Drusher wandered over to the bookshelves. He ran his finger along the old, decaying spines. There were a lot of books of natural history. Esic Fargul had liked his ornithology. Drusher saw old treatises on migration and nesting patterns, guides to birdsong, feeding grounds. He saw a slim volume at the end of the shelf called Folk Verse of the Karanine Passes and took it down. Damp had got to it. It was very much the worse for wear.

‘There’s nothing in that, sir,’ said Jaff, not even looking up.

Drusher frowned at her dubiously.

‘She knows, magos,’ said Voriet. ‘Trust me on that.’

Drusher opened the old book anyway. The pages, rotted away, flaked out in a puff of damp fibres, unintelligible.

‘Literally nothing, in this case,’ he said. Macks sniggered.

Drusher looked at the book for a moment longer, the empty, discoloured cover, the mulch of paper fibres clinging to the binding. Something that had been but was no longer.

Valentin Drusher’s worst enemy was his own imagination. It was a fact he had recognised and accepted many times in the past.

‘What if…’ he began.

‘Valentin?’

‘Macks, what if the deputy was right?’ he said.

‘Meaning what?’ asked Macks, coming over.

‘That this Keshtre place only partly shares our physical reality? That it’s not… not there all the time? Just like the scary bedtime stories say?’

Macks put her hands on her hips and gave him a withering look.

‘I know,’ he smiled. ‘The version of me that got here this morning would have looked at me exactly the same way. But… Germaine, the things I’ve seen today. The impossibilities… I have always been able to codify the living world, according to its rules and its laws and its constants. I look for that. My work is about that. It’s reassuring. It’s comforting when things make sense. But now I’m not sure of anything. I think anything is possible. The rules of sense be damned.’

Ten

TEN

Restless

The storm continued into the small hours. After midnight, the thunder diminished into a background grumble, but the downpour increased, beating at the walls and roof like tympani. It felt as though the whole mountainside would wash away in a deluge of mud and take Helter Fortress with it.

‘I’m going to do a sweep,’ said Macks. In truth, she needed to clear her head. She was beginning to fall asleep over the charts. A circuit would clear her drowsiness.

Voriet and Jaff barely looked up from their work to acknowledge her comment. Drusher had already retired – to his bed, Macks presumed. She buckled on her uniform jacket, picked up her riotgun and a plastek slicker, and left the library.