by Michael Shea
There he crouched just as we had bound him, while of the embryonic saviour we had embowered in him, there was no sign at all, and the brute mathematics of our plight were already too terrifyingly plain: the raft would soon be overwhelmed. Even as we hewed and lopped and stabbed one attacker, two more clung to the fabric and furiously fanged it. The ghostly fire stung them back, but their mad élan was that of a race combatting its extinction, and already the fabric was torn, here and there, and though it blazed and smoked at these wounds, and slowly re-closed itself, the wounds were beginning to outrace the repairs.
Then the witch called the skiff alongside of us and held the two craft at a hover, gunnel to gunnel. "Make room!" she cried to Shinn and Olombo, and the three of us abandoned the yawl and joined our friends in the skiff.
"I've precious little flight left to command, and my allowance cannot be wholly spent," she told us. To the yawl she cried, "Down! Auger that brute!" The empty craft swung upsidedown and plunged its mast to the hilt in the abdomen of a huge spawn clinging to the embattled sphere.
And still we five defended this sphere from our littler boat, but already we could feel the speed of our dives diminishing, and feel a tremor in the craft when we held at hover for stabbing and chopping.
All too soon, Jaundyssa shrieked an obscenity, pulled our skiff up through a high sweep, and brought us streaking towards the shoreline where a huge, ancient crook-oak towered above its fellows. We swarmed into the upper boughs with our sword-tipped oars, whose weight, less magic-buoyed, we were beginning to feel. The witch gestured the skiff away, to kill an out-swimming spawn by crashing into its eyeclusters.
The convergent spawn, though so powerfully called by the scent of their enemy, were not indifferent to our own food-scent, and they came at once legging up through the great boughs of our perch. Our sword-fanged oars were cruelly weighty now, and all our thews and sinews ached with the long night's desperate work. I most heartily wished the thief and Mav back with us, adding their fierceness at arms to our waning fire. I was grateful for the sun's brilliance overhead, betraying the spiderkin's ascent amidst the maze of branches.
Until that same flood of light revealed something within the websphere that made us cry aloud with fear and dismay. For even at our present distance we could plainly see our huge captive A'Rak awaken from his paralysis, and lurched mightily upon the raft, snapping his bonds and rearing fangs and forelegs high.
Bitter gall filled our hearts, knowing now our fate. The monster thrust powerfully at the sphere from within, tearing the silk wide open and flinging a trio of his lesser brothers from the sphere by the force of the blow.
"We are lost!" I cried—my despair tore it from me.
"Wait!" shrieked the witch, and the instant after, the giant on our raft surged again—but convulsively this time. His fangs unsheathed, and reared as if to strike, but then he violently outspread his every leg at once, and his flat midsection split right down the middle, and Pam'Pel, the terror and glory of her mighty eyes, emerged.
She shed the spider like a shucked cloak; hollow it collapsed behind her. Though her wings were still womb-wet and stunted, they began to hum. They kindled to a silver blur and lifted her. And as she took flight, she touched her gaster to torn globe of ghost-silk.
The bubble burst to a spray of color, a polychromatic blizzard that flamed like siegefire on the A'Rakspawn it struck. The ghost stuff consumed them, and then fled up through the bright air, unravelling in brilliant threads of smoke that seemed to sigh and sing as they melted skywards.
Pam'Pel hung in the air above the lake. Mighty she was, as beautifully implacable as a great black scimitar. And yet, for all the slaughter of spawn she had just wrought, and for all that the surviving host of spiders wheeled and fled now as one, and for all that those assailing us scuttled down the crook-oak's great trunk and away—still my heart misgave me when I beheld her slightness. The host she had emerged from still would have overloomed her alive. How could she encounter the fabled hugeness of the A'Rak?
"Lo where she comes!" shrilled the witch. "Down! Down!"
And indeed we stepped lively getting down from the tree, for however comparatively small, she was as big as a farmhouse, and she was making wing straight for the tree we perched in, with no sign in the vast black gems of her eyes that she noted our presence there.
The five of us footed it through the lakeside woods for some time before we came far enough around the lake to see the dire alien clinging to the great tree, drying her wings, drinking in the sunlight. She had grown in size and wingspan, but not enough, I thought in my heart—not near enough!
"Soon she'll go a-hunting him," the witch told us, "and we must make haste to see it. A modicum of motive thaumaturgy remains to me. We must improvise for maximum yield."
When we reached the lakeshore village, she gestured a skiff into air and caused it to twirl, flinging out a pair of husks. She brought this skiff to the highway, got us all aboard her, and summoned an invisible something up under the keel to carry us on its back. It jolted like a heavy plod but made a speed like a pair of racing skinnies, a bone-rattling ride, and not improved by the being's stench, which was that of a freshly stocked charnel house in midsummer. On towards Big Quay it sped us.
NIFFT X
Titanoplods accoutered for siege-work wear a vast, horned battering helmet that envelops their prognathous skulls and has a flared collar of steel that protects their shoulders and back. Likewise the squashers—clawed steel boots—protect their forelimbs from the fangstrokes of any but the hugest spawn. But the A'Rak's larger defenders overleapt this armor, crushing the mahout and sinking lethal fangs in the giant's hindquarters. We quickly learned to deploy our mast-spear teams to flank the plods and impale these monsters as they descended, but we lost both beasts and drivers as often as not.
We set more than half the plods to battering down the buildings that demarked this corner of the square in order to widen our avenue of approach, while a phalanx of them continued to press against the salient of defenders and provide cover for the pumpwagons to spew flammables across a slowly widening arc. Our archers kept a hail of fire arrows falling from the rooftops, and an ever broadening crescent of prey husks and defenders blazed brightly.
But the A'Rak, in the immense sarcophagus of his bloated, broken frame, crouched still untouched by the flame and fury of our best assaults, though his bodily envelope was as dull and ashen as if fire had indeed swept across it, and his legs, all crooked and torqued, seemed just such fireswept vines and roots as a forest conflagration leaves in its wake.
A hasty consultation between me, Mav, Pandagon and Minim produced a desperate improvisation. Samption and I, with a squad of flanking spearmen, retrieved two mobile cargo-cranes from the quayside, whose slings we wrapped round a pair of pumpwagons that we'd taken the wheels off of. The Ecclesiarch directed two mahouts in a clumsy effort to steady their titanoplods as we set these wagons atop their backs.
I and Samption and a squad of spearmen swarmed up the netted flank of one of the beasts, while Pandagon and his adjutants mounted the other. We swayed forward, the footing like that on the back of a Behemoth at full gallop.
Our mount hooked his helmet horn into the underside of an attacking spawn. Its legs and fangs rattled on the flared steel collar as our men cranked the bellows and Samption sent an arc of Kolodrian aquavit onto the arrayed monsters fronting us. At a torch clamped to our wagon rail I lit fire arrows and sent them winging after the streaming spirits, arrow after arrow, each new one loosed before the last had struck. We were sowing fields of fire far deeper in the ranks of our enemy now.
And then the A'Rak gave a shudder that shook the entire plaza—or rather, what was in him did. Had a flash of brilliance coruscated across the array of his dulled eyes?
Yes, for the eyecluster ruptured now, and a knoll, a very hillock of new eyes thrust dazzling into the light. The same dorsal rupture continued along his cephalothorax and up his abdomen, while his legs had begun t
o thrash and turmoil like a nest of mighty vipers.
What erupted from the A'Rak's already mighty husk was half again his former size, such that the moult fell away in rags and tatters.
Jet black and brightly glinting as wet tar was the A'Rak now. This blackness was shot through with streaks of crimson, so that in the bright noon his hugeness seemed to smoulder. His eyes were now three score and two, faceted gems deep and star-strewn as the cosmic abyss, a hill of eyes whose malign and fiery sentience sent horror like an ice-rill up my spine. Each of his legs was an added joint in length, so he crouched on a higher, more elegantly baroque array of flying buttresses. His abdomen tapered more sharply, the tip nozzled with more a complex artillery of spinnerettes.
These spinnerettes now flickered too swiftly for eye to follow, and from them gouted up coruscant sheets and billows of ghost-silk. Like tidal waves they came towering through the air, fanning out and filling the sky as the monster cast leftwards and rightwards, looming towards us all sun-shot as they blotted out that orb, so that I fancied I saw a twisted weave of vaporous arms and faces within the silk, even as I bellowed, "Jump!"—and suited my own action to that word.
Belatedly, for we were already airborne. We plunged chest deep into the leathery husks of folk and spiders as the falling sheets netted the titanoplods and anchored on the rooftops surrounding the plaza.
Our forces stumbled back in mad retreat, leaving plods and pump-wagons and cargo hoists shrouded in the silk-fall. A few moments' work for the reborn A'Rak left the whole square fenced in a wall of webbing which draped every building and walled off all the street approaches with one continuous lurid tapestry. Then, as his guard recoiled even more tightly around him, he sent new salvos of silk towering into the sunlight. These sprang flashing zig and zag, and in moments the whole square was roofed by a latticework of webbing. An indecipherable pulse of spiderthought whelmed from the A'Rak then, and his whole perimeter of spawn swarmed up his lifted legs, which he raised ladderlike, and deployed themselves atop the lattice, rearing up fangs and forelegs toward the sky, interposing themselves between their sire and that vast, empty blue.
A while longer the A'Rak flung webbing that looped and arabesqued through the existing weave and tightened it. We dragged ourselves free of the human detritus we'd plunged in, and stood helplessly watching through the silken walls' chromatic distortion the giant at his work.
It struck us all that this diaphanous profusion that the A'Rak flung with such projectile grace was nothing less than the city of Big Quay itself—was at least three quarters of its citizens, was their skins and their souls transmogrified into this lurid stuff that crackled with the very essences of rage and dolor. The inhabitants of the southern hemisphere's richest entrepot had rendered their god the ultimate tithe, and on the awful spindles of his fangs had been spun into the fabric of his armor against his enemy, and in that moment, knowing what I knew, it was plain—to me at least—that it was for precisely such an end as this that the monster had groomed and patronized and cultivated them for so long.
Yet even as the A'Rak completed these elaborate, spawn-crusted defenses, he scarcely seemed to need them. He radiated invincibility. More elaborately jointed and fanged, the living architecture of him had a devilish panache. The very hairs he bristled with were longer, complex pennate structures that flexed and palped the air, so that his shagginess was like a meadow in the breeze, rippling with the movement of his sensors. Like a great black-and-red ember of sentience he stood there, his hugeness exquisitely poised, and fairly vibrated with awareness.
For the first time, after the many hours of battle, he spoke to us. The whelm of his thought had now an abyssal thrumm of energy to it, as if his augmented mentation resonated within just such a cyclopaean benthos as the Sunless Sea he had told me of, that deep-hid abyss inside doomed Arthro-Pan'doloron:
Citizens! Why do ye assail and contend against me? Am I not now yet grander, more magnificent a deity, than ever I was these two hundred years of our Covenant? Two centuries of wealth! Does this not pay, and overpay, a single one of your brief generations, taken in my hour of extremest need? For I call to witness all gods that ever were: am I not now the match of the mightiest?
What do I not hear? I can hear your sun a-burning, hear the roiling of its heat titanic, hear a dissonance that will, in time not distant, cause your star a grave convulsion mortal to millions on this earth of yours. And what can I not feel? I feel the distant past of this spot your city stands on, when, time out of mind, the crushing advent of a colossal wave did smite these hills into their present shape. Past and future alike I can sense. How Time vies for my mind from all directions! The cosmic micro-sleet the stars exhale—I can count each exiguous particle of it that strikes me.
And what can I not see? I see you there, thief, and you, my chief priest, treacherously making war against me! Have ye no conscience? Is rectitude fled from the bosoms of men? What of our Covenant, Priest?
The sly, teasing tone of this, coming from a being so huge, was wholly unnerving, but Pandagon was already swarming up the rope-laddered flank of a new plod, and I followed him up it. Though the new elevation did not bring us near the A'Rak's level, it let our forces hear Pandagon, and readied them to take their cue from him. "Great A'Rak!" he cried, "how are we traitors? How can a Covenant be just that gives us a fortune then slaughters us every one before we can spend even a copper of it?"
The resonance of his sole voice through the city was a visceral reminder that Big Quay was now—save for our army—empty; a necropolis, all its souls humming and burning in the ghostweave. How nobly large Pandagon loomed now in his native city! The man had reached that pinnacle that I had from the first sensed he yearned for. His benign ambition now indeed bestrode the destiny of his nation. He spoke for them all, at the head of their survivors in arms, and it was his voice that flung defiance at the monster that had battened on his race two hundred years and more.
Then another sound began to mix with the echoes of his retort, and when all of us suddenly raised our faces to the sky whence it came—a high, pure hum like plucked steel bowstrings—then Pandagon, with inspired aptness, trumpeted:
* * *
"Listen, A'Rak!:
When the wing-song of her hunger
Serenades thee from the sky,
And the bright barb of her anger
Seeks thy life—thou knowest why! . . ."
* * *
This rhymed riposte made the giant recoil. With the smooth speed of falling, the vibration grew louder, till it seemed the very sky was a plucked string. And here came Pam'Pel, a-hovering down.
Not a quarter his size she looked, but her perfection was awesome, the tapered curve of her thorax and spike-tipped abdomen so gracefully lethal, the broad silver swords of her wings—the ghost of their form oddly visible within the invisibility of their blurred vibration—and her head with its two great globed eyes, a triune sphere her head was, with these eyes, full of a remorseless intelligence as black and deep as space. She fell to her predatory task as if but a moment, instead of eons, had interrupted it.
The spawn that swarmed the canopy raised a thorny flourish of fangs and forelegs at her. Liquidly she dropped, curving stinger-first up under a huge spawn's assault, and touched him quick once, twice, and curved out from under, swept up and dropped again, tucking her stinger—once, twice—under a second assailant. The pair of them crumpled and shrunk into a twitching clench of paralyzed legs, but already she had dipped again, striking now the web itself where she had cleared it of its defenders.
She touched her stinger to the silk here, and there, and there, seeming more seamstress than slayer now, tucking and tugging and adjusting, and a long, complex shudder went through the web as a whole. The spawn that swarmed it trembled at the shock, and danced little gingerfoot jigs of unease, as Pam'Pel now swept everywhere, dodging the leaps of defenders, and touching her stinger to her prey's woven roof.
And that great net vibrated now, boiled with chan
ge. Long rents split it, and the ragged edges, toothed with flames of feverish color, leapt like tongues to lick the legs of the spawn and fetter them in burning bandages of silk. The net became a writhing vipers' nest. The silk seized the spiders, shackled them, shrouded them, mummied them, clenched them, and crushed them. The crackle of collapsing exoskeleton filled the air. And when the silk had crushed them, it burned them—turned to lurid flame from which streamed up brief gaudy wisps of smoke. Ghostly fragments they were that wailed faintly, musically away in the sunlight, the plundered dead escaping at last into the sweet infinitude of light!
They were confronted then, the roofless A'Rak and his nemesis, with only empty air between.
A flux of alien cerebration joined them. Thought ice-cold and absolute whelmed down from Pam'Pel, while from the A'Rak, wrath and resolution radiated back.
She dove to the attack. He flung, with invisibly quick flickers of his spinnerettes, a barrage of silk up at her, bright rags of a lethal garment to entangle her blazing wings. The diaphanous gouts came with a speed and profusion that plainly disconcerted the millennial huntress. She veered, veered again, and found she'd been edged into the path of a projectile she could not quite dodge, and which snared her trailing legs and dragged her down. Up surged the A'Rak, titanically graceful, and his fangs swept scimitaring down and raked her abdomen, just failing to plant their points, as Pam'Pel heaved upward and wrenched herself away.
She hovered, working her stinger into the shackling silk, which she awoke to revolt, so that it fell away from her legs to drop down upon one of the giant's legs, whose hugeness its fire could harm no more than to make the monster falter but a step, and then he leapt back to the counterattack as down again she came at him.
Again and again he drove her back. A second, and then a third time, his fang-stroke came within a hair of killing her. Yet it was not in her to desist from the hunt. She would have him, or die trying, and now she was visibly tiring, while the A'Rak's energy, and his gluttonized wealth of silk, were just as plainly inexhaustible.
