‘You started breathing funny again,’ Nayl noted. He wasn’t looking at Drusher. He was prowling along the hallway, hunched, weapon aimed ready to fire. Drusher wondered why Nayl had chosen to go right instead of left. Both directions looked identical: the slender hallway advancing away as far as he could see.

‘Magos?’ Nayl prompted.

‘Yes,’ said Drusher. ‘I’m fine.’

He wanted to ask about the window. He wanted to ask Nayl about what he had seen through it. But it clearly wasn’t the time.

Nayl had looked through the window too. He had made no comment, as if the view had been what he had expected to see, or as if he’d seen it before. Drusher doubted both options. During their brief acquaintance, Drusher had come to know Nayl as a man who rarely registered any kind of reaction.

There was another door a few metres down on the right. Like the first, it was made of some kind of dense, pale wood, polished until it gleamed. The handle was silver.

‘Stay with me,’ said Nayl.

‘Yes,’ said Drusher.

‘First priority is to find the others,’ said Nayl. ‘I think they’ll be close. I think our positions will be relative to the ones we were in when we…’

He paused, thinking of the right word. Drusher was guessing ‘left’.

‘…were still in the woods,’ Nayl finished.

‘And if they aren’t?’ he asked.

‘Then I’ve got even less to go on than I hoped,’ said Nayl.

He reached the door. He listened at it for a moment, then turned the handle and let it swing open with a prod of his toe. He stepped in.

Drusher followed.

The room was identical to the one they had first found themselves in. A light Drusher now knew was not the sun, shone through stained glass-lancets. There was no cot, just four wooden chairs, arranged in a square with their backs together. There were marks made in blue chalk around the feet of the chairs, meaningless scribbles that were somehow unpleasant to look at.

Drusher found himself staring at them. One of the chairs was slightly out of alignment with the others and, driven by an obsessive compulsive urge, he reached out to straighten it.

Nayl’s big hand clamped around his wrist.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ he said firmly. ‘No matter how much you want to.’

‘Yes,’ said Drusher clearly. He had no idea why he’d felt so compelled.

He glanced fitfully at the stained-glass windows. Like the ones in the previous room, their pattern appeared random, purely decorative. Surely the point of stained glass was to make a picture? The coloured panes were used to assemble an image: a saint, perhaps, or something symbolic. This was just a patchwork of green and red and gold shapes, fixed together with leading.

Except it wasn’t. He stared. There were recognisable forms there. Figures. Elongated figures, swaying, with long intertwined limbs that–