The guardians were owls, more or less—less, I suppose. Twice as large at least as any owl I’d seen, they had an ancient, cronelike appearance, all sinew and mange with sparse, mottled grey feathers, hunched upon their perches. This was not the worst of it. It was that their lower halves ended in six limbs—long, spiderish things that extended far beyond the central framework of their bodies and gripped the stones like pincers. “Why spiders?” Ariadne moaned. “I hate spiders. It could have been anything else.”
