THE ROOMS OF CANAAN HOUSE were thick and silent with falling snow: red with new blood, and brown or black with old. Ductile, organic tubes and lymphatic nodes pulsed pinkly everywhere: in the corners, bubbling up along the doorframes and the pillars. Outside the windows, stretched webs of organ had wrapped themselves around the tower like nets of sticky venous spiderweb. They choked the stone. They burst through windows, and every so often they would tremble uncertainly and erupt in floods of bloody, foamy water.

That was wretched; but Harrowhark was more interested in the strange garbage littering the snow and the rotting furniture and the underfloor squish of tube and fossa. Pipettes, again; broken glass-fronted containers filled with dark fluid, mysterious lumps floating suspended within; and shattered skeletons, lying in the slithering mass of tubes or on mountains of what looked to be capsules or pills. At first her brain skimmed over the skeletons—it was Canaan House, ergo, there were skeletons—but then the familiarity dawned on her: some of the skeletons were not wearing First House sashes or raiment, but bearing Drearburh tools.

“Keep moving,” said Magnus Quinn, with the friendly and unyielding iron of a parent taking a small child to the bathroom. “No time to take in the scenery.”

She fell in step again and said, “Where is this room?”

Abigail said, “Close by. The others will be there already, if all’s gone according to plan—take my hand; we’re heading outside.”

The cold hit like a slap in the mouth. The snow was falling in driving, vision-obscuring sheets, smarting the skin, with a smell that made them all retch. The Fifth led her along a rope attached to an outside terrace—the obscuring fog could not disguise the roar of the sea below, nor the fact that most of the terrace had gone. Then down again, into a corridor so choked with gurgling pink tubes that they brushed Harrowhark as she followed close at heel, to descend a flight of stairs.

This was familiar territory. A vestibule, dark and claustrophobic. Malfunctioning lights overhead, fizzing madly. At the bottom of the stairs, glass doors showed the space where the pool had once been—filled now with bloody water, dark, bobbing shapes within. River water. Abigail turned to a tapestry that had been pinned up over one wall, and shouldering it aside revealed a cramped entryway to a hall that Harrowhark knew well. She said, “Surely not.”

“It’s not locked,” said Magnus. “And it’s been left alone—no blood rains, nothing jiggly.”