Jack moved aside the fire-screen and tipped himself into the demon realms before he could have any second thoughts about it.

He didn't say goodbye to anyone except Sita – although he wasn't sure how much of the 'goodbye' she'd heard over all that yelling.

It would be all right. Ellini would comfort her when she got back. She was coming back.

He tried to summon an image of the Ellini he had seen and heard about in the past few days – the woman who leapt naked out of pools and deprived teachers of their voices. The woman with the crimson sleeve and the smoke at her back who had fought Anna outside the Academy. She was a force of nature. She would always come back.

It was just that, if she didn't, his options were shrinking. He was starting to realize that Sita was another bracelet, shackling him to this world, forcing him to stay, no matter how badly things went wrong. He had to stick around to make sure she was looked after. And he didn't – he didn't want her to lose anyone ever again.

He found his own way to Vassago's canyon, not being anxious to encounter the Queen again. But it wasn't deserted in the demon realms. He saw guards and pages in the same livery Joel and Alim had worn – others in simple, belted tunics, raking the black sand into curious patterns. And workers – much more shabbily dressed – quarrying stone on the steep sides of the canyon.

The people had one thing in common: he had seen them all before. Some of them had crowd-faces he couldn't put a name to. Some were soldiers from the Indian campaign. Some were insufferable music-teachers, or tour managers from his days as Spring-heeled Jack.

Increasingly, as he got nearer the black lake, they were people he knew to be dead. They didn't return his gaze. They seemed to have no idea they were fooling him.

And the loneliness of this was unutterable. He was surrounded by people, but they were all from inside his head. Even if he talked to them – even if he forced them to speak – they couldn't possibly say anything to surprise him. They were him.

He trudged on through the black sand, trying not to look at them.

The lake's water – if it really was water – lapped innocently against the shore when he reached it. It had an oily rainbow-sheen that he hadn't noticed before. In many ways, it was like the sand, glittering with every shade of black it was possible to imagine.

Infinite variety, one drab colour.

That was a phrase Manda was fond of saying whenever she went shopping for her mourning paraphernalia – jet beads, crêpe bows, black hairpins, and those bizarre tear-collecting bottles known as lachrymatories.

He thought it was a quote from one of Lily's letters. Hadn't Manda shown him the passage once? Lily had been talking about the myriad ways to despair – all the bright, attention-grabbing things that might drive you to it – and yet despair itself erased all specifics. It was all one treacle-black, choking thing. Infinite variety, one drab colour.

Trust Manda to take the gloom out of Lily's words and use them to make jokes while she was shopping.

Jack had never wanted to read Lily's letters – or even touch them if he could help it. He felt obscurely as though she'd had some kind of disease. As though she had been consumptive and had spent her last hours coughing over the paper. OK, you probably couldn't catch despair, but if you could, what better way to do it than by reading a desperate person's words? You had to internalize words, didn't you? You had to take them in to decipher them. And then they were in your head.

But that was stupid. He hadn't caught despair from Lily Hamilton, for all the hours he had spent in the damp, unhealthy atmosphere of her room. He had caught it from his own unique combination of circumstances.

And Lily had been born despairing – or anyway, there had been something in her pre-set to go off at a certain time. Jack wasn't like that. He had never thought about killing himself before India. It was like the difference between being constitutionally sickly and catching a bad cold from a night out in the rain. Granted, this cold was proving hard to shake, but he was not like her. God, why was he even thinking about her?

Because, in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on, this lake was like her room.

Only she wasn't there anymore, was she? The atmosphere hadn't been so potent the last time he had visited, and he remembered wondering if it was because her last letter had been read, and her ghost had been exorcized.

But exorcized to where?

In his hand, the axe's light was flickering on and off, as if it was trying to get his attention.

"OK," he said, half to the axe and half to himself. "OK."

He was in a good place anyway, for surviving the atmosphere of Lily's room. He had faced Henry and Baby Jane. He had played the piano again. Did that mean he'd begun to forgive himself? No. Just to look at what was there, and acknowledge it, and cry over it. Not the same thing. Not yet, anyway. The two might converge, given time, but at the moment, the red room was still so fresh in his mind – was still behind him, somewhere, buried under all that sand.

"OK," he said again. "Let's be systematic about this. What would Sergei do?"

Sergei, he had to admit, would not have come on this hopeless errand at all. So Jack asked himself what Alice would have done. It left a nasty taste in his mouth, but it yielded slightly better results.

Searching the shallows was the easy bit. He would wade in, lay the axe down on the silt, and watch it obediently light up to make the water – well, not clear, but at least translucent. In the axe's light, he could make out the shadows that represented solid objects, and he sifted through them, working his way around the edge of the lake, until he ended up back where he'd started. That only took twenty minutes – mainly because there was nothing to see but pebbles and slime.

The worrying part was that, whenever he left the axe unattended – even if he dug its handle into the silt – it started to drift away, as if it was being sucked into the centre of the lake. Jack was no sailor, but he was fairly sure the tides weren't supposed to work that way. Things got washed up on the shore, didn't they, not washed into the depths?

There was no avoiding it. If even a well-secured axe was pulled into the centre of the lake, what chance did a ring have? He would have to search the depths. He wasn't a very strong swimmer, and he was sure he wouldn't be able to see an inch in front of his face down there. He imagined the lake-water – which seemed so unwholesomely thick – clogging up his ears and nostrils.

He took a deep breath and submerged himself, trying to keep his eyes open. They stung as if he'd plunged his head into a bucket of brine, but he could still see. In fact, the water was surprisingly transparent, and somehow... bluer, now that he was under it. The lake was still dark with iron-grey shadows and drifting weeds, but it was permeable to the axe's light, and quite easy to move through.

For the first few seconds, all he could feel was pressure: the pressure of the water against his eardrums, the pressure of that last breath in his lungs.

But, as he drifted down, he became aware that the roar of water in his ears was complicated – modulated. Like a thousand voices woven together into a big wad of incomprehensibility.

At first, it seemed hopeless to disentangle them. They were in different languages, perhaps, or they were just a senseless babble, like someone talking in tongues.

But the longer he spent down there, the more he thought he could understand it. He began to catch individual words – usually negative ones, like 'never', 'not', 'nowhere'.

Finally – after coming up for air and then diving again – the voices became clear to him, though he could never follow a particular speaker or a particular sentence for very long.

Still, he knew what it was, even if he didn't know who was talking. It was despair. Or rather, all the platitudes of despair – all the things you couldn't help thinking when you were feeling low. All the things that couldn't fail to drive you lower.

-wouldn't happen to a normal person-

-everything always works out for her-

-God, what must they think of me? What a pathetic mess I must-

Jack wondered if that was why this place had seemed like Lily Hamilton's room. Was it some kind of primeval well of despair? A sink where all the negative thoughts in the world collected?

He tried to ignore them as he swam on through the shallows, past shelves of pockmarked stone, boulders covered in shaggy growths, strange, rope-like underwater plants that stretched from silt to surface and made him feel as though he was lost in a forest.

The place felt inhabited, for all that he hadn't seen a single fish or sea anemone. At times, he was sure he could see something dark snaking along the rubble, out of the corner of his eye. Were there eels down here? Sea-snakes? He supposed the constant negativity wouldn't bother them, but it was still difficult to imagine anything living down here.

It soon became clear to him that a systematic search of this place would take weeks. All he could do was swim low over the silt, shine the axe's light on it, and look for anything that shone back.

The trouble was, the floor of the lake was alive with sparkles – bright pebbles and bones and blackened metal. There had been some kind of battle here, long ago. He found skeletons and armour, the latter consisting of chain-link mail shirts, which had excited him for a moment, because they looked like hundreds of rings plaited together. But none of them were golden, or encrusted with rubies and seed-pearls like the tacky, tasteless thing he was searching for.

Worse than the skeletons – if anything could be – were the weapons they were, in some cases, still clutching. These were axes of exactly the same shape and design as Jack's, but dead in some way, as if their light was all burnt out.

And he thought: these axes were designed to combat the power of this lake, and they didn't manage it. If hundreds of axes, wielded by hundreds of soldiers, couldn't save themselves, what hope do I have?

But, even as he thought this, it was echoed in his ears by one of the thousand watery voices:

-couldn't do it, what hope would I have?-

-never had a choice. It was all written out for me the day I was bor-

-nothing ever changes-

-might as well just accept it-

-who'd miss me? Who'd care?-

Jack kicked out with his legs and swam to the surface, desperate for air. Every time, it was that little bit harder to clear the surface of the water, as if it had thickened into ice while he'd been under there.

After another ten minutes underwater – which felt like ten days, and probably were ten days back in Oxford – it was starting to affect him. It wasn't just that terrible things occurred to him, but that the water dissolved him. When he had stood on the shore, he'd felt linked to people, through various needs and obligations – cravings for Ellini, responsibilities to Sita. Or just – or just that it was pleasant to think about them. He didn't need Sergei or Manda every moment of the day, but it was pleasant to think about them. It was nice to see them smile.

But, under the water, he didn't just feel these compulsions draining away, he could barely summon them to mind. He couldn't remember what Sergei or Manda looked like. Ellini's face and figure were the faintest of outlines. And all the terrible things that would happen to Sita if he didn't come back were remote, and maybe not that terrible.

When he surfaced – or dragged himself out and sat, shivering, on the shore – these things came flooding back. But what if, next time, they didn't? How much could his mind stretch without snapping? How long would he have to spend down there before he lost it all?

He kept going, sick and shivery as he felt. He dived again, and then again, holding the axe closer all the time. He hoped he was imagining it, but its light seemed to be getting dimmer with every dive.

He was hovering by the bottom, sifting through the rubble, when he felt the tug at his ankle.

At first, it was no more than a tickle. He just assumed he'd got himself tangled in those rope-like water weeds. He kicked out peevishly, unwilling to look up from his task.

But then the tickle tightened, and started pulling him away.

***

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