Robert Vardeman - Pillar of Night

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.