Pillar of Night

CHAPTER FOUR

Krek lurched forward and settled into the crypt, long legs fitted tightly beneath his body. Leaving his friend Inyx troubled him, but staying with her troubled him even more. She would continually remind him of the good times they had spent with Lan Martak. Such a prod to the memory only produced morbid thoughts, Krek knew.

It was better to make a clean split, find a new world, walk new paths.

“I still will think of you, though,” Krek said softly. He craned his mobile head around and peered out of the crypt to where Inyx and Ducasien stood side by side. The spider had no good feelings about Ducasien, but there were no bad ones, either. The man had come into Inyx’s life at a time opportune for her. He would take care of her sorrows and comfort her, even if Krek were unable to find or give such solace.

The spells governing the cenotaphs began to churn and boil around him. The spider closed his dun-colored eyes and fell through space to a new world. Shades of grey forced themselves upon his mind and he had no sensation of tumbling, such as the humans often talked about experiencing.

Krek blinked and stirred in the closeness of the new crypt. Tensing strong legs, the spider lifted straight up. Strain as he might, the stone top refused to yield. Krek did not panic. He was a seasoned traveler along the Road and had often encountered similar predicaments on worlds seldom visited. Talons scraping at the stone sides of the crypt, Krek found a seam and worried at it until he enlarged it and broke off chunks of the crypt wall.

“Now,” he said, with some feeling of accomplishment. In complete blackness, the arachnid dug and moved rock and dirt and forced his way out of the cenotaph and through an underground passage of his own devising. He disliked the closed-in feeling, preferring to swing freely on a web stretched between mountain peaks, but claustrophobia was alien to him. He remembered without any distaste the days spent within the cocoon, aware and yet unable to fight free. That was a memory of life as it was, another moment to be experienced and not dreaded.

But water?

Krek shuddered as he found the dirt turning increasingly wet. Soon enough, mud caked his furred legs. Krek tried to stop the involuntary trembling and failed. He dug faster, the dampness spurring him on. When he broke through the ground and saw the cloudy sky above he let out an anguished moan of stark despair.

“Noooo!” he sobbed. “This cannot be. It rains! I have come back to the world of burning water.”

He used sharp mandibles to enlarge the opening onto this world and scrambled through, shaking himself as clean as he could. Tiny drops of rain pelted his hard carapace and trickled down his legs. The tingly sensation was not one he cherished. The idea of being wet all over thoroughly repelled him.

Krek ran for cover, shaking himself dry as he went. When he found a mausoleum door half open, he didn’t hesitate pulling it wider and entering the dry, dusty interior.

An interesting web, he thought, looking at a pattern spun by a tiny spider in one corner. Krek walked up the wall and hung upside down to peer at the geometry used. His head bobbed in agreement with the clever bindings, the assured use of the stone walls for foundations, the alternate sticky and clean pathways through the web itself. When a tiny fly inadvertently touched the center of the web, vibrations traveled from one side of the trap to the other.

“Ah, there you are,” said Krek, chittering noisily. The minuscule spider in the web stopped on one strand, twisted around and stared at Krek, then let out tiny cries of indignation.

“He is your meal, not mine,” Krek tried to reassure his distant cousin. “Why, he would make no more than an appetizer for me. Which reminds me of how long it has been since I have eaten. A disgrace. Imagine a celebrated Webmaster of the Egrii Mountains not eating in days and days. No succulent grubs or those pasty fungus plants Lan Martak was so fond of.”

Krek fell silent as he thought about Lan Martak. He hardly noticed as the tiny spider hustled to the middle of the web and began spinning another web to encapsulate his prey. By the time the little spider had finished, a giant tear welled in Krek’s left eye. It dripped directly down and onto the floor to form a tiny puddle. Curious ants deviated from their strict marching path to explore this phenomenon of water inside the mausoleum. They skirted the pond, delicately sampled it, and discarded any idea of its being useful. By the time Krek dropped from the ceiling, deftly twisting to land on his feet, the teardrop had vanished.

Not so his memories of Lan.

“How could you do this to me?” the giant spider asked over and over. “Oh, woe, woe! I am surely the most put upon of all creatures. Scorned by my only love, and rightly so, deserving no more than a craven’s due, abandoned by my friends-no, not abandoned, sent away! I am so pitiful. So pitiful.”

Krek peered out the door and saw that the light rain had vanished. Gingerly picking his path, he stepped from one dry spot to another until he came to a tall rock wall surrounding the cemetery grounds. He spat forth a short length of climbing web and went up the wall, perching on the narrow top and surveying this world he had blundered onto.

The shower had cleansed the air and left it crystal clear. From his vantage point Krek was able to see a considerable distance. And he liked what he saw.

Mountains, real mountains, rose up on the horizon.

“To build my web in some valley and simply dangle in the breeze,” he said, venting a hefty sigh. “It would not be the same, not without Klawn, but the tranquility will do much to restore my good nature. Those days in the Egrii Mountains were so idyllic.” He sighed again and continued to pivot about on the narrow wall.

Humans had built a largish town a few miles in the other direction, near a meandering stream. His sharp eyes picked out scores, hundreds, of the silly beings as they bustled about doing their confusing chores for all the most confusing of reasons. Krek saw nothing in the human village to attract him. If anything, he had had his fill of humans and their illogical ways.

“And some of them do not like spiders,” he reminded himself. Krek had found a few worlds, before meeting Lan Martak, where the inhabitants actively hated spiders, a thing most ridiculous from his point of view. “They would certainly be better creatures if they would emulate their betters.” Krek sniffed and kept turning.

To the far south he saw dust clouds rising. Squinting, the spider made out tiny dots he recognized as magically powered wagons. Lan Martak had tried to explain to him how a demon could be trapped in a boiler, heat water and make stream, and then use the steam to move wheeled vehicles. Krek held the opinion that humans wouldn’t need such artificial devices if they only had the proper number of legs.

To the south, therefore, he saw nothing to hold his interest. Nor to the west did he see anything more than the humans’ grain fields. A dreary occupation, that one. Krek preferred the beauty and symmetry of a web and waiting for his supper to come to him. Actually poking sticks in the ground and hiding plant parts, tending them with more care than they lavished on their own offspring, then cutting off the plants after they had the temerity to actually grow confused Krek.

The mountains. To the north, he thought. A light jump landed all eight feet solidly on the ground and headed him in the direction of the distant range.

He quickly fell into the rolling gait that covered ground steadily and, by the time he had walked twenty miles, thoughts of Lan Martak and Inyx faded and anticipation for what he’d find in the foothills grew.

Krek’s mandibles clacked in futile rage at the sight of the grey-clad legion marching through the hills. They had set ablaze a human village and, even worse from the spider’s point of view, they had destroyed huge webs strung between some of the deserted buildings on the village outskirts. Krek had examined the webs with the hope of finding others of his own size. The tiny spiders that populated this world did not appear too communicative, but they showed no sign of surprise or fear of him. He had hoped the old webs might give a clue.

Now the webs were gone, set ablaze in the most foul way. He had hidden some distance away and watched as Claybore’s soldiers doused the fragile webs with some volatile liquid, then touched a spark to one corner. For a brief instant, the entire web had been burning brightly, the strands standing out in orange-and-white flames. Then the voracious fire gulped down the web and went to work on the buildings.

Krek cared little about the humans. Let them do what they would to one another. But he had a special fear and loathing of the grey-clad ones. He saw what Lan Martak meant when he said that they were different, had an evil about them that transcended mere human foolishness. They went out of their way to be mean.

The tongues of flame spread quickly and caused great consternation among the villagers. The greys rounded them up and herded them off. And Krek watched it all.

Now he peered down from the majestic heights at the soldiers marching deeper into the hills to subjugate other villages. None stood for long against their armed and armored might. His mandibles ceased their spastic clacking and the spider relaxed. There had to be a spot so far away in the mountains that no human ever ventured to it. No humans, no grey-clad soldiers.

Krek walked up the side of a large boulder, over the top, and from there along a ridge and deeper into the mountains.

The rocks were so lovely, the spider reflected. They provided ample footholds and the surging peaks presented challenges in web design and construction techniques. Krek personally had spun no fewer than forty web patterns, one for each of the major uses and many decorative ones. It was only fitting, after all, for a Webmaster to be artistic as well as astute in all matters dealing with the web.

Krek lumbered along for almost a week and one sunny afternoon stopped to rest. He blinked at what lay revealed in a valley below him.

“Home!” he cried. Krek studied the web patterns and felt a twinge of nostalgia. While the geometries were subtly different, they looked enough like webs he and others had spun that they reminded him of his home in the Egrii Mountains. He bounced up and down on his long legs, hardly able to contain his joy.

“To feel the strands flying beneath the feet,” he said with more zest than he’d felt in months. “To let the spinneret run free, the web flying out just so. Ah…”

He hurried down the side of the mountain to the valley entrance. He canted his head to one side, listening. Krek heard nothing. His talons dug into the soft dirt and found bedrock. He felt for vibrations that might betray another’s presence in the valley. Nothing. The spider wailed out his misery.

“All gone. They have left this fair valley. But why?”

Faint temblors, reached his claws now. Krek turned and looked in the direction of the disturbance. Caves led back into the mountainside. Why any spider would voluntarily seek out those holes when the webs were still intact, Krek didn’t know. Some distant cousins of his preferred hiding in the ground, spinning their hunting webs over the doorways and trapping their prey in this fashion. It had always seemed a bit perverted to Krek, but still it was better than the odd ways the humans fed and sheltered themselves.

Krek was torn between the need to explore those caves for others of his kind and the mad desire to run along the aerial strands just once.

Desire overwhelmed him. He started up the sheer rock face of one cliff, saw the walking strand above him, jumped adroitly. His talons closed about the webstuff and held him firmly as his weight caused the elastic cable to stretch. He bounced, enjoying the feel once again. Then he hastened to the very center of the web.

There he gusted out one of his deep sighs and simply enjoyed life-the elevation, the feeling of dominance over the terrain, the way he came totally alive.

“Once more a Webmaster,” he said aloud. The baleful howl of wind through the valley drowned out his words. Krek didn’t care. This moment was too precious to waste. He swung back and forth, relishing the sensations he had been denied for so long.

Krek turned about in the web and looked down the length of the green valley. Tiny springs kept the vegetation lush and green but did not provide the odious ponds and splashing rivers he so hated. The constant hum of insects on which to feed told Krek this was nothing short of paradise. But where were the mountain arachnids? What forced them to abandon such a fine domain?

Krek ran lightly along one of the traveling strands and found an anchor point on the far wall of the canyon. He dug talons into the rock face and walked off the web and toward the caves he had seen. As he neared the yawning shaft, the telltale vibrations increased. Spiders. Many of them.

He paused at the mouth of the cave, then clacked and chittered and shrilled out a greeting of the proper form. Krek didn’t expect an immediate reply. Such would be discourteous. Humans rushed everything so. One spoke, the other replied immediately. Spiders not only had the proper number of legs, they also knew how to conduct a polite conversation.

Twenty minutes later, a faint clacking echoed out of the cave.

Krek tried to figure out the dialect. The words jumbled and he had to puzzle out even that someone had responded to his polite inquiry about the valley.

“I am a Webmaster,” he said. “May I pay homage to another?”

“He’s dead,” came the response so fast that Krek took a step back in surprise. Such unseemly haste in a spider showed intense agitation.

“These are not unusual occurrences,” said Krek. “While I hope to enjoy a long life amid my hatchlings on the web runs, I, too, will die someday.”

“They murdered him. They set him on fire!”

The anguish communicated perfectly to Krek. Nothing short of being soaked in water, and then set ablaze horrified him more. The coppery fur on his legs bristled, and he felt his body tensing to meet the challenge of anyone attempting to put the torch to him.

“The humans did it,” came another, lighter voice. Krek recognized it as female. Not quite as lilting and lovely as that of his delightful Klawn, but still pleasant. “They drove us into the caves. We fear for our hatchlings.”

“From the extent of your webs, there must be at least twenty of you,” said Krek. He neglected to count hatchlings. Only adult arachnids were considered in populations since the younger spiders tended not to have long life-spans. The ones that weren’t eaten often fell off the webs and died or met with other maiming misfortune.

“Only fourteen now.” Krek mentally added about fifty hatchlings, of which five or ten might survive.

“Why do you hide in caves? This is not some new hunting technique, is it?”

“They might return at any moment. They are awful.”

“The humans? Yes, they are all of that,” agreed Krek. Then other pieces of this distressing picture came together for him. “These humans. Are they all dressed in a like manner? In uniforms?”

“You refer to the woven webs they hang around their frail bodies?” came the female’s question.

“Yes. These are the most pernicious of the humans. A mage of great power and evil commands them.”

“They do wear similar uniforms,” she agreed.

Krek paused for the appropriate length of time, then asked, “Might I enter your cave?”

This time a polite delay elapsed before a simple, “Please do, Webmaster.”

Krek ducked down and waddled into the cave. His eyes took several minutes to adjust to the dimness, then he pushed on ahead, careful not to touch any of the webs decorating the walls. He saw no one, nor had he expected to. The voices had echoed from a long ways into the cavern. Krek continued on until he came to a vast chamber.

He stood and studied the array of webbing, then clacked his mandibles together four times to indicate his approval.

“We are pleased by your acknowledgment of our pitiful efforts, Webmaster,” said the small female spider.

Krek rubbed his front legs together in response while he looked her over. She was not bad looking-for a mere spider. Less than half Krek’s eight-foot height and not even a quarter of his bulk, she still presented a trim, sprightly figure. Her spinnerets carried geometric decorations pleasing to the eye and her leg fur had been neatly tended. She reminded Krek a great deal of his long-lost love, Klawn-only this spider was so tiny, almost fragile.

“We have never seen one so large,” spoke up another spider.

“For mere spiders, you have done well in spanning the vastness.” Krek lifted a midleg and pointed to the intricate patterns displayed in the cavern. “Such fineness of strand, such daring spans, such beauty. I am impressed.”

“Thank you, Webmaster,” the female said.

“I am Krek-k’with-kritklik, Webmaster of the Egrii Mountains on a world far distant along the Cenotaph Road.”

“I am Kadekk,” said the female. Krek noted the lack of status claimed. He bobbed his head up and down in acknowledgment. It seemed reasonable. She was only a mere spider and hardly in the same class as his Klawn.

“We are in exile in this cave,” moaned one of the other spiders. “Our Webmaster died a foul death at the hands of the silly humans.”

“The soldiers,” said Krek, “are the worst of the humans. A mage guides their hand in their hideous deeds.” He shivered lightly at the thought of being drenched, dried, and set afire. It was something Claybore’s troops would consider good sport. His mandibles ground together as he unconsciously wished for their commanders’ heads between the serrated jaws.

Kadekk said, “We need leadership and you are so… much a Webmaster.”

The way Kadekk asked made Krek puff up with pride. He had always known of his own nobility, and it pleased him these mere spiders recognized it immediately.

“Would you be our Webmaster and help fight these humans?”

“It is nothing I have not done before,” Krek said. But in the back of his mind rose the troubling thought, But always before Lan Martak has been with me.

“Another legion moves up the valley,” said one of the smallest of the spiders, hardly more than a hatchling. “We will be burned out of even this cave unless we stop them.”

“Since I did not pass them on my way into the valley, this means they come from the far end,” said Krek.

“There is a large ground web of them two human days’ travel away. They find our fine valley necessary for their depredations on the other humans.”

“They have bases or forts,” said Krek, thinking. “Not ground webs. They are not sufficiently advanced for that.” He settled down and pulled in his long legs. In this position he was on a level with the mere spiders. His agile mind worked over various plans, then he decided. “We go immediately. Unseemly haste is required for survival.”

Fifteen of the mere spiders followed Krek. He was irrationally happy to see that Kadekk joined them and stayed close by his side.

“All is ready, Webmaster Krek.” Kadekk bounced around from one strand to the next, her nimble feet skipping over the sticky cables and finding only the walking strands.

“Just in time,” said Krek. He indicated the dusty path of the soldiers.

The grey-clads trooped along, one hundred strong. In their hands they carried the worst weapons of all-torches. As it was midday, these were intended for firing webs, not lighting a dark path.

“Now, Webmaster, do we attack now?” came the anxious chittering from along the valley.

“Not yet,” Krek answered. “But soon. Very soon.” He thought back to the other battles he had fought, the cowardice he had shown-and the courage. It seemed that Lan Martak’s presence, and even friend Inyx’s, helped him live up to his duties as Webmaster. Without them, his courage sometimes flagged and he did weak things. Now he fought without them, but the reasons were noble. Krek could not in good faith allow these pathetic little mere spiders to perish simply because their Webmaster had been so foully murdered.

“…the buggers now,” came the faint words drifting up from the valley floor. “Set your torches.” Hearty laughter echoed the length and breadth of the valley as the troops lit their torches and prepared to burn out the webs and their spiders.

“Krek, they… they will burn us!” Kadekk shrilled.

“Drop webs at either end of the valley,” Krek ordered. He rubbed his legs together in satisfaction when he saw the immense hunting webs lowered to block escape. Only when he was sure all the grey-clads had their torches ignited did Krek give the next order.

“Drop the climbing webs.”

From both sides of the canyon soared the powdery, dry climbing webs. In feathery clouds they flew out and floated downward, the air retarding descent of the light, strong webs.

“But Krek, the torches will burn them,” protested Kadekk.

“I do not have time to explain,” Krek said. “Watch and learn how to use their ghastly fire weapons against them. I really do not know if even such as they deserve this fate.” Krek thought on it for a moment before adding, “Yes, they do. They do deserve all they will get.”

The first layer of dry web reached a halfway point. Krek gave the signal for another toss to send even more webbing out. By the time he ordered the third flight of webstuff, the first had reached the ground. The soldiers held their torches aloft, laughing and making crude comments. The laughter turned to shrieks of fear as the web caught fire and continued to fall around them, sending twenty-foot-high tongues of fire into the sky.

“They burn themselves in our webs!” cried Kadekk.

“Their weapon has been used against them. Keep sending down more dry web.” Krek watched with bloodthirsty satisfaction as the troops tried in vain to extinguish their torches. But for them it was too late. The webs had been fired and now descended, clouds of flaming death dropping and clinging to their clothing. Dozens of grey-clads were set ablaze and ran shrieking as they incinerated.

“Krek, the others. Some escaped.” Kadekk pointed out almost a score of soldiers who had evaded the burning webs.

“Now we fight,” said Krek. He spat out a long climbing strand and anchored it to the side of the cliff. The arachnid kicked free and lowered himself to the floor of the valley. He amazed himself with the bravery he showed in the face of so much fire burning away merrily as it consumed underbrush and human soldier with equal hunger.

Kadekk dropped beside him. Together they and five other spiders lumbered off in pursuit. By the time they overtook the frightened, fleeing soldiers, six had already become tangled in the hunting web blocking the mouth of the valley. The others spun, drew weapons, and faced the wave of spiders.

Krek’s presence turned the tide. None of the grey-clads had seen a spider this large, and their moment of panic allowed him to slice four in half before the others responded. Seeing their feared enemies felled with single slashes of Krek’s mighty mandibles, the mere spiders fell to the fight with new courage and determination.

Blood soaked into the dusty floor of the canyon. All the soldiers and three of the mere spiders perished.

“What of the ones in the hunting web?” asked Kadekk, eyeing the captives. “We can kill them with no effort.”

“Spare them,” ordered Krek.

Those hung in the web relaxed visibly. They were to be spared.

“Cocoon them and save them as dinner for our hatchlings. They are tasty enough, even if they do not have the proper number of legs.”

The human shrieks soon stopped when the cocooning webs enfolded their struggling bodies. Krek and Kadekk climbed back to the heights to plan new webs for the valley.

It felt good being Webmaster once more.