The WeavePasha nodded. “He is. And the djinn might even allow him freer rein in ruling his own people than they give that fool Marod. But I have spoken to Cephas, and while I do not know his fate, I sense that is a man who will always seek the righteous path. At least when he can see it.”
The vizar frowned. “And yet the possibility remains. He embodies a potential threat, either as a tool of the djinn or as someone who would dare to judge you unrighteous.”
“Enough!” cried the WeavePasha. “Are the threats to Almraiven we are sure of so inconsequential that you feel free to pursue one that exists at the far end of a causal chain even I can’t track?”
“Respect, Pasha,” she said. “We guard against many ‘potential’ threats.”
The WeavePasha pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Potential is something you can measure. What you’re talking about is paranoia, which can expand beyond all reason and which I will suffer in none of my kin.”
The woman stiffened, then bowed. “As you say, WeavePasha.”
The old man sighed again. He had not slept in so long. “They seek to cross the Plain of Stone Spiders, Granddaughter, a journey only armies and elementals have survived in more than ninety years. Measure that potentiality, and be at ease. I go to seek some myself, in my bedchamber, if one of you hasn’t turned it into an alchemy laboratory since the last time I saw it.”
His vizar smiled. “It remains as you left it, Grandfather. Do you remember the way?”
He raised his hand, waving her back to her seat. “Stay. Finish that bottle. It’s a new vintage from the Turmish vineyards called Wyvern’s Tears. It has to all be drunk once it’s opened or the acidity becomes unbearable.”
After he left her alone in his inner chamber, the WeavePasha’s granddaughter sat for a long time, drinking and thinking, weighing potentialities and trying to remember if her grandfather had ever before been bested in the seat of his power. She thought about her father, missing for decades since an attempt to infiltrate the City of Brass, the extra-planar capital of the hated efreet. She thought of her fierce daughter, and of her myopic son, and of her one hundred cousins, and of all the other humans in this last human city of a land once home to millions of humans-this city she was literally bound to protect.
“I am sorry, Grandfather,” she whispered. “The potential has weight.”
Her nephews and their leashed demons came to mind. There were some leashes her family had held for a very long time, indeed.
The demon leaned against its bonds, pouring all of its terrible strength into the effort of breaking them. Black rivulets of sorcery spilled from its many eyes, their fetid ducts the source of a never-ending flow of power that splashed on the rotting stone. The demon lifted several of its enormous spiked feet, finding new positions in the slurry of waste magic and crumbled rock that formed the floor of its temple prison.
Otherwise, it did not move. It leaned. With its bloated nightmare body, yes, but also with its maelstrom of dark magic and its blasphemously ancient will.
And its hate.
The hate is what kept it leaning. The hate is what drove it to forever test this boundary, what fed the rituals of its bizarre worshipers on the plain above the temple, what had kept it pouring unimaginable strength and power against its leash, from this immobile position, for one hundred and twenty-two years.
“Spider That Waits.”
At first, the demon thought it was more chattering from the warped creatures that attended it. The spiderfolk were still more or less mortal, and mortal languages all sounded alike to it.
An image appeared in the demon’s consciousness. It was the visage of a human woman, calmly studying it. She held a twist of leather in her hand, and when it saw that, the demon howled.
“Qysara!” it hissed. “Perhaps the shame I felt when you first banished me was misplaced if you have survived until now.”
The woman shook her head, and the demon noticed something. A quiver along the jawline, was it? Or an imperfect shade in the spectrum of the shields guarding her sanity? It was a weakness, whatever it was-something to sniff out; something to exploit.
“Qysara Shoon the Fifth is dead, Zanessu, and has been these twelve hundred years. I am her descendant and namesake, Munaa yr Oma. It is I who hold your leash now.”
The demon giggled, a sound like slow bubbles bursting through some hellish marsh. “The leash was lost,” it said. “I returned after the thousand years of exile your ancestor laid on me.”
“Yes!” said the human. “And you spun your webs again for a time. But my grandfather spent decades rebuilding our family armories, hiding behind secret names and acting from the shadows, as our family was forced to for much of the time you rotted in the Abyss, fiend. Then, when the gods walked the earth …”
“When the personifications of hubris you mortals call gods fell to Earth a century ago, a man came with the leash and imprisoned me here. I remember. El Jhotos …” The demon cast a dweomer of black bile at the woman’s will, but it was seared away to nothing before it could fall.
“And now,” it continued, as if it had not tried to annihilate the woman’s soul, “Here you are. Plotting against your liege? Seeking power from a source he does not control? In search of allies?”
Enormous, unending waves of pain wracked the demon. It collapsed in a heap, its legs curling over the filthy sac of its body while it screamed. When the pain faded, the demon sought the woman’s visage again. It saw that it had made a mistake. If there was weakness in this mortal before, it was gone now.
“Ridiculous fiend,” she said. “You are incapable of understanding the love and loyalty I hold for the one you call el Jhotos. You think to tempt me with offers of power? You are nothing compared to him. You are a dog on a leash, and not even the dog you claim to be. Zanessu? Demon prince? Drow god? You are a jumped-up ascendant, immortal only because you were born of the venomous spittle fallen from a real power’s fangs. I could end you with a thought and a turn of my hand. You know this.”
The demon felt a vibration in the leash that invisibly bound its necrotic soul. It felt something boiling up in the mix besides its endless hate.
Fear.
Chapter Twelve
The Spider That Waits has eight thousand eyes,
The Spider That Waits sees through Janna’s disguise,
The Spider That Waits spins a web out of lies,
Janna gets caught there, and there Janna dies.
CEPHAS SQUINTED AGAINST THE SUN, THEN RETURNED TO his study of the boulder-strewn gully wall, plotting a route before he began the climb. Ariella squatted at the top of the rise, drinking a single mouthful of water from their last canteen and keeping a westward watch. Cephas had watched her make the ascent, but he had stopped trying to follow the leaps and graceful slides she made from shifting stone to invisible handhold. The couriers of the Airsteppers’ Guild had trained the swordmage to navigate across broken country as if she were dancing.
Cephas was no dancer.
“Any sign?” he asked her, keeping his voice low even though they had yet to see another living thing since they entered this unnatural plain.
Ariella did not answer aloud. She shook her head and held up the canteen, giving him an inquiring look. Cephas considered for a moment, then nodded, and she tossed it down. He took as shallow a swallow as he could manage, and again wondered whether this journey would be easier if he were manifesting the earthsoul he had known all his life.