He’d done that. He’d had the offhand thought that the cold of the silver he’d thrown would somehow counteract the heat of what Keel was about to throw. But he’d been wrong. He’d been horribly, horribly wrong. What if the silver goo was like … fuel? Something you could store to make the power of London work if you didn’t want to keep on making hand gestures, something that could keep things in place without continual work. The remains of the bouncer, which he was now covered with, were full of it. Presumably the killer they were looking for ran on it, was leaking it.

If that was the case, then Barry Keel had used one of his gestures to call up destructive fire into his hand, and Sefton had literally thrown petrol onto it. The resulting explosion, which had killed Keel, had made the bouncer combust too. Sefton could only hope that, since it had been made of something other than flesh, it couldn’t actually be called a person, that he wasn’t responsible for two deaths tonight.

That felt too big to cope with right now. He put it aside and let himself deal instead with his current situation.

He was standing on the edge of an abyss. The floor of the bar had largely vanished. All that remained of it, apart from the corner where they stood, were … scraps … not the jutting planks and disintegrating concrete you might expect, but ragged edges of wood, sticking out into space from the walls. A couple of narrow ragged strips of carpet still lay, impossibly, across the gap. It was like the aftermath not of a real-world explosion, but of something that had happened in a video game. Sefton supposed that this floor of the bar hadn’t been made of real-world materials any more than the bouncer had been, that they’d disintegrated for the same reason. What Sefton assumed had been lower floors were gone completely. He could only imagine that the gatekeeper he’d seen walking calmly down into them had … somehow taken them away with him. Those thoughts was pushed immediately from his mind by what he saw down there in the void.

What had been revealed beneath it all was wondrous, horrifying, something of passion, not some part of a game designer’s pixelated imagination.

He was looking into a pit of absolute darkness, at the bottom of which … Sefton’s eyes struggled to understand it. Even with the Sight, it was difficult. He dropped to his knees, half to take a closer look, half in awe. He was aware that, beside him, Costain was looking downwards too.