sentinels

Between the sunken ruins of Talery Bay's past, the scaraboga spin their webs.

The idea had always occurred to oceanoarchaeologists: they knew parts of the city tumbled below the water with the advent of the feyfloods two-hundred fifty years ago. They first descended alone in brass-helmeted suits which piped air in from the surface. When the tubes were winched in without a man on the other end, they went in pairs, then in quartets armed with pneumatic spears and thin knives. The water claimed them all.

Talery Bay cemented its reputation for birthing failed expeditions after it sent a team of scientists down in a gleaming submersible and retrieved a violated brass husk, devoid of its human occupants. The citizens hurled nails and bombs and flowerpots into the bay, terrified children put to bed upstairs. Policemen walked around with one pistol trained on the water.

But the aquatic threat never surfaced. The occasional scream in the night was the work of human assailants only.

Only after the Order arrived, two hundred years since the advent and ten since the last expedition, did someone succeed in dredging up Talery Bay's secret. The monks did their job well -- in every morning paper and cafe chat the next day, not one of them mentioned hauling up a giant spider from the center of the bay.

Most of it was completely alien: six spindly legs sprouted from its thorax, a tri-pronged spinneret respired behind its bloated abdomen. Its exterior rippled with chromatophoric activity. It was easily as large as a man, but they kept it under minimal restraint: the face it wore was that of one of the lost submersible's crew.

And then it spoke to them.

The Order learned the scaraboga do not reproduce. They assimilate.

The scaraboga told its horrified audience of those who had not changed over successfully: aborted in web coccoons, collapsed abdomens, malfunctioned spiracles. The process of transformation was imprecise and excruciating.

It still possesses eyes, eyes its former wife would recognize, had there been no order from the Holy Circle forbidding outsiders.

It told of the gaping chasms and caverns below the city, of the horrors that rise from the bowels of the world, of its duty as gaoler of those incomprehensible things. And in gratitude of its captors (for it never lost its sense of allegiance), it produced a yard of the treasured naught-silk, weaving it into an unbreakable thread.

The dragon hunters of today use nets made and supplied by the Order. Investigations for the source of the miracle material are impervious even to the most insinuating spy, for there is nothing to find. The scaraboga has returned to its post (for it had also gained a sense of commitment), no words are exchanged below the water. A small winch winds silently and incessantly in a factory's back room, pulling on a shimmering string of unknown origin.