In fact, Thorn was busy knotting and splicing around the black hole that stood somewhere in his mind. The cascade of thoughts by which he’d reached certain conclusions was hard to reconstruct, but he knew he’d taken some of Ghause’s memories in his unsuccessful attempt to subsume her. One of them had triggered something.

The black hole in his mind was the same size and shape as the black eggs he carried. It had been put there at the same time, by the same hand.

For the same reason.

He was, himself, incubating something. He had an excellent idea of exactly what that was.

He had begun to take the steps required to deceive his master, and perhaps—to survive.

And more.

“One of your plans miscarried?” Thorn asked gravely.

“I cannot be everywhere,” Ash hissed. “And the bitch Queen and her servants were there before me.” The jesters—shaped like misshapen children with fat bodies and long, thin limbs—both giggled. And spat.

“Can you not?” Thorn asked, trying to mask his interest. He was weaving a net of the insubstantial stuff in which the mind built the palace, and he was endeavouring to use it to build a deception, so that Ash would see only what he expected.

Ser Hartmut grunted. “To whom are you speaking, Sorcerer?” he asked.

Thorn pointed a stony finger. “Do you not see two capering children, dressed in motley?” he asked.

Ser Hartmut shook his head. “I see many terrible things,” he said. “But no jesters.”

Thorn considered this.

Ash said, “No, even I cannot be everywhere. And you must have learned by now how opaque everything becomes—like muddy water—when too many fingers stir it.”

Thorn considered this statement, too. In his head, his will was madly building, throwing up beaver dams of obfuscation behind thickets of deception between his thinking space and the area around the blackness.

“It doesn’t matter much,” Ash said. “I’ve out-witted her anyway, and she’s left with her concentration on the wrong moment and the wrong avatar. So the loss of a few pawns—even my favourites—is no great loss.”

Thorn thought that if the mad jesting twins were, themselves, people, then in fact, Ash was betraying fury, humiliation and loss.

“Be that as it may,” the darkness said. “It’s time to reveal a little more of our hand and limit the damage. Have you seen this?” Ash asked, and disclosed a nested set of workings, a box within a box within a box.

The whole was so labyrinthine that Thorn’s head reeled.

“I had no idea,” he said. “That life was so small.”

“Small, and wild, all the way down to the smallest,” Ash cackled. “And sometimes the manipulation of the smallest is of the greatest moment. On to Dorling, Journeyman!”