Tallah

“I don’t follow. What are the Makers?”

A smaller spider jumped off its web and rushed among the shelves. It returned carrying a tome trailing several other spiders still spinning the complicated lattice that connected the pages to the rest. It opened it up to Sil’s inspection and the Oldest placed a small black claw on the page.

Two humans were represented clear enough, with annotations in the same alien language as Tallah’s tome had.

“Vergil?”

“Illum conductivity diminishes as genetic degradation continues,” he read off the page. “Establishing and maintaining a baseline is critical for long-term survival. With plummeting population numbers, it is ne-necessary to consider a change of para… uh… paradigm?” He rubbed at his eyes. “Text keeps glitching. Hurts my eyes to try and make it out. Sorry.”

Power radiated off the book and especially off the diagram of a woman in the centre of the page, thick enough that even Sil could sense it.

“I don’t understand,” she said to the Oldest. “Humans are your makers?” What fresh madness was this?

“You cannot see it?” it asked, tapping a claw on the diagram. “Mother could see it clear, the power of the Makers in her. It is in you too, but less so.”

She yelped and sidled sideways when a white spider walked past her feet, come from who knew where, tall enough to reach her hips. As silent as a ghost, it settled on the old one’s flank and regarded them.

“This one can see it clear,” the Oldest explained. “The Makers are in you, but you are not of them.” It tapped the page again. “Not like this.”

“More riddles.”

Were they referring to Erisa being an Egia? The more she studied the diagram and the lines drawn around it, the more she was reminded of how Tallah described an Egia’s disturbance of the flow of illum. Were the builders of Grefe some early Egia? Did not explain why they were obsessed with humans of all creatures.

“She was beautiful, and Mother believed her of the Makers. She came from the Guardian’s domain, and she carried the light of the Makers. We craved her touch. We craved her understanding of Us.”

“That’s why you tried reaching her?” Sil asked, still trying to find some way to wrap her wits around what it was showing.

“Yes. Yes! Her guardians did not understand us. They kept her away when she called out to Mother. They killed us with cold claws and hot light. Mother only had so much patience before she sent the Leuki to do the same onto them.”

The white spider shifted its stance, red eyes meeting’s Sil’s. Rumi Belli’s particular gaze came to mind and sent a shiver down her back.

“So, you killed them?”

“We protected ourselves. And we protected her when the guardians turned their displeasure to her. All we did was for her acceptance. It was for her to understand us.”

“Are there more books like this one? Talking about humans?” Some shape was emerging from the spider’s words. She raised a finger to shush Vergil when he drew breath to say something. There was an answer to be teased here, if only she figured the right questions.

An army of small spiders extracted tomes off shelves and opened them to various illustrations of humanity. In some of them she easily recognised medical diagrams and certain chemical formulae that were familiar from the School of Healing. In others, she understood the unmistakable graphs for illum channelling and conversion, always centred around humans.

Why?

But a species coming into sense here, with no guidance but for whatever knowledge they could glimpse off centuries-dead lore… what would they make of the world they’d been born into? How would they react to someone like Erisa?

The spiders had thought her a kind of goddess.

“She was finally freed of her guardians and our trial was done. She was home. She was with us. And we couldn’t understand her. Nor she us.”

Ah, and there it was. How would Erisa understand a creature as alien as this one speaking? She was reminded of what the smaller one had said. Speech is poisoned gift of the false mother.

“We tried to share ourselves with her in the only way we knew how, like children. It was our mistake.”

The Oldest was getting to the real crux of this meeting. Sil found she had little patience left for more riddles, especially on the cusp of getting it, where understanding teased her just a hair’s breadth out of reach.

“Speak clearly, spider. This place is riddles atop riddles, each stranger than the other. Give me something clear to understand.”

It hesitated and looked to the white one, feet tapping on the floor. It got a soft tap back and went on, “We are born with a mind of all that were before. All are We. Upon… death we return to Mother, and she is more for it. This is how we grow and how we became. She did not understand us. She could not. We tried to make her understand.”

Cold dread gripped her heart as things slotted into place. Every spider in the room shrank back and looked away, a human expression of discomfort and shame. No, they couldn’t have…

“Mother understands all. All is of Mother. So, we made her into Mother, for she was a Maker. It was all we knew to do.”

Two possibilities flashed white-hot in Sil’s mind, both equally terrifying.

Many wasps would lay eggs inside living hosts and the hatching larvae would eat their way out of the victim. She’d treated such infections, and the results were always messy and grotesque. For one unfortunate she’d had to amputate a leg that had gone gangrenous, the infestation too far progressed for any other healing to help.

Vitalis mages, of whose work she’d seen enough of to last her several lifetimes in Anna’s Sanctum, melded together creatures to forward their sick experiments. She’d seen at least one spider-analogue among Anna’s throng and the memory of that grotesque insult to life sometimes haunted her nightmares.

As if to outdo her imagination, the Oldest went one, heedless of her mounting horror. “Mother lay a clutch of us within her. We knew little of Makers’ birth.” It gestured with a hind leg to the books. “We knew enough.”

Sil pressed her hands to her face and tried to force herself not to imagine what the monster described.

“Stop talking,” she whispered.

It ignored her.

“The first who hatched nearly killed her. Mother’s water saved her. We had gained insight. Our Knowing grew much. The hatchlings gained an inkling of the Maker’s Knowing.”

“Stop talking!”

“Again, and again, and again. More were made. We understood more and nothing at all. Each generation matured, thrived, returned to Mother. Mother gained insight… and a fragment of the girl.”

Sil wanted to stamp down on the creature. She wanted to reach for Vergil’s sword and hack at it until she purged the image out of her by sheer violence. How could they not understand the kind of horror they’d inflict?! How could it speak of it without bursting into flames by divine indignity at what they’d wrought?

The white spider—the Leuki, as a part of her was reminded of the name just to shift focus—raised a threatening leg in her direction, its palps moving in warning.

“Each one born of her carried a part of her. Mother was rejoiced for now a part of the Maker was within her. We were made complete.”

“Are you proud of what you did?” Vergil surprised her by asking. His voice didn’t tremble. “Was what you gained worth what you did?”

“We did not understand pain then.” It shifted its gaze to the boy and Sil was glad of not looking down into those black, soulless pits. “There was nothing in us to speak of pain. Of disgust. Of shame. Of fear. These were the first things we’d gained from her. And we did not understand these things. Understanding came too late. She was in Mother, and she grew. She was in every one of us made anew, growing with each new generation Mother made through her. And then we were taught of fury. And we were forced to understand.”

It came together in the end. This was Tallah’s domain. She and her ghosts would understand this better than Sil could, but she grasped the edges of it even as they cut.

“Soul transference.” Even the words made her skin crawl with their meaning. “You tortured her. And you broke her. Little by little, you took her until she began fighting back.” What horrid things had been born here! Tallah ought to burn the whole place down to the very bedrock out of which it had been sculpted. “And you dare claim our help?” She laughed at the very notion and her next words came out as revolted hissing. “What you deserve is fire.”

The Oldest bristled and reared up at her words. It was less than impressive now that she understood what kind of monster it was. She held her ground as the monster lifted itself on its hind legs and threatened its violence on her. Vergil sword whispered out, but she refused to cower behind him.

“We were children. Our actions were of children that grasped for connection. For understanding. Why condemn us when we knew no better?”

“To know no better is not absolution for the crime.”

“And we were punished for it! On and on, we were punished for our mistake. Mother is no more. Each one born anew is not of us anymore, not free of will or body. We have lost the voices of our kin. We have gained understanding of what we did. Each day we hear her voice and her accusation, reminded of our shame, told we should not be.” It backed down when she did not, crawled back into itself, a tight, pitiful ball of shame on the ground. “We are being taught of failure and the lesson is killing us. Help us. Please.”

A pause stretched between them, heavy with accusations and defences. Every spider in the room had ceased what it was doing and were now hanging on webs, watching them. Pinpricks of light shone in black eyes in the dimly lit room, a constellation of fright staring… no, waiting for her decision.

“Why do you fear us?” the Oldest asked, voice made small. “What harm would we have done you if you would’ve never come here?”

“I’m not equipped for this,” Vergil replied, not speaking to the spider but to her. “I want to be out of here, Sil. I don’t want to want to know more.”

“Go out. Wait for me and watch for Tallah,” she heard herself say. Her gaze was glued to the gnarled thing ahead of her.

A fresh headache started up again in the centre of her forehead and for a time she considered if she had anything else to say to these… these what?

She looked over them and, maybe for the first time, at them without the veneer of fright. Now that she understood some of what they were, she found that she couldn’t be afraid of them. Disgusted. Disquieted. Horrified. All those and more. But not afraid.

“I don’t fear you,” she answered the Oldest without looking at it. “Not now.”

“Then why do you want us to cease to be? Have we no right to be?”

She had to move. Needed to get her blood moving again, away from pooling in her feet. Shaking her hands in frustration, she ended up pacing the whole breadth of the room, heedless of the many creatures skittering out of her way. Whatever sort of fear gnawed at her was barely an irritant in the face of everything else.

Erisa would have been driven insane. That much was expected. A torture cycle going for as long as described was likely to drive anyone out of their right mind. Coupled with the slow extraction of the self, who knew what kind of mindscape the poor lass even inhabited now. She dreaded the idea of touching a mind like that.

Tallah would understand it, though. She and the girl were kindred now—how she hated the very word for what she’d learned here. But Tallah wasn’t here to help with this.

A headache exploded behind her eyes as she probed the concept further. Right, not something to ponder on.

What to do about these wretches?

“Why do you want help? How could we possible help you?”

“Take her back. Take the girl back!” An avalanche of voices staggered her as they all called for the same thing. “Free Mother of her. Take her back.”

She laughed, “Just like that? Want a moon while I’m at it?”

“We need no moon. We need Mother. We need a new Mother be born.”

“And I assume you’d like me to make you one of those too.”

This was absurd. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, willing the pestering pain away. It refused to abate while she kept poking at the intricacies of what had happened to Erisa.

“Mother sleeps here,” the Oldest tapped the floor. “In the centre. She sleeps and she waits. But she cannot be allowed to hatch while the infection can take her.” There was hope now in the voice as it spilled the words, barely forming coherent sentences. Images forced their way in, of an egg dressed in silk and surrounded by creatures that made the hunter seem quaint by comparison.

“I think I understand.”

Her pacing took her in the direction of the library. The smaller creatures skittered out of her way, reeled in their webs, cleared a path for her to walk among the books. They watched and dogged her steps, careful of not letting her touch anything vital.

Books stretched up into a seemingly infinite height. Illum hung in the air, motes of it drifting hazily between the shelves to obstruct the true size of the place. She expected it was much larger than the exterior suggested. If she closed her eyes, she could feel the embrace of the mind in there. It wasn’t simple power but more…

She closed her eyes and tried to draw in the illum. As before, it did not come to her beckoning… but something else did. A presence brushed against her mind, timid and frightened, recoiling back when she, in turn, reached for it. She got the sense of great hunger, of longing and a desperate need to understand and be understood.

If she invited Tallah’s fire in there, what would she really be killing?

What she needed was the Ikosmenia. But maybe it wouldn’t be wise to gaze upon whatever it was that had grown there.

“How does your Mother take you back at the end of your lifespan?” she asked without opening her eyes.

“Mother takes the essence and weaves it into herself.”

“Soul binding?”

They had souls? Maybe she would’ve baulked at the idea before, but that was what she was feeling in truth. This is what she was reminded of when caressing this power that circled her. A will. A conscience. Young. Confused.

Curious.

In Solstice, Tallah had built her Sanctum and the instruments to spin the power of a soul gem into thread. It was Sil that wielded the needle to graft the new souls onto the sorceress’s. The touch of the thread was like nothing she could describe, handling the pure essence of a self. That feeling was all around in the library.

A breath in. Hold. Release. Repeat.

“I am… I am of the many, and I am of the few. I am light, and I am warmth. I am—”

“—I am shield, and I am sword.” Their chorus joined her in the mantra. “I stand to brace the other, unbent, unbowed, unbroken.”

“Did you steal that out of her too?” She hadn’t meant the malice. Not now that her mind was made up.

“Yes,” the Oldest admitted. “She spoke this often.”

Of course she had. And Sil was going to betray that little girl in a wholly different way now. She prayed it was the right thing to do.

Her feet brought her out of the maze of shelves and silk, to sit her down opposite the Oldest, within reach of its claws.

“Part of me wants you to burn,” she said, looking into its black eyes. The small spider that had brought them was perched atop the back segment of the Oldest’s body, watching her. “Part of me thinks you deserve it. But you knew no better, and Erisa did what she could to protect herself. More victimising won’t lead us to the light of the Goddess. In Her name and because I carry Her teachings, I will help as I can.”

Something inside her chest warmed up at the words. She had to believe the Goddess watched and approved of this.

“From the top, spider. Let me understand you.”

“So… we can be allowed to be?” it asked, hope radiating off each word.

Like children, indeed. Desperate for approval. Desperate for forgiveness.

“I don’t know. I don’t think anything like you exists anywhere else. Many, my friend included, would burn you without a second thought. I am not equipped to pass judgement on an entire species for their mistakes. I am only equipped to heal. And that’s what I’ll try to do.”