She heard shots and more screams, then light blazed and there was a noise like a thunderclap and a sound like a million windows shattering.

Breyguhn screamed, loud and shrill. “Stop it! Stop it!”

“I’m trying to!” Geis bellowed.

A great thump made the floor under Sharrow quiver as she finally got free of the last of the tape and scuttled out from under the table.

Her feet splashed. She looked down, then up. Water was pouring into the dimly lit chamber from a half-metre wide hole in one wall. Geis was still hacking at the android’s body; Breyguhn was holding her gun with both hands and aiming at the android’s head; the hand clutching the Lazy Gun was jerking and clenching apparently at random, turning and firing the Gun every second or so. One of the diamond leaf ikons had shattered; it lay in a scree of glittering shards between the door and the sparking remains of the junction box. Molgarin/Chrolleser was dead, arched back in his seat with his eyes staring at the ceiling, a set of great, naked bone-jaws clamped round his neck like a man-trap, blood leaking from where the curved teeth had punctured. Even as Sharrow stared, the jaws disappeared again.

The water gushing from the breach in the wall was up to Sharrow’s ankles. She grabbed the first weapon she saw lying on the stone table; the HandCannon.

Breyguhn fired her pistol again; the shot spun Feril’s head round on the post. The Lazy Gun spun round too, as the arm. holding it jammed against the casing of the Universal Principles. The Gun pointed straight at Sharrow; she ducked under the table, into the water. A titanic pulse of sound shook the air, followed by a vast crashing, tumbling noise. A cloud of dust rolled forward from the wall, followed by a wave of dirty water that pushed Sharrow towards the other side of the table. She was floating; her head bumped against the underside of the stonework. She pushed forward as the rumbling noise behind her eased. She looked beyond the lower edge of the table, trying to see Breyguhn’s legs on the far side of the flooding room, but the dark air was full of dust.

There was a flash from the side and a painting covering one wall began to burn. The dust-filled chamber had shrunk. Half of it, including the door she and Feril had first come through and the balcony where they’d encountered Geis, was now a vast pile of rubble, fallen from layers and levels above, where the ceiling now stretched up into darkness; sparks and water fell out of the heights. The burning painting lit the dusty chamber with a yellow, flickering light. She still couldn’t see Breyguhn or Geis. The Lazy Gun was hidden by the piled treasure in the centre of the table. The weapons rack Feril’s head had been on had disappeared.

Something tumbled out of the darkness above; she dived to one side into the waist-deep water as a massive piece of stonework whistled down and smashed into the stone table, splitting it and hurling everything on it into the air. A wall of water came surging towards her; she was washed towards the small door under the remaining diamond leaf ikon.

A terrible, thrumming vibration travelled through her legs as the waves slapped and hissed against the electrical junction box where Feril’s body had lain.

She waded through the water, slipping on the bank of diamond debris under her feet, then hauled the door open against the sucking weight of water and stumbled splashing up a dark, inclined corridor beyond. She checked the HandCannon as she went, thinking it felt wrong, and cursing when she dis-covered there was no magazine in it. She stuffed it into a pocket.

Another quaking burst of sound came from behind her and a great, dark fist of smoke pushed out from the chamber, pulsing along the surface of the ceiling above her.

The corridor rose; the water around her legs became shallower.

Cables hanging from the ceiling swung back and forth, making her fight her way through, crashing off walls and cable-runs and buzzing metal boxes. Smoke preceded her along the shad-owy corridor as she finally waded up some steps and out of the water.

She ducked under drooping, humming cables, through a haze of acrid smoke, a stink of burning insulation and a scrape of sparks as the broken end of a cable swung back and forth across the damp flagstones.

She straightened on the far side to see Breyguhn standing five metres in front of her, right wrist chained to the wall, her right hand gripping a pistol. She was bleeding from a head-wound. The thin yellow light made her look deathly pale.

Breyguhn pointed the gun at Sharrow. “He’s gone, Sharrow,” she said sadly. “Taken his silly sword and gone.” She shrugged. “Frightened the Gun was going to do something irresponsible…” Breyguhn smiled bleakly.

She took a step towards Sharrow, who retreated a step and then flinched as she backed into the hanging cables. The cable at her feet sparked and crackled.

“Taken his silly sword and gone…” Breyguhn said in a girlish, sing-song voice. She aimed the gun at Sharrow’s face. The chain squeaked.

Sharrow ducked as the gun fired; she grabbed the live cable and jammed the exposed end into the chain-track on the wall.

Breyguhn screamed. Her gun loosed off its remaining rounds into the wall as she shook, her wrist smoking.

When the gun stopped firing, Sharrow hauled the cable out of the chain-track.

Breyguhn collapsed like a heap of rags, only her still smoulder-ing wrist held upright against the wall by the chain.

Sharrow gagged on the smell of burned flesh as she stum-bled forward. She turned Breyguhn’s face to the light and felt for a pulse. Her half-sister’s eyes stared up the tunnel, motionless. Sharrow shook her head and dropped the other woman’s arm.

Another explosion from the chamber behind blew her off her feet and along the tunnel.

She started running.

There was another door where the chain-track disappeared; she ignored it and ran limping, head pounding, breath ragged, down the tunnel. It ended in a tall space lit from above-and from a downward slope in front-by grey daylight. It smelled rank and fetid and the stone floor was covered with straw. She saw large stalls on either side; harnesses and bridles and tall saddles hung on the walls. There were no animals in any of the stalls. The grey light from the slope in front of her came from another short, high-ceilinged tunnel.

She limped down it, under the barbed teeth of two enormous portcullises, out into the cold drizzle of the day.

She was standing on a weed-smothered slope that led from the foot of the Sea House’s towering walls down to the sand and gravel floor of the bay. The sea was a line in the distance, light-grey against dark. A broad stone ramp sloped away to the sand pools and gravel banks the retreated tide had revealed. The grey water piled and hummocked in the distance, out to sea. There was no land visible.

A large animal carrying a single rider was picking its way through the humped shoals of gravel beyond a stretch of sand dotted with shallow pools where the animal had left its hoofprints. As the rider glanced back, the wind lifted his riding cape and blew it out to one side.

She ran down the slope, skidding on the weed, and splashed into the first sandy pool. A sliver of sand-duped land was just visible in the distance round the side of the House’s dark walls.

She ran on a way, then stopped.

What was she doing? The bandamyion reared up and turned round, stepping delicately forward across the gravel shoal until it found the relative firmness of the sand again.

You idiot, she told herself. You’ve got an empty gun in your pocket. What the hell are you going to do with that? Throw it at him? You should have run the other way, round the walls to the outfall; you could have got the monowheel and chased the asshole on his stupid animal in that.