Her ridicule pressed Shadwell to breaking point; he flung himself at her. But she was not about to let herself be touched by his hands. As he snatched hold of her it seemed to Suzanna that her whole ruined face cracked open, spilling a force that might once have been the menstruum - that cool, bright river Suzanna had first plunged into at Immacolata's behest - but was now a damned and polluted stream, breaking from the wounds like pus. It had force nevertheless. Shadwell was thrown to the ground.

Overhead, the clouds threw lightning across the roof, freezing the scene below by its scalpel light. The killing blow could only be a glance away, surely.

But it didn't come. The Incantatrix hesitated, the broken face leaking tainted power, and in that instant Shadwell's hand closed on the kitchen knife at his side.

Suzanna cried a warning, but Immacolata either failed to hear or chose not to. Then Shadwell was on his feet, his ungainly rise offering his victim a moment to strike him down, which was missed - and drove the blade up into her abdomen, a butcher's stroke which opened a traumatic wound.

At last she seemed to know he meant her death, and responded. Her face began to blaze afresh, but before the spark could become fire Shadwell's blade was dividing her to the breasts. Her innards slid from the wound. She screamed, and threw back her head, the unleashed force wasted against the sanctum walls.

On the instant, the room was filled with a roaring that seemed to come from both the bricks and the innards of Immacolata. Shadwell dropped the blood-slicked knife, and made to retreat from his crime, but his victim reached out and pulled him close.

The fire had entirely gone from Immacolata's face. She was dying, and quickly. But even in her failing moments her grip was strong. As the roaring grew louder she granted Shadwell the embrace she'd always denied him, her wound besmirching his jacket. He made a cry of repugnance, but she wouldn't let him go. He struggled, and finally succeeded in breaking her hold, throwing her off and staggering from her, his chest and belly plastered with blood. He cast one more look in her direction then started towards the door, making small moans of horror. As he reached the exit he looked up at Suzanna.

'I didn't...' he began, his hands raised, blood trickling between his fingers. 'It wasn't me ...'

The words were as much appeal as denial.

'It was magic!' he said, tears starting to his eyes. Not of sorrow, she knew, but of a sudden righteous rage.

'Filthy magic!' he shrieked. The ground rocked to hear its glory denied.

He didn't wait to have the roof fall on his head, but fled from the chamber as the roars rose in intensity.

Suzanna looked back at Immacolata.

Despite the grievous wounding she'd sustained she was not yet dead. She was standing against one of the walls, clinging to the brick with one hand and keeping her innards from falling with the other.

'Blood's been spilt,' she said, as another tremor, more fierce than any that had preceded it, unknitted the foundations of the building. 'Blood's been spilt in the Temple of the Loom.'

She smiled that terrible, twisted smile.

'The Fugue's undone, sister -' she said.

'What do you mean?'

'I came here intending to spill his blood and bring the Gyre down. Seems it's me who's done the bleeding. It's no matter.' Her voice grew weaker. Suzanna stepped close, to hear her better. 'It's all the same in the end. The Fugue is finished. It'll be dust. All dust...'

She pushed herself off the wall. Suzanna reached and kept her from falling. The contact made her palm tingle.

'They're exiles forever,' Immacolata said, and frail as it was, there was triumph in her voice. 'The Fugue ends here. Wiped away as if it had never been.'

At this, her legs buckled beneath her. Pushing Suzanna away, she stumbled back against the wall. Her hand slipped from her belly; her guts unspooled.

'I used to dream ...' she said,'... terrible emptiness ...'

She stopped speaking, as she slid down the wall, strands of her hair catching on the brick.

'... sand and nothingness,' she said. That's what I dreamt. Sand and nothingness. And here it is.'

As if to bear out her remark the din grew cataclysmic.

Satisfied with her labours, Immacolata sank to the ground.

Suzanna looked towards her escape route, as the bricks of the Temple began to grind upon each other with fresh ferocity. What more could she do here? The mysteries of the Loom had defeated her. If she stayed she'd be buried in the ruins. There was nothing left to do but get out while she still could.

As she moved to the door, two pencil beams of light sliced through the grimy air, and struck her arm. Their brightness shocked her. More shocking still, their source. They were coming from the eye sockets of one of the sentinels. She stepped out of the path of the light, and as the beams struck the corpse opposite lights flared there too; then in the third sentinel's head, and the fourth.

These events weren't lost on Immacolata.

'The Loom ...' she whispered, her breath failing.

The intersecting beams were brightening, and the fraught air was soothed by the sound of voices, softly murmuring words so unfixable they were almost music.

'You're too late,' said the Incantatrix, her comment made not to Suzanna but to the dead quartet. 'You can't save it now.'

Her head began to slip forward.

'Too late ...' she said again.

Then a shudder went through her. The body, vacated by spirit, keeled over. She lay dead in her blood.

Despite her dying words, the power here was still building. Suzanna backed towards the door, to clear the beams' route completely. With nothing to bar their way they immediately redoubled their brilliance, and from the point of collision threw up new beams at every angle. The whispering that filled the chamber suddenly found a fresh rhythm; the words, though still alien to her, ran like a melodious poem. Somehow, they and the light were part of one system; the raptures of the four Families - Aia, Lo, Ye-me and Babu - working together: word music accompanying a woven dance of light.

This was the Loom; of course. This was the Loom.

No wonder Immacolata had poured scorn on Shadwell's literalism. Magic might be bestowed upon the physical, but it didn't reside there. It resided in the word, which was mind spoken, and in motion, which was mind made manifest; in the system of the Weave and the evocations of the melody: all mind.

Yet damn it, this recognition was not enough. Finally she was still only a Cuckoo, and all the puzzle-solving in the world wouldn't help her mellow the rage of this desecrated place. All she could do was watch the Loom's wrath shake the Fugue and all it contained apart.

In her frustration her thoughts went to Mimi, who had brought her into this adventure, but had died too soon to entirely prepare her for it. Surely even she would not have predicted this: the Fugue's failing, and Suzanna at its heart, unable to keep it beating.

The lights were still colliding and multiplying, the beams growing so solid now she might have walked upon them. Their performances transfixed her. She felt she could watch them forever, and never tire of their complexities. And still they grew more elaborate, more solid, until she was certain they would not be bound within the walls of the sanctum, but would burst out - - into the Fugue, where she had to go. Out to where Cal was lying, to comfort him as best she could in the imminent maelstrom.

With this thought came another. That perhaps Mimi had known, or feared, that in the end it would simply be Suzanna and the magic - and that maybe the old woman had after all left a signpost.

She reached into her pocket, and brought out the book. Secrets of the Hidden Peoples. She didn't need to open the book to remember the epigraph on the dedication page: 'What can be imagined need never be lost.'

She'd tussled with its meaning repeatedly, but her intellect had failed to make much sense of it. Now she forsook her analytical thinking and let subtler sensibilities take over.

The light of the Loom was so bright it hurt her eyes, and as she stepped out of the sanctum she discovered that the beams were exploiting chinks in the brick - either that or eating at the wall - and breaking through. Needle-thin lines of light stratified the passageway.

Her thoughts as much on the book in her hand as on her safety, she made her way back via the route she'd come: door and passageway, door and passageway. Even the outer layers of corridor were not immune to the Loom's glamour. The beams had broken through three solid walls and were growing wider with every moment. As she walked through them, she felt the menstruum stir in her for the first time since she'd entered the Gyre. It rose not to her face, however, but through her arms and into her hands, which clasped the book, as though charging it.

What can be imagined - The chanting rose; the light-beams multiplied - need never be lost.

The book grew heavier; warmer; like a living thing in her arms. And yet, so full of dreams. A thing of ink and paper in which another world awaited release. Not one world perhaps, but many; for as she and Hobart's time in the pages had proved, each adventurer reimagined the stories for themselves. There were as many Wild Woods as there were readers to wander there.

She was out into the third corridor now, and the whole Temple had become a hive of light and sound. There was so much energy here, waiting to be channelled. If she could only be the catalyst that turned its strength to better ends than destruction.