bar, framing an old mirror etched with the words Pandemerian Railroad Company.

Rachel walked amongst empty chairs and tables, the floorboards creaking under her boots. “Hello?” she called out. The room smelled of sawn wood, that bitter-fresh yet aged aroma of seasons past. She peered up the staircase rising at the rear of the room.

“Hello? Anybody up there?”

No answer.

The hairs on her neck tingled suddenly. She sensed a glimmer of movement at the edge of her vision, like a passing shadow, and wheeled round.

Nothing.

Her own reflection stared back from behind the scratches of the old mirror. The leather jerkin Cospinol's slaves had given her looked too bulky for her slender frame. Her hair appeared darker in this gloom, almost honey- coloured. She noted the hilt of her newly acquired Pandemerian sword protruding from its roughly woven scabbard. Unconsciously her hand had slipped down to grip the weapon.

A crack divided the mirror from top to bottom. It bisected her pale face, giving her mouth a crooked appearance. Had that fracture always been there? For some reason it unnerved her.

One of the two doors from the saloon brought her into a passage that offered a way out back leading to the well and the privy, but also to a small kitchen through a further door on the left. This room had a water tank and a pantry still stocked with tinned food, jars of preserves, and boxes of fresh vegetables. She returned to the saloon and opened the second door. This must have been the owner's office: a wardrobe, an overstuffed chair before a desk, papers crammed into cardboard file boxes, and a narrow camp bed set against the rear wall. A pendulum rocked back and forth beneath a clock on the wall. Just as she turned away, the clock gave two brassy chimes.

Rachel heard a footfall behind her and spun round to face the saloon once more.

Nobody there.

From her position here by the office door, it looked as if she possessed two distinctly separate reflections in the old mirror behind the bar. They stared back at her from either side of the fracture. The glass must have warped, for each image appeared to have a subtly different expression. The one on the left looked…

Crueller?

Rachel shook her gaze away. I must be going mad. First Rys, and now this. Had she really seen Rys's double appear in his own bastion moments before it fell? A growing number of recent strange events troubled her, lurking in the back of her mind.

She sighed. This creepy place had let her nerves take control of her imagination once more.

Nevertheless, the footfall had sounded real enough, and such a noise could easily have carried from the building's upper floor. To dismiss it too easily would be rash.

Slowly, Rachel walked up the stairs.

Four doors led from the upper landing: three open, one closed. Gripping the hilt of her sword, Rachel edged past the first open doorway. Musty furniture filled a small bedroom: a bed, chest of drawers, rug, small stove, and grey lace curtains backed by fog.

The second room was similarly furnished.

Then she came to the closed door. “I'm not going to hurt you,” she announced. “I just need some directions.” She waited and then tried the doorknob.

A slender young woman in a floral dress burst out of the doorway immediately to Rachel's left and flung herself at the assassin, screaming like a witch loosed from the pyre. She hefted an axe in her raised fist. Her staring eyes and hollow, painted cheeks formed a mask of utter terror. She swung wildly, so completely wide of Rachel's shoulder that the assassin barely had to move an inch to let her attacker simply bull past. And then the woman was sobbing, visibly shaking, and turning on the landing to deliver a second blow.

Rachel could see instantly that this opponent was no warrior. “Wait!” she yelled, and held out her hand mere inches in front of the other woman's face. “What do you think you're doing?” she demanded. “You almost hurt me.”

The slim woman halted, uncertain, her axe still quivering. Her lips seemed as thin as a red wire in that powdered white face. Sweat stained her dress under the armpits and across her chest. Strands of orange hair were spilling out of the loop of ribbon she'd used to restrain them, yet underneath the hideous makeup she might have been attractive. She looked at Rachel with a mixture of fear and desperation-and perhaps just a shade of hope.

“Put that down,” Rachel said.

The other woman immediately lowered the axe. “Abner made me do it,” she said. “It was his idea. He said since I was younger than him I'd be the best one to frighten you off. I never meant to hit you. Abner said I should…” She stopped herself and gave a small wince. “But I couldn't do that anyway. We were just trying to scare you away.” Her throat bobbed. She glanced down at the axe on the floor. “Please don't kill us. There are four hundred copper marks hidden in the well. You can have them all.”

“Where is Abner? Is he your husband?”

The woman's gaze darted momentarily past Rachel to the room she'd just come storming out of, before returning to the assassin. “My husband? Yes. He ran out back when the fog and the golem came. He'll be hiding in the woods somewhere. He didn't mean you no harm.”

Rachel had turned so that her back was now against the landing wall. She was not surprised to spy movement to one side, a figure beyond the open doorway through which her unlikely attacker had just come.

A stout man wearing scruffy green breeches and a white shirt stood in the doorway. Abner was twice the size of his wife. His cynical little eyes fixed on Rachel as he aimed a musket at her face.

He said, “She's not getting my money.”

Then he pulled the trigger.

John Anchor had carried the weight of the sea on his back before and therefore he understood pressure, but in this strange realm the fluid was becoming thinner and more transparent as he descended. He felt like he was adrift in a red sky. Hundreds of motes of light had been drawn to him, and the whole constellation sparkled and danced all around like pieces of living aether; these were souls trapped in the portal.

Anchor reached out again and again, grabbing fistfuls of cord as he pulled himself even deeper, Cospinol's great ship ploughing through the waters above him.

All the while he kept his eyes on the depths, watching out for the entity that Alice Harper had detected on her Mesmerist device.

Soon he began to perceive objects in the waters around him: physical things like Anchor himself that must surely have fallen down from earth, and other, weirder detritus that looked like it belonged below in the Maze. An oak tree floated several yards to his left, complete with roots, its twigs still bearing acorns. Three steel helmets hung suspended in the waters as though they had come together to confer. In the far gloom Anchor spotted an iron vessel, a small Pandemerian steamer of some kind. He could just make out its funnel and bridge.

And everywhere there were corpses of both men and beasts: hundreds of the Northmen who had fallen at Larnaig; a score of dead horses like huge pale foetuses suspended in amnion; jackals and hunting dogs and countless scraps of other unidentifiable remains.

The Mesmerist refuse was even stranger: different-sized spheres composed of human bones, two figures on long black stilts-quite dead-clusters of vicious metal shapes, and dozens of vaguely humanoid warriors and flayed red men. But there was also debris that Anchor suspected had never seen the sun: broken chunks of carved black stone and arches, and entire sections of churches or temples. The lights seemed attracted to these things and looped around them in constantly slow orbits.

Opening the portal, Anchor realized, had caused a cataclysm not just on earth but also in Hell. Now the detritus from opposing universes mingled here in the limbo between them.

And then he saw something moving through the debris to his right-a long sleek shadow with a pointed head and a crescent tail. It disappeared behind a section of temple wall.

A shark?

Anchor paused his descent. Surely it was impossible for any normal living creature to survive down here. The tethered man and his master, however, had consumed enough souls over the aeons to bend the very substance of nature to their wills. Everyone else aboard the skyship, with the sole exception of Carnival, had been dead for

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