Her body was bruised and covered with burns and scratches, welts that hinted at vicious acts and brutalizations. She had been beaten across her back, through her ragged shift. Her breasts were criss-crossed with thin scars. She was bruised heavily around her belly and thighs.

But it was her head, the twitching headbody, that almost made him fall.

Her wings had been taken: he knew that, from the envelope, but to see them, to see the tiny ragged stubs flit in agitation . . . Her carapace had been snapped and bent backwards in places, uncovering the tender flesh beneath, which was scabbed and broken. One of her compound eyes was crumpled and sightless. The middle headleg on her right and the hind one on her left had been torn from their sockets.

Isaac fell forward and held her, closing her into him. She was so thin . . . so tiny and ragged and broken, she was trembling as she touched him, her whole body tense as if she could not believe he were real, as if he might be taken away as some new torture.

Isaac clutched her and cried. He held her carefully, feeling her thin bones beneath her skin.

“I would have come,” he moaned in abject misery and joy. “I would’ve come, I thought you were dead . . .”

She pushed him back just a little, until she had space for her hands to move.

Wanted you, love you, she signed chaotically, help me save me take me away, couldn’t he couldn’t let me die till had finished this . . .

For the first time, Isaac looked up at the extraordinary sculpture that rose above and behind her, onto which she was spreading khepri-spit. It was an incredible multicoloured thing, a horrific kaleidoscopic figure of composite nightmares, limbs and eyes and legs sprouting in weird combinations. It was almost finished, with only a smooth framework where what looked like a head must be, and an empty clutch of air that suggested a shoulder.

Isaac gasped at it, looked back at her.

Lemuel had been right. There was, strategically, no reason at all for Motley to keep Lin alive. He would not have done so for any other captive. But his vanity, his mystical self-aggrandizement and philosophical dreamings were stimulated by Lin’s extraordinary work. Lemuel could not have known that.

Motley could not bear for the sculpture to remain unfinished.

Derkhan and Yagharek entered. When she saw Lin, Derkhan cried out as Isaac had done. She ran across the room to where Isaac and Lin embraced and put her own arms around the two of them, crying and smiling.

Yagharek paced uneasily towards them.

Isaac was murmuring to Lin, telling her over and over how sorry he was, that he thought she was dead, that he would have come.

Kept me working, beating and . . . and torturing, taunting me, Lin signed, giddy and exhausted with emotion.

Yagharek was about to speak, but he snapped his head suddenly around.