He moved slowly, hugging the shadows, flinching every time a metal step or platform panel creaked under him. The constant movement and whirring of the huge Loom’s gears around him kept making him start. He jumped at every shifting machine part, imagining each motion to be the movement of some Cognitae henchman stalking him.

Finally, he climbed down through the huge, wrought-iron girder frame that supported the weight of the Loom. The frame was as substantial as a major road bridge, and its fabric was built into the walls of the tower. Further high-tension steel cables were cross-anchored around the frame to support the immense weight.

Looking down from a catwalk that ran under the heavy frame, Drusher saw a platform built out from the tower wall in the void beneath. It was large, ragged and uneven, a patchwork of steel plates and flakboarding. It looked like part of the hull-skin of an old ship that had been peeled away and repurposed as flooring. Where it extended out over the void, it sagged and became more frayed, its feathered edge dangling above the darkness below.

Below it, the tower walls continued down into the dark still further, but Drusher could see a glint in the blackness that suggested the very base of the tower was filled with promethium, or some other dark, viscous fluid. Beneath the level of the great iron frame, everything was slightly sheened with oil, every surface tacky with a fine, brown stain. The Loom had run, so Jaff had said, for centuries. Precision engineering required lubricant to keep it moving smoothly. Drusher imagined the constant tending and attention the Loom above him had received over the years, the regular application of lubricant and grease to the gears and cogs. Movement and gravity combined to gently remove the lubricant from the Great Machine, and this is where the residue ended up, draining into a sump in the tower’s base, a deep well of pooling waste oil.

There was a row of cages on the ragged platform. They looked like the metal box cage that had contained Sark: six cages, placed against the tower wall. Nearby was a small laboratory station, an old auto-medicae unit and some metal storage bins. The whole area was gloomy, lit only by dozens of fat candles ranged around the platform and the work area. It looked uncomfortably like a shrine, like a place of unwholesome ritual.

By the flickering yellow light of the candles, Drusher could see that two of the cages were occupied. He moved around for a better look. A rough metal staircase ran down from the catwalk to the edge of the platform. The hunched figure in one of the cages was Germaine Macks. A crumpled body lay in the cage beside her. The floors of the other cages were littered with blackened human bones.