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By Root 1406 0

their heads until once again they were afforded yet another long perspective with its floor crisp and ashen with fallen plaster. And there at the end of the corridor was a replica of the picture they had been witnessing a minute earlier, with Flay at yet another angle of stone. It was as though they were reliving the incident, for, visually, it differed in no particular. But this time they did not wait for Mr Flay to disappear. At a sign from the Doctor they began to run towards him. Evidently Steerpike was still in view for Mr Flay, motionless as a stick-insect, made no move until Titus and the Doctor were within a short way of him. Then suddenly, at the sound of plaster breaking under Titus’ feet, faint though it was, he turned his craggy face over his shoulder and saw them.

He touched his brow with his hand, and darted a questioning glance at the Doctor. Then he put his finger to his lips as he bared his irregular teeth. The Doctor inclined his body, so splendidly sheathed in its dressing gown, in the gaunt man’s direction. Meanwhile Titus crept to the angle of the wall and peering around the corner saw, at a distance of about sixty feet, something which set his heart pounding. It was the Master of Ritual, Steerpike; the man with the red and white face. It was his foe – long since defied in the summer schoolroom – the pale and agile officer of the realm – the one who had spoiled his happiness and weaned his sister from him.

There he sat upon the edge of some kind of low stone basin like a drinking trough that protruded from the wall at the side of the plaster-littered passage. Beyond him there was an arch, hung with torn sacking which obscured whatever lay beyond.

As Titus watched, he saw the sitting figure draw up his knee so that his feet were beneath him on the rim of the trough. His head and shoulders were turned a little away so that it was not easy for Titus to tell what he had taken from his pocket. It seemed that Steerpike’s hands were near his mouth and a little forward of it and then suddenly, as the first thin reedy note of a bamboo pipe shrilled along the resonant corridor, all became plain. For some little while, it was impossible to know how long, the three watchers listened to the solitary figure, to his nimble fingering of the stops, to the shrill and plaintive improvisations. Only the Doctor realized how well he played. Only the Doctor knew how quick and cold it was. How brilliant and empty.

‘Is there nothing he can’t do?’ muttered Prunesquallor to himself. ‘By all that’s versatile, he frightens me.’

The music had come to an end, and Steerpike stretched out his arms and legs and then slipping his recorder into a pocket, stood up. It was then that Titus gasped, and as he did so was plucked back from the corner by the two men behind him. For a few moments they hardly dared to draw breath. But no footsteps approached them from the adjacent corridor. What was it he had seen? Neither the Doctor nor Flay dared question him, but after a little while the latter, squinting round the corner, could see what it was that had startled the boy. He had himself been puzzled by Steerpike’s monkey. For a long while he had been unable to tell what it was that sat hunched upon his quarry’s shoulder, or bounded at his side. At other times it disappeared altogether. It had not added, for instance, to the silhouette beneath the thorn tree, and Flay could only think that it clung closely to his side and was lost for long periods at a time beneath the folds of his cape.

But now it bounded beside him, or stood on two legs, its long thin arms hanging loosely, its wrinkled hands trailing among the scraps of plaster.

And so there was a double need for silence. What Steerpike might miss his monkey might easily hear.

But the discovery of what had startled Titus was of small importance compared with the fact that Flay was only just in time to see the man and his monkey pass through the hangings, and under the arch. A moment later and there would have been no knowing whether he had turned to the left or the right. As it was it