It was a contortion of twisting silver, like the aurora borealis. It was a river of silver, and Sefton instantly understood that this was the same silver as at the Ripper crime scenes, the same silver that was covering him. It shone. The silver was dotted with tiny golden lights, and now Sefton looked closer he could see that they were threads, golden traceries that were spun all through the silver, as they were through the remains of the bouncer. The whole ribbon flexed in silence. He could feel an enormous coldness radiating from it. If he and Costain fell, they would fall into it, and the cold alone would be enough to destroy them. He glanced up at Costain. ‘Can you see…?’

‘Yeah.’ His voice held as much wonder as Sefton had ever heard from Costain.

Sefton sniffed. A smell was rising from the river of silver. It was very subtle. You’d need that much of this stuff together in order for the smell to register at all. It reminded him of … something very old, something ungraspable, always just out of reach, as one’s own earliest experiences were out of reach. It was immensely beautiful, epic, touching him in ways familiar and grand that made him immediately love it. He wondered if Costain felt the same way about what he was seeing. You could just as easily fear this thing. It was outside their time and space, maybe in an ‘outer borough’ like the London of Brutus that he’d visited had been. It was … what was underneath everything, where the power was, the source, the great river. The void it was in … He wondered if this is what they would have seen if, when they’d been in the tunnels Losley had made between all her different houses, they’d knocked a hole in the wall. This void was what everything was sitting in, the bigger cosmos, again outside normal time and space.

Beside his foot, a bit of floor detached itself and fell away into that darkness.

Costain suddenly grabbed him and wrenched him to his feet, dragging him back from the brink.

Sefton gasped. He’d been … kind of transfixed by this thing. He made himself wake up and looked to the room again. The dirty great hole in the middle of the floor had slowly started to increase in size, the floor crumbling away into it on the other side too, the paths across the middle getting thinner by the second. Quill and Ross were stepping back from their edge.

‘What happened to the other Keel brother?’ Costain yelled to them.

‘Escaped,’ called Quill, moving away as another bit of floor dropped away. ‘You two get over here! Now!’