The man stammered: “Forgive me, sire, I did not recognize you.”
“No need for apology. You did your duty.” He crossed the room and opened the door, which led to a further flight of stairs. The overseer seized his hand as he went past.
“You see, sire, this place is supposed to be secret. . .”
“Please, say no more about it.” He disengaged his hand with some difficulty and mounted the stairs; Grel followed behind. Niall could sense his amusement.
The next door led into a room that was obviously a warehouse, piled high with folded spider balloons. The same was true of the next floor, and the next. The sixth floor was occupied by large tanks of porifids, and wooden containers of the white, wormlike grubs on which they were fed; these smelled considerably worse than the porifids.
At the head of the steps leading to the seventh floor stood a tall death spider, whose natural dignity and grace reminded Niall of Dravig. He stood back to allow Niall to enter, then lowered himself to the ground in homage. As they exchanged formal greetings, Niall realized that he had already met the commander of the aerial survey. Asmak had been present on the previous day, at the trial of Skorbo’s former associates. They had not communicated directly; but since Niall had shared the consciousness of every spider in the room, he had become aware of their individual identities. Now he felt as if he was encountering an old friend.
The formalities over, the spider waited respectfully for Niall to speak first. “The Lord Dravig advised me to come and see you.”
“I am honored. In what way can I be of service?”
“As the commander of the aerial survey, you must be familiar with the lands to the north?”
“I have flown over them many times.”
“Dravig believes that Skorbo’s killers came from these northlands.”
“That is possible. But it is also possible that they came from the south, east, or west.”
“Where do you think they came from?”
The spider made a gesture whose human equivalent would have been shaking his head. “Dravig asked me the same question. And I had to admit that I could not answer.”
“Dravig says there are legends of an underground city. Have you any idea where that might be?”
“None. If there is such a place, it is so well concealed that our patrols have never even suspected its existence.”
Niall remembered the underground city of Dira, and realized how difficult it would be for an aerial patrol to detect its existence.
“Do your patrols fly close to the ground?”
“Sometimes. But it can be dangerous, particularly in the mountains. That is how Skorbo crashed.”
“Skorbo crashed? Do you know where?”
“Yes.”
Niall felt a tingle of excitement. “Could you take me there?”
“Of course.”
“How far is it?”
“Only a few hours — if the wind is blowing in the right direction.”
“Ah, yes.” Niall had forgotten the wind. It was, in fact, possible for a spider balloon to fly against the wind; the spider could use its will power to create an opposing force, so the balloon chose a path between two vectors. Niall had experienced the effect on his return journey from the Delta. But it was exhausting work, like rowing a boat against the current.
“But of course, it is unnecessary to wait for the wind to change.”
“Unnecessary?” Niall failed to understand him.
Asmak said: “I am familiar with the area and I can describe it to you.”
Niall said politely: “Then please do so.”
“Would my lord care to follow me?” Asmak turned and led the way across the room. Puzzled and intrigued, Niall followed him up another flight of stairs. The door at the top led out onto a flat roof, which was surrounded by a crenellated parapet. The sky overhead had turned to a deep blue, and stars were visible on the eastern horizon. But in the west, the landscape was bathed in red sunlight. The wind that blew from the mountains carried a hint of snow.
Asmak led him to the edge of the roof that faced northward. The mountains were almost invisible in blue shadows; only the western slopes reflected the setting sun. Niall leaned against the parapet, placing his foot in the embrasure.
Asmak raised his tarsal claw and pointed toward the mountains — a gesture that spiders had learned from their human servants. “All these lands that you can see are the domain of the Death Lord.”
As he spoke, Niall experienced a curious sensation, as if his body had become as light as a feather, and was floating up into the air. It was so unexpected that he reached out in panic and gripped the parapet with both hands. Contact with the cold stone made him realize that he was still standing securely on the roof. Asmak said apologetically: “I beg your pardon. I should have warned you. . .”
With a twinge of embarrassment, Niall realized that the illusion had been due to the spider’s power of suggestion. As soon as he relaxed, he once again felt himself rising gently from the roof, and floating out above the rooftops. For a moment or so, his mind divided into two parts, one of which continued to be aware of his body. Then, fascinated by the panorama that was unfolding below him, he forgot his body, and became absorbed in the strange sensation of flying through space.
What was happening was that the spider was describing a typical reconnaissance flight, exactly as a human being might describe it in words. But since he was using images and sensations, Niall experienced what he was “saying” as a series of visual impressions. Never before had he experienced such a clear sense of sharing the mind of another — not even at the trial of Skorbo’s associates, when he had been privileged to enter the collective consciousness of the spiders. And it was, he now realized, as a consequence of that experience that he was now able to enter the mind of Asmak.
He could see the city — which was bathed in sunlight — as clearly as if he was in a spider balloon. Asmak’s recall of detail was clearly extraordinary; he knew this terrain so well that his mind had photographed it with the accuracy of a camera — only a blurring effect toward the horizon revealed that this was merely a mental image. The mountains in the distance looked exactly as they looked from the roof of the palace. To the northwest of the city, across a range of low hills, Niall could see the city of the bombardier beetles, with its twisted red towers which were actually spiral cones made of beeswax. As they floated over the river that divided the city from east to west, Niall looked with curiosity toward the east — a region he never explored — and saw that the river lost itself in a region of low hills covered with woodland. Among these undulating treetops, he was intrigued to see a building like a half-derelict castle on a hilltop, and pointed toward it. “What is that?”
“A ruin. This land is full of ruins.”
The words were factual, but for Niall they brought a wave of melancholy, an image of this land as it had been in the remote past, when men took it for granted that they were lords of the Earth.
Now they were passing over the slave quarter, flying low enough to see the people who thronged the streets. What puzzled Niall was that all the slaves looked absolutely identical, as if they were all copies of the same person. Then the answer dawned on him: to a spider, all human beings looked alike.
Beyond the slave quarter lay an area of empty houses which had once been the middle-class residential area of the city. Slaves had no use for such houses, with their overgrown back gardens that might shelter dangerous predators, so this part of the city had been left to fall into ruin.
Soon they were passing over the northern edge of the city, where the main road turned northwest toward the city of the bombardier beetles. Another road, obviously in a poor state of repair, continued toward the mountains, then lost itself in an area of brown heather, which clothed the slopes of a low range of hills. On the far side of these lay more dense woodland, in which the trees were so close together that the ground was invisible.
Among the treetops to the right, Niall glimpsed a sheet of water that reflected the blue of the sky. “What is that?”
“An abandoned quarry.”
“Could we see it?”
As if changing direction in midair, the spider obediently veered to the east. A moment later they were poised above a water-filled quarry that was at least a mile wide — it reminded him of the disused marble quarry that the bombardier beetles used for their explosive exhibitions. As far as Niall could see, no flowing streams fed this enormous stagnant lake. On its northern edge, a vertical cliff face plunged into the dark water. But the southern edge of the quarry shelved more gently, and there was even a kind of beach. As Niall looked down at this he saw something that made his heart leap: a gently heaving surface of brown lakeweed that covered the shallows to a distance of about fifty yards from the shore. As far as he could see, it was similar to the mat of lake-weed that he had found in the abandoned hideout. But when he tried to look more closely, the image blurred, as he reached the limit of the spider’s perceptions.