Another flicker caught Dwer’s eye. Like an epileptic snake, a kinked vine twisted into view, crossing part of the opening Dwer had cut through the hedge. Its jerky fits and starts seemed pathetic, all alone — but that tendril was followed by another, and another still.

“Rety!” He shouted, preparing to slash at the remaining barrier between them. “The trap’s closing. It’s now or never!”

On her face lay the frustration of coming within arm’s reach of her grail, only to have it snatched away by cruel fate. Not waiting for her answer, he lifted the heavy machete with both weary arms and cried out, splitting with three hard strokes the heavy cable blocking his way forward. Don’t throw it away, Rety, he pleaded inside, knowing it would do no good to say anything more aloud.

With a cry of frustration, Rety whirled around, forsaking her treasure, hurling herself at smaller vines with her tiny blade, then squeezing between others with lithe, squirmy agility. The tight passage smeared gold drops until she resembled a streaked pastry of swirled nut cream. Dwer sliced relentlessly and at last was close enough to stretch one arm into the morass.

Rety’s hand clasped his wrist.

Dwer planted his feet and hauled backward, drawing her through a dark, fetid funnel. A low moan accompanied the passage. He could not tell if it came from her, or himself, or both of them at once.

She slid free at last and clung to him with sudden fury, wrapping his torso in quivering arms and legs. Underneath all her macho bravado, Dwer knew she must have been terrified in there.

“We’ve got to hurry,” he said, tugging at one arm.

Rety resisted but a moment, then slithered off. She inhaled. “Okay, let’s go.”

He gave her a boost with his hands, sending her clambering into the tunnel-chimney he had carved through the hedge.

{Oh, going so soon? Have I been so poor a host?}

“Dry up and burn, One-of-a-Kind,” Dwer muttered under ragged breaths as he climbed after Rety, trusting her strong instincts to lead the way.

{Someday I surely will. But by then I’ll have preserved a legacy.

{Think on it! When Jijo’s fallow age ends, and new tenants possess this world for an aeon of shining glory, they will gaze in wonder at this collection I’ve gathered. Amid their glittering city towers, they’ll cherish my samplings of the interregnum, setting my prize pieces on pedestals for all to see. And paramount among those specimens will he you, my trophy, my treasure. Perhaps the best-conserved exemplar of your by then long-extinct wolfling race.}

Dwer puzzled — how did the spider sink hooks into his brain to draw forth words he didn’t recall ever learning, like exemplar and interregnum. Lark might have used them in his presence sometime, when perhaps they lodged somewhere deep in memory.

You’re the one who’s going to be extinct, spider! You and your whole damn race.

This time his blistering reply did not shove away the entity’s mind-touch.

{By then, certainly. But our type-design is always to be found in the Great Galactic Library, and we are far too useful ever to be forgotten. Whenever a world must be evacuated, tidied up, and allowed to lay fallow once more-whenever the mighty works of some former tenant race must be rubbed down to recycled dust-then we shall always rise again.

{Can your tribe of ignorant monkeys claim such usefulness, my precious? Can you claim any “purpose” at all? Save a tenacious will to keep on existing?}

This time Dwer did not answer. He needed to conserve his strength. If the earlier descent had been awful, ascending became pure hell. It was twice as hard craning backward to hack away at vines overhead as it had been striking down. In addition to danger from whipping cables and spurting acid, he and Rety had to climb through a mist of shimmering drops. It was no longer a matter of shaking them off one by one, but of dodging the thicker drifts and somehow preventing them from adhering to their eyes, noses, and ears. Through that luminous miasma, Dwer saw more creepers twist and flop into a gathering mesh above, more quickly than he would have believed possible. Clearly, One-of-a-Kind had been holding back till now.

{What did you expect? That I would show you all the things that I am capable o—

{…that I would show you all the…

{…that I would show . . .}

When the voice in Dwer’s head trailed off, his first reaction was relief. He had other worries, like an agonizing crick in his neck and a right arm that looked as if it had been dipped in a jeweler’s vat, and that seemed about to cramp from the repetitive hacking, hacking, hacking. Now if only the chattering noor would shut up too, with its shrill keening. Mudfoot’s piercing chitters crescendoed, rising in pitch beyond the limit of Dwer’s direct hearing but not past ability to scrape a vexing runnel under his skull.

Through it all, a nagging worry bothered Dwer.

I left the glaver all tied up. Will she die of thirst if I never make it back?

“Left!” Rety shouted. He quickly obeyed, swinging as far as possible, trusting her swift reflexes to warn of jets of yellow sap.

“Okay, clear!” she called.

The machete slipped. Dwer fumbled at the wrist strap three times before getting a grip to resume chopping the slender vines filling the chimney overhead, cutting off the swiftly failing twilight. If they didn’t make it out by full nightfall, every advantage would belong to the crazy mulc-spider.

Now a sound he had dismissed as background noise grew too loud to ignore. A low rumbling counterbass overrode the noor’s yapping. All around Rety and Dwer, the hedge began vibrating. A number of brittle vines shuddered to dust while others sprouted cracks and dripped fluids — red, orange, and milky — noxious additions to a fog that already stung human eyes. Through that blur, Dwer blinked upward to see Mudfoot, perched nimbly atop the hedge of vines, withdrawing in snarling defiance as something new entered view from the south — something that hovered in the air, without any visible means of support!

A machine! A symmetrical, slab-sided form with gleaming flanks that reflected the sunset, drifting to a point just above the shuddering hedge.

Suddenly, its belly blazed forth a bitter light that diffracted past the vines. The slender beam lanced right past Rety and Dwer, as if probing for something deeper…

“It’s hunting the bird!” Rety crouched beside Dwer, seizing his arm and pointing.

“Never mind the damn bird!” he cursed. The hedge was shaking worse than ever. Dwer dragged her behind him just as a sundered tube whipped past, spurting caustic fluid, splattering a trail of fizzing agony along his back as he shielded the girl. Purple spots swarmed across his field of vision, and the machete slipped its thong to fall, clattering off branches on its way down.

Now it seemed as if the hedge were alive with stark, fleeing shadows, as the floating machine’s searchlight narrowed to a searing needle that scorched anything it touched.

By the same light Dwer glimpsed the bird-thing, trapped inside its cage of ropy mesh and coated with a golden patina, erupting now in a dance of evasion, leaping back and forth as it tried to dodge the burning ray of light, its feathers already smoldering in spots. Rety let out a throaty cry of anger, but it was all the two humans could do simply to hold on.

Finally, the bird-thing seemed to give up. It stopped ducking and instead spread its four wings in a pitiful effort to create a shielding canopy, which began to smoke as the blazing shaft struck home and stayed. Only the little bird-machine’s head poked out, snaking upward to gape toward the aggressor with one open, staring eye.

Dwer was watching in horrified amazement, mixed with stunned pity, when that dark, jadelike eye abruptly exploded.