Soon it was a dim glow, then a tiny orange-red eye. It waited for him there in the far distance. He was struck again by its naive trust in him. Perhaps that was how Deville had managed to trap it in the first place.

He took a box of matches out of his pocket and tried to light the lanthorn. He wondered if it would light at all. How old was the fuel inside it? But although he burned through four matches before one caught, when it did the lanthorn sputtered, and cleared its throat like an old man, and its light steadied and grew.

The sound of hundreds of tiny feet tore his attention away from the lanthorn, and he barely had time to comprehend what was happening before the snokeys started racing past him. They leapt over his feet and dove through piles of junk. It was as if the tunnel floor had come alive. Apart for the pattering of their feet they were oddly silent. They simply fled. Ward remained frozen to the spot, like someone maintaining his balance in the strong current of a stream. It was soon over. He heard the snokeys patter away up the tunnel until they were out of earshot. None of them had bothered to bite him. He wondered what they were fleeing. He hoped it was just the water. Perhaps they were simply returning to their holes now that the Corpusant was gone.

It took him a while to make his feet move again.

When he reached the water he found it littered with the bodies of drowned snokeys. They would all die sooner or later, he realised, trapped in here with the Corpusant. He felt sorry for them. Snokeys were loathed in Bareheep due to their association with filth and disease, but they did remind Ward of his dore, and no doubt were of similar intelligence. They were certainly sentient.

He could not carry the skull and the lanthorn in the one hand, and wanted a hand free in case he lost his balance in the water. After a moment's thought he removed one of his shoelaces, threading it through one of the skull's eye sockets and out through the other. Then he tied the two ends together and strung this weird necklace over his head. The skull hung against his chest like a war trophy.

He stepped into the water, gasping as it filled his shoes. Then he moved forward, keeping his eyes trained ahead, but his throat constricted as he felt the little bodies swishing around his ankles. He walked faster than was probably safe, until he was clear of the drowned snokeys.

In the distance he could see that the water climbed halfway up to the ceiling of the tunnel. He wondered if the tunnel had sunk in some distant century, or if it had been built this way and the water table had risen. Was the exit submerged then? For all he knew it came out in the Yar. That would explain why it had never been found. But there was no point worrying about that.

He shuffled forward, wondering what was hidden beneath the surface, wondering when he would trip and drop the lanthorn and be plunged into darkness. The piles of junk to each side slipped steadily under the surface as he progressed, and bloated things drifted by like strange vessels. He didn't stop to examine them.

The water was up to his knees now. Then his thighs.

By the time it reached his waist he was shivering uncontrollably and his teeth were clacking. When it reached his chest his arm began to throb from the effort of holding the lanthorn up above the surface; it was rigid like a tree branch, so numb that it seemed not to belong to his body. His shoulder burned. Occasionally his knuckles brushed the bricks of the low, arched ceiling. He could barely feel his legs at all, and his feet seemed encased in concrete. He did not know how much further he could go on.

The water level dropped so imperceptibly, and he was so numb to feeling below his shoulders, that he didn't realise the tunnel was rising again until he looked down and saw that the water was back below his ribcage. He had to inch around another plug, the end of which extended below the waterline, but after that the tunnel rose faster, and in a few minutes he was once more standing on dry ground, dripping water and shivering like a nine. He sneezed, and clear fluid poured out of his nose like water from a tap. There was no way of getting dry. He could take his wet clothes off, but he'd only have to put them on again. At least there was no wind down here. Keep moving: that was what he had to do. Walk. His legs felt like tree stumps, but he willed them to move.

Well he needed a wash.