I was already moving, sword half-drawn, when Auralia caught the child around the waist and spun her away from the cliff's edge. "Eyes," Elya gasped against Auralia's shoulder, breath hitching. "On the walls. Listening. They're—" She flinched, the word dissolving into a sob.
"Breathe," Auralia whispered, voice like warm cloth. "Count with me." She didn't say you were dreaming. She counted. Elya clutched at her and counted too, broken at first, then steady, as if the numbers themselves were stones across a river.
I turned to the cliff.
At a glance, there was only rock. But that's how cliffs lie. I let my eyes slacken and unfocus. The striations were not as they'd been before sunrise. New chords threaded the stone—thin, pale tracings angling in deliberate lines from ledge to ledge. I reached for one with the tip of my gauntlet.
Auralia hissed, "Don't—"
My finger brushed the line. It flexed and clung, cold and dry and stronger than a bowstring. Spider silk—only thicker, roped, gleaming in the light like wire.
"Web," I said.
Elya's breath stumbled. Auralia's jaw set.
We broke camp fast. No shame, no wasted motions: brazier doused, ash scattered, string lines reeled. Auralia wrapped Elya's scraped hands with quick, neat bandages torn from her own sleeve. I dragged the bedrolls in and cinched the packs while my runes buzzed just under my skin, a swarm looking for a place to land.
We took the road at a careful pace, boots placed as if each stone might be a bell. The mist had thinned, leaving the cliff face stark and more honest in the morning light. Honesty meant we could see more silk. It was everywhere once you knew how to look: drooping from thorn to rock, spanning cracks, singing silently in the wind. In places it lay in sheets, dust caught in it like frost.
"Ravenspine has always had webs," I said, because my mouth wanted the distraction of words.
Auralia shook her head once. "Not like this. Not this dense, not this high, not this… deliberate."
Elya walked between us, small hand in Auralia's, eyes red and stubborn. She tracked something I couldn't see, tilting her head by inches now and then, as if the air had written a map for her alone. At one turn, she tugged us gently left of the center of the road.
"Why?" Auralia asked, quiet.
"Feels wrong," Elya said.
That was enough for me.
By midmorning we found the first sign that the web wasn't art but appetite. The carcass lay slumped beneath a thorn. A horse—or what had been. Its eyes were collapsed; the lips had drawn tight over gums as if in a grin. No stink. No rot. Just skin tacked over bone and a small, perfect puncture where the neck had been softest.
Elya's fingers tightened in Auralia's. "Did wolves—?"
"No," Auralia said softly. "Wolves eat." She crouched, studying the ground. "No prints. No drag marks. Hoof-scrape… here, here. It fought, briefly, then stopped." She touched the throat without touching it. "It was taken where it stood."
I swallowed. "Gorrachs."
Auralia's mouth went thin. "I hoped not."
"You know them," I said.
"I know of them," she corrected. "Stories from the Whispers. Routes to avoid if you liked your blood staying inside you. They called the riders Rask'Vul. Webriders."
Elya's face paled, but she didn't look away. "Do they… talk?"
"They scream," Auralia said. "They chant. They laugh like breaking glass. And they talk to their spiders like you talk to a horse you love."
We walked on.
By noon the road widened and we saw why: the stone on our right broke into a bowl where two paths met. Someone had tried to make a stand there. The ground bore the story in grooves and chips: the set of wagon wheels locked against a downhill slide, the gouge of claw, the stutter of bootheels. Scraps of canvas hung like flags from the thorn. Under it, a scattering of coins glittered where someone had flung a purse and run too late.
"Stay close," I said, and didn't realize I'd spoken until Auralia's fingers brushed my arm in answer.
We found them near the far rim of the bowl. Two survivors, if the word counted. A man in a trader's vest sat with his back to a wheel, staring at the sky as if waiting for it to apologize. Beside him, a woman hunched over, elbows on knees, hands clasped so tight the knuckles had blanched to dead pearl. The angle of her shoulders said she was praying. The angle of her mouth said she didn't believe it would work.
When they heard our steps, they flinched, eyes wild, then fogged with relief when we failed to be small and many.
"Drink," Auralia said, already kneeling, holding out a water skin.
The woman took it and held it like a relic until Auralia tilted it to her mouth. The man never looked away from the sky.
"What happened?" I asked, though the road had already told me.
The woman coughed, swallowed, coughed again. "Came on ropes," she rasped. "From the walls. From the dark. Like drops of rain except every drop wanted your eyes."
"How many?"
She laughed a little. It wasn't a nice sound. "How many ants in a hill? How many prayers in a temple? Enough."
Elya sidled behind my leg and peered around my hip, a small owl with a new word. "Riders?"
The man blinked at that, eyes finally lowering from the sky. "Lean little bastards," he said, voice flat with shell-shock. "Skin like brick dust. Some more yellow. Their faces carved like maps—lines and lines, and all of them meant something to them and nothing to me. Wrapped in silk like dead princes." He swallowed. "They bounced when they hit the ground. Like the web was still on them even when they weren't touching it."
"Rask'Vul," Auralia murmured. To the woman: "Who led them?"
The woman's hands tightened and loosened. "A lady," she said. "If I can call her that and not be cursed. Didn't ride a spider. She stood on the rock and all of them looked at her when they moved. She wore a veil that wasn't a veil—more like a curtain of threads. I could see her eyes through it when the wind moved them. I think I could. So many eyes. Or maybe none." Her mouth trembled. "She said she was listening."
Auralia and I traded a look.
"Name?" I asked.
The man licked his lips. "Skra'ith," he said. "She called herself Skra'ith. And—" He frowned, reaching for a word that didn't want to be found. "And… Thousand Eyes. Gods forgive me if I repeat it wrong."
"Gods don't come here," the woman whispered.
"You're going to Mizuhara?" the man asked us abruptly, as if the question had just remembered itself.
"Yes," I said.
"Go fast," he said. "Or go nowhere. Those are the only two that don't end in silk."
Auralia pressed dried meat and a small vial of willow-bark cordial into the woman's hands. "Southwest there's a cut in the cliff," she said, pointing. "You can follow it down to a beach if the tide is kind. Fisher caves along that stretch. If anyone lives there, they'll share what they have. They always have."
"You're not coming?"
"We can't," I said, and hated how the words felt. "We have to go through."
The man nodded once as if that truth had been waiting its turn.
We left them with water and directions and what hope strangers can trade. Auralia moved us quickly, eyes more often on the ridges than on the path. I watched the silk. It had patterns now to my newly-opened sense, not just lines but chords, not just chords but phrases. Some were taut with recent travel; some lay slack but hummed when the wind touched them. When my runes warmed, the web sang higher, and when Auralia's mark pulsed under her leather, the silk near her seemed to quiver. We did not talk about that.
"Eiran," Elya said quietly after a long silence. "Don't walk there." I realized my foot had been a heartbeat from a silver thread running ankle-high across the narrowest part of the turn—a trip-line, not for us. For a bell somewhere we hadn't seen.
I shifted my weight back. "Good eyes," I said.
"It isn't my eyes," she said, and put her small palm against the air above the line with reverence, as if blessing it. "It hums the way angry bees hum when you look at their home."
We cut the line and pinned both ends under stones so the break wouldn't sing.
By late afternoon the cliff leaned in and the road crept closer to the wall. That's where we found the totems.
They stood at shoulder-height, one on either side of a pinch-point where the shelf narrowed. Bone—long bones wired with wire that wasn't wire—twisted into lattices. Skulls—not human—set like lanterns in the cages, lacework of old silk wrapped and wrapped until the light made them pearly. Each had been stained with red ochre, designs spidered across them: webs within webs, a single circle at the center, a ring of tiny pricks around it. Auralia's mouth flattened.
"Shrines," she said.
Elya wrinkled her nose. "To what?"
"To the thing that hears when you whisper in the web."
I stepped carefully around the nearest, feeling obscene for breathing near it. "Touch them and—?"
"They sing to somebody who can pull you off a road with a rope from two ledges away," Auralia said. "I'd rather not introduce ourselves."
We angled sidewise, backs brushing the rock, packs scraping, eyes up, trying to be less than a smell. The totem nearest me hummed. Only a little. Only enough to make my molars feel full. I held my breath until my chest burned and then eased it out slowly.
The shelf widened again. I exhaled properly and had just started to say something I hoped would pass for brave when the world above us screamed.
It wasn't like any noise a bird or man makes. It was violin string and broken hinge, hollow pipe and hunger. It bounced along the cliff in hard, bright pieces, found the hollow of my ear, and bit. Elya yelped and clapped both hands over her head. Auralia was already moving, spinning toward the wall with her rapier in her hand, one arm sweeping Elya behind her.
I didn't think. My runes did. They flared, and heat rose off my forearm like a forge taking a breath. I thrust my palm toward the rock where shadows moved like a hinge swinging and let the first syllable that wanted out find my mouth.
The shockwave that leapt from my hand was bigger than I intended. It always is the first time in a day. Dust howled. Silk lines snapped in a bright, brittle chorus, and three shapes fell like cut fruit from the underhang, scattering their legs wide to catch anything that would hold them.
Gorrachs.
They were not the fat, mindless spiders of cellar tales. They were lean and long, built for cliff and void, their bodies the color of shadow on stone. Their legs moved with obscene grace, each claw-tipped foot landing, curling, releasing with dancer precision. Their eyes—oh, Elya—were set in clusters, beads of polished jet that reflected us back as a hundred tiny things.
On the back of the nearest, a goblin clung with his knees and the knot of a silk belt. He was built like the spider—lean, rope-muscled, skin the reddish brown of fired clay. Ritual scars cross-hatched his cheeks and brow, tidy as script. He wore wrappings of spider-silk—bands around his forearms, a scarf that covered the lower half of his face, a vest bound tight with glistening thread. When he moved, the silk caught the light like water.
He didn't fall. He flowed, letting the Gorrach's momentum sling him toward the wall. A silk line shot from his hand, kissed a peg sunk in the rock, and held. He swung under us and landed on the narrow shelf behind our backs, knife in hand, laughing a laugh that did in fact sound like glass breaking.
Auralia spun toward him, blade low. I turned to meet the other two as they scissored sideways, landing one level up, then down, then up again, testing, tasting, feeling where we stumbled.
"Rask'Vul," Auralia said, as if names could frame a problem well enough to solve it. "We don't run. We don't shout. We don't give them rhythm."
"What does that mean?" I said.
"They hear footsteps," she said, "and breath, and the way fear makes your blood move. They listen with the web. Make your heart quiet."
"Noted," I said, and wished my heart understood Common.
The goblin behind us feinted right; Auralia didn't take the bait. He feinted left; she didn't take that either. He grinned with his eyes and then snapped his wrist, flicking a skein of fine silk toward her ankle. She stepped into it, not away, and cut the line with a neat backhand that would have taken the fingers off most men.
Two more goblins dropped with their mounts further up the cliff. They were all similar—lean, scarred, wrapped in silk, skin ranging from sunbaked red to a pale sand tan. Each wore patterns that were their story: a spiral cut into the brow, lines radiating from the eyes, a net of small scars along the jaw. Their eyes were bright and wild and clever. They chattered and clicked with their tongues against their teeth, a music to which the Gorrachs answered with leg and claw.
"Elya," I said, never taking my eyes off the nearest. "Behind me."
She didn't move.
"Elya." I risked a glance. She had both hands on the air again, fingers spread, eyes unfocused. "It hums," she whispered. "It's… so loud. If I talk to it, it moves. If I stop it—"
"Don't," Auralia and I said together.
The first goblin lunged. I met him with a short arc of steel, not enough to commit, enough to feel his weight. He was quick, knife like a tooth, lines of silk flicking from his free hand to try to foul my sword. I burned the lines with a flare of rune-heat, and his eyes widened behind the scarf—surprise, delight. He laughed again, sharp as a dropped plate, and changed his rhythm.
They were playing.
Four Gorrachs now. Five. Another scream, further up, answered by two more. The shelf we stood on was bottleneck and stage and the audience was the web itself, which sang and told our positions to anything with legs.
"Back," Auralia said. "To the wider ground."
We retreated in small, crabbed steps, never turning, never giving them our spines. The Rask'Vul slid along their lines, trading places with each other in a blur of tan skin and red, a choreography of silk. One hummed, a two-note sound in the back of his throat; a Gorrach shifted in answer. Another clicked; a line swung taut.
"Skra'ith will like this," one said in a thick accent through his scarf, voice surprisingly young. "The Warden makes fire."
"Tell Skra'ith she can kiss a stove," I said through my teeth.
He cocked his head as if considering, then smiled with his eyes. "We hear your blood," he said. "It is very loud."
I smiled back because fear and anger weren't different flavors anymore in my mouth. "So is yours when it isn't in your body."
He feinted, I didn't take it, he grinned, and then we were where we needed to be: our backs to the widest part of the shelf, thorn at our left, a low lip of stone to our right, enough room for Auralia and me to work without tripping over each other. Elya pressed into the stone at my hip, small and intense and—strangest of all—calm now that the hum had a shape.
"Three on the wall," Auralia said. "Two above. One behind if he can get the angle with a long line. Knives, hooks, silk. They'll try to bind your blade."
"Let them try." I flexed my fingers. The runes along my arm flashed and dimmed, wanting to be used, wanting to be everything. I took a slow breath and set them to watch, not leap.
The goblins moved.
Auralia met her two with a dance I never saw entirely—there and not there, edges of silver, a foot that planted and a foot that was gone, the soft snick of her rapier punctuating the web music like a metronome. She didn't overreach. She took the space she needed and no more. A nick here to a tendon, a flick there to a silk line to foul a jump, a precise punch with the rapier's guard into a throat when a scarf dropped. One goblin went quiet and clung to his Gorrach, belly-flat, while his mount scuttled it sideways out of her killing corridor.
Mine were less polite. Two pressed from the wall, one angling from above on a long line like a pendulum. I cut the pendulum at the apex of his swing—one bright strike, silk sizzling under rune-heat—and he dropped hard. He rolled and was up with inhuman quickness, the knife a third hand. I took a cut across my bicep I shouldn't have taken and let it wash the noise from my ears into my arm. The runes drank the sting and hummed.
"Eiran!" Auralia warned—no instruction, just a promise that we both still breathed.
Elya's voice threaded under it. "Left web tightens. Now. Now."
I stepped right as a line snapped where my calf had been. A hook clanged off stone instead of bone. "Good," I said without looking.
The Rask'Vul were not fearless. They were very good at trading fear for joy. Every thwarted line, every burned skein, every parried knife made them chatter, made them change their song. They were testing us, tasting us, waiting for a rhythm to break.
It did.
Not ours. The web's.
A low tremor ran the length of the stone like a breath held too long and released. Every line around us thrummed in sudden sympathy. I felt it under my skin as a note that made my blood want to answer. Auralia hissed and clapped her palm over her chest as if the mark had bitten her. Elya winced and pressed both hands to her ears.
From further up the wall, a chant rose. Not words I knew. Not entirely words at all. It was body-language made into sound: boast, promise, welcome. The Rask'Vul around us fell into hush the way snow settles—soft, complete, inevitable. They looked up as one thing.
On the ledge above, a figure stepped out where the silk hung thickest.
She was small. All the Rask'Vul were, lean and tight with a predator's grace. Her skin was paler than the others—sand rather than brick—but the scars were the same: a map etched along cheek and brow, a net of neat white lines across throat and collarbone. Spider-silk wrapped her like a queen's habit—layers and layers that caught the light in a cascade of silver. Over her face hung a veil of strands—no cloth—so fine it was like rain frozen mid-fall.
Through the veil, her eyes found ours.
I could not say how many there were. Two, and more than two. For a heartbeat, I felt the thing Elya had found words for earlier—the sense that the walls did not have eyes so much as that eyes were what walls had been trying to be.
The Rask'Vul bowed their heads. Some pressed their fingers to their scars. The Gorrachs stilled, legs half-lifted, as if they'd all remembered the same story at once.
"Skra'ith," Auralia breathed.
The figure tilted her head in that artless, young way of the first goblin who'd laughed at me, and the silk veil moved. The wind made it ripple like water. Her voice when it came was almost gentle. "Warden," she said, as if tasting a word she had invented. "Shadow-dancer. Star-child." Her accent stretched the syllables, made the s's into secret things. "We have listened to your steps for a day and a night."
My runes throbbed. Auralia's mark burned bright as a coal behind leather. Elya did not hide. She looked up, chin lifted, jaw set stubbornly. If fear wanted her, it would have to queue.
"What do you want?" I called, keeping my voice level and flat. Giving the web nothing but tone.
Skra'ith's veil shifted with her breath. "A story," she said simply. "You pass our walls and pluck our strings and leave no blood in the bowls. That is impolite. Even to a queen."
"Queen of what?" Auralia asked.
Skra'ith spread her hands, palms marked with tiny scars like a rosary. "Of what has always been here. Of the spaces between. Of the listening."
A Rask'Vul to my right clicked his teeth in quick, proud little notes. Skra'ith lifted a finger and he fell silent.
"You'll let us pass if we tell you a story?" I asked.
She swayed a little, veil whispering. "We will hear you. That is not the same as letting."
My mouth went dry. Words wouldn't feed this. Neither would steel if we let them choose the rhythm.
Auralia's hand brushed mine once—follow—and she lowered her rapier until the point kissed the stone. "We don't come to steal," she said, pitching her voice to the web, not the ears. "We don't come to carve your walls or foul your bowls. We come east."
"East is not a reason," Skra'ith said, amused.
"No," Auralia agreed. "But it is a direction. Sometimes that is better."
Skra'ith laughed softly. It sounded like a small bell rung behind silk. "Your blood says you are very interesting," she said to me. "It hums without drums. It has learned a new song and is afraid of it."
"Good ear," I said.
She tilted her head. "We have many."
Something tugged at my sleeve.
Elya stood on her toes, mouth by my arm so she didn't need to speak louder than breath. "If you step there," she whispered, "the web will sing, and they will drop the big one."
"What big one?" I asked without moving my lips.
"The mother," she said. "Below."
Of course there was a mother. There is always a mother.
"Skra'ith," I said, to buy a breath, to shape one more edge of time. "We'll leave your totems sweet. We'll cut no cords you want whole. We'll give you back the coins that don't belong to us. We'll use the goat path when the road is too narrow."
She watched me as the wind put its hands through her veil. "And if I say no?" she asked, not unkind.
"Then we fight and most of us go over," I said. "Some of yours. One of mine. Maybe two. The web eats well today and badly tomorrow because our friends will light it where it meets the cliff."
Skra'ith considered that like a mathematician considers an equation. She lifted one hand and made a small sign in the air with her fingers, a gesture I did not know. The web near her trembled in a pattern that wasn't wind.
"You have not asked what we want," she said.
"I assumed you would tell me," I said.
"We want you to remember," she said, and for the first time there was no smile in her voice. "Tell your stones and your sky and your cities that the web was here before the road. That is all. Forgetting is how your kind steals."
Auralia nodded once, a small bow that conceded a point. "We will remember," she said. "And we'll pay the tithe."
Skra'ith's veil stilled. "You do not know what it is."
"We'll figure it out," Auralia said.
Skra'ith laughed. "You will try." She moved her hand again and the web around us loosened a fraction. Silk lines that had been tight enough to sing now hung slack enough to speak. "Go," she said. "Before my sons grow bored. Boredom has always been hungrier than hunger."
We eased a step. Two. The Rask'Vul did not follow. Skra'ith watched. The Gorrachs placed their feet in the way that made cliffs jealous.
We almost made the turn out of the choke when the web changed.
Not Skra'ith's doing. Not the wind. A wave rolled through it, slow and heavy, as if something enormous had plucked a line far below and the note had swollen until it had to move. The Rask'Vul stiffened, heads cocked, eyes pinning to an angle of rock none of us could see.
The first scream had been violin and hinge. This one was a horn, deep and wet, dragging its sound against the cliff until there was nothing in the world but the promise inside it.
Skra'ith's head turned sharply. For the first time, I saw her veil shiver with a tremor that wasn't wind. She lifted her hand to settle the web, to soothe it, to say not now, and the web ignored her like a child who had found a flood.
Elya's fingers stabbed the air. "Down," she said. "Down, down—now!"
We threw ourselves flat as the shadow rolled over the shelf, blotting the light. A shape like a moving cliff shouldered into the world below our ledge, legs as thick as ship masts, each step a lesson for the stone.
The mother Gorrach had come to listen for herself.