CHAPTER THREE: THE LONG ARMS OF THE LAW
She was easily eight feet tall and wore not a single stitch of clothing. It was this simple, latter fact that allowed her gender to be distinguished, though the details of her more feminine anatomy were missing. That is to say her sex was more akin to that of a weathered Greek statue of Venus; bearing all the hallmark traits of a female but none of the specifics. This was plainly visible as her glossy black flesh reflected the ambient light of thin, glowing, crystalline rivulets, which crisscrossed the surfaces of the chamber. Her exposed skin did not seem smooth per se but rather it was chatoyant and at times seemed to ripple unnaturally. In fact, her skin was textured in such a way that it almost seemed like an exoskeleton, yet there were no gaping joints like that of an insect. Instead, her flesh bent, flexed and stretched when she moved and when she talked just as it would on any human. Alas, she was not human and this was all too apparent. For eight reddish eyes lined either side of her vaulted forehead, separated by a wide African nose and full lips. A thick crop of white hair, like the gossamer spun by the giant spider, hung down her back and long, dangerous talons tipped her each of her thirty fingers and ten toes.
Indeed, he had counted them three times. The Captain saw six arms and two legs; five digits on each. The same number as the rest of the creatures that roamed in and out of his vision, to whom she spoke and seemed to command. Indeed, by her very air and posture, she seemed to be the one in charge.
Through his Transdimensional Aural-Sensitive Goggles ™, the only item they did not remove from him as perhaps they believed these were his actual eyes, the Captain could clearly see a powerful life force at work in the gargantuan woman. Her living aura rippled and wavered like her skin. It undulated, almost like a fire, whereas a common aura tended to have slowly shifting mottled colors that hovered just outside the form. He would almost say she seemed to have life forces; plural. Was this the aura of a goddess? Much to his relief, it also shined a very bright, solid, and trustworthy white. In his experience, this meant she was honorable. She was noble. She could possibly be reasoned with unless, as he suspected, he was now a very dastardly criminal in all eight of her eyes.
She seemed the sort to favor justice and be very permanent about exacting it. Her every step was calculated. When she spoke in that strange amalgam of chitters and clicks that were the language of these creatures, the Captain could not understand a word, but he did not need Ghost-Tongue’s empathic senses to detect an air of command. That is to say, she behaved like a soldier and even more so like an officer; a proud, honorable officer who treated the enemy with respect, even when they were lined up against a wall. She was the sort to offer a blindfold and a cigarette. There may even be polite banter in the long walk to the last stand.
The Captain knew this was all speculation, but he would still cling to optimism. She had at least half a brain and as he had deduced from the more rounded features of her figure she was certainly all woman. She would take a shine to him, and who could blame the poor girl? She was in the presence of Captain Tripp Vaguely! The swooning would commence at any moment! He was sure of this even as he dangled from the ceiling, bound once again in spider silk but now fully cocooned save a thin wispy patch over his face. Alas, this silk had come from the spider people themselves. It did not seem different, at least not with the naked eye. A few hours in his lab might reveal otherwise but at the moment he would have to believe they were the same resilient fibers he had experienced when battling the giant spider.
“I suppose they’ll eat us,” said Ghost-Tongue
“Oh that’s right,” Tripp replied, “you’re here too.”
“So glad you noticed, Cap’n,” the stilt Indian retorted dryly.
“Well since you brought it up, what makes you think they’re cannibals, old boy?”
“They’d have to be human to be cannibals by eating us. We’re so much wild game to them, sir.”
The Captain harrumphed, “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“And I believe,” said Ghost-Tongue, “spiders usually eat that which they wrap up in their silk.”
“Again, I fear you are correct, Jobi,” answered the Captain. “But if we are going to continue along this line of logic and assume these creatures are inclined to behave like their lesser web-crawling brethren, then we would already have been bitten and filled with enzymatic fluids that at this very moment would be digesting our innards; turning us into a sort of human slurry. You see, old friend, spiders do not eat so much as drink.”
“Ah,” said Ghost-Tongue. “Well then I suppose we’ve nothing to worry about then.”
“Now, I wouldn’t say that, Jobi.”
“Oh wouldn’t you, Cap’n?” Ghost-Tongue jeered sardonically.
“No indeed,” said the Captain. “While you were focusing on their arachnid bits, I would implore you to remember their more… human features. Sure, they have six arms, but they are arms after all. And they walk on two legs. They speak. They have tools and art.”
“They are… intelligent,” said Ghost-Tongue.
“Exactly!” said the Captain. “Which means they could be devising all manner of horrors that any spider would consider a waste of good protein.”
A slight rustling from Ghost-Tongue’s cocoon insinuated a nod. “But are you curious,” Ghost-Tongue wondered aloud, “as to how she came to speak English?”
“What’s that?”
“English, sir,” Ghost-Tongue replied. “When the tall female surprised us, she spoke English.”
“Ah, well,” the Captain sputtered. He contemplated for a moment, writing brief dramatic tales of possibility inside his mind until a one idea rang true. “Perhaps they’ve captured other white explorers before us! Perhaps, they kept them here for years and years, captive and bonded, all the while learning from their prisoners and becoming quite familiar.”
“Or perhaps, dear Captain, we ate their brains and took from them all their knowledge.”
The eyes of the cocooned prisoners darted to their captor. She was facing them from in front of a stone table where several strangely hewn blades were lined in a neat yet menacing row. Each knife, for lack of a better term, was slightly curved like a miniature scimitar or, as the Captain believed, like a mandible. Eating utensils?
“Well I believe your first assumption proved true, old boy,” the Captain noted. “Congratulations.”
“I’ll be sure to tell my mother,” the mordant Anasazi replied.
“Should have known, really,” said Tripp, “The notion of gaining power from devouring a foe is a common idea in savage races.”
“No, Captain,” the spider woman spoke, “Here you are the monsters with blood on your hands and theft in your hearts. We are the Anansesem, children of Anansi.”
“Spider god,” Tripp noted under his breath. Ghost-Tongue’s cocoon slightly rustled.
The spider woman continued, “We have existed since long before the monkeys fell from their trees and stood on their own two feet. In fact, our father was here when the great lizards were laid low. But here, beneath the world conquered by man, we have continued to exist. We have tunneled from the earth a continent of our own and have thrived for countless eons while your kind slowly crept into intelligence. Ah but once you discovered them, your minds that is, well it seems you have gotten quite carried away, haven’t you? You trample the ground, and sail the seas, and float through the skies, all the while believing you are superior to all other creatures. You think nothing of that which you cannot see. You despise anything of which you are ignorant.”
“Now hear me, my dear… girl,” the Captain bolstered.
“Baku,” she said. “My name is Baku.”
“Well then hear this, Baku! This fellow and I have traipsed up and down the coasts of Mu and dined on ambrosia in the Valley of Nysa! We’ve battled trolls, played chess with dragons, and danced waltzes with nymphs! Why I find your notion of our ignorance and arrogance preposterous and I demand you set us free so that we might sit around a ta
ble and discuss this matter like rational, thinking beings!”
“But not at that table,” Ghost-Tongue added, his eyes still lingering on the mandible blades.
“No, Captain, you are no different,” she said. “Even as you wander into our world, and meet us on our own terms, inside you still believe you are the better. To you, there can be no equal. I know your kind.”
“I dare say you do not!” the Captain demanded.
“Oh but I do. As your companion noticed, I speak your tongue. You are my prisoner because I knew what to expect of you.” She began to pace before him, all of her arms folded across her long torso. “Do you want to know where I learned English, dear Captain? Do you want to know how I came to understand your kind of humanity? Well, incredibly your hypothesis about capturing white interlopers was correct.”
She stepped forward away from the table, empty-handed much to Ghost-Tongue’s relief. Then she pointed to her left with one of her six long arms and reached out with yet another to turn the Captain’s cocoon so that he could set eyes upon a third cocoon dangling from the ceiling. And in that cocoon, seemingly comatose and unaware, the Captain could see the pale narrow features and waxed white mustache of none other than Dr. Maximiliaan von Skaar!
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” the Captain yelped.
“Skaar,” Ghost-Tongue groaned.
“So indeed you are the dear Captain he spoke of,” Baku cooed, her lips bending ever so slightly into a wicked grin. “That is what he called you, by the way: the dear Captain. He said you would come.”
Tripp’s eyes darted between the comatose doctor and the spider woman. “I’m sure he did but you knew English long before you met him.”
“Is that right?” she asked.
“Indeed. Have you ever heard him speak English? He’s German, my dear. You can’t get a proper double-u out of him to save your life and you pronounce them just fine. You use my words to embolden me; to make me believe your words by my want to be correct. You do this because you want me to believe you know less than you do; that you’ve been hiding down here all this time. That tells me you’ve been abroad. So then tell me, my well-educated friend, why is he here?”
“Come now, as if you do not know. He came for the same reason as you did, dear Captain. And we captured him for the same reason we have captured you.”
“What’s that? Of course you’re terribly misinformed, Baku, old girl. What would Max von Skaar want with bombycis arachne gigantis?”
Baku tilted her head to the ceiling a moment in contemplation and then looked back to the Captain. “Bombycis?”
“Arachne gigantis, you baffled bug! Product of the Glandula Aciniformes!” the Captain roared. “You should have picked up some Latin while you were out globetrotting!” Baku turned her eight eyes on the Captain in a display that could not be called approachable, causing him to explain, “Spider silk! Giant spider silk! That’s why we’re here!” The Captain slid his eyes in the direction of Doctor von Skaar and added, “Who knows what nefarious scheme led that man here but I can promise you, he would have very little to do with spider silk.”
“Nonsense! You would invade the realm of the Anasesem for our webs? I do not believe you!”
“Look in my belt, dear girl,” the Captain told her. “There, in the corner beneath my gun.”
After a moment of wary consideration, Baku turned her back on the cocooned men and stalked to the far corner of the room where their gear had been unceremoniously heaped. She dug through the stuff for a moment, aided by a “Not that! There! Yes, that!” from the Captain.
Once she retrieved the belt she walked back to the stone table and held it up. “The third pouch from the buckle. Open it up and reach in.”
“Captain?” Ghost-Tongue warned.
“It’s safe,” the Captain remarked. “Nothing else is in there.”
Ghost-Tongue hoped the Captain was certain of this. As he recalled, Tripp had once tricked a rather small but nasty Hollow Earth dinosaur into one of the pouches to avoid a bloody death. Whether or not Tripp ever set the thing free, he did not know. As such, he made a mental note to have the Captain drop a canister or two of chloroform into each and every pouch before emptying the thing when and if they ever got home.
Baku did as instructed and located the correct pouch. Setting the belt on the table she proceeded to open the pouch and with another wary glance to the Captain she poked inside with one of the knives. After a moment she felt resistance, opened the pouch and looked inside.
She froze. “It’s empty,” she said.
“It’s alright,” the Captain explained. “Any light is immediately captured and cannot escape so you can’t see anything inside, but if you just reach in you’ll soon discover your hand to be quite full.”
It was a long moment before Baku would dare to reach inside. Almost immediately, her head snapped up; her eyes on the Captain. Slowly she pulled her arm back and soon her hand was revealed clutching the ichor-dripping cluster of glands and spinnerets the Captain had cut from the giant spider.
Unfortunately, this was not very pleasing to the spider woman. “Monster!” she hissed. “Butcher!”
“She has a point,” Ghost-Tongue mentioned.
“Quiet, Jobi!” the Captain demanded. He then turned his attention quickly back to Baku. “I know what you must be thinking,” he said. “If someone cut up my dog I would tend to get a bit testy as well but you have to understand…”
“I will cut your glands from you and we will see how well I understand,” she hissed.
“Glands?” the Captain wondered but then realized what she meant. “See now-“
She spoke aloud in the strange clicking spider talk of the Anasesem and two guards immediately entered. They each grabbed a knife from the stone table and began to approach.
“Baku! Hear me out! We had no intention of killing such a creature when we came! We only meant to capture one and take from it enough silk to… well it’s a long story but we only needed a certain amount and then we would set it free! You have to believe me! We had no choice! It was going to kill us!”
“You are invaders,” she said. “Of course it was going to kill you. That was its duty!”
“Well then, I would have to say it was ill-prepared, old girl. It didn’t put up too great a threat. My friend here nearly felled it with a spindly twig.”
Baku shrieked; exposing long deadly black fangs and the two guards took hold of the Captain’s cocoon.
“Now this is counterproductive!” the Captain insisted.
“Cut off his glands and spinneret,” she ordered, in English of course, so her captives could understand.
“Surely, madam, you cannot blame us,” Ghost-Tongue calmly interrupted in a tone smooth and low like a bow being slowly drawn across a cello. Much like a bell to Pavlov’s dog, the Captain learned the proper response to Ghost-Tongue’s diplomatic voice was to fall completely silent. Let the man do his work.
And so it seemed everyone in the room was prepared to do so. Knives ceased slicing at the gossamer wrapping. Two dozen and two eyes had turned toward the Anasazi. With their attention properly turned from the Captain’s nethers to his words, Ghost-Tongue continued, “After all, it was the craftiness and guile of the Anansesem that created the ignorance that led us here. The guile and wit of your sire, the great and noble but all too wily Anansi had led us to believe there was only a kind of giant spider native to the jungles above. The tribesmen who guided us through those jungles even warned us that no one had tread into that place for fear of the giant spiders; not because it was the realm of the Anansesem. Had we known of you, we would have come with gifts and praise, for such is our way. The Captain, whose groin you now threaten, is known in many lands for his gentility. Alas, we knew no more of this place, this sprawling subterranean kingdom, than we knew your name, Baku. Unfortunate as it may have been, our encounter here was brought upon by the same secrecy and silence that has allowed your empire of tunnels to expand. Your success was our misfor
tune, madam. We came seeking a creature not its demise. We came seeking… silk. Just silk.”
Silence loomed for a long moment. The moment grew so long that Ghost-Tongue began to fear the Captain might speak before Baku had a chance to respond. That, he knew, would ruin everything. Giving the Captain every credit he was due, diplomacy ran a razor’s edge with audacity in his mind. Having just politely blamed the Anasesem for the death of their beloved giant spider, himself, Ghost-Tongue knew just one more push in the wrong direction and they would be immediately headless.
Oh how agonizing that silent moment! Say something, Ghost-Tongue wanted to scream to Baku! Tell me I’m a fool and you’ll see my head at the end of a spear! Tell the Captain you’ll feed his gonads to your spider god! Just say something! But when she did finally speak, she spoke no words. A thousand syllables but not a single word or phrase was spoken. It was said in no language but it was plainly understandable by any who heard it.
She laughed.
Loud and hard and haughty and long, she laughed. Eight hands poised in various points along her body, all displaying amusement emphasized her laughter. Her minions joined her hilarity and soon so had the Captain. Even Ghost-Tongue managed to smile! This went on for quite some time; nearly as long as that agonizing silence, which it had broken. And then, it crested and began to wane and as the laughter softened to chuckles, the tall, proud, dark Anansesem leader spoke.
“How well you turn your words,” she told Ghost-Tongue. “You have the spirit of a trickster in you.”
“He is called, Coyote,” Ghost-Tongue smiled, “A kindred of your mighty Anansi.”
Baku ticked off a command in her native tongue and the guards released their hold on the Captain. Then, turning wholly upon Ghost-Tongue, she said, “While you have woven your words well, and in them I believe there is an acceptable truth, your intrusion into our land and the death of our brethren cannot go unpunished. You will be sacrificed to Anansi. Please send our regards to Coyote.”