Without hesitating, steeling himself, he had walked on into the water.

It had been a short, cold swim to the boat. He had enjoyed it, luxuriating in the feeling, the black river washing him clean of sewer-filth and days of grime. He had trailed his clothes behind him, willing the water to suffuse their fibres and clean them, too.

He had hauled himself over the side of the boat, his skin prickling as he dried. Yagharek was barely visible, motionless, watching. Isaac arranged his clothes around him and pulled the tarpaulin a little way over him, so that he lay covered by shadows.

He watched the light arrive in the east and shivered as breezes raised paths of goosefiesh on him.

“Here I am,” he murmured. “Naked as a dead man on the river’s dawn. As requested.”

He did not know if the Weaver’s dreamlike pronouncement, that it had hummed that ghastly night in the Glasshouse, had been any kind of invitation. But he thought that by responding to it he might make it one, changing the patterns of the worldweb, weaving it into a conjuncture that might, he hoped, please the Weaver.

He had to see the magnificent spider. He needed the Weaver’s help.

Halfway through the previous night, Isaac and his comrades had become aware that the night’s tension, the unsettled sick feeling in the air, the nightmares, had returned. The Weaver’s attack had failed, as it had predicted. The moths were still alive.

It had occurred to Isaac that his taste was known to them now, that they would recognize him as the destroyer of the egg-clutch. Perhaps he should have been petrified with fear, but he was not. The railside shack had been left alone.

Maybe they’re afraid of me, he thought.

He drifted on the river. An hour passed, and the sounds of the city waxed unseen around him.

The noise of bubbles disturbed him.

He leaned up gingerly on his elbow, his mind rapidly clicking back into focus. He peered over the edge of the boat.

Yagharek was still visible, his posture completely unchanged, on the riverbank. Now there were some few passers-by behind him, ignoring him as he sat there covered up and smelling of filth.

Close to the boat, a patch of bubbles and disturbed water boiled up from below, snapping at the surface and sending out a ring of ripples about three feet across. Isaac’s eyes widened momentarily as he realized that the circle of ripples was exactly circular, and contained, that as each ripple reached its edge, it flattened impossibly, leaving the water beyond it undisturbed.

Even as Isaac moved back slightly, a smooth black curve breached in the dark, disturbed water. The river fell away from the rising shape, splashing within the limits of the little circle. Isaac was staring into the Weaver’s face.

He snapped back, his heart beating aggressively. The Weaver stared up at him. Its head was angled so that only it emerged from the water, and not the looming body which rose higher when it stood. The Weaver was humming, speaking deep in Isaac’s skull.

…YOU PEACH YOU PLUMB THE ONE THE DEADNAKED AS WAS ASKED LITTLE FOURLIMBED WEAVER THAT YOU MIGHT BE…it Said in a continuous lilting monologue…RIVER AND DAWN IT DAWNS ON ME THE NEWS IS NUDES ABOB…The words ebbed until they could not be properly heard, and Isaac took the chance to speak.

“I’m glad to see you, Weaver,” he said. “I remembered our appointment.” He breathed deep. “I need to talk to you,” he said. The Weaver’s humming, crooning incantation resumed, and Isaac struggled to understand, to translate the beautiful babbling into sense, to answer, to make himself heard.

It was like a dialogue with the sleeping or the mad. It was difficult, exhausting. But it could be done.

Yagharek heard the subdued chattering of children walking to school. They walked some way behind him where a path cut through the grass of the bank.

His eyes flickered across the water where the trees and wide white streets of Flag Hill stretched back from the water, on a gentle incline. There, too, the river was fringed with rough grass, but there was no path and there were no children. Nothing but the quiet walled houses.

Yagharek pulled his knees slightly closer and wrapped his body in his rank cloak. Forty feet into the river, Isaac’s little vessel seemed unnaturally still. Isaac’s head had bobbed tentatively into view some minutes ago, and now it remained poking slightly over the lip of the old boat, facing away from Yagharek. It looked as if he was staring intently at some patch of water, some flotsam.

It must, Yagharek realized, be the Weaver, and he felt excitement move him.

Yagharek strained to hear, but the light wind brought nothing to him. He heard only the lapping of the river and the abrupt sounds of the children behind him. They were curt, and cried easily.

Time passed but the sun seemed frozen. The little stream of schoolboys did not ebb. Yagharek watched Isaac argue incomprehensibly with the unseen spider-presence below the surface of the river. Yagharek waited.

And then, some time after dawn but before seven o’clock, Isaac turned furtively in the boat, fumbled for his clothes and crawled like some slinking ungainly water-rat back into the Canker.

The anaemic morning light broke up on the river’s surface as Isaac tugged himself through the water, towards the bank. In the shallows he performed a grotesque aquatic dance to pull on his clothes, before hauling himself streaming and heavy up the mud and scrub of the bank.

He collapsed before Yagharek, wheezing.

The schoolboys tittered and whispered.

“I think…I think it’ll come,” said Isaac. “I think it understood.”

It was past eight when they got back to the railside hut. It was still and hot, thick with indolently drifting particles. The colours of the rubbish and the hot wood were bright where light breached the splintering walls.

Derkhan had still not returned. Pengefinchess slept in the corner, or pretended to.

Isaac gathered the vital tubes and valves, the engines and batteries and transformers, into a vile sack. He retrieved his notes, rifled through them briefly to check them, then stashed them back into his shirt. He scrawled a note for Derkhan and Pengefinchess. He and Yagharek checked and cleaned their weapons, counted their meagre store of ammunition. Then Isaac looked out of the ruined windows into the city which had woken around them.

They must be careful now. The sun had gained its strength, the light was full. Anyone might be militia, and every officer would have seen their heliotype. They drew their cloaks around them. Isaac hesitated, then borrowed Yagharek’s knife and shaved bloodily with it. The sharp blade skittered painfully on the nodules and bumps on his skin that were the reason he had first grown a beard. He was ruthless and quick, and soon stood before Yagharek with a pasty chin, inexpertly shorn of whiskers, bleeding and patched with copses of stubble.

He looked ghastly, but he looked different. Isaac dabbed at his bleeding skin as they set out into the morning.

By nine, after minutes of skulking, striding nonchalantly past shops and arguing pedestrians, finding backstreet routes wherever they existed, the companions were in the Griss Twist dump. The heat was unforgiving, and seemed greater in these canyons of discarded metal. Isaac’s chin stung and tingled.