Tsarnassan Silk, Part 1

Sorry this one comes so late in the month, folks. I've been pretty overwhelmed in March- I spent the first part of March finishing The Wrack and getting it off to my editor, then I took a much needed vacation in Fiji (I was already in New Zealand while finishing The Wrack, so Fiji was just a short hop away), and then barely slipped into Vietnam ahead of it shutting down to keep COVID-19 out. Unfortunately, there was a COVID-19 victim on my flight, so I ended up in official quarantine for two weeks, which was absolutely hell on my work schedule. (Official quarantine is much, much less fun than self-isolation- it was a nice hotel they'd rented out for foreign tourists, and they fed us well and were super professional and polite, but something about it just really drags on you. Partially the claustrophobia of the tiny room, partially the breakfast that came too early and always woke me up, partially the twice-daily temperature taking that seemed to come at semi-random times, partially having to break kosher and eat pork for the first day and a half until I got in touch with someone who spoke English well enough to let them know my dietary restrictions (I still eat shellfish, I'm not that good of a Jew), partially having no control over my own schedule because of the set meals and irregular temperature taking... yeah, I got absolutely no work done.) I got out a couple days ago, and I'm going to be hunkering down here in Da Nang for the next few months, because seriously, Vietnam is super on point about containing the virus. 

Anyhow, Tsarnassan Silk, Part 1, is 3k or so words, and is set a few years before the fall of the Ithonian Empire. You get to find out a lot about one of the more ancient Great Powers of Anastis, and definitely one of the more secretive and cryptic. I'll probably have part 2 to you all early in April.

And I won't be doing any April Fool's jokes. April Fools is the worst, and I hate it more than Christmas music. (I hate Christmas music because I've worked retail, not because I'm Jewish. I actually used to really like Christmas music as a kid, believe it or not.)

---------------------------------------

Every child who has ever lived has been told stories of terrible things that lurk in the woods, ready to gobble them up. Tales of monsters that lurk in the pitch-black shadows between the trees. Tales of paths that take you deep into the woods, only to vanish when you turn to follow them back. Tales of dragons, mad mages, and worse. 

In most places, these woods are just the nearest woods, and the tales are just meant to keep the children from straying and getting lost. In most places, the children slowly learn not to fear the woods, and begin daring one another to venture deeper and deeper into them. Man might not reign in the woods, but if he was respectful of them, he might venture safely into them.

In Tsarnassus, however, and all its neighboring provinces of the Empire, when children were told horror stories, it was of the forest of Aito, and only of the forest of Aito. No children dared one another to venture under Aito’s trees, and the only way to respect Aito was never to enter it at all. For it was the home of Tetragnath, the Spider With More Legs Than The Sky Has Stars, and Tetragnath suffered few visitors indeed. Few who entered on any business ever left.

So, of course, on his thirteenth birthday, when Keinan found himself under the canopy of Aito’s trees, he was, to say the least, rather concerned. He never would have entered the forest had he the slightest choice. 

He hadn’t had a choice.

----------------------------------------------

The rumors of the Empire seizing children had been circulating for years, but they all seemed to be about far-off provinces like mountainous Anblind far in the west, which spent more years in revolution than at peace. Nothing of the sort was happening here, a mere week as the gryphon flies from Imperial Ithos itself. The only ones spreading the rumors were malcontents and dissidents.

Then, last year, the rumors came from their neighboring province of Alikena. The doubters either grew quieter, or they grew louder, as though trying to convince themselves that the empire would never seize children for magical experiments. 

And then last week, Uncle Eiman came home from the legions. Not on leave, but a deserter. He came to warn them that the legions were coming for children between the ages of twelve and fifteen who had not yet manifested an affinity. 

Some of his other aunts and uncles called him a liar, and Grandfather had turned away from Eiman in shame that his son would be a deserter, and ordered a messenger be sent from the family land to the magistrate, and Eiman hung his shoulders in shame.

Keinan’s parents, however, had remembered that Eiman had never once been whipped for lying, or for making trouble as a child. That he’d wanted nothing more than to join the legion when he was grown, and had served with distinction for many years.

And so they quickly packed a few sundries and clothes for Keinan, and ordered him away. They told him he must not inform them where he meant to go, so they could not be forced to betray him.

And, without even having time to say goodbye to his little sisters, Keinan fled the family compound. His family wasn’t wealthy, and they were crammed into a smaller space than might be preferable, but they did better than so many neighbors, who had been foolish enough to divide their lands between heirs, rather than keeping it all and always in the hands of the first-born. Keinan wept as he fled from the halls and outbuildings and fields of the only home he had ever known.

And on Keinan’s third day of sleeping in ditches and fields and stealing from orchards, he saw the legions marching alongside wagons filled with cages too small for adults, and he hunkered down lower in the hedges and failed to keep the tears away.

--------------------------------------

The idea to flee to Aito hadn’t come in a flash, like it did to the heroes of the stories. It hadn’t come to him in a dream. It had been a more gradual thing, driven by quiet desperation.

At first, it was just a matter of evading the legion patrols with their cages. Then it was a matter of evading the patrols and rioting villagers. In desperation, he found himself skirting the edges of Aito.

Despite all the stories, he didn’t see a single spiderweb hanging in the borders of Aito. Not a one, not even the normal spiderwebs you might expect at the edge of any forest. 

Of course, most forests didn’t have borders that ran sharp as a knife, maintained by legion patrols that monitored Aito’s borders. When he saw one of those patrols in the distance, rather than risk them delivering him to the capture squads, he found himself entering Aito.

-------------------------------------------

There were, to his shock, animals everywhere in Aito. Not in the border regions of the forest, no, but when he was a mere half-hour walk into the forest, he found himself wandering through sunny meadows, spotting deer and squirrel and lazy forest drakes that barely took notice from him from their drowsy perches in the trees. 

There were wildflowers in every meadow, and berry bushes were everywhere. He actually spotted, in the distance, a blackbear peacefully foraging from one overlarge blackberry bush right next to a mossback turtle bigger than it was, and mossbacks and bears regularly fought over territory. 

Keinan wandered peacefully for some time. He gorged himself on berries until he forced himself to stop, unwilling to make himself sick. He slept in the crook of the roots of a truly massive ash tree, one that would take at least ten full-grown men to wrap their arms around. 

He saw no spiders, though. Not until he saw the cloud.

At least, it looked like a cloud, from a distance. A cloud that had drifted to earth, and rolled among the branches of the trees. A cloud that enveloped the trunks and lower branches of the trees, clinging to them.

Keinan knew at once what it was, and he knew he should avoid it, but he found himself walking towards it.

It was several minutes worth of walking before he could start making out the individual strands of the webs. The great drifts of spider silk fluttered in the weak afternoon breeze.

The patterns the webs formed were wrong. They weren’t the simple concentric shapes of garden and house spiders, but a twisting, interlocking maze of shapes and lines. And among those smashed silken geometries, darted Tetragnath.

None of Tetragnath’s individual bodies were larger than Keinan’s thumbnail, and they all doubted about the web on hasty business of their own. Teams of little black spiders carried cocooned insects from one web to another, while others took precise measurements of patterns in the webs and made tiny adjustments. 

Keinan stopped ten paces away and waited.

After what seemed like an eternity, but was likely no longer than a minute, a maze of lines in one of the webs began to glow faintly as the spiders fled from it.

The glowing threads vibrated, and a voice rose from it. Not the hissing, rasping sort of voice Keinan had expected, but a melodious high tenor.

“It has been some years since a human so young as you was foolish enough to enter my forest,” Tetragnath said. “I’ve been watching you for some time. You’re fleeing something, aren’t you?”

Keinan didn’t answer at first, staring at the great masses of web that extended off into the distance. He couldn’t see an end to it.

“Yes,” he finally said, his voice trembling.

“Something terrifying enough to drive you into my home, that you humans fear so much?” Tetragnath asked. “What could be more terrifying than I am?”

Keinan glanced behind him. The edge of the forest had passed out of view hours ago, but he still felt like the legion childcatchers would come in after him at any moment.

He couldn’t help but notice the spiders crawling across the tree trunks behind him.

“Yes,” Keinan said. 

Tetragnath said nothing.

The silence grew deeper and longer, until, finally, out of nervousness and discomfort, Keinan began to speak once more.

------------------------------------------

Tetragnath said nothing for some time after Keinan finished telling his story. Keinan, who had sat against a tree as he told his story, actually fell asleep as he was waiting for the spider swarm to respond.

When he awoke, he panicked briefly as he felt something atop him as he woke, and began thrashing. It fell off him, and he came fully awake gasping for breath. 

It took nearly a minute for Keinan to gather himself and figure out what was going on. It was morning, clearly. Tetragnath was busy in his web, seemingly paying Keinan no mind.

He looked down, and saw the object that had rested atop him.

It was a blanket. Not of wool, or sheepskin, or even linen, like the Ithonian officials used, but of spider silk. It was softer than anything Keinan had ever felt before, and not sticky at all.

“You may stay in my forest,” Tetragnath said. “I can guide you to where I house my guests.”

Images of some dreadful larder popped into Keinan’s mind, but he shrugged them off. If Tetragnath had wanted to eat him, he would have eaten him last night. 

----------------------------------------

Keinan had been expecting a crude cave, with maybe some scavenged furniture. Instead, Tetragnath led him through miles and miles of forest and corridors between webs to an actual house, woven entirely of spider silk. Follow, perhaps, might not be the right word, since individual spiders largely stayed put, and Keinan merely followed Tetragnath’s voice and shapes that lit up in the miles and miles of webs.

 It was no small house. Walls of silk stretched between trees, and formed rooms within the house. There were windows, with silk shutters that could be rolled up and down. Even with the shutters up, Keinan found that there were thin, almost invisible nets of silk keeping insects out. 

The furniture all hung down from the walls and ceiling, rather than sticking up from the floor. There was a great silken hammock for him to sleep on, and a table tautly woven between three close trees. The chairs were hammock-like devices hanging from the great cables that served as rafters in the house. 

The house was near the base of a great hummocky hill strewn with mismatched boulders, and a stream ran not twenty paces from the door, across a mossy meadow.

“There are fish in the stream,” Tetragnath told him. “Berries in the woods, root vegetables to be dug, and treenuts to be gathered. You may hunt land animals if you must, but I greatly prefer you do that as seldom as possible. And do not disturb me unless you must, for I greatly value my privacy.” 

And Tetragnath left. Or, rather, his individual spiders dispersed. Keinan could still see a few tending to webs nearby, but the bulk of the spiders that had been in the clearing had left, and the curious shapes in the webs had gone dim and silent. 

---------------------------------------

It was a week until the next time Keinan spoke with Tetragnath. It was, somewhat surprisingly, the spider who started the conversation, not the boy.

Tetragnath had many questions for Keinan, about politics, events in the Empire, and about various powerful dragons and serpents and sphinxes. Most of all, Tetragnath was curious about a friend of his, a scholar named Galvachren, who the spider had not seen in half a century.

Keinen could answer few of Tetragnath’s questions, though he did his best. And he’d never heard of Galvachren. When he politely suggested that perhaps the man had passed, half a century being quite some time among humans, Tetragnath merely laughed and told Keinan that it was no time at all for Galvachren. 

Weeks in the silk house began turning into months.

Keinen often went on long, rambling walks through Aito forest, now, having conversations with Tetragnath that were just as long and rambling. Tetragnath showed the boy the great swamps at the heart of Aito, where he farmed the insects he primarily fed upon. He showed the boy how he kept the forest healthy for the countless beasts within it, which the insects fed upon in turn, and were fed upon in turn by the spider. 

He showed the boy a thousand secrets in the wood, and he taught him a thousand more. It was the spider who taught Keinen to read, who taught him history, who told him of the days before the Empire, when once men were on kinder terms with the spider, and his reputation had been less fearful. It was the spider who taught Keinan sums, and woodcraft, and a hundred other skills. 

Keinan took to carrying at least one of Tetragnath’s bodies on his shoulder or in his hair at all times, and if he’d ever thought spiders repulsive, those days were long gone.

Winter came, but Aito shrugged it off with little effort. It stayed unnaturally warm in the forest, and snow melted as soon as it touched the ground. The silk house stayed a comfortable, even temperature the whole time.

Eventually, Keinan’s clothes wore out, and he found himself wearing clothing woven of pure spider silk. 

Tetragnath taught Keinan the difference between the dozen types of spider silk. The strong, structural silk that had no stick to it. The drift silk the spiders used to catch the wind. The five types of sticky silk. Egg silk, and the curious silk Tetragnath could produce that conducted magic like nothing else. All these and more. Tetragnath could not produce all these himself- or herself, Keinan supposed, since the spider had countless bodies both male and female. Instead, Tetragnath captured other breeds of spider to show Keinan their silk as well.

Tetragnath taught Keinan of spellforms, and showed the boy the order found in the geometric patterns of the webs. Of the wards that put fear into unwanted trespassers heart, and those that kept the forest warm in winter. Of the glyphs that Tetragnath could use to fight off invaders, and the enchantments that kept Aito’s animals healthy.

And when Keinan’s own magic came in, it was Tetragnath who identified his affinities for tree and wind, and who began teaching him to use them. 

And then Keinan finally began to feel he could repay his friend. He grew trees into new shapes that better suited Tetragnath’s purposes. He helped Tetragnath scout his forest from above, for before, Tetragnath’s bodies, borne aloft on their silken parachutes, had been at the mercy of the winds.

And in the air, Keinan saw that the spellforms in Tetragnath’s webs were not the only spellforms in Aito, for over centuries, Tetragnath had shaped the very forest itself into a great spellform, one of absurd complexity.

He never asked Tetragnath what the great spellform did, for he trusted the spider, and was loathe to intrude on their privacy.

And he never asked Tetragnath what affinities it possessed, for likewise, Keinan was loathe to ask such questions.

And more years passed, and Keinan was happy in Aito.

And it was the summer of his nineteenth year that Keinan next saw another human.

--------------------------------------------------

Other humans had tried to enter Aito over the years, of course. Smugglers, poachers, herbalists, and numerous Imperial patrols. Keinan seldom asked Tetragnath about them, but he knew enough to know their fates. Smugglers, if they did no harm, were tolerated, though not ever made comfortable. Poachers never left the forest alive. Herbalists were tolerated more than the smugglers, for Tetragnath did not begrudge them the rare herbs of the forest, and they tended to be a respectful bunch.

Imperial patrols usually never returned, or were driven out harshly. Tetragnath seldom had to resort to his great defenses— a simple bite from one of their bodies led to swift paralysis and slow, inevitable death. And their bodies were everywhere in Aito.

Keinan was eating his luncheon atop the hummocky hill next to his silk house when the spider on his shoulder tensed. Tetragnath’s voice echoed out of the spellforms woven into Keinan’s silk shirt.

“There is a woman in the woods, fleeing an Imperial patrol,” Tetragnath said.

Keinan set his luncheon back in its wicker basket— one of his few non-silk possessions, and one he’d crafted himself. He cast a cantrip to clean the bits of food off his clothes, and he flew from the top of the hill, stopping only to leave his lunch at his house and to collect his bow.

He followed Tetragnath’s directions, flying at top speed towards the far edge of the forest from where he’d first entered it.

“Tetragnath?” Keinan said, idly using a wind spell to make sure the spider hidden in his collar could hear his voice. 

“Yes, Keinan?” Tetragnath asked.

“Would you try and make sure I don’t fall in love with this woman, simply because she’s the first I’ve seen since childhood?”

Tetragnath chuckled merrily at that. “Some things are beyond even the greatest of powers, my young friend, but I will try.”

Keinan reached the far side of the forest in just a few short minutes. He came to rest in the branches of one of Aito’s many great ash trees. He had little worry about the woman or the patrol looking up this high, and even if they did, he’d dyed his clothes green and brown with dyes he’d made himself from stinging nettle and oak gall. 

Well, that he'd made himself at Tetragnath’s direction, but he felt only pride at the things the spider had taught him. 

The woman ran as though the wind itself carried her, and, indeed, Keinan could see her working the wind to do so. The patrol behind her was all a-horseback. Keinan frowned, for horses were rare and valuable indeed on Anastis, and their delicate constitutions were well-known. These horses ran unnaturally swift, however, and tired not.

“Animal mages,” said Tetragnath, and Keinan nodded. 

Keinan began stringing his bow. He’d grown it himself from one of Aito’s fine yew trees over an entire year, and had grown enchantment spellforms into its very grain, guided by Tetragnath. It was a mighty bow, and had no less than four enchantments upon it, and even mana reservoirs to fuel them with.

The first enchantment made the bow far more durable than any normal bow, and gave it a draw weight far beyond what a normal man could fire. The second let Keinan actually draw the thing. The third guided his arrows on the wind. 

The fourth, though— the fourth was what made his bow so special. He seldom used the fourth enchantment, for it was of no use for hunting, only for war. For the fourth enchantment made arrows fired from the bow remember when they were trees, and made them grow within the flesh of their target.

There were several full grown cedar trees growing out of the corpses of bear and deer scattered throughout Aito, none of which were older than a year or two. A few birch and hickory trees likewise, but Keinan had found the heavy, dense cedars of Aito were his favorite to grow his arrows upon. And, like any decent wood mage, he needed no metal tips for his arrows, for his own ability to strengthen and sharpen wood was more than sufficient.

There were seven legionnaires chasing the woman. In seven breaths, Keinan fired seven arrows, one at the end of each exhale. Then there were no legionnaires chasing the woman, and seven new cedars in Aito, each already the height of a man. They’d be full grown by the midsummer.

He never did figure out which had been the animal mage.

Keinan took care not to harm the horses. They would, if nothing else, provide blood for Tetragnath’s insects.