“I can’t help but feel this is a bit undignified,” he said, his voice like a winter wind.

“You sound like Ashes,” Alice said. “Hurry up. Some of those wasps are taking an interest.”

Isaac squatted on the wide end of the flyswatter, hugging his knees, and flurries of ice and snow sprang up around him. The lines of his body blurred, melting into one another, rounding off the edges and filling in the gaps with snow. In a few seconds he had become, essentially, a snowball. Alice tried hard to stifle a giggle.

“I heard that,” Isaac said, his wind-voice whistling from nowhere.

“Sorry.”

“Just don’t miss.”

Alice nodded, called on Spike’s strength, and lifted the flyswatter, careful not to tip Isaac off. She hefted it, feeling the weight of his snow-body, and turned to face the oncoming spider-thing. A loud drone nearby indicated that several wasps were getting close, but she focused on the length of wood in her hands.

Here goes nothing.

She ran forward a few steps, picking up momentum, and swung the flyswatter over her shoulder with all of Spike’s strength, like a lacrosse player chucking a ball into a net. Isaac soared into the air, gleaming in the light of the three setting suns, and Alice held her breath as he started to descend. She couldn’t help an excited shout when the snowball impacted squarely on the side of the lumbering behemoth, a good thirty feet above the ground, smashing against it in a spray of snow.

The snow shifted, briefly flickering through the shape of a boy in a long, tattered coat before changing again into something long and lizard-like. The salamander was a brilliant, glowing crimson, red-hot claws digging into the side of the giant daddy longlegs, mouth gaping wide to spew liquid fire over the wasps that clung to the huge beast.

Then Alice’s attention was drawn by more immediate problems. Half a dozen wasps were closing in on her, and she wrapped herself in the Swarm again just in time to let a stinger glance off her side. The wasps clustered in, buzzing furiously, and for a few minutes she had to devote her full attention to the fight, dodging and swinging and smashing the vicious insects into goo.

She looked up again as she fought her way clear. One of the spider’s legs, as thick as a telephone pole, had been severed near the base, and it crashed to the ground in a cloud of dust. Isaac, still a salamander, went to work on the next leg. The wasps tried to rush him, but when they got close, he raised his head and breathed a cloud of fire, sending them falling away engulfed in flames.