"I still can’t believe how loud it was," Elias said.
He had been saying some version of that since they left the training ground. Now, walking down the corridor toward their afternoon class, he was still shaking his head over it.
"I’m surprised they let you fire it more than once," Marianne said.
"That’s what the range is for," Eveline said. "They built it for armaments that might hurt someone. They weren’t going to let him do it anywhere else."
Owen let them talk. He was checking the room number on his schedule against the doors as they passed. When he found the right one, he pushed it open.
It looked nothing like the lecture hall from the day before.
Long wooden worktables filled the middle of the room. The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were crowded with things. Preserved specimens. Bones and skulls, some of them as big as a man’s chest. Rows of labelled containers. Between the shelves hung anatomical drawings, layer upon layer of muscle and bone and organ, each one carefully annotated. In the glass jars along the lowest shelf, pale shapes floated in cloudy liquid.
The air smelled of dried herbs and something sharper, a chemical tang. And under both of those, faint but unmistakable, was the smell of things that had once been alive and were now being kept from rotting.
A few cadets were already sitting down. Others were standing by the shelves, peering at the jars and arguing quietly about what was in them.
Elias stopped beside one of the larger jars and leaned in. Something coiled and grey was floating inside it.
He straightened up quickly.
"Are we sure this is a classroom?" he said. "It looks like where they keep dead monsters until they’ve finished examining them."
Marianne laughed at the look on his face.
Eveline had already moved past him and was looking up at the drawings hung above the tables.
Owen looked up too.
Several of the illustrations showed where a monster’s core sat inside its body. Others had small marks drawn on them, pointing to the places where a creature was weakest. Thin bones. Exposed joints. Gaps in the plating.
After the slope, he didn’t need anyone to explain why the Academy took this seriously.
The four of them found seats together at one of the tables as the rest of the class filed in.
A few minutes later, the door swung open, and a woman came in with her arms full.
She was carrying a wooden case, with a bundle of rolled diagrams wedged under one arm. She looked to be somewhere in her middle thirties. Her dark hair was pinned up loosely, with a few strands already escaping, and her sleeves were rolled to the elbows. She wore plain, practical clothes, the kind that wouldn’t matter if something stained them. Nothing about the way she moved was anything like Captain Pike or Sergeant Shaw.
She set the case down on her desk, laid the diagrams out beside it, then opened the lid and lifted out its contents.
It was a leg. A spider’s leg, long and jointed and covered in coarse bristles, with a curved, hooked tip at the end of it.
Several of the cadets leaned forward to look. A few others leaned back.
"Isn’t it lovely?" the woman said. She turned it gently in the light, clearly delighted with it. "Giant Spider. A fully grown one. You can see every segment of the joint. I brought it specially, because it’s perfect for what we’re doing today."
She looked up then, as though only just noticing the expressions on some of their faces.
"Ah," she said. "I suppose I should introduce myself first. I’m Professor Melisende de Montfort. I’ll be teaching you Monster Biology and Behaviour." She smiled at them warmly. "Don’t worry. It’s been dead a very long time."
That didn’t seem to make some of them feel much better.
She set the leg down carefully on a cloth and picked up a roster.
"Let’s see who I have."
She went through the names. Owen heard Elias answer, and Marianne, and Eveline. Mira Calder. Lucien de Clare, from a table near the back.
"Owen Ferrers."
"Here."
A couple of the cadets at the next table glanced over at him, and he caught a murmur. Something about the examination, and the thing he had killed.
Professor de Montfort looked up at him briefly, nodded, and went straight on to the next name.
When she had finished, she put the roster down and picked up the spider leg once more.
"So," she said. "Let’s begin with an easy one. What makes these dangerous?"
Hands went up immediately.
"The bite," Elias said. "They’re venomous."
"The reach," Marianne said. "Those legs are longer than most spears. You can’t get close without them reaching you first."
"They’re strong."
"They’re fast."
"The webs."
"Good," the professor said. "All of those. But why are the webs dangerous?" She looked at the boy who had said it. "Because they trap things?"
"Because you get stuck in them," the boy said. "And then you can’t get away."
"That’s certainly part of it."
Owen listened, and remembered the ravine. The pale curtains of silk, the spiders coming down the rock walls. He had spent most of that fight trying to kill them before they reached Eveline and Marianne. He hadn’t had much time to think about anything else.
"Here’s a harder question," Professor de Montfort said. "When something gets caught in a web, how does the spider know where it is?"
The answers came more slowly this time.
"It sees it?" one girl offered.
"Smells it," said a boy near the back.
Elias frowned. "Could it feel it? Through the silk? Like it moves when something’s struggling?"
The professor’s face lit up.
"Yes," she said. "Exactly that. Most web-building spiders rely heavily on vibration. Whatever moves in the web sends a tremor through the silk, and the spider feels it. A web isn’t just a trap. It’s a way of sensing." She held up a finger. "Different species respond to different signals, and in different ways. That’s why you can’t just learn about spiders. You have to learn about this spider. And that one."
Elias looked enormously pleased with himself.
Professor de Montfort reached back into her case and drew out a wooden frame about the width of her shoulders. Strands of silk had been strung across it in a rough web, with small, light markers of painted wood tied on at different points.
"Gather round," she said. "All of you. Close enough to see."
They crowded around her desk.
She picked up a thin wooden stick and touched it, very lightly, to one strand on the left side of the frame.
The silk trembled. Owen watched the movement run outward along the strand. Three of the little markers connected to it twitched, just barely, while the others hardly moved at all.
Then she touched a different strand, near the top.
This time, a different set of markers shivered. The movement ran a completely different way through the web.
"What changed?" she asked.
Eveline was looking closely. "The second strand was tighter," she said. "It was pulled tighter than the first. The movement went further along it."
"And some of it stopped," Mira said from the other side of the desk. "Before it reached the far side. Down at the bottom, there, it just died out."
"Both right," the professor said. "How tight a strand is, where it is, what it’s connected to. All of that changes what the vibration does. Which way it goes. How far. How strong it is when it arrives. A spider that’s used to reading those signals can learn a great deal about what’s happening on the other side of its web without ever seeing it."
Elias looked at the frame and swallowed. "That makes walking into one a lot less appealing."
"Was it ever appealing?" Marianne asked.
A few of the cadets around them laughed. Professor de Montfort laughed with them.
"A fair point, Lady Loxley," she said. "But let’s see if we can make it a little less unappealing."