Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Then she heard the door of the next room slam, and a commotion start up, of thumping and banging, and groans and snarls, so that it seemed to her that one of her fellows must be struggling with a Ghantish assassin sent to murder them all. She burst through, and found only Harathes, who had been rather ineffectually kicking the furniture about and slamming his fists on the walls. He looked drunk and angry, but he had the grace to look shamefaced before her.

  “What is it?” she demanded. In all honesty she was sufficiently worldly to be able to guess, but she left it to him to speak or hold his peace.

  He stared at her, confessions boiling beneath the surface of his face, but at last he said, “Nothing,” and, “I’m going to find solace elsewhere in the fortress. Lots of solace.” He plucked a coin purse out and actually shook it at her, as though daring her to disapprove. She knew exactly what he meant, and could not find it in her to castigate him. He was not a priest, after all, and the rules for church knights were laxer. The odd foible was practically expected. What was atonement for, after all?

  After he had gone, she went back to her prayer, trying to fight her way up to the Light, as though the turbulence around her was a tangled briar thicket, and her devotion was the occluded moon above. And she did wonder, even then, what was wrong with the world, and her faith, that these riotous and exuberant and, above all, honest emotions were a bar to her. Were they not also part of the world?

  Then the door opened softly, and she looked up with a foreknowledge of dread. In truth she might have more welcomed a Ghantishman with a poisoned dagger.

  “Dion.” Penthos stood there stiffly in the doorway. His expression was one of arch superiority, but she knew that those were essentially the lines that his face fell back into when he wasn’t bothering with expressions. There was a tightness to his jaw beyond it all, though, a slight tremble about his eyes.

  “Penthos,” she said, her voice as light as she could make it. “Was there something you wished to discuss?”

  He put a finger up, indicating she should wait, and then he bowed his head, frowning with ferocious concentration. One hand came up, crooked into a claw, and for a long while he just stood there, shaking somewhat, his fierce frown deepening and deepening. His breath hissed from his nose, and his teeth were bared with effort. She could feel power drawing in like sheets of invisible fire from all around them, all spiraling in toward the point where Penthos’s fingers met.

  Something appeared there, leaping like a candle flame, and she put a hand up to try and ward off what was surely about to be a colossal explosion.

  But then Penthos let his breath out slowly, and there in his hand was a flower. It was no worldly bloom she had ever seen, and it glowed translucently like a precious stone. The magician met her eyes and assayed a strained rictus of a smile, an undertaker’s idea of joviality.

  “For you,” he said, thrusting it at her.

  “I . . .” Her heart, which had been low for some time, had a way to sink yet, it seemed. “That’s very kind.”

  She could read him far too well. He was sieving her words and stance for signs of hope, trying to work out if she was encouraging him, but of all the lore he was a master of, that language he had never learned.

  “Kind, yes,” he agreed at last. “I can be kind. I know I am feared by many—and with good reason!—who think that being a grand master of the Power Elemental divorces me from mundane human concerns. And in many cases they are exactly right, for such as I—such as we—have higher matters in mind than the minutiae of everyday humdrum existence, do we not?”

  “. . . ,” she managed, which he took as encouragement.

  “Yes, you have your faith, your role as chosen of Armes. I see how it keeps you from the general run of the herd, makes you separate, raises you up. But I understand, Dion. It is lonely, to be so separate. I feel it too.”

  “Penthos . . .” But she could not complete the sentence. She was too horrified by his assessment. Was he right? Was she like him, cut off from humanity by office and the burden of power? When had that happened? How could it be undone?

  “I knew of you for many years before you asked me to join you in this crusade,” Penthos told her awkwardly. He was still holding out the little flower, she realized, and she could not make herself take it. “We people of power, we keep track of our peers, do we not? Dion, watching you, your deeds, your triumphs, I began to . . . slowly there was a . . . I started to think that . . . I haven’t . . . I need to . . .” His face twisted into a savage snarl, but it was directed entirely inward, at his own sudden lack of articulation. “What I’m saying, trying to say, what I’m, it’s . . . you’re . . . to me, you’re . . . I . . .” And abruptly there was a flare of fire about the flower in his hand, and he was blowing at it frantically, muttering, “No, no, no,” and trying to rescue the creation he had forced such effort into. But it was gone, gone to cinders in the heat of his frustration, and there was nothing left of it at all.

  “Penthos.”

  His look to her was agonized.

  “I have vows,” she told him.

  He let that echo for a long while before taking a deep breath and saying, “I had thought . . . these might be unusual times, given the significance of what we are about.” He could not have known he was making the shadow of an argument already tried and fumbled by Harathes earlier that night.

  “Then my vows are all the more important,” she told him gently. “If ever we might need Armes’s grace and favor, then it is when we enter the country of our enemy.”

  She saw him framing arguments in his mind, each one swimming up close enough for it to move his lips, his hands, and then sink away unspoken. Some five or six times he was on the point of trying to tackle her. She could not guess what case he might have made: demands of recompense for his services, perhaps; guilt; recriminations for leading him on; tantric mystic nonsense about acts required to boost his magic. Surely they were all turned up as he stirred the pool of his invention, and were revealed to be so much silt.

  He straightened up, drawing his dignity about him like a cloak. “I had to try,” he whispered, and that nearly broke her. She felt tears come to her eyes suddenly: the greatest magician of the age, perhaps, his heart raw and exposed like a lovestruck schoolboy’s, and yet from somewhere had come this self-possession, this knowledge of when to admit defeat.

  She should say nothing; just let him go. That would be honest of her. She did not find herself drawn to him in the least, though she had spent so long fighting against the flesh that she was not sure she even had such feelings in her anymore. And in truth, she had surely known that the great fire-mage had been holding a torch for her, and she had not put him straight, and so perhaps she had led him on, in some way. Now was the time to let that go, so that they could face the Dark as comrades and professionals, and nothing more.

  But abruptly there was a rush of sentiment in her, a burst dam of it that surged through her: not love, not even affection, but she felt sorry for him. She felt so sorry for him, for aiming his dart at someone as unfit and wretched as her.

  “When our work is done,” she told him, even though the wiser part of her was fighting to trammel the words up, “who knows what may happen? I may not even be allowed to hold my office then. I am a murderer, and I have struck down another priest of the Light. When this is done, who knows?”

  She saw him take it as the ray of hope it was not, and she wanted to call it back, the stupid thing she had just said. And it came to her, This is my penance: if the Potentate would not punish her, then she would punish herself, and by extension those around her.

  “Yes,” he said, and again, “yes, of course,” and he was turning in the doorway, almost skipping away, the happiness practically leaping about his frame. He looked back, that same awful focus building in him as had birthed the flower, and he took hold of himself with all the fierce fervor of his power, and forced himself to say, “Because I love you,” and then he was gone.

  Dion cried then,
because she was sick: sick of being a devotee of the Light and all its rules, and sick of not even being good at that, so that she would tell mortal lies over something as trivial as a magician’s feelings. Sick of being herself, she left their chambers and crept cloaked through Cad Nereg until she found a storeroom that was quiet and deep in the earth and away from all the intolerable life that hurt her so much, and there she slept.

  Cyrene woke slowly, odd fragments of information trickling into her mind. Yes, today was the day they sallied forth from Cad Nereg. Yes, it wasn’t until dusk, so for the moment she could lie here listening to the quiet activity of the fortress that never slept. For once, her companions weren’t carrying on already, bickering and muttering magic nonsense and clattering about with armor.

  Oh, and yes, she had got into another spat with Harathes, hadn’t she? That had gone badly in the past, mostly because he had been able to get her to apologize, or consent to things in lieu of apology, after sufficient application of beer and guilt. Never again, she decided. Once they had somehow pulled off the feat of defeating the Dark Lord, she would give the man the slip and never have to worry about his leering and his ogling and his occasional attempts to trick her into bed or marriage.

  There was a nagging feeling that she might have given in, though. It was being communicated by the presence of a warm body beside her, over which one of her arms was draped.

  Oh sod it, did I? No doubt she had. Bloody Harathes and his whining and his One Hundred Righteous Reasons that all seemed to end up with him trying to talk her into bed. And apparently he had . . .

  Actually, she wasn’t sure it was Harathes. The figure lacked his broadness of body. More telling still, it wasn’t snoring. Beer and Harathes’s sinuses never did make good bedfellows, as everyone in the company was painfully aware.

  Dion would hardly approve, but a liaison with one of the many soldiers of Cad Nereg, no looking back and no baggage, was surely preferable. Except that there was always baggage, somehow. One poke and they thought they’d bought a controlling interest in you.

  Time to face the music. Please, please don’t be Harathes. She opened her eyes.

  The thing she always forgot, most especially when these sorts of situations were concerned, was that all too often there were no good outcomes, just different bad ones. She stared at the back, at the shoulders she was curled into. They were gray as a Ghantishman’s, ridged with muscle in a way that seemed slightly awry—awry for human, anyway. His breathing was very soft, and she wondered if, in fact, he was asleep at all, or whether he had slept all night, or ever slept. Certainly he never closed his eyes.

  She was frozen, horrified, trapped in the morning after as shards of the night before clicked into place, her memories trailing in late and disheveled.

  I didn’t. I—we—didn’t, surely. It was just . . .

  Each memory, like a little knife.

  We did.

  She sat bolt upright, all of it coming back to her in a convulsive heave. She felt ill, sweaty, hungover, and all the blissful blurring of alcohol was banished.

  How could I—? But she knew. No plea of ignorance for her. Oh this is it. This is when I go too far.

  But somehow the rest of them weren’t there—well, of course they weren’t there. She’d hardly have . . . with an audience. But Harathes had stormed off somewhere, and Dion and Penthos were doing their respective mystical errands, and even Lief had apparently found someone else to shack up with, and so . . .

  Nobody need know. Perhaps even Enth would not remember. And if he did, well . . . She could tell him to say nothing, and he would have no choice. That was how it worked, after all.

  The thought made her wince.

  And then Harathes blundered in, pasty-faced and red-eyed.

  8: Unnatural Relations

  HARATHES LET OUT A ROAR that was equal parts rage, righteousness, horror, and frustrated passion. What words there were within it resolved themselves into, “Get away from her, you monster!” He threw himself in, slamming his boot into Enth’s supine body hard, three times. The first, ill aimed, glanced off Cyrene herself, knocking her sprawling, and then Harathes was at work. He hauled Enth up, saw the creature in his full naked glory and hurled him aside with a shriek of disgust. Enth struck the wall hard enough to shudder dust from between the beams of the ceiling. He slid down to crouch there, staring up at Harathes with his alien eyes.

  “Get out!” Cyrene shouted. Trying to hold a blanket to her, she groped for Harathes’s shoulder with the other hand. “Just get out!”

  He turned on her briefly, and the black anger in his face made her back off.

  “Whatever it did to you, I will avenge it,” he swore. His eyes and ears seemed to be receiving information from some close but separate reality where things were more to his liking: he was the rescuing hero, Enth the despoiling monster, she the damsel in distress.

  She lunged for him, and he threw her back easily before turning for his main prey. Enth was standing now, hunched a little, arms by his sides and hands twitching, but waiting patiently as Harathes pawed a knife from his belt.

  “Once and for all,” the big man declared, some highlight of his inner monologue. “It all went wrong when this thing came to us. It was a mistake. It was always a mistake.”

  Cyrene, who had tripped back over the mattress, was struggling to her feet. Why wasn’t Enth reacting, as Harathes and the knife neared him? A jolt of understanding shook her: the strictures that Penthos had put in place.

  “Enth!” she shouted. “Defend yourself!”

  Something spasmed through Enth’s body: her words or the claws of Penthos’s forbiddings. Harathes lunged for him, one hand out to grip the man-spider’s shoulder for a steady aim. If he had been his sober self, with a warrior’s command of the situation, that would have been it. He was half-drunk and half-hungover, though, and all consumed by bitter rage. Enth twisted aside from the blow, taking a long rake down his gray flank, and then slapped Harathes off him. It was a tentative gesture, with barely any force behind it. The warrior took a step back, reevaluating. For a second, the two of them stared at each other, blue eyes to black pools.

  Enth had struck Harathes, no matter how lightly. No doom had fallen on him. He was forbidden to hurt any of the company. He was permitted to defend himself. He must obey when given instructions. As Cyrene had instructed him.

  Cyrene found other words coming to her mouth, even as she lurched forward. They were all manner of cluttered, confused words, drawn from her own frustrations just as Harathes was being ridden by his.

  She did not say, “Kill him.” She caught and strangled the utterance at the border of speech.

  Harathes lashed out with the knife, taking a line that would open Enth’s throat and leaving him almost nowhere to move. Enth moved. He thrust out his hands and straight-armed Harathes in the chest hard enough to catapult him back out of the door. There was the sound of smashing furniture from the room beyond, better than any cockcrow to wake men up and draw them in.

  “Enth—” Cyrene began, but the creature was already after his quarry, stark naked and running into the realms of men. As she followed, she knew exactly how it would all look. But what could she do? To restrain Enth would be to kill him. To keep him off the leash might be to kill Harathes. To hang back would be to miss what happened.

  Enth dropped onto Harathes in a swift pounce, but the warrior had a chair leg in hand and got a solid blow into his chest in mid-jump, sending him tumbling to the side. He landed on his hands and feet, skidding a little on the cluttered floor, with three servants and an off-duty soldier getting well out of the way.

  Then the two combatants clashed again, Enth clawing and reaching, trying to bring his strength to bear, Harathes the better warrior, holding distance and landing blows that seemed mostly to bounce from that gray, dense flesh. Cyrene had ceased to shout at them. It was not doing any good.

  Enth got the other end of the chair leg, nipping it from the air in mid-swing, and Harathe
s made the mistake of contesting possession of it. In that moment, with his enemy’s position fixed through their mutual hold on the weapon, Enth dragged the man to him and got his gray strangler’s hands on Harathes’s throat.

  Cyrene opened her mouth, although she could not have foretold who she would be addressing nor what she might have said, when Dion arrived.

  She entered in an explosion of golden light, disc of Armes upraised. The impact spun Harathes across the floor hard enough to grind through the back of his shirt, and slammed Enth all the way across the room, leaving him an angular bundle shrieking and cringing away from the holy radiance.

  Dion’s face was fixed in an expression of horror. She ignored the groaning Harathes and advanced on Enth, the flame of her faith burning him with every step.

  “Hold! Dion, enough!” Cyrene told her.

  The priestess bared her teeth, and it was plain that the desire to smite Enth to the fullest extent of her faith was very strong in her, if not for justice then as a salve for all the frustrations and disappointments that she had waded through to get this far. But she held: at Cyrene’s call, she held.

  “Kill it!” Harathes roared. “It raped Cyrene, for the Light’s sake! Destroy it.”

  Dion was not taking her eyes off the crouched form of Enth. “Get Penthos,” she snapped, and then, “Harathes, find Penthos, now.”

  The warrior spluttered a little, but then stumbled off to do her bidding.

  “Well?” Dion prompted.

  There was no real way round the question that would raise Cyrene in the eyes of her companions. “There was no rape.”

  Dion let her glance flick from Enth to Cyrene and back, the one stark naked, the other with only a blanket clutched to her for modesty. “Tell me nothing happened. Tell me this is something other than what it seems. Tell me it’s a plot of Darvezian, even,” and then, into the deepening silence, “Tell me something.”