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Raguel saw nothing.

He could feel that he was no longer in the castle proper. Ged's hand covered his face, his palm thick with hair. Raguel could feel a breeze against his body, and he could hear the rivers below them, flowing into that gargantuan lake. Raguel was held still, for a second, several wetly sharp sounds reached him while, presumably, Nub was being dealt with.

"The laws, ah... I'm meant to bind you, for this," said the spider fool. "How do you feel about that?"

Raguel shrugged. He had gone this far - and Ged seemed oddly trustworthy, for all that they'd just met.

"You are allowed to speak, you know," said Ged. His hand finally let go of Raguel's head. With his eyes now uncovered, the man saw that they were in the lattice of silk which hung under the castle. Beneath him was a drop that would kill a bull. Ged's hand left some strands of silk on his face, in his beard, but Raguel did not mind. "In fact, it is better if you do. I get bored easily."

In front of Raguel was a great web, of the shape he had seen in the gardens back when he was a child. A latticed spiral. Here and there on the web were spider-folk, green and blue, who crawled and climbed away on Ged's gesture, leaving the whole mass of gossamer threads bare.

The Fool hung behind him and wrapped a band of silk around Raguel's upper body six times, binding his arms. The extrusion of this silk from Ged made a noise like dead leaves underfoot after rain. This was followed by four coils of silvery rope, which were then tied at his back, and pulled tight.

It felt strange, and soothing, and soft. This physical silk was affecting him in a subtly different way from Bochi's voice, but not altogether different.

"Wriggle a little, and come on, man, speak."

"I... ah. I am not sure what to talk about." Raguel squirmed, as best he could, and found the band and ropes tightened as he did so. As with everything of the spiders', passivity would have eventually freed him. He did not want to be free.

He did not want to be freed when he could be killed in the fall, at least. Raguel did, however, marvel at the glowing strands all about him, and imagined climbing around them, through them. It tempted him like the vines on Paean's tower had. In front of the great flat web hung many silk cords, half as thick around as Raguel himself, one of which which Ged was busily attaching to Raguel's bonds. Several others were tipped with cocoons, as well. A second set of silk bands was wrapped around Raguel's knees, followed by four ropes.

Raguel remembered something.

"What is Autumn 'the' season of? I read your laws, but it didn't tell me," Raguel said, sheepishly.

"Seasons have loves," Ged replied, as though it was obvious. The ropes around Raguel's knees were pulled tight. Raguel compliantly tried to part his legs, to find that he could not, and that they were stuck in place by his act of 'resistance'. "Each type of love. Filial, erotic, communal, all of them have their times of year for celebration. Autumn is harvest-time, and it is also our courtship-time, so Autumn is the season of generative love."

"So, the dance to start Autumn is erotic?" he asked. Raguel felt a happiness, wrapped up as he was, that he didn't want to dwell on.

"I hope so. I tried to make it so. Did you think it was?" Ged's hand - one of them - wrapped companionably around Raguel's throat. Those hands seemed to have shrunk, as they could no longer be so large as to wrap Raguel's face in their palm when they circled his neck like this. A band of silk was wrapped around Raguel's ankles, slowly, making sure his bondage was comfortable. A mouth - he could feel lips, Ged was definitely changing - whispered in his ear. "Dirty boy. Excited by unusual things."

Raguel coughed.

"Please don't do that," and I'm not a boy, he didn't add. "Are you changing shape, or are there more of you?"

"Oh, fine." Ged blew in his ear and got back to work. "Yes, I change. Did you find the dance erotic, Raguel? Be honest."

"I... suppose I did, in a way," Raguel said, his face bright red. Ropes were wrapped over the sheet on his ankles. Ged's hand on his throat - the sort of thing that would terrify him elsewhere - was somehow one of the most comforting things in the world. Ged was here, and taking care of him. "If fascination with bodies is erotic."

"...then all painters are perverts, Raguel." The ropes were pulled - Raguel, on cue, tried to squirm - and was locked in place.

"Aren't they?" Raguel said, grinning. Ged squeezed his neck, gently. "It was never my place to condemn or forgive. I meant no offense."

"Mm. You wanted to know how I know Nub, too." A final, broader band was wrapped around Raguel's waist and hands. "I heard through the door. I can tell you simply. We're brothers."

"You were a demon?"

"An incubus, even, yes." More ropes... Raguel started to shift, comfortably, in his bonds. "Unlike Nub, I loved my job. I was like a gardener, you know, making new and fabulous things take shape. And changing myself for every new lover - learning what they wanted, what would draw them - it was endlessly different, entertaining so many humans."

"But you couldn't choose whether you wanted it," said Raguel, no longer sure where Nub was, or why he wasn't saying anything.

"Hence my coming here," those lips on his ear again, "for freedom. Now, Raguel. My guest. Twist in there for me just once more, and we'll be set."

Raguel hesitated. He knew he couldn't get out of this situation, and that he had to sacrifice his memory to get through, but there was still Magdalene.

"Don't make me forget about my life," he murmured, turning to Ged. Sure enough, the huge fingered fangs were replaced with a human nose and mouth, but still with a thin fur coat, in a face that still had many eyes. Somehow, it was harder to read. "Please, Ged."

"I'll just take the bits of the spells that you'd need to cast them. I promise. No lost childhood for you." Ged's hand closed around Raguel's scalp, fingers threading gently into his hair, and turned him to face the web. A thin blue light was travelling up the spiral scaffold from its centre, almost too faint to see. Other lights, variously sky-blue and indigo, flashed up the web's spokes, and a ring of darkness flowed down from the centre, now and then, snuffing lights in its path. It was all amazingly disordered to watch, but less so the more Raguel watched.

"I believe you," Raguel said, small. Ged's other hand wrapped around Raguel's neck from the other side.

"Good. Now," A thin band of silk, not sticky, was twisted into a rope and wrapped between Raguel's lips. "Hush."

The blue that went up the spiral was brighter, then. Faster. The web was still, but alive with light in the pitch cave. Ged's hands closed over Raguel's forearms.

There was no wind through the cavern anymore. Ged's hands closed around Raguel's shoulders.

"I wove this web, like I wrote the dance," Ged whispered, his lips touching Raguel's ear again - but Raguel wasn't shuddering in response to that, anymore. This was more like friendship. "So I have a feeling you'll like this. Eventually, you won't be able to look away anyway, but that's not the point."

"Mm...?" What was 'the point'? Raguel could feel that soft mud in the back of his soul, again, and in the front of his mind.

"The point is for you to feel good. We are hospitable."

Raguel nodded. He did feel good. They were hospitable. To someone who should, by all rights, be their enemy. The indigo spoke-spots flashed blackly and softened all of Raguel's fears. Ged's hands closed around the outside of his thighs. All of Ged's hands were hot, and he felt more silk being softly secreted onto him from Ged's palms.

"I, of course, am the most hospitable among us," Ged murmured. Raguel supposed this could be true. "And you don't wish to be rude."

Raguel feebly shook his head. The green was so bright he couldn't see it. Indigo glows were swept up along the web where the blue swirl met them, dissolving through the lattice like a burst wineskin.

It was raining outside, so the rivers flowed louder and louder below them.

"You wish to please people," Ged said. Raguel hummed behind his gag, drooling, as with his mouth in the position it was in, he could do nothing else but honestly agree. "But enough of that. Think of a spell."

Raguel thought of the ritual for sanctifying of a human vessel, to prevent possession. He repeated it in his head, and each time he repeated it, there was a word less.

Eventually, he remembered the first word, over and over, endlessly.

"Think of a spell," Ged said.

Raguel thought of the warring benediction, a paradoxical blessing for the sake of demon-slaying. He cycled through it, one word shorter every whirl. Ged rubbed his belly in a slow circle.

Finally, he reached the first word, over and over, over and over.

"Think of a spell," Ged said.

-

"You should come back here, when you're finished your journey, Raguel," was the first thing Raguel heard as he woke up. The stupor the web had put him in was deeper and thicker than the dance, and it took him a moment after hearing the words to remember what they even meant. There was no point arguing that he would probably not survive his quest. The meditative state he got from Ged's web was shallower than what he got from Bochi's voice, but then again, Raguel had deliberately immersed himself in Bochi. The little librarian was due far, far more than memory. "It will be a new season, then. I'll have new dances. New dancers, even."

"Like your brother?" Raguel asked. He bent his legs, one after the other, now that they were free - but his arms weren't.

"Oh, he won't be finished his ecdyses yet." Ged was again enormous, again fanged. The fool lifted Nub in his cocoon out of the trap-door, hanging down from a thread, and Raguel saw why the boy had been so quiet - he was gagged and blindfolded, and the blindfold was still pulsing blue and indigo. "Needs more, for him, you know. Voice and all."

"You must be happy that he came here, like you did. I still don't understand why you did, when you liked to be a demon."

"Life as a demon is very sad, you know," Ged said, attaching Nub to the ceiling for safe keeping. "Not only do you not have a choice of your duty, but you must always be against someone. Versus something. Competing, corrupting, harming Christians. These days, I can do all that to people who want it, when they want it, and when I want it, and only when we both want it."

Raguel's mind filled with things he wanted. He coughed.

"Men don't normally choose these things, either," Raguel said, softly. "I was always going to be a knight, as the Order raised me. I could have been a peasant, working the land to my death... I suppose that is the attraction of these places. You get some safety, and choice."

"Mm-hmm." The hum shook him inside. Ged's face pushed right up to Raguel's, and he could not move his arms to push the creature back. Raguel remembered something else.

"You seem to both crave the freedom here, but how is it free, when you have so many rules and laws? And can you let my arms go? I think they’re starting to cramp, and I feel like a pet."

"You don't mind being my pet." (Raguel winced, because he really didn't.) "The rules are rewritten for each of us. They are made for and by us... to allow us all to weave and live together."

"Every one of you has the same --" but Ged pounced on him, and wrapped his long finger-fangs around Raguel's neck, and he felt that soft mouth press against his neck, and he laughed, and screamed, and felt nothing but a helpless body-wide shiver. What meagre blessings remaining inside Raguel were sucked out. "You could have said you were going to do that."

"You liked it, though." Ged's hand brushed the small of his back. Raguel coughed. By one rope, connected to the coils around Raguel's middle, the hazel-furred fool tugged the dark-haired knight back up the stairwell, to the other side of the tower from where Raguel had been shown in by Linyph. "Straight on, then up, and you'll find Aran. Remember to sleep, Raguel."

With one claw, Ged sliced through the two sets of bands and ropes binding Raguel's top half, and he was free to go.

-

Through the next set of double doors - which lacked the brass furnishings of the previous two, so Raguel guessed that most guests didn't go further than this when they weren't to be converted - there was another long hallway. He heard sheep, somewhere.

Above Raguel, one or two spider-folk crawled along the webs in the ceiling, repairing, creating. Hanging down from the ceiling, tall as the room, were more exquisite tapestries.

This time, they showed no pastoral scenes, no unicorns. This time, there was a story, told from left to right, to left, to right.

In the first sheet, three figures, in armour, held up a Cross. One had thicker armour than the others, larger pauldrons - one had a polearm - the last, a Bible. Bats, or some such vermin, fled from the three and their symbol.

A good stretch of the narrowing hallway was dedicated to the three knights' adventures. They slew a cambion. They killed a cattle-rustler. They killed an archdemon. They un-poisoned a well, and killed the witch who poisoned it.

The three celebrated in great halls after each victory, with an ever-growing army of supporting revellers. The human form was simplified for these tapestries, so out of the armour, it was difficult to tell who was who - but one of the three had grey hair.

The hall was low enough now that the tapestries were almost right in front of Raguel. Predictably, the knights came to learn of some divine secret, through the silver-haired third. Angels appeared above them, looking either gracious or severe. Had they been warned?

Briefly, there was an intermission in the drama, as an armed snail's battle with a farmer was shown in four sheets. The snail won. It ruined the pace of the legend, and Raguel felt that one spider with more authority than necessary must have strongly wished that this part would be included.

The three, with the angels left behind, gathered on three hills, far from each other. The grey-haired one's hill was well below the others', in a valley. There was a confusing tapestry following this one, which showed the hills, but also a strange and complex series of cerulean shapes connecting them, so none of the knights could be seen.

The next showed angels above where the knights had been, but unlike the trumpeters from before, these angels were in armour. They held weapons. Even the silver-haired, Bible-wielding one had gained a knife in his angelic form. Below them, a little over-dramatically, holes were cut in the sheet in the shape of the knights.

The rest of the story, Raguel sort of knew - he had assumed most of the previous parts of the tale, already. The angelic knights flew, with their wings and their weapons, to the gates of Heaven, and were refused entry.

The knights on Earth, from their emptiness, were remade by a serpent, a spider, and an arm from the sea. Paean, Aran, and the third Hierophant founded their church-kingdoms - Paean's colourful and chaotic, Aran's dark and intricate, the third's flooded and rhythmic.

Raguel was too busy thinking about the story that he walked into the next door, and hurt his nose.