The Spider laughed again, the sound wet in its narrow throat. "And for that I earn this? Trapped beneath a rail line like a slave."
"You tore my postings down. For that I was nearly caught by the Adjunc. Tell me why. Are you trying to prevent me from finding her?"
The Spider's laughter barked out again. "And if I do not tell you, child Sen? What then?"
Sen squatted on the gravel and pointed to the Spider's limbs trapped under the rails. Sometimes you had to be hard, and establish dominance. "The next train will come through here in an hour or so. It will break all your bones. You'll die alone and in pain. Only I can save you."
The Spider laughed, spat, and glared at him. "So leave me. If you can do that, I have wasted my life anyway."
Sen felt the balance shifting. Too hard. He would not kill the Spider, and the Spider knew it. He could not force it to speak with threats, and he was losing ground every moment as the Spider's laughter swelled.
But he had to know. He had to do something, so he stepped in and stamped on the creature's chest once, twice, thinking back to a time Mare had done the same thing. Back then she'd done it to survive, but this was important. He didn't do it hard, but still he felt ill doing it. The Spider's carapace crunched in the gravel, but it continued to laugh, kept laughing until it choked on its own blood.
"It isn't funny," Sen said. "You're going to die."
"It is funny. Is this child Sen, who threatens to kill me? Avia, do you see what your son has become?"
Sen felt a rush of anger at the mention of his mother's name. He stamped again on the Spider's midriff, hard enough now to crack something. "What do you know of my mother?"
The Spider wheezed, purplish blood glistening on its carapace in the darkness. "Of your mother, Avia? What would you hear, little Sen, when you think all truths are lies? What is truth, and what are lies? Should I speak lies that you hear the truth? Should I sob for you and call it a smile, that you might see only what you wish?"
Sen stared down at the bloody, wheezing creature. These were riddles, and they only angered him more. Sister Henderson was dead, he'd endangered the Abbey all of his life just by existing, and for what? What was any of it worth if this Spider told him nothing more? Would he spend his life posting papers about the city only to find nothing? Being kind with it, begging it for help, would achieve nothing, and his life would become a story of failed frustration. It had already done everything it could to stymie his efforts to find his mother. He had to do more.
He stepped up and stamped on the Spider's chest again, and the creature howled through its bloody mouth.
"More, Avia's child! More."
Sen stamped on its chest, as hard as he could, then on its pinioned limbs, then its face, until its shrieks echoed where once its laughter had. He was panting and shaking when he finally stopped, and the echoes of the Spider's wailing faded. It breathed through its own bubbling juices.
"I only sought to protect you," it said, its voice different now, shallow. "I never meant for this."
"Then help me! Tell me what you know."
"What I know?" gasped the Spider, breathing in spurts. "Would you hear of the King, and the webs he has laid for you? Would you hear of the madness in the night, the mouth that consumes them all? Is that what you want?"
Sen blinked. "What madness?"
"The Rot!" barked the Spider. "Of course I speak of the Rot. It has been hunting you for millennia. If it ever finds you…"
"Then what?" Sen interrupted, sick of the ravings already, "the whole bloody world will end?"
"It will! I've looked into the black of its mouth and seen what will become."
"Enough! Tell me something real, Spider. Tell me where my mother is."
"If I say I do not know, will you beat me more? I fear my scant shell has been broken already, child. Will you kill me before I give what few answers I have?"
"I don't want to kill you. Just help me!"
"I have helped you! How many times have I saved you, as you lay in the safety of your Abbey and I alerted your Sisters to the coming Adjunc? More times than I can count! And for that have you beaten me so? What did I do, but tear down a few scraps of paper? For what do I deserve to die in the dark?"
"I didn't mean," began Sen, then stopped, looking down at the torment he'd caused. Even in the darkness he could see its blood was everywhere. "You warned the Sisters?"
"I rang their bell, even as I watched over you every night. Do you think the Adjunc ever announced their intent to attack?"
Sen took a step back, feeling abruptly unmoored. He'd always thought they'd had advance warning somehow. He'd assumed the Gravailes or some other ally in the Roy had protected them, had given warning. "But they… I… I didn't know…"
"And would that matter? You are as vicious as your mother."
"I am not vicious!"
"Now you lie!" spat the Spider. "I have seen it grow in you, as she intended. I saw it as you beat the Spindle by the gate, and I see it in you now."
Sen took another step back, feeling everything shift. "That was different. That was to save us all."
"And who is this to save, now? For whom do you beat me so?"
Sen opened his mouth to answer, but could think of nothing to say.
The Spider laughed. "Ah, the ignominy! To owe your life to a creature as hideous as I. Saved that you might then exact your revenge. It only shows how much a fool I am."
Sen sagged, looking at the twisted creature before him. His hands were still spattered with its purple blood. He tried to wipe them clean on his tunic. What before had seemed so righteous was suddenly twisted. If what it said was true, then did he owe this Spider his life, not just once but many times? And here he had captured it like an insect, broken it under the rails.
The Spider wheezed. "It's never so simple, child."
Sen stared at it in the darkness, his anger washing away. "Who are you? How have you done these things?"
"I am Sharachus," said the Spider. "And I have watched over you since the day you were born."
"Why?"
"Because your mother asked me to."
The tunnel darkness throbbed around Sen like a pulse, closing in. He slumped down to the gravel.
"She forbade me to ever be seen," said the Spider, "to ever speak to you, to do anything but save you. But what can it matter, now that we have already spoken so much? So listen. I will tell you my pitiful tale."
SHARACHUS I
The Spider was born of a Moth and immediately thrown from a window into the Levi River, chased by howls of disgust. It sank in the water but did not die, as it had not yet learned to breathe. Instead, it stretched out its eight limbs and pushed. It did not know where, or against what, as its eyes had not yet pupated, but it felt the cold world and thrust against it.
Soon it was washed up on a shoal, where it lay and sucked the lichen off rocks. It remained that way for several years, as gradually its eyes attenuated, its venom sacs came in, and it learnt to cast thread. It spun webs underwater and snarled fish and small octopods, which it ate whole. It could not speak nor did it know what the world was. It only knew the rock upon which it lived, and the fish it ate.
One day it heard noises from the forest, and new things came from the green and spiked it with sticks, forcing it into a hard bag. It had never been contained before and screamed until it was beaten into silence.
Later, it was dumped into a circle of other creatures like itself, though all much larger, each with their eight long limbs bound, struggling against their bonds. As it watched, the new things walked on two legs amongst its fellows, pointing at some, making strange barking noises. One by one they placed leather caps over the heads of the others and hammered them into place. Their struggling ceased, and they were carried away.
When they came round to it, they made different barking sounds. Later it would come to know that this was laughter. It was smaller and weaker than the others, and they did not place the cap on its head. Instead they stretched
out its limbs one by one, and cut four of them away. They reached into its mouth and cut its mandibles in half, and tore away its venom sacs.
Bleeding and in pain, they put it back into the bag and carried it to a great castle, at the heart of the great city where it had been born. Therein began its schooling. It learnt to speak, and to eat using special utensils. It grew slowly, and was trained well in manners. It came to understand that it was an abomination, kept alive in the Court of a great King for entertainment.
It was taught tricks. Its venom sacs were replaced with bonded bladders, from which it could shoot jets of black ink or firewater. The stubs of its limbs were fitted with sharp hooks, with which it could clamber over and around specially prepared walls and ceilings, to the delight of the court, spewing bubbles or rose water from its bladders.
It spoke, and it sang, and learned to play instruments three at a time. It spun webs in the name of the courtiers that favored it, and let small children ride on its belly or back as it took to the walls. In those happy days, it learned that it was called a Spider, from a caste that no longer existed. It alone remained.
Until one day the King grew tired of it, and he ordered his pet Spider to be hung from the HellWest spikes. But the guards who carried it were lazy, and instead only threw it into the Levi. They did not know it had been born into the river and knew well how to swim, even with only four legs.
It swam to freedom, and so began its third life. It learned again how to survive, but this time in the dark spaces, the hidden sewers beneath the city. It learned the true strength of its body for leaping, for scuttling, for hiding. It met others whose castes had been likewise extinguished, the Unforgiven, and together they hid from the King's laws in darkness. Amongst them were Lightning-handed Cranks and gelatinous Shufflers, Bats and Harpies, Leprous Wights and Wailers. Together they fled before the mogrified Adjunc that roamed the underground railways and sewers of the city, seeking them out.
In time, it befriended an old Wight named Dreychak, who taught it the history of its kind. It was Dreychak who explained he was a person, not a creature, who could determine his own fate. Dreychak too gave him a name, Sharachus, after one of Saint Ignifer's bravest disciples. It was Dreychak who taught him to love the Heart as his maker, and to fear the Rot as the endless loneliness that came after the end.
Together they ran from the King's patrols, fleeing ahead as others who were slower or weaker were caught and gathered for mogrification. The King pressed harder, driven some said by the dark hand of the Rot itself, so that slowly and steadily the exits and entrances to their underground kingdom were stoppered up. Poisoned meats were dropped down into sewers from the Roy, killing many of his fellows as they rejoiced in feasting.
So the Unforgiven were gradually rounded up and weeded out, until time came to pass that Sharachus and Dreychak were alone in the sewers. Only the two of them survived, running and hiding, eating what and when they could. The sound of the underground became one of silence, and stillness, and the slow steady drip of their lives ebbing away.
One morning he woke to the thundering of Adjunc. They were beneath him, their huge scorpion bodies and powerful dead limbs already surrounding Dreychak, and driving their blades into his wasted body. Sharachus un-webbed himself from the ceiling and flew into a frenzy, attacking them faster than they could respond, slitting their heels and stabbing at their eyes. He didn't know how many he slew, but there were always more. They closed ranks against him, forced him off a weir into a sewer torrent, which carried him far away from the corpse of his friend.
He beached on black grime in a dark sump well, and lay sobbing in the mire, waiting for the Adjunc to come finish him off. He would not fight any longer. He lay there in the filth for days, waiting for the thunder of their many feet, but they did not come. Instead he lay and wallowed in the emptiness inside, measuring its dimensions as something new, as the shape of loss. Never before had he truly lost anything, for he had never had anything to lose.
With this new shape came a new feeling, flavored with the taste of Adjunc blood in his mouth. Always before he had fled, but now he had cut them, and hurt them, and could do so again. He lay there in the stinking dark and felt the empty shape begin to fill with this new feeling, growing so dense it burned, something that gave him purpose and a reason to return his body to strength.
He resolved to kill the King.
For months he trained his body. He ran the sewers at speeds he'd never attempted before, unmindful of quiet or the squads of Adjunc. They were none as fleet as he. He ate what he cared to eat, no longer mindful of poison or traps. He sharpened his hooks on grindstone gratings, practiced spinning and climbing webs, filed the stubs of his mandibles down to quickened fangs, and spent every waking moment dreaming of the death of the King, who had made him a plaything, and murdered his only friend.
When he was ready, he went to the King. For the first time since his banishment he entered the Aigle palace's underground, going where the others had been unable to, using his four remaining limbs and prodigious agility to evade the numerous traps. He searched the Aigle's endless sewer caverns for days, learning their revolutions as the entire palace rotated atop its skyship base. He searched until he found a chamber piled with rotten bodies, half-skinned and covered in filth, then waited until the revolving waste shaft overhead aligned, then darted in. Peering out from the sewer shaft at the top of a tall stone tower, he watched the King in the depths of his madness.
The room was empty of furnishing but for a stone altar at the center, upon which lay a fresh cadaver awash with blood, the skin of its chest half peeled away. The King stood beside it, shirtless and well muscled, slicked with blood, sharpening a knuckled skinning knife.
On every wall hung numberless bloody shreds of skin, each marked with some strange scar or discoloration. Their edges had been matched up and sewn together, creating endless whirling patterns across their contours, filling the walls with nonsense, like a message scrawled upon the hide of some monstrous mogrification.
It was sickening, but meant nothing to Sharachus. He crawled from the sewer chute and stretched to his full meager height, bared the hooks built into his remaining limbs, and advanced silently upon the King.
The first hook slid through the King's throat from behind, the second through his chest, punching out to the air. The King's blood streamed down into Sharachus' face, joy filled him, and he rejoiced at his final revenge, savoring the sensation.
Then everything changed. A cloud of black fire burst from the King's body, and Sharachus was hurled away like a leaf catching the wind. The leathery walls spun as he flew, and hit stone with a sickening crunch. Parts of his carapace cracked and his body slid to the floor, where he lay stunned and barely breathing.
The sound of footsteps drew near. His compound eyes refocused, askew, and he saw the King's feet approaching him, splashed with blood. He craned his neck back to see to the wounds he'd done, and saw an amorphous inky blackness sealing over the King's throat and heart, like scabs made of shadow.
The King put a foot on Sharachus head, turned it, and regarded him curiously.
"I recognize you," he said. "You're the old jester. I ordered you spiked."
"I stabbed you," Sharachus managed to say.
The King nodded, and scratched idly at the blurring black smoke in the wound in his throat. "You did, yes. Not enough though, I'm afraid. He made me out of sterner stuff." He moved his foot to Sharachus' chest, and pressed down. "Unlike you."
Sharachus tried to cry out but could get no breath in, as his shell cracked further, as darkness crept in to his vision. The King's shadow blackened until it seemed a long column of smoke spread across the flagstoned floor.
"What made you?" Sharachus hissed. "What was that?"
The pressure on his chest relented for a moment.
"Interesting question," mused the King. "If I answer 'the Rot', will that have any meaning to you?"
"The enemy of the Heart," Sharachus managed, drawi
ng on Dreychak's teaching.
"That's right," said the King, brightening. "He made me this way, that I might endure. You know of his hunt, I think. My hunt too." He spread his arms to take in the chamber of skins. "It is a small price, to live as I do. But enough of me. What price have you paid, little Spider, to be here now? How much have you lost, cowering in the dark? This will be a mercy, I think."
The King raised his foot to stamp down. In that brief moment, Sharachus funneled the blood leaking through his interior sacs, pushed it into the bonded bladders from which he had once spumed bubbles, then squeezed it out in a hot jet that cascaded up over the King's face.
The King pulled away, and Sharachus leapt. Three lurching bounds and he was falling back down the sewer chute, barely slowing his descent with rags of webs shot from his broken shell. He hit the body pile at the base hard, then fled madly into the sewers, chased by the booming echo of the King's laughter.
In a screw-pump room halfway across the city, he sagged down in filth and began to tremble uncontrollably. He had stabbed the King, but the King hadn't died. He saw again the black scab worming over the King's neck and chest, the black cloud that had blown him away, and heard the King's words repeating again and again, 'He made me out of sterner stuff.'
The Rot.
Dreychak had taught him it was the worst thing imaginable, worse than loss of his limbs, worse than spiking on HellWest, worse than all the shame and humiliation of a lifetime. It was the only thing Dreychak had admitted to fearing, the nothingness beyond death, the end of all things forever.
It left Sharachus truly alone, because he had failed Dreychak a final time. He could not kill the King, no more than he could kill the Rot. He was nothing, unable to protect himself or his only friend. He was worse than dead already, so he resolved to die.
It was then that she came.
At first he thought her a vision born of his madness, a beautiful woman in the dark of the sewers, but she didn't fade away. Instead she spoke of a future for him, a role in the life of her son who would one day raise the Saint and bring down both the King and the Rot. She said that it would be Sharachus' task to protect him. She promised him a life in the light, in an Abbey of green grass and beautiful old stone, and because he was weak, he followed.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 17
