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Salamonda hadn’t spoken about it yet, not even to Jella, that Arpix knew of. She’d hidden behind the trauma of it all, which was fair enough in Arpix’s estimation. He would have soiled himself, stuck in that tunnel with those nightmares advancing on him. The screams alone were enough to loosen anyone’s bladder... But now he needed to know.

Salamonda nodded, as if he’d explained himself in words rather than written it out in his expression. “It was dark. And those things... they’re complicated... I didn’t know what I was looking at really. All legs and jaws. So, I didn’t see it clearly. But it seemed as if he... got bigger. As if he filled the corridor. Though he was still the same size, which makes no sense, I know, but that’s how it was. He hooked the first one forward like he’d caught a mouse. His back feet started tearing at it and... it just got torn to pieces. I can’t say it clearer than that. He was as big as he needed to be.”

“I think we need him to be pretty big,” Arpix said. “I need a skeer brought inside the circle.”

—

“We should wait until Clovis is better.” Evar seemed as nervous about the whole plan as Arpix was, which wasn’t encouraging since he was their best warrior by a very large margin.

They stood at the perimeter, facing west towards the mountain where the skeer hive clung at the library entrance. Evar, Arpix, Meelan, Salamonda, Jella, and Sheetra, the youngest and most daring of the bookbinders.

“She might not get better.” Arpix hadn’t said it so clearly before, but Evar needed to understand. He’d left Clovis in Kerrol’s care. Despite his efforts, poison had got into the wounds, or stayed there. He’d picked two dozen of the short black cratalac hairs out of the cuts, but others might have evaded him. “She needs someone with more skill at healing than I have.”

A blood-curdling growl rumbled deep in Evar’s throat, and he showed all his teeth, but Arpix didn’t feel as if he were the target, simply the witness to canith distress. Evar gave a curt nod and drew Clovis’s white sword from his belt. “Do it.”

Arpix turned to Salamonda. “Do your best.”

Salamonda called Wentworth. She could have been in her kitchen five years ago calling with a bowl of fish heads in hand. As before, it seemed as if he would ignore the summons, only for him to be found sitting behind them as they turned away, disappointed.

“I’ve nothing to give you, fat lad.” Salamonda ruffled the cat’s head apologetically. “Just beans.”

Wentworth eyed her dubiously, as if expecting some juicy treat to be dangled before him momentarily.

“What we need, Wentworth, what we really need, is a skeer. A whole one. Brought right here. Do you think you can do that? Safely, mind. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

Wentworth stalked around her as if she hadn’t spoken, headbutting her legs in the same way he would in her kitchen to coax a meal out of her.

“Maybe you should—” But somehow on his third pass around Salamonda’s legs the cat didn’t reappear, and Arpix swallowed his suggestion. “I guess we’ll wait and see.”

—

Wentworth didn’t reappear until the following afternoon. Evar spotted a large dust cloud in the direction of the mountain. Arpix came to the perimeter and estimated it to be a band at least as big as the one that had chased the canith to the plateau. “It has to be skeer.” There weren’t enough of anything else in the area to raise such a cloud.

Within a quarter of an hour, all the plateau’s residents were out on the western edge, ten yards or so behind the perimeter. Kerrol remarked that a clever skeer would use a long stick to move the perimeter stones out an extra twenty yards and tempt the incautious into their clutches. Arpix didn’t translate that, but he did thank a broad swathe of gods that the skeer didn’t appear to have Kerrol’s initiative.

Clovis had to be carried out. Arpix hadn’t wanted her to be moved, but she insisted, saying she demanded to meet the enemy at the gates. Arpix had pressed her back onto her bed of dry leaves when she’d tried to rise. “You’re not well enough.”

Clovis had grabbed his arm, but her grip lacked the strength that she’d nearly strangled him with on her arrival. “You’re just worried about your stitching, human boy. You can always do it again. It’s not as if you have much else to do other than farm beans.”

“You should lie dow—”

“I should have died in battle. I’ve no intention of rotting here. I’ll walk out to meet them before I die lying down.”

In the end they’d settled for carrying her out to watch.

Jost had been among the last to arrive and had stared in horror at the approaching dust cloud. “You did this!” She advanced on Arpix. Starvation and the sun had aged her over the last four years, streaking grey into once lustrous red hair, setting wrinkles around the corners of eyes that had a bright, unhealthy glitter to them. She raised hands that seemed more like claws, both darkly stained with the life juice of cratalacs. “You!”

Arpix refused to defend himself. He had done it and he wasn’t sure it had been right. Jost came on, but even from what might be her deathbed, Clovis’s growl proved enough to make the woman stumble to a halt, a puppet with cut strings.

—

“Definitely skeer. Can’t see what they’re chasing.” Meelan had the best eyes but even he didn’t spot the insectoid’s quarry until they were so close that the edge of the plateau nearly stole them from sight.

Several score of skeer runners were hot on Wentworth’s trail. He showed a surprising turn of speed as he bounded ahead of their thundering advance, but it seemed impossible that he could outpace them. Unlike the warriors, the runners were all legs and built for speed. Of the various skeer castes, the runners were closer to the cratalacs, their arachnid-like knees higher off the ground than Arpix’s head.

As the runners closed on Wentworth, he vanished through a small portal very similar to the ones that the assistants used. It opened just before him and closed immediately after his tail vanished through it. Two hundred yards on he reappeared out of a second portal and paused to lick his paw. The infuriated skeer charged on, relentless.

The chase vanished below the plateau’s edge, and a short while later Wentworth appeared at the top of the steep climb, peering down to torment his pursuers. He arrived at the perimeter with the leaders of the pack just moments behind him. The foremost one proved so intent on its quarry that it ploughed headlong into the boundary... and recoiled as if it had met a physical barrier.