At the Weskitt and Fobb I was sumptuously entertained. The Ecclesiarch's card, which I presented to the Chief Steward, elicited from that frosty functionary a deferrent bow and swift service. I made use of the elegant baths in the basement, though a certain elusive something about them—was it a faintly subterranean quality to the air?—made me unwilling to linger there.
I soon presented myself to be shown to a seat in the dining chamber. The house did a lively business, and amid elegant diners, who filled the refectory with a genteel tumult of crockery and conversation, I made an exquisite repast.
As I sat viewing the gathering dusk outside the window, a tapster appeared at my elbow and presented me with a spice-sprigged potation of aquavit, indicating that it was sent me with the compliments of an angular, exotic dame of a certain age who, at my bow, beckoned me to her table with a smile of ironic charm.
"Amiable lady!" I saluted her, "Thank you for this cordial gesture! I am Nifft, an Ephesionite traveller." Her hand was very cold, and steely strong. She was lean and languid in a silvery sheathe of some reptile's skin, her eyes rimmed with kohl.
"I am Dame Eelritter, a Stregan, travelling too, though not from such a distance as yourself. You looked a bit at loose ends, Nifft. You struck me as a curious foreigner, hungry for discoveries, for local lore—an observant, enterprising fellow trying to get a feel for a new locale. Do I err?"
"You are clairvoyance itself!" I did not shrink from displaying an affability that bordered on fulsomeness. Any fool could see she was dangerous. Her spareness was as densely strong as a python's, and her being from Strega, one of the two Greater Sisters of the Astrygal Islands, gave her good odds of being a witch. "You have quite hit the mark! Of course as an outlander one fears to seem rude, to poke and probe with queries, but one craves the doings, the details of a new land. Why else does one travel?"
"Why else indeed? Well well. There is so much I could tell you, for I know Hagia intimately. What about popular culture? What about ballads and other such artless rhymes. The anonymous popular verses of a folk—do such things interest you?"
I could not help displaying a brief hesitation. Unless this were a wild coincidence, a reference to what I'd just sold the Ecclesiarch seemed intended. Was her glittery, gleeful eye taunting me now? She could be grinning at her own thoughts, the apparent allusion pure accident, but I didn't really believe it for a moment.
"I relish such things! Ballads and roundelays and the like. Am I so transparent, Dame Eelritter, or are you indeed a reader of thoughts?"
"Neither, honest Nifft. It is, rather, that I am myself keen on folkloric verse. Let me share a particular favorite of mine with you. It is a local ditty, and a perfect gem of rural Hagia's unique ethnic whimsy. It is called `Something Unspeakable.' Listen:
Clawtip by clawtip, so gingerly-daintly!
Advancing now two steps, now one step, now three . . .
Hark there! Can'st hear it? Though ever so faintly?
Hear it tiptoe from thicket to gully to tree?
Something unspeakable followeth me!
What stayeth when I stay, and when I go, goeth?
It hasteth when I haste, and when I slow, sloweth.
To advance I'm afeard, yet to linger am loth,
Such tickle-foot terror attendeth on both.
Doth the boskage there stir? I search, but naught showeth!
Crickle and crackle old Crooked-Legs speedeth
And under my footfall concealeth his own.
Hast ever happ'd past some copse where Crook feedeth?
Heard his paralyzed prey—as he's drained—feebly moan?
Ye zephyrs that fluster the foliage, stand fast!
What was it, just yonder, that just whispered past?
What pursuer so leisurely-sly giveth chase?
Ye gods, let me not feel that thorny embrace!
Ye breezes harassing the high grass, desist!
By little and little, degree by degree
Thy rustle and bustle the monster assist—
Lest I be seized let me harken! Oh list!
That delicate stealthing—what else could it be?
From a footfall so multiple, what hope to flee?
For scuttling from thicket to gully to tree
Something unspeakable followeth me!
I did not need to feign fascination as she recited. Was this a threat? A warning? If the poem's theme had not seemed pointed in itself, her smile would have made it so, this cool, ophidian dame with her eyes kohled as fierce as a carnival demon-mask's. How could I not feel a taunting admonition against my thief's errand in the lines? Or was something else afoot. Had the hostile Fursten Minim, for instance, guessing my mission, sent her after me? The poem seemed to invite me to collude in derogation of the god—to gull me into treason? To undo, or at least expel me? Cautiously, I probed for further disclosure.
"These are truly vivacious and sprightly lines. Forgive me for asking, but an outlander, if he needs anything, needs to know where he risks giving offense. Would not the verses be locally deemed as, well, disrespectful of the deity and his spawn?
"In my great age, honest Nifft—" her kohl-rimmed eyes, though she smiled, looked cold and mirthless now, "—I find myself more and more indifferent to such questions. I indulge my impulses and follow my intuitions. For instance, I sense in yourself a love of other aspects of local culture besides verse—a love of architecture, for example. If I am right, then I suggest you go abroad a bit and view some of Hagia's justly famed monastia. Functionally they are rather awkward hybrids, combination cloisters-cum-banking firms, all of them prodigiously well stocked with specie—but most elegantly and variously architected, I assure you."
I nodded, my face displaying courteous interest, but my tongue quite unable to fashion a reply. If she were in Minim's employ, this was much too plain to be aimed at entrapping me—and I could not after all think think she was a churchman's catspaw. This was a woman of power, and there was inscrutable challenge in her glinting eye.
She seemed to have been waiting for just this tacit impasse in my calculations, for now, leaning a bit nearer, she told me, "Neither the spidergod's wealth nor his welfare are any concern of mine, honest traveller. I have it in mind to offer you one helpful word, and I'm done with you. If you seek some opportunity to see the local countryside, then there is a place on the northern quayside, near the Maritime Museum, where those congregate who have some skills at arms to hire out. Get you down there in the morning, and see if there be not some employment that affords you the, ah, pretext for tourism you seek—and one with some remuneration withal. And so, I bid you good night."
I watched her sway lithely away amidst the tables. Would a witch who meant to work me woe make her insight into my busineess so blatant? Possibly. They can be as whimsical as they are wily, can the Sisters.
Against that I considered that no witch of any stature—none potent enough to fear—would be likely to deliver me to the spidergod's fangs. The Sisterhood has a long memory. To them the A'rak is an upstart still. They are the aristocracy of Earth's historians, and are disdainful of all immigrants.
But what, then, did this Eelritter want of me? Did she really, for some unfathomable personal advantage, wish to promote my reconnaissance and, thence, my thief's errand itself?
The eleventh hour found me settling gratefully into an opulent bed, and resolving to determine my course of action according to my first impulse on waking. This is a trick of mine that has helped me on many a night to cease fretting, and fall comfortably asleep—which I promptly did.
* * *
At the same hour, the Ecclesiarch, Paanja Pandagon, was as far from repose as it is possible for a man to be. He was wrestling, as he walked through the empty streets, with even more urgent ambiguities than those that plagued me. Walking through alternate darkness and puddles of lamplight, his light athlete's tread scarcely echoing on the pavements, his each step taking him nearer the grand flights ascending the crags to the stadium crowning them, he murmured from memory the verses I had sold him. He couldn't really present them to the god at all, of course . . . could he? The fury, the threat in them! To take them even half seriously was . . . impious, wasn't it? To believe they could tell truly some risk to the A'rak, ancient, colossal, and dire?
And most frightening of all, at bottom, was the thrill this gave him, the thought of an actual danger to Grandfather A'Rak. sent a thrill of exultation along his spine. Such strangers to our own thoughts can we make ourselves when there seems no scope for them! But the cat was irretrievably out of the bag now. At the mere hearing of these lines, the prelate's heart had mutined against the god, and thrilled to the thought that the giant might actually be imperilled.
He had felt the touch of the god's thought for the first time in his life this morning, and its awful intimacy left him wondering now: How far could the spider's mind see into his own? Would this rebellion in his blood not be detected by the god when he again touched his priest's mind with his own?
The grand stairs in front of him now majestically switchbacked five hundred feet high up the crag-wall. As he began to climb them he could see more and more of the stadium's balustraded upper rim, all drenched with moonlight. Each angle of the rim's oblate octagon wore sculptured pinnacles of bronze, and as he climbed he strove to still the thrum of terror in his heart by studying those bas reliefs while counting his steps, the game being to pinpoint at just what altitude various details of the sculpture became legible to the climber. It collected and concentrated him, and he was heartened by the poise he was able to command.
The city fell away behind him as the well known carvings cme clear. At the three-hundred-fifty-ninth step, he could even see the exquisitely carven ships, their little masts and sails . . . Those were temples and domed halls chiselled in the panel adjoining. The City's wealth, the potency of their tower-crowned metropolis, were the sculptor's predictable themes for this most majestic and solemn monument to the spidergod's Covenant with Pandagon's countrymen. The stadium was the very altar of that Covenant, where the contract was resworn, where the city re-purchased the mantle of its lucrative vassalage by the annual tendering of a lot-chosen tithing of human lives . . . always few, in fairness. The fee was nigh nominal.
At the crest the stone flights became a smooth-flagged promenade that flowed forth to the mighty pylons of the stadium's City-Gate, and entered between the huge brazen leaves that stood always wide open. The arena's sand floor stretched beyond. Pandagon must now walk out onto that sand, walk straight across the long axis of its vast ellipse, and stand before the Gods Gate, which stood directly opposite the City Gate, but which opened only one night a year, just long enough for the Chosen-by-lot to pass through, out to the god, and the doom that awaited them.
The prelate looked—partingly? he managed to smile to himself—down across lamp-spangled Big Quay, whose sea of roofs mobbed the knees of the cliffs he'd mounted. All the city's ridges and gables and domes seeming to vie like children urgent for notice and favor. Down along the quayside, watch-lanterns hung from jibs and rigging, freckling like fireflies the forested masts of all the ships undressed of sail and bedded down.
Would he indeed return alive to his beautiful, proud city? How could he walk into the A'rak's presence, and keep hidden from the god's eye-jeweled hugeness, that thrill his spine had sung with at the thought of the god endangered? The god's thought, this morning, had seemed to go directly up his spine to his understanding. How could his thought, his purposes, be closed to that millenial monster? Here he was even now thinking his treason unguardedly—and indeed how guard it, now he'd discovered it in himself?
The sacerdotal literature, the breviaries, early annals, constituional chronicles—all his sources were silent on how deeply the god saw into his priests' minds. Hard and terrible it appeared to him, to walk across that arena's star-bleached sand. Yet he could not choose but do it.
So he passed through the City Gate, and stepped out onto the arena, his pace still deliberate, dignified.
Unheard of, this summons. Something utterly new. A private summons of the Church's Primate to the most terrible shrine of the faith, theater of the Covenant's most solemn rite. Pandagon's irrepressible intuition . . . or just desperate hoped? . . . was that the uniqueness of this did mean unease in the god. The protocols were A'rak's own. Revision meant . . . at least something unforeseen. To that frail hope of vulnerability in the alien giant, he clung as he crossed the moon-drenched sand.
The God's Gate, its brazen valves even vaster than the City Gate's, was graven with the City's (and Covenant's) history. A'rak's Epiphany to the Gleet-Shearers. The stages of the city's explosive growth filled the ascending panels, and the highest dipicted the Quay thronged with trade and the Haagsford a-bristle with ships. As he neared the awesome valves, he had to crane his neck back to see them.
He halted, taking in the doors as a whole now, five stories high. For now, standing close, he sensed power bristling and swelling just outside them, sensed a presence outside them that was a match for their hugeness. Did not the great brazen panels even bulge with it, ever so faintly swelling and groaning with its pressure? Surely they did, just detectably! And he almost believed he detected too—like huge, remote millstones grinding slow—the murmur of that Presence's vital energy, a slow-cycling drone.
I am here.
The god's thought was a mere wisp, a fleet corruscation of comprehension. And it was a tidal surge at the same time, a huge impalpability, an immense will entering a single skull's little sanctum.
"I harken, oh revered A'rak, and attend your will." What a chattery small noise seemed his speech in Pandagon's own ears! Such was the awe that aura-ed the Presence, that in it the priest found his terror almost suspended.
Look above thee Priest. Upwards! Behold!
Pandagon again craned his neck back, and saw nothing but the gates' brazen crest. Then, all along that crest, wispy movevent caught the starlight. It seemed that some gauzy tapestry's broad hem—a silken skirt as wide as the gates themselves—had begun edging down, curtain-wise, over the graven bronze panels.
It came down with a whispery, scratchy sound, and little hitches and haltings gave its descent an almost teasing tempo, evoking a music hall curtain's coy flourishes for the comic turns. The incongruity that notion augmented, if anything could, the priest's utter bewilderment.
A moment more and he could see dark figures embedded in the descending fabric, shapes knit in ranked array . . . ? Yes. The thing was a pattered tapestry then. Some woven proclamation? Writ large for the Convocation here of the Three Thousand two nights hence?
Steadily downward this tapestry scratchily whispered. The fabric was a dense silvery gauze—was thick raw silk. The ranked figures were the scratchy part. They were made of much stiffer stuff. And in fact they weren't woven shapes at all, but rather solid things webbed into the sheeted silk.
And then Pandagon grasped what he was seeing. His horror melted his knees and froze them solid again in the selfsame instant.
This descending curtain was a vast diaphanous shroud. The shapes in it, row on row, were spider husks—the mummied residues of the A'rak's feedings. Here were every creature of any size native to Hagia's hills, riverfloors, and sea bottoms—a score of each kind formed the vast page's text. Their hides, tanned black by the venom, were sucked so tight to the bone that every tooth, joint and rib of them showed stark and sharp in the starlight, as clear as anatomic engravings.
Do you grasp what is blazoned here, Priest? That I have unscrolled for your eyes alone the tenderness for ye, my congregation, that I have cherished unspoken so long?
Pandagon then was to be sole human witness of this phantasmagoric whimsey—the whole thing had been wrought for his instruction. To bear alone the dire god's inquisition—such was his high office, his power and his danger! what did this ghastly riddle mean? But even as he despaired, he did grasp the grisly text's tale. The curtain was fully descended now, and he saw that it contained no human mummy.
"Revered A'rak," he trumpeted, feeling his words ring now, his voice commensurate with his high office. "I behold here your studious care to disburden us, your partners in the Covenant, of the weight of your divine appetite. How tenderly sparing you are of the sustenance we are plighted to yield you—this is what I see here manifested!"
His heart hammered, harder and harder as still the prickly whelm of spiderthought failed to flood him. Though the tension was torment, he had ceased to fear death here, tonight. At some point not many moments past, he had realized his present safety. This shroud had been wrought to awe and terrify him. He was needed for something.
It comforts me, Priest, to find you so wise in my worship. Here was the unearthly thought-flux tuned somehow to a solemn sadness! The silence before had denoted the deity's pain, then. I have felt, Priest—alas, unmistakably—the foretremors of a dire Befalling, of a monster's advent to blameless Hagia's green and pleasant vales. I have kept my Covenant to stand Hagia's bulwark and battlement for her flourishing generations, and I shall keep covenant against this scourge to come, whose malevolence mocks your race's scope to grasp. The tragic consequence, priest, the ineluctable necessity, is that I must feed to battle strength, that I must nourish my might for the coming encounter.
In the silence that followed, a breeze set the shroud to rippling, and the mummied beasts scritch-scratched against the bronze, their jutting bones softly gonging here and there. The tapestry seemed a naked death-writ now, one specimen page from the epic of Hagia's decimation. And was Pandagon here, the priest, to preside then over the hecatomb? Officiate the feast? He stared, numb and chill to the bone, at the eyeless grins, the crooked-shrunk paws and limbs in their dangling dance.
We grieve alike now, priest. We both stand mutely mourning—how not? But scant time remains, and now we must set to work. You must make altered provision for the Choosing. The grim gist of the matter is, five times the number we are wont to choose must be chosen on Shortest Night next.
When he'd taken it in, Pandagon swayed on his feet slightly, such was his relief. Perhaps a hundred, a hundred and twenty chosen! Grievous, to be sure, but compared to the abyss of slaughter he had just contemplated. . . .
The god now commenced an exact numeration of supplementary security measures. The ceremonial sequence of the Choosing was designed to contain and muffle any riotous impulse among the doomed. The Three Thousand convoked to the Choosing all drew their runes from the urn, and the priest then began bidding now the holders of this rune, and now the holders of that, to retire to the tiers and resume their lives. When the the identity of the one or two death runes became clear, the damned stood alone on the sand, environed by the saved—all of them motivated to enforce the rite's result. In this situation, some dozen-score Bailiffs and Reeves sufficed to maintain order.
But now, clearly the traditional cohort of bailiffs must be augmented, for with five times the number of doomed, there would be five times the number of their kin or friends among the saved, and the situation could grow volatile. The god murmured numbers of actives, numbers of auxiliaries, the means of their mustering discreetly, the details of posting them handy while yet unobserved by the Three Thousand as they entered the arena.
These calibrations and reckonings trickled up Pandagon's spine, the god counting his congregation like coin: thus much slaughter, thus much panic, equalled thus many surplus of knout-and-net men for containment. And the priest, as he harkened to this unearthly murmur, became conscious of the degree to which the god had calibrated his own emotions, seeing that the mummy shroud was precisely intended to remind him of what the god could do, and make embrace this epic homicide with the sense of relief that he had, in fact, felt. Pandagon had been informed of a hecatomb about to take place, and had been manipulated into accepting it gratefully, thankfully eager to serve.
The priest felt the kindling of anger, deep in his core. The anger gave birth to a perilous inspiration, and an heroic resolve.
"Great A'rak," he said when his master had done, "My grateful knowledge of our debt to you emboldens me to dare your august displeasure and take issue with your provisions. But I do not think they are sufficient to ensure orderly, decent, and devout delivery of your just tribute."
Thus launched, Paanja Pandagon found an effortless eloquence. Compelled, he said, by his loyal abhorrence of the impiety that panic might precipitate, he begged that the A'rak's monastia be directed to provide the wherewithal to recruit a small precautionary cohort under the humble Ecclesiarch's personal command. It was only because the A'rak's devoted priest had received in the Academy—as all of his class did—a first-rate military education, and that as a professional in the arts of force he was alarmed at the potential for mutiny here, that he dared the impertinence of correcting his deity's calcuation.
What was the A'rak a-weighing in the following silence—that long following silence—that led him, at last, led him to utter his gracious assent to the priest's proposition? Paanja Pandagon was to learn two days thence, to his woe.
| Title: | The A'Rak |
| Author: | Michael Shea |
| ISBN: | 0-671-31947-7 |
| Copyright: | © 2000 by Michael Shea |
| Publisher: | Baen Books |