Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Well, then.” Dion was trembling slightly. “If you’re going to destroy us anyway, why not show us your true face, your first face. You were a man once, you say? Then show us that man. Show us the truth of the Dark Lord.”

  And Cyrene could not but admire the woman, because even at this remove she was still striving to defeat the evil. Would Darvezian’s mortal face bring any of his actual mortality with it? Surely not, and yet Dion was still trying.

  But that request appeared to be something that Darvezian had been angling for. “Right question!” he crowed. “Oh, I love it, I love it when they ask that. Yes, O faithful priestess, I shall show you my face. Yes, it shall be my pleasure, and one I indulge only once a generation or so.” He spun away from her and stalked a few paces, spinning on his heel to spread his arms wide. “You have come all this way, after all. You have earned the right to look upon your enemy, and despair.”

  “Show me then,” Dion snapped. “But be warned: I don’t despair easily.” Her voice was a ragged ruin as she said it, but there was still a core to her that would not break.

  Darvezian sighed, and put his hands up to his cowl, flexing his fingers like a conjurer. With a great flourish he cast his hood back, and with it went all the other mummery: the robe, the gleaming armor, the griffin skull with its gemmed eye sockets. And what was left was a man.

  He was a handsome, square-jawed man with a warrior’s strong frame, robed but with a sword at his side. His hair was golden, and his eyes were a deep ocean blue, both of which details were usually missing from the statues Cyrene was used to seeing. He extended his hands, palms down like a priest giving a blessing, and grinned at their expressions.

  “Well?” he asked them. “Come on, then, someone say something. You’ve got what you wanted. Why the long faces?”

  Dion made a spitting, stuttering sound. Her eyes were bulging and her face was going red, and Cyrene wondered if she would drop dead from apoplexy there and then, and deny the Dark Lord the fullness of his jest. “You . . . ,” she got out, sounding as though her own tongue was trying to choke her. “You . . . How dare you malign his holy form! Vile though you are, how dare you go so far into blasphemy as to don his shape.”

  Darvezian burlesqued a hurt expression. “But dear priestess, O Faithful of Faithfuls, this is my shape. It was mine long before they started making the statues, although I will say, they do me very well, even after all this time. Between you and me, I had them do my nose a bit smaller, when they did the first ones, but we all have our little vanities, don’t we?”

  Dion’s face twisted, and she let out a screech of rage. “Tell him! Someone, tell him to, tell him to . . .”

  “Master magician, will you vouch for me?” the Dark Lord asked Penthos earnestly. “Surely you can see there is no illusion clinging to me, that what you see is no more than what you asked for: the truth.”

  Penthos coughed awkwardly, and Dion rounded on him.

  “What?”

  “He, it’s just as he says,” the magician reported hollowly. “There is no trace of obfuscation about him. He’s . . .”

  “Armes,” Cyrene finished. She felt as though she were watching some great natural disaster, a landslide or earthquake, vast and slow and infinitely destructive, unfolding out within Dion’s mind.

  “That’s nonsense,” Harathes stated flatly. “I look more like Armes than he does.” It was a wretched sop for Dion, patently untrue, and she cast it off.

  “Take what form you may. You cannot be Armes.”

  “Oh, the faith!” Darvezian—or whoever it was that spoke to them—gasped, a hand to his chest as though wounded. “But all shall be explained. I insist upon it. I want you to know, before you die, what you have been living. I’ll give you a clue: it’s a lie. A big lie. A lie told for the best reasons, at first. But a lie, nonetheless.”

  Cyrene’s arrow leapt from the string and struck him in the chest, but bounded from the robes as though they were stone. The Dark Lord blinked, momentarily put out, and then grinned. “Fast, very fast. Fast and futile, alas. Of course you had to see if I had inexplicably bared my vulnerable spot at you.” He scooped the arrow from the floor and held it up. A word came from his lips, like the words he had spoken to repel their earlier attacks. Once spoken, Cyrene could not recall it, nor could she ever have said it, but she knew its meaning: it meant arrow, in some quintessential way that the mere word “arrow” did not. Then he looked at Cyrene and spoke another word, and a great invisible fist smashed her to the ground, hard enough to knock out two teeth and send her vision out of focus for a moment. The terrifying thing was not the attack, but the word. The word had been her, the essential nature of her in a single utterance.

  “It’s all right,” Darvezian assured them as though nothing had happened, turning the shaft this way and that. “I don’t have a vulnerable spot. I don’t have a weakness. I am the master of all things. You can’t hurt me—why are you snickering, rogue?” He cocked an eyebrow at Lief.

  The thief swallowed, and then squared his shoulders and faced Darvezian full on, an act of more courage than Cyrene would have credited him with. “I thought you looked like the sort of person who didn’t have any vulnerables,” he got out through clenched teeth.

  “Hah!” Darvezian grinned, and then a single syllable had Lief rolling over and over, cursing and clutching at ribs that had just been cracked.

  Cyrene struggled to her knees, and then a hand found her arm and helped her up. She turned to see Enth, whose face was almost refreshing in its lack of emotion. Of all of them, whatever revelation was about to come would not touch him. Why should he care about the faith that despised him on sight?

  Darvezian looked about brightly, grinning. “So tell me,” he addressed them, “who was paying attention in theology class? Who can tell me the story of Armes—my story? You, O faithful one?”

  “I will not give you the satisfaction of mocking my faith,” Dion growled.

  “I think you mean my faith. How about you, Gaptooth the Archer? No? Or the magician? Or . . . or your thing. Is that . . . ? It’s something of the Dark . . .” He squinted. “Is that a spider in there? You bizarre people.”

  Enth just stared at him mulishly, and then helped Lief to his feet as well.

  “Armes looked upon the world and saw it riven with strife.” The voice was Harathes’s, reciting what was practically a child’s text. “He found the sacred mountain and ascended past the clouds, to where he found knowledge of Light and Dark. And Armes came down from the mountain and gave the gift of Light to Men, so that they would always know the Darkness. And you’re not him.”

  “And it wasn’t a mountain, of course, but you tell people a metaphor and a generation later everyone thinks you were speaking literally,” the Dark Lord moaned. “You, you magician-type, you’d probably understand some of this, so forgive me, I’ll have to put it in baby-language for the rest.” He sighed. “I was a magician—the greatest of them all. And principled, as I said. I did indeed see that the world was ‘riven with strife,’ and I thought that a proper application of magic should heal all ills. You understand that, yes?”

  Penthos was nodding, stroking his beard.

  “But from the perspective of a mere human, the problem was too complex. I could not perceive the world in the right way. And so I had to step beyond it. I found a way to rise above it all. Not demon-worlds or elemental planes or cloud castles or any of that nonsense, but . . .” A frustrated expression marred the strong-jawed perfection of Armes’s familiar face. “Look, think of the whole world as just a map, a flat, flat map. All the people on it are just dots on the map. They can’t see beyond what’s immediately around them. Any line on the flat is an insuperable boundary to them. Imagine how life is to those flat little dots of people. Then imagine if you could break from that map, so that you could stand over it and look down. That was my mountain. I turned myself toward a direction nobody had ever thought about before, and walked until I could look back and see the whole of real
ity in one go. All the world and everything in it, its true nature and being, all laid out for me like an anatomist’s diagrams. Or . . . no?” He plainly did not see the comprehension he was hoping for in their faces. “Come on, this is the clever part. I want you all to see just how damn clever I was back then.”

  Penthos spoke up. “You’re . . . talking about dimensions,” the magician said thoughtfully.

  “Yes! The man in a dress wins a prize!” Armes pounced happily. “Just as, with more dimensions than the map, we can view it, understand it as a whole, amend it and fold it as we please, so I could stand and view the world as if it were that map. I gained complete knowledge of the world. I learned the secret names of all things—all laid out for me. And I brought that knowledge back to the world, to help people. As the lump in the armor recites, I brought Light into the world.”

  Dion’s face was as stone.

  “And Dark, of course,” their antagonist added, offhand. “Light and Dark, the knowledge of them both.”

  “Why?” Dion whispered.

  “What’s Light without Dark?” Armes shrugged. “But seriously, the world was in a mess. People fought each other, enslaved each other, stole, raped, and lied to each other. And I thought to myself: what’s the real problem here? It’s that people need help to tell right from wrong. Plainly they do, or else everything wouldn’t have been so fucked up, am I right? And so I came back to the world, from my ‘mountain,’ and I made them all creatures of the Light. And I made most of the rest, all the subhumans and monsters, creatures of the Dark. And I set out some doctrine for how the Light should live. And I gave them the Dark to go work out their frustrations on. It should have worked.” And for a moment the mirth dropped off Armes’s face like shed skin. “It should have worked. I’d thought it all through. I was going to save the world. I gave you brutal apes everything you needed for paradise. And you wasted it, you stupid, ignorant barbarians.”

  “You set up a system of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and you wonder why it didn’t make people nice?” demanded Lief, wheezing a bit around his injured ribs.

  “It should have worked!” Armes snapped at him. “But people just went on doing things to each other. Some of them even went over to the Dark, because there was power there to be had, power to balance the Light. Nobody did what I wanted them to do. The whole thing, all that work, it was a waste of my time. And there I was, immortal, powerful beyond the dreams of an archmage, and sick of you mewling, backstabbing, ungrateful maggots. And bored. After the first hundred years you can’t imagine how bored. And when did the first Dark Lord show his face? Yes, you at the back in the mail!”

  “About . . . a hundred years after Armes brought the Light,” muttered Harathes sourly.

  “First prize,” the man-god applauded. “You’re helpful. I’ll enjoy wearing your face. I bet you get all the girls, too.”

  Harathes took that badly, and said nothing.

  “Even when I was the Dark Lord, that first time,” Armes went on, “I thought it would help. I still wanted to help, you see. A real enemy, to unite the forces of the Light: something to make people put aside their differences and really appreciate what they had. And when the first real hero came, to the tower I had then—not this one, it was a smaller one, and I hadn’t had the throne done—I let him think he’d killed me, and I traveled back with him, sightless as a ghost, to see the brave new world my experiments with evil had built. And it was just the same. Nothing had changed. And in all this time, nothing ever has. There is no hope for humanity, or anyone or anything. There’s just me, forever and forever. I knew then that I might as well just amuse myself. Dark, Light, Light, Dark, over and over.” He shook his head, like a man contemplating the follies of children. “But you know what, you hero types, you do believe. You go through life doing terrible, terrible things to each other, and to everything else, but you somehow still believe that you’re right. You come here full of the joys of the Light, practically singing with self-righteous fervor. And then you meet me, and I tell you all of this, and I hear your little hearts break. When you find out you’re not right, and you’re not chosen, that the prophecies are just me indulging myself, and that there’s nothing but me that has meaning in the world, forever and forever. So let me hear it. Let me hear the sad little sound of your hearts breaking. And then we can end this.”

  There was a long silence after he finished speaking. Everyone was looking at Dion, and she was looking nowhere at all, still clutching the little round piece of metal to her, though the Light had long faded from it.

  Then Enth said, “I want to kill him.”

  “Join the queue,” Lief muttered.

  “You?” Harathes looked from Armes to Enth and apparently found the latter a target he could safely strike against. “This must be music to your ears.”

  “I want to kill him,” Enth repeated. His knuckly fists were clenched.

  “How touching. Does it do any other tricks?” Armes asked, approaching Enth and staring into the black orbs of his eyes. “Why even bring this thing? Even had I been no more than Darvezian the Dark Lord, it would have been mine for a word. Of course, you weren’t to know who I really was, and that everything is mine for a word.” He examined Enth’s face, then grimaced. “It’s disgusting, really. You’ve surpassed nature in making something even nastier out of a spider. And does the little monster want to kill poor old Armes?” In a grotesque stage whisper, with an eye for Dion’s reaction, he confided to Enth, “It’s all right, I’m not really of the Light. Light and Dark are just things I made up, back when I was trying to help. Does that set your little arachnid brainstem at rest?”

  Enth was shaking with a captive rage Cyrene could entirely sympathize with. “My Mother was hurt,” he hissed out. “My people were slaughtered. I was taken from my home. I was remade. All for your prophecy. All for your Light and Dark. And it was a joke. And it was because you were bored.”

  “And I never did like spiders much,” Armes added carelessly, peeling back Enth’s lips to look at his teeth.

  The man-spider shook him off furiously, and Cyrene thought he must surely go for Armes’s throat, but he just stood there, radiating frustrated anger. “Everything I have seen of Men has made me want to hate them. But it is you. It is you I can hate. For making me part of your prophecy.”

  Armes mummed looking wounded. “But you have to have a prophecy, or nobody takes you seriously as a Dark Lord. You have to be great and terrible and all-powerful, save for some ludicrous set of conditions that—alas!—strips you of your invulnerability and lets some hero in to polish you off. How else to balance the overwhelming threat with the possibility of defeat?” And his focus was swinging back to Dion again, sending him stalking across the floor to her. “And I’ll bet a hundred learned disciples of the church spent decades mulling over all those veiled references, before they came up with the ‘right’ answer. And I’ll let you into another secret, there wasn’t one. I wouldn’t really have cared. Some other interpretation would have been just as good. What a shame, though, all that earnest scholarship in vain. Just like the Light and the church turned out to be in vain.”

  “You’re wrong.” Dion’s voice was almost too quiet for Cyrene to hear.

  “What was that?” Armes snapped.

  “You’re wrong. The church has good people. The church has people trying to do what is right.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Not all of them, perhaps,” Dion went on, not looking at Armes or at any of the rest. “Perhaps not even most of them. But even the Potentate himself tries. And I have tried. I have had faith. I have done my best.”

  Armes’s face was solemn, and for a broken moment Cyrene thought that Dion’s sincerity had got through to him. It was just another ploy, though. “Oh,” he sighed. “Oh, my poor dear faithful one, what sad words. Done your best? Have you really done your best? Do you not see what a wretched epitaph that is? What poor last words? My child, it doesn’t matter if you do your best, if you don’t get anywhe
re. It’s just doubly pathetic that this, only this, was your best. That, pushed to the utmost limit of your abilities, all you could achieve was this. Have you defeated the Dark? No. Have you slain Darvezian? No such man. Have you fulfilled the prophecy? Yes, but you’ve found out that was just a bit of fun anyway.” He was very close to her now, speaking in her ear. “Have you championed the church and the Light? Yes, but it’s my church and my Light, and all those statues you’ve prayed before, they’re me.”

  “Stop it!” and she struck him, backhanded him across the face, Cyrene heard the crunch of bones breaking, saw Dion’s hand deform across Armes’s square jaw. The priestess let out a single sound of raw agony, and then she was clutching her shattered knuckles to her, eyes bright with tears. The pain on her face was not for the physical hurt, though, but for the philosophical.

  “Enough,” came a voice, and Armes raised an incredulous eyebrow at the challenge.

  “Enough came centuries ago,” he said, hunting for whoever dared interrupt him. “The whole point to this is to keep me amused for the long, long years after ‘enough’ came and went.”

  “Leave her alone.” Penthos was pale, muscles ticking in his jaw. “You’re upsetting her.”

  Armes’s eyes flicked from him to Dion. “Of course I . . . That’s the point. I’m not just ‘upsetting’ her, I’m breaking her. I’m destroying her faith. Haven’t you been listening? Haven’t you . . . Do I need to start all over with the explanations?”

  “I don’t care about the Light,” Penthos said carefully. “I don’t care about the church. I care about Dion. Leave her alone.”

  “Seriously?” Armes wondered. Cyrene wondered if this was a moment when he stood before them without masks: the damaged human being he had once been, confronted with the damaged humanity he had lost. “I am Armes, you street-corner conjurer. What are you going to do to stop me?”