Yet that great host of spiders was holding back, and Dion knew that Penthos’s fire was not achieving that, nor was the sacred symbol of Armes she bore. If the things descended now then many of them would die, but sheer numbers would overwhelm Dion’s little band. But their matriarch, that great, bloated monster, she would surely die as well.

“Come on,” Harathes spat. “Now’s our chance. We’re looking straight at what we’ve come here for.”

“We’re here for more than that. Hold fast,” Dion ordered. This was a dark, terrible place, a mass grave of all the luckless fools who had trod this path before them and whose bones now cracked underfoot, but there was nowhere that the Light of Armes could not penetrate.

“Sod me, to think I offered to come here alone and just steal the fucking things. I didn’t think the prophecy was so literal,” Lief complained.

“Quiet now,” Dion told him, laying a hand on his shoulder. “It speaks.”

“What do you mean, it speaks?” Harathes demanded. “They can’t speak. They’re animals.”

“Anything that grows old and large enough must approach wisdom,” Penthos intoned. “And approach evil too, often enough, but time suffices to bring wit even to such creatures as this, and Madam Spinner here is many centuries old.”

“Then killing it will do the world a great service,” Harathes snapped, but he held back at Dion’s order, grinding his teeth in frustration.

And she heard it in her mind, opened by Armes’s wisdom.

What do you want? A resonant, female voice, but that was just her imagination gifting humanity and character where there was none.

“We are here because we are sworn to destroy a man—a magician who has styled himself a god, and done much evil,” Dion declared, staring down her companions until they understood that she had not just been speaking rhetoric for them. She guessed that their cause would mean nothing to this creature, though. She doubted that “evil” meant much to a spider. The spinners of webs kept no mirrors, after all.

“Darvezian, he calls himself, a wielder of Dark power, a man given over entirely to that Darkness.” The same Darkness that this spider matriarch was born of, but everyone knew that the things of the Dark fought among themselves. “Darvezian, who has inherited the works of those Dark Lords who came before him, to become a terror to the world.”

I know of him. A cautious answer, but of course this creature knew Darvezian. The tales told of their meeting, two products of the same ancient evils. There had been a time, decades before, when the man-god had amused himself by sending his enemies into these woods as offerings to the matriarch and her host, but he was a thing of whims, and had moved on to other punishments.