Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “I . . .” Cyrene had no lies for her.

  Harathes burst back into the room, as though he expected to find some villainy part-performed, and with a rather worn-down-looking Penthos at his back.

  “What needs burning?” the wizard demanded. “This joker tells me there’s an emergency.” It was plain that being hauled from his sleep by Harathes had not found favor with him.

  “Do your strictures on the creature Enth still hold?” Dion asked him.

  Penthos looked around the room blearily, seeing the various states of undress and drawing no conclusions whatsoever. “Of course,” he said, mildly insulted. “And will do for all time, unless I undo ’em. Was that it?”

  “Yes. No.” Dion knuckled at her forehead. “This has gone far enough. Get everyone together. We will talk this out, like the old days.” She meant: before Enth had come. “We need to decide what to do with this creature.”

  At that moment Lief wandered in, cockily cheerful from a night spent in the welcome company of strangers. “What’s this? I miss anything?” he remarked, and then took in the tableau, turned around, and would have absented himself entirely had Dion not called him back with an iron voice.

  “Now, let’s not be hasty here,” was Lief’s considered opinion. “Obviously some things got said, some things were done, but still . . .”

  “You knew,” Dion told him. The five of them had commandeered a soldiers’ dormitory. Enth was locked in one of the cells of Cad Nereg.

  Lief looked shifty. “Look, we were all a bit drunk last night . . .”

  “You knew,” Dion repeated. “You could have stopped this thing before it started.”

  “Technically you can’t stop something before—” began Penthos, under the sincere impression that he was being helpful, then wished he hadn’t.

  “What do you want me to say?” Lief demanded. “That I should have been the beacon of moral probity, to whom all the wayward souls of the world look for guidance? Because I thought that was you. Where were you, exactly, when all this was going on? Closeted away, being holier than us.”

  “How dare you cast aspersions at the Light’s chosen?” thundered Harathes, clashing with Penthos’s grand “Speak not of things of which you know naught!”

  “Enough!” Dion shouted them down. “I don’t need defending. But you’re right, Lief. You’re no man’s moral compass. You’ve consorted with this creature from the start, spoken for it, defended it, made it a part of your schemes.”

  “I thought ‘making it a part of our schemes’ was what we were all doing!” the thief snapped back.

  “You have merely shown,” Dion continued without appearing to hear him, “that your opinion is tainted.” There was a heavy burden in her voice, that reminded them all of what coinage she had spent on Lief’s behalf.

  “We have followed a twisted path, since the wood of the spiders,” Dion told them. “I have been too convinced of the rightness of my own judgment. I have led us awry.”

  “We have no other plan to defeat Darvezian,” Cyrene pointed out. “Even if you were right about Enth—which you’re not—that hasn’t changed.”

  “We could just attack!” Harathes insisted. “We get Penthos all charged up and we go in with a pack of Cad Nereg’s best. We fight, like we’re supposed to, and rightness triumphs, like it’s supposed to.”

  “Then we die, and nobody defeats Darvezian,” Lief said flatly.

  “We don’t die. We have faith.” Harathes looked to Dion. “Don’t we? If we have faith in the Light, then we’ll win against the odds, surely.”

  “And everyone else who ever fought him was, what, secretly consumed with doubts?” Cyrene asked, throwing her hands up in the air. “We can’t do it without Enth.”

  “Maybe it is better to fail, and be pure, than to succeed by such means,” Dion said.

  She let the silence of that remark spread out across the room. Even Harathes didn’t seem that taken with it. Because, most of all, Harathes wanted to win. Win the fight, win the holiness contest, win Cyrene. “Penthos, you are a magician of noted power. You are the most powerful magician I have ever met. How would you stand, against all the armies of Darvezian?”

  Penthos’s lip trembled a bit. She thought it was fear at first, but then she realized that her compliment had reduced him close to tears. At last he said, “You flatter me. Not without cause, admittedly. I would inflict dreadful harm on the forces of the Dark Lord. Thousands would burn at my behest. For you, I would tear down his fastnesses and fortresses, exterminate his Doomsayers, lay waste to his works. But defeat him, with all of his servants together? That would be beyond me, or any magician. I am truly sorry.”

  “That’s all right.” She spared him a small smile of thanks. “Then . . . then I don’t know what we do. I fear that, if we go onward with the creature, we will be irrevocably lost to virtue. If indeed that has not already happened.”

  “We have to destroy it,” Harathes decided.

  “No!” Cyrene insisted.

  “Do you have any idea of how much work I put into reworking that creature?” Penthos complained. “An unparalleled work of wizardy, and you’re just, ‘We have to destroy it.’”

  “For Dion,” Harathes said.

  “Oh, ah.” Penthos’s eyes darted to the priestess. “Well, for Dion . . .”

  “It would have killed me,” Harathes pointed out. “Despite all Penthos’s strictures, it would have killed me if it could.”

  “You would have killed it!” Cyrene spat.

  “And what of that?” Harathes spread his hands, appealing directly to Dion. “It is not a person. It is a thing, an animal at best, a monster at worst, a creature touched by the Dark. It is ours to destroy or use as we see fit. I am a man, a child of the Light. It is my right to destroy this abomination if it poses a danger to me, or to any other human being. It has no such rights to life.”

  “Will you just listen to yourself?” came Lief’s halfhearted rejoinder.

  “It would have killed me,” Harathes insisted, locking eyes with Dion. “It violated Cyrene. It must be destroyed.”

  “It—!” Cyrene started, then stumbled to a halt with all eyes on her. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Yes it was!” Harathes shouted in her face. “It must have been like that. What else could it have been like? It bewitched you or it forced you, because it is a thing, Cyrene! A disgusting, inhuman thing that had you! How can you even sit there and face us—!”

  “Enough!” Dion bellowed, the sheer volume forcing Harathes back into his seat. Cyrene was looking shocked and shaken, far more so than Dion had ever seen her.

  “I will talk with Cyrene,” she decided. “Alone, I will talk with her. And then I will give my judgment.”

  “Tell me,” Dion suggested.

  With the men gone, the room seemed cavernous. Two mugs of hot nutmeg steamed between them, which Dion hoped Cyrene would see as a peace offering of sorts, a sign that this was not the inquisition but just two women talking together. Like old times, Dion reflected. They had talked, once, when Cyrene had first sworn to the quest. They had spoken of all manner of things. Then the quest had grown larger and larger in Dion’s mind, and she had stopped talking to anyone.

  “As a priestess of Armes, tell me,” she tried again. “I will listen.”

  “It wasn’t rape,” Cyrene said, not looking at her.

  “Then . . . help me understand, Cyrene. Because I don’t. All I see is . . . something terrible.”

  “Something that offends you.” The warrior woman’s voice was dead.

  “Yes,” Dion admitted.

  “Something disgusting. Something that sickens you.”

  “I’m . . . afraid so.”

  “And if I’d slept with Harathes instead?”

  “Then that would probably have disappointed me, but it’s the lesser of two evils.” The words came out without vetting, a sign of just how tired Dion felt.

  “So it is carnal relations you disapprove of? Or just Ha
rathes? Or just monsters?” Cyrene was staring at the table.

  “The church has a variety of opinions, from sect to sect,” Dion said, taking refuge in pedantry, but then, “but either of the last two. I’m a realist. I know what people do.”

  “A realist? You? The Lady of the Ivory Tower? You don’t even live in the same world as the rest of us.”

  “That’s unfair. And not true.”

  “You don’t feel like we feel,” Cyrene accused her. “You’re holy, chosen by the Light. What would you know of it?”

  “We’re not talking about me,” Dion said somewhat hurriedly. “I just . . . I need to make a decision, you know that. So help me, Cyrene. Tell me what the creature did.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Very evidently not true.”

  “It’s just . . .” Cyrene put her head in her hands. “It’s just . . . he was there.”

  Dion frowned at her.

  “We go to face the Dark, and it was late, and I was . . . I wanted . . . You won’t understand. You can’t understand. I was lonely, Dion. I was lonely and I wanted to reach out to someone. And he was there, and he’s . . . there’s none of the complications that there would be with . . . well, you know how Harathes is. One ride and you’re in his stable, as far as he’s concerned.”

  “He’s a knight of the church.”

  “He’s a prick. He’s an insufferable, scheming prick. And it’s always the same. You’re all right. You’re a priestess. That means people don’t think of you the same way. But believe me, most of us basically can’t talk to a man without him looking us over and deciding whether or not he wants to give us the shaft. And if he does then, whatever else we are, whatever else we do, it’s always there, somewhere in his mind. And if he doesn’t fancy us, then that’s a judgment too, writing us off as a thing without value. You can’t get rid of it. And either way it means you’re always a woman, first. You’re not a warrior, or an archer, or even just a friend to drink with. You’re a woman, and that means you’ve got a place, and a use.” She spat the taste of the words from her mouth. “And you know what? With Enth, it’s not there.”

  “It’s not there because he’s not human!” Dion said sharply. “He’s a creature of Darkness. He’s a spider, for the Light’s sake.”

  “But he’s not, not anymore,” Cyrene told her soberly. “What Penthos started, we’ve all continued. When you look at him now, you see all the pieces of human that we’ve sewn onto him.”

  It was, Dion thought, a profoundly horrible metaphor. “Then he’s like one of those insect things, that builds itself a house of stones and leaves to hide in. But it’s still the insect underneath. It’s just a blind, so that it can fool its prey.”

  “And I’m his prey, am I?”

  “What am I supposed to think?”

  “At least think that I’m able to steer my own course. At least think that if there’s trouble, and I’m there, then I might not need rescuing. That I can make up my own mind once in a while. Stop thinking like Harathes, in short.”

  Dion took a deep breath. “You’re saying that you did this . . . thing of your own free will.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you were drunk.”

  “Because I wanted to. Drunk, yes, but I wanted . . . warmth. Contact. Shelter from the world and all its fucking stupidities. And he was human enough that . . .” She paused, considering. “He’s strong, you know? His arms? But delicate, almost. He’s . . .”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “And he was there, and he was . . . he listened to me. And he couldn’t hurt me. He couldn’t . . .” Cyrene looked up, a spasm of angst passing across her face. “It might . . . it might have been rape.”

  Dion stood up so quickly she almost upset the table. “Then it will have to be destroyed. We’ll take our chances without it.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  The priestess stared at her for a long while before understanding found her. “Oh.”

  “Because . . . I can’t remember exactly how it all happened, how we got to . . . but I wasn’t thinking that . . . I wasn’t thinking that he couldn’t say no.”

  “Oh,” Dion repeated. She found she was gripping the table edge. “Oh, but . . .”

  “But what? Or are you going to take Harathes’s line now, Dion? That it’s a monster. It has no rights? I can rape the fucker as much as I like, command it to do all those things that so offend you? And it’s still to blame, for somehow . . . what, leading me on? And I’m a creature of the Light, so I’m innocent no matter what?”

  “That’s not . . . what I’m saying. That’s not necessarily doctrine.”

  Cyrene gave her a hard, strained grin. “So what I’m saying is, you don’t have to decide what to do with Enth, you have to decide what to do with me.”

  “No, you know I’d . . .”

  “What? You wouldn’t? No matter what? Because I thought that wasn’t ‘necessarily doctrine.’ Or are you special? You get to say, do you?”

  “Cyrene, please.” To her embarrassment, Dion felt that she was about to lose control and start to cry.

  “Enth lives. Enth goes with us, unbound and free. And when we’re done, he gets his shape back and we take him home.”

  Dion sagged, but at the same time a weight seemed to lift from her. It was a treacherous feeling, though. It was just that she had shirked her responsibilities yet again. She had taken the easy route, avoided confrontation.

  How can we ever succeed, when we are so mired in wrong? But she nodded, abominably weary though the morning was still young. “No needling Harathes.”

  “I won’t need to. He does that all on his own.”

  After a tense day cooped up in Cad Nereg, during which they mostly avoided each other, one of the scouts came to inform Dion that they would be heading out at nightfall. It fell to Cyrene to fetch Enth from his imprisonment.

  She approached the locked door with trepidation, turning over her fragmented memories of the previous night. How much had she forced on him? How much had he become her victim? She could not pry apart right and wrong: they were entwined like lovers.

  Enth might hate her now. She found the thought painful. The only retreat from that pain would be to take up the ground that Harathes had prepared: that Enth was a thing, a monster; that what Enth might feel—if Enth could feel—was too trivial for Light-blessed humans to concern themselves with. Eschewing that convenient philosophy, she exposed herself to the emotional consequences of her actions.

  When she opened the door, he was there, standing on the other side as though he had been waiting like that through all the hours of the day. She tried to find meaning in his gray face, in the liquid black discs of his eyes, letting the moment stretch out. In her own self, something moved: uncertain but undeniable. Pieces of last night kept filtering back into her recollection. The confusion, the tentative motions, his fear of something unknown and unknowable; then the physicalities, the rhythms and the clutch of her arms against the hard muscle of his back; his own fierce grip that was strong enough to crush her, and yet could never do so. And she had lain beside him, after, and felt nothing of the guilt and shame and disgust that usually came to her, with that unwelcome postcoital clarity. Because what she had pressed herself against was not the smudged and overwritten story of some lothario, that would leave her marked and dirty with its expectations and its baggage. Enth was tabula rasa, and she had come away from him unsullied. Or so she had felt. Lying beside him, still comfortably drunk and feeling sleep steal upon her, she had felt at peace.

  “We’re leaving here,” she blurted out awkwardly. “We . . .” Last night, I need to talk about last night, I need to ask if I’ve wronged you. But she did not have the words, and more than likely Enth did not have the ability to understand the question. No doubt he saw what had gone on as just an extension of the general way he had been treated ever since they had taken him from his home. The thought was hard-edged and ugly.

  She wanted to s
ay that she was sorry, but even that might be more than he could understand, and what did that ever solve, anyway? She’d had enough empty apologies made to her, in her life.

  “Thank you for not killing me,” Enth came out with, apparently after his own struggle for vocabulary.

  “I, yes, I spoke for you. Lief spoke for you. You’re not going to be killed.” She felt a rush of relief that the talk had gone so quickly onto comprehensible things.

  But Enth’s head twitched sideways twice, a weird tic until she realized he was shaking it, disagreeing with her. “After the union,” he said.

  It was a moment before she could work it out. “You mean after we . . . ? Why would I kill you . . . ?” She thought he meant that she would have been horrified at what she had done, perhaps, or . . . No, she didn’t know what he meant at all.

  “That is what happens. That is what I thought would happen,” Enth told her, speaking carefully. “Where I was, when I was . . . myself, that is how it would be.”

  And she thought, spiders, and put a hand to her mouth. It was horrific. Worse, if he had been expecting that, the previous night, and still . . . and at the same time part of her wanted to start laughing hysterically.

  Oh, I’ve been worrying. I’ve been worrying about how he felt. And he was worrying about being killed and . . . what?

  “You thought I was going to eat you?” she managed.

  He nodded, quite matter-of-factly. “I do not know how it is, with humans.”

  “Well, now you know.” She closed her eyes, rubbed at the lids. “And I suppose that puts a lot of things in perspective. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry that . . .” She couldn’t quite say it. “I’m sorry I used you. I’m sorry.”

  There was the lightest touch on her arm, and she opened her eyes to see the tips of his fingers resting here, before being pulled hurriedly back. His eyes were on her, his face not currently hung with any of the manufactured expressions he had learned. He said nothing, though, just waited for her to lead on.