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Something clamped inside the door as Raguel closed it.

Here was another wide, circular hall with a transparent roof, like the theatre, but the moonlight reaching Raguel was dappled. The walls of the hall, all the way up, were lined with a castle estate's worth of plant life. Ivy began in hanging baskets and swamped the walls themselves. Thick, herbaceous branches spilled from balconies and hooked around one another. Every plant's every leaf hung still, with that odd softness plants have at night.

The floor of the hall was a metal lattice, presumably so the plants could be watered without damaging the castle. Raguel wondered if the roof could be removed when it rained.

Nothing was quite thick or woody enough to climb, and all the doors were bolted except for the one facing the entrance. Still, Raguel stayed here for an hour or two, sat down, and rested. Occasionally he saw a spider move in the upper levels, hanging down a silk rope from their tail to wrap their legs around themselves and sleep.

It wasn't a bad idea. The moon was almost gone.

-

Magdalene had loved her food very heavily seasoned.

She had said this over dinner, a mustard-heavy pork stew. Every meal among minor nobility was extremely complex, to Raguel, not least how he was supposed to behave. There was likely some hidden meaning to what she said, but it was beyond Raguel, who just agreed with her.

Magdalene then changed the subject to demons, asking a myriad questions - how you get rid of them, if they're killed or simply sent back to Hell, what the benefit was for a warlock summoning them. Raguel answered as best he could. He had learned early on in courting her that the rules about protecting the laity from unpleasant information did not, under any circumstances, apply to Magdalene.

After dinner, as Raguel was armouring up to leave, Magdalene asked him if he had to leave so soon.

She had bitten her lip.

-

Raguel woke up halfway up the room, wrapped in a thick sheet of webbing. Some of the spider-folk must have moved him out of the way for the night. Nothing had been taken. He found himself unoffended, and a little touched.

The webbing that held him was not sticky, or binding, like Ged's had been, and he climbed down with relative ease to continue through the castle.

Through the following door was another long corridor, but this time, there were no further doors. For the next mile, at least, there was a continuous hallway hanging by great pillars from the cave roof, between which Raguel could see the cave. The further down this passage he walked, the more thickly the pillars were wrapped in unorganized cobwebs, and the more roughly-hewn the floor became.

The silk along the ceiling was no longer so organised, but a cottony mess. The coloured lights in those silk threads, that once flashed from globules of liquid inside or sticking to them, now flashed and slowly throbbed through the entire tangle with no pattern or direction.

Raguel could hear the sea, so he was near the end of the cave. It had been at least a year since he had heard the sea.

He came to a point where the bricked and carpeted floor of the castle tattered away into uneven, unhewn stone. Pillars became natural columns of lime - and above him was a mess of silk wrapped all around a mass of warrens.

Further down, each step was made laboured by a web-lined floor that was slippery and sticky at the same time. The light faded.

Further down, his environment shed more and more artifice, and finally, there were no tapestries, no rugs, and eventually, no light at all. The darkness became its own thing, rather than a shadow. Raguel knew the direction he needed to go in was the same as he had entered with, so he felt his way between and around stalagmites, keeping that direction in mind.

There was, eventually, a ladder-like cave wall. Pleased with something to interact with, Raguel hummed happily for the few moments it took to climb.

Above the top, there was light, again - the other end of the cave, illuminating the silhouettes of every single one of the cave's teeth yet to pass. As Raguel approached it, he saw that it was bordered, of course, by great hanging cobwebs, and that one great spiral web hung around the cave's whole entrance. That - and the many little lumps stuck in the web - explained the lack of bats and birds.

Raguel called:

"Aran?"

"Up here," came the reply, from where a large lump of silk lowered down from the cave roof. Raguel dug his heels into the slimy mass, and was raised up.

-

He passed through a hole in a sort of second floor to the cave, near the roof, a net so fine that Raguel only saw the lattice when he passed its threshold. Raguel would not have seen it if Aran had not pulled him up - and it had to be Aran, if only because it had taken so long to reach him. He stepped out onto it, finding it held, and continued to walk towards the light.

Cobwebs, tangled like a broken loom, hung from and caked the walls around Raguel, flashing and pulsing with more power than he had seen from the spiders yet. A greyish-furred man lowered himself to the taut net-floor.

"You'll want to take your shoes off," said Aran. The monster had a huntsman's build, and a wolf's gait. His many eyes made Raguel feel somehow surrounded, and only sometimes did Raguel notice the long spidery limbs coming up from his back, and hands that hung limply above his head. "We don't want you to tear through the floor."

"Of course," said Raguel, obeying, and carrying them. The warrior was undisturbed by the lack of decorum, of official greetings. He had come to expect it, and it was far better than having to improvise diplomacy with all the normal rules in place. "I have come from the Order of St. Parthos, to request aid in a plague of demon-worms. Paean explained that you were once Christians, you Hierophants, so you may know exorcisms we do not."

"Mm." Aran's expression was kind, but his words were short. "You want to bring our cures back with you? Substances?"

"No, I mean to send missives with the knowledge."

"You can use a pigeon of ours, then," Aran said, and scratched his chin. The hands on his man-like arms bore strange black claws. He stopped walking. "We are going too fast. Far too fast. Let's stop, and start again, Sir Knight."

"I - I am Brother Raguel," Raguel said, obediently stopping. He had been overconfident. The silver web-net below his feet was softer than the rugs he was used to, especially given its thickness. "I must apologize for..."

"No, no, no." Black hands at the tips of Aran's 'legs' took Raguel's scalp and moved him to face Aran, to look up into (some of) his eyes. It was difficult to tell if Aran was thickly-muscled, or if he wore some sort of suede armour. "Don't worry about all that, Raguel, I know who you are. I believe I can give you some knowledge."

Raguel gently pushed at the hands on his head. He knew where Aran was, so he did not need them. Their palms were waxy and smooth, as opposed to the fur that covered the man-like portions of Aran. Ignoring him, the hands brushed over, then gently curled around his wrists.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to lift you up, little Knight." So saying, with a little flourish of his wrists, those black hands attached a piece of silk to each of Raguel's wrists, attaching them together, and pulled back with that dead-leaf noise, tethering them. The black limbs were long enough that if they were to uncurl, they would have pulled Raguel's arms up, like a puppet's. "You'll understand in a moment. May I?"

"May you what? Will you even explain? Do I have a choice?"

"Of course you do." Aran poked Raguel's chin up. His fur was velvety, softer than Ged's. Raguel nodded, curt, and found the tethers wrapped around his forearms, and the black hands lifting his own straight upward. Two more hands took hold of Raguel's bare ankles, and he was held up before the long-limbed lord, facing him as he walked.

Raguel flushed at his helplessness, which had become a habit on his journey. The Hierophant reached up and took Raguel's boots from him, carrying them, too.

"What sort of knowledge can you give me?"

"I know the plague's origin," said Aran, with what seemed to be a smile. Unlike his children, his mouth seemed mostly human. "Or, I am reasonably certain I know. I may not be able to cure it, but I have an idea of why you are being attacked now, little sir."

There was a pregnant pause. Raguel, from his stretched position, tried to think of how to reply politely.

"I will listen, Aran, but will it help?"

"All knowledge helps someone," Aran said, and held Raguel a fraction closer, so he could feel the warmth from Aran's chest. The silk around Raguel's arms was warm and soothing, a rawer feeling than Ged's spell. The sea grew louder. "We Hierophants are the bodies left by your predecessors after they tried to ascend their souls to Heaven, filled in by the Earth, as you know. You also know, as my new pet Nub has told you, that Hellish demons target Christians. You'll have been taught that human suffering is a just response to the sin in Eden..."

Raguel's face was right in front of Aran's. The creature hesitated.

"The angel-things we spawned have spent the last few centuries knocking on Heaven's gates, and being repulsed by their Heavenly Father. I feel certain that they have now succeeded, Raguel, and wander the golden realm among pure Christian souls and blameless Christian Angels. They are Heavenly matter, our angel-things, but they are so mis-made that they are in an Earthly condition, you see."

"Speak some sense, please. At all." Raguel's patience was wearing thin - he had never taken to hearing bad news gently.

"That condition of earthliness means they will lay eggs, if they have not already. They will reproduce. They are pests in Heaven, allowed by their matter, unnatural in their nature. They are not blameless, not sinless, not everything a human should be after the sanctification of death, and your lord's salvation. They have also not sinned enough to Fall - they may even be incapable of Falling, not being real angels."

"Surely, the Lord is..."

"Omnipotent, yes, of course, in his own Creation. However, he made his worlds with rules, and Heaven is one of his worlds. Heavenly matter committing sin was not part of the design. Angels were capable of sin, but their bodies Fell when that happened, and that served a purpose - Satan and his lot are there to tempt or to punish you. Human souls that are saved cannot sin any further, their free will an Earthly matter. I am certain your Lord will solve this problem for himself, such is His power over His own creation, but he hasn't, yet. Meanwhile, the Order they – we? The other whomever it was founded has lost its grace, and the diseases of the world are flooding in again." Aran rested a hand on Raguel's chest. "You are very agitated."

"I saw my bride die to these worms," Raguel said, frustrated. "Are you saying she was punished for your arrogance, Aran?"

"I am only the body, Raguel, not the soul that betrayed your faith," Aran replied, gently. "I remember him, but I am not him. The portion of him that was beholden to your Christian... er, way, has been taken away."

"Their crimes, then!"

"Then yes," said Aran. "The sins of the father are passed to the son - as it is in a monastic sense, too, at least as per the covenant your Order has with your Lord. Your worm-plague may not be Heaven's doing directly, but you will find no protection from them, now, from the spells the founders made for you. Now, as for healing..."

"But," said Raguel, "if we repent, can we not... can we not sanctify the Order? Can we never save our people?"

"Earthly suffering from pestilence is a part of human life the Lord gave to you long ago," Aran said. "Paean's rites should clear away normal and magical parasites, even those from other faiths than ours. You saw, too, how my folk can drain anything of its Hellish nature, but I'm afraid we can only do that with our bodies, and I have no songs or portions that can do that for you. You sent a missive from Paean before reaching us, I assume, so I expect the Order is already saving itself..."

One of Aran's remaining hands rested on Raguel's side, warm and gentle. Raguel was exhausted, somehow, despite Aran carrying him.

"...and the Polypi... ah..." Aran looked regretful, for a moment. "The Polypi are the most disorg- ah - diverse, of our three peoples. Not just their bodies, but their magic. They don't all have the same power in their flesh, like we do, or know the same magic, as Paean's flock do. They have scholars that should know something of Hellish worms, I think."

"Thank you, Aran," Raguel said, almost under his breath.

"For what? For being your horse and carriage, this past hour?"

The sea was loud behind them now - Raguel turned, to see that he was at the end of the cave. Beyond the web lining it was a beach, and the sea that held the Unnumbered Polypi, stretching out to the horizon. The sunlight was relieving.

"Truth is... truth. It has its own worth." Raguel smiled, unwillingly. "I did wish to know, though I would not have asked."

Aran let go of Raguel's legs, and let him stand, but there were tethers attached to his ankles, now.

"What are you doing?"

"There is something you need to know before you go to the Polypi," the spider-priest said. "You need to know how to deal with them, how their guardsmen work."

"I don't mean to attack them," Raguel said, hesitant. "Neither your nor Paean's people have truly harmed me. If --"

"You misunderstand me," Aran interrupted, yet again, "because, as I was going to say, the Polypi do not guard themselves with brute force. They guard it with sensation, and alteration. You will have to learn to endure them."

Aran pushed Raguel off the web, and what would have been a fall to his death became a slow and gentle descent on the ropes on his hands and feet.

Raguel saw that he was in the centre of a naturally flat area of the cave, the bottom of a former river that ran into the sea. He felt a little twitch in each point of contact, and knew, somehow, that he would literally be puppeted now.

At the bottom of his drop was a bag - with his book, and his ankh. At Aran's prompting, he picked up both.

"You learned how to escape our webs by much the same way, but it's different with the Polypi," Aran explained, hanging above Raguel by a silk rope from his tail. "We'll give you an example before you go."

Towards the sea, he saw Cern, in a short kilt, walking towards him.

"What are you doing...?"

"Teaching you," said Cern, who threw a punch to Raguel's face - and the knight ducked before it had any chance of hitting him, rolling out of the way. Somehow, Aran's bonds around Raguel's wrists never tangled. "Your tricks work, Aran. Let's start."

"Can we stop for a moment?" Raguel said.

"Wait," said Aran, and Raguel was made to stand still - upright - and then to relax, somehow, warm, honeyed feeling flowing through the silk and his ankles and wrists and from there through his whole body. The pleasure was immense. Cern placed his hands on Raguel's face.

"I don't think this is really meant to help me with anything," Raguel said. “I think you just want to do things to me, and you’re contriving to make them seem necessary.”

"I've missed you, too, little one," Cern said, and his hands grew strangely wet, and the wetness made a soft song start in Raguel's head, driven by the hum of the waves crashing. Raguel's breath became part of that rhythm. He did not shake his head - did not argue with his body - and the slime faded from memory and life. "Did you miss me?"

"Slightly," Raguel said. "Would I have died, had I fought that?"

"No," said the horned god.

"You'd have never stopped feeling it," Aran said, above them. "Most drugs, you know, their effects become lesser the more you take of them. This, instead, is a perfect feeling that will come back when you are given it, and last as long as you struggle. The effect never grows stronger, though."

"Can I give him another, Aran? I think my toy needs cleaning before his swim."

"I need a drink," Raguel sighed, and Cern slid his wetting fingers into the man's mouth.