Chapter 79: The Guillotine Strikes
The Red Widow spider shrieked in pain .
Behind her , in the background of the glade , the crimson brood was dying — the dozen spiderlings squeezed and crushed one after another by the autonomous shed segments , the brood’s disposable ordnance meeting the Choir-Eater’s disposable pieces and losing , the small bodies bursting their red venom uselessly into the bloodglow-lit dark . Inside the joined bleed bark , both teams watched , holding the anticipation of a fight whose outcome neither could call .
The Widow did the thing a creature did when the thing eating it would not stop on its own .
She spat web — a great volume of it , onto her own wounded leg and into the open mouth of the Choir-Eater , fouling the draw , clogging the circular aperture with the one substance it could not instantly consume . The suction stopped for an instant . The Choir-Eater’s jaws loosened , the feeding interrupted , the mouth working against the silk packed into it —
— and the Widow took the instant .
She retreated on her hind legs , her front kept toward the predator , never turning her back , the oldest discipline of a thing that had survived among worse things by never showing them her spine . Ten meters . Fifteen . And as she retreated she spat , upward and outward , silk crossing the high ground of the forest tree to tree , strand after strand laid across the canopy in a pattern that was not flight and not defense but construction .
Several strands landed on the joined bleed bark .
On the hideout tree .
The teams went still . Even Doctor stopped writing — the feather lifted from the parchment , the man gone as motionless as the rest , every body in the fused trunk holding the one discipline the tree survived on .
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The Choir-Eater sucked in the web that had fouled its mouth .
It cleared the aperture , the clogging silk drawn down with everything else , and it faced the retreating Widow , and the human eyes along its segments showed fury in the only register a thing with that many eyes could show it . It coiled . It squeezed the long body down against the forest floor and raised the middle segment into an arch , the predatory posture , the loading of a thing about to leap .
It lunged .
A jump high and long both at once , the seventeen meters of it leaving the ground and rising nearly to the canopy , crossing the distance the Widow had put between them — and the Widow retreated , but the length of the thing was more than her retreat had accounted for , and she could not fully clear it . The Choir-Eater reverted in the air . The body turning over , its back coming to face the ground — and it landed inverted and wriggled like the centipede shaped it was , faster than the eye tracked , the mouth and the front segments driving low and going under the Widow before she could account for a thing that did not strike from the front .
She had kept her front to it .
It had gone beneath her .
The jaws locked on her abdomen . And the abdomen did not bleed — darkness came out of it instead , the shadow-substance that ran in the apex of the northern web , small strands of it pulled from the wound into the circular mouth , the Choir-Eater finding under her chitin the one thing it had crossed the glade to eat .
The Red Widow withheld the pain .
And she pulled .
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The web she had built while retreating finished tightening , and it was not a web anymore .
It was a blade . The silk drawn so tight and so close along its frame that the strands had stopped being strands and become a single pale plane , a sheet of thread hung suspended between the trees on anchor-lines that ran taut to a dozen trunks at once , the whole structure loaded like a drawn bow . Each strand of it sharp and abrasive the way synthetic manja was sharp — the glass-coated kite-string that took a finger before the hand knew it had touched anything — except there were thousands of them , packed edge to edge into one continuous cutting face , a guillotine of silk strung across the glade and catching the bloodglow as the one bright thing in all the dark .
And the anchor-lines ran , several of them , to the joined bleed bark .
To the tree the teams were hiding in .
Kei saw it . The whole team saw it . And the VDU fired across Kei’s awareness in the instant the structure resolved .
*[ RED WIDOW’S INFAMOUS ATTACK — WEB GUILLOTINE . STAY SHARP . THE TREE MIGHT BREAK . BE READY TO DISENGAGE AND RUN . ]*
Kei braced .
" Brace , " he told Asp through the thin seam of trunk between their fissures , the word low , flat , carrying no further than her concealment . " It is anchored to us . "
Doctor braced . Rapax . The Rite Cleric — each of them reading the guillotine for what it was and setting themselves against what it would do . And Tula , a little apart down the seam , too far for a low voice to reach and impossible to warn without a shout that would give the tree away , was not told . The team could not risk the sound . The team could not risk coming out . Tula sat in her fissure and did not know what had been strung across the forest above her .
The Widow cried out , and she pulled .
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The blade came down .
It descended from its suspended state in a single sweeping fall , the pale plane dropping out of the air toward the Choir-Eater on the forest floor , and it landed across the long body and cut — three segments , two meters each , six meters of the creature severed clean from itself in one stroke . But the support strands that had held the blade pulled taut under the force and did not break , not on the first strike , and the guillotine returned to its suspended position the way a thing on a tensioned line returned . The Choir-Eater wriggled in pain . It stopped sucking at the Widow’s abdomen . It tried to wriggle clear .
The Widow , freed , retreated two steps and pulled again — twice , in unison .
The blade descended swift , at an angled edge , the plane not yet fully stagnant from the first strike and coming down canted — and it cut again , two more segments off the black chitinous trunk . And this time some of the support strands could not hold the tension the swinging built . They tore free — and they did not tear clean . The silk’s adhesion was strong enough that the strands took the tree bark with them where they pulled , and the trunks they were anchored to began to break , trunk and branch giving way across the glade under a force the wood had not been grown to bear .
The third pull came as the blade retreated to its position .
And in that small window the Choir-Eater — nine meters now , cut down from the seventeen it had been, from the twenty it had dropped out of the canopy as , disadvantaged by the very length that had made it apex , seeing that it would not be fast enough to clear the next descent of the blade — stopped wriggling .
It made a sound .
A rattling — a stridulation , the long body producing it from somewhere in the segmented chitin — and across its skin small eyes opened . Countless all at once . Popping open along every segment , and no two of them alike : some human like , some the eyes of beasts , some of birds ; some with the vertical slit of a reptile ; some clouded and blind ; some milk-white with neither pupil nor iris ; some only black , a sclera with no light in it at all . Hundreds of eyes . Thousands . Opening on the cornered creature like a thing turning its whole surface into a single act of looking .
The Caedis members saw it from the hideout .
And a foreboding swept through every one of them — the wordless certainty , arriving in each body at once , that something dangerous was about to happen , that the eyes opening were not a defense the way teeth were a defense , that the thing the Choir-Eater had stopped wriggling to do was worse than being cut . The Red Widow sensed it too . But she was in the momentum of the third pull , committed to it , the blade already beginning its descent .
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The Umbra High Cleric’s voice broke the silence .
The protocol they had held since the fight began — every shadow domain dark , every voice stilled , nothing given to the glade — broken by the Master practitioner who had supported Rada through the run and read the hunting call and named the berserk for what it was , his voice tearing out across the fissures :
" EVERYONE GUARD YOUR MIN— "
The word stopped .
Not forcefully . Not cut off by anything that reached him . It stopped the way a thing stops when the one saying it has ceased to want to say it — purposely , mid-syllable , the warning abandoned by the mouth that had begun it .
The Umbra High Cleric stopped speaking .
He came out of his fissure .
He jumped down to the forest floor — a high jump , the drop long , and he met the ground with none of the means a Master practitioner met a drop with , no domain , no ability , nothing to break the fall , landing on his legs as a man with no training would land . His right ankle bent under him and broke . A small sound — a *tut* , bone giving — and the leg went wrong beneath him .
His face registered nothing .
No pain . No alarm . The blankness of a man whose mouth had stopped because there was no longer anyone behind it to keep speaking — and he turned , the broken leg dragging , and he walked . Toward no direction the glade contained . An abstract heading , a line that meant something only inside whatever the opened eyes had put behind his own , the Master practitioner limping calmly across the kill-ground toward a destination that did not exist .
He had gone a few steps .
A six-meter shed segment — one of the lengths the guillotine had cut from the Choir-Eater , still autonomous , still hunting — turned toward the moving body , and leaped , and came down on him .
It crushed him to mush against the forest floor .
And his face , in the last of it , registered nothing at all .
