They went down at the second hour past midnight, when Blackthorn was at its most genuinely asleep and the fortress above held only the sounds of distant snoring and the creak of torchwood settling in its brackets.
Jack carried no light. He did not need one. His vampiric vision turned the dark into a grey landscape of edges and depths, entirely adequate for navigation. Julius rode on his left shoulder with the iron sword strapped across his back like a soldier of impractical scale. Three other spiders followed at a distance, which Jack chose not to acknowledge because doing so would require acknowledging that Julius's authority over his own species was approximately theoretical.
