Un Lun Dun

“What is that?” she muttered. Hemi bumped into her.

“Stop stopping,” he grumbled.

“Hold on a second,” Jones whispered. “There’s a bit of light coming, and…whoa!”

The web bounced violently, and Deeba slipped down a sudden incline.

She couldn’t help letting out a little scream. Jones grabbed Deeba in one hand, plucking her out of her slide, and Hemi in the other, pulling them close. He wedged them with him in a little hollow behind a cobweb-smothered ridge. The three of them were absolutely still, waiting to see if they had been noticed.

The cord stretching behind them was repeatedly tugging, Deeba realized. She pulled it three times, to reassure Skool.

Eventually, her heartbeat slowed down, and she looked into the interior of Webminster Abbey.

They were high up in an enormous space. It was dim, faintly illuminated by the light of the UnSun through the silk arcing above them.

The great room was dotted with supports, cobweb-swaddled minarets or trees, jutting at random in the irregular framework on which the web was stretched. In the very center was an ancient, ruined church, dwarfed in the chamber. Its steeple poked up into the cobweb ceiling, which smothered its weather vane.

“That must be where they started all this,” whispered Jones.

Deeba could see black holes around the chamber: the ends of the tu

“Alright then,” said Jones. “Let’s do this.” He dangled their bait some way below them. Hemi took Jones’s flashlight from his pocket and played the beam on it.

“We’re ready?” said Deeba. She yanked the cord four times to say stop touching the web.

“Here, window window window,” she whispered. Hemi waggled the light a little, and they settled down, very still, to wait.

A few seconds after their companions stopped vibrating the silk, something began to move.

Deeba saw motion. There were swaying beams of dim light, off in the distance of the darkness. She froze.

Out of the tu

There were tens, twenties, untold numbers of them. Crawling into view were heavy, painted wooden window frames, filled with thick, mottled old glass, through which Deeba glimpsed strange lights. From every frame splayed eight wooden arachnid limbs, four each side, clenching and unclenching.

They dangled; they scuttled with horrible bursts of spider speed or picked their way tarantula-slow over the floor. Deeba put her hand over her mouth so as not to make a horrified sound. She and Hemi clutched each other.

A Black Window descended out of the darkness, playing out silk. It twisted on the cord as it came, light from behind the glass rotating like the beam of a lighthouse, the same view, it looked like, shining from both sides. Deeba could see faint shapes beyond the panes of glass.

One or two of the windows trailed broken ropes from under slammed-shut panes. That must be where explorers had attempted to attach themselves, Deeba thought.

The Black Windows were not only clambering over every surface, raising their segmented legs high, through every loop and hole of webbing. They were clambering in and out of each other.

In some bizarre social interaction, windows pulled wide open, and in seemingly impossible motion, others would approach with furtive arachnid scurries and wriggle inside, the pane closing behind them. Others would open, and wooden forelegs would waver out from inside, and other windows would emerge and creep away.

All sorts of complicated maneuvers occurred. Windows that had just ingested others themselves climbed into yet others. A window opened and emitted three of its siblings, one of which then climbed into another, while the third spat out a fourth. Deeba saw one window emerge from another, then eat its own regurgitator. It was endless.

The web was dim. Noises were hushed. There was a soft clicking from countless wooden limbs.

Deeba saw glimpses through their glass. Through one window she saw a room full of tailors’ ma

“What’s that?” Hemi whispered; then his voice gave out.

A skeleton was floating among the kelp, beyond the glass.

There were other dead, Deeba saw. Bodies lying in empty rooms and corridors beyond some of the windows, rope tied around their waists. So this was what happened to the lost arachnofenestranauts.

If they managed to get out of the window they had entered, it might by then have entered another, which itself had entered another and exited a different one still. Even if they avoided the deadly realms that were beyond some of the panes, treasure hunters might roam helplessly through window after window, hunting for food and drink in a succession of alien rooms, never finding their way back to UnLondon.

“You didn’t see what the one that took Rosa looked like, did you?” Jones whispered. Deeba and Hemi shook their heads. They had no way to tempt that particular window back. Rosa was lost.

74. Spider-Fishing

“Make sure you don’t pull the wrong cord,” whispered Deeba. There were two: one took the weight, the other tightened the loops.

Their trap dangled below them.

“No two are alike,” the bishops had explained, and told them of the infinite rooms beyond the Black Windows’ panes. They had glimpsed monsters and gas and mustard-colored limbos, as well as the more tantalizing vaults and stairways and arsenals, the glints of coins that attracted those foolish adventurers.

“We’ve got to get past them, and we’ve still got no idea where the UnGun is,” Fing had said.

“Where do you think it would be?” Deeba had said. “It was put somewhere no one could get at.”

Fing shook his head helplessly.

“It’s in one of them,” said Hemi. He and Deeba nodded at each other.

“Maybe…we can trick them,” said Deeba eventually. “No two are alike, you said?”

“All different. We’ve seen a sword, a flame, a coal mine—”

“— the canopy of a tree…But all different.”

“Because we’re looking for one particular window, right?” Deeba said. “And we reckon we know what’s in it. So, if all the windows are different, how d’you think they’d react if they saw one exactly like them?”

“They’d hate it,” said Jones.

“They’d love it,” said Hemi. “Maybe they’d, y’know…I mean, there are no baby windows, are there? Maybe they’ve been waiting.”

“I agree with you,” said Bon and Bastor simultaneously, Bon pointing at Hemi and Bastor at Jones. The bishops looked startled.

“It don’t matter,” said Deeba. “If they’re territorial and they attack, or if they’re lonely and they want to, you know, whatever. Either way, if there’s one just like them, they’re going to come see.”

With tools from the bus, Jones had pulled free a window from an empty building.

Following Bon and Bastor’s description, they’d sawed and hammered, while the locals had ignored them as foolish treasure seekers. They made attachments to the frame, taking care not to crack the glass, and behind it nailed a flat piece of wood, on which Hemi drew exaggerated lines of perspective.

“Now the main thing,” Deeba had said.

From his tool kit, Jones had taken a soldering iron with a grip like a pistol, stuck a length of pipe on its end, like a barrel, and attached it to the wood behind the glass.

The thing was inelegant. Its eight limbs swung stiffly on old hinges. It moved randomly when they jiggled it. Still, it was an eight-legged window with what looked like a gun behind it.