Tallah

A rumble like distant thunder shook Grefe. Echoes of destruction tore through the once-silent city. Erisa seemed to listen to this, gaze turned away, body as still as stone. The pit quivered behind her, moaning in agony.

“She is quite terrible,” said the girl. She let out an inhuman laugh. “A whole clutch, just like that. Little wonder he’s brought something like her.”

Vergil nudged Sil in the small of her back and pointed to the windows. Black silhouettes crawled outside; gnarled shapes contoured against the ruby light of the spire. More arrived by the heartbeat, crowding the windows with their bulk.

Two climbed inside, nearly too large to fit the opening. Sil’s heart stuck in her throat, choking down the screams that would otherwise erupt. The new arrivals crawled towards the girl in pumping, jerking motions, bone-white, red-eyed, moving with a sort of determination not seen in any of the others. They skittered into the pit, trampling the dead and dying without care, flanking Erisa like obscene guardians.

Maybe three steps away…

They could pounce before she even turned to flee. Not that her legs would obey anymore, every fiber awash in terror of these things that could stroll through her barriers.

“What do I do?” Vergil’s voice was tight with worry. He held out his sword, swivelling between the monsters.

Each time the blade fixed on Erisa, the two would become animate, raising pedipalps, their message quite clear.

“Put the sword down,” Sil squeaked out, barely able to breathe. “If they attack, we’ll die. Simple as. Don’t encourage them.”

“But—”

“Put it down.”

Him sheathing the sliver of pointless metal seemed to relax the flanking creatures. Why were they here? She suspected this Erisa wasn’t true if the grave was any indication. What harm could she and Vergil do to this simulacrum to warrant such guardians?

One of the spiders reared and hissed at Vergil, four legs raised with fangs outstretched as if to strike. Sil screamed and cringed back.

“Be calm, sister,” Erisa said. “My child will not harm you. It was simply surprised.”

Vergil clutched his head, crumpling to his knees. He gave a low moan as he yanked the helmet off, throwing it away in a clatter. His hands rose to his ears, screaming in agony. Erisa gazed at him in impassivity, as if observing a pinned insect.

“Stop it!” Sil stepped forward, raising her hand to strike the girl, nought but stupid instinct and blind panic to guide her.

The left spider raised a leg and gently tapped its paw into her upraised palm with near-surgical precision. Pain flared through her hand as a claw erupted through the strange flesh, its tip impaling the centre of her palm. She retreated, kneeling at Vergil’s side. Whatever troubled him had ceased and he gasped in huge breaths, shivering with relief.

“Like… when…” He swallowed down a lump and tried lifting his head. “Like with the goblet. It hurt like that. I’m fine.”

“What an ugly thing’s been done to him,” Erisa said. “And to you. My child sought to understand him but was thwarted. You are a simpler puzzle, sister Dreea.”

Sil’s heart stopped. Her head emptied out like a sieve trying to hold water. Pain burst behind her eyes, familiar and loathed, something straining in her to come to the fore. It grew into a searing burn, spinning her senseless until something shook her. Someone.

“Sil, answer please.” Vergil rested his hands on her shoulders.

Pain flared in her arm to contest that in her head. She wrenched away from his hands.

“Don’t touch me!”

She screamed at him. Why did she do that? Everything felt alien just then. She most of all.

“What did you do to us?” Vergil asked the girl, interposing himself between Erisa and Sil. “What was that… screeching?”

“I did nothing,” Erisa replied, still immobile between her two sentinels. “To her even less than to you.”

The spider that had threatened Vergil lowered itself onto its belly, regarding them evenly, beady red eyes filled with absolutely nothing. Sil’s revulsion kicked again. Then shame. Guilt for letting Vergil stand tall while she cowered. Pride came last as she lurched to her feet, stumbling towards the girl, heedless of the way the spiders tracked her. She needed to be Silestra then, reliable, clear-headed, penitent. Shock drained away as Vergil regarded her with worry, opening his mouth to ask pointless questions.

“You… mind touched us.”

It was forbidden.

It was impossible.

It was supposed to be impossible!

Erisa had her name and every dirty secret buried with it. Sil’s cheeks flashed hot at the notion of this thing knowing all that she’d spent so long forgetting.

Hypocrite, came the chiding voice in the back of her mind. As if she hadn’t done the same to Vergil.

Was that surprise on that inhuman face? A ghastly smile split bloodless lips, revealing rows of perfect teeth embedded in bright pink gums.

“No god is watching, sister Dreea. Certainly not a false goddess that lies. Her edicts hold no power over me.” She shrugged, bones pushing up against the stretched skin of her shoulder in some parody of human anatomy. “But I now understand why you are here. I’ve seen it in the folds of your memory. You’ve been lied to.” She inclined her head to Vergil as he settled next to Sil but kept an arm’s length away. “He is goddess-touched. Protected. I do not understand him yet. You are easier.”

Sil choked on the memory of that freed name while trying to crunch it beneath the heel of her shamed willpower. Vergil was keeping his head while she lost hers at every turn. That couldn’t stand. She forced herself back into some semblance of coherence.

Another rumble in the distance and the pit whimpered as if in sympathetic pain. Their stalk of flesh had crumbled while Sil had her crisis and the corpses lay scattered about as before. The one Erisa had sprouted out of languished atop a broken statue, an overripe fruit that had burst to release its red seeds.

“You are Erisa, the Egia from the School of Healing. We came to find you. That is what I know as our goal.” She thought of something just then and voiced the question, “Are you really Erisa? Or just another thing pretending?”

A stomach-churning smile. “I am she whom you seek. And you came here to kill me and bury sins long forgotten. You are not here for any noble cause.”

“I figured. Why are you alive then? What’s happened here?”

Erisa looked like a girl but nothing of her demeanour spoke of youth. Her smiles and her eyes spoke of old wisdom—and cruelty—gained across two centuries lost in this absurd city.

“I was brought here to open the way. That much is true. I did my part well, marching an army here. Do you believe that he was a scholar, sister? I know you don’t.”

Ruby light faded into what felt like sunlight. A glance to the window showed more black bodies crowding one another, slowly covering the gleam of the spire until only the interior crystal veins remained as illumination.

Which dimmed with every heartbeat.

“We came to plunder. That is the truth of it. Not an expedition for knowledge but for greed and gain. Any knowledge this place might have held was to be pillaged and carted back.” She smiled grimly. “Hardly a scholar’s intentions.”

“Tallah accused him of as much,” Sil confirmed.

“Your friend? I see her in memory. She was righter than you imagine. Because we weren’t attacked when we came. We struck first. Whoever has built this prison is long dead. Here the Kin waited, greeting us when we emerged from the labyrinth. Commander Angledeer ordered the first spiders burned. And the next. He foolishly roused Mother with his actions.”

She moved aside, running protective hand down the smooth back of one of her spiders. “These children are called Leuki. They have the same sight I do. They watched. Learned. Planned. And then they began killing us, as we deserved.”

Tallah had been right to call him grave robber. And she’d dismissed her friend’s attitude as simple dislike for the old man’s obsessive devotion to empress Catharina.

Bile rose in the back of her throat. She gritted her teeth lest she bit her tongue at having come all this way, survive the horrid maze, trudge through her worst nightmare, only to discover it was all in service to another lie.

“Our story is boring, I know.” Erisa grinned, as if distracted for a moment. “We came, we saw wonders, we burned them down. How wonderfully human.”

Sil’s attention hung on the last word. Erisa spoke it like an accusation, like it tasted bad on her tongue. But her eyes…

She cringed back from that hungry gaze coming back to rest on her.

“Mother was roused then. Her curiosity had given way to anger. The children no longer approached in peace and men began dying. Taken at their weakest. Ambushed. With each one taken, Mother understood a little more and killed us a little better.

“I begged the commander to stop and listen. I begged him. He brought doom on us and would’ve seen it if he’d stopped and listened for the voices I could hear. You cannot hunt a spider in its own lair.”

Erisa approached, walking with hands clasped demurely against her naked stomach. Her nearness made Sil’s skin crawl, but she was determined not to allow herself be cowed again. Vergil moved to stand just behind her shoulder.

“It took decimation before he started questioning. It took devastation before he felt fear. It took trying to use a shard before he grew desperate.” She let out the most horrifying laugh Sil had ever heard. “He has stopped you from trying to run. He did, yes. The men that he tasked with trying the shards were turned inside out. The lattice the ancients used to protect themselves from our lying goddess sent that transmission straight back. It was gruesome. Ten people fused together into a lump of flesh that screamed.”

And yet, somehow, there was the girl. The old man had managed to escape and get back to the empire.

“How?” Curiosity overpowered her fear. “How did he get out? He told us he’d traded you for escape.”

Erisa circled her, bare feet slapping on the stone. Sil dreaded letting the girl move out of view, but the white spiders’ presence kept her frozen. Vergil pressed his back to hers as the girl spoke.

“He got out because I allowed it to happen. Because Mother did.”

“I don’t understand.”

Were the spiders creeping closer? Erisa kept her even pace, voice coolly detached from her words. Vergil shivered as the girl moved to his side.

“He’d failed the mission. Twenty-two days of being besieged dwindled our supplies to near nothing. Discipline, little as it was, broke down. I became something for men to fight over.” She laughed again, entering Sil’s view. “For some, their only hope of escape. For others, just an escape. For Commander Angledeer, the only thing between him and being fed to Mother’s brood.”

“Who is Mother?” Vergil asked before Sil could.

“I am Mother. I wasn’t then. I was still just Erisa, learning of how cruel men get when they’re desperate. And how they vent their desperation on the weak and the defenceless.”

Sil could see it all playing out. No way forward. No way out. Men terrified out of their wits and good sense. Tired. Desperate. They’d turn on one another, vent their frustration in any way they could. She’d seen it before and the memory got niggled by Erisa’s recollections.

Did the girl know this? Did she understand? She knew about Dreea, a dead woman buried under a collapsed mountain.

Her hackles rose.

“You’re lying,” she accused. The cruelty of the pit, the whimpering, moaning, gnashing of teeth, all of it painted this creature a monster. Bringing up that blasted name! “Why would I believe a word of this?”

“The spiders said—”

Sil elbowed Vergil in the kidney. It wasn’t his question to answer.

Erisa only shrugged, eyes still locked on Sil.

“Believe what you will. I care not.”

Silence stretched, broken only by Erisa’s soft footsteps. A glance from her quieted the pit’s whimpers down to whispers and sighs.

Ultimately, Ludwig had lied of his sins. Of that, at least, Sil was certain.

“I believed him.” Vergil moved by her side when Erisa turned back and joined her spiders. He had his helmet held by a horn in one hand, and his other on the hilt of his sword, knuckles tight against the leather strap. “I believed him, Sil. Every word.”

“So did I,” she admitted quietly.

The girl’s attention was off her for now. Eyes followed something in the air, a smile tugging on the corners of her pale lips. A soft-pink tongue lashed out as if tasting Grefe’s very scent. Erisa breathed in deep, and her smile grew into a wolfish grin.

“So, she’s coming at last.” Her head swivelled back to Sil. “Is she coming to answer your prayers, I wonder?” One spider crept forward on claws clinking against the stone floor. “She will not arrive on time to save you, sister. I need you much more than she deserves you.”

The Leuki pounced, four claws outstretched to skewer Vergil on the spot before he could even draw the sword.

A black shape barrelled into it from above. More followed. Erisa watched impassively as her child was cut down, drowned in a tide of black coming from the galleries above.

Sil was grabbed by the hand and yanked painfully sideways before the stupor had a chance to burn out. She meant to resist but Vergil’s voice cut through the mounting panic. “Run.” He pulled her along the edge of the pit, away from the fighting.

A glance to the windows showed other spiders crawling in to attack the ones rushing Erisa and the second Leuki. That one fled. The girl was torn to pieces. Before disappearing down the side passage, Sil saw that inhuman head tracking them even as it was crushed beneath the embrace of a huge, gnarled spider.

“What just happened?” Vergil urged her into a dead run, huffing out every word.

The melee was a confusion of dark shapes fighting blindly, one spider indistinguishable from another. Several chased the Leuki up the wall but weren’t as quick and agile as it.

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Sil replied, still stunned by Erisa’s sudden turn.

A black spider barred their way into the tunnel forward, rushing them. Ancient ruins of furnishing shattered beneath its charge. Vergil let go of her hand, drew his sword, and attacked. Where was he getting the strength from? Sil looked around in a panic for anything that would serve as a makeshift weapon. Nothing but detritus.

Sword clanged against claws, Vergil grunting with the effort. He deflected the blow but was tackled instead to the floor, the creature much larger than he.

She rushed to kick the spider, but two other black shapes barrelled past like wraiths and ripped away the one atop Vergil. Claws dug into carapace as they wrenched it off the boy and pinned it down. They stabbed at it until red blood sprayed from its shattered carapace. It screamed in Erisa’s voice, a cry of frustration and not pain.

They squeezed past the scene into the dark passage, and broke into a headlong, dangerous sprint through the narrow space. It gradually narrowed until it ground their progress down to an urgent crawl in the dark. Here there was no light to guide the way at all, just the faint whisper of a draft.

“Are you there?” Vergil called back, his voice ahead of her by some paces.

“I’m here. Don’t stop.” She walked straight into his back, recoiled in momentary panic, then steadied herself. “I just said—”

“There are two paths,” he answered, a disembodied voice in the pitch. “Which way?”

“Pick one. Just move.”

Her imagination provided claws on her back, cutting into her to drag her back to the horrors of the pit and the dead-eyed girl. But no pain came, not real. Her back itched with a thousand imaginary crawlers on her skin, always expecting the strike from the dark and it never arriving. The soft swish of cloth and the scrape of armour on stone amplified to ear-splitting noise in the confined space.

Her scream when Vergil reached back and took her hand echoed down every tunnel in a myriad reflection. She bit her tongue, feeling the red-hot rush of blood to her cheeks.

Vergil said nothing. He led her down a passage to their right. It narrowed and lowered into a crawlspace. Another tight fit, another bout of misery with her mangled arm, another emergence into nowhere good.