Upon reaching the steps, Bruthen Trana was buffeted by a sudden roil of the current and he looked up to see that the door had opened. And in the threshold stood a most extraordinary figure. As tall as the Tiste Edur, yet so thin as to seem emaciated. Bone-white flesh, thin and loose, a long, narrow face, seamed with a mass of wrinkles. The eyes were pale grey, surrounding vertical pupils.

The man wore rotted, colourless silks that hid little, including the extra joints on his arms and legs, and what seemed to be a sternum horizontally hinged in the middle. The ripple of too many ribs, a set of lesser collarbones beneath the others. His hair-little more than wisps on a mottled pate-stirred like cobwebs. In one lifted hand the man held a lantern in which sat a stone that burned with golden fire.

The voice that spoke in Bruthen Trana’s mind was strangely childlike. ‘Is this the night for spirits?’

‘Is it night then?’ Bruthen Trana asked.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well,’ the figure replied with a smile, ‘neither do I. Will you join us? The house has not had a guest for a long time.’

‘I am not for this place,’ Bruthen Trana said, uncertain. ‘I think…’

‘You are correct, but the repast is timely. Besides, some current must have brought you here. It is not as if just any old spirit can find the house. You have been led here, friend.’.

‘Why? By whom?’

‘The house, of course. As to why,’ the man shrugged, then stepped back and gestured. ‘Join us, please. There is wine, suitably… dry.’

Bruthen Trana ascended the steps, and crossed the threshold.

The door closed of its own accord behind him. They were in a narrow hallway, directly ahead a T-intersection.

‘I am Bruthen Trana, a Tiste Edur of-’

‘Yes, yes, indeed. The Empire of the Crippled God. Well, one of them, anyway. An Emperor in chains, a people in thrall’-a quick glance over the shoulder as the man led him into the corridor to the right-‘that would be you, Edur, not the Letherii, who are in thrall to a far crueller master.’

‘Coin.’

‘Well done. Yes.’

They halted before a door set in a curved wall.

‘This leads to the tower,’ Bruthen Trana said. ‘Where I first saw your light.’

‘Indeed. It is, alas, the only room large enough to accommodate my guest. Oh,’ he stepped closer, ‘before we go in, I must warn you of some things. My guest possesses a weakness-but then, don’t we all? In any case, it has fallen to me to, uh, celebrate that weakness-now, yes, soon it will end, as all things do-but not quite yet. Thus, you must not distract my dear guest from the distraction I already provide. Do you understand me?’

‘Perhaps I should not enter at all, then.’

‘Nonsense. It is this, Bruthen Trana. You must not speak of dragons. No dragons, do you understand?’

The Tiste Edur shrugged. ‘That topic had not even occurred to me-’

‘Oh, but in a way it has, and continues to do so. The spirit of Emurlahnis. Scabandari. Father Shadow. This haunts you, as it does all the Tiste Edur. The matter is delicate, you see. Very delicate, for both you and my guest. I must needs rely upon your restraint, or there will be trouble. Calamity, in fact.’

‘I shall do my best, sir. A moment-what is your name?’

The man reached for the latch. ‘My name is for no-one, Bruthen Trana. Best know me by one of my many titles. The Letherii one will do. You may call me Knuckles.’

He lifted the latch and pushed open the door.

Within was a vast circular chamber-far too large for the modest tower’s wall that Bruthen Trana had seen from outside. Whatever ceiling existed was lost in the gloom. The stone-tiled floor was fifty or more paces across. As Knuckles stepped inside, the glow from his lantern burgeoned, driving back the shadows. Opposite them, abutting the curved wall, was a raised dais on which heaps of silks, pillows and furs were scattered; and seated at the edge of that dais, leaning forward with forearms resting on thighs, was a giant. An ogre or some such demon, bearing the same hue of skin as Knuckles yet stretched over huge muscles and a robust frame of squat bones. The hands dangling down over the knees were disproportionately oversized even for that enormous body. Long, unkempt hair hung down to frame a heavy-featured face with deep-set eyes-so deep that even the lantern’s light could spark but a glimmer in those ridge-shelved pits.

‘My guest,’ Knuckles murmured. ‘Kilmandaros. Most gentle, I assure you, Bruthen Trana. When… distracted. Come, she is eager to meet you.’

They approached, footfalls echoing in this waterless chamber. Knuckles shifted his route slightly towards a low marble table on which sat a dusty bottle of wine. ‘Beloved,’ he called to Kilmandaros, ‘see who the house has brought to us!’

‘Stuff it with food and drink and send it on its way,’ the huge woman said in a growl. ‘I am on the trail of a solution, scrawny whelp of mine.’

Bruthen Trana could now see, scattered on the tiles before Kilmandaros, a profusion of small bones, each incised in patterns on every available surface. They seemed arrayed without order, nothing more than rubbish spilled out from some bag, yet Kilmandaros was frowning down at them with savage concentration.

‘The solution,’ she repeated.

‘How exciting,’ Knuckles said, procuring from somewhere a third goblet into which he poured amber wine. ‘Double or nothing, then?’

‘Oh yes, why not? But you owe me the treasuries of a hundred thousand empires already, dear Setch-’

‘Knuckles, my love.’

‘Dear Knuckles.’

‘I am certain it is you who owes me, Mother.’

‘For but a moment longer,’ she replied, now rubbing those huge hands together. ‘I am so close. You were a fool to offer double or nothing.’

‘Ah, my weakness,’ Knuckles sighed as he walked over to Bruthen Trana with the goblet. Meeting the Tiste Edur’s eyes, Knuckles winked. ‘The grains run the river, Mother,’ he said. ‘Best hurry with your solution.’

A fist thundered on the dais. ‘Do not make me nervous!’

The echoes of that impact were long in fading.

Kilmandaros leaned still further, glowering down at the array of bones. ‘The pattern,’ she whispered, ‘yes, almost there. Almost…’

‘1 feel magnanimous,’ Knuckles said, ‘and offer to still those grains… for a time. So that we may be true hosts to our new guest.’

The giant woman looked up, a sudden cunning in her expression. ‘Excellent idea, Knuckles. Make it so!’

A gesture, and the wavering light of the lantern ceased Its waver. All was still in a way Bruthen Trana could not define-after all, nothing had changed. And yet his soul knew, somehow, that the grains Knuckles had spoken of were time, its passage, its unending journey. He had just, with a single gesture of one hand, stopped time.

At least in this chamber. Surely not everywhere else. And yet…

Kilmandaros leaned back with a satisfied smirk and fixed her small eyes on Bruthen Trana. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘The house anticipates.’

‘We are as flitting dreams to the Azath,’ Knuckles said. ‘Yet, even though we are but momentary conceits, as our sorry existence might well be defined, we have our uses.’

‘Some of us,’ Kilmandaros said, suddenly dismissive, ‘prove more useful than others. This Tiste Edur’-a wave of one huge, scarred hand-‘is of modest value by any measure.’

‘The Azath see what we do not, in each of us. Perhaps, Mother, in all of us.’

A sour grunt. ‘You think this house let me go of its own will-proof of your gullibility, Knuckles. Not even the Azath could hold me for ever.’

‘Extraordinary,’ Knuckles said, ‘that it held you at all.’

This exchange, Bruthen Trana realized, was an old one, following well-worn ruts between the two.

‘Would never have happened,’ Kilmandaros said under her breath, ‘if he’d not betrayed me-’

‘Ah, Mother. I have no particular love for Anomander Purake, but let us be fair here. He did not betray you. In fact, it was you who jumped him from behind-’