by Michael Shea
We laid a double span across Cavil, and ran catwalk to a balconied window, which we prised out in the name of civic necessity. We left other men to go into the house and establish the route down to the street, and these men found a goodly number of people staying quietly withindoors and much troubled by the intrusion, until they were assured of a grave emergency facing the state—and this they seemed well able to accept, and stayed hiding within. We pushed walkway across Lesser Cavil and then bridged the next street, Wharfside. In the block thus attained, we could descend through the buildings down to Navvy Common, a major commercial thoroughfare transecting the city on a parallel with the river. Here some kind of deployment of troops could be made—a pitched battle fought.
We branched out our aerial path, catwalking along cornices and ridges, creaking back and forth across the voids of the streets. Meanwhile some of our number, acting on their own hook, were discreetly bringing back colleagues and friends, such that within two hours we numbered nigh two hundred, and had a third warehouse roof joined by bridges and provisioned.
Still we had not yet half enough men and women to hold our rooftops against any strong attack, so Samption and I designated a deputation of judicious men and women and sent them to circulate through Keelyard Square for a more concerted drawing off of allies for our work here. With a sufficient force for defense now, we could begin assembling the defenceless for safety, with a surplus of the able for an expeditionary force to launch attacks out along Navvy Commons.
Through all this, nothing specific was voiced in my hearing, but at some point it became clear that not one of these men and women believed for a moment that it was really the A'Rak's enemy that we were all working so furiously to prepare against.
As we waited for the people to start streaming back to us in earnest, I began to feel a crushing sense of danger's imminence. I set myself to helping tie tow round the heads of arrows, and dip them in pitch. I was feeling a kind of pressure behind my eyes, and a prickliness of the nerves as I worked, as if a kind of sharp, invisible sleet filled the air. Most of us were on the rooftops, with a few still down on the dockside working the cranes, and I noticed in everyone else's movements a vagueness and distraction, as if they too were troubled by this curious sensation.
In my restlessness I went to the riverside parapet and studied the broad, empty flux of the Haagsford. How could it be that still not a sail, not even a rowboat, dotted the open water of this, one of the great highways of southern trade?
My eyes were drawn inland to the distant Square—hadn't I caught some slight, strange movement about its periphery? By the Crack, yes! For there it was again, among the rooftops surrounding the square: something dark darting quick across a cornice, a little to quick for me to make out. . . .
It was then that I heard, behind me, a vast, ripply whisper of water. I spun and looked down, saw the river's edge buckle and swell along the whole length of the quay at once, and saw erupt from it—in a burst of bright spray—a thorny black wave of A'Rakspawn.
They surged up onto the Quay's whole width at once, hair-raising in their sheer vast number! The people working the hoists got not even one full scream out before they were jailed within bristly legs and fanged with a brutally destructive finality. So huge a gout of venom was discharged with these annihilating strokes, that the victims ballooned up grotesquely with the corrosive infusion, which ate its way through to the outer flesh in a half dozen bulges; they were sucked dry with equal suddenness, while the main spider-wave had seethed and scuttled away, streaming into the city up every street and lane and alleyway.
We on the rooftop, crouching low and as mute as terror could make us, rushed to the inland edge of the roof and peeked over. The invasion filled Cavil, already boiling in every street we had a glimpse of. With their fangs they tried and tore open every door, some rushing through each while the main body poured unstoppably uptown, whither our vista already revealed to us a general convergence of the host towards Keelyard Square.
Such a host, and yet so silent! There were muffled screams from the stay-at-homes they had found in the houses, but in the main their seething progress made only a muted hailstorm sound of claws on stone, a soft boil of clicks that plainly did not carry far ahead of the host, for still, in the distant square, the folk could be seen serenely feasting.
Now though, on the rooftops around the square, the dark shapes of spawn scuttled everywhere. We on our rooftops felt precisely that quality of paralysis that is Nightmare itself, watching the spider-seethe like a black surf scour through the streets below us, the whole tide of them contracting toward the focus of Keelyard Square, its own roofs aswarm with a tightening girdle of death—and yet we, withal, so completely voiceless, lest we draw some of that tide up against ourselves!
We stood not long in this helpless horror. For, from those swarming rooftops round the square, bright sprays of brilliance suddenly leapt out, to dazzle in the morning light above the feasting multitude. You could almost make out the upward tilting of forty thousand faces beholding that dazzlement, and could just hear their vast murmur of surprise—for still the muted hailstorm of claws on stone, yet a few streets distant, went unheard by them.
But now, at last, fear rippled violently through the human host, as those bright outflung sprays of ghostweb fell on them and seized their limbs in crushing bondage.
Round the square's whole perimeter the webbing fell, tangling the host's whole periphery into a struggling, squirming barrier that contained all the rest of the multitude. Even then, from the rooftops, the spawn themselves leapt out, diving into the pool of their prey, while, a moment after, in through all four corners of the square, the phalanxed spiders from the river poured.
A sea of terrified humanity swirled beneath a boil of spiders furiously feeding. Not quite yet had terror's limit been attained, however. Not until the A'Rak himself rose into view from behind the buildings along the plaza's northern side, and stepped over that block of buildings, and down into the square itself to wade amidst the slaughter.
When we beheld old Grandsire himself, we understood that invisible sleet that stung our nerves, for now it grew to a painfully shrill storm. It was the A'Rak's thought: not an intelligible utterance now, but a piercing, mindless imperative which absolutely commanded the wills of his countless sons, and which drove them as irresistibly as the wind drives chaff. From the father flowed a current of compulsion which pulled the sea of his spawn into a foaming swirl toward his center. They poured into the square from all sides and slew and slew and slew, scything the multitude (now their screams reached us clarion-clear!) with their plunging fangs, and gorging with gluttonous suction on the liquefied flesh of their kills.
And as the spawn fanged and fed, growing swollen with their food, on them did their huge sire fall and feed. The human food, too picayune for his huge fangs, he drave his sons to gather, and then upon their ampler frames himself did feast!
"We must save who we can!" the cry rose among us—from my lips? From everyone's? Our wills were as firmly welded as terror and loathing could bind them in one common purpose. Spawn still fleetly scavenged through the streets of the city at large, but now in pairs and triplets they could be encountered and slain, which we burned to do.
Samption and I led off the column. Along our catwalk path we streamed and down to Navvy Common, into which we plunged with a muster of half a dozen mast-spears in the lead. The first spawn that reared up to strike us we speared under the jaws and held propped while a score of us surrounded him and sworded his legs off for him, joint by joint, in a trice. Branching into cohorts some two-score strong, we began to clear the Commons, and as we advanced we set up the cry for those hiding withindoors to come down to us. The stay-at-homes whose dwellings had withstood the spiders' attempts at penetration proved many.
Of these, the young and the elderly we hustled back up to our fortresses. The abler added their strength to our mast-spears, and on we pressed, dodge and fight, recoil, riposte and counter-thrust—a long time it took us t
o come within the last few streets of Keelyard Square, but as at last we neared it, and we emerged on a broad boulevard yielding a view of the stadium in the crags above the city, we saw up on the grand promenade that climbed the crags a force of several hundred folk in arms looking down upon the city in horror. The highlanders had come through.
I took a detachment of spearmen and we sprinted towards them. They met us halfway down the broad switchbacks, and Mav stood at their head. She was pointing to Keelyard Square even before I came up to her, shouting something.
"Do you see what he means to do?" she cried when we reached them. "Look you, he means to force a moult! See how he gorges on the man-gorged spawn! He whirls them in the cyclone of his will, and makes the most swollen ones scuttle to him to be consumed. He is a maelstrom! Every jot of food spins to his maw, and see how gravely swollen he himself is already, as if his meal began to rupture him? It does, in fact! His frame is breaking there, and there! He feasts towards his own annihilation—he strives to force a moult in violation of his natural time. And if he should survive the damage of such transcending gluttony, then he will moult—to something surpassing what his race was fashioned to be. It is a desperate ploy—to do it he must stay fixed and pull all to his center. We can take the fight to him, and on the way free all those folk where they're sieged in their dwellings."
And our vantage from the cragface showed us our work cut out for us: wherever spawn clung to walls and tore at shuttered windows with their fangs, or recoiled from shattered doors whence pike-thrusts came, were citizens still to be liberated who might swell our forces.
Down to it we ran. Mav's highlanders did not lack spears and pikes, for such arms had they long cultivated in their militance against the A'Rak. They had broadswords as well for the leg-lopping sweeps so effective here. We merged our troops with them into units each of which was centered around two or three mast-spears, and each of these could now be managed by four handlers, much increasing the quickness of their thrusts. We grew quite adept at stabbing them—crunch—under the midsections of spawn, and then propping them up for the lopping off of their legs.
We were soon near a thousand strong, and closed ever faster upon the square, with refugees steadily streaming back from our lines, and up the catwalks to the fortressed rooftops, which we now had well defended with nigh five hundred troops to hold the parapets. Now the sun approached the zenith, and so did this hellish war.
It was a war, at least, at its outskirts. At its center, I'm afraid, it was nothing more than an obscene, gargantuan feasting where a swirling spider-host sucked the flesh from a human one, and in its turn was torn by the titan jaws of the A'Rak on his mountain of husks. Now, at least, the last of the streets peripheral to the square was empty of spawn, except those we'd lopped and gutted. We came together then for a focussed assault and, gathered in phalanxes three abreast, we approached the southeast corner of the square.
We confronted one vast pool of death and alien horror. A sea of husks, human and A'Rak, filled it from wall to wall in leathery dunes. Atop this heap sat the A'Rak, monstrously swollen, his abdomen twice too huge for even his mighty legs to move, and ruptured into bulges and billows that grossly deformed its tapered spheroidicity. Around him perhaps a thousand of his sons, last of their generations, were gathered in a tight, protective formation, all arrayed fangs-out and palps high, warding us from their colossal sire, but not advancing to engage us. We halted our advance, and gazed.
"See how his eyes grow waxen," Mav said. "He's going into moult! They must now stand his defense here. Now we can draw our full muster up against him, for he cannot move from here, and they dare not desert his immediate defense.
"Burn the monster!" cried Samption, whom the carnage had whipped into a hollow-eyed, raving fury. "He crouches on a pyre ready-made. Bring the tuns of oil and spirits here from our fortresses! Cart it quick here in freight wagons. We can drench them and burn them where they crouch!"
The idea kindled an eager fire in all of us—here was an encompassable vengeance upon our enemy's hugeness!
All the plods and other draybeasts had been ravened up in that first great carnivorous wave that had rolled dripping from the river. Men and women, then, seized the yoke poles of four score freight wagons, which they hauled in file between our fortressed rooftops, whence the recently hoisted tuns and casks of combustibles were winched back down. Once loaded, each wagon was run at a near sprint, by folk too overfilled with horror to feel it more, folk in whom wrath and grief-goaded lust for vengeance were the only passions that still burned. They rushed the wagons back to our point of attack at the southeast corner of Keelyard Square.
Our problem was the drenching of more than the mere periphery of our foe's corpse-heaped stronghold. The tactical force of spawn that skirted their immobile sire deployed to the very brink of the sea of husks he slept on, and furiously engaged any sortie we made to bear the inflammables inside the square's vast necroscape.
Pump wagons from the municipal yards were thought of, and at once assembled. But these, though designed to deal with fires in lofty structures, were poor in the actual performance. Perhaps the spiritous and oleaginous fluids that we sprayed, differing from water in density, were to blame. We were able to drench the skirt of the husk-dunes, and the van of the defenders, to a distance of some three or four rods within the square. Our fire arrows set this crescent of husks and defenders fiercely ablaze.
But the spawn then, using palps and forelegs with all the mighty leverage of siege engines, thrust the burning husks and bodies back at us, heaping them into a smoking dyke thrice a man's height and ramming this dyke outward at us, forcing our troops and wagons to fall back.
We had to wrestle the hot debris ourselves then, dragging it aside, reopening a laneway of assault. All the while the A'Rak in his bloated deformity showed a stillness that grew more ominous with each second that passed. His ranked eyes were dead, opaque, as were the barbs and bristles that furred him all over. The glint of life was utterly absent, yet movement from within at length began to stir his dead-looking shell. There was a slow, rippling labor within his colossal distorted abdomen, and this was soon followed by a sudden, sprouting growth affecting two of his legs, both of which began elongating crookedly.
In short, the alchemy of the god's desperate tactic appeared to be a-bubbling within his gluttony-ruptured corpse. By the time we had cleared the dyke of burning organic debris, and charged again with our pump-wagons spraying in the van, his abdomen had begun tumescing even further in asymmetric billows.
Once more our flaming arrows fell like rain and kindled furious flames, consuming perhaps half a score of spawn. Again their brothers thrust their blazing bodies forth, and drove us back before the broiling wall. We began to despair. We were killing them only by dribs and drabs, while A'Rak's forced moult was all too plainly—by the upheavals of his frame—imminent.
A ragged cheering reached us from our distant fortressed rooftops, and then louder cheers from troops posted on nearer roofs. Then behold! Here up boulevard came Paanja Pandagon and Fursten Minim at the head of fifteen hundred mercenaries with pikes and halberds, and a cohort of fourscore titanoplods shod with iron-spurred squashers!
We cheered ourselves hoarse, and made way for our new vanguard.
They had come none too soon, for even now the A'Rak's deformed immensity began to shudder and heave, then to buck titanically, sending mighty tremors through the city's foundation that drowned out even the weighty footfalls of the advancing titanoplods.
LAGADEME IX
The silk shroud's gibbous bulge would have been as white as the moon, except for the ghost-fever flashing through it. As our aerial battle continued—the globe both beacon and barrier to the convergent monsters whose leg-toil dented the silver water, and whom we left eyeless and legless to sink, fanging the empty air—the silk's delirious glow intensified to an unearthly fire, until the witch cried:
"Lo! It wheels and rolls! Is she waking, or does the ghost silk defend
her?"
The globe indeed glinted with rotation, and brought up its wet underside with a monstrous spawn clinging to it and striving to thrust huge fangs through its tough integument, and just at the fangs' points of impact with the silk did the fire flash brightest.
In we swooped. We lopped off its fangs first. Still it clung, though powerless to feed, and so—with some effort due to its bigness—we lopped off its legs, the silk helping us by lifting and turning the clinging monster to present the limbs to our strokes. Meanwhile its severed fangs, left hanging from the silk, began to smoke and shrivel, till the ghost-fever had consumed them like wicks.
"Her presence wakes them to rebellion!" trumpeted Jaundyssa. "Those souls the fabric fetters—they burn and bind the spawn! They defend Pam'Pel. As she wakes, she wakens them to know that it is their vengeance they envelope!"
It was well that the ghostweb was becoming an ally, for of the swarming horror that ceaselessly converged upon us, there appeared no end. When the dawn had fanned out silver across half the sky, we beheld a host of the hellbugs dimpling the water's wide pane, and we knew that yet more were groping out along the lake-bottom, for the ghost-silk kept turning them up for us to kill.
Endlessly we fought them, and as they came swarming, their thought coruscated across the lake—not the articulate, sardonic mentation we had grown to know, but a wildfire of emotion, a repeated pulse of alarm, whose only decipherable content seemed to be: It is she! The enemy!
We fought the sun up, fought it two hours, three hours high. We were fighting in a desperate fever now, our orbit tight to the silken planet, our efforts focussed on the monsters that had actually seized hold and clung to it. The bright globe turned endlessly now, and as fast as we hewed away one clinging spawn, two more had latched a grip. The sky's perfect blue, the bright profusion of sunlight made the horror of that swarming lake more horrid still, while at the same time it made vaguely visible our bubbled captive, frozen on his raft, the larger image of those who swarmed to reach him.
