Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “You see,” Abnasio said, ever more mournful at the state of Lief’s soul, “how evil twists the minds of those infected with it. This poor sinner still thinks he serves the Light, despite the dreadful act of Darkness he was about to commit. Take heed, my brothers.”

  Lief felt that this was a mirror more properly turned to face its owner. “Seriously?” he demanded. “I’ve seen the kit you’ve got laid out there. I’ve known priests of the blood god who would have been oohing and aahing over some of those toys, and asking who your torturer was so they could book him for parties. So honestly, who’s the one doing bad stuff and claiming to be good, exactly?”

  “And now the confessions start,” came Abnasio’s inexorable rejoinder. “Already he has fallen from the path enough to become a devotee of vile temples.”

  “Hey! Excuse me! I was robbing them at the time!” Lief returned hotly.

  “And the sin of larceny, also.”

  “Yes, but . . . look . . .” The whole situation was starting to feel rather familiar, speaking as a man who’d had to try and explain himself to the authorities—temporal and spiritual—before.

  “Do not fear, my son,” Abnasio said, not very reassuringly. “You are safe now. When our ritual is complete, the source of corruption will be removed. I know that you seek the Light. I know that, as all men, you find the path hard to follow. But you will be saved. We will not let you succumb to the Dark.”

  Lief was beginning to wish he’d kept the knife. “Come on then,” he challenged vaguely. Even as he said it, he realized that he didn’t know whether he wanted them to come on, or not. “Do it, whatever you’ll do. Come and take me.” He raised his little fists.

  “You will be held, until we are done,” Abnasio informed him. “After that, some period of correctional penance may be required but, as we will be on our journey to defeat Darvezian, armed with Tyrant’s Bane, our Weapon of Righteousness, that will not be our task. We will hand you to the staff of the Potentate before we leave. You are not an evil man, merely misguided.”

  Then they swamped him, three or four monks grabbing him, tearing the borrowed robe from him—none too gently—and then frog-marching him out back into the main ritual area, where he was searched thoroughly and set down close to the altar and bound. No sacred shackles for Lief, it seemed, so perhaps they were in short supply, but the rope they used was plenty strong enough, and they seemed suspiciously good at tying knots. Lief let himself speculate about intramonastic fun and games after lights out in the dormitory. It wasn’t much, but he wasn’t really in a position to strike any more significant blow against them.

  Worse, the ritual was beginning, with a host of monks coming in to chant and wave around smelly censers and generally line up to be counted. Shortly thereafter, Enth was hauled out, and Lief winced to see them dragging him by his chains, while he scraped and scrambled to keep his feet. Once he fell, and when they hauled him up he let out a thin keening sound of grief and agony that belonged to neither man nor beast.

  He was dragged before the altar, and Lief thought, Well, crap, this is it. He had kept a hopeful eye out for a quartet of figures in purloined robes sneaking in at the back, but he was sourly aware that none of his companions were likely to be able to pull off the come-as-a-monk trick in any event, nor would they likely even think of it. The lack of any visible presence from Dion and company did not lend itself to the idea that they had a secret master plan about to be put into action.

  After that, with Enth crouched shuddering before the altar of Armes, the ritual continued to go on, with stern sermons, some rather tuneless singing, and a number of sonorous invocations. Despite the overall feeling of peril, Lief felt his eyelids drooping with the raw and unadulterated tedium of it.

  And then it was all quiet, and Abnasio had in his hand a long two-pronged blade, and Lief could not help but notice that a couple of monks had a fire going in a little stone-walled forge that was swiftly making the air stifling and hot. They had pots there, such as might be used for the boiling of glue.

  “Know, brethren,” the high priest declared, because apparently he reserved “brethren” for formal occasions, “that before you is no man, but a spider, of all the things of Darkness the most loathed. Know that the fall of Darvezian, as prophesied, shall come by the spider’s path and with the spider’s fang. And we have long known, by the words of the seer Gamograth, that one would come who would bring us the makings of such a weapon, in this age, at this time. So it was foretold, and so it has come to pass.”

  “So it has come to pass,” murmured his followers.

  “Know then, that the spider-creature was formed into this shape for us to use, so that the very substance of its being shall go to make the body of our weapon: bones, skin, sinew, teeth, all shall be extracted with full ceremony to become the blade that shall rid the world of the Dark Tyrant Darvezian! So it shall come to pass!”

  “So it shall come to pass.”

  And, in the moment’s silence that came after, Lief burst out, “You’re all fucking insane!”

  The monk behind him cautioned him to stay out of ecumenical matters by way of a kick to the kidneys, but he gabbled on, “Look at yourselves! You’re going to make a weapon out of a hu—a living body? You’re going to make it out of bones and teeth? You’re going to scrimshaw Darvezian to death? You—stop kicking me, you turd!—you think this is holy? You’re going to cut him open slowly and lever the poor bastard apart because you think the Light wants that? Torture is the way of virtue now, is it?”

  Abnasio’s smile was so kindly you could shave with it. “My child, you know not what you say. You cannot torture a thing of the Dark. It has not the sensibilities of those raised to the Light.”

  Lief stared at him, and all he had left, the last shot in his quiver, was: “But look at him. He’s hurting. Even with those things you put on him, he’s hurting.”

  “Those born to the Dark cannot know pain, as you or I,” Abnasio said simply. “The true source of pain is the soul’s agony when confronted with the imperfection of the world, and all physical pain is a mere reflection of that. There is no soul to a creature of Darkness. At its heart is only a vessel of black wickedness that festers, and seeks to spread its malignity to others. Your pity for this beast is admirable, and yet misplaced.”

  At a gesture, Enth was hauled up until he had his back hard against the edge of the altar, arms twisted until they lay flat along it—an experience as painful as the touch of the chains from the way he writhed—and his head dragged back by the hair. For a moment Lief thought they would cut his throat first, which might at least have been merciful. Mercy was not part of Abnasio’s dogma when it came to things of the Dark, however, and he touched the points of his blade to somewhere south of Enth’s ribs.

  Then a clear voice rang out, “Hold!” and they were clattering down the stairs: Dion and the rest, all four of them, and Lief exploded with, “About fucking time!”

  Abnasio stepped from the altar, shaking his sleeves—perhaps unconsciously—to free his arms, as though he and Dion were about to settle this by wrestling. “Welcome,” he boomed in that authoritative voice of his, although Lief thought he detected just a little strain there. Yes, that’s right, now there are two of you with the Light, so you’ll have to share it. Play nicely now.

  “Stop this abomination at once.” You had to give Dion credit. She just stormed through the ranks of the monks as though they weren’t there, and they drew back from her. She was a priestess of Armes, and they were good little votaries. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Armes’s will,” Abnasio rejoined. “All honor to you, for you have brought to Armesion the means by which Darvezian may be defeated, but it is for the followers of Gamograth to take this raw material you have supplied, and force the mighty weapon Tyrant’s Bane from it, so that Darkness may be purged forever from the land.”

  “That is not a true reading of the prophecy,” Dion snapped. Harathes and Cyrene had heavy staves in their h
ands, and they were watching the crowd nervously because their mistress was right there in the middle of it. Behind them all, Penthos stood with the utterly serene expression of a man who will set things on fire the moment the word is given.

  Lief thought about being in an enclosed space full of monks on fire. It seemed to offer few advantages to the nonincendiary version, and several drawbacks. He hoped that Dion was keeping the magician on a tight leash.

  “The prophecy says that Darvezian shall be brought low by spider’s fang and by spider’s path,” Dion declared. “We have hunted out the mother of spiders, an obscenity that makes this creature seem a mere catcher of flies in contrast, and we have wrested from it the venomous fang that I intend to drive into Darvezian’s Dark chest, but this creature is needed to guide us by secret ways that will let us reach the Dark Lord without trying conclusions with every monster and Doomsayer and Ghantishman between here and his tower.”

  Abnasio actually chuckled at that. “I applaud your fervor, my sister. I give you all tribute, as she who has made our work possible. You must know, however, that the spider’s path is merely a reinforcement of the fact that by the spider’s fang shall Darvezian die. It is not a separate requirement. Gamograth himself has said this, and in doing so he was following Innazi’s On Prophecies and the teachings of Meflo the Bright.”

  Dion’s face took on an odd look not before seen by Lief, although he guessed that this was because he had never happened across her when she was at debating class in the seminary. It was a rather arch and patronizing look, but one very specific to the face of a person of education about to show another person of education how wrong they are. “It is, however, written in the Divinatory Epistles of Chalcy that every word of prophecy is like a rare pearl with its own import, and Blessed Armes would not lower himself to merely repeat in one line a message already given in another. It is therefore for us to correctly interpret every intention of the divine. As you are failing to do.”

  Abnasio drew breath in through his nose, an audible dismissal. “You will be familiar with the Edicts of Fargalon where the sage Nieth recounts that Armes is well aware of the frailties of human comprehension”—and somehow he had turned that phrase into a direct attack on Dion’s intelligence—“so that oft times, when the message is as vital as in this case, the truth must be repeated twice or even more. Alas, for more general comprehension, Armes did not give us a third repetition, that even you could not argue with.”

  There was the sort of murmur among the monks that Lief would have expected after a particularly vicious blow in a bar fight. For his part, though, while this was presumably the theological grudge match of the century and he could probably have sold tickets to it across Armesion, he had never really taken to settling arguments by way of three falls and an inarguable philosophical truth. Instead he had been working for some time on the ropes, using a peculiar flexibility inherent in his joints and the benefits of long hours of practice. Already he was mostly out of them.

  “Ah, well, but,” Dion led with, “Dorthric says that, while the power of the Light can make the blind see and the deaf hear, no amount of repetition will bring the willfully ignorant to true knowledge.”

  Ba-dum cha! thought Lief, and with that his arms were free, and nobody was looking at him.

  “Litho of the Northern Wastes was quite specific—” Abnasio began, but Dion jumped on him, verbally at least.

  “Litho is a corrupted secondary source—!”

  “My own tutelary deacon swore by Litho—!”

  “Well, my tutelary deacon at least knew about the veracity of ancient Boralian texts!”

  “Your deacon’s a corrupted secondary source!” Abnasio spat.

  “How dare you denigrate the good name of Aloysius the Pure!” Dion demanded, which was apparently a name to conjure by if you were a churchgoing type, and therefore made for good ammunition.

  Abnasio seemed caught on some sort of philosophical fork at that point, stuck between trying to attack Dion and yet at the same time not get down to mud-wrestling with the sacred memory of whoever Aloysius the Pure had been. Lief, who was inching toward Enth right then, wondered what cunning piece of sophistry he would dredge up in his time of need.

  “Take the heretics!” he shouted.

  “Oh thank you!” Lief hissed to himself, because abruptly the monks were bundling forward toward Dion and the rest, and he could close the remaining distance to Enth. He could hear Dion shouting out, “Kill none of them! Beat them down only! They are all servants of the Light, however—” And then her voice cut off for a second, and Lief spared a panicked glance in case she had been brought down already. However, she had her mace out, and apparently “beat them down only” was by no means inconsistent with breaking bones with a blunt object, and Dion was throwing herself into it with a will.

  Lief had his hands on the manacles now, and he had retrieved that other set of picks that the monks hadn’t found. Yes, he had given up on them before, but he felt that a fully ambulatory fighting Enth would be a far more useful fellow fugitive than a crippled Enth. Swiftly, hunched about the manacles, he got to work, letting his hands inform him while his eyes raked the melee.

  The monks were burly and well exercised, but not fighters by nature, nor armed. Their first wave had been battered into the ground by Cyrene and Harathes’s staff work, Lief saw, but now it was down to fists, elbows, and feet. Cyrene had always been a good close-in fighter and, be they ever so chaste, monks still had genitals just like other men. Harathes himself was mostly relying on sheer brute strength and armored gloves.

  Behind them, Penthos was apparently carrying on a running argument with Dion, having surrounded himself with a glittering and impenetrable shield. Lief caught brief snatches of it as he worked, and it was apparent that the wizard was dying to argue the case for a mass auto-da-fé of the followers of Gamograth, and was getting nowhere with it.

  “Just do some magic, Penthos!” Dion shouted at him at last. “No fire! No killing! Just do some magic to them and make yourself useful, you fraud!”

  Lief actually got to see that one hit home, and the resultant betrayed expression that passed briefly over the wizard’s saturnine features. Then he had dropped to one knee, with such determination that Lief thought he’d been cold cocked. A second later, though, an invisible eruption of force ripped through a crowd of the monks who had been trying to get through his magical barrier, hurling them about the room like dolls. Lief reckoned that it was about as nonfatal as serious internal bleeding by mace, and therefore that it counted as a point for Penthos.

  And still the manacles were stubborn, and would not unlock, and in his extremity Lief found that he had only one option left to him: the thing he had sworn never to do on many occasions, the compromise of his rogue’s honor, the last resort of any man of crime.

  “Armes,” he whispered. “Come on, man. Your work, eh? Come on, give me a break!”

  “Lief!”

  His head jerked up at the sound of his name, concentration utterly lost, but his eyes met those of Dion’s across the busy room. She was clouting monks with fierce abandon, unable to get close to him, but some connection passed between them, dodging about all those flailing limbs. A blessing. A blessing of Armes just for him.

  The manacles sprang open and Enth, creature of Darkness, was free.

  “Let’s go!” Lief snapped, but the prisoner was quailing back against the altar, hands shielding his face, and Lief turned . . .

  Abnasio was there, disc of Armes presented strongly, and a handful of still intact monks with him.

  “Seize them both!” he roared, purple-faced with fury.

  Lief punched him, really quite hard, and then slapped at the disc of Armes, trying to get it away so that Enth could join the fray.

  A moment later he felt a shock of pain, and he sat down on the altar, abruptly weak. There was something new around his midriff level, and although he could identify it as a dagger hilt, he could not quite work out how it had got
there. The monk who had donated that item to his private internal collection was looking shocked and pasty. Well, how do you think I feel, eh? Then the urgency of the situation came to him and Lief cried out, “I’m hurt! For fuck’s sake, help!” before falling backward across the altar in a welter of blood and torture implements.

  6: Old-Fashioned Hospitality

  CYRENE WAS THE CLOSEST. She saw Lief sagging, and the spider-creature Enth cowering at the altar. For a moment she thought that the monster had attacked the thief—it would be the confirmation she had wanted, the thing she wished to believe. Even as she barreled in, she saw that it was the monks who had crossed the line: Enth was pinned back by Abnasio’s symbol of Armes, incapable of anything. At that point, she had not spotted the dagger hilt or the spreading stain of darkness that was growing about it. She did not register how serious the wound was.

  “Take the creature!” the lead disciple of Gamograth roared. “Take the creature and clear the room of these heretics!”

  “What have you done!” Dion cried, and there was another thunderous detonation of Penthos’s magics. It was not yet clear whether the balance of power would allow Abnasio to clear the room of them or not. Cyrene decided she could not wait to find out.

  A monk tried to get in her way just as she was pressing forward, and she put his nose to the test with her elbow and found it wanting. Even as he was reeling back, sneezing blood, she hooked a foot behind his knee and then stamped on the closest part of him as she trampled over him. It was only the shoulder, far from ideal, but it kept him out of the way. There were another couple of monks in between her and Abnasio, but they were moving in on Harathes, who was making his own inroads. Cyrene stepped behind them neatly and punched one in the back of the neck. When the other one turned to see what had befallen his comrade, she had already stepped into his shadow, keeping at his back like some sort of slapstick routine, and she put a knuckle in his ear with considerable force. Then she turned back for the main event and saw at last that Lief had been stabbed.