"Judah," Cutter said. "Judah, get back," and Judah turned. There were bodies all around in the water, motionless but for chewing. Men and women, a shivering dog. Each was smeared with old matter around their mouths, and seemed to trail a vine.

Gases moiled, and what Cutter had thought a coagulate of muck began to rise. It blinked. What he had thought stones or holes were eyes. A tight studding of black eyes. It rose.

Those were not vines but the thing’s sucker-studded limbs. One stretched from each scrawny figure-each adult or child, each animal, tethered by the back of their necks. What they ate was rerouted into those grotesque intestinal leashes, passing peristaltically. They were made mindless conduits for food. And suspended at the centre of the arms, and shaggy with others whipping free, was the thing that ate through them.

Corpulent as an obese man, vaguely and horribly polyp. It did not hang deadweight but buoyed full of gas or thaumaturgy. Cutter saw a crablike nub of crustacean legs unfolded below, impossibly spindly and close together. It stood very tall as if on a handful of thin stalks. It dripped. It watched. Its tentacles twitched, and it unflexed bony talons.

The thing scuttled quick and grotesquely dainty on legs that should not support it. Its tendrils stretched: it moved without disturbing its idiot feeders.

The Hiddentowners ran, pursued by ghosts of warm fog and by the creature’s arms. It gripped trees with its bird claws and scobs of flesh budded from it like snails’ eyes. Cutter’s repeater felt tiny. He ran toward Judah. The creature’s appendages seemed to fill the air. Cutter saw little eyes at one limb’s end, a flexing orifice, concentric rasp-teeth like a lamprey’s.

Cutter fired at the flanged body, hit and did nothing but burst a little piece with milky bleeding. A snare of arms crawled over each other for him like bickering worms.

"Kill it!" Qurabin spoke from somewhere. There were more shots.

Cutter heard Judah-"Wait, wait"-and then wood and leather and he saw the golem. It cut across the plait of tentacles, severed some right through. Others wrapped around it, ground into the golem’s neck. The ropy limb twitched. It shuddered for several seconds, flexed glands, spurted enzymes into the wood. It paused as if confused.

The golem attacked in its simple way, beating down with its knives and great hexed strength. Gouts of matter and the thing’s blood burst up and it staggered, and every one of its tethered creatures stopped eating. Pomeroy ran up, jabbed his muzzle into its fat. The explosion was muted by flesh, but the fist of bullets punched into innards.