Iris is sobbing, cringing away from me as far as the ropes will let her. She can't get very far, though: she's weighed down by the body of the dead Spetsnaz trooper, a black ring-binder lying on the floor beside him.

As for Alexei, he's dead: eaten by the thing the cultists tried to make of me. Their sacrifice bit a huge and vital chunk out of my soul; after the power of my death-magic ran down, I was all but inert until Alexei unintentionally filled up the hole. I don't think he intended to do that. I didn't intend to do that, certainly: I'm no necromancer. But when they've performed the ritual of binding upon you, trying to turn you into a vessel for the Eater of Souls . . .

You need to eat.

Epilogue
On the beach

THE MIND'S EYE HAS A FAST - FORWARD BUTTON. IT'S FUNNY: most of the time we don't think about it in those terms; but when you're trying to write down a sequence of experiences, to take a series of unfortunate events and turn them into a coherent story, the mind's eye takes on some of the characteristics of an old-fashioned videotape recorder: balky, prone to drop-outs and loss, cumbersome and wonky and breakable.

So call me a camera and stick a battery in my ear.

FIRST, PANIN GOT AWAY.

Here's what I imagine happened, around the time I was screaming my lungs out on a bed of nightmares:

In the back of a shiny black BMW speeding towards Woking—and thence to the motorway south to Dover and the Channel Tunnel—an old man opens his eyes and takes a deep breath. "That was altogether too close for comfort," he says aloud.

Dmitry glances at him in the rearview mirror. "With respect, sir . . . I agree." His knuckles are white where they grasp the steering wheel, and he is racking up fines from the average-speed cameras at an almost surreal rate. "The men ..."

Panin closes his eyes again. "Dead. Or they'll exfiltrate. Vassily in the embassy can see to their needs. I am going home to explain this fiasco." He is silent for nearly a minute. "We nearly had it all: a transcript of the Sternberg Fragment, Fuller's memorandum on binding the Eater of Souls."

"With respect, sir, cultists are always unreliable proxies. And we did get the schemata for the violin, and we weakened the British ..."

Panin glares at Dmitry: "Weakening the British is not the goal of the great game! Survival is the goal. We are intelligent men, not panicking rats biting each other as they struggle to escape the sinking ship. They are the enemies of our enemy, never forget that. It is the cultists' error, to imagine themselves beset by foes they can never defeat."

"Like back there?" asks Dmitry.

Panin doesn't answer. They drive the rest of the way to the Channel in silence.

SECOND, HERE'S WHAT I KNOW HAPPENED: