'Okay,' she said. 'You're free to go.'

A shout made her spin round. In the gloom, she saw a short figure.

Miss DeGroot stepped out of the shadows, holding a handkerchief to her mouth and a hand up in apology.

'Sorry,' she whispered.

'Patience!' said the Professor. 'God almighty, I thought you were . . . Where have you been?'

She did not answer. Delphine turned back to the cellar door. She lowered the sawn-off, touched the door knob and felt a small cold pressure against her temple.

'Put down your gun.'

Delphine swallowed.

'Now,' said Miss DeGroot.

'This isn't funny,' said the Professor. 'Pay . . . oh God.'

Delphine felt a shadow fall across her.

'What are you doing?' she hissed. 'We have to go.'

'Drop the gun,' said Miss DeGroot.

'But '

'Last warning.'

Delphine crouched. She set down the sawn-off.

'Good girl.' She heard Miss DeGroot kick it across the floor. 'Now turn around slow.'

Delphine turned, her hands raised, to find a hulking minotaur filling the passageaway. Her gut sank. It breathed in deep, grating tides. Its hide was Guinness-black, its horns a harp. Fluid glistened in the pinks of its eyes. It stooped and picked up the sawn-off at its hooves.

Miss DeGroot stepped away and trained her gun on the entire group. She had pulled a pearl-grip baby hammerless a pistol that, even in her satin-gloved hand, looked petite. The grip fitted inside her palm, the barrel extending just past her index finger. It was a pop gun, a piece of jewellery basically the kind of dinky joke gangsters' molls were always pulling in stories.

It scarcely qualified as a gun at all.

Mother spoke: 'Patience, what the Hell are you '

'Shut up.' Miss DeGroot jabbed the snub nose at Mother. She turned to the looming bullman. 'Now do you believe me? Come, lieutenant let's take them to your master.'

CHAPTER 29.

VOYAGE AU CENTRE DE LA TERRE.

Henry followed stone steps that curved downwards. Moisture clung to bas-relief carvings of smocked peasants bowing before minotaurs. As he descended, a beery smell grew stronger.

The Little Gentlemen followed with their tools and fuses and big aluminium bowls, negotiating each deep-cut step with precise hops. Henry reached the bottom, and stopped.

He listened.

'Sounds like those vesperi were the last two on guard,' he said. 'They weren't expecting a counterattack. Right. Two need to stay here and rig up some frustrations. Also we need a channeller.'

One of the scarabs extended a skinny arm from within its wine-coloured shell. Henry nodded. Two more took the sack containing the traps. The rest of the Little Gentlemen followed him down into the tunnel. The tunnel went south for some time, before opening out into a grotto.

Henry put down his shotgun. He flashed his torchbeam around the chamber. Six lifesize statues two harka, two vesperi and two human stood facing inwards, water dripping onto their heads, their faces striped with milky trails of limestone. Set into the floor where their gazes met, surrounded by a low ridge of stone, was a pool.

He walked to the edge, boots splashing through puddles. The pool was in the middle of the chamber, its waters thick and black. Bubbles swelled like toad gullets before coughing gouts of vapour: pah. It stunk of yeast and burning peat. The dark waters churned clockwise.

Carved into the ridge surrounding the pool was a basin, in which lay a creature identical to the Little Gentlemen, except coral-white, its segmented shell lustrous with steam.

He grasped the creature lying in the basin. It was almost too hot to hold, but his old hands were callused and tough. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he pulled. He felt resistance, then it clunked loose. Immediately the pool became flat and still. The scarab bucked in his grip. He placed it on the stone floor and pressed a boot to the hard ridges of its thorax. He broke his shotgun, removed the cartridges and slipped them into his pocket. He closed the breech, turned the gun butt downwards, and drove it into the creature's skull.

Mouthparts crunched. He hit it again and again.

When he looked up, the Little Gentlemen were watching, motionless.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'but we're at war.'

A loud snap echoed from the top of the stairway.

'We have less time than I thought,' said Henry. He took the map from his pocket and studied the wall. 'Set charges here, here and here.' He indicated the places with a piece of chalk, marking large white crosses. The Little Gentlemen split into teams and got to work, unstacking the aluminium basins, cutting fuses. The last of their number, the one who had put its arm up, stood waiting before Henry. He picked it up, gently. 'If you'll excuse me.'

Henry set it down on the lip of the inert pool. The scarab regarded the stone basin through big, luminous eyes.

'Never you fear,' said Henry. 'I won't abandon you. You'll be all right.'

Even as he said it, he felt stones in his belly, a cold hard hunch that he was wrong.

The creature lay down in the socket. Nothing happened. It looked up at Mr Garforth, then its irises shrank and its eyes turned to oil rainbows. The pool groaned, heaving and slopping.

Slowly, its black waters began to churn counterclockwise.

CHAPTER 30.

BAL MASQUe.

Ten people sat round the edges of the banqueting hall, tied to chairs with wrists behind backs. Delphine's crown throbbed from where the minotaur had walloped her for walking too slow. Beneath the eight silver moons of the lunar mandala, forty or more vesperi gave off a musk of cured meat and tar. No two were the same shade of black-brown. They had the keen muzzles of pine martens, with complicated fanning layers of cartilage, like giant leaves. She breathed through her nose, glaring at Miss DeGroot, who stood by the roaring fire, cupping a very large glass of cognac.

In the centre of the rug, bound at the wrists and kneeling, was Mr Propp.

The collar of Propp's shirt dangled raggedly. His right eye had swollen to a slit. Each time he inhaled, he winced.

Oil lamps burned around the room, casting a gentle, fluxing light across the antique shields and oak panels, picking out the jewels in the great polished warhammer. A minotaur Mr Garforth had called them harka stood guard on either door, one armed with Delphine's sawn-off. Their thick snout rings rested upon their upper lips, rising and falling as they breathed.

Her bandolier lay crumpled by the sideboard. On the far side of the room, silent now for ten minutes, sat the masked figure she had seen in the Great Hall doorway. She recognised the uniform from the oil painting above the smoking-room fireplace the ankle-length leather coat, the wide-brimmed hat, the smooth, bone-white beak. A plague doctor.

The masked stranger drummed leather-gauntleted fingers on the arm of an antique chair. The beakmask had little grooved fangs carved along it, as if clenched in a furious rictus.

To the right of the chair stood the monster which had shot Dr Lansley. Dressed in old-fashioned coachman's garb, it had the splayed ears and hard, furtive eyes of a vesperi but was much bigger, its nose-leaf a sprawl of broken ridges. Fur grew unevenly across its face and head, exposing red blotches that might have been welts or ringworm scars. A pair of tattered, useless wings sprouted through holes in its jacket. From its belt hung a cudgel and two pistols. Three fingers of its right hand had fused into a claw.

On the masked figure's left stood a tall, slim man in black riding cloak, tawny silk waistcoat and breeches of rich ultramarine. The skin across his high cheekbones and long neck was tanned, and his silky hair was the colour of chocolate. His only blemish was the wart on the end of his chin, accentuated by the way he held himself, head up, eyes half-lidded. It was this man who broke the silence.

'Ugly.'

His lower jaw jutted out to eject the word.

Miss DeGroot ceased studying the play of light in her brandy glass and turned slowly to face him. As she turned, Delphine watched her expression change from one of vacant fatigue to a smile, starting with the corners of her mouth and only after some apparent effort spreading to her eyes. She looked at the slim man.

'Did you say something?' The fireplace was heaped with logs; about her head, stray and shining blond hairs danced in the heat.

'Ugly.' The two syllables seemed to lodge in his throat. He regarded the floor darkly. 'Vulgar. Tawdry.'

'What is?'

'Address me!' The masked figure stamped a heavy riding boot against the hardwood floor, but confusingly it was the elegant thin man who spoke. 'Not the herald!'

Miss DeGroot's eyelids fluttered. She made a show of rotating an extra five degrees to face the chair. She tilted her glass towards the masked figure.

'Forgive me, Peter. I'm still getting used to your . . . puppetry.'

Delphine's stomach lurched. Surely the person in the mask couldn't be Peter Stokeham?

Again, the beakmasked figure in the chair began to gesture but it was the slim, cloaked man on the figure's left who spoke.

'For the last time,' the slim man said, the masked figure thrusting a palm towards him in time with his words, 'Mr Cox is my Tongue.' The leather gauntlet swung towards the grotesque bat-monster. 'Mr Loosley is my Fist. Do not stare at my Tongue. Look at me.' And here, the masked figure in the chair leaned forward, pressing fingers to puffed-out chest. 'I am the one who speaks. They are merely my agents. And do not address me as "Peter".'

'Understood,' said Miss DeGroot. She tilted the cognac to her lips, hiding her expression. 'You are fond of rules.'

Delphine's heart clenched. Why was Miss DeGroot doing this? Was it an elaborate bluff?

'Ugly.' The slim man was he Mr Cox? spoke again, and as he did the masked figure behind him rose, with none of the decrepitude of a man more than a hundred and twenty-five years old. Delphine glanced between the two strangers, straining to make sense of their relationship.

Firelight played across circular lenses of tinted red glass set into the beakmask's eye sockets. The mask tilted. Its little carved teeth emerged from shadow, and, for an instant, the bird became a wolf. 'Look at it.' As Cox spoke, the masked figure pointed at a painting beside the fireplace: panels of colour separated by stripes and swirls, suggesting cobbles, a crowd, the curve of a naked breast. 'Since I have been away, that boy has littered my house with degenerate rubbish. Mr Loosley.' The beakmask turned to the monster. 'If you please.'

Vesperi scattered out of the way as the bat-monster crossed the room. It had nothing of their slender frame it rippled with sinewy power. Miss DeGroot flinched and stepped aside as the creature known as 'Mr Loosley' tore the painting from the wall. It kicked through the canvas, then dashed the frame against the floor until there was only kindling. It she could not bear to think of something so grotesque as a 'he' gathered up the pieces and flung them into the fire.

'Peter,' said Miss DeGroot. 'You promised me something.'

The masked stranger could it really be Peter Stokeham, the Silent Earl? turned to face her. Again, Mr Cox spoke. As far as Delphine could tell, he did so not on the masked figure's behalf, but somehow as the figure.

'Give me the child.'

Delphine's throat closed. She strained her wrists against her bonds.

'That was not one of our terms,' said Miss DeGroot. 'I helped you get here. I even anticipated your guests' escape bid and cut them off. I've done all you asked of me and more.' She sipped her brandy and eyed the faceless stranger over the rim of her glass. 'It's time you kept your word. Stokeham family honour demands it.'

'I want the child,' said Cox.

'I'm sure Ivan can help you with that, can't you, Ivan?'

Without opening his eyes, Propp shook his head. 'They shot Dr Lansley.'

Miss DeGroot threw a glance over her shoulder. 'What? Where is he?'

'Patience. He's dead.'

The surface of Miss DeGroot's brandy began to flutter. She looked round the seated captives, as if she suspected a lie. She turned to the figure in the mask.

'You said no guns. You promised . . . '

'To take every precaution against unnecessary loss of life,' said Cox. 'And so we did. Including that of our soldiers. The Doctor's death was an unfortunate accident the type that befalls all who find themselves between Mr Loosley and his target.'

'They killed him,' said Propp, his voice breaking. 'They killed Titus.'

Miss DeGroot gazed at the expressionless, bone-white mask. Gradually, the confusion left her face. Her brandy became millpond-still.

'No, Ivan. You did.'

Propp opened his eyes and looked up at her. 'Patience. My dear friend. I forgive you.'

Miss DeGroot turned. She walked until they were face to face. With Propp on his knees, she was slightly the taller. She cupped her brandy goblet, holding it up like a gravedigger's lantern.

'You forgive me,' she said quietly. She half-closed her eyes. 'How brave. How very spiritual you must be.' She snatched her free hand into a fist and shook it gently between them, a silver bracelet flashing on her wrist. 'I shall treasure your forgiveness, Ivan. Just as I treasured your promise of a cure.' She pressed the fist to her breastbone, and her eyes became thinner still. 'Just as everyone who trusted you treasured your promises. Now . . . ' Miss DeGroot closed her eyes, her forehead almost touching Propp's. Her voice was so low Delphine could barely hear her. 'Titus is gone, and that is a tragedy. I never wished for harm to come to anyone, but the past can't be changed. Let's make sure no one else is harmed.' Her eyes flicked open. 'Tell them where the child is, Ivan.'

She held his gaze, her eyes inches from his held it so long that even Delphine had to glance away. At last, she stood back.

Mr Cox sniffed approvingly.

'Make amends, Ivan,' he said. 'Don't draw these innocents into your game. Give us the girl.'

Propp hung his head. 'I cannot.'

Miss DeGroot slung her brandy glass into the fire, where it exploded in hissing blue flame.