The A'Rak Read online

  But I had no patience for interrogation of this man—unlucky addition to our crew, in every way unlucky, as I saw it then! "What of our yapps?" I asked Mav.

  "Their leader's spawnfood—they'll not run in the van while it's dark—too many ahead, they say—so they'll trail us till daybreak, if we live that long. I say trust the map and push on."

  "I say push on we must—it is our nuncial duty. To the ridgeline!" I cried. And we footed it with a will, none of us loath to leave this hideous corpse that we had made, and all of us exultant and heartened by the fact that we'd made it a corpse.

  NIFFT V

  When the lottery known as the Choosing is held on Shortest Night, up in the Stadium in the crags above Big Quay, the Three Thousand—those citizens whose fate it is, according to the annual census, to stand the Choice that year—go up to the stadium after sunset, in a procession you may be sure is solemn enough. Within the corridors of the stadium, they are channelled through an array of little dressing rooms, each citizen passing singly through his designated room, where Bailiffs robe and hood him. Each is sent robed out into the arena before another is brought into a given room. As the assembly grows in the arena, under the gradually thickening stars, each of the Three Thousand is presumably unknown to his neighbors.

  You will have gathered, old friend, that I here—as before—supply in its chronological place an account I myself was not possessed of till after the event. Since the robing of the Three Thousand begins at full dark—or when, by canonical prescription, "a score of stars do blaze distinct on high"—the events I now present began just about exactly when my spearcast put paid to the account of the accusatory A'Rakspawn we encountered in the Ribbonrill Valley. Whatever the other deficiencies of Dame Lagademe's narrative, I find she has had the rectitude to report in full the characteristic precision and panache of that spearcast of mine. Naturally, with respect to those divagations on ethical and moral quiddities, and reflections upon my own conduct, which mar her narrative, I will continue to preserve a manly and forbearing silence.

  ( . . . )

  ( . . . )

  The Three Thousand, then, once assembled on the torchlit sand, are meant to be anonymized. But though their hoods' eyeholes be small, and their robes hang to the feet, complete anonymity is never achieved. Shoved-back sleeves show bracelets or tattoos, and a man will readily know his cousin or his neighbor by little more than a bit of his brow glimpsed through an eyehole, or by a note of her voice when talk runs through the hooded throng after a sigil is drawn, and those who are freed by that rune cry relieved encouragements to the remnant that must wait a further drawing, while those remaining call brave congratulations to the saved, and promise to join them in safety when the next sigil drawn is their own. There is, then, much mutual recognition among the Three Thousand despite their hoods and robes.

  But it is the ingenuity of this rite's design that those who have drawn freedom, when they retire to the arena's perimeter, must take up ceremonial cudgels and assume the duty of all the Exempted, which is to aid the Bailiffs and Reeves in driving the Chosen Ones out through the great brazen A'Rak Gate when the moment of their sacrifice arrives. At that juncture the Exempted, you may be sure, are glad of their robes and hoods; they willingly embrace their facelessness then, and are grateful for the heavy veil of office that conceals them from the friends and kin they must drive weeping to the shaggy monster's fangs.

  Paanja Pandagon stood with Fursten Minim on the ceremonial proscenium mounted on the stadium wall just to one side of the A'Rak Gate. The pair shared not even a glance as they watched the hooded throng filter into the arena below them, for they feared that their pity, their horror, their shame, must leap visibly forth on their faces if their eyes should meet. Perhaps a hundred souls to die tonight! Time out of mind, a score at most was the life-toll levied by the god.

  I know they judged themselves more harshly than would any rational witness of their dilemma. The god had solicited of them what he might as easily have compelled. Meanwhile, by his assumed obsequious compliance, Pandagon had purchased the A'Rak's complacent trust, and a military stipend which the two old comrades had already set a-working. I won't anticipate my tale, dear Shag, but surely, one particular military use of titanoplods shod with squashers will have, by now, occurred to you.

  But for this night, Paanja and Fursten must act the executioners, and purchase with the blood of their townsfellows the means and time with which to—dare they hope it?—aid the spidergod's overthrow for good and all. Their preparations to this end caused no small stir among the hooded throng as it collected on the sand, and grew aware that they were surrounded, not merely by the Hundred-Twenty—Bailiffs and Reeves—but by a muster of two hundred foreign mercenaries as well, knout-and-net men, the troops of choice for quelling crowds in riot.

  This unprecedented change in protocol could not fail to seem of sinister import to those who stood upon the sand tonight. Pandagon quelled their swelling murmur with the cry: "Now let the runes be drawn, Ye given-to-the-god!"

  A squad of Sextons flanked the great urn of mingled runes planted on the sand in mid-arena, and they now directed the filing-past of the hooded host. Each of these, when he had drawn, tucked his copper chit into a special fold upon the forehead of his hood, so that he wore plain to the eyes of all the rune chance had allotted him.

  So many little tricks for luck did the people use in drawing their runes! Some turned and reached in backwards; some genuflected before drawing, or knelt and drew on their knees; some spun thrice leftwards, or twice rightwards, or gestured strangely, or muttered spells ere they drew. Rhymed prayers, special placings of the feet—every kind of pathetic little magic was seen, till at last the Three Thousand stood, runed and waiting for the draw.

  Paanja Pandagon thrust his hand into the cull-box. Protocol required him, of course, to draw only at the last those runes whose burning touch advised him they were death runes. With ginger fingers, he found and drew a cool, unvenomed chit. Reading it, he boomed aloud:

  "Holders of the Ha'gaf rune, now retire, your duty's done!"

  A surflike roar rolled through the hooded host, an irrepressible groan of jubilation, damped almost as it erupted out of sympathy for neighbors still at risk. But a hubbub of congratulations followed, of jaunty cries from those who still stood the chance, and encouragements were called back by those now freed, as they retired to the arena's perimeter, received their cudgels, and joined the surround of Bailiffs, Reeves and mercenaries. Thus were perhaps four hundred spared in one stroke.

  In the regathered silence, Pandagon drew again, again intoned:

  "Holders of the Ga'lad rune, now retire, your duty's done!"

  There was some wonder mixed in the second hubbub, for perhaps five hundred people appeared to hold the Ga'lad rune. The lottery, usually involving half a score of runes, had never before proceeded by such broad strokes. Again the saved withdrew, the silence settled, though a silence nibbled round the edges by a dawning sense of the extraordinary.

  "Holders of the Lapta Rune, now retire, your duty's done!"

  Five hundred more souls were freed by this third stroke. The bustle of their retiring had relief in it.

  Paanja Pandagon, reaching into the box, discovered with a sick thrill that only two runes remained in it, one of them venomously hot to the touch. As he drew the cool one, his heart was already hammering with premonition:

  "Ye holders of the Uruk rune, now retire, your duty's done!"

  This rune released perhaps a hundred souls! Now at last the Ecclesiarch understood the treacherous ambiguity of the A'Rak's words, ". . . more than five times . . ." His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. He could not proceed with this vast homicide.

  But it was then that he and Fursten Minim saw from their high perch something that the rest, absorbed in their expectation of a half dozen more runes to come, had not yet noted. And so he seized the last poison-hot chit, and thrust it high, and cried, his words a metered moan:

  "Ye hold
ers of the Nalga Rune, your duty falls upon ye soon, for now your lives are A'Rak's own."

  The entire remaining host now boiled with turmoil. Fifteen hundred souls had drawn the death! Surely riot would have won the day, except for that advent which the pair on their proscenium had already seen, and which now was discovered, with a shout of horror, by the entire stadium.

  For over the crest of that stadium, topping the oval wall at every point, A'Rakspawn now scuttled, two hundred of them at the least, the smallest as big as a coach-and-four. Down the empty tiers they came dainty-footing until they formed an outermost perimeter, containing Bailiffs, mercenaries, Exempted—all! There the shaggy nightmares stood at ready, palps lifted, as a rolling tidal wave of spiderthought filled the arena.

  It was not the thought of these lesser monsters. Its power declared it to be the ideation of One greater than them all, one who stood as yet unseen, but—plainly, from the thrust of its current—just outside the giant brazen valves of the A'Rak Gate.

  Stand fast, ye Faithful, oh ye dear devoted in my worship! Know ye my grief that this terrible tax must be taken, but a monstrous foe bears even now towards our imperiled nation, and I must be armed with strength in the battle at hand! What you render shall be wholly painless—easeful as sleep, as a dream—this I swear ye! As for the Exempted, and all of your countrymen, in sign of my sadness at war's dire demands, on the next dawn but one, out in Keelyard Square, a hundred million gold lictors, in one immense donative, shall I disburse among ye. A paltry indemnity for loved lives sacrificed—how well I know this! But in some wise 'twill signal my grief, and my love of ye. Bailiffs! Exempted! Stand by our Covenant! Stand ready for what I shall bid ye!

  Metal groaned. The great brazen valves of the A'Rak's Gate gaped slowly open, and through their widening aperture fell ruddy torchlight from the crags outside. The stunned assembly gasped, and moaned aloud.

  Just outside the stadium the crags were forested with torches and, immense in their midst, ablaze with their light, there crouched great A'Rak himself. Vast shaggy machine of implacable carnivorous appetite! His many tiered eyes were as soulless as polished gemstones, coldly alight with an immortal hunger. The great gates were too small to admit his hugeness, but, risen, he could plainly overstep the coliseum's walls, and stand within.

  But he did not move. His utter immobility, like a command, held the human host completely paralyzed. Paanja, in his perfect terror's trance, grasped—slowly, slowly—that the torches burning all around the god showed through his body. That the god's entire body was perfectly translucent. Legs, midsection, abdomen, the torches glimmered through every part. Every part was empty. It was a husk. It was a moulting of the god.

  Behold my emptied flesh. My vacant image.

  This whelm of utterance rippled from a new direction. As one, the human host turned. And there, cresting the stadium's eastern rim, came the A'Rak indeed, gingerfooting down till his splayed legs spanned the whole tiered wall from top to bottom, dwarfing his issue where they stood ranged before him.

  The god's shaggy-sleeved fangs stirred daintily. His ancient mind breathed delicately through the host of human minds, and his will was instantly, intricately understood.

  Oh my Chosen Ones, mount my empty flesh, enter inside it, and by this gesture of devout submission your painless sleep is purchased—your placid, dreamlike, tranquil passage to my service is achieved. Advance now, never hesitate! Delay's impiety! 'Tis heresy! Make haste, and I'll not feed on one of you!

  The dire luster of his eyes' black moons shone down upon them all, pitiless, unreadable.

  "Great is the god's mercy!" Paanja shrieked. He knew now that all that came from the god was doubleness, mendacity, but he also knew that here was a vast homicide already achieved, and that an added thousand lives hung upon his now displaying a gullible piety, and an unaltered devotion to his monstrous master. Tears ran from his eyes as he cried it out, voice cracking: "All praise to merciful A'Rak! Bailiffs and Reeves, help them forward! Ye men-at-arms and ye Exempted ones! Forward! Aid the Chosen to their rightful duty!"

  And they all lurched groaning forward, that ring of armed ones whose sole—but so compelling!—inducement to this dire work was that they themselves would not suffer what they inflicted. Almost as stunned and halting as those they herded, the armed folk crowded the Chosen host forward, the spawn-ring closing round them as they went and adding an impetus that was decisive in moving even so great a mass of the doomed toward their fate.

  The Chosen ones ripped off their hoods as they went, showed their faces and shrieked appeals to known or loved ones they knew to be somewhere in the crowd of their compellers, but forth they must go and forth they went, all tears and helpless cries. And over them all loomed A'Rak who was their lowering sky, whose will was a silent hurricane that moved both sacrificers and the sacrificed alike.

  With what loathing did human hands grip and clamber up the legs of that mighty effigy—guards and doomed alike! There was a great split in the cephalothorax and the dorsum of the abdomen alike, and through this long aperture dropped the herded Chosen. The Bailiffs and other warders, maddened by the loathsome strangeness of the work, began to execute it with an hysterical ferocity—hoisting, hauling, dragging their neighbors up the bristly legs, hurling them into the translucent chambers of thorax and abdomen. As the warders began to outnumber the Chosen still outside, they manhandled them ever more fiercely and efficiently, and as the numbers within the moult rose to the hundreds, the first of those imprisoned began to be displaced by the pressure of the squirming doomed, and to fall down the hollow, tree-thick shafts of the jointed legs.

  As they slipped and tumbled down, branching through the hellish husk, their faces of awe and dread, all distorted by their chitinous container, still were visible as twisted, inhumanly warped masks, and these expressions seemed like A'Rakian mockery, a spiderish parody of human woe and pain.

  The great husk began to sag, crouch lower with the growing weight, which made the hoisting up and the insertion of the Chosen easier, while the fever to be done with the horror still grew on their neighbors, until, almost suddenly, it seemed, the hellish work was done, the Bailiffs, Reeves, Exempted, and mercenaries had jumped down and withdrawn, and there stood the moulting crammed with human contents, the great hollow planet of the abdominal bulb a little world of blurred, mute-mouthing faces, the legs great crooked columns spliced from hundreds of separately writhing human legs and arms.

  Again the god spoke:

  You have done well. Let all retire now save the priests of my temple. Return ye to your homes, your beds, and on the next morn from tomorrow's, expect my golden gratitude.

  They ran. Exempted, Bailiffs, mercenaries alike. They were gone like autumn leaves before the gale—gone even before, it seemed, the forgotten clubs and swords they dropped had settled on the empty, trampled sand. As swiftly gone were the circled spawn—they scuttled out the A'Rak Gate and melted away among the crags. The god breathed his will, and all vanished, save the two churchmen on their high ceremonial perch.

  When the god stepped ginger-footing down to the arena—which he all but filled—Paanja and Fursten found themselves at a level with the topmost tier of his eye-globes; they could see the torchlight kindling the exquisite facetings of those huge black gems.

  Pious prelates, upon you only falls the burthen of beholding your deity's dire extremity. Bear up strongly now beneath the weight of what you must witness.

  The titanic spider crouched, and sprang into the air, vaulting the stadium wall, and landing poised beside his bulging husk, his simulacrum seething, shuddering with the struggles of its captive contents. What warped masks of horror now did mouth and grimace through that moult's distortive transparency! And when the A'Rak reared his fangs on high, the great black barbs unsleeved and tipped with bulging drops of golden venom, what a muffled wail seeped from that colossal casting!

  Down plunged his fangs. Again! Again and yet again! Every part of his own effigy he pierced, and w
here each stroke fell, golden effusions of venom flooded the husk. The amber liquid was a potent caustic—naught save the husk itself was proof against it. The human throng, amid a muffled shrieking past description, became a human jam of melting flesh, corroding bone, and smoking garments.

  With tears unstoppably streaming down their own faces, the churchmen watched the faces of their countrymen and countrywomen swell and melt in clouds of crimson filaments, eyes bursting into whitish puffs, clawing hands and kicking feet unfleshed in rosy smoke and falling still. In moments the moult was a ghastly vessel filled with human soup, which the monster crouched upon, and set to draining with his bristly maw.

  Now prelates, do you comprehend my need, and thence deduce the depth of my necessity? Ecclesiarch, attend mine altar at sunrise, but before then, make known throughout the city that no ship now docked anent my quay is to depart her moorage until my leave is given, the which it shall not be until my donative—of purest gold—has been distributed, particulars of which thou'lt have tomorrow. . . .

  This flux of otherworldly mentation had for its unspeakable accompaniment the spectacle of the alien colossus draining his own image of its human beverage. Both men grasped that the god, in making them witness his feasting, was communicating more than what his thought articulated, though now he all but uttered this unspoken message.

  Report tomorrow your martial preparations on my behalf, Priest. I here show thee what atrocity I will embrace at need, that both of ye may know from what ye are exempted, if ye in faithful diligence do my behests. Absolute exemption is your meed, and after that, my danger being past, power supreme, and exaltation above all others of this nation. I do dismiss ye—go in peace.

  * * *

  They left the god a-feeding, and descended the deserted walkway to the foot of the crags. On legs numbed and unsteady they trod the emptied streets of the city. All was silence in the nighted lanes and boulevards, a silence which for both the churchmen was deafening with remembered screams, while the emptiness they walked through swarmed and seethed with remembered images of horror.