‘Impossible. You see – I haven’t told her. I – I didn’t want to alarm her.’

Tartarus folded his arms across his chest.

‘So why are you here?’

‘To consult you. You’re the expert.’

Tartarus paused. He seemed to be considering the matter.

‘You must give me your word – on our sacred Doctor’s Oath – that you won’t poach my research.’

‘Damn your research! I want to save my daughter.’

‘Very well.’

Jerame followed the glimmer of Tartarus’s shabby white coat down interminable gloomy corridors until he stopped and ushered Jerame into an ill-lit chamber lined with shelves.

The sour stink of the room was overpowering; some vile stale chymical miasma that seemed to have pickled the dusty interior and stained the window pane.

‘There! A fine specimen. A unique specimen.’

Tartarus brought out a glass jar.

Jerame saw that it was a brain. A human brain, floating in a hideous discoloured liquid.

‘The only one of its kind. Look at the right hemisphere – overdeveloped, hm? If I lift the top section so that you can see better –’

‘Whose –?’ Jerame, experienced practitioner that he was, felt a sudden rising surge of nausea.

‘You can clearly see these extraordinary neural pathways –’

The pungent stench of the cloudy chymical vinegar was making Jerame’s stomach heave.

‘Ophil!’

‘The subject’s name was Serafine. I didn’t perform the dissection, you understand. That honour fell to my predecessor.’

‘How can you be sure she had the Accidie?’ The suffocating stink was sickening Jerame, filling his nostrils with its pungent odour of decay.

‘Read this entry in the Register here. “Serafine in an extreme manic state. She cannot abide a note of music to be sung or whistled within earshot. It sends her crazy. She also claims she can hear the music in others’ minds. All the time.” ‘

‘A kind of musical telepathy?’

‘A cacophony. A din. A chaos…’

Jerame nodded slowly.

She sits naked on the floor, her hands clutched over her ears, rocking to and fro, to and fro. Her pale face is twisted with a silent agony, her hair, unwashed, unbound, streams wildly about her shoulders, tarnished golden snakelocks. ‘Make it stop, Jerame,’ she whispers, ‘make it stop!’

‘… caused no doubt by this rapid degeneration of the neural pathways.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ Jerame struggled to make sense of the information. ‘That the musical gift is nothing but the result of some – physical defect in the brain? This – malformation?’ He tapped at the clouded jar with his finger.

‘Defect, malformation… what can we do but speculate? If it is a Lifhendil inheritance – what were they like, these Lifhendil? Did they practise some form of telepathy? Oh, I’ve many theories, Jerame. All hypothetical. This is the only evidence. Apart –’ and his eyes seemed to gleam again in the dusty room ‘– from your daughter Orial.’

‘You are not laying a finger on her! I will not have her used as part of your experiments, to prove some crackpot hypothesis –’