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Raguel's negotiation with the snakes' Hierophant, then, had gone swimmingly. He had gained a powerful friend and ally, and rituals of potential use against the Hellminth plague, which he could send details of back to the Order. He had some confidence in himself as a diplomat.

He had completely lost his trust in the Order.

Raguel's mind whirled around one fact, nearly becoming obsessed. The angel-like creatures spawned from the Order's founders had immediately left Earth for the gates of Heaven, and demanded entry. They had either entered it, or stayed there trying to enter it, for three centuries, and that was irrelevant morally. Somehow, while free from sin, they focused only on their own gain. They left their lands to the other forces in the world, to their other selves. Eventually, to demons.

However, they were angels. Or near angels. Saint-like. Were they evil, or tainted, or somehow still too human, they would surely have fallen from sort-of-angels into sort-of-devils. No, Paean explained, he felt his counterpart's existence too keenly, and it still radiated something holy to the Christian god.

The Order was Raguel's church. It was the only church that had ever mattered, because they took him in. His foundations were shaking, now.

The Order had a skilful way of making every new decree sound like it was obviously derived from scripture or from the initial tenets, from their founders. Their founders who were, in some sense, the pagan priests they preached against. Things were valued based on how ancient they were if they were from the Order, described or twisted to seem as such even if they were relatively new. They were derived as primitive if older than some point they decided based on how un-Christian they were. Those things could be songs, cultures, races, people, ideas.

Raguel hadn't touched the ankh in a while. An odd energy thrummed when he used it, not unpleasant but not pleasurable. He had no fears of becoming dependent upon it, back when he was more resolute in his faith, but now he wanted for a sense of power, a sense of righteousness.

Magdalene, however. He remembered how they had begun to talk. She toyed with heresy in every conversation - toyed with the nature of whether women and men should be in their situations, as, as she said, "Not every problem in the world needs a field ploughed or a man cloven, Raguel."

She would have made a formidable witch, he thought, fondly.

For a week, he slept on Ghum, or in him, when he was lonely. When he was not learning, he would climb in the forests. It was a very good place, this valley.

He detailed the rituals on some durable paper the serpents provided, and sent it back to the Order's lands with a shipment of wine. Paean even sent a couple of the serpent-folk guards with them to guarantee their safe passage, and perhaps as an olive branch to the Order, too.

Raguel prepared to leave for the next Hierophant's lands to the South. Paean said his brothers could know more about the plague, know other healing rituals, if it had come to their lands. So, Raguel was still going forward. Whatever the Order was, whatever the founders' sins meant, people would continue to die like Magdalene did if Raguel did nothing about it.

-

On his first night back on the road, in the cooler woods outside of the snake valley, Raguel took out Worl's information on the spiders. He was more familiar with them, because one had attacked travellers and livestock in a village on Order lands, and he and some other Knights were sent to dispatch her.

She had been driven mad by something, Raguel believed, because she had only made guttural noises and lashed out at anything living in front of her. He remembered her shining black skin between patches of white fur in the snow, and her great tenacity in battle, running wholly on complex instinct. He also remembered the gruesome conversation they all had when she was dead, about why she had five pairs of limbs - meaning ten in total. By rights, they should have had four.

She had a sort of human-shaped body, man-like arms and legs, then three extra pairs of long, spidery appendages tipped with large hands. They resolved to find a normal spider, because if spiders turned out to have had ten legs all along, they would have felt rather foolish, and sure enough, the next they saw had two small 'arms' on either side of its mouth.

It was still irritating, somehow, for all Raguel's guilt about her death.

A more pressing matter would have been what drove the she-spider mad, but the men were who they were. Perhaps she was just too far from her own folk, and the isolation did it.

The spider-folk lived in a series of caverns that began just South of a small gulf just South of the serpents' valley. The lands above those caves were verdant, well-farmed grasslands, covered in all sorts of different sheeps and mouflon. It was difficult to see the spider-folk shepherds, as they hid in burrows for most of the day. There was a gargantuan fortress built into the centre of the caverns, and Worl's accounts described how some of its spires stabbed up through the meadows, smooth and windowless and pitch.

The spiders' silks, wools and tapestries were traded more with the kingdoms South of them than with the Order, so their information was more about their bodies than their culture.

As Raguel already knew from talking with Worl, when the spiders' Hierophant decided to make a new disciple, he would prepare a potion from his own venom and some herbs. Once the acolyte had drunk it, over the course of the next day, the new disciple's skin would grow brittle and papery. Seven disgusting times, new skins would be shed, through various soft and misshapen shells, before a new spider-person came out, who could have the aspect of any number of different spiders - the large or small, the cobweb or spiral-web, poison or harmless.

It made them abominations in the eyes of the Order, of course, and they were definitely in some way beholden to Satan upon taking themselves out of God's plan for them, but they were not innately violent, nor did they tend to change their behaviour afterwards.

It was certain, Worl wrote, that the ritual for spider creation (Lord, spideration) was only ever successful if consensual. If the participant was unwilling, even unconsciously, the ecdyses would stop after the third or fourth moult, and the participant would die for their indecision.

Raguel started to fall asleep at all this information. It wasn't clear how important it would become. He had climbed a tall sycamore for the night, less for safety than for the pleasure of climbing. There was a shift in the thicker branch next to his. On that branch, he saw on glancing, was a nude Cernunnos.

"Good morning," he said.

"It's the middle of the night," said Raguel. "And you are naked. Of course you are. Hello, Cern."

"It's hot here, and it's more than the middle of the night. You handled the deal with Paean beautifully, Raguel," Cern said. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

"I was about to go to sleep."

Cern beamed that beam again.

"Let's make a hammock," he said.

"Fine," sighed Raguel, happy to have someone keeping watch. While they roped the hammock up, Raguel decided to make conversation. "Are you a witch, Cern?"

"Only in that I have power," Cern replied. "The only inn between here and the start of the spiders' lands is run by a witch, though. A right and proper warlock."

"The baby-eating sort?" The sun was threatening to come up, and the birdsong made Raguel sleepy, like it always did. Raguel adjusted himself on the hammock, throwing his boots down the side. "Will he lure me in with a song?"

"You should be so lucky." Cern pulled the last knot on the hammock, and roughly shoved Raguel onto it. It held, and Cern smiled at a job well done. He ducked under it and lay beneath Raguel. "He's one of the few people the spider-ritual failed for. He turned into something else. Now, he curates a small magical library, and runs an inn in the last human settlement before the caves."

"I thought the ritual killed them if it failed?" Raguel pulled his hair out of the knot he'd put it into, and Cern's snake, Hubbub, crawled up to curl into a sleepy pile of himself on Raguel's belly.

"Only if they don't want it. It might not work for all sorts of reasons. Bad luck, in this case. In any case, he's a friend, and I sent word ahead --"

"You turned into a fly and flew ahead to tell him."

"A thrush, Raguel." Cern kicked Raguel's backside through the net. "Please."

-

Cern was a bigger deer this time. They travelled through bandit-free land, suffering mosquitoes and one another, and it was all pleasant, really. The distance they covered was far greater than the time they spent would warrant, but Raguel had learned to stop questioning how Cern worked, and to just be grateful for it.

When had he become so submissive?

For that matter, when had he become so introspective?

If he was honest with himself, he would have admitted that he was always this way. He followed directions from his superiors in the Order, and did not question, did not think, except if the 'how' was unclear. He was a soldier, a religious soldier, and obedience and humility of some sort was normally a joy for him. This questioning had come from Paean, really. It was uncomfortable.

Once the village was in view, Raguel gave Cern a good scratch along his neck with both hands, and the deer loped off. It wouldn't do to ride in on the wrong kind of animal. Though this wasn't a Christian area anymore, it paid to avoid accusations of malevolent sorcery.

It was a silent, desolate place, even now in the early evening. There were lit windows, and a lit and quiet tavern, but no-one was on the street. Now and then, he saw older men and women peering at him between their shutters. Raguel was not wearing his Order regalia, but it may have been his build or manner implying it. He had allowed himself to grow a short beard on his chin, and to grow his hair longer than it had been before, tied into a long ponytail behind him.

Past the rustic houses of the village, past the town square, he saw what was probably Cern's friend's place: an abbey choked in ivy, with a sign next to it, reading 'Library (for all)'.

Odd. Raguel walked along the pleasant, if eerily silent, path, and saw another entrance - this time with a different sign, 'Tavern (for you)'.

Odd.

Raguel walked inside.