One-of-a-Kind, he thought, not really wanting to evoke the name but unable to resist. He pulled his gaze away, scanning for Rety. Don’t hurt her, One-of-a-Kind. She’s only a child.

He didn’t want to converse with the mulc-spider. He hoped it might be dormant, as when the lake was a harmless cranny in the winter snowscape. Or perhaps it was dead, at last. The spider was surely long past due to die. A grisly hobby seemed to be all that kept this one alive.

He shivered as a creeping sensation climbed the nape of his neck.

{Hunter. Fellow-seeker. Lonely one. How good of you to greet me. I sensed you pass nearby some days ago, hurrying in chase. Why did you not pause to say hello?

{Have you found what you sought?

{Is it this “child” you speak of?

{Is she different from other humans?

{Is she special in some way?}

Scanning for traces of Rety, Dwer tried to ignore the voice. He had no idea why he sometimes held conversations with a particular corrosive alpine puddle. Though psi talent wasn’t unknown among the Six, the Scrolls warned darkly against it. Anyway, most psi involved links among close kin — one reason he never told anyone about this fey channel. Imagine the nicknames, if people learned of it!

I probably imagine it all, anyway. Must be some weird symptom of my solitary life.

The tickling presence returned.

{Is that still your chief image of me? As a figment of your mind? If so, why not test it? Come to me, my unowned treasure. My unique wonder! Come to the one place in the cosmos where you will always be prized!}

Dwer grimaced, resisting the hypnotic draw of the algae patterns, still scanning amid the rocks and tangles for Rety. At least the spider hadn’t taken her yet. Or was it cruel enough to lie?

There! .Was that a flicker to the left? Dwer peered westward, shading his eyes against the late afternoon sun. Something rustled near the coiled vines, just a dozen or so meters closer to the lake, hidden by the bulk of several stone slabs, but causing a section of hedge to quiver. Squinting, Dwer wished he hadn’t been so hasty in dropping his pack, which contained his priceless handmade ocular.

It might be a trap, he thought.

{Who would trap you, Special One? You suspect me? Say you don’t mean it!}

The wind had died down a bit. Dwer cupped his hands and called, “Rety!”

Queer echoes scattered among the rocks, to be sucked dry by pervasive moss and dust. Dwer looked around for alternatives. He could slip down to ground level and hack his way inward, using the machete sheathed at his back. But that would take forever, and how would One-of-a-Kind react to having its fingers sliced off?

His only real option was to go over.

Dwer backed up till his heels hung over empty space, then took a deep breath and sprang forward… one, two, three paces, and leaped — sailing over a jungle of interlacing tendrils — to land with a jarring thud atop the next slab. This one slanted steeply, so there was no time to recover. He had to scramble fast to reach a long knife-edged ridge. Standing up, he spread his arms and gingerly walked heel-and-toe, teetering for ten paces before reaching a boulder with a flatter top.

Dwer’s nostrils filled with sour, caustic odors from the lake. More nearby tendrils throbbed with veins now, flowing acrid tinctures. He skirted puddles of bitter fluid, collecting in cavities of etched stone. When his boot scraped one pool, it left fine trails of ash and a scent of burning leather.

The next time he took a running leap, he landed hard on hands and knees.

“Rety?” he called, crawling to the forward edge.

The shoreline barrier was a dense-woven knot of green, red, and yellow strands, twisted in roiling confusion. Within this contorted mass, Dwer spied objects — each nestled in its own cavity. Each sealed, embedded, within a separate crystal cocoon.

Golden things, silvery things. Things gleaming like burnished copper or steel. Tubes, spheroids, and complex blocky forms. Things shining unnatural hues of pigment or nanodye. Some resembled items Dwer had seen dragged from Buyur sites by reclaimer teams; only those had been decomposed, worn by passing centuries. These samples of past glory looked almost new. Like bugs trapped in amber, their cocoons preserved them against the elements, against time. And each item, Dwer knew, was one of a kind.

Not every sample was a Buyur relic. Some had once been alive. Small animals. Insectoids. Anything that strayed too close and caught the mad spider’s collecting fancy. It seemed a wonder that a being devoted to destruction — one designed to emit razing fluids — could also secrete a substance that conserved. All the more astonishing that it would want to.

The rustling resumed, coming from his left. Dwer slithered that way, dreading to find the girl trapped and suffering. Or else some small creature he would have to put out of misery with his bow.

He edged forward… and gasped.

What he saw netted in the profuse tangle, just a few meters ahead, came as a complete surprise.

At first sight it resembled a bird — a Jijoan avian — with the typical clawed stilt for a landing leg, four broad-feathered wings, and a tentacle-tail. But Dwer swiftly saw that it was no species he knew — or any genus listed on his brother’s charts. Its wings, flapping desperately against a surrounding net of sticky threads, articulated in ways Dwer thought unnatural. And they beat with a power he found suspicious in any living thing that size.

Feathers had been ripped or burned away in several places. Within those gaps, Dwer glimpsed flashes of glistening metal.

A machine!

Shock made him release the screen on his thoughts, allowing the tickling voice to return.

{Indeed, a machine. Of a type I never before owned. And see, it still operates. It lives!}

“I see that, all right,” Dwer muttered.

{And you don’t yet know the half of it. Is this my day, or what?}

Dwer hated the way the mulc-spider not only slipped into his mind but somehow used what it found there to produce perfect Anglic sentences, better than Dwer could manage, since the spider never stammered or seemed at a loss for words. He found that obnoxious, coming from a being lacking a face to talk back to.

The false bird thrashed in its snare. Along its feathered back gleamed clear, golden droplets that it fought to shake off, flicking most aside before they could harden into a shell of adamant, preserving crystal.

What on Jijo could it be? Dwer wondered.

{(I was hoping, now that I have you, to learn the answer.}

Dwer wasn’t sure he liked the way One-of-a-Kind put that. Anyway, there wasn’t time to bandy words. Dwer pushed aside pity for the trapped creature. Right now he must keep Rety from becoming yet another unique specimen in the mulc-spider’s collection.

{So, as I suspected. The small human is special!}

Dwer quashed the voice with the best weapon he had — anger.

Get out of my mind!

It worked. The presence vanished, for now. Once more, Dwer lifted his head and shouted. “Rety! Where are you!”

An answer came at once, from surprisingly close by.

“I’m here, fool. Now be quiet, or you’ll scare it!”

He swiveled, trying to stare in all directions at once. “Where? I don’t see—”

“Right below you, so shut up! I’ve been followin’ this thing for weeks! Now I gotta figure how to get it outta there.”

Dwer slid further left to peer into the crisscrossing network just below — and found himself staring straight into the beady black eyes of a grinning noor! Stretched out across a dormant vine as if it were a comfy roost, Mudfoot tilted his head slightly, squinting back at Dwer. Then, without warning, the noor let loose a sudden sneeze.