This suggested to Niall an interesting possibility. The spider city would soon be needing more agricultural land — for Niall foresaw a steady increase in the human population now that the slaves had ceased to be the main staple of the spiders’ diet. Shadowland had more agricultural land than it needed, excellent for cattle grazing as well as for crops. Here was a chance of an important trade link between the two cities.
All this was so absorbing that Niall forgot to contact his mother at dusk. He had been meaning to suggest delaying their departure by twenty-four hours, to give Typhon more time for final arrangements. But as he climbed into bed at one o’clock in the morning, it struck him that it would be better to leave things as they stood. At the end of twenty-four hours, there would certainly be more reasons for delaying until the following day, and then the day after that. . .
At dawn Niall spoke to his mother. Veig, apparently, was making remarkable progress, and it had taken Simeon’s authority to persuade him not to go out for a walk. And the spider balloons would be leaving for the Gray Mountains soon after dawn. There was a northwest wind, but even with tacking, it should take them about five hours to reach the Vale of Thanksgiving. The homeward journey should take an hour less than that.
Two hours later, Niall and Typhon climbed into a cart pulled by two gelbs. As they were about to start, Niall was startled to see Umaya approaching. She had walked all the way from the palace to present Niall with a bag of cinnamon cakes she had baked for his journey. As Niall kissed her, he realized that she was probably closer to him than any woman except his mother. He felt sad as he looked back to see her waving from the street corner.
Typhon said: “Why don’t you invite her to Korsh?”
“Yes, I think I will.”
But as they drove toward the north gate, he thought about all the complications that would ensue with other women in his household, and decided to delay his decision until his next visit to Shadowland. It seemed ironic that the ruler of two great cities should be afraid of antagonizing his womenfolk.
The drive out of the city filled him with the excitement he always felt when starting out on a journey, and he could sense that Typhon felt the same, and that even the captain was looking forward to his return to the spider city. It must seem strange, Niall reflected, for a man of fifty to be leaving his native land for the first time in his life, aware that, now that his master was dead, life would never be the same.
Once the cart was out of the city, traveling through the featureless landscape of northern Shadowland, Niall asked Typhon the question that had been in his mind for two days.
“Did you hate the karvasid?”
Typhon considered this for some time.
“Not really. It would not have been sensible. I had to work for him and do his bidding, and knew I had to make the best of it. In fact, there were times when I was almost fond of him, particularly in the early days. I suppose I was what you might call his only friend. And everybody needs friends.”
“Weren’t you afraid of him?”
“No. When you’ve worked for somebody for thirty years, you get to know him pretty well. I often had to oppose things he wanted to do, and he accepted that. Besides, when he first became karvasid, he was a completely different person. You see, he worshipped his father, who was a man of iron self-control, and tried to be like him — Sathanas the Thirteenth lived like a monk and practiced asceticism, breath-control, and self-flagellation.”
That brought back to Niall a question that had puzzled him.
“Breath-control? Is that why the karvasids didn’t seem to be breathing?”
“All the karvasids had a natural gift for it. Sathanas the Thirteenth could hold his breath for a quarter of an hour. But my karvasid couldn’t manage it for more than five minutes. I think he exhausted himself trying to live up to his father. And toward the end, he simply gave up, and his temper got worse and worse. There were times recently when he became insufferable.”
Niall thought of the cool, murderous fury the Magician had displayed at the end of his reception, and was suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that his death had been a necessity.
“How was it possible to like a man as cruel and selfish as that?”
Typhon said seriously: “You’ve got to understand the problems he faced. As you must have realized, people just don’t like living underground. They build up a longing to escape, and they blame their ruler for stopping them. But it wasn’t his fault. If it hadn’t been for the spiders, he would have let them travel as much as they liked.”
“But why didn’t he think of approaching the spiders about a treaty?”
“He did. Our spies were always slipping into Korsh disguised as slaves. That’s how he learned that you’d become the ruler. That made him very thoughtful, and I could see his mind brooding on what could be done. He brought down Skorbo’s balloon so he could learn more about the spiders. He wanted to see if their minds could be altered by vibrations. And of course, he thought he’d succeeded. Then Skorbo began to change as the effects wore off, and the karvasid knew he’d have to die. That was when he decided to try to bring you here.”
It came as no surprise, but Niall was interested to hear Typhon confirming it. “So he planned it?”
“Yes. He told the assassins to leave that ax in the garden. He knew somebody wouldn’t be able to resist feeling the edge with his thumb.”
“But what if it had been me instead of my brother?”
“In that case, your brother would have come to Shadowland to try and save you, and that would have been just as effective — perhaps more.”
“So you knew I was coming all along?”
“He was tracking your progress with his crystal and with trained birds. Mind, there was one point where he thought he’d lost you — when you almost got swallowed by a metexia . . .” — Niall looked puzzled — “. . . a mass of slime. He told me you managed to escape on your own before he could make it dissolve. But he thought he was going to be too late.”
This, Niall realized, was why he had occasionally had a sense of being watched, particularly on open moorland.
“So his main goal was to replace me as the ruler of the spider city?”
“That was his ultimate goal. Meantime, he thought he could control you until you became a kind of glove puppet.”
Niall did not like to tell him how close the Magician had come to it.
Typhon said: “But there were other things he wanted. Since women stopped giving birth, there was a feeling of growing revolt, and he knew it could only get worse. He either had to find more women to bear children, or grant everyone more freedom. He knew that everyone needed new goals, new purposes, new distractions. At first he thought those fantasy machines were the answer. But they made things worse. They made people dream about distant places.”
Thinking of his own travels, Niall said: “I think many of them are going to be disappointed when they finally see the distant places.”
“He knew that. But meanwhile he had to think of more distractions. He even created an arson squad to go to remote parts of the city and start fires. He started rumors of hidden enemies. He urged the workers to greater and greater efforts to complete the city walls, and made the army drill day and night. That’s why he became so foul-tempered at the end — he’d become completely obsessed. I think he would even have welcomed an attack by the spiders.”
The captain, who had been following all this as he loped gently alongside, asked: “Did he never think of attacking first?”
Typhon nodded. “In effect, that’s what he did.” And although he did not add: “And look where it got him,” Niall knew that was what he meant.
It made him deeply thoughtful. As Typhon was speaking, Niall had been reflecting that the karvasids were one of the most remarkable dynasties in human history. And they had encountered the same problem as most other great rulers in history: how to keep their people contented. The strange fate that had made the women infertile had spelled the end of the dynasty.
But at least the globe Niall was carrying in his pocket guaranteed their place in the history books.
Meanwhile, they were passing the lake with the grilweed, which made Niall aware that it had been three hours since breakfast and that he was hungry. He opened the bag of cinnamon cakes, and found them excellent — so excellent that he was struck by an excuse to bring Umaya to Korsh: giving her a job in the palace kitchen.