And Leothric answered: 'I am Leothric, son of Lorendiac.'

And the spider said: 'I will make a rope at once to hang you with.'

Then Leothric parted another bunch of strands, and came nearer to
the spider as he sat making his rope, and the spider, looking up
from his work, said: 'What is that sword which is able to sever my
ropes?'

And Leothric said: 'It is Sacnoth.'

Thereat the black hair that hung over the face of the spider parted
to left and right, and the spider frowned; then the hair fell back
into its place, and hid everything except the sin of the little eyes
which went on gleaming lustfully in the dark. But before Leothric
could reach him, he climbed away with his hands, going up by one of
his ropes to a lofty rafter, and there sat, growling. But clearing
his way with Sacnoth, Leothric passed through the chamber, and came
to the farther door; and the door being shut, and the handle far up
out of his reach, he hewed his way through it with Sacnoth in the
same way as he had through the Porte Resonant, the Way of Egress for
War. And so Leothric came into a well-lit chamber, where Queens and
Princes were banqueting together, all at a great table; and
thousands of candles were glowing all about, and their light shone
in the wine that the Princes drank and on the huge gold candelabra,
and the royal faces were irradiant with the glow, and the white
table-cloth and the silver plates and the jewels in the hair of the
Queens, each jewel having a historian all to itself, who wrote no
other chronicles all his days. Between the table and the door there
stood two hundred footmen in two rows of one hundred facing one
another. Nobody looked at Leothric as he entered through the hole in
the door, but one of the Princes asked a question of a footman, and
the question was passed from mouth to mouth by all the hundred
footmen till it came to the last one nearest Leothric; and he said
to Leothric, without looking at him:

'What do you seek here?'

And Leothric answered: 'I seek to slay Gaznak.'

And footman to footman repeated all the way to the table: 'He seeks
to slay Gaznak.'

And another question came down the line of footmen: 'What is your
name?'

And the line that stood opposite took his answer back.

Then one of the Princes said: 'Take him away where we shall not hear
his screams.'

And footman repeated it to footman till it came to the last two, and
they advanced to seize Leothric.

Then Leothric