As I trotted up to her, I told the wights, «Don't hurt her… for the moment.» I said it only for the woman's benefit – as long as Wheezle held Unveiler, the wights didn't care a pin about orders from me.

The woman's eyes were wide and watery, glaring at me with vicious fury. She was in her early thirties, of middling height but very wiry. Up where the wights held her hands, her knuckles each sported a thick knot of callus, as if she liked to use her fists on passers-by; Brother Kiripao's knuckles had an identical set of calluses.

«Hello,» I said to her. «I'm going to ask this nice wight to take his hand out of your mouth… and if you behave, he won't have to put it back in. All right?»

Grudgingly, she nodded. «Do what he says,» Wheezle murmured to the wights, tapping Unveiler lightly against his thigh.

The wight slowly removed its hand, watching for any sign the woman might try to scream again. However, the hard-edged expression on her face showed that her initial outburst had been a one-time reaction; now she wanted to show how tough she was. «Who are you?» she growled.

«We don't have time to exchange life stories,» I said. «You're going to tell us everything we want to know, and you're going to keep answering our questions until we say otherwise.»

«If I don't, you're going to feed me to the wights?»

The wights all leered with their pointed teeth, but I shook my head. «That would be too easy. If you won't talk, I'll turn you over to… The Kid.»

Dramatically, I spun around and pointed at Hezekiah.

«Me?» he gulped.

«Him!» I said, turning back to the woman. «Looks like a gawky little Clueless, doesn't he? Too stupid to live. I wish I had a ducat for every person who's thought that… every corpse left festering in an alley, the body mutilated and the face frozen in agony. Look at him again. Can anyone really be that much of a leatherhead? Or is it just an act to make you think he's harmless?»

«Britlin…» Hezekiah began, but I stopped him quickly.

«No!» I cried, cringing in front of him. «Don't be angry with me for giving away your secret. Please, master, don't… don't…» I stumbled against him, and in reflex, the boy reached out to steady me. The moment his hand touched my shoulder, I gasped, «Oh saints, the pain!» and collapsed, whimpering.

«Please,» Wheezle said to the woman, «please, honored lady, you see I am a Dustman and no stranger to death. Yet even I cannot bear the hideous atrocities which this youth might visit upon your person. They claim he learned the arts of torture from the Lords of the Abyss. Surely you have heard of him? Surely you have heard of… The Kid.»

A pity I was down on the ground, moaning like a barmy – I would have given a pound of gold to see the expression on the woman's face. Or on Hezekiah's face, for that matter. Still, I hoped the boy would have the wit to play along with the act; if we didn't scare this woman with cheap theatrics, we'd have to use real torture to get information out of her. That would mean noise and delay and a burden of guilt I preferred to avoid.

Carefully, Hezekiah stepped over me and approached the woman. I groaned louder and wondered if the boy was about to mess up my plan. «Don't let these berks peel you,» he said in a passable imitation of a Sigil accent. «I'm really quite harmless.»

And then, suddenly, Hezekiah was terrifying. From my position on the floor, all I could see was his boots; and they were the most frightening boots I had ever seen in my life. Terrible visions erupted in my mind, showing those boots kicking me mercilessly, breaking bones, crushing the skulls of children and grinding eyeballs under their heels.

Boots marching over the stubble of scorched fields.

Boots stamping face after face, annihilating every flicker of life.

Then, just as suddenly, Hezekiah was once more just a Clueless youth, innocent and ungainly. «You see?» he said in his normal voice. «I'm harmless.»

I moaned, and this time the moan was no act. It took all my strength to stop myself from shivering in the afterchill of terror. My sudden unreasoning fear must have come from magic, of course – some spell cast by Wheezle or Hezekiah himself, to make the little leatherhead seem monstrous; but my usual composure was shattered by the experience. I found myself asking which was the illusion: the suddenly horrendous aura surrounding the boy, or perhaps his usual bumbling persona. What did I really know about him? A Clueless hick who just happened to know high-powered magic… did that make sense?

«Keep him away from me!» the woman shouted.

«I do not have authority over The Kid,» Wheezle answered. «But if you tell what you know, perhaps he will not trouble himself to make an example of you.»

«All right, I'll talk,» she said. And she did.

Her name was Miriam and she didn't know much. Ten days ago, she'd been a streetcorner thug in Sigil, playing the protection peel over a few blocks of dingy shops: «Cross my palm with silver, or I'll burn your place down.» When some basher in a tavern offered her a heavy purse in exchange for three weeks of strong-arm work, she'd said yes. That's how she'd come here to the Plane of Dust.

Yes, this really was the Plane of Dust that Oonah had mentioned a few days earlier. The plane was nothing but an infinite ocean of dust – no water, no air, just dust untouched by the slightest wind. I'd heard a rumor that the Doomguard maintained a citadel somewhere on this plane, because it was the sort of lifeless place that appealed to their sensibilities; but this building didn't belong to the Doomguard. Miriam told us we were standing inside the Glass Spider… «Glass» because of its see-through walls, even though they were constructed from something much more indestructible than ordinary window panes. The «Spider» part of the name came from the building's shape: a circular central body almost half a mile in diameter, with eight arms radiating outward around the circumference. Each arm was a long sloping corridor like the one where we'd come in, and the outer end of each housed a portal to some other part of the multiverse.

The most surprising aspect of the Glass Spider was that it could move. Miriam claimed the Spider's legs could crawl through the dust faster than an eagle could fly, stirring up silt in mammoth plumes that streamed away for miles behind the speeding bug. It had been racing through the dust for most of the past week, covering a hundred leagues every hour; but a short while ago it had finally stopped, apparently at its journey's end.

What was the Spider's purpose? Who built it? Miriam didn't know, but at least she could list the people who had arrived with her ten days ago.

Her immediate superior had been the drow back at the corpse-heap; since the wights had torn him to bloody confetti, we didn't bother asking his name.

The drow's boss was our old friend Bleach-Hair, his real name Petrov. Petrov hailed from some Prime Material world whose predominant landscape was ice; Miriam didn't remember the world's name, and none of us cared. (I might comment, by the way, that so-called ice worlds usually have their share of green fields, lakes, and even jungles; when someone like Petrov says he comes from an ice world, he almost always comes from a perfectly normal world and just lived in an icy part of it. Folk of the Prime Material plane are so parochial they seldom know much about their own homes, let alone the multiverse at large.)

Petrov occupied the second highest rung on the ladder of command. Above him were two powerful figures who shared control of everything that happened in the Glass Spider. One was a human mage who called himself «The Fox»… although Miriam contended «The Loon» was a more appropriate title. The Fox loved fire the way another man might love women; he could gaze at flames for hours, talking to the blaze and showing every sign of listening to it talk back. Thanks to various magic spells, he could even caress fire, bathe in it, wear it like a cloak. Needless to say, the Fox manufactured the firewands used at the courts, and masterminded all the other fiery accidents that had struck faction headquarters in Sigil. The very first incident – the riot at the Gatehouse asylum – had started when the Fox broke out of a padded cell where he had been confined for years.