The glass in the bottom of the frames, on the narrow sill, on the walls under the windows and on the floor of the room was joined. It was all one. He stayed kneeling and let his hands rest in his sloped lap. He stared ahead.

He recalled, from when he could not remember, that glass - ordinary glass, made from sand - was theoretically a liquid, that in old buildings" very sensitive measuring equipment could detect a significant thinning at the top of the pane, and a corresponding thickening at the bottom of the sheet as the glass gradually gave in to the incessant pull of gravity. In the Castle of Bequest, in places at least, the process had simply had time to go further. The glass had flowed - was still flowing - from the frame, over the sill, down the wall, to the floor.

He knelt, realised this, and after a little while, to his own astonishment, he started to cry.

The mines, anyway, had not been visible from the windows; he had wandered again, mind blank, until he found himself back where he had started, in the empty games room.

He had made for the balcony almost automatically, then stopped to think; vaguely, almost innocently surprised at the ease with which he was suddenly able to accept his own death, even desire it.

And, thinking, there was nothing.

So he had climbed up onto the cold stone parapet.

Now he knew what the red crow had meant by soul, and that a-religious quality of irreducible character, that selfness, would now articulate its most profound self-statement, in its own destruction.

Quiss closed his eyes, leaned forward into space.

Arms closed around his waist; he was pulled back. He opened his eyes to see the sky tipping, the wall of the castle above the balcony slanting over him as he fell. Ajayi gasped as they thumped together onto the slate of the balcony floor. Quiss rolled over, into the warmth of the games room, banging his head on the glass floor.

He looked up, dazed, to see Ajayi lying on the floor of the balcony itself, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and staring at him. She was picking herself up. "Quiss -"

He scrambled to his feet, drew back his hand and hit her hard across the face, knocking her to the ground again. "Leave me alone!" he shouted. "Why can't you leave me alone?" he screamed. He bent down and picked her up. Her mouth was bleeding, her face was white. She cried out, and put her hands up in front of her face to protect herself; he threw her into the games room and she staggered across the floor, tripped on some fallen books and went sprawling. He went after her. "You just can't leave me alone, can you?" he sobbed. His eyes were filling with tears, his hands and arms shook. He bent and picked the woman off the floor again; she brought her hands up, her eyes tightly screwed up, face grimacing; he slapped her and she cried out again, falling to the floor as he let her go. He drew back his foot to kick her, as she lay, curled up on :he glass floor, hands over her head, crying.

He saw the games table, not far away, with the pack of cards lying on it. He didn't kick the woman, but stamped over to the small table, got hold of it by two of its legs, took it over to the woman, then as she looked up, eyes wide with fear, he raised the table over his head (she cringed, cowered, hands over her head again; the cards fluttered down), he swung the table down, into the glass floor near her head, shattering the table and smashing a network of cracks a jagged metre in diameter on the floor's transparent surface.

The table disintegrated; the small red jewel at its centre broke into a thousand pieces, a tracery of shining filaments burst from the table's intricate surface, sparking and spitting for a second, then smoking and going dull, and the solid legs of the table sprang open, cracking and revealing tightly compressed pages with print on them. Quiss kicked the debris, then turned away, covering his eyes with his hands and sobbing.

He stumbled off, into the back of the room, away from the balcony.

Ajayi looked up, over the remains of the shattered table, and saw Quiss bump into the wall by the winding-stair. He staggered down the first few steps and disappeared. She breathed again, dabbed at her split lip with the hem of her furs.

She sat up properly on the glass surface, moving away from where a thin pool of warm salty water was spreading from the cracks where the table had hit. She was trembling.

She looked at what was left of the table.

Well, they had played their last game; they had been left in no doubt about that. No table, no valid games. So they had just their one, unused answer left.

She tried to think calmly, wondering what had made Quiss want to kill himself. She didn't know. He had been increasingly morose recently, but would not talk about the reasons, if there were any. She had hoped he would come out of it; he had been depressed before, as had she, but for the last hundred days there had been a special sort of despair about him, and he had just kept on going downhill, unwilling to talk about it or be cheered up. Perhaps she shouldn't have left him alone just now, but what could she do? If he was determined to kill himself there was nothing she could really do about it. It was his life, it was his right. Maybe she was just being selfish.

She stood up shakily. She was a little dazed, and she hurt in a variety of places. Well, nothing was broken; that was something to be thankful for.

She noticed that the legs of the small table had been made out of books. A couple of them had torn covers and pages; bits of them were still stuck to the veneer of wood which had covered them when they were still part of the table. There had been one or two books making up each of the three legs. The books were written in English.

"Titus Groan," she read, talking softly to herself. "The Castle, Labyrinths, The Trial..." And another book, which had the title page missing. She glanced over the torn remains of the first page instead, and frowned.

She looked at the other books she held. This was interesting. She had been looking for a couple of them, having read about them in some of the literary guides and commentaries which she was using to select which books she ought to read. They hadn't been in the places in the castle where she had expected to find them. Perhaps it was significant that they had turned up instead inside the games table. She looked again at the book with no title page.

She decided she would read this nameless book first. Anyway, it might help calm her down, take her mind off things...

Yes, she thought, as she walked over to her stool, she would read this one first, then the others. She would just have to hope Quiss would be all right. They still had that last answer to come up with.

She sat down.

She started reading.

After all, what else was there to do?

The story began:

He walked through the white corridors.