For most of the preceding hour, the sun had been hidden from view behind the heavy clouds covering the Carnival. Now it slid below the horizon, hardly marked by anyone. Here and there among the jumble of tents and caravans, lanterns were flickering, their already feeble light attenuated by blotched, grimy glass. At irregular intervals, lightning stabbed down from the clouds at a withered patch of grass near the centre of the Carnival, like a beast’s savage attempts to dislodge a parasite, disorientating anybody who was looking that way for a few seconds.

And those seconds were all Varne needed.

High above, Kumba continued to clamber up the spar of the Ferris wheel.

As he paused for breath, his burden stirred. A pair of feet drummed ineffectually against his chest. “What’s going on? Let go of me right now!”

Kumba grunted, and reached for the next handhold. As he pulled himself up, his body swung out over empty space, and the ground far below. The voice and the drumming stopped abruptly. Kumba ignored the silence as he had ignored the noise, and kept climbing.

The voice said, much quieter: “Forget what I just said. Whatever you do, don’t drop me.”

“Here is your order: Kill my father!”

Delilah radiated triumph as Fritz lurched forward toward Gideon—which became puzzled anger as the Fire-Eating Moron continued on past him and away.

“Stop! Where are you going?”

“To obey your order,” Gideon suggested. He hadn’t moved a muscle as Fritz lurched toward him, and didn’t turn now to watch the freak lurch away with gathering speed. “It coincides, I believe, with a desire Fritz has nursed for quite some time, but is far too well-trained to have acted on without permission.”

“But my order was to kill you!”

“I’m sure you thought so. Fritz, however, knows better.”

“I said ‘Kill my father.’ You are my father.”

“No,” said Gideon. “You are my daughter. The other does not necessarily follow.”

“You’re certainly not my mother!”

“Certainly not. Varvara was your mother. There is no doubt that you were Varvara’s daughter. And everything that was Varvara’s is now mine. Everything.” His tombstone smile edged wider. “Assuming that it was only me you wanted dead, hadn’t you better be going after Fritz? It would be a pity if your touching reunion with your father were to be forestalled by a violent death. Don’t you think?”

Dominic, his history muse’s instincts aroused, eyed the music box. “Interesting that it’s the Appalachian version of the ballad,” he said, “and not the English.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Well, for one thing, there’s the ending. In the Appalachian version, Pretty Polly’s ghost hangs around bewailing her fate, with or without rings on the fingers of her lily-white hands depending on the variant. In the English version, she hunts down the man who put her in her grave and slaughters him horribly.”

Her eyes gleamed. “I like that ending much better.”

“Yes,” said Dominic, “somehow I thought you might.”

Ezekiel hit the dirt, stretched full-length in a patch of dead grass—the circle that marked the progress of the eater.

It made short work of him—short but, to judge by the expression on his face, definitely not sweet.

Magnus was not quite sure what happened to that which had its life-force consumed by the eater. As a practical matter, it had never seemed important; the main thing was that once a thing was eaten, it never came back to bother him again.

He found himself wondering now, though. If flattery gets you nowhere, where does gluttony get you?

Cold, gritty sand underfoot. Mysterious constellations shining overhead. The afterlife, in a form many of the denizens of This Time Round would find familiar.

To Gideon Tod, it was… not unfamiliar. He’d studied this afterlife, as he had studied many others. He’d planned for this. He’d planned for everything.

There was a psychopomp who went with this afterlife, he recalled. A tall, dark-robed, grinning figure.

And here indeed was a dark-robed, grinning figure—but a figure unexpectedly feminine, and a grin not fixed and skeletal but full- fleshed and triumphant.

Gideon Tod had not planned for the Daughter of Matai Shang.

Delilah stood surrounded by a grayish mist, strangely dry on her skin. No sky was visible through the murk, but a subdued light seemed to filter through from somewhere far above, casting no shadows beneath her. Thin gray dust shifted under her feet, too fine to be sand.

In the distance, a deep bass howl throbbed with melancholy anger, a heart-deep sadness that had turned to a gloomy fury. There was hunger there, too, and hurt, and a sense of loss.

Impossibly, she thought she recognised it.

In her mind, the memory of fire blossomed, chilling her to the bone.

Death muttered something about hedgehogs into the tabletop, and didn’t move. Albert sniffed.

“I suppose there’s a large bar bill?”

“Oh, no,” said the maitre d’. “The young lady settled up before she left, and there was an advance payment to cover anything else he had afterward.”

“Quite a large advance payment, no doubt,” said Albert. “Most of these mugs held scumble, or my nose is a liar. I expect there was a bit extra to you for the inconvenience, yes? And another bit extra to let him go on drinking a while before you called me to collect him?”

A worried expression put in a belated appearance on the maitre d’s face.

“Not my concern,” Albert assured him. “Not unless it was a trick to get into the House, which it wasn’t, because I was there all day. Funny thing: whatever she’s been up to, nobody can say it was his concern now, either, what with him having been here and off his head the whole time. Convenient, that.” He hoisted Death up. “Come on, sunshine. Let’s get you home.”

Death began to tunelessly aver that it was Albert who was his sunshine, his only sunshine. Albert ignored him.

“This is the Round, remember,” says the Doctor. “Much as we usually try not to think about it, our lives have an audience; our deaths too. You went alone to the Dust, but through you there are others who will remember the people of Irem now. Not as clearly as you, but if enough of them remember, and care…” He shrugs. “I can’t offer a certain solution, only a hope.”

“But one good solid hope,” Adric quotes, “is worth a cartload of certainties.”

“I say, that’s very good,” says the Doctor, tipping the fourth wall a wink. “Who said that?”