Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (38 page)

“
I promised you a bag of
bloodstones for your service,” Cheobawn pouted.

“
Yes, but I am beginning
to think I should have asked for more. Tell me the truth. What is the
cargo you wish me to carry so secretly downriver?”

“
Tell me,” she asked,
curling her bare legs under her. ‘’If I offered you retribution
for all the offenses ever done to you by Colonel Bohea and all of
Spacer kind, would you be brave enough to take it?”

Sam swore long and hard.
Cheobawn waited.

“
Is it a weapon? Do the
Highlanders now wage war against us? Who else among my people have
you seduced to your side?”

“
There is only you, sweet
Sam,” she said. “Without you, we are all doomed. Can you not find
it in your power to help me?”

“
I am here, am I not?”
he snorted in disgust. “Against my own better judgment.”

“
You will be given two
wooden casks. Take them to Orson’s Sea. Do not open them until you
are well away from the shores and far from prying eyes. Then, when it
can be unobserved by anyone, break the casks open and dump the
children of my heart into the water.”

“
Children?” Sam said,
shaking his head in confusion. “I am drowning Highland children?”

“
They are wee things.
Twenty-three in all. Spider children. They just want to come home,
Sam. It is such a small favor to ask.”

“
Spiders. Spiders?” he
said. Something bloomed behind his eyes as if the word triggered an
unpleasant memory. “Spider. Oh, by all the gods, this is not what I
think it is. Is it? We are at war, Ch’che! What are you thinking? I
lost friends in the battle over Halide Five. You have no idea what I
went through. What I did. What I was forced to do to stay alive. The
spiders came out of the dark like ghosts in a horrible nightmare and
launched a cloud of spines that melted the ship wherever they
touched. They very nearly took us all out. No. No. Absolutely not.”

“
That is what the Bohea
said,” Cheobawn said as she pasted a sad look on her face and bent
her head to study the buttons on her pajama top. “He was quite
furious.”

“
Was he?” Sam said,
eying her as if she had suddenly sprouted fangs.

Cheobawn looked up at him
from under her eyelashes, a smile playing on her lips.

“
Revenge. Think on that
for a moment. It would not be immediate. No one would notice for
years and years until one day, in the darkest part of the night,
spiders would rise from the ocean to take back the beaches. By that
time it will be too late. Bohea would have to acknowledge that the
game was lost, on this planet at least. Spider is not so different
from us that it would not be grateful for those who give it aid. It
would reward those who align themselves with the proper side. What
would you give to take your planet back from Spacer control? Do you
want to be free? I can give you that. I can give you revenge for all
the wrongs done to you and yours.”

“
You are a cancer inside
my soul,” Sam said. He grimaced as he threw back his head to stare
up at the stars.

“
Yes, I am sorry for that.
I do not know how to make it better,” she whispered. “We are
doomed to be intertwined forever, you and I.”

“
A bag of bloodstones,”
Sam said, looking back into her face. “Medium to low quality so
that their sale will cause no more than a ripple when I sell them on
the black-market. Forty or more. I have expenses. My gods cursed
holds are empty.”

Cheobawn nodded solemnly.
“And revenge served long and cold,” she said, her voice soft and
low like the wind in the rigging.

“
I will be at Meetpoint by
midday.” There was a hard gleam in his eyes where there had been
dull acceptance before.

“
The young Fathers will
come down the cliffs at twilight, no later,” Cheobawn said.
“Remember; do not open the casks until you are well out to sea. The
babies are fragile but deadly poisonous. Do not dare to touch them.”

“
I know,” Sam said. “I
was there, in the corridors of the frigate when they peeled back the
hull and filled the ship with hard vacuum. They tried to take our
ship.”

Cheobawn looked at him in
dismay. Deep was the hurt behind those words. “It was not Spider
who put you in harm’s way. Remember that.”

“
My grandfather was a boy
when the first starships arrived,” Sam said softly. “We had not
believed in them, even though the old teaching tales insisted they
existed. But there they were, hanging in the night sky, as big and as
bright as Little Moon. They were greeted like saviors, heroes come to
return us to the glory of the old Accord but that turned to fear when
they demanded tribute. The gunships settled upon the marshlands,
turning the land to glass. Who could fight such power? My great
grandfather was part of the delegation that went out to meet the
Spacers. Take everything we own, but do not take our children, he
begged. But we had nothing they wanted. So they took the best of us,
the young and the strong and the brave and made us into killers.”
Sam turned the glare of his mad eyes in her direction. “Revenge,”
he whispered. “I will hold you to your promise.”

“
Spider has promised and
Spider cannot lie,” she said. She tried to touch his cheek but her
fingers passed through his flesh. Sam flinched away, wresting himself
out of the grip of the stone matrix.

Cheobawn lifted her hands
away from the stone and rubbed them against her pajamas. Oud, taking
this as a signal to end the connection, whispered goodbye, the sound
of it sliding through her mind like snowflakes across the surface of
the dome.

That was not the only sound
inside her mind. Legs rubbing against mandibles hummed for a moment
in the air around her. It was the only warning she had before the
common room dissolved and she stood upon the sands of Orson’s Sea.
Spider stood before her, the ancient empty plain thousands of years
in the past filling the horizon behind him. The city of Dunauken
would grow here with time.

“
I do not appreciate eaves
dropping,” Cheobawn said, glaring at the giant arthropod. “My
conversations with others are meant to be private.”

Spider laughed a spidery
laugh, its short forelegs sliding back and forth like a bow over
fiddle strings as the tips of its many claws danced a staccato in the
hot sand under their feet.
You are Spider’s child. There are no
veils between us.

“
I am no such thing. I am
a child of the domes, not a child of the warm sea. There are no gills
on this neck.”

Ask your Truemother. She
knows. This is why she made you. You will come to me, to the hot
beaches and the salty sea, and you will dance the egg bearer’s
dance under the darkening moons with all the rest of my children who
returned home.

“
I
will not,”
Cheobawn said firmly, but unaccountable, a
rising terror made her heart skip a beat. Spider seemed so sure of
the future and she could only imagine it. What if Spider was right?

You will. It has been
ordained. It is the thing that we sang into your forebearer's ears as
we danced around the edges of your dome not long before you killed
the last of us. Your Makers knew this though it has been buried and
forgotten inside their minds these thousand years or more. Make me a
weapon, we sang. Take the flesh of your bodies and make me a weapon
that we might point it at those who killed us. You are that weapon.
You are that Making
.
It is your doom to come down from the
high places and take back the world from those who have stolen it
from us. It is as you said to the Lowlander boy. Revenge is a meal
long in the making and served with great joy to those who have
forgotten their crimes. Spider never forgets. Spider cannot forget.

Her breath caught in the
back of her throat as the memory of Sigrid’s Queen’s Gambit rose
unbidden from the shadows in the back of her mind. That moment of
triumph as the War Master’s aides tied Sigrid’s ribbons around
the opposing Queen’s neck was an image seared into her brain. Now
it haunted her waking mind.

Yes,
whispered
Spider, its body shivering in excitement.
You know.
Can you
still doubt my words? This was your intended purpose from the moment
you were born. Ask your Mothers.

“
Mora
will never send me away. She needs me,”
Cheobawn said
stubbornly but her protest sounded hollow even to her own ears. Who
was she trying to convince, Spider or herself? Spider had sowed seeds
of doubt in her heart and it was going to take all her power to sweep
its toxic thoughts from her mind.

Cheobawn closed her eyes and
began building geometry proofs in her head. Spider laughed its
spidery laugh as it faded from her mind. She opened one eye and
looked around. She was back in the common room, sitting on the map
table, shivering, though the air was not cold. She stared at her
distorted and upside down reflection in the golden sphere nestled in
the hollow between her legs.

“
I will not do what you
want,” she whispered. “I may be a piece in a giant and
complicated game of War; I will not argue that, but I can pick myself
up and walk off the board anytime I want. If I stay or if I go, it
will be my choice.” Having the sphere so close was suddenly more
than she could bear. Cheobawn swatted it away. It sailed through the
air to land on a nearby armchair piled high with clothes. “Not all
paths lead to certain doom and being forewarned means I can step over
the leg traps and pit falls,” she said. Saying it out loud made her
feel better. Who was Spider to think it knew more than she about her
own life, after all? “I will not hate. I will not kill for you. My
fate is my own to write as I see fit,” she hissed at the offending
ball, her body trembling uncontrollably, the sound of her chattering
teeth loud in her head.

Alain came out of his
sleeping chamber and peered at her in the dim light as he scrubbed
his fingers through his hair. “Who are you talking to? It’s the
middle of the night,” he whispered.

Cheobawn wrapped her arms
around her body, trying to control the tremors in her muscles as
Alain padded across the floor towards her. Spying the com-ball, he
picked it up and put it in its cradle. “Candles that burn too
bright exhaust themselves long before their time,” he said.

“
I do not think I like
Spider,” Cheobawn said around the quaking of her jaw.
Unaccountable, she began to cry.

“
What a chowder head you
are sometimes,” Alain said, gathering her up and carrying her back
toward his own bed chamber. “What was Connor thinking, letting you
work yourself down to bone? We are well and truly done with the whole
spider fiasco. They are the Lowlander‘ s problem now. Forget them.”
He set her down on his bed and crawled in beside her, pulling her
close against him under the covers. Warmed by the heat of his body,
the shuddering faded as her body relaxed against his. “Time to rest
and play. We could go mushroom hunting in the bogs tomorrow if you
want. Tam could use a day outside in the fresh air and sunshine, let
me tell you. It was not easy for him, being cooped up and walled away
from the world. Holy introspection is not his cup of tea,” Alain
said sleepily, his cheek resting against her golden curls. Cheobawn’s
eyelids grew heavy, Alain’s voice shielding her from the worst of
the ambient. “We need to go out in the real world where no one
cares who you are and you don’t have to think about anything but
what lies around the next bend in the trail. Free to run and shout
and laugh out loud and be …” Alain’s voice trailed off into
sleep. Cheobawn followed him, slipping sideways into sleep. The dream
was waiting for her there.

It was a dream full of
sunlight. She sat in a meadow making flutterflies out of flower
petals and spider webs, her Pack ranged around her in peaceful
repose. Connor chewed on a long stalk of grass as he stared up at the
cloudless sky while Megan and Tam plotted and planned, laying on
their bellies to draw diagrams in the dust. Alain said something that
she did not quite catch but he was looking expectantly down at her
constructs.

Cheobawn breathed upon the
creation in her hand and it came to life and flew up into the sky to
dance in the still air over their heads. Lying back in the grass and
watching its fantastical movements, Cheobawn let her laughter mingle
with that of her friends.

If there were shadows they
were far away and far too polite to jump out at her while she rested.

A
message notice popped into the middle of Hayrald’s screen,
accompanied by an insistent beep. The border of the message icon bled
red into the document behind it.