For a moment Heno was impassive, and she thought she must have offended his sensibilities, but then he showed his sharp teeth in a sudden grin. “Celest, I’m a Heart Taker,” he told her. “There’s no one thing that unites all the Kinslayer’s followers, except for the Kinslayer, but being a Heart Taker is the next best thing, because nobody likes us. But they will listen, almost all of them, because they know we’re to be feared.” The prospect of abusing his position seemed to have made him abruptly cheerful. “This will get us where we need to be, will it?”
“It will get us where our man went next, or closer to it,” she confirmed. “Where we go after that, I don’t know.”
“Maybe we’ll just find his bones and the crown,” Heno suggested, obviously warming to the prospect.
THERE WAS QUITE a large concentration of Yorughan based a few miles into the Unredeemed Lands, but Kait’s most recent scouting intelligence suggested they were undergoing a cataclysmic bout of infighting as various leaders struggled for overall control. Nobody wanted to go waving a Temple banner anywhere near them, and risk unifying them all into one anti-human alliance. Celestaine herself thought about General Thukrah and his efforts—not to mention his pragmatic approach to the war’s victors—and wrote a note for a rider to run around the edge of the Unredeemed Lands to Bleakmairn. The arrival of a respected Yorughan war leader who was willing to come to accommodations with just about anyone could only improve matters.
More of an immediate problem was the Kelicerati colony in the dense forest near the outpost’s gate, which had been a poisoned thorn in everyone’s side during the great push against the Kinslayer’s forces. The tree-dwellers had spent the war sallying out whenever they were unwatched to waylay supply trains, mount surprise attacks, kill messengers, and do the various uniquely unpleasant things that the Kelicerati life cycle required. Since the war, they had reacted aggressively to any attempt to curtail the forest’s boundaries, leading to one open clash that had been costly for both sides, but they hadn’t actually tried expanding their territory or taking the fort. In light of the Temple’s new statement of intent, Kait was clinging to that fragile thread in the hope that it meant a dialogue could be established.
“Kelicerati?” Heno echoed without enthusiasm. “Feh.”
The forest-dwellers had played more of a role in the nightmares of the free world than on the actual battlefields, for which everyone had been grateful. It turned out that ‘everyone’ included the Yorughan as well, who found the spider-people as creepy as humans did. The Kelicerati had never been particularly biddable servants of the Kinslayer, Heno explained. Mostly he had just seeded forests with them in parts of the world he hadn’t wanted his enemies to be able to traverse freely, and left them to it.
That he was making this explanation to a gathering of the outpost’s leaders rather than just to Celestaine was the remarkable thing. Here was a Yorughan Heart Taker lecturing Ilkin and Arvennir and all the rest about the war, and they were listening. Not happily, perhaps; not without a scowl when he unthinkingly referred to the Kinslayer’s armies as ‘we,’ but still they listened.
“So you’re saying you can’t help,” Kait clarified.
“I’m saying I will do what I can, but I can’t even talk to the Kelicerati,” Heno told her. “I don’t understand their noises, and they have this mind-to-mind speech of their own I can’t break in on.”
“That…” Kait grimaced. “That won’t be a problem. We have a translator. Of sorts.” If she took any joy from Heno’s expression of incredulous horror, it didn’t show.
They had been sparring with the Kelicerati for years, Kait explained, here and elsewhere. Early on, the spider-people had made any travel near the forest lethal. They seemed impossible to surprise, hiding in every shadow and behind every tree. When they came near the fort, they were cut down with sword and arrow, but the forest itself remained inviolable, and at night they would raid in all directions, scuttling from their fastnesses to ambush anyone who hadn’t got behind safe walls by dark.
The Kelicerati might not have been mainstays of the Kinslayer’s armies, but he had made them a common problem for anyone trying to break into enemy territory. He’d scattered their colonies like spring-traps. Somehow, though, a bleak tradition had arisen amongst the scouts of those who had to face them. Kait was slow to give details, instead introducing them to one such specialist ranger, a man named Meddig.
When they first met, Meddig wore a leather mask, and she thought he must be a Tzarkoman or something, then guessed he had some injury or disfigurement to hide. He spoke slowly and precisely, reminding her a lot of Nedlam when the big Yorughan was trying really hard to be understood around her tusks.
“They have a dozen smaller nests around the forest,” Meddig explained. The rhythm of his speech was sporadically interrupted by random stresses, as though someone was thumping him on the back at unpredictable intervals. “There is a big one in the centre, caves beneath. They talk about a leader sometimes.”
Meddig could hear the Kelicerati speak sometimes, in his head, because of something he had done to himself years before. It was a risky procedure; sometimes it led to madness or death. Having advance warning of Kelicerati activity had apparently been worth the risk to those who had to live near them.
“Show them,” Kait directed him. “They need to understand.”
He doffed the mask reluctantly. At first she just thought his face was pock-marked, as though he’d had some disease of the skin.
The Kelicerati were most notorious for the way they made little Kelicerati. They liked warm flesh to incubate their eggs. Meddig, and those others of his tradition, stole those eggs and had surgeons place them beneath their skin to hatch and develop. The process was extremely painful, he explained candidly. The doctors would tie the victim to his bed as the things hatched, under strict instructions not to intervene as the larvae began to consume flesh and bone.
And then, at a precisely calculated time, the victim—that was his phrase for a category of people he himself was a part of—was fed a virulent poison to kill off the grubs. If the timing was right, a connection would have been made.
“I get headaches sometimes,” he said to Celestaine, almost defiantly. “But I hear them. And they can hear me. If I call, they will know it.”
“And you’re willing to try and make peace with them?” she demanded, because she would have wanted to exterminate the entire scuttling race, she thought, if it had been her hearing their voices in her brain.
Meddig smiled with half his face. “They’re a part of me, Forinthi. I’ve lived with them for more than a year, now. It’s hard, being at war with yourself. Peace would be pleasant.” He reminded her of Ralas then, a man trying to live with a terrible burden that was never going to go away.
A SMALL PARTY went out to front the Kelicerati, all of them mounted so that they could show a clean pair of heels if things went wrong: Celestaine and Kait were there, Meddig and Heno, Amkulyah for his sharp eyes and a handful of others from the fort. Nedlam had argued bitterly about coming along, but there was no horse that could carry her, and if things did go badly, even she wouldn’t be able to hold off an entire Kelicerati colony on her own.
Their counterparts emerged from the cover of the trees slowly, called forth by Meddig’s unheard voice. There were three of them, plus a scorpion-thing as big as a dog, and Celestaine had to fight down all sorts of memories from times when she had been cutting off jointed limbs and poking out glittering eyes during the war. Kelicerati were about the height of a tall man, but slender: certainly smaller than even a runtish Yorughan. They had a hard skin that was almost like a shell, and several eyes—four or five or six or eight, depending on who-knew-what. Their mouths were not like mouths at all, really, dominated by two inward-curving fangs with tips like glass needles. They wore harnesses for their weapons and gear, but little else in the way of clothes, leaving the neither-ness of their physiology on show—not quite human, not quite spiders, not quite anything
.
“Shelliac,” Amkulyah said, surprised.
“They’re not Shelliac,” Celestaine said sharply.
“They are like them, though.” He looked at her, an Aethani who had never grown familiar with the one nor fought the other. “Do you not see?”
“I thought the Kinslayer made them from nothing, like most of his monsters.” Celestaine was here to play diplomat, but distrust was creeping up on her like an ambush.
“So did I,” admitted Heno. “But now he says it…”
“They’re not…” But if she squinted hard, they almost were. And Shelliac kept their bodies covered, and made themselves as human as possible to interact with humans. Take away the Kelicerati’s savage fangs, reduce the number of eyes… Was this some lost atrocity of the Kinslayer, to take a band of Shelliac and turn them into this?
Heno had his hands out. He was still in full Heart Taker regalia, of course, and the Kelicerati plainly recognised it. He named himself and his station for them, in two human languages and in Yorughan speech, and waited for Meddig to relay the meaning wordlessly in the spider-people’s own talk. Celestaine concentrated hard on the forest-dwellers, trying to read them as she would a Shelliac. She realised with a start that she recognised some of the twitching of their hands as mood-qualifiers, just as the peaceful boat-people would use to supplement other elements of their speech. How did I never see that? Because I wasn’t looking for it.
Heno was taking a firm line with them: the last thing Kait wanted was for the entire forest-full of Kelicerati to decide the humans had gone soft. He was speaking peace, though—an offering to pause hostilities and see what arose out of it.
Meddig listened, went inward, his eyes losing focus, then snapped back to them. “They will meet,” he said, frowning at his own words. “I can feel they’re afraid. And… other things, feelings there aren’t words for.” A shiver passed through every part of him except where his face had been frozen, nailed down by the parasites that had died there. “There is a grove, a Way-shrine for the Oerni. It is also a shrine for them, somehow. That is where to meet.”
Kait exchanged glances with Heno, who shrugged. “Sounds like a trap to me.”
“Is it?” she asked Meddig. “Why not talk here, right now?”
“Their leader wants to see you. Their leader can’t come out here, or—no, they fear you will kill their leader. I can’t feel the leader at all, too far, or… I don’t know. But that is what they say. Or it’s what they mean.”
“Well, tell them we… will discuss it, and if we agree then I suppose we send some people into the forest. Volunteers only.” Kait’s voice shook a little, and Celestaine knew that she would be among them. She wasn’t a general, but a battlefield Hegumen. She led from the front.
MEDDIG THOUGHT THAT the Kelicerati were telling the truth, in that they would meet peaceably. He claimed that their mental web wasn’t something they could dissemble over. Everyone else was plainly wondering whether he was just a puppet dancing on their strings. Going into the forest to have tea and cake with the spider monsters wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good time, and Meddig’s halting attempts to explain what he felt of their nature didn’t help much. The Kelicerati mind was full of concepts he could feel but not interpret or understand. Similarly, plenty about the human mind was plainly just so much noise to them, including the very relevant human concept of ‘revulsion’ which would be playing a major part in any negotiations.
“I’m like something of theirs, to them,” Meddig said. “I could walk in and out of their places a hundred times without danger, so long as I didn’t draw blade or light a fire. They’re all together in here.” He tapped his head. “To them, that’s like warmth and home and mother, being at one like that. They think… I’m honoured, to be there with them.”
“What do you think?” Celestaine asked him.
“I think… people don’t look at me the same, since this was done to me. They don’t accept me. They don’t trust that I’m human. The Kelicerati know I’m one of theirs, even though I am human.” He gave a slightly hysterical little laugh. “Some mornings I just don’t know what I am, any more.”
“We’ve killed a lot of them,” Kait said thoughtfully. “They’ve killed a good few of us. And done worse than kill. We’ve found our people sometimes, still alive, but…” She made a twitchy gesture towards Meddig. “But worse. All eaten away, with one of them growing within their skin.”
“Better than being dead and rotting, to them,” breathed Meddig. “To them, it is not just food, it is becoming a part of them. To them it is good.”
“How much do you need this peace?” Celestaine asked, thoroughly unsettled by him.
“If we can somehow come to an accommodation with them—if we can even get their agreement to leave us alone as we skirt their forest—then we can get to the interior and fight, or talk, or whatever the hell we’re supposed to be doing,” the Hegumen decided. “Otherwise we just fight them and fight them—and we don’t have the strength to drive them away or wipe them out, and they’re not going to all come out and make themselves targets. And the Temple—the gods say…”
“Even these? I mean, even the Yorughan don’t like them,” Celestaine said.
“And I’d be happier if it were Yoggs and not Crawlies,” Kait said, heartfelt, “but we play the hand we pick up when we sit at the table, right?” The gambling metaphor sounded strange from a Templar.
The deciding factor was the Oerni Wayfarer, Olastoc, who had some jurisdiction over the shrine. He wanted to see whether the place had been entirely defiled, or if it retained some residual divinity.
The next morning saw a whole procession heading out into the twisted forest; on foot this time, as the horses wouldn’t venture beneath the canopy. Olastoc had dressed himself as a Wayfarer on the move, which was to say, heavy practical robes and not a sniff of the priest to him. Around him, Kait and her dozen Templars seemed tiny, barely reaching his shoulders. Oerni always seemed to move slowly, mostly because they were careful around breakable things like humans. Once outside the fort’s walls, Olastoc set the pace, pushing aside branches with his staff and brooking no barriers.
Ralas stayed behind again—they left him in the mess tent tuning a harp one of the Arvennir had provided. Celestaine took the other three with her, though; she wanted them at her back if things went sour.
Beneath the knotted canopy the forest was like dusk, and Heno conjured up a cold light that gave illumination but no cheer. There had been a path to the Wayshrine, back before the Kinslayer came, but now there was almost no trace of it, the ground snarled up by the clutching roots of the trees. They had to rely on Olastoc and Meddig, who between them navigated their way to the place. Heno stood at their shoulders with the light dancing in his upraised palm, and everyone else crowded in close. Beyond its frosty radiance, the darkness between the trees was absolute.
“They’re out there, of course,” Kait said, through gritted teeth. “And worse, too. It’s not just Kelicerati in these woods, and whether we can trust them or not, nothing else is looking to make a deal.”
“What other things?” Celestaine asked.
“All sorts. Vilewolves, Red Vine Walkers, various one-offs that got out from the Kinslayer’s laboratories.”
Soon after they ran across something like a horse-sized boar with a hide of rust-coloured scales and a serpent for a tongue. It hissed and squealed at them, but meeting only a fence of sword-points, it turned and clattered clumsily off between the trees, as if it were a normal animal. Of the Vilewolves and the rest, they saw not a sign.
Then Meddig announced that the shrine was ahead, and they broke from the impenetrable canopy into a clearing around a huge stone it would have taken an Oerni’s strength to move. Under normal circumstances, the monolith would have dominated the view, even with a dozen skinny Kelicerati hunched against the sunlight, their heads cocked to shade their many eyes. Nobody spared them much attention, though, and Celestaine was reminded of Meddig saying t
hat he had no sense of their leader in their spared headspace. The reason for that was now evident: there was no bloated spider-mother here to bargain with them. Awaiting them, its sinuous body coiled about the great stone, was a dragon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
WHATEVER THE ORIGINS of the Kelicerati, the origins of dragons were well known. There had been such beasts on the face of the world in the dim recesses of history. One of the first tasks given by the gods to their Guardians had been to rid the world of them, because they had been vast, fiery, venomous and jealous, each one bent on an individual war against all other life. There were statues in the Ilkand Temple and elsewhere showing Lord Wall and Fury and even the Undefeated slaying the serpentine monstrosities; even the Reckoner—the Kinslayer as would be—had shed his share of draconic blood. The Guardians had performed their task well, back in the mists of time. No more dragons had been uncovered since.
Then the Kinslayer had mounted his war, and one of his particular hobbies had been to breed monsters to plague his enemies, either as part of his armies or just to let loose upon the world. Of course he had recalled the dragons of old, and he had done his best to recreate their towering ferocity, but never quite succeeded. The height of his efforts had been Vermarod, that Celestaine had killed on the field at Bladno; and after that, she felt, he had become discouraged with the whole enterprise. He had created a variety of reptilian monsters later in the war, but they had been smaller and more specialised, like the Ram-wyrms. His false dragons had been thin on the ground, and not replaced when they met their violent ends. Heno claimed that they had somehow inherited the intractable nature of the originals, and even the Kinslayer had wrestled to control and direct them. Celestaine had always assumed a few had outlived their creator, but she hadn’t looked to meet one in her lifetime. They had surely fled the haunts of man, she’d thought, and she was right: one of them had fled here.
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