. . . YOU PEACH YOU PLUMB THE ONE THE DEADNAKED AS WAS ASKED LITTLE FOURLIMBED WEAVER THAT YOU MIGHT BE . . . it said in a continuous lilting monologue . . . RIVER AND DAWN IT DAWNS ON ME THE NEWS IS NUDES ABOB . . . The words ebbed until they could not be properly heard, and Isaac took the chance to speak.

“I’m glad to see you, Weaver,” he said. “I remembered our appointment.” He breathed deep. “I need to talk to you,” he said. The Weaver’s humming, crooning incantation resumed, and Isaac struggled to understand, to translate the beautiful babbling into sense, to answer, to make himself heard.

It was like a dialogue with the sleeping or the mad. It was difficult, exhausting. But it could be done.

Yagharek heard the subdued chattering of children walking to school. They walked some way behind him where a path cut through the grass of the bank.

His eyes flickered across the water where the trees and wide white streets of Flag Hill stretched back from the water, on a gentle incline. There, too, the river was fringed with rough grass, but there was no path and there were no children. Nothing but the quiet walled houses.

Yagharek pulled his knees slightly closer and wrapped his body in his rank cloak. Forty feet into the river, Isaac’s little vessel seemed unnaturally still. Isaac’s head had bobbed tentatively into view some minutes ago, and now it remained poking slightly over the lip of the old boat, facing away from Yagharek. It looked as if he was staring intently at some patch of water, some flotsam.

It must, Yagharek realized, be the Weaver, and he felt excitement move him.

Yagharek strained to hear, but the light wind brought nothing to him. He heard only the lapping of the river and the abrupt sounds of the children behind him. They were curt, and cried easily.

Time passed but the sun seemed frozen. The little stream of schoolboys did not ebb. Yagharek watched Isaac argue incomprehensibly with the unseen spider-presence below the surface of the river. Yagharek waited.

And then, some time after dawn but before seven o’clock, Isaac turned furtively in the boat, fumbled for his clothes and crawled like some slinking ungainly water-rat back into the Canker.

The anaemic morning light broke up on the river’s surface as Isaac tugged himself through the water, towards the bank. In the shallows he performed a grotesque aquatic dance to pull on his clothes, before hauling himself streaming and heavy up the mud and scrub of the bank.

He collapsed before Yagharek, wheezing.

The schoolboys tittered and whispered.

“I think . . . I think it’ll come,” said Isaac. “I think it understood.”

It was past eight when they got back to the railside hut. It was still and hot, thick with indolently drifting particles. The colours of the rubbish and the hot wood were bright where light breached the splintering walls.