Night.
Spiders were busy spinning webs between pepper trees and devil’s apples.
Overhead, rain was brewing. A few scout drops fell on the shingled roof of the old cottage and rolled down to the edge to perch precariously above a rambling herb garden: rich thickets of hops, chickweed, lovage, tonka beans, high john, marigold, and coltsfoot.
Inside the cottage, a naked man lay on his back near a flickering fire. Miles Kindste’s eyes were open and daft, staring at nothing. His breath eased in and out in a slow, opiated rhythm. His erection was thick. Blood oozed from a neat, deep cut in the webbed flesh between the big toe of his right foot and its neighbor. His eyes couldn’t see nor could his mind register that a spider the size of a possum sat on a blanket in the corner of the dark room.
A figure stepped out of the cottage, stooped but spry. She wrapped a scarf around her head against the cold rain and started along the flagstone path through the herb garden. Though the clouds were snuffing the last light from the night sky, were anyone close enough they’d see that her expression was as hard as flint.
The path she took meandered through stands of hawthorn and blackberry toward a ring of trees: twenty-four weeping lilly pilly planted in a wide circle, tall and beautiful. Carved low in the trunk of each was a different arcane symbol. The old woman stepped off the flagstones and around the outside of the circular grove till she found the tree she sought. She stroked its trunk with tenderness. Then she reached to her belt and, with a whisper, unsheathed a sharp stiletto. She cut a finger-thick branch off the tree, then stepped into the circle.
The ring was some ten meters wide. Its surface was sandy dirt kept meticulously clear of weeds. Within the ring were many things, but four were significant: three were posts forming a triangle; the fourth was in the triangle’s center. It was a low column, thigh high and the same wide, made of vertically set branches held fast by woven twigs. On this basketlike pillar sat a sphere, or a globe, or a cage. It, too, was made of woven branches and twigs, but also of bone. It was bound tightly with vines and tough stems and hair.
In the cage was a thin girl. Even Mr. and Mrs. Gerlic would have had trouble recognizing their elder daughter; Miriam’s eyes were red and puffed from terrified crying. Her naked skin was alive with welts: a thousand spider bites. Her arms and legs were tied fast to the ribs of the globe, strung by wrist and ankle. When she saw the old woman approach, a pitiful stream of urine trickled from between her legs. Her throat was raw from hours of fruitless screaming, and only a ragged sigh came out.
“Time to go,” the old woman said.
She caressed the little ladder rising to the odd cage with the branch, then ascended, softly speaking old, old words. She held her sparkling knife to the blind eyes of the trees, and reached down to the girl.