The A'Rak Read online

  In our crossing of that town we encountered what must have been its entire population, and not a single word, civil or otherwise, was directed at us from beginning to end. For all my sympathy, the cumulative sense of insult quite stung me.

  "What oafs! What troglodytes!" I cried when we'd put Haggis behind us. "What a sullen, vindictive, moronic breed of rusticated rurals and backwater dolts! Have they never heard of nuncial impartiality? Of our sacred neutrality?!"

  "Dolts?" came a voice from behind us. "Might you hap to be characterizing in such ungentle terms my towns- and kin-folk of happy, healthful Haggis?"

  It was a woman who asked us this. We wheeled and stood, a ludicrous tableau of the thunderstruck, staring at her there on the highway, onto which she'd just emerged from the high grass. Smallish, and spare withal she was, but with eyes an unsettlingly pure, limpid blue. From the belt of her short kilt hung a hangared blade heavily curved and with the murderous massiveness of a cleaver about it. She carried as well a javelin athwart her back, and a sling with a pouch of lead shot big as walnuts.

  I was still stung, and answered quick. "Madam, I ask your pardon of course, but since we are no more the A'Rak's servants than yourselves, it makes your incivility the more vexing. We are commissioned to entomb yon casket in an A'Rak fane, and as nuncials our neutrality is accepted the world over. More than this, we have ourselves been misused. We now know our client to have been a witch in disguise! We are hoaxed! Perhaps you could be moved to aid rather than abuse us. Is it some heresy we're sent upon, for which the godspawn themselves will seek our lives? We in fact know next to nothing of the matter!"

  I was ranting like a fool, but finding at least some relief in it. She stared at me, coldly weighing my words, or perhaps taking my personal measure. "If a witch has hired you," she observed, "she'll not likely destroy you before she's had what she paid to get from you—for witches are very tight-fisted as a rule."

  "But how can we know what it is she has paid to get from us? Her true aims are masked. Our Nuncial honor compels us to execute the letter of her commission, though we now know it to be a charade. Our deaths under the fangs of the outraged deities, useful for some larger plan of hers, could be the very thing she's hired us for!"

  I knew my own words for folly as I spoke them. I was railing at my own self-chosen fate, at the inherent danger of my nuncial honor.

  The sun was down. It seemed, in the following silence, with the breeze washing over the tawny, rippling ridges, that we could actually feel old titan Earth's wheeling on his oiled axis, and Night's sliding approach with her silent storm of swarming stars.

  The highlander tipped a nod at our coffin. "Your spiderspawn might little care whose ends you're serving, because it's hungry times everywhere so nigh the Choosing. My stead's well walled. You may camp the night in my paddock, and I'll sup you as well, for two gold lictors."

  "They are not our spiderspawn," I could not forbear snapping. Her price was twice a fair rate. We might learn from her though, if she would talk. "We thank you for your offer, and accept it," I told her frigidly. I told her our names.

  "I'm Mav," she said, turning on her heel. "Follow me," she threw over her shoulder, and led us brusquely down into the slopes of windblown grass, under the fading afterglow of the vanished sun.

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  NIFFT IV

  Mav's walled paddock was a tidy grounds where barns, sheds, shearing and milking stalls and the like were neatly arrayed, but it was, like all such pastoral compounds, not unredolent of gleets' dung. I willingly forgave this homely aroma, thinking it a slight price to pay for the fine wall surrounding the property. Sturdy mortared fieldstone this wall was, half again a man's height, and crowned with cruel spikes for the underbellies of spiders. That feeding a'rakspawn's gloating intimacies with his pinned prey still gave me after-shudders as we sopped bread in bowls of gleetsmilk, round a rather parsimonious little fire Mav had built us in a brazier.

  I won't dwell here on the doubts about my character which appear to have sprung so spontaneously to life in my new employer, though it goes without saying ( . . . )

  My silence on these matters is the more fitting in that she had not yet at this point fully articulated to me these grave misconceptions of hers, though by means of innuendo, and nuances of tone and gesture ( . . . )

  In sum, I bore her unspoken slanders with stoic courtesy, having scant attention to spare her crotchets. I am sure, my dear Shag, you have already astutely inferred from my report thus far that if the rumor I'd come here to sell proved out as a veritable prophecy, I would be far indeed from grief-struck by it. It would seem to me, if anything, an opportunity to be improved upon with all dispatch, and I craved to explore ways and means to this end with knowing locals. But with pious, or even merely conventional citizens, I dared not rouse a hue and cry against myself by speculation on the deity's downfall.

  But this Mav now, in her highlanders' enclave with its dissident, even separatist tradition—what seditious lore might her people not have preserved through the generations? What might she make of the verses I had sold Paanja Pandagon?

  She was exceeding short-spoken, yet would not quit our company, summoning her two daughters to our little supper-circle (two grave, pale-eyed little versions of herself, slender and tough, their gaits as smooth and as neat-foot as cats) and sending them off with instructions for securing the farmstead against the night. Seeing the profit she'd got from us—two gold lictors for a scant mess of coarse bread and skim milk!—I knew she was as tight-fisted as any witch. Did she linger among us to be sure we stole no croziers or carding-paddles from her sheds? Or did she suspicion us for the spidergod's faithful after all? Even after our Nuncio's humiliating proclamation of "our" deception? (How that mortified me! I hadn't been duped! I had undeceived her and her crew!)

  "What is that weapon of yours, Dame Mav?" Olombo asked her. I'd wondered the same—a short but strongly curved blade with the breadth and mass of a cleaver.

  "You've not seen a sunder before? It hacks and it throws equal well—rightly thrown, with a nice whistly tumble to it, it'll clip off four spiderlegs right in a row, snickety-snackety. This was my late Mackle's sunder."

  "You take arms against the, ah, gods?" I tried to make my delight sound like anxious awe. "You . . . kill them?"

  "The littler ones now and again we do manage to accommodate in that way, yes. My Mackle killed one with his here. Out in the hills one dusk with his flock he was, when he had one spring out from a thicket at him. A spawnlet scarce five times his size it was, luckily. He pitched this blade in a whistly tumble, and cleaved the spawn's foresection like a rotten rumkin."

  "Then the, ah, god killed your husband with a dying stroke?"

  "Ha! The divine runt-bug was dead as dung. Mackle died elsewhere long after, died of getting drunk midst his flock one night in the High Tors, and lying stupored too long past sun-up, when some 'gnaths flapped down and started gnawing on him. A soberer man would have roused up and drave them straight off, but drunk as my Mackle was, the 'gnaths ate him down to clean bone without waking him. He was a great thundering lout, but I miss him now and again. . . ."

  The following silence was not one of mourning for Mackle, I fear. Whatever our unuttered conflicts of aim or of interest, mine and my nuncial friends, we knew perfect harmony just at that moment, imagining the butchery of an a'rakspawn, and the joy of it.

  And Mav knew it, this little Mav such a slyboots it seemed, behind all her upcountry bumpkin-slang. She seized the moment of our beguilement and gently pushed for what, when I heard it, I realized she had wanted to know from the start.

  "Would you tell me, Dame Nuncio, the place you are taking yon casket? It may hap I could help you some way in the finding it."

  Here came the most high and holy nuncial protocol thought I, when Lagademe responded with silence at first: a lofty refusal to violate confidentiality, even that of a lying witch. But then, by the Crack, she drew out her map!

  "I was not told this was p
rivate, after all. I'd be obliged to know if you find it accurate, in fact. The red line marks our route—you'll note we're to swing east down across the Murkside River Vale some ten leagues north of here."

  Mav's busy eyes ate up the vellum. "You're mistaken, Dame Nuncio. You're to swing east 'crosst the next valley north, the Ribbonrill River Vale—this turn's two leagues distant at most."

  "Oh no, you're mistaken my dear!" But when Lagademe had it back, the map dumbfounded her. "I'm not wrong," she growled. "It's changed. This bloody-foul map is witched too! Of course! That's why she said check it each time! She's changing it as we go!"

  Mav was nodding thoughtfully. "If so, Dame, it's changed for the better now. You know what tomorrow night is, do you not? By the route that's been changed, you'd have been crossing the Murkside bottom woods at just about darkfall on the night of the Choosing, and while you don't want to be abroad at all on that night, you especially don't want to be down in a bottom-woods. But by this changed route you'll climb out of the Ribbonrill with daylight to spare. . . . Do I read that aright, Dame? That the fane you're taking your coffin to is called . . . Endon Thioz?"

  "Yes, Endon Thioz. Do you know of this fane?"

  Mav smiled vaguely. "I'm going to ask my friends of it tomorrow. My girls will bring you breakfast at dawn and see you back to the highway. If I . . . learn something of value, I'll overtake you, and you may have it for a price."

  "Overtake us. . . ." Lagademe didn't like that, but let it pass. "At what price, exactly?"

  "I'll know that when I'm sure what I'm telling you. You can pay it or not—I'll not charge you for my coming to find you, if you don't want my news."

  Although Mav left us then, and we all not long after lay snoring, the events of that night are not yet told. Far from it.

  For that same evening, Big Quay's religious calendar was marked for the penultimate ritual step toward The Choosing on the following night, the summer solstice. That evening the rune-engraved chits whose drawing was to separate the Chosen from the Saved were prepared with solemn ceremony, and conveyed to the Ecclesiarch for his use on the morrow.

  Again, what I here supply I learned only after the fact—and barely survived to learn at all.

  The rite I speak of was the Rune Reading, conducted each year in the "coin-cellar," or vault, of a different monastium. It was an awesome ritual, for in its course the spidergod, through one of his sons, spoke his will directly to his human servitors.

  By calendrical rotation, the honor of hosting this year's Rune Reading had devolved upon the Klarvcoffert Monastium, a particularly prestigious coin-coven situated not far in-country from Big Quay itself. Arch-monast Geldergrab, primate of the Klarvcoffert monastium, had received six months ago the twenty urns of runes at a brief midwinter ceremony. In this ceremony, the monasts of the Scintillion Monastium, last year's rune-keepers, had carried the bronze amphorae of runes in procession down to the Klarvcoffert coin-cellar, where they had stood untouched till tonight.

  At about the time, by my reckoning, that the fair Mav was telling us of her late husband's adventures, the Klarvcoffert campanile tolled First Evening Bell, and the Rune Reading commenced. The rite had an element of manual labor about it, as well as involving some unsettling communion with one of the Deity's sons, and so the arch-monast Geldergrab followed the custom of all monastial primates, and deputed an underling to officiate. His choice was Prelate Pankard, his trusted chief of Transferrable Draughts of Deed and Title.

  With two scribes from Reckoning to assist him, and with palms moist with fear, the slight, bookish Prelate Pankard began his descent of the stairs leading down to Klarvcoffert's deepest vault. The scribes preceded him with lamps, while Pankard carried only a small silver casket.

  Solemnly they descended several gloomy flights, the last flight hewn from the living bedrock. When the scribes opened the coin-cellar's outer door, the brazen valve's great mass groaned on its hinges. When they had stepped inside, Pankard bade the door be shut behind them, a requirement of the protocol he would gladly have foregone from his dread of being close-chambered with one of the a'rakspawn, notwithstanding that the hideous being was supposed to be concealed from his direct view.

  Within the main door, the cellar wall was doored with the heavy hatches of subsidiary vaults—a deed vault, a draught vault, a gemstone vault, a bullion vault, and the like. The bedrock wall had one unsealed aperture, however, and this was the crooked narrow mouth of a natural fissure in the stone, this vent of a bigness through which two men might, with some jostling, go abreast.

  Five of the urns had been tipped over, disgorging spills of graven copper lozenges, worn smooth—for all the brevity of their yearly use—by fearful, fretting fingers.

  Only five urns spilled? The three shared doubtful looks. Had the a'rakspawn finished before withdrawing? Customarily each drawing's three thousand tokens were compiled from varied proportions of around a dozen runes. Then spiderthought rippled from the vent's crooked mouth:

  Advance, and gather thy runes by my reading.

  The formula, prescribed by church writ as the commencement of the process, ended all doubts. The scribes took up the empty urn they would bear away filled.

  Of Lapta Rune, four hundred.

  The scribes plucked up the copper rhombs, and by turns dropped them in the urn to the count which Pankard slowly intoned. (How interminably long must such a proceeding, in such a crypt, begin to seem?) The count done at last, and all spillage restored, they righted the urn of Lapta Runes.

  Of the Uruk Rune, six hundred.

  And so it proceeded. At length, the endless slow-march of numbers, and the matching clatter of copper counters, came to an end. The scribes closed their collecting urn's mouth with a round wooden wafer rimmed with a waxen gasket, which they melted snug to the jar-mouth with their un-chimneyed lamps. Pankard gripped his casket, nerving up for the last brief task, when spiderthought again touched his, sinking a fang of fear through him. The rite prescribed no further utterance from the god.

  Let thy helpers retire with their runes, priest, while thou remainest.

  Pankard was instantly running sweat everywhere under his cassock. Why he alone? That wasn't the protocol! Disobey, of course, he dared not. When the great valve closed behind him, he began to tremble.

  Advance, Priest. Time does not abound for our many needs this night.

  From the outset he had known he must approach the fissure to put the Priest's Cull in his casket, and the prospect had terrified him. But this unprecedented solitude, this rupture of protocol . . . he shivered so, nearing that black crack, that he was sure he would fall. He attained the fissure, somehow, and knelt there. An alien air, the otherworldly breath of A'Rak-kind, whispered from the darkness that the stone lips portalled. On the floor just within those lips lay the five-rune Cull, one rune of each group for him to put in his casket by means of the little horn scoop it contained—for the death rune or runes were marked as such, invisibly, by a fang-touch of A'Rak's venom. At the drawing the Arch-Priest would not know the death runes till he touched them, and they burned his hand.

  But on this night there was more than the Cull runes lying inside the fissure. Behind them was a stout satchel of plod-hide.

  Pankard's shaking hand made the Cull-runes rattle in the scoop, but he got them into the casket.

  Now priest, take up the satchel, and fill it with gold coins of middling denomination, to a valuation of ten fine gold hundredweight in sum. These, with the Cull, convey thou straightly this same night to Big Quay A'Rak-Fane and tender both to the Ecclesiarch.

  Pankard sensed the godspawn withdraw, and trembled now with relief as he opened the coin-vault. He could only just manage the filled satchel's weight.

  The Prelate brought his strange news to Geldergrab. Arch-monast Geldergrab had not reached his cloistral preeminence by debating for even an instant an A'Rak's pecuniary dispositions. A vehicle was commanded, and Pankard dispatched with his satchel to the metropolis

  Panka
rd's carriage-wheels whirred him down eight leagues of starlit highway within an hour. A sexton met him on the Big Quay Fane's steps, smoothly relieved him (much to his anxiety) of satchel and casket, and conducted him, surprisingly, not to the synodium in the sacerdotal annex, where church fiscal affairs were discussed, but into the Fane itself, and down through the silken-veiled, high-vaulted emptiness, toward the dais surrounding the altar-pit. Upon the platform, cressets burned round a makeshift array of benches occupied by perhaps seventy or eighty men whom the Ecclesiarch, standing, had been addressing. They all paused to watch Pankard's approach, and the monast noted as he neared the assembly that most of them wore the octagonal caps of Bailiffs of the Fane.

  "Welcome, Prelate Pankard. Thank you for your haste." Pandagon and Pankard had in fact known one another at school as youths, but it required the Ecclesiarch's pleasant smile to encourage the timid monast to point out, as he climbed the platform, "The, ah, your, ah, sexton has the ten—" He broke off in sudden terror of an indiscretion. Pandagon, however, wished the sum to be known.

  "The ten hundredweight in gold, yes, thank you Prelate, it is part of the precautions we've gathered to implement tonight—precautions against a very real menace to the secure performance of the Choosing." Pandagon was glad to see his audience's impressed gazes converge on the satchel at his feet. He wanted them impressed. Normally the Hundred and Twenty—the Bailiffs and their Reeves who constituted the armed wardens of public order at the Choosings—were convoked in the sacerdotal annex. Pandagon had gathered them here because, as he personally knew, to abide near the brink of the pit was to feel awe.

  But they must be here to be awed, and fully two score of the Reeves had not yet arrived, though all twenty-four Bailiffs were present. The Ecclesiarch was not surprised. Bailiffs were on the Fane's pay year-round, groundskeeping and maintaining not only the stadium, but the many valuable secular properties of which the Fane was owner of record, including two theatres, three public baths, and several thriving hostelries. The Bailiffs lived their posts, and were municipal functionaries in spirit, of that familiar type who are keepers of the civic score, who like to see punishments paid and dues rendered.