We had a dead man's thirty gold in the pack and two of our own dead on the floor, and a little while left on the light. That is how it stood when the dwarf walked in.

He came up the hall with a lantern held out in front of him, which is more sense than most people show in that place. A red-haired dwarf, with crystals braided into his beard so that they caught the light and threw it back. He said his name was Omen. He had chain on him and a shield and a short sword and a crossbow, and he was looking for a company to go down with. We had a company and were short of people. Nobody asked him much. You do not, down there. He had a lantern and he had come to us, and that was enough for one night.¹

Charlotte had the lead again. She asked if we knew how badly that goes. We did. She filled her lantern from the flask and said that was good for an hour.

One word of Spider

There was a door off the big room nobody had been through. Charlotte had pushed it open on another day and seen the webs and shut it again. She said if it was hers to decide we would set the room on fire first and go in after. I said I was against it. I have seen what came of the last room we put fire to, and what was lying in it, and I will not do that twice.²

I opened it instead. The webs were not at the height of a man. They were above, thick in the ceiling, and the ceiling went up into the dark farther than the light reached. Anister said he had some skill with animals, and we had met spiders in the woods that summer and lived, and could he not try it. I said I had one word of their speech. It is the word for peace. It is the only one I have.

I said it, in an ordinary voice, not loud, and went forward a step. Something clicked and clacked in the webs above, a good many somethings, and did not come down.³

Anister told me to hold where I was. He said we should bring them food. We had dead stingbats on the floor behind us and no use for them. Charlotte said they had been at her eyes already and she did not care to carry one. Anister asked her whether she would rather be eaten by a spider. She said she would rather set the room on fire. He asked her, please, not to.

He picked up a stingbat himself and carried it in and held it out, and made a noise that he said was the sound one spider makes to another when it means no harm. I could not tell you if it was. They hissed at him. It was a warning and he knew it for one, and he stopped. They were in the ceiling and off to the side of us, more than one, not far.⁴

We dragged Arforth in after it. He had asked to be left with the dead, and we had meant the other room, but I do not think he would have minded. I thought about asking Silvanus for a small light, a red one, something I could see them by without putting a torch in their eyes. Anister said they were waiting on their meal and we were standing between them and it. So we backed out and shut the door and let them eat. Through the door we heard them scurrying. Anister said they would be wrapping it up for later, unless they were hungry enough to eat it now.

Two hours

We had been through the big room once, for an hour, and found thirty gold in a dead hand. I did not believe that was all of it. Anister did not either. So we went back through the niches, Anister and Omen and I, moving the dead to look under them and putting them back. Charlotte stood in the middle of the room with the only light and listened for the hall.

She heard voices once, far off, people talking somewhere down in the dark, and then nothing. Nothing came.⁵

An hour of it and we had nothing. I asked Silvanus for my good fortune back. I told him I had fed his spiders that day and kept the peace with them, which is more than most men who go down there can say. He did not give it. Omen said it was a good thing it was a short night, because we were no good at this. Nobody argued.⁶

Anister wanted to look in on the spiders. We opened the door and I said my word again. Arforth was gone. Not a scrap of him. They hissed at us, and then they went on in their own speech, which I do not have, and it seemed to us they were more interested in the two stingbats than in us. We kept the stingbats back for later and shut the door.⁷

We went back to the niches. Another hour. Charlotte stood in the light and nothing came by. Near the end of it she said, from the middle of the room, to check that one. Anister said he had been through that one many times. He went through it once more. Inside the skull, wedged where it would not rattle, was a ring with a small diamond in it. He held it up to the lantern. It was worth more than the thirty gold by a long way. Anister said he had hoped for more. It is a ring with a diamond in it. I do not know what he was hoping for.⁸

Who woke me

We went back to the door a third time. I said my word. Nothing answered. Anister said he would make a comfortable noise, and made one, a low slow hum that he said is what a great many spiders make together when they have eaten well and mean to sleep. Omen said it sounded like a man after a big dinner. It was something like that. Whatever it was, nothing hissed. They were asleep in the ceiling.⁹

The webs were low in a few places and high in most. Anister said we should crouch and go in and see what was around the corner, and that he and the dwarf should go first. I went first. I wear the most iron. I have said that before and I will likely say it again, and it will likely go the same way.

I got down low and got around the corner a little way, and my shoulder took a web and pulled it, and the whole ceiling hissed at once. I held out a stingbat and said peace. They did not want peace. Omen said from behind me that I was in plate and he did not know why I had been the one to sneak. I said I had done well with the talking, which was true as far as it went.¹⁰

They were black, with a white patch on the belly in the shape of a skull where a widow spider has her hourglass, and about the size of a big dog. Omen is not much over five feet himself.

Charlotte backed off a step with a flask of oil in her hand and told them she would burn their whole room down around them if they did not leave us be. Anister said if she did we would all burn with it. The spiders did not seem to follow either argument. Omen put a crossbow bolt up into the webs and it went in among them and hit nothing.

Then they came down on me. Three of them, out of the ceiling, all at my head, as if the rest of the company were furniture. Two of them could not get through the iron. The third found the join at my neck, and I felt it, a pinch through the iron, and then it was off again.¹¹

Anister put an arrow past Omen's shoulder into one of them and did it about as much harm as I had done the webs. He started forward to stand in front of Omen, and Omen told him, in so many words, that he had chain and a shield and a sword and did not need protecting. He said it the way a dwarf says things. Anister said fair enough, he had forgotten.

I swung at the nearest and missed it clean, and got back through the door. Charlotte slung a stone up into the webs and it went nowhere. Omen gave up on his crossbow, backed out after us, and pulled the door shut behind him. Something rattled it from the other side for a while. Then it stopped.¹²

We left them the two stingbats. Omen said let them eat and go back to sleep. Anister said we could always put Nimue in there. Omen said she was already dead. We went through what she had left, a dagger, flint and steel, two torches. I was wearing her cloak already. There was a wound on her neck gone purple. I did not look at it long.

The little room

There was a small room to the north nobody had searched. Charlotte had the only light, and the rest of us had shields on our off arms, so there was some talk about who would carry a torch. I asked Silvanus for light. He said no. Omen offered to help me ask again. Anister said never mind, and lit a torch and held his sword in the other hand.

Ten minutes in that room and we were sure of it. There was nothing. No door, no coin, nothing. Anister took out a piece of chalk and wrote DOOR on the floor, small, with a small arrow beside it, and explained that the next time a crowd of strangers came through he meant to swear to them there was no secret door in there, so they would hunt for it while we went the other way. It is the kind of plan Anister has.¹³

Charlotte said, "Guys."

She had seen them first, coming up from the south. Seven men. Anister said, in a whisper pitched to carry, not to tell them about the secret door. Then Charlotte's light went out, and Anister's torch was all we had.

They were bare to the waist, every one of them, with a strap across the chest and spiked caps on their heads and fur at the tops of their boots. Some of them had oiled themselves. A couple had something strapped in their mouths that I did not understand and did not want to. The biggest wore a metal mask over his whole face. He pointed at Charlotte first. Then he saw Anister around the corner and said, "Answer me, dwarf."

Anister asked what he wanted with our leader.

"Trade," the man said. He said she looked as if she could be of some use, and asked whether there were others. He said he had no use for dwarves.

Anister told him the rest of us were dwarves too, hairy ones, who took orders from nobody, and that the rest of the company had gone through that door. He pointed at the spider room. The man told him to line up his people so he could pick one to sell. Anister said the humans were all in the room down there to the right, and pointed again.¹⁴

The man came around the corner and looked at Omen and me. He asked what about those two. Anister said we smelled bad. Omen said he was a dwarf, and the man did not want dwarves, did he remember.

The man said he would take that one, and whatever was behind that door, and he would give us fifty gold for her. He said it was a fair price. Omen said we did not sell companions. The man said it was a fair price for woman flesh.

Anister asked how many of them there were. Seven. He said it was always seven. Seven skeletons in that room, seven stingbats, and now seven of these. He told the man, he called him Conan, that we did not much care for the people who had gone through the other door, and he was welcome to all of them. The man said he did not mind opening that door. But he wanted that one, and he pointed at Charlotte again.

They were not there to kill anyone. They were there to buy, or to take, and a man like that counts a woman the way I count a hen. Anister wanted to charge him. Omen asked him whether he wanted the four of us dead.

There are three angry spiders behind that door, and seven men who mean to open it, and Charlotte standing in the dark with a cold lantern. The man has put a price on her. I do not have an answer for him yet.¹⁵