“Oh, Cephas,” said Ariella.
“The day after you were born, your mother was turned into the pits below the Djen Arena. She was issued a pail and a cotton shift, and her face was branded with the Calimien slave mark. She survived there for ten days, until her name appeared on the card of gladiators and threw the wagering into disarray, because she was unknown and had drawn a famous opponent.
“She was handed a spear and driven onto the sand, and, before eighteen thousand spectators, she met the greatest gladiator of the era, and she died, Cephas. She died as the last opponent faced by Azad adh Arhapan.”
The prey moved about less than they had earlier, but the vibrations of their steps and sighs and endless prattle still carried along the stone strands. All the scouts felt it, and joined their minds together, then their minds with stone. They agreed. The prey was stuck, their position was fixed, and the fighters would come from the north.
Web and rock, thought the scouts, web and rock.
The demon sent its awareness through the stone strands, obliterating the personalities of all the plaguechanged aranea joined with it. The demon ignored the chaos this engendered in the ranks of his worshipers. The barely discernible individual personalities of the spiderfolk did not concern it, as long as their fighting prowess was unaffected.
The demon moved south over the plain, testing the limits of its leash. It had briefly imagined it was testing the limits of its freedom, but as soon as the concept came to its mind, the torment returned. The human woman was watching closely.
The demon did not consider the possibility of escape. It could not be said to be wise, but the demon was canny, and it knew any such attempt would find its physical body destroyed and its wretched soul sent spinning into the blackest pit in the universe. It had crawled out of that pit once already, and would not risk being cast down into it again.
The sorceress would never free it. She would not even reward it, as the demon doubted she possessed the depravity of imagination necessary to conceive something it would find rewarding. Except that she held the leash, the woman was a poor standin for the wizard who imprisoned it in the temple more than a century past. She was not even a pale shadow of the Qysars she claimed as ancestors.
The demon realized the woman might sense this direction in its thoughts, so shied away from them, fearing her psychic lash. But the lash did not fall.
A message coalesced out of the vibrations in the stoneweb. The shamans were joined in their awareness. They were the caste of aranea who believed the demon to be a god, and who had reshaped their warped and forgotten people when the land around them desiccated from nightmarish swamp to chthonic badland. The shamans pooled their thoughts from points scattered widely across the plain, where their naked bodies stretched across the ground, attuned to the tiniest trembles in the earth. They collectively decided on an action, then communicated their will to the vast, immobile eggmothers, who plucked the stoneweb and directed the hunters and scouts and fighters.
The demon felt a warning tug on its leash and turned its attention back to the wailing shamans.
The prey was stuck in the far southern reaches of the web, they told it. The scouts have fixed the particular junction of strands, and the fighters approach. Do they wait for its majestic and terrible coming?
The demon listened, waiting to see if the sorceress would offer direction. Nothing came, and it judged the distance to its prey to be such that it could drag its enormous body there in a moment or two-no farther than a human could walk in a day, certainly.
Send in the fighters, the demon told the shamans. The one that survived receiving the message passed it on.
A bolt of liquid stone shot out of the dark, enveloping Cephas’s head and shoulders and making it impossible for him to breathe. He dimly heard shouts and the rasp of steel clearing leather, then the screams of a wyvern intent on destruction.
A tremendous blow fell, shattering the net covering his face. He blinked rock from his eyes and looked up to see Mattias standing astride him, one of his canes held in both hands like a club.
“Keep your head down,” said the ranger. “We don’t know what they are, but these webs they cast are hard to clear off.”
He twisted his canes together, and the thin gold line of the bowstring shone in the dark. “Surprised the bastard didn’t have them disable it permanently,” Mattias muttered, then said, “Ariella was on watch at our right flank, beyond the balanced rock.”
Before they bedded down, after Corvus promised to explain the WeavePasha’s plot at first light, Cephas had made a long, careful check of his equipment. He turned the double flail over and over, wondering about its age and powers. About its provenance, and about the great value it held for Azad the Free. Corvus saw him and said, “I have no way of knowing, Cephas. He used a flail on the sands. Whether it was this one in particular …”
The kenku had not finished the thought, and now that Cephas heard the sounds of fighting out on the plain, he found that it did not matter. For now-for tonight, at least-the flail was just a tool he would use to help Ariella.
Mattias’s climbing of the rock was a hard thing to watch, but for all his awkwardness, the ranger made the top of the balanced tor quickly. The strength in his arms must be enormous, thought Cephas, as he trotted around the stone. As he went, he shouted over his shoulder. “Where are the others?”
A flaming arrow flew away from the rock. An explosion followed out in the dark, and inhuman screams of pain rose up.
“You will see Corvus and Shan only if you’re in trouble!” Mattias called. “Trill is on the wing. She’s in a testy mood.”
So am I, Cephas realized. It felt good to have implacable anger surging through him, energizing him. Did I become earthsouled again while I slept? he wondered.
But no, it was the wind-force gathering, and the heft of the double flail was different in his hands-not lighter, precisely, but suited for a more fluid style of sweeps and swings than the inexorable crushing blows he usually favored. He was going to fight differently, he sensed, but he was still going to fight.
An alien figure rose up from a cluster of boulders on his left, hefting a crude, stone-tipped spear and chattering from the mandibles that dominated the lower half of its face. Their attackers were like nothing out of a story, and like nothing from Grinta the Pike’s lengthy catalog of past and potential victims.
Cephas flexed his left arm, dropping the distal flailhead and bringing the proximal around high and hard. The spiked steel sphere struck the creature in the face, rupturing one of its enormous faceted eyes. It fell without casting its spear, the eerie chattering dying with the thing that sounded it.
“Another one!” Ariella shouted. “Behind you!”
Even as he turned, her glowing blue sword whipped out of her hand and swung in a wide arc around him, leaving a trailing wake of golden sparks that floated to the ground, guarding the two windsouled in a circle lit by magic. The blade cut through the spear arm of one of the creatures, but another ducked back, only to stop still and sink to the ground with white bile pouring from its mouth. Cephas caught the briefest hint of shadowy movement behind the thing and knew Corvus was near.
Very near, in fact. When Cephas turned to face Ariella, the kenku stood between them.
“Imaginative namers of places, Calishites,” Corvus said. “Plain of Stone Spiders, indeed.” A rushing wind above their heads caused them to instinctively duck, and when they straightened, the motionless silhouettes of three more of the spiderfolk plummeted to the ground, killed and dropped by Trill.
No other threats were apparent nearby, though the steady song of Mattias’s bow did not diminish. Every note his weapon sounded was followed by an answering scream or percussive shock.
“Shan saw another group of them circling around to the south and went to meet them,” said Corvus.
“This seems an ill-considered attack,” said Cephas. “Unless it is a probe of our strength.”
Corvus cursed, and Ariella
looked grim.
“Of course,” said the kenku. “Something else is coming.”
Cephas nodded sharply. “Then we should gather together and guard against it,” he said. He turned toward the camp. “Perhaps where Mattias stands and shoots.”
Corvus said, “If it is where Mattias chose to stand, then it is the strongest place on the field.”
“Ariella can carry you up,” said Cephas. “I will find Shan.”
“I have my own means of getting there,” Corvus said. The last word floated out of the shadows, and Cephas had no doubt the kenku stood beside Mattias in an instant.
“He said she was to the south,” Cephas said to Ariella. “Come on!”
Weapons at the ready, the pair of windsouled ran, curving wide of the camp in case more spiderfolk were drawn there. When they came to a wash or a sinkhole, they took to the air, and it was when they were floating down from such a leap that they found a clutch of dead spiderfolk, five or six in all.
Shan stepped out of the dark, breathing hard, her arms coated to the elbow in gore. She did not greet them, but stepped past them to the fallen creatures. She bent and retrieved dart after silvered dart from the corpses.
“Shan,” said Ariella, “we’re to join Mattias above the camp. Corvus fears-”
The halfling woman held up one hand, cutting the swordmage short. She brought her fingers to her lips, signaling silence. She looked north, and it was then that Cephas and Ariella heard the sound-heard and felt it.
Tremendous crashes sounded, growing louder, above something else, a sound almost like the sea in its liquid swell and fall, but thicker, contained.
“It’s like a giant dragging a wineskin over gravel,” Ariella said.
Cephas said, “If the giant has many legs.”
“Come, Shan!” said Ariella, and the halfling leaped onto the swordmage’s back. The windsouled pair ran for a moment, and then they flew.
At the direction of Mattias, even Trill came down from her hunt, awkwardly wrapping her long body around the rock so that the companions watched the thing that approached over a parapet of scale and muscle.
“I don’t understand,” said Cephas. “I see it, yet I cannot say what it is I see.”
“Foul magic,” said Ariella. “It is a nexus of fear and hate.” She rubbed her hand across her upper lip, the scant light making the blood flowing from her nose appear black against her silver skin.
The thing dwarfed the rock where they stood. Cephas wondered if it might even be as large as Jazeerijah. The milky white sac it dragged behind its countless grasping legs had something of the shape of the earthmote. The massive, distended body was bulbous near its front, then tapered to a spiked protuberance that left a trail of slime stretching over the northern horizon, glowing with heat or sorcery.
The impossible creature was still beyond the farthest range of even Mattias’s bow, but for all that its movements were a kinetic chaos, with the bulk of its body dragging over uneven ground and its tree-trunk legs clattering and pulling a half-dozen different directions, it approached with the speed of a galloping horse.
“It is a demon,” said Corvus. “An abomination of the Abyss and a stain on the fabric of the world. Oh, Acham el Jhotos, I never dreamed you would go so far.”
“Hmmm,” said Mattias, and he said it with such calm, that the others dragged their gazes from the nightmare on the plain to look at him. “Do you know, Corvus, that now that it’s come right down to it, I think you’re slandering the old tyrant? I doubt it’s his hand that guides that thing. Ah. It hardly matters.”
Corvus said, “But perhaps it does. If I can reach the WeavePasha, he might-”
“Swordmage,” said Mattias, interrupting Corvus’s rush of words. “What does your magic tell you? Can you send your thoughts as far as the edge of this rock? Can you even feel your own power within that thing’s aura?”
“No, Mattias,” she said.
“Of course you can’t,” he answered. “I can’t even tell what time of night it is, and I’m about as sensitive as a turnip. Corvus, you’re a hobbyist with a very impressive collection of toys built by your betters. But the only tools you have right now are your shadows and your blade. And against that thing, they’ll avail you as well as … well, as turnips.”
“So we stand here and die?” Cephas asked. Trill constricted her body, struggling to wrap them in her coiled torso and sheltering wings.
“Not at all,” said Mattias. “The plan is unchanged. Corvus will finally tell the whole truth about something. The djinn of Calimport will find you in the desert and sneer elaborately. Shan”-he turned, crouched, and looked the woman directly in the eye-“Shan will find Cynda, and the blood of those who hold her will make a warning sign, a ward that keeps the wise away so that they will sing of Shan’s descending on them for a hundred years.”
The old man winked at Cephas. “Didn’t know I liked stories, too, did you?”
Corvus stopped him. “What is this? What are you saying?”
Mattias pulled a quiver from his back and drew the first of its score of arrows. He stuck its point down in a crack that ran by his feet, then set another there, and another. He set out more and more of the black-fletched shafts as he spoke.
“I am doing what I’ve always intended, Corvus,” he said. “I am offering up my own secret at last. I am telling you why I have stayed by your side, through blood and darkness, tempering what I could and mourning what I could not. Telling you why I’ve made this journey of-gods, has it been forty years?”
Corvus waved his hand impatiently. “Shan,” he said, “climb down to the camp and gather all the food and water you can carry. Ariella, you remember the way to the coast? Go ahead, scout a route around any spiderfolk who still live. The dhow I piloted must have washed ashore on the tide, and with luck-”
“With all the luck in the world, with the goddess Tymora flying down to kiss your lipless mouth, we would make it the length of a drunkard’s song,” said Mattias. Anger flooded his voice. “Corvus Nightfeather! Death and doom approach, and they will not be stayed by your schemes! Our enemies have unbarred the gates of hell and set a hunter against us who will never pause, except for blood!
“But you can save these people. You can save yourself. I will do what I have always intended.”
“What are you talking about, Mattias?” asked the kenku. “What are you going to do?”
Cephas heard notes in Corvus’s voice he never imagined he would. He heard pain. He heard bewilderment, and grief.
“Ah, there it is, finally,” said Mattias, and he must have been talking about the demon, because he plucked an arrow from the ground, drew it to his cheek, and released. A tremendous explosion sounded in the night.
He turned, one last time, to Corvus.
“I am going to ensure your escape.”
Trill did not protest.
This shocked Cephas as much as anything else. Mattias paused in his shooting just long enough to put his hand on the wyvern’s head and say, “Take our friends as far as you can, girl, then flee north. Find others of your kind in the mountains. Stay far from the settlements of men and elves. You are free.”
The wyvern relaxed her grip on the balanced tor and fell away. The sound of her wings rose up from below, then was lost in another devastating release of magic from one of the ranger’s arrows. At the last instant, Shan leaped after Trill, darting past Mattias so that her shoulder brushed against his blurring hand. When the wyvern wheeled around with open claws, the halfling’s face was visible between her wings, white against the boiling clouds of black on the plain behind them.
Cephas and Ariella did not get to say good-bye before they were swept up.
“The kenku!” called Ariella.
Cephas looked down. The spider demon seemed to grow ever larger even as they retreated, but Mattias and Corvus were small figures on the distant rock. Corvus was leaning close to the ranger, as if he were saying something. Shadows rose and Trill dipped in her flight.
>
“He is above now, with Shan,” Cephas said.
The sounds of the ranger’s arrows were a long time in the fading, and were still discernible when Trill dived and deposited the four companions on the western bank of another petrified river. She did not pause after the halfling and the kenku slid from her saddle, even though Cephas approached with the intent of cutting her harness clear. The wyvern leaped back into the air, dipped her wing in something that might have been parting, and flew away, back to the east.
“She is ignoring Mattias’s wishes,” said Cephas. “She is going back to fight with him.”
Corvus shouldered his pack and started walking away from the river. “She is going back to die with him.”
Shan scrambled after Corvus, but Ariella and Cephas stood for a moment, torn between listening to the sounds of battle behind them and trekking after the kenku.
“Is that what he told you on the rock?” Cephas called.
“No more words passed between us than what you heard,” Corvus replied. “Now come on. These are the banks of the old Volomir River, still short of the desert. But we can be there by dawn.”
Another blast, the loudest yet, sounded behind them. Cephas imagined he heard Trill’s battle cry in it.
They walked through the dark, the way clear beneath bright stars. For a long time, none of them spoke.
When Corvus broke the silence, it was clear to the others that they should not respond.
“Well, he was a fool, of course,” said the kenku. “He spent his whole life making the wrong decision every time he was presented with a choice.
“He might have been a scholar, if you can imagine that. For all that he was raised among woodsfolk who valued tracking more highly than reading, he had a sharp mind and his family valued it, at least enough to send him to schools in the Silver Marches towns during the winters. He always went back when the thaws came, though. Always back to the forests.
“So, he decided to become another anonymous ranger. The North is full of them. But it turned out-and I suppose this is something that might have proven valuable if he had actually followed through-it turned out that Mattias Farseer was destined to be the greatest archer the world has ever seen.
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