the rest of us did the same, at first harkening mainly for another prickly probe of spiderthought to reach out of the black circling forest and touch our spines anew, but as the minutes stretched out, we also began harkening for any sign that the witch's summons would produce any result at all.

  Then there came a far, slight silvery chuckle of movement on the water, and a small dark shape detached itself from a distant shadow and moved slowly out onto the moon-silvered expanse of mid-lake.

  In a moment it was two, then three little shapes floating towards us. A while more, and we saw what they were: three small, empty vessels drifting in a wandering kind of way—bowfirst, then broadside, then stern-first, trailing their painters and dawdling towards us. One was a little one-masted yawl and the other two were skiffs, their oars waggling in the locks like broken wings they trailed as they advanced. At length all bumped softly up against our raft.

  "Clear them out and lift the oars out of their locks," said the witch. It was the yawl I stepped into, not knowing what she meant by "clear them out" till I found, on the bottom amidships of her a shrivelled shape like a heap of wrinkled shadows. When I dropped it overboard, the mummied corpse floated a moment like a dead leaf, till its torn night-gown grew soaked, and dragged it under. One skiff was empty, but no less than three poor souls had made it to the other skiff before they were stricken and devoured.

  Of the oars the witch improvised strange weapons—or such I assumed them to be, for she was now uncommonly short-spoken. She required of me, Olombo, Bantril and Shinn our swords. Against the blade of each oar she laid the hilts of a sword, so that the swordblade protruded past the tip of the oarblade. She walked astern of our huge captive and, with the butt of one of Nifft's javelances, smote the spinnerettes at the abdomen's caudal tip, and muttered a formula. The spinnerettes emitted a phosphorescent leakage, which she—twisting the spearbutt—wound round it in the manner of thread on a spindle. With this ghost silk, twisting the spearbutt in the opposite direction, she bound the sword hilts tight against the oarblades.

  Brother! . . . on the lakewaters . . . ?

  This feathery touch of spiderthought came from afar. I thought the dread of it had tensed me as I stood harkening for more, but when the next whelm followed almost instantly, I jumped a foot at least, so near at hand it was—upon the shore just opposite our raft:

  Why do you evade me, my brother? You are hurt, I perceive. Approach, that I may feed on you . . . what is it that ails you, it hath a most menacing aura—what hath hurt you? Why can you not speak, brother—stay and I will come to thee. . . .

  Even now our slavewater was moving us smoothly offshore—in an instant we were bathed in moonlight, and making for open water, our summoned skiffs and yawl keeping pace with us. We were not half a furlong from shore when the foliage near our moorage stirred, and a massy spawn, nigh half the size of our own, sprouted from the boskage and melted into the shadowy water. We moved far faster than it—we were two furlongs away before it swam, a glittery turmoil of legs, out into the moonlight.

  "Praise be they're bottom walkers," Mav said. "See how spastic he swims!"

  "But they'll be coming thick and fast," said the witch. "Do you not feel her now?"

  The hum of garbled mentation in our captive had grown sketchier and more frantic—a thoughtless whine of panicked sentience. Something was astir in the guts of our paralyzed monster.

  But the woods round the lake were also astir. Here was a faint flare of spiderthought, reaching out to meet us from whither we steered to—and here came the feathery touch of another from our portside.

  "By the Black Crack!" spat the witch, "the gluttonous filth converge! They sense her now, and cry each other on. They'll be swimming the surface and they'll be coming across the lakefloor as well."

  We had reached the lake's center. "Here we will stand," said the witch. "You, thief, and hill-girlie, you—you twain will be leaving us now. Hark ye, Thief, closely—give me my map again, Nuncio!"

  She snatched the vellum from me, and rent it in half with one sharp, surprisingly powerful pull of her pudgy hands. "What I will pen ye now," she told the thief, "is a missive to the A'Rak himself, and you must deliver it in person—stow your askings, and listen only! The ink this sending is writ in will secure your audience, I think—give me thy bodkin."

  Plucking his poignard, the witch strode to the A'Rakspawn's abdomen and slashed it. A freshet of the monster's black blood spattered on the raft, and in this she dipped the dagger's tip again and again, penning with its steel fang on the backside of the map's vellum.

  She wrote at length, then scrolled it up quick, and bade the thief thrust it in his belt. "You and the hill-girlie—put the 'shaw in that skiff and lash it down strongly. Past that dead village the highway runs, and down it the 'shaw will convey you, for I will call up a neffrit to the yokepoles, and it will be fighting to go the instant I bind him there. Be quick, for the pair of you must be away without losing an instant. Thou, Nuncio, and thou, puller" (she mea
nt Bantril) "board the yawl with thy sword-tipped oars, and ye two, likewise in that skiff."

  We did as she directed, and while Mav and Nifft lashed down the 'shaw in their skiff, Jaundyssa again went astern of the A'Rakspawn. With her left hand she summoned the air, and a little devil-wind, a vortex of breeze, began spinning above her head. She kicked the spawn's spinnerettes and made a repeated pulling motion in the air with her right hand.

  At her kick, pallid strands of ghostweb snaked up from the spinnerettes, and twisted themselves in a single cable which fed itself into her busily working right hand. The right hand drew this upwards, and touched its end to the whirlwind, round which the strand was snatched as onto a spindle. The vortex turned white with its wrapping of silk, and after a moment began to fling up a broad, gauzy banner that floated upon the air, snaking lazily, doubling back on itself, the loops of the banner fusing edge to edge into a supple sheet that hung in a broadening dome above the raft.

  She left the whirlwind at its work and found Mav and Nifft just completing their lashing-down of the 'shaw in their skiff. The witch made a gesture towards the lashed 'shaw, uttered a rusty cry, and on that instant the vehicle's yoke-poles sprang out to the horizontal and it surged and quaked within its bonds, causing the skiff to rock on the water.

  The witch addressed the departing pair. "The neffrit will stop, though none too long, hill-girlie, at Haggis. There dismount, and call your folk to arms, and gather all such highlanders as can be gathered and weaponed and brought to Big Quay post haste! Bring them along the ridgeline behind the city, and into the crags where the stadium stands, and there await how matters do unfold in the streets below.