The trail of blood had been obliterated by falling snow; but by bending until his face was within a few inches of the surface, he was able to make out the darker patches. These, he could now see, led back toward the second house from the corner, a tall building whose rusty balconies suggested that it had once been a hotel. Like the others, its windows had been boarded up and its door was closed — all houses in this square had been forbidden to human beings. Niall tried the door; it seemed to be locked. Yet when he brushed aside the snow on the doorstep with his shoe, a damp bloodstain told him that this was the house in which Skorbo had met his injury. He rammed the door with his shoulder; it seemed completely immovable. But a sheet of plywood covering a window proved to be less solid, and caved inward when he pushed it with both hands.
He leaned in with caution. If something — or someone — powerful enough to kill a spider was lurking inside, he was going to take no risks. In fact, he found himself looking into a bare hallway whose wooden floor was covered with plaster and rubble; it smelled of decay and damp. Recognizing that his tension was blocking his perceptions, he deliberately relaxed, exhaling deeply and closing his eyes; then, as he achieved inner stillness, concentrated intently. A point of light glowed inside his skull, and the silence seemed to deepen. In that moment, he knew with absolute certainty that no concealed enemies were lying in wait; the building was deserted. Yet this deeper perception also made him aware of another odor, musky and slightly sweet. It was familiar, yet its significance escaped him.
He pushed the plywood violently; the nails that held it to the window frame tore loose, and it fell into the building. Niall clambered inside. By now he was regretting that he was not wearing warmer clothes; his hands and feet were frozen. But since he was here, it seemed pointless not to explore. The light from the window gave him a clearer view of the hallway. He observed rat droppings among the dust and plaster on the floor. That indicated clearly that no spiders used the building; they regarded rats as particularly appetizing delicacies, and would wait for hours in the hope of catching one.
As he expected, there were more bloodstains on the floor, and clear signs in the dust and rubble that a wounded spider had dragged itself across the floor. The marks continued across the hallway to an open door beyond a collapsing staircase; this admitted light and a draft of air. Beyond this, a corridor led down to an open space that had once been a garden; there were more bloodstains on the floor. The door at the end, which stood half open, had obviously been forced; its lock had been smashed, and marks on the outside woodwork made by a chisel or a crowbar looked fresh.
Niall peeped cautiously into the weed-grown garden, then looked upward at the wall above the door; it rose vertical and windowless to the roof, where the guttering was still intact. This disposed of his theory that the spider had been struck by some heavy object — perhaps a piece of masonry — dropped from above. Yet when he brushed aside the snow on the threshold, he saw signs of blood. This garden clearly held the secret of the spider’s death.
To Niall’s untrained eye there were no obvious clues. The layer of snow on the ground had covered any footprints. The garden, which extended as far as the rear wall of the next building, was divided from the gardens to the right and left by high walls. A dozen feet from the door stood a young palm tree; beyond this, there was a tangle of weeds and shrubbery which offered a great deal of concealment. When Niall studied this more closely, he observed a number of freshly broken twigs which indicated that someone had been there recently. But the hard ground had retained no other indications.
He penetrated the shrubbery as far as the rear wall; here the overgrown grass convinced him that no one else had been here for months. But as he was about to turn back, he noticed something that made him pause. In a corner of the garden wall there lay a heap of palm leaves, some of them spreading out from a common center. They looked so natural in that setting that he almost failed to notice them. But why should there be palm leaves lying in a corner? Then he looked up and saw that the young palm tree had no leaves. In fact, someone had hacked off its top, leaving a bare trunk. And within a foot of the top of the truncated palm, there was a length of rope.
Now at last he understood. The tree was about twice the height of a man — precisely the distance from the foot of the tree to the rear door of the building. A further search of the shrubbery revealed the stunted tree to whose base the other end of the rope had been tied. The young palm had been bent backwards like a catapult. When the spider had stepped out of the doorway, hesitating as it faced the dark garden, someone had cut the rope, and the tree had snapped over like an immense spring. Skorbo had evidently been standing slightly to one side, or had started to move at the last moment; the tree had smashed his legs and battered him to the ground. . .
Niall returned to the doorway and looked down at the bloodstains. They showed clearly that his reconstruction was correct. The blow had caused blood splashes which were some distance from the original stain, and other splashes had struck the wall at an angle so they were elongated, with tadpole-like tails. And a few feet away, half-buried in the snow, there was a triangular fragment of the spider’s skull, with brain fragments still adhering to its underside. But the original blow had shattered the legs, not the skull. This could mean only one thing: that while the spider was stunned, someone had deliberately smashed the top of his skull, with the intention of penetrating the brain and destroying his capacity to send out a distress signal.
Niall shivered. He had no liking for Skorbo, but the sheer savagery of the attack horrified him; he felt as if he had been there to witness it.
His shiver reminded him of how cold he was; his facial muscles had lost all feeling and his eyelids felt as if they were frozen. He retraced his steps back through the empty building. The front door had been wedged shut with a balk of timber. He heaved it loose and went out into the square.
As he plodded back through the snow, walking in the deep footprints he had left earlier, he recalled his excitement on first seeing the snow from his bedroom window. It had made the world look like fairyland. Now it was merely cold and uncomfortable, and somehow too real.
Someone had lit a fire in the great fireplace that faced the main door; the sight of flames leaping up the chimney brought a glow of delight, and made him realize why the men of old had regarded fire as a god. But as he stood before the blazing logs, watching the snow melt from his garments, he was surprised by the pain in his limbs as the blood began to circulate again.
In the chamber adjoining his bedroom, his personal servant Jarita had lit the stove and laid out his breakfast on a low table: cold meats, preserved fruits, honey, sweetened milk, and newly baked bread. Before he ate, he changed into dry clothes: a baggy woolen suit, in which he felt comfortable, and slippers lined with down. Then he sat cross-legged on the silken cushions, tore a crust from the hot loaf, and spread it with butter and honey. This was usually the time of day that he enjoyed most, the hour before work began, when he could eat good food, and reflect on the incredible twists of fortune that had brought him from a cave in the desert, and made him the ruler of fifty thousand human beings. It was an important hour of the day, for he was still stunned by the swiftness of the change, and his unconscious mind needed time to absorb it; he still woke up in the middle of the night and imagined that he was in the underground den surrounded by his family.
But this morning he was unable to relax or to enjoy the food. He could only brood on the problem of why Skorbo had been killed, and who had carried it out. Both questions left him baffled. It was true that the city was full of human beings who loathed the captain of the guard and would be delighted with the news of his death. But none of them possessed the kind of courage or determination to lure him into a trap. They had been the slaves of the spiders for so long that they no longer had any will of their own; they were conditioned into total obedience. And there would have been no point in harboring thoughts of hatred or revenge, for the spiders could read their minds more easily than Niall could read a book.