‘No, that can’t be all,’ said Dalip. ‘Why did you make me fight in the pit?’

‘Fight? Pit?’ asked Mary.

‘Like a, a gladiator. She wanted me to be afraid. Isn’t that right?’

Bell shifted awkwardly, painfully. ‘I … I was carrying out an experiment. When we came to Down, we were all running from something, someone. I thought that by making someone scared enough, I could open a portal back to London. Didn’t work though, did it? You were too bloody honourable.’

She said it with grudging admiration, but hadn’t counted on Dalip not taking it as a compliment. Luiza just about stopped him from dragging the geomancer up by the hair and throwing her through the closed balcony doors.

‘It wouldn’t have worked if I’d told you why you were being trained to fight,’ said Bell. ‘It wasn’t about you being scared. It was about those other plebs being scared of you.’

Luiza pushed Dalip away and stood in front of him. Dalip’s chest heaved, and he seemed to only control himself with the utmost effort. ‘It didn’t work at all.’

‘You can’t blame me for trying,’ Bell offered.

Luiza’s hand pressed hard against Dalip’s sternum.

‘I do blame you for trying.’

‘To be honest,’ said Mary, ‘it sounds like a really shitty thing to do, over and above all the other shitty things you did. And though Crows might be shady as fuck, at least he never tried to kill me, or any of my mates. He saved me from the wolfman. He taught me how to use magic. Why don’t I guess why he left you?’

Bell stayed defiantly silent.

‘If I said he left you because he thought your idea was fucking nuts, would I be wrong?’

‘Yes. You don’t understand anything.’

‘So make me understand.’

The two women stared at each other. Mary was acutely aware of the cold wind rattling through the tower, brushing against her wounds in a way that didn’t happen when she was a bird, but also that Bell was sitting opposite her in a fine white dress turned to scarlet rags. The gravity of the damage they’d done to each other should have been worthy of comment, but neither of them were ever going to be called to account for that.

‘Crows was my lover,’ said Bell. ‘We planned everything together.’

‘Hang on,’ said Mary. ‘Where’s Grace?’

‘She’s not here.’ Mama shrugged. ‘She’s not here and we don’t know what that means.’

‘Okay. We’ll have to look for her after this. Go on, Bell: you were making plans.’

‘We knew there was a portal around here, but didn’t know where. We found this crossing point using …’ Her voice trailed off as she contemplated her collection of broken brass instruments. ‘A device. We searched – him by water, me by air.’

The others frowned at this.