Let me tell the old affair first — not because I wish to, but because you are already thinking it, and it is better laid on the table.
Three hundred years ago, seven spider spirits lived in Web-Coil Cave: my seven great-aunts. They abducted the pilgrim monk — that is fact. Later, bathing at the Purification Spring, they were harassed by Zhu Bajie in the shape of a catfish; then Sun Wukong came for them; cornered, they fled to their senior, the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord — and in the end they died or were scattered.
The storytellers play the spring episode for bawdy laughter, to full houses.
Whenever we spider-kin hear that passage, we fold our ears shut. Not from shame — abduction is a crime, and we own it. From pain: what set the seven great-aunts on that road was, at bottom, nothing more than wanting one cave's worth of shelter in the human world, like every yao. For the sin their hands committed, they paid with their lives. And having paid, they were made into a dirty joke — and laughed at for three hundred years.
The crimes yao commit, yao repay. The humiliations yao suffer — who keeps that account?
Enough. Today's story is about the one who lived.
The youngest of the seven did not die. Gravely wounded, she crawled back to Web-Coil Cave, and among the hanging silk she thought for ten full years. Then she recalled the scattered kin and cut three family rules into the cave mouth:
One. Silk shall never again be woven into webs that trap. Never.
Two. Silk shall be woven into roads.
Three. For every kindness our clan receives — one road repaid.
What is silk woven into roads? The "silk route" you walked in this chapter — that is what it is.
Web-Coil silk is the toughest in the world, and the lightest, and the hardest to see. The great-aunt turned the web-craft inside out: silk no longer strung across to bar the way, but along, to lead it — a line between two cliffs is a rope-bridge; a thread between two caverns is a guide; a strand slung across the dark catches the falling before the ground does.
Three hundred years on, the silk-roads under the Nine-Bend Winding Caverns have grown into an inverted web: mesh facing outward, heart facing the people — a net that gathers not prey, but the lost, the fleeing, the hunted.
Elder Antelope teaches people to vanish. We pave the roads the vanished walk on.
I am this generation's road-weaver. When the Golden Cymbal barrier sealed the monastery's front gate and the boy's company stood stymied — it was I who brought out the ancestral silk-route map and led them through the Nine-Bend silk-roads to the barrier's unguarded back.
If the great-aunt's spirit watches, she should be comforted: the cave that once trapped the pilgrims has, three hundred years later, opened a road for those walking west.
With that, the old account closes even. The road from here is our own choosing.
One last strange matter — the reason I march.
Spider-silk has a gift you may not know: whatever passes near it leaves a grain in the thread. A moth passing leaves a shattered grain; an owl, a sunken one; a human, a tangled one. On night watch we do not use eyes. Touching the silk is enough.
This half year, on the deepest silk-roads of the Nine-Bend Caverns, one grain keeps recurring.
I have never touched its like. Neither has the oldest road-weaver of the clan. The grain runs deep and cold — and the thing that leaves it passes the silk without making it tremble. Do you grasp how wrong that is? All things that pass silk set it trembling; the trembling is the grain. This does not tremble the silk, and leaves a grain regardless — as if the grain were stamped on.
And its path never varies: out of the bottomless rock-cleft at the cavern's deepest end; along our silk-road; a full circuit toward the Lesser Thunderclap; and back.
Every night. Like a patrol.
We have sounded the cleft; it has no bottom we can find. And the draft that rises from it carries one very faint scent — Elder Bifang took a single breath of it, and every feather stood erect.
That smell, he said. The rank one.
What does the cavern's deep connect to? What lives there? And why does it patrol along our silk, night upon night, toward the Lesser Thunderclap?
I left a copy of the route-map with the clan, shouldered a full spool of new silk, and joined the westward company.
The road-weaver's duty: wherever the silk can reach, people should be able to walk.
This time, the silk is going to be woven all the way west.