Mark Chadbourn - Jack of Ravens

Church took a hesitant step forward. If he could find the exit, he could discover where everyone had gone and what odd game Conoran was playing. His thoughts were interrupted by a rapid scuttling motion in the gloom ahead. He had a horrible feeling that he knew what was in the tunnel with him. His breath was taken away by the size of it, bigger even than him. He gripped the sword with both hands, the pounding of his heart filling his head.

More scurrying, the click-click-click of legs rattling on stone, oddly metallic. Church sensed the attack before he saw it. The spider launched from the dark, and he dropped to his knees, swinging the sword, cutting air. The spider swept over him, the size of a car, and disappeared into the shadows as quickly as it had come.

Church moved through the fogou trying to get his bearings, but it appeared to be much larger than he had imagined, with side tunnels branching into a labyrinthine network. Soon he couldn’t tell where the spider was, or whether he was hunting it, or it him. Long periods of silence were punctuated by the rattling of legs that sounded close at hand one moment, then far away a second later.

He rounded a bend and the light of his sword revealed it, gleaming with a black sheen, eyes turned on him, dark and maleficent. Its maw was open, toxins sizzling at the tips of razor-sharp fangs.

The spider struck with devastating speed, moving from floor to wall to ceiling, knocking Church to his knees with its bulk. The serrated edge on one of its legs tore through his shoulder and he cried out as the pain burned deep into him. When he swung the sword up sharply, the spider was already gone. The blade raised a shower of sparks as it clanged against the corbels.

For minutes that felt like hours, Church dived out of the creature’s way, tearing open knees and elbows on the stones, striking as fast as he could, but never fast enough. Occasionally he would nick its steely flesh, raising a venomous cry deep in his own head; and once he struck quickly and strongly enough to hack off a length of leg that twitched with a life of its own on the floor.

He hoped to carry on whittling the thing down, but as he ducked an attack, he turned his ankle and fell to the floor, his sword skidding out of his hand. The spider was on him in an instant, its bulk pinning him down so that he couldn’t reach the sword, its legs skewering his flesh. Its eyes hovered over his face. A thousand tiny Churches were reflected back.

It struck rapidly, driving its fangs into Church’s arm. The agony was excruciating as his flesh ruptured and the poison rapidly flooded his system. On his pale flesh, the thin blue veins began to turn black as the toxins moved inexorably towards his heart and head. A jarring whispering echoed deep in his skull. The words were alien and came and went like a badly tuned radio, but they carried with them images that threatened to overwhelm him with dread and despair. The spider’s consciousness had invaded his system along with the poison, a viral intelligence within the very molecular make-up of the toxin.

After a sickening, hanging moment, a black wave sucked Church along in its wake. The language infiltrating his skull was emotional, speaking of the end of everything, of a vast hole in Existence that pulled in all light, all matter, all hopes and dreams. Church found himself walking across a blasted landscape where ghost-images hovered before winking out. Church saw modern cities fallen into shadow, and Ruth filled with a crushing grief. There were other men and women he felt he should know but didn’t.

It would have been easy to give in to the deluge of hopelessness, but instead Church became more aware of qualities that had shaped him. He recalled his despair at the death of his girlfriend Marianne, and how he had overcome that to find some hope for the future. He uncovered a strength forged by hardship. And in that instant he felt the sword in his hand.

He didn’t know whether he had found it in the throes of his delirium, or if it had magically appeared there, but he acted instantly, thrusting upward where he remembered the spider being.

An echoing shriek filled his head and the black wave receded. When his mind cleared, Church lay with the spider’s body across his legs, ichor leaking all over him. But that impression faded just as quickly, and once more he was in the tiny nook at the end of the fogou with the heartbeat drums echoing through the ground. A dream within a dream within a dream.

And he was still dying.

What followed came in flashes as if he were viewing intermittent frames on a reel of film. Being carried out of the fogou, seeing the powder-blue and pink flush of a dawn sky, with a few stars and a ghost-moon still hovering. Lying next to the fire in a roundhouse with Etain leaning over him, tears in her eyes. A foul stench from a pot bubbling over the fire, and an anxious Conoran throwing unseen things into the brew. Tannis bowing before him, making some oath that Church couldn’t translate.

A long period of darkness followed, and when Church next came to consciousness, the fragmentary nature of reality had subsided but the pain and exhaustion in his limbs was near-unbearable. Church fumbled for where the spider had been embedded in his arm, felt nothing.

‘Death stalks you.’ Conoran loomed over Church, his pale eyes gleaming in the firelight. ‘Are you ready for the next step of your journey?’

‘Yes.’ Church’s voice sounded as if it came from a different person. ‘But I’m not ready to die.’

‘You must fan whatever flames lie within you if you are to pull your spark back from the dark.’

‘What do I have to do?’ Church found his strength creeping back, but he still could not lift his head.

Conoran considered his response. ‘You are to meet the god above gods and plead for your life.’

In the dark before dawn, Church found himself carted from the roundhouse and fastened to a stretcher of wood and straw harnessed to Tannis’s horse. They set off at a slow pace that still amplified every rut and bump in the main street, and was barely less uncomfortable when they passed onto the sweeping grassland. Church was vaguely aware of other riders accompanying him, but their identities remained unknown.

For a while he was transfixed by the stars and for a moment touched a sweeping sense of wonder rarely felt outside childhood. But after an hour or so, branches closed in overhead, bringing with them a feeling of claustrophobia and a dull background drone of dread.

Tannis clearly felt it, too, for he said quietly but insistently, ‘Go slow. We are no longer alone.’

The rocking motion became a crawl, the thud of hooves barely a whisper. Church could hear the breeze rustling through the upper branches and the tinkle of a nearby stream, but nothing else. It was too dark, and death increasingly tugged at his sleeve.

‘The dark powers do not want us to reach Boskawen-Un.’ It was Conoran’s voice.

‘They come for Jack, Giantkiller?’ Etain this time.

‘He is a threat to them. They recognise this. That is why the Poison-Spider was set in his body. They did not wish a direct confrontation,’ Conoran replied.

‘Then he must be a great warrior indeed, ‘Tannis said with awe.

Church faded out for a while, and when he fought his way back to consciousness the atmosphere had grown even more tense.

‘Where? Towards the west?’ It was Etain’s friend Owein, cautious and intelligent.

‘No. Look north.’ Branwen, as flinty and insistent as ever.

‘What are they?’ A touch of horror in Etain’s voice. ‘Are they men or beasts?’

‘No time now to discuss their nature,’ Conoran said. ‘With the Giantkiller near death, we do not have the strength to fight them.’