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The other two moths remained unseen, flattening themselves against the glass.

There was a shouted discussion from below.

“. . . ready . . . sky . . .” he made out, then some word that sounded like the Shankell words for “sun” and “spear” run together. Someone shouted out to take care, and said something about the sunspear and the home: too far, they shouted, too far.

There was a barked order from the cactus directly behind the vast torch, and his team adjusted their motions obscurely. The leader demanded “limits,” of what Yagharek could not understand.

As the light lurched wildly, it found its target again, momentarily. For a moment, the tangled presence of the slake-moth sent a ghastly shadow across the inside of the dome.

“Ready?” shouted the leader, and there was a confirming chorus.

He continued to swivel the lamp, desperately trying to pin the flying moth with its hard light. It swooped and curved, arcing over the tops of the buildings and careering in spirals, a dimly glimpsed display of virtuoso aerobatics, a shadowy circus.

And then, for a moment, the creature was caught spreadeagled in the sky, the light caught it full on and time seemed to stop at the sight of the thing’s awesome, unfathomable and terrible beauty.

At the sight, the cactacae aiming the light tugged some hidden handle, and a gob of incandescence spat out of the lens and blazed along the path of the searchlight. Yagharek’s eyes widened. The clot of concentrated light and heat spasmed out of existence a few feet before it hit the glass of the dome.

The momentary white-out seemed to still all sound in the dome.

Yagharek blinked to clear the afterimage of that savage projectile from his eyes.

The cactacae below began to talk again.

“. . . get it?” asked one. There was a confusion of unclear answers.

They peered, along with Yagharek, unseen above them, into the air where the slake-moth had flown. They scoured the ground with their eyes, turning the powerful beam towards the pavement.

Throughout the streets below, Yagharek saw the armed patrols standing still, watching the searching light, standing implacable as it swept over them.

“Nothing,” shouted one to the elders on high, and his report was repeated from all sectors, shouted into the claustrophobic night.

Behind the thick curtains and the wooden shutters of Glasshouse’s windows, threads of light spilt into the air as torches and gaslights were lit. But even woken by the crisis, the cactacae would not peer out into the darkness, would not take the risk on what they might see. The guards were left alone.

And then, with a sough of wind as lascivious as a sexual breath, the cactus people on the temple summit learnt that they had not hit the slake-moth: it had ducked in a sharp zigzagging manoeuvre out of the range of their sunspear, it had flown low enough over the rooftops to touch them, to claw its way towards the tower, to pull itself slowly up and to rise magisterially into view, wings outstretched to their full compass, patterns flickering across them as fierce and complex as dark fire.

There was a tiny moment when one of the elders shrieked. There was a split second when the leader tried to tug the sunspear into position to blast the slake-moth into burning fragments. But they could not but see the wings unfolded before them, and their cries, their plans, evaporated as their minds overflowed.

Yagharek watched in his mirrored eyepieces, not wanting to see.

The two moths still clinging to the ceiling of the dome dropped suddenly away. They plummeted towards the earth, to lurch away from gravity with a stunning curving glide. They swept up the steep sides of the red pyramid, rising like devils from inside the earth, manifesting beside the transfixed cactacae horde.

One reached out with grasping creepers and whipped it around the thick leg of one of the cactus people. Thin arms and avaricious talons bit into cactus flesh without response, as the three slake-moths selected their victims, each grabbing hold of one of the