Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Lief was a cynic, a realist, the last to cheer on a hero, the first to bite a coin to see how little gold it contained. Even he, though, felt a thrill of destiny in him, looking up at that tower. Who would have thought we’d ever make it?

  And yes, there was the little matter of actually having to confront and kill Darvezian himself, but Lief had assumed that first they would have to cut a swathe through a shambling mass of minions, and such a mass was conspicuous by its absence.

  He skulked closer. The foot of the tower was as grand around as a nobleman’s country manor house, all of the same black stone, and every edge adorned with the sort of pointlessly elaborate spikes that made Lief wonder how many Ghantish masons were accidentally impaled during its construction. Of course, it was the Evil Tower of the Dark Lord. Perhaps random deaths had been the point.

  There was a set of great doors, big enough for a dragon riding an elephant to process out of—too big, really, even for the size of the tower, suggesting that the ground floor must contain a great deal of empty space. They were, in fact, far too big for anyone of Lief’s acquaintance to even reach the handle, and instead some practical-minded evil carpenter had installed a man-sized door set into the main portal, and that stood open.

  Lief’s fingers twitched, a thief’s eternal instincts kindling to life at seeing such a breach of security. Well, I suppose the Dark Lord probably doesn’t get many visitors, he considered. Even so . . . It would be terrible to find that some other thief had already got to the place and cleaned it out.

  At that point he had to stop and forcibly remind himself that robbing the Dark Lord was not the point of the exercise. The former possessions of Ultimate Darkness were notoriously difficult to fence, or indeed to physically divest oneself of before turning into a toad or becoming irrevocably evil oneself. More than one previous Dark Lord had started out as an opportunistic adventurer coming into possession of some damned memento or other.

  But he crept closer, trying to work up a proper head of nervous energy while all the time the great almost-empty valley stood silent around him.

  Is everyone on holiday or something? Is it Evil Pilgrimage Week?

  When someone came out of that smaller door, it was more a relief than a shock.

  Lief saw a couple of Ghants: not armed and armored as warriors of the Dark Lord’s Dread Host, but just wearing stained and patched robes, and carrying . . . buckets, actually. Squint as he might, Lief could not particularly characterize them as evil buckets, although from the way that the Ghants held them at arm’s length they were probably evil-smelling. The two gray-skinned humanoids shuffled around the tower, and Lief shadowed them soundlessly, waiting to discover what nastiness was going on.

  There was a garden there, he saw. It was a wretched thing, a long trough chipped out of the stone and filled with an ashy gray earth, in which thorny, twisted plants grew. Poisons, Lief wondered. Magic potion ingredients, maybe? Whatever grew there, the locals weren’t stinting on the fertilizer. The Ghantishmen slopped the contents of the buckets about without much energy, the reek of it enough to wrinkle Lief’s nose where he hid.

  Well, nobody gets to be a sneak thief without knowing the smell of shit, he considered. Someone’s eating well in that tower. And he waited while the Ghants made several more trips, and tried to calculate just how many bowels were moving in the Dark Lord’s domain.

  So is it just Ghants, or . . . ? Experience suggested that his nose was not sharp enough to tell the stools of Ghants from the excrement of men and, in all honesty, before now he would not have said it was a skill any adventuring hero might have need of.

  When the Ghants finished their rounds—four trips, two buckets each, and no easy way to know how often they slopped out—Lief let himself creep closer to the door, still standing open.

  What vile practices lie inside? he wondered. Is all that crap from prisoners, or a garrison . . . ? It would have to be a rather meager garrison for the size of the tower, but then perhaps most of the defenders were undead or something. A freedom from being caught short seemed to be one of the few advantages of being a Deathless Servant of the Dark.

  Hidden, with a vantage point through the doorway, the mystery unraveled. He was looking into a huge space, too large to see how big from his narrow slice of it. He could spot a half-dozen Ghants there, and they were engaged in the villainous activity of cooking something.

  Of course, you could still cook and be evil—Cyrene’s encounter with the innkeeper proved that—but this looked to be a relatively run-of-the-mill subsistence sort of cookery. There was a fire, and a big iron pot, and the stuff they were throwing in looked more like vegetables and some rather nasty sort of meat than eye of bat and wing of frog. Human meat, Lief speculated, but he wondered if he was just finding evil because he was looking for it. Even the servants of the Dark Lord needed to eat.

  He had an odd moment, then, considering just how inconvenient this place must be to live in. Nothing much grew roundabouts, and that twisted, spiny patch was more likely an attempt at a vegetable patch than a place to cultivate horrors. Even the wood the Ghants were burning must be brought in specially. No wonder there were no great hordes at the Dark Lord’s very doorstep—they would have starved to death, or frozen in the nights, or just died of extreme bad backs and crooked necks trying to sleep on the hard ground. Of a necessity, the Dark Tower’s complement must be a small one.

  Then another figure crossed past the Ghants, speaking sharply to them and cuffing one. Lief drew in his breath, confronting a proper evil at last. The man was rake-lean and stooped, but he wore dark robes embroidered with glimmering symbols: no mistaking a Doomsayer.

  This is where the Doomsayers live. Or at least where they came back to and reported, when not out doing evil. Darvezian had his little elite of warriors and magicians, and here in this tower would be the greatest concentration of them in the world. Lief felt almost upbeat, discovering that: suddenly the whole business didn’t seem too easy and, despite all their tribulations so far, it had been leaning that way. At least now he had something to report.

  “Swift and silent” was Cyrene’s plan, pretty much in its entirety. “We go in, kill the Doomsayers before they have a chance to react, cut our way to Darvezian, and take him on like we discussed.”

  Lief leant in toward Enth. “You up to nobble another few of the Doomsayers? You’ve got a title to defend, remember?”

  The man-spider looked at him with that depressingly familiar blankness, but then essayed a tentative expression. It was probably meant to be a smile, but the movement of the lips was off, and no definite impression was communicated.

  “Am I permitted?” Enth turned his round black eyes from one to the next of them.

  “What is it asking?” Dion frowned.

  “There will be fighting,” the man-spider clarified precisely. “Am I permitted?”

  “Penthos’s things on him, his restrictions,” Lief put in. “Good question, actually. It’s going to get a bit frantic in there, I’d guess. We don’t want him just standing about.”

  Dion stepped until she was looking Enth right in the face, eye to glassy eye. Lief waited for the creature to glance away, but this time the spider met her head on. After what had happened in the tunnels there was a new tension in Enth, and hardly surprising. Perhaps the creature was desperate for a fight now, to take out its frustrations.

  “You want to fight the minions of Darvezian, do you?” Dion asked him. Lief was glad that at least she hadn’t said “the other minions.”

  “There will be fighting,” Enth repeated. “I can—I cannot—I do not know what I can fight, or when. Tell me.”

  Dion glanced at Penthos. “But it knows, surely, with your strictures.”

  The magician shrugged. “It finds out, when it attempts something outside the bounds I have set on it,” he said. “I . . . suppose that might make it somewhat hesitant about experimenting. Probably it isn’t very pleasant, to get bitten by the geas if it tries to overreach its bou
ndaries. If you want Enth fighting alongside us, then it may be worth setting some fresh limits.”

  “Does that mean you need to change the spell?”

  “No, no, no.” Penthos waved a hand magnanimously. “We’ve built in that sort of flexibility, in demanding the creature follow orders. Simply give it permissions in the form of orders, and it will take those as its limits. Have I not wrought well?”

  Dion sighed. “There’s nobody else I’d turn to if I needed to yank a monster of Darkness about by its chain,” she remarked dryly.

  Penthos beamed, oblivious as always to subtext.

  “Listen to me, creature,” Dion said to Enth, and then a shadow passed over her face and she grimaced. “Enth, listen to me.”

  The man-spider waited for her to speak.

  “We go to fight the Dark Lord,” Dion told him. “All we have done—entering your forest, all the traveling, the tunnels, the Spider’s Path, and the Tooth of the Great Mother, all this has been to put us in a position where we can defeat him. We have been guided by the most erudite scholars’ interpretations of prophecy, to bring us to this point.”

  Enth nodded.

  “I can’t expect you to understand why the Dark Lord needs casting down. I think you’d need some Light in your soul for that. You have no such Light. Probably you have no soul.” Dion shrugged. “It isn’t your doing, but that’s how things are. Darvezian has caused the deaths of thousands, the corruption of more. He threatens the freedom and virtue of the world, as his predecessors did before him. Just take it from me that he must be destroyed.”

  Enth nodded.

  “When we enter his tower, you may fight and kill any creature that is not one of us, and is not a prisoner of the Dark Lord. Certainly anything that seems our enemy.”

  Enth nodded a third time. Dion peered into his almost-human face, into the void of his eyes, seeking true comprehension and seeing only her own shadowed reflection.

  “It will have to do,” she said at last to the others. “I fear I am not thinking clearly, but if he is to fight, he will need his initiative.”

  Enth was looking up at the pinnacle of the Dark Tower now, and his long-fingered strangler’s hands were clenching and unclenching slowly.

  They went in as swiftly as Cyrene had said, although the “silently” was a matter of opinion. There were six Ghants in the kitchen now, one of them engaged in the very evil business of sweeping something up. There were also two different Doomsayers, a great bull of a man wearing a filthy arming jacket, presumably suitable for wearing under huge suits of rune-inscribed black armor, and a woman whose pallid skin glowed with greenish sigils. They were eating.

  “Don’t like the look of her,” Lief had decided.

  “Don’t look at her then,” had been Cyrene’s advice. “Get into place, all of you.”

  First through the door was Cyrene’s best arrow, properly briefed on all details of the plan by its mistress. The woman with the illuminated skin took it through the eye at quite a respectable distance, flinging her plate at the high ceiling in a theatrical gesture before toppling backward. Even as the man looked up, the rest were through the door.

  Harathes went for him without ceremony, brawn to brawn. The Doomsayer had a sword leaning beside him, and just enough time to snatch it up. Then the warrior’s shield struck him in the face and knocked him sideways. The black-metal rune-sword swiped wildly over Harathes’s head and, with a furious shoulder-barge, the warrior knocked the Doomsayer into the cauldron and the fire.

  In the interim the others had poured in, Penthos’s hands spitting with fire and Dion with the disc of Armes bravely upraised. The Ghants fled across the room to cower in a pack against the wall. Harathes got his sword through the big Doomsayer even as the man was clawing his way out of the boiling mess of the cauldron, and chopped his head off with the next swing.

  “What about them?” Cyrene had her bowstring drawn back, the arrow at one of the Ghants. The kitchen staff were cowering back, a few of them with knives upraised in threat, baring their teeth and hissing defiance.

  Dion opened her mouth, and then the stooped old Doomsayer in the robe appeared in a doorway, mouth open and eyes wide in shock. Instantly his hands lit up with blue fire, even as Penthos was turning to meet him.

  “Aa—!” the old man began, a challenge or a spell or just an exclamation. At that point Enth tackled him about the waist, slamming him to the floor, ribbons of arcane flame scattering everywhere. He had his hands about the Dark wizard’s throat instantly, finding their place with desperate need, and everyone heard the sharp snap as he clenched them into fists.

  “Kill the Ghants,” Harathes snapped.

  Cyrene hesitated, though her fingers shook on the bowstring.

  “They’re things of Darkness and we can’t just tie them all up. They’ll bring down the rest of the tower on us, probably while we’re facing off Darvezian,” the warrior went on. “This is no time for philosophical niceties.”

  “They’re serving staff,” Lief pointed out.

  “Everything in here is evil,” Harathes stated flatly.

  “Even the waiters?”

  “What, you think only murderers and monsters can be evil? Darkness is Darkness.”

  “Fuck your theology,” Lief stated flatly.

  “Enough!” Dion hissed. “What happened to ‘swift and silent,’ for the Light’s sake? They’re Ghants. They’re things of the Dark. We can’t leave them to raise the alarm behind us.”

  “No, listen.” Lief glanced from her to Cyrene, seeking support that was plainly not forthcoming.

  The archer shook her head. “Lief, this is not the time—”

  Then the yelling started because, while Lief looked away, Harathes had started laying into the servants. He had strolled over to them, and abruptly his sword was in motion, cleaving them down with brutal economy. One got under his swing to run for the door, and Cyrene tracked and shot him convulsively, a predator that cannot help following its instincts.

  They were dead in moments, the Ghants. Broodily, Harathes cleaned the blood from his blade.

  “We’re here for the Dark Lord, Lief. We can’t take chances.”

  They waited: had that outburst of noise called down worse upon their heads? Apparently not. It had been over swiftly, and probably the Dark Tower of Darvezian was used to the odd bout of wailing and crying.

  “You didn’t have to,” Lief muttered.

  “Dark is Dark,” Harathes declared.

  “I’m sorry, Lief, but the enemy’s servants are still our enemies,” Cyrene said, notably less pleased with herself but not backing down.

  “There were Ghants at Cad Nereg, on our side,” the thief pointed out.

  “And if this lot had joined them, this wouldn’t have happened to them,” Dion decided.

  “Let’s go.” Cyrene was at the exit the old Doomsayer had appeared from. “There are stairs here. Onward and upward.”

  Lief went ahead once more, padding on flannel feet up the steps, his way lit only by globes of reddish, angry light. He let his mind connect fully with his ears, an old thief’s trick—good thieves knew that you didn’t just hear, you had to properly listen. What his ears told him was that he was being followed.

  He looked around, and found Enth almost peering over his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed out of the corner of his mouth, using his smallest ever voice.

  “I want to see.”

  Lief was impressed: the man-spider’s lips had barely moved. At least Enth understood stealth, which was more than the thief could say for most of his more human companions. “See what?”

  “The Dark Lord.”

  Lief was keeping his eyes on the curve of the stairs, watching for any shadows to fall through the red light. “He won’t just be sitting up on the second floor twiddling his Dark thumbs, Enth. He’ll be right up top, lording it over his Dark domain or whatever it is Darvezian actually does with his time. Can’t you wait until I give the general gu
ided tour?”

  “I want to see,” Enth repeated stubbornly.

  Lief sighed. “Just keep quiet, fall back when I do, and don’t go running off.”

  Enth nodded curtly, and the two of them crept on.

  The red lamps kept up a constant murmuring hum that put him off, but he realized after what must have been a half-turn of the tower’s circumference that there were voices mingled in with it. At first it was just low talk, and in these surroundings he could easily picture an evil ritual, or a torturer whispering questions to a victim just before the screaming began. A half-dozen steps closer still, though, and what he heard was just talk, the back and forth of an amicable conversation.

  He glanced at Enth, found no clues there, and crept on.

  He had seen they were running out of steps, with a broader space beyond, and was just edging upward to get a look when he triggered the trap. It was a magical trap, and that was his excuse: no loose stone or tripwire or beam of light, or any other conventional trigger. He felt a sudden rush of cold air about him, and a phantasmal thing just floated up through the stone of the stairs, a glimmering skull and bones atrocity hung with the ghostly ropes of entrails, and with eyes swiveling independently in their hollow sockets. Lief practically swallowed his tongue, seeing that wheeling gaze pass about the stairway and then both translucent eyes come to a consensus and fix on him.

  Silently the specter lifted an arm in accusation, the bony pointing fingertip almost close enough to brush his nose. The temperature plummeted still further, Lief’s breath gusting white from his mouth and a skin of frost forming on the stones around him.

  Enth lunged for the thing wordlessly, his groping hands passing through its fickle substance. The specter reacted even so: those mad eyes span about again as though they were balls on a gambling wheel, and then they fixed the man-spider with their crazed stare.