‘Certainly. So did Mr Black. Even Mother came out of a book, though that was so long ago, I doubt even Geryon can remember. You and Geryon are the only real humans here.’ Ashes hesitated. ‘Oh. And Emma, I suppose.’

‘Why does Mr Black work for Geryon? He doesn’t seem to like doing what he’s told.’ The idea of the big furnace-keeper drawing a salary suddenly seemed ludicrous. He never leaves the house, so how could he spend it?

Ashes gave an irritated flick of his tail. ‘A Reader can draw up a sort of magical contract with his servants. As long as he can get the creature to agree to it, they’re both bound by the terms until something breaks the magic. Mr Black might not be happy about his job, but there’s nothing he can do about it, unless—’

Alice stopped and held up a hand as the seeker gave a tug on its leash. ‘I think it’s found something.’

The leech-like thing was indeed straining towards a particular shelf, a cheap, cracked wooden one groaning under a mountain of old paperbacks. Alice didn’t have any way of telling which book the seeker was pointing her towards, so she began the long and tedious process of holding each one up for the creature’s inspection.

It was twenty minutes before she found the right book, a thick, half-rotten volume with a title she didn’t understand in what looked like Dutch. When she held it up, the seeker pressed its sticky body right against the cover, so she tied the creature up and started to page through. The text was incomprehensible to her, and some of the tissue-paper-thin pages fell to pieces when she touched them. It felt like a thoroughly pointless exercise, and she had almost concluded she was doing it wrong, somehow, when she found what she was looking for.

Towards the back of the book, one half-torn page bore a solid block of text that looked different from the rest. It was printed the same, and the language was still incomprehensible, but when her eye fell on it Alice had a sudden feeling of clarity, as though the meaning of what was written was so apparent that it shone forth like a beacon through the faded ink and foreign words. She couldn’t have explained what that meaning was, but it felt as obvious as the nose on her face, as though it had skipped her eyes entirely and sunk directly into her brain.