The Weaver loomed in the corner of the room. It stepped forward slightly, and behind it, Isaac saw a militiaman. The officer seemed paralysed. He sat with his back against the wall, shaking quietly, his smooth faceplate skewwhiff and falling from his head. His rifle lay across his lap. Isaac’s eyes widened when he saw it.

It was glass. A perfect and useless model of a flintlock rifle rendered in glass.

…THIS WOULD BE HOMESTEAD FOR THE FLEETING WINGED ONE…crooned the Weaver. It sounded subdued again, as if its energy had ebbed from it during the journey through the planes of the web…SEE MY LOOKING-GLASS MAN MY PLAYMATE MY FRIENDLING…it whispered…HE AND ME SHALL WHILE TIME AWAY THIS IS THE RESTING PLACE OF THE VAMPIR MOTH THIS IS WHERE IT FOLDS ITS WINGS AND HIDES TO EAT AGAIN I WILL PLAY TIC-TAC-TOE AND BOXES WITH MY GLASS-GUNNER…

It stepped back into the corner of the room and set itself down suddenly with a jerk of its legs. One of its knife-hands flashed like elyctricity, moving with extraordinary speed, scoring a three-by-three grid onto the boards before the comatose officer’s lap.

The Weaver etched a cross into a corner square, then sat back and waited, whispering to itself.

Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek shuffled into the centre of the room.

“I thought it was going to get us away,” mumbled Isaac. “It’s followed the fucking moth…It’s here, somewhere…”

“We have to take it,” whispered Derkhan, her face set. “We’ve almost got them all. Let’s finish it.”

“With what?” hissed Isaac. “We’ve got our fucking helmets and that’s it. We’ve not got any weapons to face the likes of that thing…we don’t even know where we damn-well are…”

“We have to get the Weaver to help us,” said Derkhan.

But their attempts were quite fruitless. The gigantic spider ignored them utterly, wittering quietly to itself and waiting intently, as if waiting for the frozen militia officer to complete his move in tic-tac-toe. Isaac and the others entreated with the Weaver, begged it to help them, but they seemed suddenly invisible to it. They turned away in frustration.

“We have to go out there,” said Derkhan suddenly. Isaac met her eyes. Slowly, he nodded. He strode across to the window and peered out.

“I can’t tell where we are,” he said eventually. “It’s just streets.” He moved his head exaggeratedly from side to side, seeking some landmark. He re-entered the room eventually, shaking his head. “You’re right, Dee,” he said. “Maybe we’ll…find something…maybe we can get out of here.”

Yagharek moved without sound, stalking from the little room into a dimly lit corridor. He looked up and down its length, carefully.

The wall to his left slanted steeply in with the roof. To his right, the narrow passage was broken with two doors, before it curved away to the right and disappeared in shadows.

Yagharek kept crouched down. He beckoned slowly behind him, without looking, and Derkhan and Isaac emerged slowly. They carried their guns loaded with the last of their powder, damp and unreliable, aiming vaguely into the darkness.

They waited while Yagharek crept slowly on, then followed him in faltering, pugnacious steps.

Yagharek stopped by the first door and flattened his feathered head against it. He waited a moment, then pushed it open slowly, slowly. Derkhan and Isaac crept over, peered into an unlit storeroom.

“Is there anything in there we can use?” hissed Isaac, but the shelves were empty of everything except dry and dusty bottles, ancient decaying brushes.

When Yagharek reached the second door, he repeated the operation, waving at Isaac and Derkhan to be still and listening intently through the thin wood. This time he was still for much longer. The door was bolted several times, and Yagharek fumbled with all the simple slide-locks. There was a fat padlock, but it was resting open across one of the bolts, as if it had been left for a moment. Yagharek pushed slowly at the door. He poked his head through the resulting gap and stood like that, perched half in, half out of the room for a disconcertingly long time.

When he withdrew, he turned.

“Isaac,” he said quietly. “You must come.”

Isaac frowned and stepped forward, his heart beating hard in his chest.

What is it? he thought. What’s going on? (And even as he thought that a voice in the deepest part of his mind told him what was waiting for him, and he only half heard it, would not listen for fear that it was wrong.)

He pushed past Yagharek and walked hesitantly into the room.

It was a large, rectangular attic space, lit by three oil-lamps and the thin wisps of gaslight that found their way up from the street and through the grubby, sealed window. The floor was littered with a tangle of metal and discarded rubbish. The room stank.

Isaac was only fleetingly conscious of any of this.

In a dim corner, turned away from the door, kneeling up and chewing dutifully with her back and head and gland attached to an extraordinary twisted sculpture, was Lin.

Isaac cried out.

It was an animal wail, and it grew and grew in strength until Yagharek hissed at him, unheeded.

Lin turned with a start at the sound. She trembled when she saw him.

He stumbled over to her, weeping at the sight of her, at her russet skin and flexing headscarab; and as he approached he cried out again, this time in anguish, as he saw what had been done to her.

Her body was bruised and covered with burns and scratches, welts that hinted at vicious acts and brutalizations. She had been beaten across her back, through her ragged shift. Her breasts were criss-crossed with thin scars. She was bruised heavily around her belly and thighs.

But it was her head, the twitching headbody, that almost made him fall.

Her wings had been taken: he knew that, from the envelope, but to see them, to see the tiny ragged stubs flit in agitation…Her carapace had been snapped and bent backwards in places, uncovering the tender flesh beneath, which was scabbed and broken. One of her compound eyes was crumpled and sightless. The middle headleg on her right and the hind one on her left had been torn from their sockets.

Isaac fell forward and held her, closing her into him. She was so thin…so tiny and ragged and broken, she was trembling as she touched him, her whole body tense as if she could not believe he were real, as if he might be taken away as some new torture.

Isaac clutched her and cried. He held her carefully, feeling her thin bones beneath her skin.

“I would have come,” he moaned in abject misery and joy. “I would’ve come, I thought you were dead…”

She pushed him back just a little, until she had space for her hands to move.

Wanted you, love you, she signed chaotically, help me save me take me away, couldn’t he couldn’t let me die till had finished this…

For the first time, Isaac looked up at the extraordinary sculpture that rose above and behind her, onto which she was spreading khepri-spit. It was an incredible multicoloured thing, a horrific kaleidoscopic figure of composite nightmares, limbs and eyes and legs sprouting in weird combinations. It was almost finished, with only a smooth framework where what looked like a head must be, and an empty clutch of air that suggested a shoulder.

Isaac gasped at it, looked back at her.

Lemuel had been right. There was, strategically, no reason at all for Motley to keep Lin alive. He would not have done so for any other captive. But his vanity, his mystical self-aggrandizement and philosophical dreamings were stimulated by Lin’s extraordinary work. Lemuel could not have known that.