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I nodded.

'Well, I was listening to the other end of it. There's a large township a couple of hundred clicks away...'

'Clicks?'

'Kilometres. A bit over a hundred miles. Anyway, I was scouting around a big temple-type building, and heard something big inside opening hailing frequencies. The town itself was occupied by the rakshassi.'

'Occupied? You mean, they were living there?'

'Yeah. Worshipping at the temple, too.'

'Worshipping what?'

'I don't know, but it wasn't Sonic the Hedgehog.'

She took pleasure in watching the stunned expression blossom on my face.

Foolishly, perhaps, I had made certain assumptions about the nature of the new reality in which I had found myself. Now, one by one, those assumptions were being overturned. If only Holmes were there to make things clear for me.

'They could have taken him anywhere,' I whispered to myself, disheartened.

'Not quite,' Ace said. 'The plants here kip during the night, and they get a bit ratty if something disturbs them. If we're lucky, we can tell which way the kidnappers went by checking how quickly the plants react to us.'

'How do we do that?' I asked stupidly.

'Stick your finger out and see how long it takes them to bite it.'

Ace watched on, a sardonic smile upon her face, as I hesitantly knelt and tempted the mosses with my outstretched digit. It quickly became apparent that those lying towards the distant mountains responded significantly faster than those in any other direction. So quick were they that they almost ripped my nail out with their thorny little mouths.

'Well,' she said, 'that settles it.'

'Do you think they're poisonous?'

'I wouldn't have thought so. They're probably more at risk biting you than you are being bitten.'

'Somehow that fails to reassure me.'

'It wasn't meant to.'

We set out shortly after that.

The walk to the lower slopes of the nearest mountain took us some hours.

Every few minutes I would check the plants in the vicinity to ensure that we were heading in the right direction, but our course was as straight as a die.

It was hard to tell when we actually began to climb the mountain slopes: it was only after I complained to Ace that I was tiring, and she agreed that the going suddenly seemed to have become hard, that we realized we had been walking uphill for some little time. We rested for a few moments, and I took the opportunity to appreciate the view in the manner of a tourist, rather than a tired doctor.

The slope fell away from us, blending gradually into the purple plain below.

I could see Maupertuis's quondam encampment and, through the haze of distance, men in blue and silver uniforms in close combat with fivelegged Ry'lehans. Further than that, the ground rose up to form more mountain ranges whose tops were lost to the ice. Ry'leh seemed to be a planet composed of peakless mountains. From where we stood I could see along three major valleys. It was like standing in Cheddar Gorge back on Earth, and looking between the stalactites and stalagmites, but on a far vaster scale. What was God thinking of when he created this place?

We seemed to have risen above what, on Earth, I would have termed the tree-line. The vegetation had died away, but we had been moving in a straight line for so long that we saw little point in altering our course.

We were closer to the sky now, and I could see features upon it: patches of shadow, deep gouges and little black specks that seemed to move.

'Animals,' said Ace when I pointed them out to her. 'Good to eat, too. I shoot them down with a bow and arrow when I get the chance. They taste of chocolate.'

'But how can . . .?'

'They're like big balloons full of some gas that's lighter than air. They float up against the ice.'

'I see. So how do they move around?'

She looked at me as if I was slow-witted.

'Skates,' she said succinctly.

We moved on. The going was getting rougher now: we were having to use our hands, more often than not, to pull ourselves along. Sometimes, when I looked up, the