Dappo continued to attack the darkness, and the force of his blows was such that stone fell like rain as cracks spread in all directions and the ceiling threatened to collapse.

It was all for nothing. He floated back down to the others long seconds later, as Kuei laid Timu on the ground and covered his decimation with a cloth.

The bandits had broken rank, and while some cowered, others tried to flee.

"Stop them," Dappo commanded, and the three unstarred cultivators sprang to obey, as much out of a desire to be away from the area where such violence had been witnessed as quickly as possible as out of a sense of duty.

Activating his lead stance, Sunwhisper outpaced Janna in a quick series of hops, but he was not as fast as Gomen Ji, who left a trail of burning footprints behind him. They quickly headed off the bandits and herded them back into the room with the pond. Sunwhisper tried not to hurt anyone, but those that Ji stopped directly were left with bruises and burns.

"Does he still have his core?" Dappo demanded. "Was it taken?"

Kuei shook her head. "The spider did not reach so deep."

"Good, it will be returned to the village when all of this is done."

When cultivators died in Fringe, it was common practice to return them to the fields, where their mana would be absorbed by the Soma stalks to ripen the next harvest. It occurred to Sunwhisper that there was no practical reason why cultivators could not steal each other's cores and use them to brew elixirs, as they did with the essence of sacred beasts, but the moral and social ramifications of that kind of action were no doubt prohibitive.

"We’re all going to die!!"

Godfrey, too wounded to run, screamed at them in his barbarian tongue. His patience for servitude was evidently at an end.

He hobbled toward Dappo, gesticulating his frustration.

"If we don’t leave now, if you don’t let us leave, we’re all going to end up like that starlord!"

"Your faith is lost so swiftly," Dappo said, disappointment creasing his face. "You are like the rabbit who sees her mother taken by the hawk, and misses the eagle circling above."

"What are you saying?"

"I am the eagle," Dappo said, "and I am tired of your disrespect." His fist was still monstrously deformed, and he swung it like a mace. Godfrey was launched twenty feet, stopping only when he slapped wetly against the cavern wall.

"Listen carefully," Dappo said, addressing the remaining bandits, who were as frozen as the rabbit in his parable, "you are in no danger from the spider. You have nothing it wants. But you are in danger from me, because you owe me your lives, and there is nothing more dangerous than a creditor with a heavy hand. I want no more dishonorable behavior from any of you, or you will meet the same fate as that one."

They watched him with dull faces and numb eyes, There was no protest.

Dappo turned to his fellow cultivators. "The spider will have a nest, a place where he stores what is valuable but he has not or cannot eat. Some of the pure artists who died under his fangs owned many valuable treasures, and they will still be here. For all that he eats cores, no mere beast could devour a treasure in the same way. We must continue on this path until we come to its end, wherever that end may be."

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"What about Tumi?" Kuei said, glancing down at her former partner, her face tight.

"Bring him with us, it will tempt the spider."

Little more was said, but Dappo produced a batch of pitch torches to give to several of the bandits, commanding them to investigate the open passages and report back whatever they found.

There wasn’t much to do while they waited, and none of the cultivators were comfortable enough to channel, so they formed a rough circle, backs in, under a stretch of ceiling that had no apparent holes. What had happened to Timu made them all look at the roof of the cavern in a new way.

"What is our strategy," Gomen Ji finally said. Earlier, he had run without difficulty, but he was putting pressure on his puncture wound from the day before. The bandage underneath his hand was stained red.

"The spider will come to us," Dappo said, "or we will come to it. Either way, I will kill it."

It sounded more like an aspiration than a plan, but none of them were senior enough to challenge his judgment. After another quarter of an hour, the first torchbearer returned with news that she had reached a dead end, with no navigable branches along the way. The second torchbearer took longer, but reported a similar lack of success.

Dappo drank from the water of the pool and considered one of the pale fish that surfaced lazily to regard him with an eye that was surely blind.

"Then we have our path."

They found the lost bandit dead in a crevice, having suffocated. He was untouched by the spider. It required some force to pull his body free of the crack, and there was talk among the bandit crew of why and how he had gotten himself stuck.

They agreed that he must have been fleeing the spider, though no one could say why he hadn’t simply run back the way he had come. He was dead, and they would never know. The other torchbearers had reported sticky webs and cutting lines in their paths, but they had been able to use the flame to clear them. The thickest mass of webbing that any of them had seen was just ahead.

It filled exactly half the passage, allowing a clear side channel of such precise dimensions that it had to be deliberate. The webbing was so thoroughly laced as to be opaque, the glistening fibers concealing whatever was beyond along with the curve of the passage.

To follow the free path, one would be forced to press nearly flat against the other wall and follow it into the unknown.

"Burn it," Dappo said.

The torches were relit, but it was Ji who pressed forward, sweating and in pain, driven by pride and honor to show his skill before the elder. To show that he alone among the young cultivators was worthy of this hunt. After all, he had his first star, and even if Sunwhisper had begun to use elemental techniques, he had not been marked.

The mass did not catch easily. It was too wet, and it took persistence, along with the last of Ji’s mana reserves, to force it to give up its moisture and shrivel into ash. He nearly collapsed at the end of it, wobbling on his good leg, his look triumphant.

Dappo brushed past him without a word, white mana already swirling around his limbs in preparation for the coming contest. Sunwhisper focused on the energy coursing through his own meridians, channeling was not completely second nature yet, but he was getting better at multitasking.

He extended his spear and followed behind Dappo with Janna at his side and Kuei guarding the rear. Because of his limited mana reserves, Sunwhisper did not preemptively activate any of his cultivation techniques, for fear of running out of steam before the fight had begun. Ji made it into the next chamber almost at Dappo’s shoulder.

"Impossible!" The fat man swore, his expression dour. "This cannot be."

The room was not a natural formation by any stretch of the imagination. All of the stone had been smoothed down by hand, and a tiered dais was carved out of the flesh of the mountain, complete with a circle of slender columns that ran fifty feet to the domed ceiling. Webs were everywhere, of both varieties, laced between the columns in an intricate pattern that Sunwhisper found to be vaguely familiar. He had the sense, quite dissonant, that this was a holy place, and that the webbing was a part of that holiness.

Mana flowed here. He could not see it, but the air was so rich with energy that it practically hummed.

None of this was what had caused Dappo’s exclamation. The older cultivator had an eye for treasures, and he had spent a lifetime collecting only a handful that he kept safely locked away in his personal vault. He had expected there to be valuable equipment left behind from the cultivators who had failed to kill the spider before him, and there was; a sword, boots, epaulets, and scattered cabochons, all items that had been painstakingly inscribed with the secrets of mana, made into something more than any mortal craftsman could hope to duplicate.

They were here, these and many more, and they had all been destroyed.