Glove Spiders

Overview

Glove spiders are the black spiders of old cellars and dry ruins. Their bite rots the flesh around it and, in a small or weak body, can kill. Goblin salvagers named them for the habit they force: nobody in the Broken Marches puts a bare hand into a dark gap, and a salvager's first tool is a pair of thick leather gloves.

Appearance

A grown female is the size of a thumbnail in the body, with legs that span a child's palm: glossy black or very dark brown, round-bellied, with a pale violin-shaped or hourglass mark on the underside that few see until it is too late. Males are smaller and duller. The web is not an orb but an untidy, strong tangle of grey silk in a corner or behind a stone, with a funnel or a silk tube at the back where the spider waits. It makes no sound. A cellar long held by them smells faintly of dust and dead flies.

Habitat and Range

They want dry, dark, undisturbed places close to food: the root cellars and ruined storeworks of the Broken Marches, the culverts and storework chambers under Lowbank at the Greyford Reach, woodpiles, outhouses, and the backs of store-rooms in the older basin towns. Kobold underhouses keep them out by sweeping; abandoned works fill with them.

Behaviour and Temperament

A glove spider is shy and bites only when pressed against skin: a hand reaching into its gap, a foot into a boot it has moved into, a body rolling onto it in bedding left on a cellar floor. It eats flies, beetles, woodlice, and other spiders, and it can live months without feeding, which is why a ruin sealed for a generation still has them when it is opened.

Abilities

The bite is a pinprick at first, often unnoticed. Within hours it burns; within a day a blister rises with a dark centre, and over a week the flesh around it dies and sloughs, leaving an open, slow sore. A child, an old person, a Goblin or Kobold bitten more than once, or anyone bitten near the face, may take fever, cramps, and worse, and some die (see Stings and Bites).

Life Cycle

The female hangs several silk egg sacs in her tangle each summer, each holding dozens of young, and guards them. Spiderlings scatter on threads through the cellar. A female lives two or three years.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing, except that a cellar full of them is a cellar nobody has disturbed. Their cost is the bite and the sore that follows, which often festers into wound rot. Salvage gangs smoke a storework before they go in, shake out boots and bedding, and carry a lamp into every gap before a hand. Healers of Vital Magic can draw the venom into a poultice if they reach the bitten in the first hours, and seldom do.

Lore and Belief

Marches folk say a glove spider bites only the hand that takes without asking, and salvagers mutter a word to the ruin before they reach in. Basin households hold that a black spider in the house means a thief nearby. Goblins say the gloves are the spider's gift: a people that learned to keep its hands covered learned to keep them out of other people's business too.

Salvagers tell of a cellar in the Marches so thick with them that a salvage crew went in for a lord's buried silver and came out with three hands swollen black; one of them died, and the silver is said to be there still.

Where It Appears

• Stings and Bites
• Wound Rot