He caught her gaze on the bottle, and his very blue eyes twinkled a little madly, and he said with greater calm: “It’s thistle shrub, child. I could not get drunk on it if I tried. And how I have tried.”

Ortus said, “You speak in riddles, old man.”

“Then let me speak plainly,” said Teacher. “You worship a monster in a box and play at being the masters of its tomb. Now we have a monster in a box, and it has become obvious that it means to master us all. Canaan House has never changed its colour, nor its shape, nor with the seasons. I should know; we measured summer to winter, temperature and precipitation and the acidity of the very sea beneath us, and it never hailed, and it never snowed, and we certainly never saw fimbriae hanging from the rafters. Let me prophesy in my old age: the Sleeper is getting up the strength to wake completely, and colonize what it finds. I fear! God! How I fear!”

Abigail said, “Teacher, please come and take up residence with us. We have beds—we keep watches,” but he cried out: “And miss out on the chance to die? I’ve been wandering these halls at three o’clock in the morning, saying at the top of my voice, ‘It would be terrible to be shot,’ and the Sleeper still does not come … It is dreadful to be shown a monster’s pity.”

He pivoted abruptly and took another long suck at the bottle. “Your swords will not rend its armour,” he said, with his back turned to them. “Its weapons will ruin your flesh. It will not stop until it has subsumed its quarry. And it would only acknowledge the blade without … all we have are the blades within. It has seen them and made them dull. There is no hero left among us … and I say, hooray!”

Teacher, in a mad sprightly dash, clicked his heels together with the ardour and energy of a man a quarter of his age. “Hooray!” he said again. “Into the River with us, boys! Fifty can school like fishes!”

And he threw his bottle violently at the nearest section of tube, out in the corridor. Harrowhark watched as the shiny red organ gave out a wet, squishing blarp; the bottle bounced off it dismally, and as Abigail and Ortus drew close beside her, it rolled sadly beneath another fold of wet, curtaining pink. Some of the bitter fluid within spilt out onto the battered wooden floor. Within seconds, even the ends of that alcohol began to flake into shards of ice.

“It’s coming for you, Reverend Daughter!” said Teacher. “Oh, it’s coming for you—and once it’s got you, once that rock’s rolled away, once that tomb’s levered open, the Emperor of the Nine Houses will never know peace ever again! The King is dead! Long live the King!”