Suzanna might well have doubted this unlikely confession but that the menstruum, brimming at her eyes and throat, confirmed the truth of it. The wraith before her - and the power behind it - had no hatred on its mind. What did it have? There was the question. She didn't need to ask; it knew her question.

I'm here with a warning,' it said.

'About what? Shadwell?'

'He's only a part of what you now face, sister. A fragment.'

'Is it the Scourge?'

The phantom shuddered at the name, though surely its state put it beyond the reach of such dangers. Suzanna didn't wait for confirmation. There was no use disbelieving the worst now.

'Is Shadwell something to do with the Scourge?' she asked.

'He raised it.'

'Why?'

'He thinks magic has tainted him.' the dust said. 'Corrupted his innocent salesman's soul. Now he won't be content until every rapture-maker's dead.'

'And the Scourge is his weapon?'

'So he believes. The truth may be more ... complex.'

Suzanna ran her hand down over her face, her mind seeking the best route of enquiry. One simple question occurred: 'What kind of creature is this Scourge?'

The answer's perhaps just another question,' said the sisters. 'It thinks that it's called Uriel.'

'Uriel?'

'An Angel.'

Suzanna almost laughed at the absurdity of this.

That's what it believes, having read the Bible.'

'I don't follow.'

'Most of this is beyond even our comprehension, but we offer you what we know. It's a spirit. And it once stood guard over a place where magic was. A garden, some have said, though that may be simply another fiction.'

'Why should it want to wipe the Seerkind out?'

They were made there, in that garden, kept from the eyes of Humankind, because they had raptures. But they fled from it.'

'And Uriel -'

' - was left alone, guarding an empty place. For centuries.'

Suzanna was by no means certain she believed any of this, but she wanted to hear the story completed.

'What happened?'

'It went mad, as any prisoner of duty must, left without fresh instructions. It forgot itself, and its purpose. All it knew was sand and stars and emptiness.'

'You should understand...' said Suzanna. 'I find all this difficult to believe, not being a Christian.'

'Neither are we,' said the three-in-one.

'But you still think the story's true?'

'We believe there's truth inside it, yes.'

The reply made her think again of Mimi's book, and all it contained. Until she'd entered its pages the realm of Faery had seemed child's play. But facing Hobart in the forest of their shared dreams, she'd learned differently. There'd been truth inside that story: why not this too? The difference was that the Scourge occupied the same physical world as she did. Not metaphor, not dream-stuff; real.

'So it forgot itself,' she said to the phantom. 'How then did it remember?'

'Perhaps it never hasI said Immacolata. 'But its home was found, a hundred years back, by men who'd gone looking for Eden. In their heads it read the story of the paradise garden and took it for its own, whether it was or not. It found a name too. Uriel, flame of God. The spirit who stood at the gates of lost Eden -'

'And was it Eden? The place it guarded?'

'You don't believe that any more than I do. But Uriel does. Whatever its true name is - if it even has one - that name's forgotten. It believes itself an Angel. So, for better or worse, it is.'

The notion made sense to Suzanna, in its way. If, in the dream of the book, she'd believed herself a dragon, why shouldn't something lost in madness take an Angel's name?

'It murdered its discoverers, of course - ' Immacolata was saying,' - then went looking for those who'd escaped it.'

The Families.'

'Or their descendants. And it almost wiped them out. But they were clever. Though they didn't understand the power that pursued them, they knew how to hide. The rest you're familiar with.'

'And Uriel? What did it do when the Seerkind disappeared?'

'It returned to its fortress.'

'Until Shadwell.'

'Until Shadwell.'

Suzanna mused on this for a little time, then asked the one question this whole account begged. 'What about God?' she said. The three-in-one laughed, her motes somersaulting. 'We don't need God to make sense of this,' she said. Suzanna wasn't certain if she spoke only for themselves or for her too. 'If there was a First Cause, a force of which this Uriel is a fragment, it's forsaken its sentinel.'

'So what do we do?' said Suzanna. There's been talk of mustering the Old Science.' 'Yes, I heard 'Would that defeat it?'