Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (28 page)

In the morning, with the
first rays of the sun, the next wave of spider-kin would clambered
from the sea, their legs clashing against their mandibles, offering
challenge to any taker. These were the old ones and the young from
the last hatching, their bellies empty and waiting for the seed
Nnursht now carried in his reformed sex organs. They rose from the
sea, come to try their strength against the best of what spider
species had made. Some would retreat back to the sea, vanquished and
some would die and be eaten by the carrion feeders, all for the honor
of mating with the transformed seed givers. This season Nnursht was
to plant the seed, having taken his turn as egg carrier. Even now,
the reformed egg sac in his belly grew heavy, begging for release.

As the sun rose, the surf
churned with scarlet bodies. Nnursht could not find the strength
inside himself to meet this new challenge. Instead he retreated
before the onslaught, letting it drive him inland, into the grass
covered dunes. When the din of battle and mating was no more than a
dull roar, he mounted a dune and turned his senses inland. What, he
wondered, lay beyond the dunes besides lizards with teeth? It was a
fool’s question. Taller dunes blocked his view. If he were sane he
would go back to the beach and take the first receptive partner who
presented herself. He took one step. Inexplicably, it was in the
wrong direction. Then he took another. After that, each step became
easier and easier, until he stood upon the highest dune he could
find. Yet still, there were other places on the horizon that seemed
higher still. He gave in to his thirst and set out to find the
tallest place in the world.

A hundred days he walked and
as Nnursht drew near to the high white lands, the child named
Cheobawn recognized the outline of the Dragons Spine. The place
Nnursht sought had a name. White Dragon. This was not some alien
planet far across the universe. This was home. Her surprise wrested
her out of the misty places in her mind.

“
We have no antidote for
this venom,” Amabel’s voice said grimly. “I need a dozen of the
things that bit her and a month to concoct the serum.”

Cheobawn opened her eyes.
Most of the Coven and their Husbands stood around her bed somewhere
in the bowels of the infirmary. She wondered vaguely where Connor had
gotten to.

“
The arm grows black with
every passing hour,” Hayrald said through clenched teeth. “You do
not have a day, much less a month.”

“
What would you have us
do, Husband?” Mora voice snapped, her eyes glittering and cold.
“Cut off the limb?”

“
Yes, if need be,”
Hayrald said with equal force.

“
No,” Cheobawn said,
“Leave me be. I will get it sorted out.”

As one they turned and
stared. Her lucidity seemed to surprise them. Hayrald bent to touch
her forehead and look into her eyes. Mora brushed him aside.

“
You have been bitten by
one of your alien spiders,” Mora said. “We have tried everything
but the sickness grows.”

“
Stop. Stop trying,”
Cheobawn said as she closed her eyes again. Nnursht called to her,
his journey not yet done. “Stop helping. Give me peace. It is a
puzzle I mean to solve.”

“
There, confirmation of
everything I have been saying,” Amabel said. “Now get out of my
sickroom.”

“
What are you going to
do?” Mora asked.

“
Do I need to say it even
to you, First Mother?” Amabel asked. “I am going to trust in the
magic of the things we have wrought. To do otherwise would be
madness.”

Cheobawn closed her eyes,
oddly content to have Amabel standing guard over her body while she
dreamwalked.

Nnursht climbed the
mountains until there was no place left to go but down. There he
reabsorbed his child bearing organs and settled down to stay. The
stars were ever so much more brilliant here, their songs un-muddied
by the ambient of the fecundity of life down in the low places. After
a time, when he thought he had the stars firmly planted in his mind,
he began to sing their song into the world. Far away, at the edge of
the horizon, his kin paused in their daily tasks to listen. Much to
Nnursht’s surprise, a few heard his song and wove it into the
matrix of their own crystalline brains.

In the world of Spider, one
was an unnatural number. Nnursht’s song was painful in its
loneliness. Thirty years later, it drew a double leg-count of seed
bearers up off the beach on the next hatching night. He heard them
coming, their songs full of hope as they battled the toothed lizards
and sky hunters on their journey to the high places. He was glad not
to be alone. So it became for every egg laying season after that.
More and more seed bearers gathered on the tip of the white spire to
listen to the stars and sing their songs into the memories of Spider.

Nor was it in Spider’s
nature to be idle. Frustrated by the heavy storms of winter, they
began to build a spire to reach above the clouds. Such a simple idea
turned into a feat of intricate engineering. There was nothing to
build with but the stone under their claws. Nnursht spit his venom
onto the ice and watched as it melted it down to bedrock. He spit
again and sucked up the stone that dissolved in the acid bath and
then spit it out again in the shape of a standard building unit that
looked very much like the longest segment of a spider’s leg. Using
this and the thickest extrusion of silk from his spinnerets to tie
them all together, he laid the first course of girders.

The first few towers
toppled. It became a matter of trial and error but finally they found
success with a lattice of web rigging and elongated crystalline
struts.

Above the clouds more stars
revealed themselves. New stars were sung into the map of the
universe. The matrix of the crystalline minds of the young growing in
the egg bearer’s bellies at the bottom of the warm sea grew in
their understanding. Nnursht’s longing for empty beaches and salty
seas wove itself around and through this new song. More spiders came
up the mountain. The tower grew tall, the stabilizing webbing now
more extensive and stronger.

There were limits, even for
Spider. The cold and thin air, this they could accommodate. It was
the lack of pressure on their bodies that nearly stopped them. The
hollow parts of their carapaces, meant to withstand the weight of an
entire sea, shattered and exploded outward in the emptiness above the
spire. Nnursht clung to its tip just on the edge of the cold vacuum
and considered the problem. He was old; his joints creaked when he
moved and his eyes had grown dim, but he could still hear the stars
upon the ambient, the pull of their song as strong as ever. Was this
the end? Was the fragility of their bodies going to stop them here?
They needed legs that could still move under terrible pressures,
hearts that could still pump, and membranes that did not allow the
body fluids to boil away into space. Nnursht locked his claws into
the spire and put all his efforts into imagining a spider suitable
for space. When he thought he had it right, he sang the song of it
into Spider.

How long did he cling there?
Long enough for his kin to encase his body in webbing and add it to
the superstructure of the spire. Long enough for the other spiders to
rework the stabilizing webs in preparation. At long last, a birthing
cycle brought a wave of spiders carrying burdens on their backs. Up
the spire these bundles came, up to the very tip, there to be
carefully unwrapped from their web casings. A new kind of spider
emerged. Gossamer were their impossibly long legs, thin and sharp as
slivers of glass. These spider’s bodies, while useless in gravity,
flourished in the darkness above the earth. They set to work at once,
adding to the spire, building it higher with incredible speed, though
it was not nearly strong enough to support the weight of a land
spider. There was no need for that. They built and built until one
day, a gossamer spider lifted its feet up towards the heavens and
felt the first flutter of the wind between the stars.

They built a web, these new
spiders; a simple sail to catch that breeze and when it was done, the
gossamer spiders cut its moorings, took hold of the lines and leapt
off into space, letting the wind from the stars take them where it
pleased. Nnursht’s mind had long since gone empty, his brain only
able to hum in harmony with the rest of Spider, like an empty shell
left on the beach as the wind blew over its opening, but Cheobawn
thought he would have been pleased with what he had begun. Thirty
cycles brought the next wave of space spider. How many cycles passed?
A leg-count magnified a hundred thousand times, at the very least.
Wave after wave of gossamer spiders took flight on a quest to find
what lay beyond the great chasms of space.

The songs of some who went
out went dark, extinguished by misfortune or time. The songs of
others found nothing but dust and rock. A few, a precious few, found
suns with planets and planets with oceans and oceans with beaches
empty and waiting for eggs. The cycles of egg laying and seed bearing
began again, all synchronized to the turn of a pair of moons and the
cycle of a hot yellow sun none of them would ever see again.

Nnursht went with them. Not
in body, but in memory. They never lost their need to listen to the
stars, nor their wish to sing their songs into the void. Every
birthing cycle found a handful of spiders climbing to the tallest
places to listen to the song of Spider as it spread across the
universe. That song held the memories of all of them, no matter how
far from the shores of the First Egg they traveled.

Far did they spread.
Glorious was the kingdom of Spider. Infinite was their destiny. Then,
with hardly any warning, the Place of the First Egg went dark in the
minds of Spider kind.

Cheobawn suddenly found
herself standing upon the dark beach, human in form once more, her
nightgown fluttering around her body as the uncertain breeze eddied
around her. The sun hung low in the western sky. She held up her hand
to inspect it in the pale light. A single scarlet scale pulsed with
the beat of her heart in the center of her palm. It was all that was
left of her spider bite. She smiled as she buried her toes in the hot
sand and looked around. A solitary spider stood nearby, its eyes
fixed on the sky.

“
Why did you leave? This
was your home,” Cheobawn asked, puzzled by the memory of being
Nnursht.

Look up,
Spider said.

The sky was cloudless and
palely blue from the haze of sea mist that drifted towards the
rapidly cooling land. The first evening star appeared in the southern
sky.

“
It’s a star,”
Cheobawn said, confused, “although it does seem to be out of
place.”

Watch,
said Spider.

The star grew brighter until
it outshone even the sun. Then it extended some sort of wing from its
center and flew. It was a ship. The wings gave it purchase on the
air, allowing it to glide like her kite wing, only much faster. It
approached their position from over the sea, blasting by them, the
sound battering against them, making the Spider’s carapace hum
under the onslaught. It flew just above the tops of the dunes and
then roared away, dragon’s fire shooting out the back. Cheobawn
watched in wonder and awe.

This is the first human
ship,
Spider said sadly.
The first of many. We thought that
you might be comrades at
first. Were you not like us, a
curious species who had traveled to the stars? We sang the song of
our First Egg as greeting. We sang the song of star longing and the
song of leaping off into the void, but your kind did not choose to
listen or perhaps they were like our young, come to challenge the egg
bearers for the first time, not understanding that holding a spot on
the beach it not about conquest but about keeping the stones of the
worlds from grinding your children into dust.

The ship came back, to
settle delicately upon a rocky outcrop in the near distance. Cheobawn
could not help but admire the maneuver. The pilot was deft at the
controls. The spider opened its jaws. A soft sigh moaned out of the
chambers in its head.

W
e were patient. That was
a mistake, of course, and we died for that mistake. Spider kind can
hear each other, across all the distances of space and so it was that
we, who
had found a place to stand amongst the stars, were
forced to listen as the last of our kind died here, in the place of
the First Egg.

Spider remembered and fed
the memories into Cheobawn’s mind. Images rushed through her.
Images of human hunters ranged along the ridge-line, picking off the
spiders one by one with their weapons of light, as they emerged from
the sea, scattering body parts, egg sacs and dying children upon sand
soaked with Spider blood. Air ships flew low along the beach,
blasting the egg bearers, fusing the sand under their feet, searing
the eggs and encasing them in glassy tombs. The seed bearers, too
consumed by their madness to retreat, died, as did the egg bearers
rising up out of the sea. The beams of light silenced their roars of
defiance and stilled the clashing of legs against mandibles, purple
blood running down the sand until the surf frothed thick with their
fluids.