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What’s the rush?”
    “You know her. Everything’s always urgent.”
    “Some of us actually have lives outside this place, you know.”
    “I think she’s forgotten how…” The voices move away from us.
    Flutter gestures and we step-rush for the stairway, which bends back above itself in yet another of those sharp angles.
    At the end of that steep ascent is a door. A reinforced steel monstrosity that gleams with an oily film. Flutter shrivels into herself at the sight.
    “What’s behind this?” I ask.
    “The womb.” Her eyes go large and mesh-like again. In this light, I see oily rainbow colors in them. “Destruction. Reassembly. Rebirth. Where we are made.”
    She remembers. This is promising. I put my shoes back on.
    “n="tify">&;Can you get through the door?”
    She shakes her head. “It resists me.”
    But not me.
Eagerness thrums in my veins. If Sera is behind that door…
    A partial transformation will not hurt me. The spiders have had a day to rest and the marrow-deep weariness of my abused bones and stretched-string tension of my tissues is almost gone.
    I feel alive, like I haven’t in years. I can do this.
    The spiders have gone deep. I am too impatient to coax them out. Not that I was ever very good at persuading.
    That had been Sera’s job.
    “Attack me.”
    “What?” Flutter stares.
    “Attack me.” I prod her stick-thin arm, tweak a fold of her wings. I crouch, expecting her swoop.
    She doesn’t move.
    “Come on.” I balance on the balls of my feet. “Attack me. I’m a heretic, you know. Taurin’s a dumb-ass.”
    Flutter looks confused.
    “If he exists—which I doubt—he’s not good for much, is he? When was the last time he came around to see how we were getting on? Why does he let the golems attack us every hundred years from Tau Marai? Every time we spread, every time we settle new land or open a new mine, they come and trample us into the ground.
    “And what’s this whole business about prophecy that no one can decipher?” It feels so
good
to be saying all this, these things I’d kept bottled up far too long. “How many lives lost, eh, because so many idiots followed a stinking goat-herder from Sau Veria? And how many dead because other morons followed another claimant? And all that could’ve been avoided if he’d maybe put a—I don’t know—a great big sign on the backside of the poor sod he’d really picked out.”
    Flutter looks sad. “You’re angry. I don’t blame you. Taurin’s ways look messy to us, like tangled yarn, but to him they are clear, spread out like a tapestry.”
    Why does she look at me with such understanding and sorrow? How dare she think she can understand? “Aren’t you
eilendi
? Aren’t you going to defend Taurin’s good name?”
    “Taurin doesn’t need my defence.” She lays her fingers on my arm. I push her hand away. “We are all blasphemers one way or another. Even me. Even the holiest of the
eilendi
. You are just more honest.”
    She won’t attack me? Fine. I don’t need it. Anger suffuses my veins and the spiders come scurrying out of bone and muscle, begin weaving their more dependable magic. I put my hand on the door, and my pores eagerly suck in its substance. Metal spreads up my arm and over my shoulder. I stop it just shy of my neck. Nerves turn to wires, pulled up my arm, plugged into my brain. I feel the paths of heat, the buzz of flow inside the walls as vibrations against my fingertips.
    “Come,” I say, and my voice is as strong as my armored arm. The door, half eaten away, crumples in my hands. I leap into the chamber beyond. My right arm is too heavy, I almost pitch over. The spiders strengthen my other arm, my legs, my spine.
    But I guard my organs. My brain, my heart. My lungs and my stomach. They are too fragile for this.
    A large patch of heat—the only warmth inheyly warm this cold upstairs warren—calls to me. I hurry into a hallway to my left. It dead-ends into a door with thick glass set in the top