Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

Epilogue

In spite of a headache and lack of sleep, Niall was awake before dawn. He had stayed at Typhon’s house, and the captain — as on the previous occasion — had slept on the rug in the same room.

Niall used the thought mirror to dispel the tiredness that was the result of only three hours of sleep. Then he sat up in bed, closed his eyes, and went into deep relaxation. He became immediately aware of his mother’s presence, and realized that she must have been trying to establish contact at the very moment he had.

She asked: “Where are you?”

“I am back at Typhon’s house.”

“Ah, I knew you were free.”

“How?”

“Your brother began to recover at ten o’clock last night, and insisted on sleeping in his own bed.”

Niall was astonished. “As quickly as that? I calculate that the Magician died at about that time.”

So Typhon was right: the graddiks had lost no time in deserting.

Niall made no attempt to describe what had happened in detail; it would have used up all his mental energy and tired his mother. But he told her that he had accepted the position of the master of Shadowland. He also asked her to contact Asmak, the director of the aerial survey, and arrange for three spider balloons to land at the top meadow of the Vale of Thanksgiving the following afternoon, to pick up Typhon, the captain, and himself. He felt that it was a matter of urgency, as well as courtesy, to introduce Typhon, now the deputy ruler of Shadowland, to the Spider Lord and his council.

The news that Veig was already on the road to recovery had filled Niall with joy and relief, and he was anxious to begin the new day, Shadowland’s first day of freedom. But Typhon and Gerek were not at breakfast — they sent an apology with Katia and said they would appear later. Niall was sympathetic; without the aid of the thought mirror, he also would have preferred to spend the morning in bed.

Soon after half past nine, Niall and the captain set out for the palace, where Niall had arranged to meet the Citizens’ Committee at midday. There were many things Niall wanted to find out before he met them, and he intended to address his questions to Kvaran, the brother of the red-haired Zadin, who was now in the hospital suffering from burns.

Kvaran, a lieutenant of the palace guard, was waiting for him at the drawbridge, and greeted Niall and the captain with a military salute. His cheeks were drawn, and in response to Niall’s question he told him that his brother was now sleeping under sedation, after a healing ointment had been applied to his burns by the palace doctor. He would be permanently scarred, but was expected to make a full recovery. Niall was intrigued to learn that Zadin had been trying to crawl down the stairs when Kvaran had found him. The fact that he was still conscious revealed just how much the Magician’s crystal globe had been depleted by his attempt to destroy Niall.

On Niall’s orders, the central tower had been locked after the Magician’s body had been removed. As Kvaran unlocked the heavy door, Niall observed that he looked nervous. Niall guessed the reason, but asked nevertheless: “Is something troubling you?”

“Yes, sir.” Kvaran obviously was glad of the opportunity to voice his fears. “The guards saw the animal that killed the karvasid. It was so horrible that one of them has gone mad.”

Niall was puzzled; it seemed unlikely that the guards had been able to see the boca.

“What did it look like?”

“A great crimson monster with no eyes.”

Suddenly Niall understood. “Was the body badly torn?”

“As if by a wild beast.”

The boca obviously had been covered in blood, but since it was invisible, had seemed to have no eyes.

Niall said: “If you would rather wait here, I will go up alone.”

Kvaran looked relieved. “Thank you, sir. I’m not afraid of any human foe, but this thing sounds like a demon from the pit.”

Kvaran’s fears were groundless, as Niall had known they would be. There was no sign of the boca. Niall had no doubt that, after centuries of bondage to a master who was sick with the lust of power, it had lost no time in returning to its home in the silver mines of the north.

But the room was as horrible as Niall had expected, and made him feel sick. Although the body had been removed, dried blood covered the walls and ceiling, and the place smelled like a butcher’s shop on a hot day.

Strangely, there was no blood on the glass cylinder, in which the blue gas still bubbled with black clouds. Like the crystal sphere, this glass, it seemed, could cleanse itself.

This was no longer true of the Magician’s globe, which lay underneath the bench; it was brown with dried blood, and when Niall picked it up, the bottom was wet. Niall washed the blood off his hands under the laboratory tap, then cleaned the globe with a wet towel.

This is what Niall had meant to ask Kvaran about; he had awakened in the night and wondered if it would still be there. For although the globe felt dead to his touch and was probably drained beyond hope of recovery, Niall knew that the information it stored was almost certainly indestructible.

He left the laboratory, glad to escape its stench, and found the guardroom at the end of the corridor; this contained a table and two chairs, and a large sink. The room was too small for the spider to enter, and he stayed outside in the corridor.

Niall drew the curtain, sat at the table, and cupped the globe in his hands. Then he emptied his mind and tried to tune in to the crystal. The result was a stinging shock that made him drop the globe, so it rolled across the floor. Clearly, it had been booby-trapped in case some unauthorized person should attempt to use it. If its force had not been so weak, Niall probably would have been stunned or knocked unconscious. He placed it on the table, stared into it, and tried to gauge its wavelength. Because he was now accustomed to his own globe, he knew how it should respond. And finally, by allowing himself to be guided by intuition, he began to feel his way into its world.

The first impression was unfavorable. His own globe was like a universe, with immense galleries that stretched in all directions, and it somehow conveyed an impression of light, as if it was housed under a giant glass dome. The Magician’s globe was more like entering a dark building full of badly lit corridors and airless rooms. It was not only claustrophobic, but somehow frightening and stifling. The sphere was permeated by the personality of the Magician, and that personality was terrifying in its capacity for vindictiveness.

But all this was forgotten as Niall grasped the truth about the Magician and Shadowland. What he now learned left him feeling utterly bewildered. The man whose baleful presence filled the globe was not Sathanas, the soldier who had led his small band of warriors into Shadowland, but his lineal descendant, Sathanas the Fourteenth. The first Sathanas was the original builder of this palace, who had lived until his ninety-seventh year and fathered eleven sons and seven daughters.

This, Niall now realized, was why the interior of the palace was built in so many different styles. It also explained why the palace was so vast, a virtual citadel, with as many rooms belowground as above it. Here each later Magician lived his solitary existence, and guarded his closest secret: that he was not the Sathanas who had founded Shadowland, but one of his descendants.

But what was the purpose of this strange charade? It had started, Niall learned, by chance, and continued because it happened to suit the obsessive characters of each ruler of Shadowland.

When the first Sathanas died, his death was kept secret, because he had believed that the spiders would invade Shadowland if they knew he was dead. So his son, also called Sathanas, who was then aged forty, had taken his place. This second Magician had been a remarkable intellectual, undoubtedly a man of genius, who had devoted his life to the study of science and magic. It was he who had lured the warriors of Cheb the Mighty into the Valley of the Dead, and then drowned most of them in the Great Storm. It was this Sathanas who had created the globe that Niall was now holding, and enslaved the boca that had killed his thirteenth descendant.

His son, Sathanas the Third, had lacked his father’s intellect, but had possessed a natural talent for agriculture. It was under him that the Vale of Thanksgiving became the center of rich farmlands that could support ten thousand people. From his father he learned the secret of controlling the weather, and the spider balloons that were occasionally blown over the Gray Mountains were invariably destroyed before they saw the fertile valleys with their orchards and wheat and vines.