The most surprising aspect of the Glass Spider was that it could move. Miriam claimed the Spider's legs could crawl through the dust faster than an eagle could fly, stirring up silt in mammoth plumes that streamed away for miles behind the speeding bug. It had been racing through the dust for most of the past week, covering a hundred leagues every hour; but a short while ago it had finally stopped, apparently at its journey's end.
What was the Spider's purpose? Who built it? Miriam didn't know, but at least she could list the people who had arrived with her ten days ago.
Her immediate superior had been the drow back at the corpse-heap; since the wights had torn him to bloody confetti, we didn't bother asking his name.
The drow's boss was our old friend Bleach-Hair, his real name Petrov. Petrov hailed from some Prime Material world whose predominant landscape was ice; Miriam didn't remember the world's name, and none of us cared. (I might comment, by the way, that so-called ice worlds usually have their share of green fields, lakes, and even jungles; when someone like Petrov says he comes from an ice world, he almost always comes from a perfectly normal world and just lived in an icy part of it. Folk of the Prime Material plane are so parochial they seldom know much about their own homes, let alone the multiverse at large.)
Petrov occupied the second highest rung on the ladder of command. Above him were two powerful figures who shared control of everything that happened in the Glass Spider. One was a human mage who called himself «The Fox»… although Miriam contended «The Loon» was a more appropriate title. The Fox loved fire the way another man might love women; he could gaze at flames for hours, talking to the blaze and showing every sign of listening to it talk back. Thanks to various magic spells, he could even caress fire, bathe in it, wear it like a cloak. Needless to say, the Fox manufactured the firewands used at the courts, and masterminded all the other fiery accidents that had struck faction headquarters in Sigil. The very first incident – the riot at the Gatehouse asylum – had started when the Fox broke out of a padded cell where he had been confined for years.
The Fox had managed his escape with the help of the other leader of this group, a human woman named Rivi. She was not a sorcerer – Miriam claimed that Rivi hated sorcerers, although she got along well with a barmy like the Fox – but Rivi could still do things that struck Miriam as magic: reading minds, for example, or projecting her thoughts through the building to give orders to underlings.
«Oh,» said Hezekiah. «Rivi must be psionic.»
«What do you know about psionics?» I asked him.
«How do you think I teleport?» he replied. «I'm not a magician.»
«I thought you were.»
«Nope. It's all mind over matter.»
Hmm. If Hezekiah's mind could win that kind of contest, it substantially lowered my opinion of matter.
Miriam didn't know exactly what Rivi and the Fox were up to, but they wanted to find something that was buried in the dust a long time ago. The mysterious object had been unearthed once before, by an expedition under the leadership of Felice DeVail, Guvner Oonah's mother. The Fox had belonged to that expedition, along with members of many other Sigil factions; they had toured several planes including Dust, eventually jumping by accident into the middle of the Gray Wastes and finding themselves trapped between hostile armies in the Blood Wars raging there.
Most of the party had died in short order; the Fox had been battered by evil magics, and driven insane; but a few, including Felice, had escaped unscathed, dragging the Fox with them and eventually making their way back to Sigil. Naturally, the survivors had all reported these events to their factions, depositing personal accounts of the expedition in the various faction archives. Just as naturally, the Fox had set about stealing those accounts from faction headquarters the moment Rivi freed him. His eagerness to return here suggested that the long-ago expedition had found some kind of treasure in the Plane of Dust but hadn't taken it with them. Now, the Fox had come back to collect that treasure, using the information he had stolen from the factions.
Miriam's story introduced a dozen new puzzles about what was going on, but such questions could wait. At least we knew something about our opposition now: fire-wizard Fox, psionic Rivi, and an assortment of bashers from Sigil. There was only one other question in my mind, and I asked it. «If Petrov and his cronies captured some prisoners, where would he take them?»
«To Rivi,» Miriam answered immediately. «She can do things to people's minds. She can… change you. Back when she and the Fox were recruiting people, they hired two first-rate knights of the post: sneak thieves. Only problem was, the thieves wouldn't work together – one was githyanki, the other githzerai. Hated each other like poison. So Rivi took them away for a few hours, and next thing you know, they're bosom buddies. Lifelong friends. She did something spooky to their brains.»
«Is that really possible?» I whispered to Hezekiah. It irked me to turn to a Clueless for information, but he was the only authority we had on psionic powers.
«Rearranging a person's thoughts can be tricky,» he whispered back. «Making it permanent is even harder. It once took Uncle Toby a whole day to stop two kings from declaring war with each other. Of course, he had to fix up their generals too, so that's what dragged out the time.»
«Your Uncle… painted over their minds?» I pictured how easily I could change a frown to a smile with just a few strokes of the brush. Was it that easy for Uncle Toby? Was it equally easy for Rivi? If this brainpainter had enough time to work on Yasmin, to rape her mind…
«We have to save the others,» I said. «We have to save them now.»
«Where can we find this Rivi?» Wheezle asked quietly.
«Her quarters are on the lower level,» Miriam replied. «I can show you.»
I glanced at Wheezle, raising my eyebrows. «We cannot trust her,» Wheezle said, answering my unasked question. «On the other hand, it is safer to take her with us than leave her or kill her. As long as she remains in our hands, she has an incentive to cooperate.» The little gnome turned to her. «You understand what these wights will do if you betray us?»
The wights leered in her face, but she just jutted out her chin. «I know the game,» she answered. «I'll play.»
«And I'll make sure she does,» Hezekiah said. «I'll take her under my wing.»
He moved to her side and smiled. Suddenly, he was terrifying again – his face didn't change a muscle, but his smile took on the unnatural brightness of a killer, the placid tranquility of a child who could slay its mother without conscience. In that face was all the cruelty of childhood, the taunts, the bullying, the inventive tortures of insects and younger siblings.
«You'll be good, won't you?» Hezekiah told Miriam. Then he was simply a Clueless boy again, his smile only a smile, his face only an eighteen-year-old face.
I couldn't stand to look at it.
«Don't worry about me,» Miriam mumbled. «You're my high-up man, you are.» She edged away from him but kept her head lowered, like a dog showing submission to a wolf.
«Then we're all set,» the boy said. «Let's get going.»
With a pair of wights taking the lead, we proceeded down the corridor. Below us, in the circular arena surrounded by the ring of the Glass Spider, other wights continued to wade through the dust, searching for who-knew-what. I wondered how big their target was. Something the size of a needle would take days to find, but something substantial, like a spellbook or a magic sword, would surely turn up soon; there was a lot of ground to cover out there, but there were a lot of wights searching.