Then a brief flicker of movement caught his eye, and there was Alcevan, crouched low among the ruins of the poorly constructed wall along the south side of the temple. She was in the shadows, so nobody would even know that she was there—if she stayed still and didn't move. Either she didn't know that, or she was positive that nobody would be looking for her. Rabbit, however, had been searching, and he'd just found what he wanted. "I don't think she's going to like this very much," he murmured to himself as Captain Gimpy climbed up onto a large stone block to speak to the gathered priests.
"Captain Squint-Eye and me decided that there's something you priests really ought to know about, since your lives could very well depend on your knowing what it is," Gimpy declared. "To keep it short, our scouts saw quite a few bug-people sneaking through the bushes toward this south wall, and that's why you're here to lend us a hand. There was something that'd happened earlier, though, that our scouts didn't know about." He put his hand on Rabbit's shoulder. "This little fellow has actually seen a certain variety of bugs in the corridors that lead to the main temple, so he can tell you what they look like and just how dangerous they are."
"I'll do my best, Cap'n Gimpy," Rabbit said. Then he looked out at the not really too interested priests. "This will be the fourth war we've had with the bug-people since last spring, and I've managed to live through all four of them—so far, anyway. There are dozens and dozens of different kinds of bug-people. Most of them are fairly stupid, so we've been able to outsmart them three times already. An entirely different kind of bug showed up in the second war last summer, and that's the bug that somehow got into these corridors. Most bugs have six legs, but these ones we've seen in these corridors have eight. Now, most bugs chase things—or people—that they want to eat. The eight-legged ones set traps, though."
"That's absurd," one of the priests declared.
"Not really," Rabbit disagreed. "Most of the corridors here in the temple have spiderwebs all over the walls and hanging down from the ceiling. The spider-bug we encountered last summer was fifty or a hundred times bigger than any other spider I've ever seen. We had two different enemies in that war off to the south. One of the enemies was the bug-people, of course, but the other one came from Trog-land, and they came here to look for gold, and they thought that they saw more gold than they'd ever seen before lying out there in the Wasteland."
Rabbit smiled then. "We had two enemies, and they were running toward each other. It wouldn't have been very polite to interfere with either one of them, so we just got out of the way. The Trog-landers encountered bug-people with poisonous fangs, and that eliminated quite a few of them. But then the Trogs came up against the spider-bugs we've been talking about here. The huge spider-bugs had spun out their webs, and a fair number of Trogs got snared in those webs. Then the spider-bugs came out of their hiding places and bit the snared up Trogs. The venom of the ordinary bug-people is so poisonous that it kills people instantly. The venom of the spider-bug works differently, though. It dissolves the innards—hearts, livers, lungs, and so on—so the person caught in the web has had most of his insides turned into a liquid. A spider doesn't have to chew its food. It drinks it instead. The Trogs were snared in those webs, so they couldn't move. Then, any time the spider got hungry again, it'd just tiptoe along the web, bite a hole in one of the Trogs, and then drink a gallon or so of the liquid that used to be the insides of the trapped Trog. The screaming when that happened isn't the kind of screaming you really want to hear."
"Are you saying that those men were still alive after their insides were dissolved?" an older, chubby priest demanded skeptically.
"I've never heard a dead man scream," Rabbit replied. "I'd guess that the spider wants fresh food, so its venom dissolves things, but doesn't kill. That's what you'll be coming up against if you try to go back through those corridors to the main temple."
"We have managed to recover what was left of several of the victims of those overgrown spiders." Captain Gimpy smoothly stepped in. "There wasn't really very much of them left—except for their bones. It looks to me like spider venom doesn't dissolve bones, so we can show you what condition you're likely to be in after one of the spiders eats most of you."
Then he pulled back a tarp to reveal four skeletons. Gimpy tapped one of the skeletons with his foot. "This one was probably a Maag before the spider ate most of him. He was wearing fairly standard Maag clothes, though, so that sort of identifies him. The other three… ?" Gimpy shrugged. "Maybe one of you can identify the clothing on those others. Clothes are about all we've got to work with. Bones are bones, and they all look pretty much the same."
The priests all shrank back from Gimpy's suggestion. Rabbit was fairly sure that none of them had ever seen a human skeleton before. Finally, one of the older priests ordered a novice to go look. The young man turned pale and hesitantly approached Veltan's recently manufactured skeletons. "It's sort of hard to tell, Your Reverence," he said in a trembling voice. "There are only a few rags attached to any one of these three."
"What color are the rags?" the old man demanded.
"Black, Your Reverence."
"I'd say that sort of answers the question," Gimpy declared. "Maags don't wear black clothes. It's considered to be unlucky. You priests here all wear black robes, though, so those three skeletons are—or were—almost certainly priests who served Lady Aracia. I want all of you to take a good hard look at those three skeletons. If you happen to get some kind of urge to go back to the main temple, you'll almost certainly end up looking exactly like these three do. Of course, dead people don't really care what they look like, do they? They're too busy being dead to worry about their appearance. It's entirely up to you men, though. I'm not going to make staying out of those hallways an order. You might have very important things to do back in the main temple, and your chances of actually reaching the main temple aren't very good, but that's up to you. I won't interfere with anybody's religious obligations."
Rabbit rather casually looked at the tumbled-down wall where Alcevan had been hiding, and he saw that the look she was giving Cap'n Gimpy was filled with frustration and hatred.
"I'd say that poor 'Teenie-Weenie' just got cut off at the pockets," Rabbit murmured, doing his very best to avoid laughing out loud.
THE TRIBE OF OLD-BEAR