Being human was horrible.
But they drove him and they drove him, and the terrifying fire-handed Man who had remade him gave him sharp commands, and he could only stagger on and on to their mad plan. Terrified, chained by magic, tormented. Mother, for you, he told himself, but it wore thin. He could not have known the agonies and the horrors he would be subjected to. He might even have defied Mother, faced with this.
For a long time he let their babble wash over him, his attention only on the misery of his new being, but eventually he found sufficient equilibrium that the words started falling into place, no matter how much he resented it. His ears were as perpetually open as his eyes, and he wondered if true Men could close those as well. Surely they must be able to. Nobody could live happily with such chaos continually intruding into their skulls.
A moment after that thought, he was struck with a wave of nausea at his own changed self, because the word “skull” had come naturally to his mind, and it had no place there. He did not want to own a skull.
He was just finding a tenuous balance within himself when they reached the place called Shogg’s Ford.
He had no idea. Perhaps even Mother had not known. She had not been abroad in the world for a long time, after all.
It was a nest, a crawling nest of Man. Here they had grown filthy fungal-looking excrescences in profusion, and then they had bred and festered until the entire hideous hole of a place was overrun with a scurrying tide of four-limbed, flabby-skinned Man-creatures.
Words burrowed into his mind, all-unsought: hovels, huts, houses, a village.
“So many.” The voice was strange to him. It was not from any of the Men he traveled with. He realized they were looking at him with those arrangements of articles on their faces that were expressions. Expressions were used to show the attitudes of Man toward the things their eyes rested on, he discovered. The “expressions” of his jailers and tormentors—which he would rather have remained a mystery—were uniformly hostile.
He realized the voice had been his.
One of them looked less fierce than the others. “It’s just a village,” the small male Man said. “You should try a city.”
The meaning of the word “city” followed unbidden a moment later, and the concept horrified Nth beyond any bounds, simply because of what it said about just how many of these Men there must be.
The female Man who commanded the agonizing light, and seemed to be like a Mother to this little brood of them, broke in. “Lief, go on ahead and find something to disguise . . . that as best you can.”
That, Nth realized, was he himself. He was beginning to think more clearly now, and to disentangle something of the net of dealings within the world of Men, and between that world and its newest and most unwilling immigrant. That they had made him into this form, and were now sufficiently chagrined over it that they wished to hide him introduced him to another new word. Hypocrite.
But Lief, the smallest male, was already nodding and heading off, while the rest settled down off the track, within sight of the village.
He had been trying to think of his captors as just “Man,” the homogenous mass he had perceived in the forest, but part of his transformation was a forcible induction to humanity, with all that entailed. They were individuals, each with different things to fear and loathe about them.
The one who had just gone was Lief, and he seemed least offensive. There was a furtive nature to him that was at least comprehensible to Nth, who had crept through his share of shadows in his time. The others were even less pleasant than he.
Two were plainly of greater power and authority. The male who had contorted Nth into this shape was Penthos, and it was his mind that had granted an understanding of human speech and the human world. At first he had seemed the very acme and exemplar of what it was to be human—a God-Man perfect in every line and motion. Nth had been in awe of him to start with, but as soon as he had begun to follow the speech of his captors he had realized that this worship was not in any way universal. Indeed, the expressions of the other Men when gazing upon Penthos could be read as annoyance and exasperation rather than adulation. With that realization, something had fallen from Nth, and he had understood that the awe he himself had felt was an artificial construct, something given to him by Penthos along with everything else. It was a trick played by creator upon creation. However resistant Nth might be to understanding the world of Man, it was that revelation—of the fallibility of even powerful Men—that made him realize how important it was that he make the effort to comprehend.
The other Man of Power was the female, their Mother. She was Dion, he understood, and her power was far more terrifying: that light inimical to his very nature, so that every look she cast his way could bring with it pain and unmaking if she chose. It was her task that had resulted in Nth being subjugated like this, he knew, and he was entirely certain that, when he had done what she needed him to do, she would have him destroyed. Despite the relative balance of power between them, she seemed to view him as some threat that must be wiped out the moment expedience allowed her to do so.
Of the other pair, they were of the same hatred, but of lesser ability to put it into practice. They were a male and a female, a distinction that Nth had no wish to make among Men, as it seemed inappropriate and somehow obscene, and yet it was obviously important enough to Penthos that it had carried over into his reworking. Cyrene was the female Man, and she simply regarded him with loathing and disgust, which for Nth was entirely mutual. Harathes was the other, and his hatred was more active, so that he was constantly finding excuses to shove or trip Nth on the road, when the Men of Power were not looking. That, at least, was honesty in him. Nth could almost appreciate the lack of masks. Almost.
Then the small Man, Lief, was back, his expression betokening great satisfaction.
“Am I not the most resourceful of all thieves?” he declared, then appeared to regret it because Dion had turned a stern gaze on him.
“I gave you money.”
Nth tried to follow the exchange, grasping for concepts that Penthos had gifted him with only loosely.
“I, ah, mean, in general, as a sort of wide-ranging assessment of my abilities,” Lief said awkwardly. “Obviously, I bought most of it. Look, here’s some proper clothes, so he doesn’t look like a wizard—”
“Oh, of course, we can’t have him looking like a wizard,” Penthos snapped with what even Nth recognized as sarcasm. “How terrible that would be!”
Lief’s expression shifted to “aggrieved.” “Seriously, he looks like a freak to start with. Have him look like a freak wizard and we’ll have a mob after us with torches and pitchforks. Let him at least look like some everyday sort of freak.”
“I am not a freak.”
They froze, staring at Nth. He had not exactly decided to speak—in fact, had he been able to, he would have chosen to stay silent and live a few more moments being ignored, but something in him—the native spider or the transplated Man—had piped up.
Their expressions were shifting and hard to read, but at last Harathes spat out, “Shut up, freak,” and that was apparently the end of it.
Lief still looked a little unhappy, and his eyes strayed to Nth a couple of times. “Anyway, some decent clothes for the road, a nice leather cuirass so he at least looks fit to travel.”
“A knife,” Cyrene observed.
“Everyone has a knife,” Lief said defensively. “I thought you wanted him to blend in?”
“We’re not giving it a knife,” she told him.
The small Man spread his hands, a gesture with complex connotations. “Fine. Anyway. All of that ate all your money, so be very thankful I was able to find these in the gutter.”
He held something up. Round, dark discs of glass on a wire frame.
“They’ll hide those . . . eyes of his, and if he wears his hood, the little ones on his forehead’ll get covered too. Smoked glass spectacles. Amazing what people don’t realize they’ve dropped, eh?”
Dion was still looking at him unhappily, but he told her, “It’s for the quest, right? For the Light? I’m sure whoever, ah, lost these would have given them willingly to the cause if we’d only been able to ask, eh?”
Shogg’s Ford had more inns and tavernas than most places twice its size. It was somewhere to pass through, not somewhere to live. Here, in the uncertain territories not yet claimed by Darvezian’s Darkness, nor actively protected by the Light of Armes, the doors were open to travelers of all inclinations. A place for dark deals, for traitors and turncoats and mercenaries, thieves and opportunists, adventurers and prodigies. Left to her own devices Dion would never have come to Shogg’s Ford save at the head of a cleansing crusade, but she was unhappily aware that Lief, and probably Cyrene, would have been regulars at places like this, had she not given them a higher purpose. Just as she was aware that Lief had stolen some priceless eyeglasses from an alchemist or black market merchant to disguise their new companion. Compromises. Everything in this quest had become an exercise in compromise, and every compromise eroded the vaunted purity of her status as a priestess of Armes. And yet the quest was worth it, wasn’t it? One could compromise a great deal if it meant putting an end to Darvezian, surely?
Ends and means. Dion had known fellow servants of Armes who had followed that road one compromise too far. She had even brought some of them to justice herself.
I feel I lose my way. She could confide in nobody, seek reassurance from nowhere. Until they found themselves somewhere with a proper temple, she must be strong and certain to the others, no matter how sullied and unsure she felt in her heart.
Shogg’s Ford was a bustling den of villainy. The streets were alive with a mixture of men and Ghants, the slimy, greenish skins of the Arghul-born, the ratlike features of Reshers. The writ of Armes, brought back from the Divine Planes after the prophet’s ascension and return, had confirmed that only humanity was fit for the Light, and that those other manlike races were creatures of the Dark. Here, though, everything was gray. There were debased men and women who neither knew nor wanted Armes’s grace, and there were Ghants and others who, though vile, were not actively in the service of the Dark Lord. It was a hive of opportunism and vice.
Cyrene had secured them a room in a leaning shack of a place with a lower floor that was almost entirely given over to a thronging taproom, or possibly brothel or smoke den, or all three. Dion was bitterly tempted to simply turn in, blot out the horrors of the place with sleep, and hope for dreams of Light. Her work was not done, though. It seemed her work would never be done.
“We need intelligence about the movements of Darvezian’s forces,” she told the others. “With Isinglas under siege it sounds as though the armies of Darkness are starting the new stage of the war in earnest.”
“What is our road, anyway?” Cyrene interrupted. “What’s this spider’s path business?”
“Well, we can take the opportunity to quiz the creature now we’re here, as well,” Dion decided. She tugged at the bridge of her nose, feeling a headache coming on. The sheer exuberant amorality of the place was already getting to her. “Cyrene, do you know this place at all?”
“I know some people to talk to, who’ll tell me most of the truth,” the other woman confirmed. “The Light isn’t entirely forgotten here.”
Dion had planned to hole up in their room while her less sanctified companions did the legwork, but Cyrene’s words gave her other ideas. “Truly? Even in this place?”
The bow-woman nodded cautiously.
“Then I will accompany you to them.” Because I could dearly use some indication that the Light is not simply to pass out of the world, unheeded and unmourned. I have been too long in dark places.
“Then I go too,” Harathes told her. “This place is a pit. You’ll be marked by every thing of Darkness on the streets.”
“If you must. Penthos, you have magical means of gathering information, I know. Do what you can.”
“It shall be as you command,” the mage said grandly.
“What about me? I’ll go talk to some less enlightened sources, shall I?”
Dion gave Lief a level stare. “You stay with the creature here in the room. One of us must.”
The little man looked outraged—no, that was just for show, Dion saw. He was just bitter that he wouldn’t get to go whoring and stealing while her back was turned, no doubt. She was immediately nagged by uncertainty. Surely Lief was a good man to have out gathering information—and wasn’t that what she needed? Didn’t that serve their quest? One more compromise, ends and means?
No. Consider it a punishment for his thieving ways. “You stay with the monster,” she told him severely, already knowing that she was the basest hypocrite, and that she was punishing him when in truth she should be punishing herself. For a moment she felt as though she were going to lose it, all her composure, all at once, just burst into tears before them and confess that, no, she was not sure at all, and that this entire venture was seeming more and more a lost dream.
But she had to be strong. They looked to her for their moral guidance. She must be firm, because there was no other anchor in the world for them, if not she.
Lief looked less than delighted to be anchored to the creature, Enth, but she had made her decision, and now she had to stick with it. That was how leadership worked.
There were small chambers built above, and Lief and Penthos repaired to one, with Nth following numbly in their way, squinting behind the dark lenses the thief had procured for him. Once there, the magician settled himself down on the floor, and Nth sensed by the prickling of his hairs that some manner of magic was afoot, or would be if Lief would only let the mage get on with it.
“Penthos . . .”
The magician cocked an eyebrow. “What is it?”
“I’m just going to . . . can I leave you with it . . . him . . . ? Only . . .”
“You cannot. I shall be in a trance. I can’t be expected to look after it.”
“But it’s your thing,” Lief pointed out. “You made it . . . turned it into . . . did whatever with it.”
“Dion said you had to look after it,” Penthos told him smugly. Human emotions were a new and unpleasant book to Nth, but Penthos had enough smug that even a spider was able to recognize it.
“Oh, right, fine then.” Lief folded his arms. “Well, will it do what I tell it?”
The magician gave him a level stare. “No, in which predilection it shall follow the grand majority of creation. Why should it?”
“So I get to be responsible for it but not actually get any power over it?” Lief demanded.
“Life is seldom fair. Now shut up, I need to concentrate.”
Nth, the it of their discussion, looked from one to the other, seeing Penthos close his eyes, and Lief adopt an expression of low cunning.
“What if it attacks me? No—what if it attacks you? What if Dion walks in and it attacks her, because you’re dead to the world meditating? What if it throttles you the moment you drop off, or whatever it is you do? It’s not as if I could do much to stop it—look at the thing, it must be twice as strong as me.”
Penthos rolled his eyes. “Very well. Creature, do what Lief tells you. There, happy?”
“Happier.” Lief appeared to settle down, watching Penthos ease himself into his trance, or whatever he was doing. Nth watched Lief, aware that this gambit of his was not played out, but having no idea where it was going.
Eventually, and presumably taking his cue from some familiar sign undetected by Nth, Lief stood up. “Away with the fairies, at last,” he declared. “Right, monster, you hear me?” After a pause, he added, “Answer me, will you?”
Nth judged that a nod here would be appropriate.
“Right, follow me, then. We’re going downstairs. I don’t care what Dion says, I’m not pitching up at even this approximation of civilization and not getting a drink. How fair would that be? Problem with that woman is, she’s too damn holy for her own good. She
forgets that the rest of us are just a bit more human.” Lief eyed his charge. “Some of us, anyway. You drink, monster? Answer me—look, just take it as truth that if I ask a question, you answer, right? You know what a question is?”
Nth nodded.
“And the drinking part?”
Nth nodded again. He felt very afraid of this energetic little man. Downstairs was full of humans and others that might as well be humans. There was noise, and inexplicable things were done with liquids and discs of metal and the bodies of other humans.
“Come on then.” Lief opened the door, then looked back, his face twisted awkwardly. “I’ve had better drinking buddies. There was a time when people actually wanted to share a jar with me, and I didn’t have to resort to coercing magic monster spider people by secondhand duress.” A pause, in which Nth searched wildly for some appropriate response and found none, before the little man added, “So I guess that means I’m buying the round, eh?” His mouth turned up at the corners, but in a rather forced way. He did not seem happy, even now he had got what he wanted.
The big room below was a seething maggots’ nest of humans and Ghantishmen and other things, most of them armed and almost all of them bigger than Lief, but the man shouldered and elbowed his way to where a makeshift barricade of barrels had apparently been built by a very fat woman. Nth felt such a measure eminently sensible, and would have liked to shelter behind it too, as protection from the surging tide of the crowd. Every moment he was being touched, some spongy-skinned human creature jostling him, leaning into him, or brushing against him. The feel of their pliable hides was profoundly uncomfortable, a horrible and unsought intimacy.
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