‘Those are the ones you should try your best to avoid,’ Dahlaine cautioned. ‘Eight legs means spiders, young man, and spiders are even more dangerous than snakes.’

‘I thought snakes were about as bad as it’s likely to get,’ Rabbit said.

Dahlaine shook his head. ‘Snake-venom kills - usually very quickly. Spider-venom paralyzes its prey. Most spiders spin webs that capture the prey. Then the spider bites the captive to keep it in one place until the spider’s ready to eat again. It’s not uncommon for a spider to have four or five meals tangled in the web, waiting to be eaten.’

‘That’s terrible!’ Rabbit exclaimed.

‘It gets worse,’ Dahlaine replied. ‘A spider doesn’t have jaws – or teeth - so it can’t chew its food. A significant part of its venom is a powerful digestive fluid that liquefies the internal organs and flesh of any creature it attacks. Then the spider’s able to suck that liquid out of whatever - or whoever - it’s having for supper. All that’s left when the spider finishes is skin and bones.’

‘We’d better come up with some way to kill them, then,’ Longbow said.

‘Fire, maybe?’ Keselo suggested.

‘Fire might be the best answer,’ Dahlaine agreed.

‘Is there any part of a spider’s body that’s not protected by the outer shell?’ Longbow asked.

Dahlaine thought about it. ‘The eyes, possibly.’ Then he smiled faintly. ‘That would give you quite a few targets, Longbow.’

‘Oh?’

‘A spider has eight eyes, you know.’

‘No,’ Longbow replied, ‘I didn’t know that. There might be a few possibilities there, then. Maybe this isn’t quite as hopeless as we first thought it was.’

3

Longbow hadn’t slept much in the past few days and he was bone-tired. He went some distance on out into the grassy basin and bedded down in the forest to the west of the geyser. Dahlaine’s suggestion that the turtle-shelled spiders might be an easy target for his arrows had lessened Longbow’s sense of helplessness, and he fell into a deep sleep almost before he’d laid his head down.

It was much later when he seemed to hear a tantalizingly familiar woman’s voice saying, ‘Go away, brave warrior, go away.’

He sat up quickly and looked around, but there was nobody there. He was almost positive that he remembered that rich-sounding voice, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on just whose voice it was.

He lay down again and went back to sleep almost immediately.

‘Go away, Longbow, protector of Zelana, go away. Put not thyself in needless danger. Stand aside, brave Longbow, stand aside.’

He jerked himself up into a sitting position again, but there was still nobody there.

This was beginning to become very irritating. ‘Don’t pester me,’ he grumbled, lying back down. ‘I’m trying to get some sleep.’

But yet again the woman’s voice came out of the night in an even more commanding tone. ‘In the name of Misty-Water, I command thee to go from here. This war is mine, not thine, and I will give thee victory if thou wilt but stand aside.’

And then the voice of Longbow’s dream was gone, and he sank once more into dreamless sleep.

‘Were you trying to reach me last night?’ he sent the soundless question out to Zelana as the sun rose the following morning.

‘It wasn’t me, Longbow,’ her silent voice came back. ‘Are you sure you weren’t just dreaming?’

‘I think I might be just a little too old to be one of the Dreamers, Zelana.’

‘Doesn’t that sort of depend on just exactly what you mean when you say “old”, Longbow?’ she asked archly.

‘Don’t do that,’ he scolded. ‘Whoever - or whatever - it was, it was trying very hard to persuade me to just pack up and go away.’

‘It certainly wasn’t me, then. I couldn’t live without you, dear, dear Longbow.’

‘Are we just about done playing?’ he asked her.

‘Sorry.’ She paused. ‘Do you think it might just have been the Vlagh - or one of its more intelligent servants?’

‘I don’t see how it could have been. Whoever it was gave me a command to go away in the name of Misty-Water, and there’s no way the Vlagh could know about her or have even the faintest idea of her significance to me.’

‘It could have been just a real dream, Longbow. I’ve occasionally had people tell me that there are times when dreams seem so real that the people who have those particular dreams can’t tell where reality leaves off and the dream begins.’

‘Well, maybe,’ Longbow said dubiously.

During the night Sub-Commander Andar had pulled his forces back to the third barricade, and, though it was probably futile, they’d laced the intervening open space with the now-customary poisoned stakes.

Longbow and Rabbit went on down to join their friends just before the sun rose.

‘You’re late,’ Andar rumbled in his deep voice.

‘Overslept,’ Longbow said with a shrug.

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Andar said. ‘From what I’ve been told, you know more about the bug-people than anyone else, so maybe you can explain just why they pull back every evening. Several hundred of their companions get killed every time they overrun one of our breast-works, but they just turn around and walk away when the sun goes down. Then they have to start over and recapture what they’d had right in their hands the previous day. Isn’t that sort of stupid?’

‘Stupid’s part of the nature of the bug-men,’ Rabbit told him. ‘It might just be that they don’t know that the sun’s going to come back tomorrow. For all they know, the sun dies late in the afternoon, and it’ll stay dark for the rest of eternity - it’s either that, or maybe Big-Mama gets lonesome when the sun goes down.’

‘Big-Mama?’

‘The Vlagh. If I understand what Lady Zelana told us correctly, the Vlagh’s the one who laid all the eggs that turned into the bug-people when they hatched. If she lays the eggs, doesn’t that make her mommy?’

Longbow glanced over the top of the barricade. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I see that your men planted stakes out to the front. That should bring the spider-creatures here. We need a dead one - fairly soon, I think.’

‘What for?’

‘So that we can take it apart and see if we can find any other weaknesses. Your archers aren’t really well-trained enough to drive arrows into a spider’s eye from a hundred paces away, are they?’