The Weaver’s head moved with alien smoothness from one to the other side. It took in the room in its multiple and glinting eyes. Still no humans moved.

From outside came Rudgutter’s voice. It was tense. Angry.

“Weaver!” he shouted. “I have a gift and a message for you!” There was a moment of silence, and then a pair of pearl-handled scissors came skittering through the door of the warehouse. The Weaver clasped its hands in a very human motion of delight. From outside came the distinctive sound of scissors being opened and closed.

…LOVELY LOVELY, moaned the Weaver, THE SNIPSNAP OF SUPPLICATION AND YET THOUGH THEY SMOOTH EDGES AND ROUGH FIBRES WITH COLD NOISE AN EXPLOSION IN REVERSE A FUNNELLING IN A FOCUS I MUST TURN MAKE PATTERNS HERE WITH AMATEURS UNKNOWING ARTISTS TO UNPICK THE CATASTROPHIC TEARING THERE IS BRUTE ASYMMETRY IN THE BLUE VISAGES THAT WILL NOT DO IT CANNOT BE THAT THE RIPPED UP WEB IS DARNED WITHOUT PATTERNS AND IN THE MINDS OF THESE DESPERATE AND GUILTY AND BEREFT ARE EXQUISITE TAPESTRIES OF DESIRE THE DAPPLED GANG PLAIT YEARNINGS FOR FRIENDS FEATHERS SCIENCE JUSTICE GOLD…

The Weaver’s voice shivered in some crooning delight. Its legs moved suddenly at terrifying speed, picking its intricate way through the room, rippling through the space.

The militia crouching over Lemuel dropped their staffs and scrabbled to get out of its way. Lemuel looked up at its arachnid bulk through swollen eyes. He raised his hands and tried to cry out in fear.

The Weaver hovered for a moment before him, then looked up at the platform above. It stepped up lightly and was instantly, incomprehensibly, on the walkway, a few feet from Isaac and Yagharek. They stared in terror at the vast and monstrous form. Those pointed spike-feet pranced towards them. They were immobilized. Yagharek tried to move backwards but the Weaver was too quick…SAVAGE AND IMPENETRABLE…it sang, and scooped Yagharek up with a sudden motion, sweeping him under its humanlike arm where he twisted and cried out like a terrified baby.

…BLACK AND RUSSET…sang the Weaver. It tottered elegantly like a dancer on her toes, moved sideways through twisted dimensions and was once more by Lemuel’s cowering form. It grabbed him and bundled him dangling beside Yagharek.

The militia stood back, dumbfounded and terrified. Mayor Rudgutter’s voice sounded from outside again, but no one listened.

The Weaver stepped up and was once again on Isaac’s raised living space. It skittered up to Isaac and grabbed him under its free arm…EXTRAVAGANT SECULAR SWARMING…it chanted as it took hold of him.

Isaac could not resist. The Weaver’s touch was cool and unchanging, quite unreal. Its skin was as smooth as polished glass. He felt himself lifted with breathtaking ease and enfolded, cosseted under that bony arm.

…DIAMETRICAL NEGLIGENT FEROCIOUS…Isaac heard the Weaver say as it retraced its impossible steps and was twenty feet away, standing by Derkhan’s motionless body. The militia around her moved away in concerted fear. The Weaver fumbled for her unconscious form and tucked her up next to Isaac, who felt her warmth through his clothes.

Isaac’s head was spinning. The Weaver moved sideways again and was across the room, beside the construct. For a few minutes, Isaac had forgotten it even existed. It had returned to its customary resting place in the corner of the room, from where it had watched the militia attacks. It turned the one feature on its smooth head, its glass lens, towards the Weaver. The ineluctable spider-presence flicked the construct up onto its dagger-limbs and tossed it nimbly up. The Weaver caught the ungainly man-sized machine on its curving chitinous back. The construct balanced precariously, but did not fall no matter how the Weaver moved.

Isaac felt a sudden, murderous pain in his head. He cried out in agony, felt hot blood pumping across his face. He heard Lemuel scream a moment later, echoing him.

Through eyes bleary with confusion and blood, Isaac saw the room flicker around him as the Weaver paced through interlocking planes. It appeared beside all the militiamen in turn and moved one of its bladed arms too fast to see. As it touched them, each of the men screamed, so that a weird virus of agonized sound seemed to pass around the room at whiplash speed.

The Weaver stopped in the centre of the warehouse. Its elbows were pinioned, so that its captives could not move. With its forearms it dropped red-stained things across the floor. Isaac raised his head and looked around the room, trying to see through the burning pain below his temple. Everyone in the room was crying out, cringing, clapping their hands to the sides of their faces, trying without success to staunch gouts of blood with their fingers. Isaac looked down again.

The Weaver was scattering a handful of bloody ears onto the ground.

Below its gently moving hand, blood spilt across the dust in slicks of dirty gore. The gobbets of freshly sliced flesh fell, tracing the perfect shape of a pair of scissors.

The Weaver looked up, impossibly laden with struggling figures, moving as if unencumbered.

…FERVENT AND LOVABLE…it whispered, and disappeared.

What was an experience becomes a dream and then a memory. I cannot see the edges between the three.

The Weaver, the great spider, came among us.

In the Cymek we call it furiach-yajh-hett: the dancing mad god. I never thought to see one. It came out of a funnel in the world to stand between us and the lawgivers. Their pistols were silent. Words died in throats like flies in a web.

The dancing mad god moved through the room with a savage and alien step. It gathered us to it-we renegades, we criminals. We refugees. Constructs that tell tales; earthbound garuda; reporters who make the news; criminal scientists and scientific criminals. The dancing mad god collected us all like errant worshippers, chiding us for going astray.

Its knife-hands flashed. The humans’ ears fell in flesh-rain to the dust. I was spared. My feather-hidden ears hold no delight for this mad power. Through the ululations and the despairing wails of pain the furiach-yajh-hett ran in circles of delight.

And then it tired and stepped through the twists of matter out of the warehouse.

Into another space.

I shut my eyes.

I moved in a direction I had never known existed. I felt the scuttling slide of that great multitude of legs as the dancing mad god moved along powerful threads of force. It scampered at obscure angles to reality, with all of us bobbing beneath it. My stomach pitched. I felt myself catch and snag on the fabric of the world. My skin prickled in the alien plane.

For a moment the god’s madness infected me. For a moment, the greed for knowledge forgot its place and demanded to be quenched. For a sliver of time, I opened my eyes.

For a terrible eternal breath I glimpsed the reality through which the dancing mad god was treading.

My eyes itched and watered, they felt as if they would burst, as if a thousand sandstorms afflicted them. They could not assimilate what was before them. My poor eyes struggled to see the unseeable. I beheld nothing but a fraction, the edge of an aspect.

I saw, or thought I saw, or have convinced myself I saw a vastness that dwarfed any desert sky. A yawning gap of Leviathan proportions. I whined and heard others whine around me. Spread across the emptiness, streaming away from us with cavernous perspective in all directions and dimensions, encompassing lifetimes and hugenesses with each intricate knot of metaphysical substance, was a web.