Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “I’m sorry,” Cyrene was murmuring. “Enth, I’m sorry. I really am.” Dion was shocked at Cyrene wanting to comfort the thing, more so that it apparently wanted comforting.

  “Why do I feel this?” the man-spider asked. “Why would anyone want to feel this . . . I don’t even have words for what this is.”

  “Guilt, remorse, empathy,” Lief listed lazily. “You’re already more human than Harathes.”

  “Stop . . .” The warrior gritted his teeth. “Stop taking its side.”

  “But we’re all on the side of the Light, didn’t you know?” Lief smiled sweetly at him. “No matter what we do.”

  “Enough.” Dion glanced about for the last member of their company, finding the magician with his back turned, looking hawkishly at the stairs.

  “You’re right, Penthos,” she decided. “Recriminations later. Let’s finish this.”

  “Hmm, what?” The magician glanced at her, frowning. “Apologies, I was miles away. What’s happened?” His eyes took in the dead prisoners without finding anything amiss.

  They trooped back down the stairs in grim silence. If Enth was leaving a trail of bloody footprints, the black stone and red lighting contrived to conceal it. Back in the makeshift kitchen there was a moment when everyone looked over the dead Doomsayers, the dead Ghants, and probably there was some sort of reassessment going on, in some heads at least. Dion knew that inside hers there was a great dammed weight of introspection that she was holding back. She had felt soiled from the moment that they had taken up Enth as a traveling companion, but that had been simple: to travel with a thing of Darkness was a bad thing—hardly the sort of complex moral quandary that would go into a seminary exam. The sullied feelings she was penning up now were not because she had used Enth as a tool. She did not like what she had seen, through Enth’s eyes. The moral certainty of the Light’s crusading methods was an easy thing to vouch for, when you only saw it from the side that held the sword and the disc.

  There were several other doors off the kitchen, and Lief examined each, making full use of the fact that they had all been put in far more recently than the building of the tower, and that none of them fit their stone frames overly well.

  “Storeroom,” he murmured, “weapons rack, some sort of tool cupboard. Oh . . .” He backed up rapidly from one door, no grander than the others. “Oh, that’s the one.”

  “You’re sure?” Harathes demanded.

  Lief gave him a look. “Well, I’m no expert, but it’s a big old room, most of the rest of the bottom floor, and it’s pretty much empty, but there’s the biggest seat I ever saw at the far end with a robed bloke sitting on it. Maybe they just went overboard with the dunnies here, but somehow I don’t think it’s that sort of throne.”

  “Well, then,” Dion stated, drawing their attention. “You know the prophecy. Bring out the Tooth.”

  For a horrible moment she could not remember who had the thing, and would not have been remotely surprised if the vital artifact foretold in omens had been left in an inn room somewhere. Then Cyrene drew it out, the curved, wicked-looking fang of Enth’s bloated mother.

  “Let me have it,” Harathes demanded.

  “No,” Dion said. “We will not defeat the Dark Lord by challenging him to single combat. His powers would destroy you, or any of us. Not Penthos nor I could stand against the full strength of Darvezian.” Or why would we go through this remarkable charade? “We will hold his attention, though. We will draw him into a fight, and we will stay alive, and hold him off—even keep him talking—just long enough for Lief.”

  “Me?” The thief flinched. “You’re . . . ?”

  “You are no great hero, Lief,” Dion told him kindly, “and you are no virtuous paragon of the Light. But you are a subtle and soft-footed rogue, and in a fight you’re best placed at the enemy’s back. So there you will go, while Darvezian focuses on us. Go and be the man who strikes down the Dark Lord. Take your place in history.”

  Lief’s eyes were wide as moons. “You’d . . . trust me with this?”

  And Dion smiled fondly. “None better.”

  “This is a travesty,” Harathes muttered, but nobody dignified him with an answer.

  “All right, okay,” Lief said, visibly mustering his courage. “In that case the main obstacle is furniture, because I wasn’t exaggerating, that chair is huge. I need him out of it so I can get a good stab in.”

  “I would hope that even the Dark Lord would dignify our presence by standing up,” Dion shrugged. “You hang back, Lief. Everyone else?” Her gaze took in Harathes, Cyrene, Penthos, even Enth. “I bless you all. I give you the strength of the Light, the fortitude of Armes.” Her gestures pointedly excluded Enth—because he would sully her religion, or because her religion would burn him? She made no attempt to answer the question. “Let’s go.”

  She strode forth and kicked open the door, wondering mid-move whether it was locked. Thankfully it was not, and the portal slammed back with all the thunderous booming she could have wished, the sound reverberating across the vast, echoing throne room of the Dark Lord.

  The Dark Throne was as great a symbol of evil as whoever sat in it, and also the main reason the ceilings were so high. It rose as tall as four men on each others’ shoulders, a splay of stone spines and barbs rising to a pair of ridged horns that curved together until, high in the upper shadows, they came within a thumb’s breadth of touching. The scale of the seat was such that it would have borne a giant easily enough. The figure sitting there was dwarfed by it. Darvezian had been a man once, after all, before he had become the master of the Dark.

  His black robe was made of shadow more than cloth, depthless, textureless. Over it were odd fragments of armor, silver chased with more black: a single shoulder guard, gauntlets, a gorget. Every piece of metal was wrought into the shape of interlocking screaming faces, and they shimmered and trembled, impossibly pale no matter how red the light was.

  There was a griffin skull atop the Dark Lord’s head as a kind of helm, the hooked beak curving down over his brow, the eye sockets set with rubies that glimmered with their own malevolent fire. They had names, those gems, and sagas of their own that listed the atrocities they had spurred their many owners on to. Beneath that beak the figure’s hood contained two burning orbs of scarlet fire.

  It was all, Dion considered, good theater. No doubt it kept the Doomsayers and the Ghants in line. He was just a man, she reminded herself. She felt fear, of course, but she had long ago learned to be its master, not its servant.

  “Darvezian!” and she was striding across the great vacant floor toward that throne.

  “Who calls my name?” came a voice from the cowl. It was a surprisingly human voice, for all the pomp and dread grandeur, deep, rich, and deceptively pleasant. It was the sort of voice that would order men to their deaths and expect them to go willingly. It was, she guessed, the last thing remaining of the man Darvezian had been.

  “All the world calls it,” Dion declared. “All your many victims cry it out, and demand justice!” Cyrene had an arrow to the string; Harathes had his shield up on her other side. Penthos was a little behind her, his hands dancing with fire that he was visibly restraining. Enth . . . Enth was there. He was there, and somewhere behind her. Should I have had the creature killed? Is this what will doom the world, my inadequate resolve; the unwillingness of some of my friends to squash a spider? Too late now to wonder.

  “I am Dion of the Light!” she cried, purging her uncertainty through the fires of shouting at someone as loud as she could. “Stand forth and face me, monster, and pay the price for all you’ve done.”

  “What took you?” Darvezian asked idly. “I’ve been waiting here since all that racket in the kitchen. Did you take the scenic route?”

  Dion was left wordless, finding herself not apparently meeting the rigorous standards a Dark Lord expected in his enemies.

  Unexpectedly, it was Harathes who came to her aid. “We have disposed of your servants, Dark One. Ei
ght of your Doomsayers lie dead, that might have aided you.”

  “Consider me inconvenienced,” Darvezian growled, with a great shrugging sigh—trackable in the dark only because of that single pauldron. He stood abruptly, no obvious human motion, just a serpent-smooth transition. “Well, then, Champions of the Light, I salute you for getting this far, but you have no idea of my power and my provenance. I will have to make you die in agony over a long period of time now, but don’t take it personally. You really have done very well indeed.”

  And he laughed, a great, full peal of genuine amusement, and stepped down from the throne with his hands held out to his sides. Dion thrust the disc of Armes forward, calling up her strongest wards, and Penthos’s hands blazed bright and fierce.

  And Lief leapt up, actually getting a foot on the seat of the Dark Throne and kicking off from it to give his blow more force, and buried the Tooth of the Mother in the small of Darvezian’s back.

  11: Putting out the Lights

  “HAVE IT, YOU TURD!” the thief yelled as he struck. It was, Cyrene considered, a battle cry unlikely to make the sagas. The bravado of the shout was also belied by the fact that Lief got as far away from Darvezian as possible the moment after, leaving the fang embedded in the Dark Lord’s back.

  Darvezian dropped to his knees with a gurgling choke, and the seething silvery power that had wreathed his fingers a moment before was abruptly dissipating into the gloomy air.

  Cyrene loosed, sending her shaft thudding into the Dark Lord’s shadowy chest, rocking him back and eliciting a hollow gasp.

  “What have you done?” Darvezian choked. “What is this sorcery? My wards, my protections—! How have you done this to me?” He clutched at his throat, choking and gurgling horribly.

  “This fate you brought down on yourself . . . ,” Dion started, but uncertainly, because the character of the Dark Lord’s garglings was changing even as she spoke. From rasping and gasping, Darvezian veered inexorably into laughter. In context, it was the least pleasant and welcome sound Cyrene had ever heard.

  “What’s this?” the Dark Lord cried, springing to his feet nimbly. “Someone’s done their homework! Is this really . . . ?” Ignoring them, he reached back and, after some awkward twisting and fumbling, yanked the spider fang from his back with a ripping sound. “Don’t tell me . . . It is!” He brandished the gory memento aloft. “Well done, you, look what you brought me. An actual tooth from a spider matron! I can’t believe it, how did you ever get this? I thought this would keep your lot on their toes for another two decades at least. What tribulations you must have gone through.” He shook his shrouded head in a kind of wonder. “I’d ask you to tell me all about it, but I suspect that it’s probably not that interesting. Better preserve the mystique, say I.”

  “You . . .” Harathes was the only one of them who could speak. “You fiend! You wanted us to bring you the tooth? You’ve . . . it’s part of your evil schemes . . . ?”

  “What, this?” Darvezian cocked his head at the fang. “Nasty-looking thing, isn’t it,” and he threw it casually over his shoulder. “You’ve no idea how hard it is to put together a properly foreboding prophecy—and believe me, I’ve been doing it for a while! No, don’t worry, you’ve not fulfilled my evil scheme by bringing me a piece of a spider. Why would I want that? You’ve fulfilled it mostly by just storming my tower. But you have to have a prophecy, don’t you? To keep you hero-types on your toes. And it gets so dull, otherwise. Next time I’ll have to set some really challenging conditions. I honestly thought the whole spider business would keep people busy longer.”

  “Enough!” and Harathes launched himself at the dark figure, and a heartbeat later they were all in motion. Lief struck from behind again, with just a regular blade, and Cyrene sent an arrow right between those glowing red eyes. Dion ran forward, calling on the Light, and Penthos’s fingers spat arcing darts of fire.

  And perhaps the fire singed Darvezian’s dark robes slightly, but the rest did nothing. The arrow vanished tracelessly into his hood. Lief’s blade snapped, and Harathes’s sword rebounded, each feat of magic accomplished with but a word from the Dark Lord. Dion practically thrust her disc of Armes into that unseen face, the symbol blazing like daylight. Darvezian took it off her.

  She stumbled back from him, aghast. They were all aghast, right then. Even as powerful as he was, the Dark Lord should have suffered something from the power that was his nemesis. Instead, he turned the disc over in his gauntleted hands as the golden fire died on it.

  “Trinkets,” he said, and cast the disc ringing at Dion’s feet. “Now, have I established my credentials? Yes, I am the Dark Lord. No, you cannot harm me. Yes, I will tell you my evil plan. No, you will not live to tell anyone else. But I will tell you, you see. It’s the highlight of my life, each time we get to this point. I want to see your faces, when I let you in on the joke. I get surprisingly few laughs, in my line of work.”

  “Joke?” Dion demanded, but Cyrene was already butting in.

  “What do you mean, ‘each time’?”

  “Each time some pack of would-be heroes comes to defeat the Dark Lord, of course. I’d thought that was obvious,” Darvezian told her conversationally. “Do you not study your own histories anymore? You should—I’m in them. Don’t you recall Sargos the Light-Herald when he took down the Dark Lord Morticleer? Or, wait, what about the Three Companions and their epic defeat of Dreadnoth the Unspeakable? Or—”

  “But that wasn’t you, it was . . . there were other Dark Lords,” Dion said weakly.

  “It’s the throne,” Lief put in. “The throne’s the Dark Lord. Or the robe, or the hat, or . . . something.”

  “No, no, it’s me,” Darvezian corrected him. “It was always me. I was the first Dark Lord. I was all the Dark Lords. And in between, I’ve been most of the heroes of the Light, as well. When Sargos came to defeat me, it was I who walked out of here in his shape. And—oh!—such a shame that only one of the Three Companions survived that grand battle, hm? So many different shapes and faces. And I suppose I need to decide which of you lot will return the triumphant, yet grieving, hero. Not the weasel thief, not the women, and being a magician would be too much like the regular job, don’t you think? And . . .” The red orbs fixed on Enth briefly. “Well, not that. Nobody’d mistake that for a hero of the Light. So congratulations, son,” he concluded to Harathes, “you get to be the hero. Or I do, anyway, but your face goes on the statues. Preferably not with the expression that’s on it now, of course. I’ll try to be more dignified.”

  “You,” Dion hissed. “You could never pass for one of the Light. They would scent the reek of the Dark on you from a hundred miles away.”

  “Oh, really?” Darvezian steepled his metal-sheathed fingers. “And you’re such an expert, are you? Then tell me, oh, Champion of the Light, can you see the Dark in me?”

  Cyrene watched as Dion frowned furiously at the Dark Lord, seeing the priestess go ashen. “I . . . there’s nothing. Dark, Light, nothing at all.”

  “I was a man once,” Darvezian said contemplatively, “a long, long time ago. But I have become a different order of being. Dark, Light, I have wormed my way through both sides of this world I have helped shape. I have been all your worst nightmares and terrorized the world; I have been your most glorious heroes, and saved it once again. History is a book of my victims, and a litany of my praise.”

  “But . . . why?” Lief got out, his voice shaking. “Why all of that? Why would you do that to people?”

  Cyrene expected some mocking retort, but apparently Darvezian took that part of his work seriously.

  “People?” he spat, putting more than a lifetime’s contempt into the word. “People? What do I do to people, that they’ve not brought on themselves? That was my mistake at the start, trying to help people. And you know what, they don’t want to be helped. They deserve it all, everything the Dark inflicts upon them, every harsh judgment of the Light. People? Don’t make me laugh. Helping people is like beatin
g your head against a wall, and in the end, when you live forever and you’re sick of the same mistakes over and over and over; in the end the only thing left is just to amuse yourself at their expense. Because you can’t make things better, and frankly, no matter how much evil you do, you’re not making things much worse, either.”

  “That’s not true!” Dion challenged him. “The Church of Light is devoted to helping people.”

  “Oh, spoken with the wisdom of, what, four decades? I am suitably chastened, I who was old before your church even began!” Darvezian advanced on her, but she held her ground, reclaimed disc clutched to her breast, and the others clustered behind her for what little moral support they could provide.

  “I know,” the Dark Lord whispered, and a gauntleted hand rose up to rest on hers, closing about her holy symbol. “You were brought up proper, a good little girl. You were taught about the Light and the Dark, and told how everything was. And before I destroy you utterly, and your dreams, and your friends, I’m going to correct you on a number of interesting doctrinal points that will break your spirit and your faith, and amuse me just enough to make saying the words worth the breath it takes to speak them. But right now you’re burning with self-righteousness, because you know you’re right, and because you’ve lived your whole life only seeing the good in people, and ignoring all the bad—yes, even among your fellow priests—because you knew they were touched by the Light, and therefore they had to be Good. Good by default, no matter what they did.”

  “You’re wrong,” Dion said quite calmly. “Destroy me as you may, you will never break my faith. I believe in Armes, who brought the Light into the world, and saved us. I believe in his church, who strive to defend us from the Dark. And if we do not destroy you, others will.”

  “Such conviction,” Darvezian murmured. “And to think, I used to sound like that. I’ve been so many people, heroes and villains, generation on generation, but at the start I was just like you. Oh, more intelligent, certainly—vastly so, the most gifted magician and philosopher who ever lived, I modestly add—but I was an idealist first, before I became anything else.”