on that cord. The door will come down and block off your pursuers. But get
outside as fast as you can because…’
Masha said, ‘I know why.’
‘Good woman. Now, the spiders.’
The things came before the webs were clearly visible in the lights. She had
expected to see the lights reflected redly in their eyes, but they weren’t.
Their many eyes were huge and purplish and cold. They scuttled forwards, waving
the foremost pair of legs, then backed away as Smhee waved his torch at them.
Masha walked half-turned away from him so that she could use the brand to scare
away any attack from the rear or side.
Suddenly, something leaped from the edge of the darkness and soared towards her.
She thrust the brand at it. But the creature seemed to go through the torch.
It landed on her arm and seized the harfd that held the torch. She had clenched
her teeth to keep from screaming if something like this happened. But she didn’t
even think of voicing her terror and disgust. She closed her hand on the body of
the thing to crush it, and the fingers felt nothing.
The next moment, the spider disappeared.
She told Smhee what had happened.
‘Thanks be to Klooshna!’ he said. ‘You are invulnerable to them. If you weren’t,
you’d be swelling up now!’
‘But what ifit’d been a real spider?’ she said as she kept waving her torch at
the monsters that circled them. ‘I didn’t know until my hand closed on it that
it was not real.’
‘Then you’d be dying. But the fact that it ignored the brand showed you what it
really was. You realized that even if you didn’t think consciously about it.’