Interlude // The Basement, I

The wood was gray and cold and Bethil supposed perhaps that was the origin of stone. The stairs descended down into the dark, a dozen altogether, but she squeezed every bit of herself into the space of the uppermost step, against the basement door. She watched the single shaft of sunlight streaming through the keyhole.

Below, the spiders clattered in the darkness. The sound–ticatac tictac–tracked back and forth impatiently, and every three-dozen breaths a single, yellow-and-black-stripped leg reached slowly from the shadows to probe at the beam. Long as a chair leg and sharp as the dockmaster’s tongue, it would tap at the light with a violinist’s grace before withdrawing into the black.

She could smell their want.

They needed her flesh.

The keyhole shaft of light journeyed slowly down the stairs, pushing the spiders back to the basement’s depths, but hard experience has taught her to hate this false hope. Below, in the shadows, forty-eight dagger-legs shivered in anticipation against the packed earth floor.

The shaft stretched on, growing golden, then orange, then red. Finally the shaft quivered and faded into a sickly gray glow that conjured little but the shape of the keyhole itself.

And below Bethil heard them dancing on needle-sharp toes, tapping and probing. They studied the creak of each wooden step, the scrape of each stone in the wall. A symphony of giddy percussion, so that when the attack finally came, it was silent.

Without vision or hearing, Bethil’s only warning was a half-second of scent—a dull throb of earthiness punctuated by acrid stink—and then the pain of fangs sinking into her leg. Animal instinct seized hold and her legs ran blind, stepping out into the air above the obscured stairway. She toppled and with each impact her black vision flash red-green with pain until she rolled to a stop on the packed earth below. Something had broken in the fall, but she could no longer tell arm from leg in the chaos of the moment.

Fangs sunk into flesh again and she screamed.

The first layer of webbing silenced her, binding her jaw, then her hands, her legs. Downy threads robbed her of motion and touch. And then fangs sank deep again and she could feel the spiders inject their venom. Her flesh bulged, melted, mingled with their own. She could feel them rock and shove one another aside, jockeying for position.

Fangs, deep. Again and again.

And what was Bethil faded.

___________________

Absalom, Isle of Kortos

Date Unknown

Year Unknown

___________________

"They're ready for you."

Colonel Montand Jeggare cuts a severe silhouette in the doorway of a lavishly-appointed diplomats office. Late afternoon sunlight dappling the Foreign Quarter outside casts stark horizontal banding across Jeggare's gaunt features and gleams off of his spectacles.

"About time," the woman at the diplomat's desk indicates, swinging her feet off of it. The name plate reads Paraduke Royce Blackrose, but that's not her name. She is

"Captain Sinclair, you would do well to lose that arrogance before you step in front of the Grand Council." The Colonel warns, squaring his shoulders and standing up straight to try and posture himself as taller than Captain Sinclair is. Even in his thick-heeled boots he only comes up to her nose.

Captain Sinclair reaches into her pocket and produces a rolled cigarette and a tindertwig, striking the latter against the medals on the Colonel's chest as she pushes past him. He gasps in offense as she lights her cigarette and steps out into the hall.

"The Grand Council will be too busy shitting their pants after I tell them what we know," Sinclair says with a lopsided smile before taking a drag off of her cigarette. "Besides, what are they going to do, throw me in jail for being rude?"

The Colonel stares at her flatly, then sighs through his nose and follows lock-step beside her. "This is Absalom, Captain, they could do much worse than put you in the stockades."

Sinclair casts a side-long look at the Colonel and smiles. "Look, you worry about mobilizing our forces once we're giving the all-clear to intercede." She says, gesturing to him with her cigarette. "I'll focus on sweet-talking the council."

"Is that what you call what you do?" The Colonel says with a faint smile.

"Charm comes in all forms, Colonel." She says between drags on her cigarette. "Not all of them are sweet."