They must be inside, he thought, feeling a glimmer of hope.

He shook the skull with both hands. Nothing rattled inside it. He tilted it, allowing the Corpusant's light to penetrate the cavity, peering in. Nothing. The skull was empty.

Where are they?

The skull was brown with age, and looked as if it had been burned. Its surface did look remarkably like that of the dice, now that he thought about it. He had never stopped to wonder what kind of bone the dice were made from – the bones of some animal or other, he would have assumed.

(What art thou doing?)

"Just looking at something."

(What is it?)

"Can't you see it?"

('Tis obscured to me.)

Interesting.

"Just some old piece of junk," Ward said. He picked up the lanthorn again, then turned and continued up the tunnel, clasping the skull to his belly with one hand, the lanthorn swinging from the other.

For a moment the Corpusant's light remained where Ward had found the skull, as if it was scanning the rubbish. Then it followed.

Ward wasn't going to tell the Corpusant anything until he was sure the skull worked the way the dice did. He felt it should work. There had been that jolt of recognition when he touched it. There was power there – even more power than the dice had. Was it because there was more of it? More bone? All this time he had thought it was the dice that were special, but what if it was the bone itself?

Corvus called them the Devil's Bones, he remembered.

The Devil's Bones. Devil's Island. Deville's Island.

A light went on in his head.

Deville's Bones.

Was this the skull of Jean Deville, the man who had trapped the Corpusant for King Sol, and vanished soon afterwards – the man who, like Ward, had travelled between worlds? King Sol had killed him. Burned him no doubt, like all the others. Then had dice made out of Deville's bones. Oh he had been mad all right.

Ward glanced back at the Corpusant, and it shimmered for a second in the air. Then he looked ahead at the seething mass of snokeys. He had no idea how much further the tunnel went. He had to try to make the skull work, and he had to do it without the Corpusant knowing.

Keep walking.

He held the skull up before his face and looked into the empty eye sockets

He had already decided which symbols would take him back to the Cathedral. More out of instinct than any rational thought process, he had settled on the Anchor and the Ape. The Anchor was obvious enough. When he drilled down through a few levels of meaning, it meant security. The Ape usually meant evil, malice, mockery. However, deeper down, it also meant craftiness. Security and craftiness. That was what the Scowerers mean to him.

Now, as he looked into the skull's eyes, he held the Anchor and the Ape in his mind. He didn't need to close his eyes to see them: their images were already imprinted there. Burned in. He could see those rude etchings as clearly as he could see the tunnel before him. But it was not an easy thing to do, to hold them both there, as if weighing the symbols in each hand, balancing them. He had to disconnect his mind from the gear that drove his everyday thoughts and connect it to one he only used when he was dreaming. It was a kind of unseeing seeing, an unthinking thought. Carmen would have recognised it: it was the same trance-state she went into when she held the barking iron in her hand. And it was something that got easier with practice.

But it was not working now.

Parker Brothers plan to release a Special Limited Edition Monopoly set with dice made out of 500 year old dead sorcerer's bones. True story.*

*May not be true.