Cutter did not know if he was seeing hills or insects flying close to his eye: that could not be, he knew, but the impossibility of focus confounded him. Was that a forest so far off? That went for many miles? Or was it not a forest but a tar pit? Or now perhaps not a tar pit but a sea of bones or a grid, a wall of tessellated carbon or scabmatter the size of a city.

He could not make it out. He saw a mountain and the mountain was a new shape, and the snow on its top was a colour snow should not be and was not snow but something alive and tenebrotropic. The distant stuff extended cilia that must be the size of trees, toward oncoming darkness. Lights in the sky, stars, then birds, moons, two or three moons that were the bellies of acre-wide lightning bugs and then were gone.

"I can’t do the sense of it." Qurabin’s voice was terrible. "There are some things the Moment of the Hidden and the Lost doesn’t know, or’s scared to say."

The Torquescape was insinuatory, and fervent, and full of presences, animalized rock that hunted as granite must of course hunt and spliced impossibilities. They had all heard the stories: the cockroach tree, the chimerae of goat and ghost, reptilian insects, treeish things, trees themselves become holes in time. There was more than Cutter could bear. His eyes and mind kept trying, kept straining to contain, encompass. "How could they do this? Travel through this?"

"Not through," Judah said. "They didn’t. Keep remembering that. They went just round the outside. Close enough to scare."

"Close enough to die," Cutter said, and Judah inclined his head.

"What things live here?" Cutter said.

"Impossible to list," Judah said. "Each is its own thing. There are some I suppose-there are shunn, there are inchmen in the outskirts…"

"Where we’ll be."

"Where we’ll be."

They would be three weeks, perhaps, in the edges of the cacotopic zone. Three weeks pushing as close as they dared into the viral landscape. There must have been those who had passed through it before, in the half-millennium since it appeared in a spurt of pathological parturition. Cutter knew the stories of Cally the winged man; he had heard rumours of adventures in the stain.

"There must be another way," he said. But no, they said there was not.