When he opened his eyes he was lying on one of the trestle tables, and Phelim was taking his pulse. He heard Simeon say: “He’s dead.”
“No I’m not.”
Simeon said: “He is.” He pointed at the body of the man. Niall forced himself upright, fighting off the nausea that spread upward from his stomach, and lurched off the table, supported by Phelim’s hand on his arm. He could see at a glance that Simeon was right. The dead eyes stared glassily at the ceiling. The jaw had sagged open, and the hairy chest had ceased to rise and fall.
Niall groaned and struck himself on the forehead with his fist. “What an idiot I am!” He tore the chain from around the man’s neck and hurled it across the room.
Phelim shook his head in bewilderment. “Would someone tell me what’s happening?”
Niall said bitterly: “I killed him out of pure stupidity, that’s what.”
Simeon laid a hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Oh yes it was. I should have removed the pendant first.”
He looked down at the dead face, with its yellow teeth. “He can kill from a distance.”
Phelim asked: “Who can?”
“The man who sent him. The magician.”
Phelim looked at Niall in blank astonishment. “A real magician?”
Simeon said quickly: “I’ll explain it all later.”
“But. . .”
“We’ve other things to do now.”
Phelim was obviously troubled. “I’d still like to know what killed him.”
“If you want my guess, a heart attack.” Simeon reached out and closed the staring eyes.
“But I thought. . .”
Simeon silenced him with a gesture. “Before we do anything else, let’s get the rest of these webs off. I want to see if there are any more pendants.”
Ten minutes later, the spider silk had been removed from the remaining bodies. There were fourteen in all, and their garments made it obvious that all came from the spider city. Their faces made it even plainer; all had the striking but somehow vapid good looks of human beings who have been deliberately bred for beauty and stupidity. Three of them were workmen, four adult women, and seven youths and girls — some hardly more than children. Phelim pointed out that each of them had fang marks on the neck or shoulders: evidence that they had been attacked from above.
Niall watched all this in a state of angry self-reproach; he was still cursing himself for his stupidity. When the last of the webs lay on the floor, Phelim said: “No more pendants.”
Simeon voiced what Niall was thinking. “That means the girl is the last one alive. We must guard her carefully.”
“Or better still, find some way of waking her up.”
Phelim said: “How about the viper serum?”
Simeon considered it. “Yes, I suppose it might work. It’s worth trying, anyway.”
Niall asked: “But what does it do?”
“It’s an antidote to the poison of the horned marsh viper. I made it by injecting a horse with the venom until it built up a resistance — it cured my wife in the Great Delta. The poison of the marsh viper has roughly the same effect as spider venom — a small quantity causes paralysis, a large quantity causes death.”
“But what if it killed her?”
“Why should it? The poison in a serum is already neutralized. In any case, we could try it on one of these sleeping beauties first.” He turned to Phelim. “Help me find one with a good, strong pulse.”
Phelim lifted the wrist of the girl closest to him. “How about this?”
Simeon took her other wrist, and nodded. Then he opened her eyelid, and very delicately touched her eyeball with his fingertip. Niall thought the girl’s other eyelid twitched.
From a wooden medical chest Simeon took an instrument that Niall recognized as a hypodermic syringe. He had never seen one, but his history lesson in the white tower had made him familiar with their use. Simeon guessed what he was thinking.
“I’d never seen one either.” He held it out for Niall’s inspection. “Beautiful, aren’t they? One of these would have saved the life of my father. Now we’ve got six dozen.”
A voice said: “Twelve dozen.” A boy of about fourteen had come into the room. His dark hair was close-cropped; otherwise he bore a striking resemblance to Phelim.
“You’ve found more? Good.” Simeon placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “This is my nephew Boyd, the mechanical genius of the family.”
Boyd said: “And guess what I’ve found? An electric generator. Isn’t that tremendous?”
Phelim snorted. “It would be if we had any use for electricity.”
“Any use?” Boyd’s tone was outraged. “What do you mean, any use?”
Phelim said: “Well, you tell me what we can use it for.”
“Well, lighting this place to begin with. That’s what it’s for. It’s an emergency generator. Don’t you know anything?” It was obvious that the brothers maintained an attitude of mutual criticism.
Simeon said: “Never mind him. I think it’s wonderful. What have you got there?”
Boyd was holding a curved metal band of a pale gold color. “I’m not sure. It’s either a bipartite encephaloscope or a Gullstrand apparatus. I thought you might know.”
Phelim took it from his brother. “It looks like an ordinary headband to me.”
This was true; it reminded Niall of the kind of band Merlew wore ho keep her hair in place. Yet there was something about its pale gold color and graceful form that fascinated him.
Simeon said: “Why don’t you go and look it up in the big medical encyclopedia? Have you finished unpacking?”
“Of course not. There’s a whole crate yet.”
“Well, go and finish it. We’ll come up in a moment.”
Boyd turned to Niall. “Do you want to come?” It was the first time he had acknowledged Niall’s existence.
Simeon said: “No, he’ll come up with us. Go and unpack the other crate.”
Boyd exchanged a glance with Niall and pulled a wry face. As he ran off down the corridor, Phelim said resignedly: “My younger brother is brilliant, but he’s a terrible pest.”
In fact, Niall had taken an instant liking to the boy, whose eyes radiated intelligence.
Simeon had already turned back to the girl, and was studying her forearm. “Give me the viper serum.”
Phelim handed him a small glass bottle containing a yellow fluid. But as Simeon filled the syringe, Niall experienced an odd sense of misgiving.
“Wouldn’t it be safer to try a small quantity first?”
Simeon shrugged. “It shouldn’t do any harm. But perhaps you’re right — I don’t want to waste the serum.” He squeezed some of it back into the bottle by pressing the plunger.
Niall looked down at the girl’s sleeping face. She was a pretty, dark-haired teenager with an olive skin and full lips. There was something very attractive about its serenity. Almost without being aware of it, his consciousness passed beyond her sleeping face and into her brain. It was like plunging into a sea of oblivion, total absence of being. Through this nothingness, Niall continued to be aware of his own body, standing there and looking down at her. Yet he was no longer inside his body. Nor did he possess any identity. He was like a newborn baby, gazing blankly out on the world.
Yet this consciousness of nothingness was dimly illuminated by flashes of somethingness, like a faint dawn on the horizon. This was the girl’s sleeping consciousness, dimly aware of her body and of the room she was lying in. This vague, almost nonexistent consciousness became momentarily more aware as Simeon drove the needle into her arm and pressed the plunger.
Simeon said: “Do you realize this is the first time in a thousand years that one of these things has been used?”
His voice produced a slight shock that brought Niall back into his body. It was pleasant to reenter his own identity and to become aware that he was Niall, and not a fragment of nothingness.
The three of them stood there in silence, looking down at the girl’s face, and at the rising and falling of her breasts. After about a minute her breathing became faster, and spots of color appeared in her cheeks.
Phelim said: “It’s working.”
Simeon shook his head. “Don’t speak too soon.”
As he said this, Niall once again probed the girl’s mind. As soon as he did so, he realized that something was wrong. There was an acute sense of discomfort, a feeling of suffocation, and a scalding sensation in his veins. The waves of delirium made him feel so unbalanced that he hastily withdrew.
The girl was now breathing fast, as though in a fever, and Simeon was beginning to look concerned. Phelim reached out and raised her eyelid. Niall could see that the eye was moving around rapidly, showing the white of the eyeball; the effect was unpleasant, as though she were a frightened animal. Simeon, who was holding her wrist, shook his head.