It was worse, more frightening by far than the ambassador. The Hellkin were appalling and awesome, monstrous powers for which Rudgutter had the most profound respect. And yet, and yet . . . he understood them. They were tortured and torturing, calculating and capricious. Shrewd. Comprehensible. They were political.

The Weaver was utterly alien. There could be no bargaining and no games. It had been tried.

Rudgutter conquered himself, angry, judging himself harshly, studying the thing before him in an attempt to itemize and metabolize the sight.

The Weaver’s bulk was mostly its huge teardrop abdomen that welled up and hung downwards behind it from its neck-waist, a tight, bulbous fruit seven feet long and five wide. It was absolutely taut and smooth, its chitin a shimmering black iridescence.

The creature’s head was the size of a man’s chest. It was suspended from the front of the abdomen a third of the way from the top. The fat curve of its body loomed above it like skulking black-clad shoulders.

The head swivelled slowly to take in its visitors.

The top as smooth and spare as a human skull in black: multiple eyes a single, deep blood-red. Two main orbs as large as newborns’ heads sat in sunken sockets at either side; between them a much smaller third; above it two more; above them three more still. An intricate, precise constellation of glints on dark crimson. An unblinking array.

The Weaver’s complicated mouthparts unhinged, its inner jaw flexing, something between a mandible and a black ivory trap. Its wet gullet flexed and vibrated deep within.

Its legs, thin and bony as human ankles, sprouted from the thin band of segmented flesh that linked its headpiece and abdomen. The Weaver walked on its hindmost four legs. They shot up and out at a forty-five-degree angle, hinging in knees a foot or more above the Weaver’s hunkered head, higher than the top of its abdomen. The legs rebounded from the joints almost straight down ten feet, culminating in a point as featureless and sharp as a stiletto.

Like a tarantula, the Weaver picked one leg up at a time, lifting it very high and placing it down with the delicacy of a surgeon or an artist. A slow, sinister and inhuman movement.

From the same intricate fold as that great quadrupedal frame emerged two sets of shorter legs. One pair, six feet long, rested pointing upwards at the elbows. Each thin, hard shaft of chitin ended in an eighteen-inch talon, a cruel, polished shard of russet shell edged like a scalpel. At the base of each weapon sprouted a curl of arachnid-bone, a sharpened hook to snag and slice and hold prey.

Those organic kukris jutted up like wide horns, like lances. An ostentatious display of murderous potential.