"B-but," he gulped, "you can't disobey me. The drug, the spider poison—"
"Doesn't work on a born spider. I must have neglected to mention that, naturally, we're all immunized against it." She smiled with a flash of those sharp white teeth.
"Then—then—" Dworn stumbled, feeling his preconceptions tossed helter-skelter. "Then you must have come with me—of your own free will!"
"At first," murmured Qanya, "I knew you'd never trust me unless I pretended ... and I was curious, too, to see how it was to be the one that obeyed. And then ... well, you'd have known, if you'd ever seen how the drug really works. You should have realized, anyway, when I laughed at you.... But you do so love to be masterful don't you?"
For a moment, Dworn's chief emotion was one of quick rage at the revelation of how thoroughly she'd deceived him. Then the anger subsided and left him feeling merely foolish, as he saw that she'd merely let him deceive himself. And, finally—as it came home to him that this girl had followed him of her own choice into exile and great danger—a new and quite unaccustomed feeling flooded in on him, a queer sense of humility.
"I'm sorry," he said confusedly. "I didn't—I don't—understand."
She breathed in a barely audible voice, "You said I was beautiful.... And you hadn't the drug."
From far away, from around the vast, mysterious buildings, came mournful hooting sounds, a sighing and a sobbing as of some mythical monster in torment.
Dworn was rudely recalled to realization of where they were—and of the fact that, as the spider-machine stood poised here on the cliff-edge, it would be starkly visible from over there, seen against the setting sun.
He gave up trying to unsnarl the tangle of his own feelings. He said hurriedly, "But you should go back. There's no time—I have to go on. But there's no reason you should die."