She stood gazing at him, smiling a little with a curve of scarlet lips that revealed white, sharp-looking teeth. Dworn groped for his voice; but she spoke first.
"Patience, beetle," she said. "I'll attend to you in a moment."
The words had the accent of a strange speech, but they were intelligible. Dworn stared uncomprehendingly at her, mumbled, "Who—what are you?"
She moved nearer and stood smiling down at him. "Why, beetle, don't you know?... I'm the spider who caught you."
"Spi-der?" Dworn fumbled with the unfamiliar word. "I don't—"
Her eyes too were black, very black and intense. She said slowly, "You don't know about spiders, beetle? Strange. It must be that till now there were none of our kind on this side of the Rim."
Dworn's aching head was not serving him well, but a part of his intelligence functioned to grapple with the implication of her words. "The Rim"—that must mean the Barrier, as seen from its eastern side. Then she, and others like her, must have come from beyond the Barrier. A walking machine could descend by the broken path of the landslide.
But "spider"—the word rang some bell deep in his mind, some recollection of childhood's fairytale bogeys perhaps, but he still hadn't succeeded in grasping the memory.
He growled, "I don't know—but if you'd untie my hands, I'd show you what a beetle is."