Rudgutter watched the little drama uneasily. The last but one time he had spoken to the Weaver, it had illustrated a point it was making, a figure of speech of some kind, by reaching out to the militia captain flanking Rudgutter, lifting him into the air and filleting him slowly, drawing one of its talons through his armour up the side of his abdomen and around under the chin, drawing out bone after steaming bone. The man had screamed and flopped and screamed as the Weaver eviscerated him, its mournful voice resonating in Rudgutter’s head as it explained itself in its oneiric riddles.

Rudgutter knew that the Weaver would do anything that it considered improved the worldweave. It might pretend to be dead or reshape the stone of the floor into a statue of a lion. It might pluck out Eliza’s eyes. Whatever it took to shape the pattern in the fabric of the æther that only it could see, whatever it took to Weave the tapestry into shape.

The memory of Kapnellior discussing Textorology—the science of Weavers—flitted in and out of Rudgutter’s mind. Weavers were fabulously rare, and only intermittent inhabitants of conventional reality. Only two Weaver corpses had been procured by New Crobuzon’s scientists since the city’s birth. Kapnellior’s was hardly an exact science.

No one knew why this Weaver chose to stay. It had announced in its elliptical way to Mayor Dagman Beyn, more than two hundred years ago, that it would live below the city. Over the decades, one or two administrations had left it alone. Most had been unable to resist the pull of its power. Its occasional interactions—sometimes banal, sometimes fatal—with mayors and scientists were the main source of information for Kapnellior’s studies.

Kapnellior himself was an Evolutionist. He held to the view that the Weavers were a species of conventional spider that had been subjected by some Torquic or thaumaturgic fluke—thirty, forty thousand years ago, probably in Sagrimai—to a sudden, short-lived evolutionary acceleration of explosive velocity. Within a few generations, he had explained to Rudgutter, the Weavers evolved from virtually mindless predators into aestheticians of astonishing intellectual and materio-thaumaturgic power, superintelligent alien minds who no longer used their webs to catch prey, but were attuned to them as objects of beauty disentanglable from the fabric of reality itself. Their spinnerets had become specialized extradimensional glands that Wove patterns in with the world. The world which was, for them, a web.

Old stories told how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act—to Weave—was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.