Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  With a stiff elegance, the spirit essayed a bow, and then sank back through the floor, leaving Lief sat on the stairs with his back to the wall, breathing heavily and trying to slow his heart back down.

  He wanted to say a lot to Enth then, but any words would surely have escaped into the room beyond and warned whoever was up there. There was no suggestion that the man-spider understood what had just happened: probably he went through most of his forcibly human life not understanding things, and a visit from random undead fit into that pattern perfectly. Lief had a good idea, though. Nobody living in a place like this would go mad with pressure plates and wires and all the rest: fine for tombs and treasuries but hardly practical to have at home. The Doomsayers and their master had some thoughts for security, however. He guessed that they had set up a trap that they themselves need never worry about triggering. The spirit had been bound here ready to wreak its unliving vengeance against all comers, unless . . . well, unless they were already tainted by the Dark, Lief supposed. He felt almost flattered that the heinous apparition had considered him virtuous enough to take offense at. And then he thought about Enth, and felt rather less pleased with himself. You poor bastard. You’re one of them, whether you want to be or not. Mind you, Harathes is one of us, so you win some, you lose some.

  He signaled that they would creep up a little farther, to see what was what. The whole business with the ghost had taken place in utter silence.

  The stairs came out onto a curve-walled room that Lief guessed was basically a segment cut out of the tower’s roughly circular profile, and then truncated to fit around some central core. There were doors here—not just doorways but actual doors, although the carpentry involved looked shoddy—probably the original evil architect had not considered internal doors sufficiently villainous. There was some furniture here as well, Lief saw: rugs on the floor in various stages of moth-eatenness—and did that imply evil moths, or had they been shabby before they were brought here?—and some chests at a far wall that set his fingers twitching. He was forced to restrain his larcenous desires, though, because there was also a big table and a half-dozen chairs, some of which were occupied. There were two of them, both men, one squat and corpulent, the other broad-shouldered and powerful-looking, and they were playing for money. Lief knew the type instantly: they slapped their cards down fast, looked in each other’s eyes, and were constantly commenting on the flow of the game or abusing one another’s parentage. Aside from the motley of baleful amulets and rings both wore, and the fact that the tougher-looking customer of the two had glowing red eyes, they could have been any pair of card-sharps in any dive Lief had been to.

  He had turned back to Enth to whisper something when he heard the first scream. It was a woman’s voice, and there was a man’s triumphant yell with it, and it came from just beyond one of the doors.

  Of course there would be torture cells, Lief thought. He pointed hurriedly back down the stairs for Enth’s benefit, and then the two of them scurried back down as quickly and quietly as they could.

  Dion listened carefully to Lief’s report, and then had him describe the phantom trap again in as much detail as possible, with Penthos listening in over her shoulder. They conferred briefly together, two professionals who had gained a good knowledge of each other’s capabilities, and then Dion led the way.

  She had not truly thought that there would be prisoners to rescue. No doubt there were some luckless scouts from Cad Nereg, brought here for interrogation about the fortress’s strengths. The opportunity to relieve them from torment and release them was like a ray of sunshine in Dion’s increasingly murky world.

  But she and her fellows would have to be perfect in their execution if they were to get the chance. If they got into a pitched battle with the two gambling Doomsayers then surely any prisoners would end up dead before they could be rescued.

  She put Harathes as rearguard: as the least stealthy, he would have no chance of tipping the enemy off with an inopportune scrape of shield or rattle of armor. She and Penthos were in the lead, the rest strung out down the stairs in the middle.

  Ahead, she tried to detect the undead lurker within the stones, but there was such an all-pervasive Dark aura to the whole place that her divine senses were useless. Thankfully Penthos’s Power Elemental cared nothing for Light and Dark. He put a hand to her shoulder and nodded, his finger jabbing at something invisible.

  He flexed his shoulders and brought his hands up, ready to unleash his magic, and she took that one step farther.

  The thing shot out of the wall considerably faster than Lief had described, no doubt keyed up by the Light that she brought with her. Even as its mouth hung open for screaming and the air crackled with ice crystals, Penthos lunged with both hands, encapsulating the apparition in a bubble of spinning threads and streamers of flame. Any ghostly wail of warning was caught by the magician’s power and held within the vibrating shell.

  Dion brought the disc of Armes up and concentrated on the creature, finding the knot of evil that comprised it, distinct from the background emanations of everything around her. With brutal efficiency she focused her faith and power into a scalpel sharpness and severed all the bonds that held the spirit to the mortal world. It was easy work: those unnatural cords had been bowstring-tense, straining against the natural tendency of dead souls to be drawn to other less corporeal places. In an instant, the monstrous revenant was sucked away, off to its much-deserved sinner’s reward.

  Through it all, nobody had made a sound. From ahead the murmur of idle conversation, the slap of cards, went on uninterrupted. Then another female scream shook the air and Dion turned to her companions and signaled the all clear.

  Lief and Cyrene were up next. The thief slid past Dion to the top of the steps, paused briefly as he waited his moment, and then snuck soundlessly into the room above, sloping about the walls until he could get himself into position. Cyrene counted carefully, putting an arrow to the nock and slowly drawing her bowstring back, the weapon pointed almost at her feet.

  What number she and Lief had agreed on, Dion did not know, but abruptly Cyrene skipped up three steps and into sight of the room, swinging the bow round. Dion heard the musical thrum as the arrow leapt from the string, and at the same time there were a couple of knocks and a gasp from above.

  “Done,” Cyrene murmured, and they all crowded into the room.

  One of the Doomsayers had an arrow in the back of the neck, just about where it met his skull. He was sitting up very straight, his head tilted at a quizzical angle, quite dead. His companion, no less dead, was slumped face down on the table, the cards awash with blood. Behind his chair stood Lief, like an overenthusiastic barber, cleaning his dagger blade with a grimace.

  In moments they had pushed forward to the door of the torture cell, Lief to open it, Harathes to bound through it, Cyrene to back him up. Dion and Penthos were ready to deal with any supernatural threat, although Penthos claimed there was nothing much of a magical nature behind the door. Of course Penthos’s “nothing much” could be another man’s arcane arsenal.

  Enth himself was standing by the table, looking at the two bodies as though trying to work out what had gone wrong with them and whether it could be fixed. He reached out a finger and prodded the arrow-struck man in the temple thoughtfully, turning the angle of the man’s head from quizzical to incredulous.

  Dion shook herself. Time to worry about the man-spider later.

  She nodded. Lief threw open the now-unlocked door, and Harathes barrelled in.

  A male voice from inside yelled out, “Don’t you clowns have anything better—oh, fuck!” and then there was the sound of a shield and a skull coming into swift collision. Cyrene had her bowstring drawn back, but there was an awkward look on her face and she hadn’t loosed the arrow. Dion shouldered past her, disc upraised for ease of smiting, and took a look.

  There were two people in there, a man and a woman, but even a first glance suggested that any torturing had been purely consensua
l. They were both stark naked and still semi-entwined on a bed, and Dion could not help noting the rapidly wilting credentials of the male party involved. Harathes had them at sword point, and the man was sporting the beginning of what promised to be a spectacular bruise across half his face.

  Strewn about the floor were various articles of clothing, including a leather breastplate covered in what seemed to be stitched-together human faces, and a robe that swirled with dark mists. Doomsayers, then.

  Stripped of their trappings, the pair of interrupted villains had little of evident evil about them. Harathes was making them keep their hands in view, and if either was a magician then any attempt at magic was likely to be brief. There was, as all could plainly see, nothing up their sleeves.

  “No sign that anyone heard that ruckus,” Lief commented. “All right, what now?”

  “Who the pits are you?” the woman Doomsayer got out.

  “We are of the Light,” Dion told her sternly. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “You’re mad. Darvezian will make your deaths last a thousand years!” her trysting companion added.

  “And yours will be somewhat swifter, but we’ll all be just as dead at the end of it,” Cyrene pointed out, and drew back her string to the ear.

  “Wait!” the man threw up his hands, and she shot him through the left one, pinning it artfully to the woodwork.

  “There you go,” she told him as he writhed and choked. “Another notch for the bedpost.” Even as she was speaking she had a second arrow nocked. “How about you steer clear of anything that looks like magic?”

  “Oh—Dark Lord’s Wrath!—it wasn’t magic! I don’t do magic! She does the magic!”

  “Shut up, moron!” the woman spat, and then the edge of Harathes’s blade came to rest companionably under her chin and she followed her own advice.

  “Get something out of them, at least,” Lief suggested. “They must know what’s waiting above us, if nothing else. You can tell if they’re lying, right?”

  “The Light shall illuminate the truth,” Dion agreed. She fixed the two hapless Doomsayers with a steely glower. “You’ll answer what we ask, and truthfully, or you’ll end here.”

  The woman tried a defiant look, but it was somewhat spoiled by Harathes inching his blade up, forcing her to stare at the ceiling or cut her own throat.

  The male Doomsayer’s gaze was fixed on the steady point of Cyrene’s arrowhead. “Look, please. We were just—”

  “Evidently,” Dion finished for him. “And just as evident, you’re servants of the Dark Lord. Why are his chiefest servants always human? Why not Ghants or specters? There is nothing more abominable to the Light than those who cast away its gifts to choose Darkness.”

  “No, no, we’re not, we were never chiefest anything,” the Doomsayer told her hurriedly. “We’re very minor, not important, not really . . . I never wanted to be evil, it was just, things happened, and . . .”

  Dion remembered the vacant sockets and gapes of his leather vest, and her lips thinned.

  “I’ll talk,” he got out hurriedly, seeing that dangerous expression. “Please, I’ll tell you it all. Just, don’t kill me. Take me back for judgment, I’ll do whatever you want, just . . .” He could see that Cyrene’s arm was beginning to quiver, that soon she must loose or relax.

  Dion exerted her faith again, fighting against the innate resistance of this place to circle his brow with a blazing golden band. It obviously pained him, but it would burn far fiercer if he tried to lie to her. “Tell us what lies above,” Dion commanded him.

  “All right, all right! There are about half a dozen more spook traps,” he said, stammering over the words. “There was a guardian serpent, but someone forgot the password and we had to put it down. The armory has a whole load of locks and glyphs and things on the door but I don’t know how to get past them. I’m not important enough, please—seriously, there’s not much up there. The top levels, nobody goes there anyway.”

  “Except Darvezian,” Dion prompted.

  His eyes bugged. “You’re looking for . . .”

  “Wait,” Cyrene broke in. “You’re saying Darvezian isn’t up the tower?”

  “No, I wasn’t, I didn’t mean—Ah!” and the golden fires of truth seared a red weal across his forehead. “All right, yes! He’s not up there! Nobody’s up there!”

  “Don’t tell us he’s not even here,” spat Lief disgustedly.

  The Doomsayer stared at them helplessly. “Well, of course he’s here. He’s down on the bottom floor. That’s where his throne room is. You must have gone right past the door to it. Who would live at the top of a tower? Have you seen how many fucking stairs there are?”

  Dion stared woodenly at him, aware that somewhere at the edge of her vision Lief was smirking uncontrollably.

  “Oh, well, don’t we feel like fools now,” the thief snickered. “Terribly sorry to have bothered you. We’ll head back downstairs again, shall we? Let you get back to ploughing your furrow. Sorry about the mess. Oh, no, I forgot! You’re evil, and it’s an evil furrow! What an impasse!”

  “Shut up, Lief,” snapped Dion, Cyrene, and Harathes all together, when it became evident that his gift for improvising was not going away any time soon.

  “Well, seriously, though, what do we do with them, exactly?”

  Dion sighed, looking at the two wretched Doomsayers. “You’re good with knots. Tie them—to the bed, to each other, whatever. Gag them.”

  “Break their fingers, maybe,” Harathes suggested dourly.

  Lief shook his head, and took a knife to the bedsheets, ripping them into strips and then doing a very professional job securing the two naked Doomsayers, leaving the man’s hand pinned to the bed by Cyrene’s arrow. He took his time and checked all of the knots. “Well, don’t know how long it’ll take to do what we came here for, but they’re here for the duration or until someone finds them. Let’s pop downstairs and finish this.”

  Dion took a deep breath. “The Dark Lord.”

  Lief shrugged. “We’ve made quite a dent in his hired help already. How many Doomsayers are there, anyway? We’ve finished off five here, and Enth got a couple before. Even if we . . . even if things don’t go to plan, that’s got to count for something, right?”

  “Things will go to plan,” Dion stated, hearing the force of her own words ring hollow inside her head. “I will bless you all, when we’re down. What power the Light can muster in this place, I shall gift you with it. If you have any talismans or potions or other measures of last resort, now is the time to resort to them. I should . . . I should say something, I think.”

  “Nothing long-winded,” Lief pointed out.

  “But this is . . . we’ve worked so hard for this.”

  There was a muffled rasp and a thumping noise from the prisoners. Dion rounded on them angrily, about to castigate them for their impiety. And stopped. They had been precastigated with extreme prejudice. Enth stood by them, a knife in his hand that gleamed wetly. The pair of Doomsayers were sagged together, heads lolling drunkenly, and both of them awash with red that slicked their skins and soaked into their bindings.

  “What . . . ?” she whispered.

  “What did . . . Why did you . . . ?” Lief got out, bug-eyed. “We didn’t need to . . .”

  Enth looked at the knife in his hand, then back at them all. “It was permitted,” he said simply.

  “You murdered them!” Harathes snapped, leaping to full righteousness from a standing start. “You filthy animal.” He tried to loom at Enth, waiting for the man-spider to cringe away, but Enth just stood there, staring past him as though he was the least relevant thing in the world. Instead, that glassy black gaze met Dion’s.

  “They were of the Dark,” he said.

  “You can’t even know what that means,” she told him, skin crawling to hear him say the words.

  “I know what it means. It means they can be killed,” Enth stated flatly. “My people are of the Dark. They can be killed by Men.
The Ghants are of the Dark. They can be killed by Men. Perhaps Friend Lief is sad they are killed, but it is too difficult not to kill them: they are killed. These were servants of the Dark Lord. They are to die.”

  “We were going to spare them, because they helped us,” Dion said weakly.

  “Helped you?” Enth echoed vacantly.

  “They told us where Darvezian was.”

  “And if the Ghants had told you, they would have saved themselves?” There was a tremor building up in the creature. “No,” it said. “No. It is because these were Men. Dark Men. Evil Men. But Men. So you save them.”

  “Enth, we tried, with the spiders. You tried,” Lief said softly.

  A full shudder went through the man-spider, a convulsion that drove the knife into the body of the dead man by sheer muscle reflex. “I tried,” Enth hissed. “I tried and I couldn’t save them. From you. I couldn’t save them from you. Dark, Light, I don’t know these things, but they were not servants of your Darvezian. These, these were, and why, why should they live, when my people, when my people are dead, are dead, all dead.”

  “Enth, please just put the knife down,” Lief whispered, because the man-spider’s hand was making a mince of the dead man’s shoulder and chest, spasmodically carving and cutting.

  Enth’s fingers twitched wide, the blade dropping to the floor, and then he had whirled and lashed out at the wall, beating his fists against the black stones, shattering one of the red lamps. A sound came out of him: something utterly inhuman; something utterly comprehensible, frustration and rage and grief.

  Harathes actually stepped forward, sword directed at that bowed back, but Cyrene shoved him to one side and was beside Enth in the next moment, her bow falling to the bloodied bed, her hands on his shoulders. Dion tensed, waiting for the creature to batter itself against Penthos’s strictures, to get its hands about her throat, to have to be put down. But it just slumped there, as though that one strike had somehow thrown its anger into the substance of the tower, and it had nothing left.