Spiderlight

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  For an answer, Penthos thrust forward his arms, and a line of flame leapt eagerly from them to hammer into the man-god, striking him from Dion’s side and hurling him across the room.

  Cyrene felt a shock go through her: some small churchgoing part of her soul still cried “blasphemy!” no matter all she now knew, but by far the greater part of her was exalting.

  Armes had been knocked back all the way to the throne, and for a moment his body sprawled on it in an unintended pose of casual dissipation. Then he shook his head and pushed himself back to his feet, stumbling a little. “That . . . ,” he said, “that hurt.” He worked his jaw like a man with a loose tooth. “That actually hurt. I don’t think anyone’s managed to hurt me for centuries. I can’t even remember the last time. Not bad, magic man. Not enough, but not bad.”

  “That,” Penthos said tightly, “was just to get you away from her.” And he lashed out with a ceiling-high wave of flame that struck Armes directly in the chest, the Power Elemental smashing the man-god backward and shattering his Dark Throne into splinters of stone.

  “Yes!” Cyrene whooped—they all did—but even then Armes was stirring, lurching to his feet. There was a trail of blood from the corner of his mouth, and his pale robes were scorched across.

  “Oh, it’s on,” said the face that launched a thousand statues. Cyrene had been entertaining a little hope that actually finding someone to challenge him would make a coward of the man, but there was nothing in Armes’s expression except eagerness to rise to that challenge.

  “You may wish to stand back,” Penthos advised primly, and then Armes had unleashed a wave of crackling silver energy the width of the room.

  Dion brandished the disc of Armes in her good hand, conjuring a shield of Light about them, and Penthos was already summoning forth a rushing tide of elemental flame to meet it. The two surges of power met, and the room resounded with the thunder of it, the very air punching left and right about them as the magicians fought. Cyrene and the rest—even Enth—were huddled behind Dion, hoping that the Light was real enough to keep them from being obliterated by the merest aftershock of the wizards’ duel.

  But Cyrene could not look away. Even though she had to shade her eyes as though looking at the sun, she could not avert them. Everyone’s attention was fixed on their unlikely champion as Penthos strode forth, calling on the bottomless reaches of his power, transforming it into flame and hurling it at Armes. Penthos had never been subtle. He was not a wizard to be trusted with illusions. No sane man would go to him for cures or enhancements, love philters or parlor tricks—not unless they had a parlor they badly needed incinerating. But for raw power, for taking the stuff of magic and using it to blast and burn and destroy, there was no equaling him. And, watching the back and forth of magical energies that blazed between the two, Cyrene understood that, all the time she had known him, Penthos had been holding back. Even in his most uncontrolled and unwise moments, when idle use of his powers had caused such widespread devastation, he had been keeping them on a leash. Now, though: now he had an adversary he did not need to hold back with. Now he could let it all come out.

  His face was fixed in a rictus that was somewhere between exhilaration and agony, the face of a man shorn of all the social niceties that Penthos had always been so bad at. It was a face so naked, so lost in the moment, that to look on it was almost indecent. And Armes was having to work, to keep him back. The man-god had his head lowered like a bull, physically braced against the force of Penthos’s attack. He gave as good as he got, his own magical energies boiling and seething about his foe, but at least he was not crowing, not mocking. The fight took all his attention.

  Cyrene nocked an arrow carefully, steadying her breathing. Her chance was at hand.

  She would have liked to have chosen her moment, but the roiling magical chaos that had engulfed the two allowed no such distinction. Instead, all she could do was leap up and step from the shield to loose her shot.

  She heard Harathes shouting at her to stop, but she was already gone by then. The air that engulfed her was hot as a furnace.

  She had a line on Armes as she took that step: her fingers knew their work and let the string go, even as the fire scorched across her. Then hands were on her, dragging her back, but too late to prevent that shaft from speeding true.

  Her hair was aflame, when they got her back in, and her clothes. Lief and Enth had hauled her from the inferno, and now they beat at her until she was out, with a dozen small burns across her body where they were not fast enough. Her bow was ruined, the string shriveled, the wood charred. She fought through the pain, though, asking through cracked lips, “Did I . . . ?”

  Dion was the only one whose eyes had never left the fight. “No,” she said dully. “The arrow . . . burned. It flared into light.”

  “But I . . .” I was going to be the one who killed the Dark Lord. Surely that was the point where it could be done. I was . . .

  “Sorry,” Lief muttered. “Good idea, but . . .”

  “Penthos,” Dion said.

  Beyond the shield, which was cracking across with the mere backwash of the energies hurled back and forth, Penthos retreated a step.

  Armes’s expression had changed. There was something of his former smugness back on it now. He very deliberately advanced another step, and again Penthos was forced to give ground. He was retreating at an angle to the others, rather than back straight into Dion’s shield. They could see his face screwing up in dreadful concentration as he ransacked his reserves of strength, emptying them, throwing everything he could muster at his enemy. His rival for Dion’s affections, Cyrene wondered. Is that how he’s always seen Armes?

  But probably that was not it. Probably she could have no idea about what Penthos thought or felt.

  And then a change came over the magician. He had been hunched forward, every part of him crooked and clawing as he hurled forth his fires. Now he straightened up suddenly, and his face was very pale. The expression they saw there was of a man seeing something just out of his grasp, reaching, desperately reaching.

  Falling short.

  And then the fires went out, so abruptly that Armes dropped forward to one knee. Penthos swayed, trying to look toward Dion but his eyes never quite seeing her, and then he fell full length to the floor.

  Dion was rushing over to him instantly, her shield gone. The Light seethed about her hands, the whole and the broken one, and she lunged for Penthos’s body, grasping desperately for that last spark of life that surely remained there. She had saved Lief by catching that ember and breathing on it until it flared once more. Surely she could . . . surely . . .

  But she was left kneeling by his still form, pressing the disc of Armes to flesh that was waxy and cooling. The fires of Penthos had finally gone out. The great magician was dead.

  There was a chuckle. Armes had regained his feet.

  “That was fun,” he told them. “I’ve not had a tussle like that for ages. You should probably have run off, while we were doing that. I’d have hunted you down, but still . . .” And his smile was back and he was sauntering over toward them.

  “I want to kill him,” Enth said once more.

  “Oh, yes.” It was the first time Harathes had agreed with the man-spider. Then the warrior of the church was rushing forward, sword and shield before him.

  “Come on then!” crowed Armes, and took the shield to his face, the metal bending about his cheekbones. “Do your best! Do your worst! Do it all, and then I’ll do mine!”

  Dion screamed and sent a ray of Light at him that would have obliterated a squad of Ghants, but the radiance just splintered away from Armes’s chest. Lief was behind him by then, ribs or no ribs, breaking a dagger against the man-god’s kidneys. There were words on Armes’s lips, as he ordered the world around him, the world he had seen entire. He spoke of metal, of mankind, all the secret names of a creation that was his to command.

  Cyrene had her own sword out in raw hands, hacking at Armes’s hamstri
ngs and not even marking his skin. Harathes’s blade shattered across his temples, and then the founder of the church grabbed the warrior’s face with one hand and flung him backward across the room.

  Enth just stood there, clenching his fists. I want to kill him, he had said.

  Cyrene tried a scything cut at Armes’s stomach that felt as though she had struck iron, and the thought came to her, He’s asking for permission, the poor bastard! “Enth! Do it! Nothing to lose!” she cried, and then Armes took her blade from her, twisting it out of her fingers by main force and swatting at her with the quillons. She threw herself underneath what was surely a bone-breaking swing.

  Lief had leapt up on Armes’s back, an elbow about that unyielding throat, the other hand prying into eyes that were as inviolate as stone. Armes rolled those eyes, put a hand on that strangling arm, and clenched until Lief screamed and dropped away. The moment his throat was exposed again, Cyrene’s dagger blade lunged at it, snapping in half with the impact.

  Armes kicked her in the stomach, driving the wind from her so hard she thought she would never breathe again. Another bolt of Light from Dion refracted from his face, making him blink irritably. Lief drove another knife savagely into his foot, bending the blade.

  “Have we just about exhausted your capabilities?” Armes asked them pleasantly. “I want you to feel you’ve had a good run, but really, I have a heroic procession to be attending in your names.” He raised a hand—whether to make a point or blast them into dust, Cyrene couldn’t guess—and then Enth tackled him about the waist and knocked him off his feet.

  It was the same artless move he had used on the old Doomsayer, just a desperate attempt to bear his enemy down so he could get to strangling. Enth, like the magician who had reworked him, was not one for subtlety in a crisis.

  Armes hit the ground hard—the stone cracked beneath him, though the impact did not seem to hurt his flesh—and hurled Enth away. The man-spider landed on hands and feet, skittering sideways across the floor in a stomach-twistingly inhuman way.

  “You as well?” Armes got to his feet, and he was doing his mummery again, pretending that the whole business was just too much effort for him. Cyrene saw the very moment that he stopped, putting a hand to his side. There was a moment’s puzzlement on his face that was not feigned.

  By then, Enth was already charging him again, on two legs, then on all fours, then two again, and Armes looked at him with contempt and said a word.

  Spider, Cyrene understood. All of Enth’s being summed up in that single dismissive utterance.

  Enth leapt and struck Armes hard. Cyrene braced for the sound of him splintering off the man-god’s invulnerable hide, but instead Armes went reeling back, Enth clinging to him like a monkey.

  Armes said the word again, and again, and then Enth’s thumb found his eye and he screamed, bucking the man-spider off him. Cyrene stared aghast as the founder of the church staggered back, a hand over half his face, yelling, “Stay away from me, Spider, Spider!” that defining word.

  Enth had gone tumbling over and over—Armes was still supernaturally strong—but now he was stalking forward once more, his glassy, lidless eyes fixed on his opponent.

  “Not a spider,” he spat, with a string of bloody saliva. “All I wanted to be was a spider. I was happy as a spider. Or what a spider thinks is happy. Your prophecy. They made me into this for your prophecy. And you have killed the only man who could make it right. Not a spider. Not a man. Not any thing.”

  Armes stared at him, one good eye, one red-rimmed and weeping. He spoke more words then, a battery of meanings from the man who had seen the world laid out like a map, to be redrawn as he willed it. He knew the names of everything in creation, from the lowest to the highest. He was as much a god as any man had ever been. But the creation that he had catalogued so thoroughly had not contained a thing such as Enth. It was Penthos’s posthumous revenge. Have I not wrought well? he would have asked of his magic. They had shied away from what he had made, but what he had accomplished was more than any of them knew, magical laymen as they were. He had brought something new into the world.

  And still Armes tried to name Enth, ransacking his divine lexicon for the term that would pin down the thing before him, and put it within his power.

  Enth watched him for a moment, taking great breaths and flexing his shoulders. “Yes,” he said softly. “What am I? Can even you tell me what I am?” and Cyrene thought that he might be actually hoping that Armes would find some precedent, some explanation for what he had become.

  “You are . . . a thing of the Dark,” Armes told him hoarsely. “You owe me fealty. I am the Dark Lord, am I not? Obey me, and I shall give you power, I shall make you my . . .” But he could see that the words were just chaff to Enth, and the man-spider was closing with him again.

  Desperately, Armes plucked his own sword from its scabbard for the first time, having dropped Cyrene’s when he was bowled over. Nothing in the stance he took suggested he had been forced to resort to the weapon in the last 500 years.

  Enth took it off him, prying the weapon from Armes’s fingers and then breaking it against his face. The blow did nothing in itself, but Enth was right behind it, fingers clawing for his enemy. For a moment they grappled, strength against strength. There was a point when Armes had his enemy bent back, sheer godlike might prevailing against the man-spider. Then Enth had squirmed from his grasp and got his hands either side of Armes’s face, thumbs under his chin, forcing his head back.

  The man-spider thrust forward savagely, jaws gaping wider than human tolerance should allow, and buried his teeth in Armes’s throat.

  Nobody interfered. Nobody went near, until the thrashing and the kicking and the gurgling were done; until the blood of the man who would be god was a slick across the black stone of the floor. Until it was done.

  Then Enth straightened up and, with an oddly fastidious gesture, began using a torn scrap of Armes’s robe to wipe at his chin.

  “I want to go home,” he said, and the loneliness and grief in his voice almost broke Cyrene’s heart. There would be no going home for Enth.

  Looking around, she wondered if there would be any going home for any of them. Dion was standing by Penthos’s body still, looking down at it. Lief and Harathes, as battered as Cyrene herself felt, were exchanging bruised glances, waiting to see what happened next.

  “Hooray,” the thief said in a small voice. “The Dark Lord is dead. That’s going to be our story, is it?”

  Dion looked up at them, red eyed. “More than the Dark Lord is dead.”

  “He . . . was lying. It was a trick of the Dark,” Harathes suggested improbably. Even he could not muster much conviction, and a moment later he put in, “Nobody must ever know. Nothing needs to change.”

  “What do you mean?” Dion demanded.

  “The church, nothing needs to change. We can just go on. We didn’t know Armes was still, ah, with us. Now he’s not. Things can be as they always were. You still have the Light?”

  Dion turned the disc of Armes over in her hand. It glimmered and flashed. “What changes Armes made to the world have not been undone,” she confirmed.

  “Then nothing needs to change. We can just go on,” Harathes insisted.

  “And the Dark? The Ghants? Him?” Cyrene challenged, with a look at Enth.

  “We need an enemy to fight. Or what would bring people to the Light,” Harathes said earnestly. “Yes, Armes turned out to be a monster, but some of what he said was—”

  “No more,” Dion stated. The words were quiet, but they shut Harathes up straight away. “It was a lie,” she added.

  “No . . .”

  “It was a lie,” she repeated. “But there is a truth there. There are good people in the church, even as there are bad ones. There are those who have sought wisdom and compassion and generosity. If the Light was a lie, then that makes those people all the better for living as they have. And the Dark . . . Being born to Light or Dark does not make you good or ba
d. That is the lie that Armes gave us, not that we can be good in the first place.”

  “So what then? I don’t understand,” Harathes demanded plaintively.

  “If I return to Armesion, the priestess whose mission brought down the Dark Lord, they will make me Potentate in time,” she said, and there was a new fire in her, a new faith. “And I will take the church and make it what it should be, what it should always have been. And I will make peace with the Ghants and the others—all the easier now they have no Dark Lord spurring them to evil. I will end centuries of strife. I will work toward the world that Armes saw, before his power turned him into this. Before he grew bored with trying.”

  “It won’t work,” Lief muttered. “You can’t change human nature.”

  Dion knelt to close Penthos’s eyes, staring sadly down at him. “You cannot say how much you can change,” she said, “until you try. Enth.”

  The man-spider started, hearing his name.

  “I want you to come with me to Armesion.”

  “I don’t reckon he’s got many fond memories of that place,” Lief pointed out.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t. And I am asking. I cannot order you any more, Enth. But I want the people there to see you. I want them to see you, and see the Dark in you, and know that you were one of us, that you brought down the Dark Lord. No word of Armes, no word of that sordid history. But you have earned your place, and I want people to see. And perhaps, when they next meet a Ghant, or see a spider, they will remember.”

  Enth looked uncertainly from Lief to Cyrene. She went to him, touched his arm gingerly, ignoring Harathes’s grimace. A moment later, his hand was on hers, gripping: not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough for her to feel the desperation.

  “And besides, we don’t need to stay long,” Lief’s voice came to them. “And once we’ve had the parades and the fanfares and the no-doubt-sizeable reward, then I know some places where you won’t stick out, Enth. We—we three, if you want—we can go some place where nobody will care who or what you are, so maybe you can decide for yourself.”