The passage out was as mad as the passage in; Ariosto folded his wings and dropped through the tall gate, and even though the gate was a hundred paces wide, it seemed to reach for them like a leering mouth, and then they were out in the warm, moist darkness with the sea, the moons, and the lurking feeling of fear.

He was over the greens instantly. They were moving quickly, looking over their right shoulders.

Lower, Gabriel said, readying one of Morgon’s javelins from the bucket by his hip.

He came out of the darkness and Sauce’s head turned.

“Ride for it!” he roared. They were closer to the new gate than the old one, and he gestured and was past.

The column of soldiers opened out to a gallop as he climbed, heading out over the sea and into the darkness. All the phosphorescent patches were together now, a galaxy of constellations dancing together, a thousand paces off the causeway. Something was down there, and it was close.

He turned over the wheeling patches of sickly green brilliance. To his left, Sauce seemed to race over the moonlit sea, and the moon dazzled on her armour as if she was, personally, the tip of a moonlit spear.

The water began to move.

Don’t try and face it, Morgon said.

This from you?

It’s the size of a dragon, or larger, in the aethereal.

Right. Gabriel did not drop the charged javelin. He turned away, out over the sea. The thing was rising; it was the size of Harndon. Or so it seemed in the unseelie moonlight.

As fast as you can, he said.

Like you needed to tell me, brother.

Gabriel felt the shift in speed, the force of the wind against his body, and he crouched. They went on . . .

Why are we going this way? Ariosto asked.

So that it doesn’t look at Sauce, Gabriel said. Farther.

Their speed was formidable; even in leather and fur and armour, Gabriel’s sense of their passage was deep and cold. He could no longer see either of the gate towers in the real, and both of them were hundreds of paces high, and white.

Hungry, Ariosto said.

Oh dear, Gabriel thought. We need to turn.

Sure. Where are we going now? Hungry.

Gabriel thought through the fatigue and the vague fear and the growing panic. It was dark; the moons were in the wrong place, and the phosphorescence was everywhere; there were patches like eyes as far as he could see, a dazzle of them under the darkness where there were no stars, like false reflections, like . . .

Where to, boss?

In the real, it was all one seamless image—flat water speckled with phosphorescent images as far as his eyes could see.

They banked.

Morgon?

Silence.