Then, in the blink of an eye, they were gone and the room was silent.

The candles had all been extinguished. Strange rolled on to his back, but for some moments he could do nothing but stare into the Darkness. “Mr Norrell?” he said at last.

No one answered.

In the pitch-black darkness he got to his feet. He succeeded in finding one of the library desks and felt about until his hand met with an upturned candle. He took his tinderbox from his pocket and lit it.

Raising it above his head, he saw that the room was in the last extremes of chaos and disorder. Not a book remained upon a shelf. Tables and library steps had been overturned. Several fine chairs had been reduced to firewood. A thick drift of raven feathers covered everything, as if a black snow had fallen.

Norrell was half-lying, half-sitting on the floor, his back against a desk. His eyes were open, but blank-looking. Strange passed the candle before his face. “Mr Norrell?” he said again.

In a dazed whisper, Norrell said, “I believe we may assume that we have his attention.”

“I believe you are right, sir. Do you know what happened?”

Still in a whisper Norrell said, “The books all turned into ravens. I had my eye upon Hugh Pontifex’s The Fountain of the Heart and I saw it change. He used it often, you know – that chaos of black birds. I have been reading about it since I was a boy. That I should live to see it, Mr Strange! That I should live to see it! It has a name in the Sidhe language, the language of his childhood, but the name is lost.”⁵ He suddenly seized Strange’s hand. “Are the books safe?”

Strange picked up one from the floor. He shook the raven feathers off it and glanced at the title: Seven Doors and Forty-two Keys by Piers Russinol. He opened it and began to read at random. “… and there you will find a strange country like a chessboard, where alternates barren rock with fruitful orchards, wastes of thorns with fields of bearded corn, water meadows with deserts. And in this country, the god of magicians, Thrice-Great Hermes, has set a guard upon every gate and every bridge: in one place a ram, in another place serpent … Does that sound right?” he asked doubtfully.

Mr Norrell nodded. He took out his pocket handkerchief and dabbed the blood from his face with it.

The two magicians sat upon the floor amid the books and feathers, and for a little while they said nothing at all. The world had shrunk to the breadth of a candle’s light.

Finally, Strange said, “How near to us must he be in order to do magic like that?”

“John Uskglass? For aught I know he can do magic like that from a hundred worlds away – from the heart of Hell.”

“Still it is worth trying to find out, is it not?”