She went to the hearth and picked up the iron rod that was used to poke the fire. Then—keeping her distance from the thing—she touched the creature with the end of the poker.

What happened next came so fast that it caught Candy completely off guard. The creature suddenly flipped itself over, and crawled up the poker with the speed of a striking snake.

Before Candy had time to let go of the poker, the design beneath the bug’s eyes opened up like the mouth of a crab, and a spike, about five inches long, emerged and jabbed Candy’s hand in the cradle of flesh between her forefinger and her thumb. Blood ran out of the wound. Yelping, Candy dropped the iron poker.

She put the cut to her mouth immediately, tasting the tang of her own blood, and perhaps something of the creature’s metallic innards, from whence the spike had come.

Meanwhile, the insect had dropped off the poker and was finally retreating. It was wounded, she saw; two of its legs were set awry and were being dragged behind it.

Even so, as it retreated, it underwent an extraordinary transformation.

Without missing a steady step of its speedy stride, its back opened up, two doors sliding out of sight. Its wings were then raised and folded and slid with perfect accuracy into the opening and its back closed up again. At the same time a host of other smaller changes were taking place in its anatomy. A telescopic tail appeared, almost doubling the insect’s length when it reached its full measure, and a second rack of legs appeared along its abdomen. When its reconfiguration was complete it no longer resembled a locust or a dragonfly, but a huge centipede. Even its color seemed to have changed subtly, its bright greens bled of their intensity, so that now it was a sickly, mottled yellow.

It no longer tried to record Candy or her surroundings. All it wanted now was to be away as fast as possible, so as to avoid another attempt on its artificial life. Candy made no further attempt to stop it from escaping. It wasn’t worth the risk.

The creature was now about two feet from freedom. And then, in walked Izarith. She failed to notice the thing scuttling beneath her feet. Good mother that she was, her eyes went first to her frightened daughter.

“Watch out!” Candy yelled.

Too late. Izarith had trodden on the tail of the creature, which cracked like the shell of a lobster.

Izarith looked down. The food she’d brought in with her fell from her hands. An expression of the most intense disgust came to her face.

She raised her foot to stomp on it again.

“Get it, Muma!” Maiza said, silent tears running down her cheeks.

“Be careful,” Candy warned her, still trying to stop the blood flowing from her hand. “It fights back.”

Izarith didn’t seem to care; her house had been invaded and her child had been terrorized. She was furious. She stamped on it twice, bringing her heel down hard. The creature was fast, however. It tried to rush away between Izarith’s legs. But she took a step back to stop it, and realizing the way was barred, the creature turned, its bug eyes scanning the wall to the right of the door. Picking up the poker that Candy had dropped, Izarith pursued the creature to the corner of the room.

But again the insect showed a remarkable turn of speed. It ran toward the wall, and leaped, driving its feet into the plaster. Then it made a zigzag ascent, evading each and every blow Izarith attempted to deliver. In a matter of seconds, it was out of her reach and heading across the ceiling to a place where the plaster had fallen away, exposing a sizeable hole. It disappeared through it and was gone.

“Hush,” Izarith said to Nazre, who’d begun to cry out loud.

The child stopped crying almost instantly. Candy listened. She could still hear the creature’s feet as it scuttled away. Eventually they grew so soft, Candy wasn’t sure whether she was still hearing them, or imagining it.

Then they were finally gone.

Candy looked down at her hand. It was still bleeding. Not a lot, but enough to make Candy feel faintly sick. It was not just the blood that sickened her; Candy had a strong stomach. It was much more to do with the memory of the creature’s scrutiny; the horrid intelligence in its stare.

“Do you know where that thing came from?” she asked Izarith.

Izarith picked up what looked like the remains of a child’s shirt and tossed it over to Candy. “Here,” she said, “it’ll stop the blood.”

“Well, do you?”

“No,” Izarith replied, not looking at Candy. “There are things like that all over. But never before in my home.”

“But it wasn’t real, Izarith. It was a machine of some kind.”

Izarith shrugged, as though the matter of its being real or not was completely irrelevant.

Candy tore the old garment she’d been given into two strips and bound it around her hand. It slowly stopped throbbing. As she tied off the knot, Izarith—who’d been silently working to calm and then feed her children—said, “I think you should go.”

She still wasn’t looking at Candy. Plainly the fact that she was ushering the girl who’d been so generous to her out of her house was an embarrassment. But her primary concern was her children’s safety.

“Will others like that thing come to replace it?”

“I don’t know,” Izarith said, finally glancing up at Candy. The blood had gone from her face. Though she’d dealt with the insect efficiently enough, she was obviously deeply afraid. There were tears in her eyes, but she was fighting them bravely. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just think it’s better if you go.”

Candy nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I understand. I hope things go well for you and your family.”

“Thank you,” Izarith said. “I hope things go well for you, too. But be careful. This is a dangerous time.”

“So I begin to see,” Candy said.

Izarith nodded, then she returned to the business of feeding her children, leaving Candy to make her own way out.

Carrion had no love of things Commexian. On the island of Pyon, where it was always Three O’clock in the Morning, Rojo Pixler had built Commexo City, his so-called city of Light and Laughter. It had been, many years before, the site of the Carrion Night Mansion. The Lord of Midnight had happy memories of the times preceding the fire that destroyed the Mansion; Hours when Pyon had been a place of play. He’d needed no magic then. He’d been the prince, his father’s favorite. That was all he had needed in order to make the world glorious and Pyon a playground.

But after the fire he had never gone back. And when the man he’d thought was a harmless dreamer by the name of Rojo Pixler had offered to buy the land on which the ruins of the Night Mansion still stood, he’d readily sold it.

Only later did he discover that Pixler’s representatives had been surreptitiously buying up other plots of land around Pyon, until he had enough ground to start the construction of his dream city; a place where night was to be permanently banished by a constant blaze of artificial light. What a mockery, that on the very site where the Carrion family had lived in a palace of shadow and enigma, was now a garish city whose every surface blazed. The dazzle and gaud of it could be seen at midnight, if you stood in certain spots along Marrowbone’s Shore on the northwest where the wind off the Izabella thinned the red fogs.

Carrion had promised himself that he would personally extinguish those lights when his Night of Nights came. And Rojo Pixler would get a nightmare or two to replace his bright and wretched dream. Something plucked from Carrion’s own cortex. Something that would leave the man a gibbering wreck, driven so far into madness he would be unable even to remember the name of his own damnable city.

But that was for the future. Until that happy Night came, it made sense to put the inventions that Pixler funded to use. Pixler was no fool. He had found a way to marry the ancient magical principles that had been practiced on the islands since the beginning of time with new machineries invented by the scientists he kept in gleaming laboratories in the towers of Commexo City.