As Ludlow blinked after, however — wiping at his lips, then spitting one last bilious mouthful at his own feet — he finally perceived what threatened to shatter his sanity altogether. There were people clinging onto the creature’s back; perhaps a dozen. Minuscule figures, only visible for their lightness against the spider’s dark, but there.
Treating it, Good Lord, like it was some sort of mount. An island-sized elephant, without even the regulation howdah to keep them seated.
What sort of unholy sons of bitches . . . ?
At which point, peering yet closer, he made out that one of them might have red hair and a purple coat — and knew.
Geyer, whitened and dumbstruck, seemed to’ve seen it too. But Asbury simply stood there with tears rolling down his face, unable to distinguish spider from riders.
And quoted to himself, huskily, from Job — “Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.”
Only a second or so after Grandma was done talking, Old Woman Butte shook itself under Chess’s feet like a dreaming dog, so fierce it hurt even his semi-substantial flesh. He grabbed for Morrow’s and Yancey’s shoulders at once, too stunned to curse. Beneath the circle gathered atop the Butte, the ground turned black, empty as the Crack itself, though no one fell inside. Grandma stood unmoving, rock-paw hands still lifted to the sky; Chess looked up to see charcoal-coloured clouds corkscrewing around them, same way they had when the twister that’d been Ash Rook’s first miracle blew up.
“We’re lifting!” Carver hollered, petrified, wide eyes casting ’round in every direction. Chess glanced east, sized up the horizon and the sun’s height with a marksman’s instinctive sense of range, and saw the bluebelly was right — whatever the old Diné bitch had conjured, it was rising straight out of the Butte, bringing them along with it. The stuff they stood on no longer felt like stone, or even dirt — gone horridly soft, almost squelchy, like some overstuffed goose down mattress soaked in tar.
Morrow on his left hand, Yancey his right — they wrapped arms ’round him to get at each other, and damn, if he wasn’t well content to let ’em. Songbird (typically) had taken to the air at the first sign of trouble, hovering nevertheless beside Yiska, as if tethered; Sophy Love clutched wailing Master Gabriel tight, straining not to stagger, while Berta and Eulie clung close to Carver in their turn, like schoolgirls in a rainstorm.
Higher and higher the curving black mound rose, its yielding surface hardening underfoot, cracking and splitting as it befurred itself with bristling hairs. Eight massive ropes of tarry black hex-matter shot out and downward, each bending up at the same time into a joint that rose above them. The great black blimp-bag contracted amidships, swelling into two sections like some fat saloon gal, corseted tight. Lightning flashed and flickered, painting them all with hissing, variegated lights.
And then, with a final thunderclap, the storm clouds broke at last, washed away. The winter sunlight poured down over them; with a groan, Chess squinted ’gainst it, feeling it stab straight through his head.
Songbird whispered something in Chink-jabber Chess couldn’t spare the mojo to translate, though its sense was clear enough — finally, here was an event so crazed as to impress even her. Missus Love had given up trying to stand, and lay curled on her side, protecting Gabriel, saucer-eyed. Eulie and Berta dared a few cautious steps away from Carver, toward the edges of this living platform, but the moment they did the young Negro soldier almost collapsed.
He gawped ’cross at Morrow, who raised his eyebrows, as though to say: Yeah, it’s what you think it is, but what’re we gonna do about it?
Yet Carver stammered all the same, as if the words were being dragged out of him: “Ed, this . . . this is a . . . we’re — we’re on a giant . . .”
“A servant of Na’ashjéii Asdzáá, the Spider Who Weaves All, yes,” cut in Yiska, not quite brusquely enough to mask her own astonishment. She turned to Grandma, who had not lowered her massive stone arms, and managed a laugh. “Spinner, this working of yours will live in the songs until the end of the Age! To summon a Weaver alone, without even a living body to command — I will write your song myself! I will . . .” She trailed off, smile fading. “Spinner?”
The great figure still had not moved: arms upheld, its flat stone face immobile. Suddenly, Chess saw clearly all the separate pieces of bone and granite that made “Grandma” up, as if he’d never grasped before just how patchwork a construction it really was. One fell from its place, soon followed by another, with a gritty, grinding noise, coming apart by degrees. Then, with a rending crash, Grandma’s fossil-golem body collapsed, resolving into a mound of broken shards atop the titan arachnidan shell.
“Finished,” Yiska said, to no one in particular. “As you knew you would be, after such effort. Oh, Grandmother mine: I will remember you, always. I, and all others who benefit from your sacrifice here, your re-Balancing.”
Songbird goggled, far as her squinched eyes would let her. “We needed her!” she complained, finally.
“But we have you,” Yiska pointed out, matter-of-fact as ever. “And Gabriel Love. And, best of all . . .”
As one, they swivelled to look at Chess, significantly. Prompting the man himself to mutter, in turn — or perhaps just to think, not that there was all that much distinction ’tween the two these days: Great.
Yiska knelt to rap on the spider’s carapace, hard, like she was ordering up a hansom. “Follow the Crack,” she told it. “To its end. To Hex City.”
The magic that held up the spider-titan’s astonishing size ate the ground in mighty blurring leaps, moving so fast most of the riders had to flop down and grip the shell hairs death-tight to keep from flying off. The smeared-looking landscape shifted beneath them, wrenching at Chess’s missing guts. He looked backward once, and saw ribbons of liquid light trailing out behind them from the creature’s spinnerets, a cascade of red-gold and blue-green energies twining together as they stitched themselves into the earth. Behind the spider’s eyes, Yiska, Sophy Love’s babe and Songbird had wrapped themselves together, wove deep in their own power web, guiding this living shuttle as it knitted the world’s tapestry back together.
A few minutes’ watching was enough; Chess closed his own eyes, and held on grimly. He felt the closing Crack in every quarter, a boxcar door pressing him on all sides at once; every inch it narrowed made the world he clung to stabler, but also thinned away the raw hexation cloud feeding what scant substance he had left. So rather than lament, he set himself to the menial, painstaking work of drawing in every shred of it he could, a weaver’s prentice sweeping scraps from the loom.
Miles passed in minutes, slowing as they closed in on the City, and the depth of the wound being healed grew by fathoms. Before Chess knew it, they were passing what had to be the Texican troop at speed, t
hen onto the battlefield, where a hollering battalion of Mexes were just rushing the walls — the eastern gate, outside which Clo Killeen’s mortal remains kept vigil, while Ixchel Rainbow and her Enemy watched from its already cracked ramparts. It was a sight which sent Chess’s whole being humming with lightning-fed ire.
Two more magicians stood with his Enemy and Enemy’s enemy alike, one Injun, one Chinee. The larger of whom turned now to the smaller, observing, “See — I told you it was spiders.”
“Hmp,” was all the Chinaman — “Honourable Chu,” Chess’s hex-sense named him — had to say, in return.
Though fire-scorched and halfway levelled, the defensive ring of black stone ceiba trees had one last trick to play, rearing back to vicious life soon as the colossal spider’s legs touched down within ’em — lashing out with razor-edge branches to trap and score the chitinous limbs, making them spill viscous, steaming liquid. The spider gave a shriek like a ruptured boiler and slowed, staggering from side to side as it kicked its way free, only to be grappled once more; trees shattered glassily under its flailing limbs, widening the path of devastation. Morrow fisted a hand in the spider’s hairs, the other gripping Yancey’s so hard he’d have feared to hurt her, if her grip hadn’t been so equally tight on his, and held on for dear life. For a moment, he saw himself rodeo-ing atop two huge broncos roped together, with laughter bubbling like vomit in his throat.
While the careening spider spun nearly all the way about, Morrow risked a look back at the battlefield, and gulped again. Taking advantage of the path being cleared for them, the Mexes were already racing for the breach — no lack of balls, this comandante, though perhaps an egregious lack of brains. Morrow opened his mouth to shout a warning, but found Yancey already there before him.
Yiska — company comin’! Her psychic shout spiked through both Morrow’s temples, and he bit down on a yelp; judging by Yiska’s wince, it hadn’t been ticklesome for her, either. Gotta get through that gate first, and fast!