He held it out to Dravig. “What do you think this is?”
Dravig reached out both feelers, then quickly withdrew them. “Do not touch it. Put it back.”
“Why?” Niall stared at him in surprise.
“Can you not feel it?”
Niall withdrew into the still center of his mind and opened all his senses. Now, suddenly, he understood what Dravig meant. There was something strange about the object in his hand, a kind of force or energy that was not unlike the force of a living creature. And as he looked at the toadlike face, it now seemed oddly malevolent — although a better word might have been predatory, like a hunter lying in wait and watching the approach of its victim. Niall had observed it many times among the carnivorous plants of the Great Delta. Even so, the emanation from the stone was mild, almost undetectable; Dravig must have possessed remarkable sensitivity to observe this without even touching it.
Niall rewrapped it and replaced it in the drawer. Then, one by one, he removed the others and unwrapped them. Each, he observed, had been placed with its face toward the back of the drawer. Each was subtly different from the others, although there was a strong basic resemblance. Some had more humanoid faces than others, and one had an open mouth inside which teeth were visible. But these teeth were like no others that Niall had ever seen. They were not triangular and pointed, like the teeth of a fish, nor flat like those of a herbivore, but a combination of the two, with oddly irregular points. One figure had a curious protuberance, not unlike a short trunk, and one had closed eyes, although the face seemed to have the same vaguely menacing watchfulness as the others.
Dravig watched all this with an air of doubt that amounted to disapproval. Niall was aware that he seemed to feel that all this curiosity was unnecessary, almost indecent — much as humans might feel about ransacking someone’s personal possessions. Once again he was struck by the alienness of the spider mind, its strange lack of curiosity. Spiders were intelligent and observant; yet they seemed to have very little of the natural inquisitiveness of human beings.
He asked Dravig: “Why do you suppose they keep their lucky charms wrapped in seaweed?”
Dravig replied: “They are not lucky charms. They are their personal gods.”
Now, suddenly, Niall understood. Spiders had a highly developed sense of the unknown forces of nature, and a boundless awe for the great goddess. This was why Niall himself was now treated as a kind of god; the spiders regarded him as an emissary of the goddess. Dravig was perturbed because Niall was failing to display respect for sacred things. Yet his disapproval was muted since Niall himself shared their sacred nature.
Niall carefully rewrapped the last of the images, and replaced it in the drawer. “I’d still like to know why they wrap them in seaweed. I thought they lived underground.”
He was trying to open the bottom drawer, but it yielded only with difficulty; its wood seemed to be swollen and damp. The drawer proved to contain a flat wooden box, about eighteen inches long and a foot wide. Niall had often come across such boxes in the kitchens of deserted houses, during the hours of rambling exploration; they usually contained cutlery, although on one occasion he had found one full of small bottles containing herbs and condiments. He placed this one on top of the chest of drawers and pushed up its catch. To Niall’s surprise, it proved to contain nothing but a mass of brown seaweed and a quantity of liquid, presumably sea water. The iodine-smell of the weed filled the room. He lifted a corner of the weed and looked underneath; there was nothing. But he noted that the inside of the box had been treated with some gray substance that looked slimy, but was, in fact, quite hard to the touch; it was evidently intended as waterproofing. The weed itself had a slippery, leathery consistency, and as he raised it, he noted that it was not, as he had first thought, a mass of separate leaves, but a single sheet of weed. When he lifted it in the air, holding it in both hands, it became clear that it was a roughly rectangular mat which had been folded in two. One side of the mat was smooth and leathery; the other side consisted of sucker-shaped buds, each one about half an inch across. At the edge of the mat there were a number of trailing stems or tendrils; these made it clear that this was a single piece of natural weed which had been removed in its entirety.
He held it out toward Dravig, its water dripping onto the floor. “What do you make of that? What do you suppose they did with a piece of seaweed?” Dravig made a mental gesture that was like a head-shake. Niall replaced it in the box and closed down the lid. When he rubbed his wet hands down his tunic, he noticed that a few fragments of brown weed stuck to the cloth.
The rest of the room yielded no further clues. A cupboard in the corner proved to be empty except for two grubby slave tunics. Niall tossed these onto the bed with the others, then looked through the pockets. As he had expected, these were empty. Finally, he left the room and explored the rest of the ground floor. When the locked door of the front room failed to yield to a determined push, he turned the handle, and rammed it with his shoulder. The door burst open. But the room, as he had expected, contained only dusty furniture, and had evidently not been used for a long time, possibly centuries. All the windows were broken, and shards of glass still lay on the floor.
Since this was a small house, the only other room on the ground floor was the kitchen. This proved to be spotlessly clean, and the few cups and dishes had been washed and left to drain. A dish towel hung from a rack above the sink, and two dish cloths had been spread out to dry from the edge of the draining board. Saucepans and other utensils were upside down on a shelf. The stove contained burnt wood ash. A waste bin underneath the sink was half full of decaying remains of vegetables and some rabbit bones.
The kitchen drawers contained knives, forks, and other implements, some of them rusty and evidently dating back to the days when humans ruled the earth. The cupboard underneath was locked, and an attempt to force it open with a rusty pair of scissors only broke the blade of the scissors. But by removing the drawers, Niall was able to look down into the cupboard; in the middle of the top shelf lay a key. He tried it in the lock; the cupboard door opened. His first impression was that it was empty. Yet in that case, why hide the key? Kneeling on the floor, he peered sideways into the bottom shelf, and gave a grunt of satisfaction. In the far corner there was a small wooden box, which had been placed so far back that he was able to reach it only with his fingertips. It proved to be a few inches square, and made of a black, polished wood. What puzzled him was that it appeared to have no lid; there were no hinges and no sign of a catch. It took him several minutes of careful study to realize that it had a sliding lid, so carefully crafted that its groove was virtually invisible. When he placed his hand firmly on the lid and pushed, it slid open. Inside, there was a brown glass bottle, and a curious device whose purpose eluded him. It was made of the quill of a bird, and one end was sharpened to a point; the other was covered with a small bulb made of a rubberlike substance. Niall uncorked the bottle and sniffed it; the liquid inside had a medical smell. He dipped the quill into it and squeezed the bulb; a yellow liquid was drawn up into the tube. But he still found it impossible to guess why the end was pointed. After squeezing the liquid back into the bottle, he replaced them in the box, and dropped it into the pocket of his tunic. Simeon would certainly find it interesting.
He concluded by looking at the upstairs rooms. But these, as Dravig had said, were empty and showed no sign of occupation; except for Dravig’s footprints, the dust on the floors was undisturbed.
Back in the bedroom, Dravig was waiting with that infinite patience Niall found so admirable — he had apparently not even changed his position since Niall left the room. Niall sat down heavily on one of the beds and surveyed the room. Dravig could sense his frustration. He asked with carefully controlled courtesy — so as not to imply that Niall had been wasting his time: “What message shall I take to the Death Lord?”