'We have to go and find Rukenau,' Rosa said, her thin fingers digging into Frannie's shoulder. She reached up and touched Frannie's face. 'Are you looking at the world?' she said.
'Is that what this is?'
'This is the Domus Mundi,' Rosa reminded her. 'And whatever you're seeing now, there's far finer to see. Now come on, I need your strength a little while longer.'
She didn't need to be carried any more; she had clearly gained some measure of vigour from being in the House. But her sight was not restored, and she needed Frannie to lead her, which Frannie was happy to do. By the time they had crossed the first chamber into the room beside it, the message of rebellion had overtaken them. A dry rain of soil particles started to fall upon them as cracks opened in the vaulted ceiling; and the room was already brighter than the space they'd left, the blaze flickering from fissures on every side. There were sounds rising to accompany the spectacle; though like the first hints of sight they were at present undifferentiated, a murmur from which now and then a more specific noise would come. An elephant trumpeting, perhaps; a whale making song; a monkey howling in a churning tree
But Rosa heard something closer to her heart.
'That was Steep,' she said.
There was indeed a human voice, afloat in the brimming sea of sounds. Rosa picked up her pace, the same word coming with every breath:
'Jacob. Jacob. Jacob. Jacob.'
Will couldn't see what was happening between Rukenau and Steep they were too far from him, their struggle obscured by the ropes - but he saw the consequences. The structure, for all its complexity, had not been built to withstand the struggle now going on in its midst. Ropes were being pulled from their roots in the wall, bringing clods of dead earth with them. Light and motion were coming in their stead, illuminating the spreading collapse. Places where the burden of furniture was the heaviest were the first to go. A table came crashing down, claiming two of the more substantial platforms as it fell, delivering them all in splinters to the shaking ground. There were fissures here too, and shafts of roiling brightness coming to swell the sum of light. More than light, life. That was what Will saw in the swathe of unfurling colour: the throb and shimmer of living things.
As the ropes and platforms continued to fall, he had sight of Jacob and Rukenau. They looked, he thought, like something Thomas Simeon might have painted: two spirits engaged in a life-and-death struggle on the shaking heights. Rukenau was by no means accepting his fate. He was using his ease amongst his perches to keep his body out of Steep's way. But Jacob wasn't going to be denied his quarry. Without warning he dropped to his knees and caught hold of the precarious lace of rope on which they swayed, and shook it so hard that Rukenau pitched forwards. Will saw Jacob's knifehand rise up to meet the other man's chest, and though he couldn't see the weapon Will knew by the shriek escaping Rukenau's lips that the blade had found its home. Rukenau started to topple; but as he did so caught hold of his executioner, so that they both fell, locked together, dividing the mesh with their combined weight as they hurtled to the ground.
The House shook. Rosa stopped in her tracks, and uttered a little sob. 'Oh now...' she breathed. 'What have you done?'
'What's happened?' Frannie said.
She got no answer, but she no longer needed Rosa to locate Steep, because she heard him for herself, his voice unmistakable.
'Finished now, are you?' he was saying, 'are you finished?'
Rosa was stumbling ahead of Frannie, who followed her through a narrow door into a rubbish-filled passageway. Several times Rosa fell as she scrambled towards her destination, but she was up the instant after, and out of the passageway now, with Frannie on her heels, into Rukenau's chaotic chamber.
Will caught a motion out of the corner of his eye, and was vaguely aware that somebody had entered, but he could not unglue his gaze from the sight on the ground long enough to see who it was.
Jacob had got to his feet, and was tearing at the ropes that had caught about him as he fell. Rukenau had no hope of rising ever again, however. Though he was still alive, his body twitching, Jacob's knife was buried in the man's body, and blood was coming from the wound in copious amounts. His filthy shirt and waistcoat were already completely soaked, and the blood was now pooling around him.
Will was still outside Jacob's field of vision, but he knew he would not remain so for very long. Once the Nilotic looked his way, it would come and finish its threatened work. Though it was hard to look away, he turned his back and slipped off, choosing as his means of exit the door through which Ted had disappeared in pursuit of his wife. Only once he reached it did he think to look back across the chamber at those who'd lately entered, and there saw both Frannie and Rosa. Neither had eyes for him. Both were looking at Rukenau's cavorting body.
Jacob had finally tired of that same sight, however, and looking up, turned his eyes on Will. Very slowly, he shook his head as if to say: did you think you could escape me? Will didn't wait for the creature to start in pursuit of him. He ran.
The same process of revolution was underway in every room as had begun in Rukenau's chamber, the walls stripped of the concealing filth, the life beneath spilling into view. But there was something more startling still, Will realized. The walls, for all that they contained, were not solid. He could see to the left and right of him into rooms he'd never visited; rooms to which the same message of liberation had come, and the House making its glories known. No wonder Jacob had trembled with remembrance in Eropkin's ice-palace; this was what he'd dimly recalled in that frigid bedroom. A site of exquisite lucidity, of which the palace, for all its glory, was but a remote echo.
Ahead of him now, the place to which Rukenau had superstitiously referred when speaking of how Ted's wife had been lost. Seeing it in front of him, the source, the heart, he felt as he had on Spruce Street to the hundredth power. News of the world coming to him in all its abundance, like a blaze of light between dividing clouds, climbing in fierceness as the vapours melt away. Soon, he would be blinded, surely. But so be it. He would look until his eyes gave out; listen till his ears could take no more.
From somewhere behind him he heard the Nilotic calling for him. 'Why are you running?' Jacob said to him. 'There's nowhere you can hide.'
It was true. Any chance of escaping detection was denied him now. But that was an insignificant price to pay for the bliss of moving through this marvellous place. He glanced behind him, to find that Steep was no more than twenty yards away. It seemed to Will he could see the Nilotic's form moving in the man, as though Steep's addled flesh had caught the fever of revolution, and was resigning its concealments.
His own body was doing the same thing, he thought; he could feel the fox in him, vulpes vulpes, rising as the hunt quickened. A last, primal transformation as he fled into the fire. And why not? The world made miracles like this every moment of every day: egg into chick, seed into flower, maggot into fly. Now man into fox? Was that possible?
Oh yes, said the House of the World. Yes, and yes, and always yes
Rosa had halted a little way from Rukenau, and waited until his thrashing subsided. Now it had. Now he lay still, except for his gasping chest, and his eyes, which went to the woman, and fixed on her as well as they were able.
'Stay ... away ... from ... me...' he said.
Rosa took his demand as her cue to approach, halting a yard from him. It seemed he was afraid she intended him harm, because he used what little strength he had to haul his hand up to shield his face. She didn't try to touch him however. 'Such a very long time,' she said, 'since I was here. But it doesn't seem more than a year or two. Is that because we're at the end of things? I think maybe it is. We're at the end, and nothing that went before seems of any consequence.'