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.

Part 5

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