It was as he opened the door to the room where he had been tortured that he sensed the dice for the first time. They flashed faintly across his mind, like a faraway beacon over the sea. They lay somewhere ahead and below of where he stood. Although he had told Carmen they were close by, he actually couldn't tell how far away they were. And something lay between the dice and himself – something he should have been afraid of. But he was not afraid. The dice pushed all else from his mind.

Nothing but the dice could have brought him through that place. The part of his brain that told every nerve in his body to flee seemed to switch itself off, and he floated across the room as if in a trance, his eyes set on the door on the far wall, and only the door. The terrible chair glowered at him from the edge of his vision, growing in his mind until its strange high back touched the ceiling. But he never looked at it.

The door.

He had barely registered it when he was last here, and it hadn't occurred to him until now that it might be the door they sought – he hadn't even remembered it until now.

He swung it open and looked into the room beyond.

It should have been as black as the inside of a mountain, but it was lit by a warm glow that seemed to emanate from everywhere, as if the walls and the ceiling and the floor were membranous and outside raged the fires of Eden. The floor was concealed beneath a blanket of white-grey ash from which bones poked out like twigs. He wondered how many dead people lay there. Hundreds probably. Thousands. There wasn't much ash on the floor just inside the doorway: it was as if it had been swept forward, though he saw no signs of sweeping.

Every visible surface of the room was leaden. Ward knew four things about this metal: that it was poisonous, weighty, soft, and melted easily. It made no sense then that this was a crematorium, for the metal would not have been able to withstand the heat of the furnace. Or did the cremation take place elsewhere? After all, he could see nothing that looked like a furnace. The only other things in the room were the chair, and the woman seated in it.

A thick lead collar secured the woman's neck to the chair's high back. A wide band of the same metal crossed her chest, pinning her arms to her side and forcing her hands into her lap, which were secured together with leaden manacles. Her ankles were secured in the same way to the front legs of the chair, which Ward guessed was bolted to the floor, though the chair's feet were buried in ash. He could see no door at the other end of the room. If there was one, it was blocked by the seated woman.

Her head was bowed. Her archon-black hair pooled upon her bare shoulders. Her face, downcast as it was, revealed itself from between the curtains of hair as no more than a nose, a pair of long black eyelashes, black eyebrows, and a smooth coffee-coloured forehead. She wore no clothes. Ward felt his face grow hot.

"What's in there?" Carmen whispered from behind him.

Instead of trying to explain, he crawled through the doorway and stood up, then sidestepped to let her through. He heard her make a strange, surprised sound.

The woman's head had not risen, and it seemed she hadn't noticed them. Was she deaf? Surely she would have heard the door opening? Or was she dead? She was certainly keeping very still.

Carmen watched the woman intently, her mouth half open. Ward knew what she was thinking. This was the Guardian? How could it be? Or was she a prisoner left here by the Brothers – a human sacrifice for some as-yet-unseen horror?

"Talk to her," Carmen whispered.

Ward gulped. "You do it."

"What're you afraid of?" she said, a defiant note in her voice.

"Nothing."

"She won't hurt you." But even as she said it Ward heard the doubt in her voice.

He was stung by Carmen's words, and without thinking he took a deep breath and stepped towards the woman. Just one step, but it seemed to him that it was this rather than the hesitant "hello?" that he followed it with that drew her attention – as if he had stepped across some invisible threshold within the room beyond which she became conscious of his presence. He realised faintly that he had stepped into the ash. It was soft underfoot. He touched what looked like a human jawbone with his toe and it crumbled into white ash, as if it had never been.

The woman's head rose and her hair fell away from her face.

Please mail complaints about this chapter to my dog.