Lee felt a shock of recognition as she looked from those lights to the snow, to the clouds, to the frozen horizon. Her breath was pluming, the cold burning the exposed skin about her eyes. It was all patterns. It was all one pattern. She almost saw it, just for an instant. The world around her was frozen dead, yet animate. Even the weather was part of a vast and sentient system.

Then she lost the sense of it, left only with an overpowering sense of awe.

Stig was already moving, not looking back to see if his fragile human wards were following. He trekked out into the endless antarctic waste, without even the courtesy of an “I may be some time.”

“This is London too, is it?” Lee demanded.

“London in high summer!” Mal called back, muffled by two layers of scarf. “I was here once before.”

“Me too, remember. Almost killed me.”

They hurried after Stig, and Lee wondered whether this was it, a death march to a parallel world’s gulag across this killing wasteland. Her feet were already numb as they marched to a destination invisible beyond the horizon.

Her next step was uphill.

She stopped, but that was fine because Stig had stopped too, standing there like Moses parting the sea. Except it was not the landscape ahead which moved, but the ground beneath their feet. Lee felt the temperature rise abruptly, a wash of mere cool where before there had been sub-zero cold. From deep within the ice came a long, tormented groan, and she and Mal clung together as the world lurched, shuddered and lifted them all up.

“What the hell?” she demanded. A tower was growing beneath them, the ice flowing like liquid to force it upwards, one storey, five storeys, higher and higher. Not straight up, either, but rushing forwards, rising at a steep angle—like a building-sized serpent striking. All round them the icy plain was fracturing and cracking. Again she almost grasped the pattern, like code written across the landscape in letters large enough to be seen from space.

“The masters of this place”—Stig had to raise his voice over the suddenly rushing wind—“are very powerful, very wise. And dead, very dead a long time. This world is their corpse, and they inhabit it still.”

But Lee was staring down at the ice as it surged forwards—on, Donner; on, Blitzen!—hurling them across the landscape and, simultaneously, high into the sky.

“But why are they doing this?” she asked, not that she was complaining—it was perhaps the most magnificent thing she had ever experienced—but still…

“We travel from branch to branch, but it is easiest if we match place and velocity!” Stig told her. “Now, you are ready.” Not a question but a statement.

“Velocity?” she said. “Wait, where are we—?”

The door in the air opened for them so suddenly it cut the question in two.

Interlude: The Hedonists