The received the pilgrims as a courteous Daoist at the Yellow-Flower Temple, and poured them welcome tea, and the tea was poison, and the whole company went down — , , , all of them folding where they sat, because the demon of light was also, quietly, a demon of poison, and hospitality was his first weapon.
had not drunk — his eyes prickled at the tea the way they prickle at everything false — and so the fight fell to him alone, and it was the fight the whole spider-arc had been driving toward: the monkey whose furnace-forged eyes see through every disguise in creation, against a monster whose whole body was eyes.
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