By the end of that day, Madig had sickened with a fever, so that he was unable to stand upright. He was lodged in a room at the top of the Death Lord’s palace, and even his father — also called Hallat — was forbidden to see him. Finally, when Hallat heard that Madig was close to death, he cast himself to the ground before the Death Lord and begged to be allowed to take leave of his son. The Death Lord granted his request, and allowed him to sit by Madig’s death bed. No one learned what passed between them; but a week after Madig’s death, his father followed him to the grave. Qisib was with him when he died — for Hallat, like his own father, was a friend rather than a servant — and saw that the loss of his son had deprived him of the will to live. The last words he spoke to Qisib were: “My son has been condemned to death.”
When the Death Lord next returned to Cibilla in the hot season, he found the town in a state of panic. In the course of a year, thirty more of his human servants had disappeared. Some had been shepherds who had been tending their flocks in the foothills. But others had been taken at night from the city itself; one man had even been kidnapped from his home while his wife and two sons were asleep. The guard had been doubled, and slaves began to build an embankment of earth around the town. And still men continued to disappear without trace. What caused so much disquiet was that no one had even caught a glimpse of the kidnappers.
It was Qisib who suggested that perhaps the enemy was entering the town from the sea. The Death Lord immediately ordered guards to patrol the shore line. Yet on that very night, two of the guards disappeared — one from the embankment, one from the seashore. When the Death Lord learned of this latest outrage, he sent a hundred spider balloons to scour the surrounding country, as far as the Gray Mountains. But it was Tubin the Tracker, working alone, who found the body of one of the guards, buried in a shallow grave within a mile of the town. Both arms had been cut off at the elbow, and both legs removed at the knees. This was the only body that was ever found.
Now the Death Lord fell into a rage and swore revenge. (This, Niall realized, was a considerable admission; unlike men, spiders were ashamed of strong emotion; it was a point of honor never to admit to it.) He called together all his counselors — of whom Qisib was the oldest and most respected — and announced that he would search out the enemy and destroy him. Overawed by his wrath — as well as sharing his anger — most of them agreed that the enemy must be punished at all cost. Only Qisib, and an old general named Amalek, advised caution. Qisib felt that an enemy who was so skilled in concealment was more dangerous than the Death Lord realized. But Kasib was so angry that their advice was ignored.
And since everyone agreed that the enemy must be hiding in the Gray Mountains, and since it had always been Kasib’s intention to lay claim to all the northern lands, Amalek was ordered to assemble an army of thousands of spiders and human warriors. These were gathered on the plain of Cibilla, then marched north to the Valley of the Great Lake. The human warriors marched along the coastal plain, while wolf spiders scaled the mountains and searched every valley. (Niall could imagine the tireless wolf spiders clambering up and down mountains as if they were hillocks.) Four days later, the army regrouped on the shores of the Great Lake, and prepared to begin the invasion of the northern mountains. The human soldiers, under Amalek, would march up the western coastal strip; the wolf spiders would once again scour the mountains and valleys; the death spiders, under Kasib the Warrior, would march eastward to the river valley that gave access to the wastes of Kend.
On the day before the armies of Kasib prepared to march northward, the weather was stifling and humid, without a breath of wind. But in the late afternoon, the sun disappeared behind a great black cloud, and a cold wind sprang up from the southeast. By early evening the wind had turned into a gale, and the rain was so heavy that it beat the canvas tents of the foot soldiers to the ground. Kasib gave the order for the army to take shelter under the southern flank of the mountains, where a great cliff offered some refuge from the wind. Kasib himself, together with his counselors and commanders, crossed the river on a pontoon bridge built by his engineers, and struggled to the north side of the valley — the wind was now so strong that they had to cling together to avoid being blown away — and took shelter in the mysterious city carved into the face of the cliff. There, from inside a deserted palace, they saw the pontoon bridge swept away by the torrent. The Death Lord was unconcerned, convinced that the storm would soon blow itself out. But by midnight, the gale was stronger than ever. In the early hours of the morning, they heard the sound that Qisib had feared (for a sixth sense told him that they were on the brink of disaster), the thunder of waters as the lake burst its bank. Qisib had already shut his mind to the misery being endured by the spiders exposed to the storm, but now he was overwhelmed by their anguish as the torrent struck them and smashed them against the rocky wall of the mountain. Within a minute, all had been destroyed; the force of the water swept the valley clean, leaving behind not a single trace of the mighty army that had been encamped there.
By dawn the next day, the rain and the wind had ceased, but the whole valley had turned into a brown river that ran toward the sea. The Death Lord and his retainers were forced to spend another day and night in the deserted city before the waters had subsided enough to permit their escape. The sun now blazed down on a deserted wilderness of mud.
The Death Lord was in a dangerous situation, and he knew it. Unlike human beings, spiders possess little imagination, and are therefore disinclined to exaggerate their problems by brooding on them. Yet it was clear to Kasib that he had lost most of his army, and that if his human subjects should hear about this and decide to revolt, the spiders would be annihilated. But then, since there were no survivors, there was no one who might carry the story back to the ears of men. This is why Kasib the Warrior decided to return to the spider city, claiming a great victory in the north, and keeping silent about the disaster. For months afterwards the bodies of men and spiders were cast up along the coast on the incoming tide; but these bodies were instantly burned by squads of slaves, to prevent knowledge of the disaster from becoming known among men.
The stratagem worked. Men never learned of what had happened in the Valley of the Dead, and the Death Lord continued to reign as if he had a million warriors at his command.
But the unknown enemy from the north continued to make incursions into the realm of the Spider Lord, killing shepherds, kidnapping guards, even destroying a death spider with their arrows. No one ever saw them — they seemed to possess the gift of invisibility. This is why, on the advice of his counselor Qisib the Wise, the Death Lord decided to build a great wall across the Valley of the Dead, a wall that was too high even for humans to scale. It took half a century to build and cost the lives of twenty thousand slaves. (In the time of Qisib’s successor, Greeb, it led to a slave revolt that ended in the death of thousands of spiders and their human servants.) Before it was half-completed, Qisib had passed into the realm of the unliving. But from the moment the building began, the incursions ceased, and the Death Lord and his descendants were able to live in peace.
The voice of Qisib became silent. Every spider present was deeply moved by his narrative. The images of destruction were so vivid that it was as if they had all been present when the lake burst its banks and destroyed so many lives within seconds. None would ever forget the image of the valley on the morning after the catastrophe, a waste of brown-black mud and pools of standing water. (Qisib’s mind had conveyed it exactly as he had seen it, and again Niall was amazed at the photographic accuracy of detail in the spider imagination.) Suddenly aware once more of his surroundings, Niall realized that the tiny chamber had become intolerably hot and stuffy. Yet this seemed unimportant compared with the significance of the story he had just heard.