If you flee from the things you fear, there’s no resolution - Chuck Palahniuk

Of course, some resolutions are death, so run you idiot - Varya’ Qu

A loud squeal rang out behind them causing most of the group to glance back they way they had come. An answering screech sounded further south of their position. Hank shivered. There were more out there. He rode up alongside Sabine. “The one behind us is much bigger than the one we just killed.”

“And what do you want me to do about that?” She snapped

A good question Hank decided, he hadn’t really thought it through. But they needed to know if the spiders were following them or not. “Someone needs to drop back and see if they are coming after us or not. That’s going to be a dangerous role. The things jump.”

“Well, those sorts of jobs are the reason we brought Marko. As a ranger, it’s what he’s supposedly good at.” Sabine’s skepticism shone through. “But with his injuries that’s not going to work.”

Hank wasn’t well suited to the role of scout, but it didn’t look like there were many choices. Nobody else was a ranger and Hank just didn’t know what alternative roles would fill the same purpose. “It’s a problem,” he mumbled to himself.

He opened his mouth to volunteer when Jamie interrupted him. “Hank, I think, perhaps I should drop back. We need to make sure we are not being followed.”

Hank still didn’t know a lot about the wanderers but volunteering as a scout did not seem to fit with Jamie’s previous occupation as diplomat, courier and herald. But needs must when the occasion arises so all he said was. “Thanks. Don’t get caught.”

“Never do.” Jamie halted allowing everyone to ride on past him. He soon disappeared as the goat track they followed wound through the deep forest.

Some time late Fritz whispered rapidly to Sabine in Compidge. Hank chided himself for not learning the tongue. It was frustrating not knowing what was going on. In any case, Fritz finished, handed over the reins of the pack palfrey’s he’d led.

Hank looked at Sabine raising an eyebrow in question.

Answering his unspoken question she replied, “If we are being chased, we need to make sure we lose our pursuers. We also need to make sure we don’t get cornered. Fritz has experience as a pathfinder. It’s what they do.”

“Leaving the two of us to look after this lot…” Hank gestured to the unconscious Gruffly, Marco and four pack animals around them, “… and I’m injured.”

“‘n’ iy.” Marko wasn’t as unconscious as Hank had thought or maybe that was just hope. It was no secret, he and the short scout did not get on as a result of the night in the bandit’s camp. But he didn’t wish the man dead.

“So, Marko and I will keep watching. You need to read some of your books and see what else they say about these spiders. The one we killed was scary enough without them being bigger, or in greater numbers.” Sabine said.

Privately Hank wasn’t sure he would be able to concentrate with all the tension. Still if they hoped to survive, they needed to know what they were up against. Hank reflected that so far on this trip his role and degenerated to knowledge guy in danger of being regarded as a rear end… mensch or REM for short. On reflection he decided ‘knowledge guy’ was better.

People never gave credit to his strengths which appeared related to his curious nature. He was a proficient trail blazer, good at wood crafts, possessed keen eyes and a nose for danger. After all, he had been living off the land for over three years. That lifestyle made you good in the wilds. He had spent years moving through forests, mountains plains and swamps, living off the land and avoiding predators that sort of thing.

Admittedly he wasn’t in the same league as Jamie or Frtiz when it came to stealth. But neither could tell the difference between a belladonna berry and a blueberry. A mistake that would give you more than mild stomach ache.

None of these thoughts made it past his teeth, instead he said “I have reasonably good trail blazing skills. Perhaps I should be doing Fritz’s job? He would be better at defending the train than I.”

“Perhaps,” Sabine answered politely before rejecting his suggestion. “But none of us do book worm like you. Read.”

“I just feel the love.” Hank groused to himself. In his opinion Marko was useless even when uninjured. He had good eyes but not much else. Gruffly was out cold still and Sabine was the best fighter in the group by a country mile. That left him with all the support roles. He hated support. But he had the highest medicine rating. He had the best ‘nature of things’ rank as far as he could tell. And to the best of his knowledge he was the only person in the group with a book collection he actually used. Some of the things that Marko had cooked up when it was his turn to cook…, Jamie had politely called the meal adventurous until he needed to release himself. After that Hank learnt a whole range of expletives that transcended any collection of languages he knew.

Hank contemplated vocalising some of his grumbling, but instead, pulled out Nancy’s book on fauna. He flipped open to the section on the Arachnid Gigantous. Nice original name Hank thought. His notes from his conversation with Tom resembled barely legible chicken scratchings scribbled into margins and around drawings. Lots contained details of group behaviour. The spiders seems to live in colonies, a fearsome proposition he supposed.

The original text did however include some important details. ‘Whilst the typical colony is very territorial, defending its range aggressively against other arachnid groups and aggressor species, there are two exceptions to this rule. Firstly colony’s typically have only a single male. For unknown reasons this spider species struggle to produce males. Invariably this leads to colonies of between twelve to eighteen females focused on breading with their male and nurturing the subsequent offspring.’

“Oh yay,” Hank muttered to himself. “Up to eighteen those nightmares.”

He read on. ’If a male offspring hatches, they will allow a juvenile colony of up to fifty spiders to form at the edge of their territory. Juvenile females will fight to the death over a number of years until the colony matures and the numbers of females drop to less than twenty five.’

Worse still, Hank reflected as he continued to read.

‘Once the colony matures, it will move to its own territory. Until that time the parent colony will defend the young male often at ruinous cost to itself. Only deserting the young nest if their own male is threatened.’

‘Occasionally a male dies early, then another colony will contribute a male. Under these circumstances there may be up to forty adult and up to twenty juvenile spiders all living on top of each other. For all other species this is a dangerous period as the spiders are nervous in each other’s presence, attacking anything without provocation.’

Hank stopped there. Fantastic. This wasn’t the sort of information he regarded as encouraging. If he was doing his math correctly, there should be a juvenile colony out there somewhere of up to fifty female spiders and another twelve to twenty mature spiders in a connected parent colony. All of whom would be upset about a dead juvenile male.

“Sabine, we have a very big problem.” Hank looked up from his book.

“Oh?” It was a question.

“Yes, we could be fighting up to seventy spiders that would range in size from slightly smaller than the one we killed to level fifty fully grown females.” Hank grimaced as he spoke.

Sabine started speaking Compidge too herself. Hank didn’t know what she spat out over the next minute. But if he had understood, he was fairly certain he wouldn’t be teaching those words to any nearby children.

She changed back to common, sulfurously addressing Hank. “Not much will survive being attacked by seventy of those massive spiders. Thank you oh so much for bringing my brother and the rest of us to the GNF. It overjoys us to take part in your casual stroll through this tiny wood filled with sunshine, fairies and the good things in life.”

Hank liked a sarcastic comment as much as Sabine and replied in kind. “Naturally you and your brother don’t want any of the lovely gold he has panned from the river in the last few days. Looking forward, as he is, to giving it to the rest of us without compensation. It’s worth what, about three Suiden now, but you don’t want a bar of it.”

Sabine muttered something under her breath.

Hitting his stride Hank continued. “And as I recall, it was his idea to head to the Tabor for that very reason, despite the comments about spiders in the captain’s journal we all read. I also seem to recall that you were present there and happy to contribute many things to the conversation. None of which could, in any way, be considered a disagreement about the route or destination.”

Sabine was muttering again under her breath. “Yeah well you know I don’t approve of plenty of the things he does.”

Marko coughed, he seemed to be drifting towards sleep.

Sabine just kicked him in his non-injured leg. “And as you for you, you weasel. You’re always making trouble and never well enough to sort it out yourself. Tie yourself to your palfrey before you fall off.”

“What did I do?” Marko was a little incensed.

“If my husband does not come back because he was doing your job, you will find out how easily my axe will go through your armour. Clean as a whistle is my guess. Then my idiot of a brother can rediscover how to walk back to civilisation without any legs. I swear, none of you have any sense. Why did you not read more about the spiders before we arrived?”

Figuring that she was now talking to him, Hank opted for meekness and truth reasoning they would serve best in avoiding a tongue lashing. Well truth, when it also sidestepped blame. “Miss-copy in the book. Here it says that the spiders range from one and a half to three feet in height depending on the spider’s maturity. Tom said the publisher didn’t believe Nancy when she said those numbers should be in metres.”

“And you’re only telling us now. Marvelous. Men and their idiocy.” Sabine’s humour depended further.

“You where there when we all traveled with Tom on the way to ‘Big Tree’.” Hank spat back. “None of you were doing anything else. Didn’t you listen to what he said?”

There was silence.

“Didn’t you pay attention to the dangers of the GNF he talked about?” Hank gained volume and force.

Again silence

“Women and their selective memories,” Hank ground out.

Marko snorted.

“And don’t get me started on you. You didn’t pay attention either.” Hank wasn’t in the mood for Marko’s typical nonsense, subconsciously reiterating Sabine’s complaints. “For someone who's supposedly a scout you seem to get injured an awful lot, doing very little scouting. As I recall, it was following your lead for five hours that almost lost us your strongbox at the Rhea ford.”

Silence, except for the sound of the forest and the palfrey’s. Hank was on the point of returning to his reading when the rain started. It wasn’t heavy, but given what Tom had said about the weather in this part of the great northern forest, stupid name, Hank was convinced it was setting in. It rained a lot here in the GNF Hank realised.

Jamie rode back into the group. “A group of four large spiders are tracking us. They're moving faster than us. Fortunately, they won’t catch us before night fall.”

“If we can survive until night, the darkness will slow them down.” Sabine translated Marko’s optimism.

“Yeah nice one. Idiot.” Hank grumbled under his breath before continuing in a louder voice. “What spiders do you know? The ones I’m familiar with hunt at night.” Hank was still in a mood from the earlier discussion.

“Marko can’t be a scout, or he’s plain dense.” He grumbled to himself. Fortunately the dense foliage and the rain served to deaden the sound so his comments didn’t travel to the others.

“Good thing we have palfrey’s, they can keep going at this pace when horses and ponies would have required rest.” Sabine tried to sound chipper. “When Fritz gets back, we will pick our path to pass through smaller gaps and dense parts of the forest. We’ll make it harder for the spiders to follow.”

It turned out to be a tough night. Fortunately there was a full moon, providing enough moonlight to traverse those denser parts of the forest and allowing them to stretch their lead over the trailing spiders. I was only a partial win. Whilst the spiders struggled with the density, the palfrey’s did too, tiring more quickly than everyone hoped.

The next day it was still raining when they came across the first battle field. Battle field might have been a slight exaggeration. A better phrase may have been, bloody mess.

The rounded a bend on the current goat trace to see Fritz waring for them. He had returned from ranging ahead and with a grim face informed them that they needed to look at something. He lead the group, excluding Jamie who was still acting as the backstop, to the edge of a small clearing.

Gruffly had been in and out of consciousness all day and Marko was showing signs of delirium, so they were left tied to their horses whilst Hank and Sabine followed Fritz into the clearing. Hank dropped down from his palfrey and instantly regretted it. Pain lanced through his leg and he got that annoying bleeding symbol all over again.

It was a bad situation, but he knew Fritz well enough to realise the little man wouldn’t stop them unless it was something important. He would just have to solider on. Sometimes you just have to push past the pain.

He followed Fritz and Sabine into the clearing. It was chaos. Obviously there had been a big fight. There were eight dead spiders scattered across the clearing, his identify skill classified them all as ‘juvenile, female’. There were five dead horses gathered at one end. The most surprising part however were seven of the largest men Hank had ever seen, scattered throughout the surrounding clearing.

Hank didn’t think any of the dead were shorter than seven feet. Not that he had time to measure. They also wore furs and poorly tanned leather. In general they were quite different to any of the peoples Hank was familiar with. From descriptions he had read, he suspected these were the Ore Cane people of the north high lands. Not the half breeds that he had met in the past but the much more insular larger full bloods. “I wonder what they are doing on this side of the Spine mountains. They’re a long way from home.” Hank said without receiving a reply.

Hank would have taken more time to examine the field of battle but just then Jamie rode into the clearing. “Those chasing spiders are closing in. We need to move, they are only about 30 minutes to the West of us.” That galvanised the group. With a few sharp tugs, Sabine removed a couple of the large spears from the dead spiders, then they all ran, in Hank’s case, shuffled, back to the palfrey’s.

The spears Sabine had gathered were big enough that they were an ungainly problem for her, even with the extra height that came from being mounted. There was some grumbled conversation between her and Fritz before he took one and rode off.

“Actually, not the case.” Hank reasoned Jamie was commenting on the mumbled Compidge discussion. He assumed that since Jamie was speaking in common, his own opinion might be required. “My people have always used pikes that are not much shorter than the one you hold.”

Jamie seemed unflappable in the face of their problems. “We all have to learn how to use them. They’re great defence against horse raiders. Still, as I’m probably the only person with any archery related abilities I should probably keep doing what I did yesterday.”

Sabine snorted. “Now. If the last fight is anything to go by Marko is the best archer in the group and assuming that he is not delirious I would be handing him your bow.”

Maybe he wasn’t completely useless Hank thought.

“Ok, so we haven’t been fighting as we should have. For the next fight Marko gets the archer role. Jamie and I will be the pike force. Fritz…” Sabine was focused.

“Actually,” Hank thought she had forgotten something, “I think that you need to hand the other spear to me. My staff has no effect on the spiders and you and your axe did by far the most damage.”

“No. You yourself have forgotten something. Your staff made some weird sound when you attacked the spider. I don’t know what it was. It was at the limit of my hearing, but the spider reacted much more strongly to that than anything else we’d done to that point. If I remember correctly, it allowed you to commit that monumental act of stupidity.”

Hank thought she was going a bit far in her criticism until she continued. “Who thinks it’s a good idea to crawl under something with fangs the size of my forearm.”

Hank felt sheepish but did his best not to look it.

“The only bright spot was that it allowed us to find a weak spot. We have to get these spears into that crack between the two body parts. Hank your job is to make them rear back like that so that Jamie and I can skewer them. Fritz, Marko and Gruffly are there to keep the extra’s off.”

“You seem pretty sure that it was the spear that killed the previous spider.” Jamie was a little sceptical.

“Well, in the previous fight, shooting it in the eyes is the only other thing likely to have been fatal,” Sabine said. “I mean yes, the spider would have died without any legs on its left side but that’s a hard way to stop these monsters. If the adults are really forty to fifty percent bigger, I am not sure we will be able to cut through the exoskeleton even with my favourite axe.”

“So why don’t you think the eyes were the killing blow?”

“Arrows in the eyes might kill them in the end, but they’ve eight eyes and I think that the fatal bit is when the arrow penetrates the brain. These spiders have big upper body, head, things. I’m not sure how far arrows have to penetrate, but from the fight I saw in the clearing back there, a long way, possibly the entire shaft length. Which will require a lot of strength.”

“Is the spear attack even fatal?” Hank asked.

“Why are you questioning me? I’m the only qualified warrior here. Added to which I am the only level twenty person you’re likely to meet in a lifetime and I got all my levels killing things. I know my business, much better than you know yours. So let me make this abundantly clear. In a fight, any fight, you do what everyone else does.” Sabine was getting exasperated.

“Which is?” Hank had to ask.

“Exactly what I say, when I say it. Don’t question me in battle and I won’t question you about towns.” Sabine paused taking a breath to calm herself. “But for the sake of playing nice. Let me take you through it.”

She cocked her head in his direction. “Did you see the reaction when we pushed the spear into the one we killed? It actually tried to get off, but it’s strength failed. Even if it is not fatal, it completely disabled the ugly thing. That’s the moment when the fight turned in our favour. If we can pierce whatever that was we can put a spider out of action. What was it you said Hank? Up to seventy to kill. Well by my numbers they have lost about ten, so there are only ten left for us…” She paused savouring the next and last word. “… each. I don’t care if we disable or kill them. I’m much more interested in remaining alive. This is the best way to do that.”

Jamie opened his mouth to say something, when, from behind them, they heard a series of high-pitched squeals. It sounded like the spiders had found the clearing.

By mutual consent the conversation stopped and everyone concentrated on riding. Thankfully the discovery of the clearing held up the chasers. But as the afternoon shadows lengthened on the second day of the chase, it was becoming evident that the palfreys would not handle much more of the constant travel.

Dusk was creeping into the forest when they came across another clearing with more bodies. Leaving Marko and Gruffly strapped in their saddles, everyone else dismounted to inspect the scene of another spider battle. There were about twenty dead horses in a clump at one end of the clearing. They had obviously panicked, stampeding to escape they had trampled each other and some spiders.

It thrilled Sabine to discover a slowly dying juvenile spider. She decided it was a perfect opportunity to test her spear plan. The spider had a lot of arrows sticking out of its eyes and was obviously blind. It staggered around the clearing bumping into things and tripping over the bodies.

She struck from the side at the joint between the two parts of the body. It only seemed to enrage the beast. But it reared up, a reaction she took full advantage of as she plunged a spear into the underpart of the spider. She was positively gleeful as the creature’s death registered. “We have a plan for these things now. Stab them in that joint.”

Killing the juvenile added to the fourteen other spiders scattered around the clearing. It also notified the team that they had gained another 25 xp killing another spider. Sadly there were also about twelve or thirteen dead Ore Cane. Worse, some of them were children.

“If I’m reading things correctly, it seems like Ore Cane tribe came over the mountains or down from the north and have ended up at war with a spider colony. Not a smart plan for moving into unfamiliar territory. I wonder what brought them over here?” Nobody had any answers for Hank.

“Can anyone tell me if the Ore Cane were chasing the Arachnids or vice versa?” His second question also drew a silent answer. Nobody knew.

As a scout, Marko should have been able to. But either, due to his injury or his poor scout abilities he couldn’t. Hank wasn’t sure which reason was valid. In any case they needed to move on. Given the state of the palfreys they decided to dump any spare equipment off the pack animals. This allowed Jamie, Fritz and Sabine to change mounts as the riders having done the most work.

“Does anyone here have a real plan or are we just running?” Marko mumbled a question during one of his awake moments.

Sabine’s translation into common just increased Hanks general dissatisfaction with Marko. Which combined with his own need for medical treatment extracted a sarcastic response. “Hoping they give up and go home. You mean that kind of plan?”

“Yah.” Marko’s morose reply didn’t need translation.

“Nope. Just running.” Hank had a resigned grimace on his face.

“Schwanse” was Marko’s only response.

Jamie was a bit more forthcoming. “Yep we’re running. But we are hoping we lose them in the denser parts of the woods. Or hope the rain makes it too hard to track us. But personally, I’m just hoping my horse outlasts the chasers.”