The spider congress convened at midnight.
Jack had not been invited. He attended anyway, which was the sort of distinction that meant a great deal more to him than it apparently did to the spiders, who regarded his arrival in the upper gallery with the collective equanimity of creatures who had already decided he was furniture that occasionally gave instructions.
Julius was at the front, as always. The iron sword was propped against the cavern wall. The spider in the top hat was present. The one with the blue bowtie. Seven others Jack had begun to distinguish by temperament if not by marking — there was the cautious one, and the one who was always slightly late, and the one who had taken to building architectural models out of webbing and dungeon debris and presenting them at meetings as though they were formal proposals.
