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‘I fear it’s not my place to say. As I believe I mentioned, I may only report. It’s not within my functional parameters to understand the operating system.’

‘What?’

‘Here it comes,’ said the mouth, quite calmly. And everything went black.

3

Thought About Saving the World,

Couldn’t Be Bothered

They were coming out of the walls, out of the floors, out of every nook or cranny that seemed dark and unimportant enough to spawn them. Fingers like razors, muscles of tin.

Moving along the corridors with an awkward, lurching gait, like children’s toys whose batteries had run down.

They fed from the ship’s structure in the boot-cupboards, and played dice with the universe in the cloisters. Creations, phantasms, aberrations...

... why be coy? Monsters. They were monsters, that was all.

The ground was slippery with frost and rainwater.

The ground was slippery with blood and gunpowder.

Daniel Tremayne crouched in an alleyway off Burr Street, pulling the soaking blanket tight around his stick-thin body, letting the rain spit in his face. He couldn’t remember where he’d found the blanket, but then he couldn’t remember much about anything; not where he’d run to, not where he’d been.

He guessed he’d spent most of the last hour here in the alley, down in the shadows, with a big bloody gash across the top of his head.

Columns of soldiers, diseased bodies rotted and falling to pieces as they marched through the winter.

When he’d fallen and cracked his head on the ground, when he’d heard music in his skull and dreamed of the carnival going past, when he’d seen the soft people in their carnival clothes...

The soldiers’ uniforms were covered in dirt and vomit. ‘Up the Revolution,’ one of them had said, and his comrades had laughed. They hadn’t thought it was funny, but they’d laughed.

... it’d been a warning. Like he’d needed one. Should’ve been out of the town by now, Daniel Tremayne. Should’ve been a dozen, a hundred, a thousand miles away.

Daniel Tremayne had been only so-high when the War of Independence had ended. Smaller than so-high, no bigger than a baby. The War, when all the soft people had decided to stick their heads up and get involved with the way the world was run, making their own bloody laws, inventing their own bloody taxes.

Blood and gunpowder.

And most of them had gotten themselves killed, because, God, what else can you expect if you get yourself noticed like that? What else do you get, Daniel Tremayne, for sticking your head into other people’s cellars, and are you listening to what I’m telling you?

Diseased and rotted.

They said they’d won the War, the soft Revolutionaries and the men whose souls they’d bought to fight for them. Daniel thought of the half-people he’d seen, skeletons dressed in mud and diarrhoea. Hah. And they called that winning, did they?

Dirt and vomit.

He’d been so-high, or less. He remembered so much of it.

How come? Shit. Did it matter?

Daniel dropped the blanket, started moving along the alley, heading God-knew-where. Anywhere, anywhere that wasn’t near Catcher’s house. But the call was in his head, and he could still hear the whispers in the dark, trying to lure him back. And he knew they’d never leave him alone.

There were many questions. All of them seemed perfectly sensible, until they were spoken out loud, when they suddenly became pointless and insignificant. For example:

‘But... Catcher, where in the name of the old bastard King is this place?’

‘This is my house.’ A note of surprise in the man’s voice, as if he didn’t understand why anyone would have to ask.

‘What? It’s... well, it’s smaller on the outside.’

‘With the correct tools, a man of Reason may even bend the mundane dimensions to his will.’ Catcher seemed convinced of the logic behind his words, despite the fact that he was quite obviously talking gibberish. ‘Naturally, it is well within the power of the Watchmakers to supply such tools.’

Watchmakers? Erskine opened his mouth to ask, but it hardly seemed worthwhile. Why