The A'Rak Page 15

  Just across the river, the highway turned north to parallel it. The riverside woods ran unbroken on our left, while on our right, forest intermittently yielded to grassy slopes.

  The sun might have been still as much as two hours high, but it wasn't one whit more, when at last we beheld, up in one of these grassy swards, the surprisingly impressive Haggardscroft Fane. It was an octagonal vault of massive and polished black ashlar, and its dimensions were quite grand for an up-country church. It looked most foreboding, in fact, and I was keen to reconnoiter it well and master its layout and surroundings while there was good light for it.

  This was not to be. We were all set at once to work in the riverside woods downslope from the fane.

  "We must cut a laneway from highway to river-bank, you see," the witch told us, "and make a raft of the trees you cut down to do it. Start at the river bank and cut towards the highway, and your work will be shielded thus from the highway till dark has fallen, by which time you must be done."

  So impossible seemed that task within that time-span, that we plunged to work without protest. For her part, the witch vanished up the sward to do her own reconnaissance.

  Our work was nasty and gruelling at the start. We hacked away undergrowth with our swords to clear enough free footing for the toil of the tree-felling. But once we'd felled and trimmed a score of trees, and laced them together with ropes and vine, our workspace and our pace increased, and our axebits began biting steadily through a swathe of trees.

  The witch returned as sunset neared, and pulled Bantril and Shinn off axe work to help her—over a low fire—cook the trim-wood for the thick yellow resins it was full of. She laced together a sizeable basketwork frame of boughs, and began to coat this frame with the collected pitch. A huge tarry mass of sap quickly accreted on the frame.

  As the sun set and the light started failing, we with the axes became veritable engines of labor. Implacably we hewed, our bits chewed through the trunks, and the trees collapsed with whispery concussions . . . until—quite suddenly, as it seemed—here were stars coming out above us, here were the last trees fallen, here we stood at the highway, and a treeless corridor behind us ran all the way from the highway to the riverbank.

  The witch and the pullers had finished the raft. A massy platform it was of two-score big trunks bound and cross-braced, and mounted on its riverward end was the big pitch-covered frame. The witch assembled us round the raft, just as moonrise kindled in the east.

  "Well done, my doughty troops, well done! Ye work like demons, and in truth, I chose ye all for your mettle! But one task remains before the sweet moment of drawing blood. We must convey yon raft up to the very porch of the A'Rak Fane."

  Her honey-tongued praise, so uncharacteristic, seemed now explained: We six were to convey a forty-trunk raft over all the treestumps that still obstructed the corridor we'd cut, and then three hundred strides up a goodly slope of meadow-grass! It was plainly impossible, far beyond our strength, with or without flattery.

  As one, we vigorously protested, but were calmed, for, in the event, the conveyance of the raft to the temple door was implemented by some of the witch's tightly-budgeted thaumaturgy (for as all the world knows, an Opus Eponymous is only earned under the most draconian austerity of sorcerous means). But before moving the raft, the witch took me up to the temple, to rehearse me for my role as bait to our quarry.

  Or better I should say, took me as close as we dared go to the temple—"For at near enough range your mere thievish odor will call him out prematurely," the witch assured me. Still, under the deepening night we drew quite near enough to the fane's great, doorless portal. It held a square mouthful of the torchlit gloom within, and I promise you it inspired me—if not with piety for the cult—at least with sufficient awe for the horrors that ruled it.

  Here we crouched, while the witch detailed to me an alarming scenario according to which I was to bring the monster into our trap. I won't say she didn't show impressive imagination. In fact, it was her plan in the main which I agreed to, though not before modifying some of the details of execution she had blithely specified, pointing out to her that while I was indeed a remarkably nimble fellow, some of her instructions presumed an impossible agility, and to follow them must be the death of me.

  She was as much disposed to hear criticism of her wishes as any witch is, which is to say, not at all, but by threat of doing nothing at all for her if denied, she accepted my alterations.

  Back down to the raft we went, the infallibly abrasive Jaundyssa muttering peevishly the while. Round our raft, in our odd little notch through the trees, we stood under a sky thickly paved with stars, where the moon-blaze had not quite yet begun to fan out. We stood looking up towards the fane in silence. Not even Jaundyssa's fanatic zeal could fail to see that our silence in this moment expressed our shared awe and dread of what we were about to undertake.

  "As blatant as these doings of ours here seem," said the witch, trying out an unaccustomed soothing tone, "we will have the advantage of surprise, my troops! There is a lethargy after feasting which even now must weigh the monster down. Then too, mighty spawn like these, in times like these—if they are alert for anything, it is the stealthy tread of their Sire, who perhaps is coming even now to gather what they have reaped from their lesser brothers. In short, the spawn won't feel us near till our good Ephesionite strides into his temple, and he senses the weight of a thievish tread crossing his stony roof. Drawn out, startled and dazed, at that moment, the monster will fall, fall helpless into our hands, I promise you!

  "And now, as I have also promised you, we will enjoy what my tight-fistedness with thaumaturgy has purchased us: a mighty vehicle, and a kind of invisibility as well. Mount up on the raft with our precious Pompilla there!"

  She stepped out on the riverbank, scowling down upon the black sinewy water twisting past. Raising her hands, she began to make the movements of one who pinches thread between left thumb and forefinger, and draws it out with right thumb and forefinger. And though her hands began empty, it was suddenly thread in fact she was pulling—a bright yellow thread, which softly blazed in the starlight. From her empty left hand she pulled out this bright yellow thread, while it dangled longer and longer, piling in a bright heap at her feet. At length, appearing to judge that she had length enough, she tossed her end of the thread out over the water.

  The thread leapt out and hung floating on the air; it curved back to join its tail, and formed a rippling oval above the muttering river. Suddenly the oval dropped, and laid a hissing circle on the water, a circle of yellow steam undisturbed by the river's flowing through it. The river flowed, but the hot circle smoked there unmoved. Then Jaundyssa the Fat made a gesture which lifted a thick, shuddering oval of water up out of the river.

  "A nice, thick piece of slave-water," she muttered, "should make it go smooth enough. . . ." The newly minted coin of water, its melting sides textured like hammered pewter, came edging tonguelike onto the bank, and slid itself foaming under the raft. "Secure the 'shaw and stand steady!" cried the witch.

  Up we were hoisted, smoothly swept through the corridor we'd cut, and on up the slope of starlit grass. Our progress was almost mute; the water, cohering like a possessive palm, cupped us along with a kind of low, wet breathing noise, no more.

  I will say that, buoyed by this deft, massy chunk of magic, I began to feel a little better about my own personal role here—began to feel, you might say, that our resources might carry enough clout to match our quarry's hideous, inhuman strengths.

  The raft floated to the temple's very threshold. The witch gestured, and the water flowed away and sank hidden into the grass.

  The Nuncial crew and Mav dispersed neatly, taking up concealments that flanked the portal. They had bows and fire arrows and spears, none in themselves potent enough to harm the giant we expected here, though the spears were all now anointed with a powerful paralytic that would greatly magnify their impact. The witch, trundling away the 'shaw, crouched into her
covert last, and gestured me impatiently to my work.

  The stage was mine, so to speak. My role even involved some stage properties and costumery, which I disposed first. From gray gleetswool blankets we had improvised two identical roomy cloaks with hoods. One of these I draped as convincingly as possible over the mass of pitch on its frame. The second one, with a flourish, I donned.

  Thus arrayed, no further preparations offered me pretext for delay. So I advanced—gingerly, I do concede—through the looming portal of the Haggardscroft A'Rak-Fane.

  Beneath that gloomy and severely architected vault, at each of its eight angles, cressets blazed, and dropped a flickery, mothlike light upon the dark stone rim of the yawning altar-pit. It was not the chasm of Big Quay, but it was nonetheless a hole sized to admit a mighty bulk. It lay some forty strides within the temple, wherein I advanced but ten. The interior was pew-less—one worshipped standing, it seemed, out in the country. The significance of this circumstance to me was that the space between me and the pit was bare of any obstruction that might slow down whatever emerged.

  Though bare of seating, the sprawling interior was—just like the metropolitan fane—transparently partitioned by gauzy white hangings. I found these hangings most unnerving. They had a way of breathing, stirring sluggishly to the most delicate crosscurrents of the air, and of course it seemed to me that the pit's breath stirred them.

  After a few moments, it felt faintly ludicrous simply to be standing there awaiting notice, but I found it mortifyingly difficult to perpetrate any movement or utterance that would more blatantly announce my intrusion. My every instinct, and least muscle, strenuously concurred in my perfect stasis: immobility seemed the only conceivable behaviour in this monstrous place.

  With enormous effort, however, I made myself pace a few steps leftward, then rightward—taking care to get no nearer to the altar-pit in doing so. I scuffled my feet on the flagging with each step, and the dry abrasions of my bootsoles seemed loud as thunder.

  Nothing answered. Sluggishly, menacingly, the hangings breathed in the silence. Obviously, I must resort to yet more foolhardy demonstrations. As I stood hesitating, a vague coolth that smelt of the tomb flirted with my nostrils. I comprehended that it was the breath of the spidery under-world, a rumor of all the dark, dank vastness of their tunnel labyrinth wormholing all Hagia's foundations. . . . But still, that eerie exhalation from the pit reported no murmur of movement below.

  Not only my own survival, but our plan's success as well, required that I emerge from the fane before the god was upon me. Though the witch had planned otherwise, it seemed clear to me now that to penetrate further was tactically imprudent. I decided that if the impiety of my thievish feet's contact with these holy stones did not suffice to bait our beast, I must try a still more violent impiety, rather than a closer approach.

  "Why, what lovely silk hangings!" I exclaimed. How huge my voice seemed! "I simply must slice me a swathe of it for a cloak or two!" I bellowed. And plucking my blade from my back I suited action to word, and slashed a great winding-sheet of silk off the hem of the nearest dangler. Immediately I whirled and slashed off another—more to keep myself in motion than for anything else, for I greatly dreaded being even briefly paralyzed with fear when the moment came.

  Even as I stooped to sweep up my pair of diaphanous trophies, I felt with sickish clarity an oily-scratchy scrambling deep in the stony sinus of the pit. My brain improvising madly, I swept my slashed silk round my shoulders, cloaking my cloak with it, even as I sprang nimbly backwards, to plant myself just within the portal of the Fane.

  Now the silk hangings bulged quite unmistakably with an outwelling of air from the pit, whence then erupted legs like nightmare cacti, all bristles and barbs. These paused in crooked arches for an instant, and then the pit disgorged the furry horror. The sticky whisper of the titan's thought feathered up and down my spine:

  Thief! Desist! Thy meat and thy ghost are forfeited to me for this thine impious intrusion!

  I had, without daring to plan for it, hoped for this moment of formal accusation. The spider spawn—taking our first for typical—showed a ceremonious streak. They believed themselves gods, perhaps. I will concede, too, that there was indeed awe enough radiating from this one. It was twice the size of a crofter's cottage, its fangs thrice as long as a scythe. The delicate claws of its feet plucked a dry, chittery music from the stone floor as it fidgeted, gathering to spring.

  "A thousand pardons, O thou noble sprig of Greatness!" I cried suavely. They heard one out if one replied, I'd found. "I'm quite in awe of you! I didn't think a god would be . . . in, you see! I do apologize, and I wholeheartedly renounce these spoils of your sanctum! By all means, keep your fabric!"

  Your crime exceeds amendement or reparation. Your very being is a capital offense, for you are a most palpable and unmistakable thief, and no thief may live past the hour when his foot profanes my shrine.

  "Forgive me, oh deity," I protested, "but this appears both captious and intransigent of you. Please allow me to point out—"

  My words were a mere feint, covering my leaping exit. It was a supple, sudden, and prodigious saltation. A second mighty leap put me halfway across the raft, and a third landed me behind our pitch-frame, round which I wound the silk in one enveloping sweep, and above which I positioned my head, just as the mighty a'rakspawn boiled in a furor of legs from the Fane's looming portal.

  "But grant me leave to depart on my raft in peace!" I cried with brazen nonsensicality, "and but spare me after all, oh great one, but this one paltry swathe of your silk that I've made me this cloak from—"

  But the shaggy giant was launched, of course: Thus I possess thee, meat and ghost, foul thief!

  I had but fractions of an instant to work with, for before I leapt clear, he must be so nearly on me as to make a mid-air swerve too late. Never have I beheld hugeness so fleet—a giant near quick as a flea! It revisits my nightmares still, that endless instant, but leap clear I did, and so narrowly that I felt the heat of my colleagues' flame-arrows streaking in to ignite the pitchy frame even as the A'Rakspawn's fangs sank fast in its lethal adhesion.

  I hugged earth as I tumbled away, for the whirr of flung spears also sang above me. Meaty impacts decorated the great furred bulb with new bristles. The great legs fought furiously to wrench free from their blazing prey (which we had firmly anchored to the timbers), but almost on the instant when the spears impacted, the monster's struggles grew spastic, and slowed. A few seconds more, and the nightmare lay slumped on the raft, the pitchy mass burning down to a huge ember that still encased his now fused and melted fangs, and his legs only twitching vaguely now and again.

  "All aboard!" trumpeted Jaundyssa, as she set the example with the 'shaw in tow. "Unlimber the line! Lash down the legs and the bulb! I am Genius incarnate, am I not!!? Behold the brute! Ours! And the snaky bitch mocked me—behold, wrinkled viper! Hither now, slave-water! Hither—be quick!"

  We were scarce well aboard when the silvermuscled water tongue slid cohering from the deep grass and licked itself under the raft, lifting us onto its smooth flux with a downhill plunge that staggered us all. But the witch would brook no staggering, nor a moment's pause:

  "Lash the brute, damn ye, lash him—this is the slowest we'll run all night long—find your sea legs and secure him!"

  We ringed the A'Rakspawn—and found scant clear deck to stand on round his great perimeter. Heaving coils of line criss-cross, we lashed the brute's huge bulb down, dogging the lashes with spikes to the logs.

  "Here's a plunge now!" the witch shrilled—for we'd plunged through our corridor now and here was the rushing Haggardscroft, its black water sinewing past two fathoms below. We crouched and gripped the lashings we'd just strung as our watertongue surged out and hung on the air. "Down!" shrilled the witch, and we plunged and smote the river with a soft-foaming fusion.

  River-borne now, we ran silent and smooth. The river was wide enough to carve a chasm of sky in the treetops, and
the river of stars running over us was paling before the moon's advance.

  "Lash the legs now!" barked the witch. "Look sharp, blast ye, won't ye look sharp? We're a breath, no more, from our triumph! Lash down his legs! Thou, Nuncio, and hill-girlie, thou! Help me unlash and unbox her now, and hoist our Pompilla up onto his midsection!"

  Less than the pale light and the flux of the raft, what made our work somewhat dizzying was our captive's mind, for his unearthly thought, though now so discohered as to be meaningless, still flared and muttered in him. It licked and prickled along our spines, and provoked strange qualms deep in our nerves. It soon fell to a low mutter, like dying coals, as the paralytic took fuller hold on the monster, but this unearthly murmuring of his captive mind and shackled will was never wholly silenced.

  When the witch, with Mav and Lagademe, had extracted Pompilla's pallid ellipsoid from the coffin, and carried her up onto the carapace of the monster's flat midsection, she borrowed Mav's sunder of her, and leaned over the tiered black gems of the A'Rakspawn's eyes. Jaundyssa's gloating glee made her eyes glow an unpleasant pale orange.

  "How does it suit you, crook-leg? Paralysis—how do you like it? You will, yet cannot move, hear, yet cannot speak. I dance—feel me?—on your helpless sprawling meat, oh so-called deity! Likest thou this? Eh? Eh?" With each prompt she stomped with her heel. "We'll have many a pleasant chat, you and I—as you yourself have always liked to do with your prey, eh? Eh? Eh? But look you now, crook-leg. Your helpless, voiceless mentation—so impotent to cry out a coherent alarm, yet still will aimlessly report fragments of what you see, to whatever of your kin might chance to hear you. Therefore I have the melancholy duty of informing you that we must obliterate every last one of your loathsome eyes." The witch, leaning over the largest eyes, thwacked the flat of Mav's blade suggestively against her palm. "Ready now? Mmmm?"