He walked along the corridor. He was in the general area of the door he had found open, many many days ago. He thought he could just make out a sort of half-felt, half-heard thumping noise, and suspected he was somewhere near the number-crunching room; dee pee as the snooty attendant had called it.

The corridor opened out to about twice the cross-section which he regarded as the castle's standard. A slate bench on one wall faced a row of twelve large, stout, metal-strapped doors.

He was weary, so he sat down on the bench, looking through the gloom at the tall, dark doors.

"Tired, old man?" a voice said, from above him. He turned and saw the red crow, perched on a peg stuck into the wall high above the slate bench, near the vaulted ceiling.

"What are you doing way down here?" he asked the creature, surprised to find it so deep in the castle's structure.

"Following you," the crow said.

"To what do I owe such an honour?"

"Your stupidity," the red crow said, stretching its wings as though stiff. One of its small eyes glinted in the dim light from the glowing, transparent tubes at the apex of the ceiling.

"Really," he said. If the red crow was just insulting him, let it. If it wanted to talk it would have to start things off. He suspected it did want to talk. It was here for a good reason.

"Yes, really," the red crow said testily. It flapped off the perch on the wall and landed in the middle of the floor, facing him. It folded its wings. A little dust swirled around it. "You won't listen to reason, so I'm going to have to rub your nose in things."

"Are you indeed?" Quiss said coldly. He didn't like its tone. "What 'things'?"

"Call it truth," the red crow said, spitting the word out like a lump of gristle.

"What would you know about that?" Quiss scoffed.

"Oh, quite a lot, as you'll discover, man." The red crow's voice was calm, measured and mocking. "If you want to, that is."

That depends," Quiss said, frowning at the bird. "What exactly are we talking about?"

The red crow jerked its head, indicating the wall and the doors behind it. "I can get you in there. I can show you what you have been looking for all this time."

"Can you really?" Quiss said, stalling. He wondered if the crow was telling the truth. If it was, why was it telling him?

The bird, its bright plumage dulled to burgundy by the gloom, nodded. "I can. Do you want to see behind the doors?"

"Yes," Quiss said. There was little point in denying it. "What's the catch?"

"Ah," the red crow said, and Quiss thought that if the bird could have smiled, it would. "I must have your word."

"On what?"

"That I show you what I show you of your own free will, that you go willingly on the understanding that without any outside influence from me or anything else you may not desire to come back, or may desire to kill yourself. You may not, of course, but if you stay, or if you kill yourself, you must give me your word you will say that I warned you of this first."

Quiss narrowed his eyes, leaned forward on the slate seat, putting one elbow on his knees, one hand to his lips. His chin was rough with stubble. "You are saying that what you will show me may make me wish to stay behind those doors, or may make me desire death."

"In a word: more-or-less," the red crow cackled. "But you won't use any dirty tricks to influence me."

"No need."

"Then I give my word."

"Good," the red crow said with some satisfaction. It flapped once and rose into the air, and Quiss had the impression that it was done too easily, that the wings had not powered the bird at all, that it flapped them merely for show. The bird turned and flew off down the corridor, in the direction Quiss had been heading. It disappeared round a corner in the dim distance.

Quiss got to his feet, wondering if he was supposed to follow the creature. He scratched his chin, looking at the dozen doors. His heart started to beat a little faster; what was behind the doors? The red crow wanted him and Ajayi dead; it wanted them to admit defeat and give up their struggle with the riddle. That was simply part of its job, though it claimed it really did want rid of them anyway, because they were boring. It knew that Quiss knew this, so it must be very confident that whatever was behind the doors would have a considerable effect on Quiss; enough to break him, perhaps. Quiss was nervous, keyed up, but determined. He could take whatever the red crow was going to throw at him, whatever it had to show him. Anything which might help him find the way out of this thing, even just give a new angle on his and Ajayi's plight, would be useful. Besides, he suspected the red crow did not know that he had been behind one of those doors once, even if only briefly. If the revelation beyond that heavy wood and metal strapping had something to with the ceiling-holes and the place called "Dirt', then Quiss vas already prepared.

The door nearest Quiss clicked. He heard a tapping noise, and went forward. There was a metal-lined slit in the door which he took to be a handle. He pulled on it; the door opened slowly, smoothly, and revealed the red crow hovering in a long corridor lit by small glowing globes fixed to the wall.

"Welcome," the crow said. It turned, flew slowly down the long corridor. "Close the door; follow me," it said. Quiss did as he was told.

The bird flew, and he walked, for about ten minutes. The tunnel led down and to the left, curving gradually. It was quite warm. The red crow flew, silently, about five metres in front of him. Finally they came to another door, similar to the one through which they had entered the tunnel. The red crow stopped at it.

"Excuse me," it said, and disappeared through the door. Quiss was startled. He touched the door, to make sure it was not a projection; it was solid, warm. It clicked. The red crow reappeared over Quiss's head. "Well, open it," it said. Quiss pulled the door towards him.

He walked, with the red crow behind him and over him, into a strange place.

His head swam; he felt himself stagger momentarily. He blinked his eyes and shook his head. He felt at once that he had walked into a place, but also out into the open air.

It was as though he stood on a flat desert floor, or the dulled bed of a salt lake. But the sky was within touching distance, as if some flat layer of clouds had lowered to within a couple of metres of that salt or sandy surface.

Behind him (as he turned, dizzy, looking for a point of reference in the confusing, pillared infinity before him) was the door they had just come through. It was set in a black wall which at first sight seemed straight, but which he soon realised was curved; pan of a gigantic circle. The red crow flapped lazily just overhead, watching with amused malevolence as Quiss turned again to the space in front of them.

The floor was smooth slate, the ceiling composed of the glass and ironwork and water common to the castle's upper storeys. Slate and iron columns supported the roof, which was at the same height it had been in the room Quiss had found his way into such a long time ago, when he discovered the hole in the glass with the creature over and around it. All that was missing, in three out of the four directions, was a wall.

It was not bright, with only a few of the luminous fish waving lazily over his head and nearby, but it was light enough to see that the space he was now in seemed endless. Quiss peered into the distance, but all he could see were pillars and columns, growing smaller and smaller in the squeezed, twisted depths before him. Pillars and columns and... people. Human figures stood on small stools, or sat in high chairs, arms in iron hoops, shoulders hard up against the undersurface of the endless glass ceiling. Some of the things he had thought were pillars or columns at first, stunned sight were not; they were people with their heads stuck in the ceiling, dark shadowy forms above them in the glass, surrounding holes in the ceiling like the one he had stuck his own head into, briefly, in that small room long ago.