Objects of Worship (11 page)

Coro looks up at the dark, nightmare-covered sky. He is
distracted by flashes of fire and Godlight as the Shifpan-Shap engage in their nightly struggle.

The sword whispers, and Coro’s attention is taken away
from the spectacle, his thoughts reined in to focus on
Yamesh-Lot’s plan.

Coro has forgotten his former existence. He is thus
unsurprised by his newfound strength and stamina. He
runs across the surface of the Earth, moonsword in hand.
He must execute his mission this night, for the nightmares
encased within the sword cannot survive the return of
sunlight.

Coro finds a village. But the dogs are woken by his arrival,
and soon the whole village is roused.

The whispers bore into Coro’s mind. He yells in pain.
He lashes out with the moonsword; he slaughters every
inhabitant of the village, down to the last animal. Alas
for his mission, every one of his victims was awake; the
nightmares were unable to slip into the world of dreams.

Coro runs again, driven by the pain in his head, knowing
the torment will end only if he succeeds in fulfilling his
appointed task.

The sound of singing reaches Coro; it dampens the raucous
noise emanating from the moonsword. Coro walks toward
the new sound, seduced. The nightmares intensify their
cries, but to no avail. The closer Coro gets to the source
of the song, the more the voices of the nightmares are
shushed.

At the mouth of a cave, a handful of the Green Blue and
Brown God’s acolytes are gathered; they are singing, in that
language only the acolytes know, their tattoos glowing with
Godlight.

The song calms Coro and soothes his maddening
headache; his arms go limp. The moonsword drags on the
ground as he approaches the five acolytes.

Coro almost begins to remember his previous life, but,
retaliating against the acolytes’ song, the nightmares now
shriek at Coro, driving him berserk.

He attacks the acolytes, but, for all his ferocity, strength,
and speed, he is also clumsy. The acolytes move with nearly
ethereal grace, slipping out of the sword’s reach every
time it comes close to striking one of them. Throughout
Coro’s attack, they continue to sing. Their song changes;
it becomes higher pitched, piercing. The sacred ballad has
segued into an urgent call.

Coro keeps slashing at the acolytes, never connecting,
while the nightmares screech in his mind with increasing
venom.

The acolytes’ song changes again; it slows down, grows
deeper, imbued with reverential awe.

The moonsword strikes something hard, and sparkles
of Godlight flash in Coro’s sight. He recoils and falls on his
back.

There stands in front of him a warrior of the Shifpan-Shap: taller by half than the tallest human; her body
covered with golden scales; a prominent beak emphasizing
her fierce visage; powerful wings feathered green, blue, and
brown sprouting from her robust shoulders. She holds a
Godmace in one hand, and a firesword in the other.

She raises the firesword, and Coro knows that it will be
a killing blow.

The five acolytes, the Shifpan-Sho, and Coro enter the cave.
The warrior has put her sword in its scabbard, but keeps
her mace at the ready; she disagreed with the acolytes
about not killing Coro, but she reluctantly deferred to
their judgement. With her free hand, she holds both of
Coro’s wrists above his head, pushing him along, keeping
his sword pointed upward. It sometimes scrapes against
the ceiling, making him stumble, but the warrior’s grip
prevents him from falling. Two of the acolytes hum sweetly
into Coro’s ears, keeping the nightmares at bay.

With the nightmares silenced, Coro’s memories slowly
return.

As the group descends, the veins of Godlight illuminating
the tunnels remind him of the frequent journeys down
a similar path in his youth. He relives the pain of his
numerous submersions in the Godpool. But the chant of
the acolytes calms him.

The group reaches a doorway; not the one from Coro’s
childhood, but similar enough that he recognizes it
nonetheless. The eldest acolyte, a very old man with broad
shoulders and thin white hair, says to the warrior, “Release
him.”

Without thinking, Coro touches the warrior’s shoulders.
Looking at the Shifpan-Sho, feeling the scales on her skin,
smelling her foreign aroma, he realizes the folly of his
lifelong dream. He could never be anything like one of these
nearly divine creatures. The knowledge that he wasted
his life striving for something so manifestly impossible
shatters him.

She brushes his hand away, and they all file into the
cavern that holds the local Godpool.

Coro recalls his vigil at the foot of Shifpan-Ur and the
despair that led him into the embrace of Yamesh-Lot. At
the memory of the villagers he slaughtered, Coro’s heart
fills with loathing for himself and for the monstrous entity
who drove him to perform such a deed.

Turning to Coro, the elder says: “Immerse the length of
your sword into the Godwater.”

The two young acolytes are still humming gently into
Coro’s ears, but he is overwhelmed by a desperate onslaught
of nightmare shrieks. He lashes out, and his sword cuts into
the eldest acolyte.

The Shifpan-Sho warrior strikes Coro with the back of
her hand, hitting him on the jaw, knocking him down. She
brings up her mace to strike Coro dead, but she hesitates,
her eyes reflecting the Godlight that floods the chamber,
and she stands down. She steps on Coro’s sword wrist, puts
her weight into it, stopping short of breaking the bones,
and says, “I should have killed you outside.”

Coro is crying, hating himself for being nothing more
than an instrument of Yamesh-Lot. He wants the warrior
to kill him.

The two young acolytes bend down to Coro’s ears and
resume their song.

Blood flows freely from the elder acolyte’s shoulder.
Already infection is setting in; the skin around the wound
rots darkly, pungently. The warrior says, “Get in the pool,
holy one.”

“No, not yet. First, let him up.”

She reluctantly does so, and Coro, his cheeks hot with
tears, hurries to the Godpool. Bracing himself, fearful
of what might happen, he submerges the sword. The
nightmares’ dying screams reverberate through his whole
body. The Godpool seethes, and Godwater erupts, soaking
everyone.

Coro expects agony, but instead he is flooded with vivid
images and sensations that connect him to every one of the
Green Blue and Brown God’s creatures. He experiences their
bodies and sensations as if they were his own. Briefly he
glimpses his mother — still alive, but old and bedridden —
but then the holy effervescence recedes, leaving Coro
dazzled, acutely aware of the miraculous beauty of his
own body. The sword is still welded to his hand, but now
it sparkles with the God’s colours. He feels the Godwater
flowing from the sword, mingling with his blood, and he
almost orgasms at the sensation.

The eldest acolyte, healed, his body having shed some of
the ravages of age, says, “Now, you must return to the pit.”

It is daytime; the Shifpan-Shap have once again defeated
the nightly invasion. The Moon is at rest in the pit.

Coro is flying. The wind whips through his hair. The
light of the Sun dazzles his eyes. The Shifpan-Sho warrior’s
muscular arms hold his back tightly against her chest.

Coro knows that neither he nor the warrior are likely to
survive this expedition, but — after he had given up hope
that his life’s dream could ever be realized — he is flying
with a Shifpan-Sho warrior.

He looks down and sees the gaping pit and the moat of
Godwater that surrounds it. They have arrived.

The warrior shifts her weight and moves Coro to her
side, holding him with just one powerful arm. She takes the
Godmace from her belt, raises it, and nods silently at Coro.
He extends his sword arm, and the Shifpan-Sho turns
upside down, toward the pit. She flies downward, carrying
them both past the threshold that leads to the darkness at
the heart of the world.

All the spiders in my apartment are araneomorphs, the
most common type of spider. The second most common
suborder consists of mygalomorphs — hairy, often large
species, such as tarantulas. Mesothelae, the oldest suborder
of spiders still extant, are quite rare; of the estimated
hundred thousand or so species of spiders, fewer than one
hundred belong to this primitive family, and they’re found
almost exclusively in Asia. I’ve only ever seen pictures. The
natural history museum has some specimens on display,
but I disapprove of taxidermy. I can’t stomach the thought
of walking through room after room of victims sacrificed
in the “holy” name of science.

The body of the female of the common house spider,
Achaearanea tepidariorum
, measures less than a centimetre,
and males are even smaller. Female spiders are generally
larger than their male counterparts. The common house
spider enjoys humid and dark environments, such as my
basement apartment.

There are two small windows in the apartment, one in
the bedroom and one in the kitchen. The only other room
is the tiny, mouldy bathroom with cracked tiles and no
ventilation. The two windows are just low enough that I
can, if I stand on tiptoe, slide them open and closed. I like
to keep them open, except when the landlord’s four-year-old twins are outside playing. They like to lie down on the
ground and peer at me, giggling. They’re not mean, but I
intrigue them. So they laugh.

The whole house is surrounded by flowerbeds, bushes,
vines, and trees. The landlord and his wife love to garden.
The compost and vegetation attract myriad insects, many
of whom find their way inside. Their persistent invasions
irritate me, but the spiders feed on them. Webs hang from
the furniture, from the corners where walls meet ceilings.
I do my best to keep these intact, to make my home
comfortable for the spiders.

My father held my hand as we walked through the train
station. At the age of six, I had never seen such a high
ceiling. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it and its intricate web
of exposed, carved rafters. Gently, Dad kept reminding me
to look where I was walking.

He stopped at the newsstand to get a paper. He led me
to the comics rack and asked me to choose something to
read on the train. It would be hours to the coast, where we
were going to join Mom. As I took my eyes off the ceiling, a
bright red cover caught my eye. It was a giant comic book,
the size of a tabloid newspaper, but with a spine and the
cover the kind of thick stock used on paperbacks. There was
a yellow band at the top with the words SHRUGGING ATLAS
TREASURY SPECIAL in black letters. Below that, a blue logo
in stylized, creepy letters announced the title: SPIDERKID
ADVENTURES. In the middle of the cover a character who
could only have been Spiderkid himself was crouched, ready
to leap into action. A dark blue skintight costume covered his
whole body. The suit was veined with a yellow web design. He
wore big goggles to cover his eyes. A black belt with pouches
and an empty holster hung around his waist. A string of
webbing shot from the gun he held in his hand.

“I want that one!” I said, and my dad bought it for me.

I take a break from my term paper. My head hurts, my back
aches, and my eyes are sore from staring at the screen all
day.

Until grade nine, I’d always believed that I’d become a
biologist, to eventually specialize in arachnology. Images of
spiders chaotically wallpapered my room. Books on spiders
filled my bookshelf.
Spiderkid Adventures
dominated my
comics collection.

But then one day I was expected to dissect a frog in class,
and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even watch my lab partner do
it. I ran out of class screaming in terror, and I never lived
it down. The incident ensured that high school would be
a particularly relentless hell for me — bullies forcing raw
meat down my throat during lunch break, that kind of
thing. After that, I stopped eating meat, despite the violent
protests of my parents.

I learned that the “study of life” involved killing and
torturing, and I had no stomach for that. I didn’t pursue
biology. Now I major in history, a much safer subject.

I check my email before getting up.

It’s all spam, except for one message that came through
my webofspiderkid.net domain. I run a Spiderkid tribute
website. It includes a database indexing the appearances
of all the supporting characters, a checklist of writers and
illustrators, a comprehensive listing of every Spiderkid
guest spot in other comics, cover scans, and other obsessive,
geeky stuff. My passion for Spiderkid has always allowed
me to tap into a secret well of enthusiasm. Managing the
website helps me focus on that energy, helps me find the
strength to deal with real life. My own personal religion
and virtual temple.