The bouncer spun as if to grab Quill. Quill jumped away from him. Sefton and Costain ran for the stairs. Sefton had the feeling that Quill had started running at that moment too.
Ahead of them was a mass of people falling over each other to get upstairs. They were going to have to push their way through. Sefton glimpsed Ross up ahead, shoving to stay out of the crowd as it tried to take her with it.
Something grabbed Sefton from behind and threw him backwards. He was aware, in that second, of the same thing happening to Costain.
Barry and Terry Keel stood over them, Barry in front of Terry. He made a complicated gesture and suddenly something bright was burning in his hand. The bar was emptying. Sefton couldn’t see where his colleagues had gone. He hoped they’d got out. He scrambled backwards and managed to get to his feet. Costain did the same, putting the length of the room between himself and the Keels. The bouncer moved to join the brothers, flexing its fingers once more. Sefton remembered it had been ordered to rip them apart.
Barry Keel drew back his hand, ready to throw his fire.
Sefton had a sudden thought. Just playground stuff: rock, paper, scissors. They had fire but he had-
He grabbed the freezing phial from his pocket. At the instant Barry Keel threw his heat, Sefton threw what he only thought of as pure cold.
Sefton didn’t understand what happened next. He was somehow in the air. Heat was all around. He was breathing in heat. Then suddenly a wall came flying up behind him and it was going to hit him so hard-
* * *
Someone was yelling at him.
Sefton opened his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. The weight on his chest. There was nothing on his chest! No, no, he could breathe, just little breaths. Control it. Just little breaths. What was he looking at? He was looking at the tweedy man who’d been sitting by the stairs leading downwards. The tweedy man was walking quickly down those same stairs, which, a moment later, vanished, leaving a smooth wooden floor.
Oh. What was this stuff all over him? He looked down. That was … silver goo. But now it wasn’t cold. It was sizzling, evaporating. There were gold bits too, streamers of them. Amongst it … the remains of a bouncer’s bow tie.
The bouncer had exploded. Why had the bouncer exploded?
There was a smell of smoke. It was everywhere. There was heat, there was fire … all around him there was fire.
‘Kev!’ That’s who was yelling at him, that was Quill’s voice. ‘Kev, don’t move!’
He slowly got to his feet. His head was ringing. His body ached everywhere. He took a step forward …
With a yell, Costain grabbed him and hauled him back, inches from a dirty great hole in the floor of the bar. A chasm. On the other side of it were Quill and Ross, and there was …
A pile of ashes. A pile of ashes and bones with fragments of a leather coat. The remains of Barry Keel.
He’d done that. He’d had the offhand thought that the cold of the silver he’d thrown would somehow counteract the heat of what Keel was about to throw. But he’d been wrong. He’d been horribly, horribly wrong. What if the silver goo was like … fuel? Something you could store to make the power of London work if you didn’t want to keep on making hand gestures, something that could keep things in place without continual work. The remains of the bouncer, which he was now covered with, were full of it. Presumably the killer they were looking for ran on it, was leaking it.
If that was the case, then Barry Keel had used one of his gestures to call up destructive fire into his hand, and Sefton had literally thrown petrol onto it. The resulting explosion, which had killed Keel, had made the bouncer combust too. Sefton could only hope that, since it had been made of something other than flesh, it couldn’t actually be called a person, that he wasn’t responsible for two deaths tonight.
That felt too big to cope with right now. He put it aside and let himself deal instead with his current situation.
He was standing on the edge of an abyss. The floor of the bar had largely vanished. All that remained of it, apart from the corner where they stood, were … scraps … not the jutting planks and disintegrating concrete you might expect, but ragged edges of wood, sticking out into space from the walls. A couple of narrow ragged strips of carpet still lay, impossibly, across the gap. It was like the aftermath not of a real-world explosion, but of something that had happened in a video game. Sefton supposed that this floor of the bar hadn’t been made of real-world materials any more than the bouncer had been, that they’d disintegrated for the same reason. What Sefton assumed had been lower floors were gone completely. He could only imagine that the gatekeeper he’d seen walking calmly down into them had … somehow taken them away with him. Those thoughts was pushed immediately from his mind by what he saw down there in the void.
What had been revealed beneath it all was wondrous, horrifying, something of passion, not some part of a game designer’s pixelated imagination.
He was looking into a pit of absolute darkness, at the bottom of which … Sefton’s eyes struggled to understand it. Even with the Sight, it was difficult. He dropped to his knees, half to take a closer look, half in awe. He was aware that, beside him, Costain was looking downwards too.
It was a contortion of twisting silver, like the aurora borealis. It was a river of silver, and Sefton instantly understood that this was the same silver as at the Ripper crime scenes, the same silver that was covering him. It shone. The silver was dotted with tiny golden lights, and now Sefton looked closer he could see that they were threads, golden traceries that were spun all through the silver, as they were through the remains of the bouncer. The whole ribbon flexed in silence. He could feel an enormous coldness radiating from it. If he and Costain fell, they would fall into it, and the cold alone would be enough to destroy them. He glanced up at Costain. ‘Can you see…?’
‘Yeah.’ His voice held as much wonder as Sefton had ever heard from Costain.
Sefton sniffed. A smell was rising from the river of silver. It was very subtle. You’d need that much of this stuff together in order for the smell to register at all. It reminded him of … something very old, something ungraspable, always just out of reach, as one’s own earliest experiences were out of reach. It was immensely beautiful, epic, touching him in ways familiar and grand that made him immediately love it. He wondered if Costain felt the same way about what he was seeing. You could just as easily fear this thing. It was outside their time and space, maybe in an ‘outer borough’ like the London of Brutus that he’d visited had been. It was … what was underneath everything, where the power was, the source, the great river. The void it was in … He wondered if this is what they would have seen if, when they’d been in the tunnels Losley had made between all her different houses, they’d knocked a hole in the wall. This void was what everything was sitting in, the bigger cosmos, again outside normal time and space.
Beside his foot, a bit of floor detached itself and fell away into that darkness.
Costain suddenly grabbed him and wrenched him to his feet, dragging him back from the brink.
Sefton gasped. He’d been … kind of transfixed by this thing. He made himself wake up and looked to the room again. The dirty great hole in the middle of the floor had slowly started to increase in size, the floor crumbling away into it on the other side too, the paths across the middle getting thinner by the second. Quill and Ross were stepping back from their edge.
‘What happened to the other Keel brother?’ Costain yelled to them.
‘Escaped,’ called Quill, moving away as another bit of floor dropped away. ‘You two get over here! Now!’
Sefton forced himself not to hesitate, ignored the tightness in his lungs, the bruises and the injuries, and stepped quickly out onto one of the strips of carpet that lay across the gap, didn’t think of what was below, aware the floor might give way under him at any moment. He clung to the thought of Joe, of getting home to him. Costain had taken the other strip of carpet, moving quickly beside him.