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.'

Her words seemed to find an echo in Rukenau, because as she spoke, tears came. 'What did I do to you?' he said. 'Oh Lord.' He closed his eyes, and the tears ran.

'I don't know what you did,' Rosa said. 'I only want an end to it.'

'Then go to him,' Rukenau said. 'Go to Jacob and heal yourself.'

'What are you saying?'

Rukenau opened his eyes again. 'That you're two halves of the same soul,' he said. She shook her head, not comprehending. 'You trusted me, you see; said I was better company than you'd had in two hundred years.' He looked away from her, and stared at the bright air above his head. 'And once I had your trust I put you to sleep, and I spoke my liturgies, and undid the sweet syzygy of your being. Oh I was so proud of myself, playing God that way. Male and female madeth He.'

Rosa let out a low moan. 'Jacob's a part of me?' she said.

'And you of him,' Rukenau murmured. 'Go to him, and heal both of your spirits before he does more harm than even he can calculate.'

There was a man squatting in the passageway ahead of Will, his hands clamped over his eyes so as to shut out the vision rising around him. It was Ted, of course.

'What the hell are you doing down there?' Will and the fox said to him.

He didn't dare unstop his eyes; at least until Will demanded he do so. 'There's nothing to be afraid of, Ted,' he said.

'Are you joking?' the man replied, uncovering his eyes long enough to confirm that he was talking to Will. 'The place is coming down on our heads, for God's sake.'

'Then you'd better find Diane pretty damn quick,' Will said. 'And you're not going to do it sitting on your arse. Get up and get moving, for God's sake.' Shamed into action, Ted got to his feet, but kept his eyes half closed. Even so, he couldn't help flinch at the sights that were surging from the walls.

'What is all this?' he sobbed.

'No talking!' Will said, knowing Steep was closing on them, stride for stride. 'Just get moving.'

Even if they'd had the time to debate the visions brimming about them, Will doubted there was any explanation for them that fell within their frame of knowledge. The Nilotic had built a house of numinosities; that was all Will knew. The means by which it had done so was beyond his grasp; nor finally, was it important to know. It was the work of a sublime being, that was all that mattered; a holy mason whose labour had created a temple such as no priest had ever consecrated. If Will's eyes ever distinguished the patterns moving around him, he knew what he would see: the glory of creation. The tiger and the dung-beetle, the gnat's wing and the waterfall. It was perhaps, not the House that smeared their particularities, but his brain, which would have perished from the sheer excess of all that these swelling clouds of life contained, had he seen them precisely.

'This ... is such ... a glorious ... madness...' he gasped as he moved on with Ted, towards the source. And from that insanity a figure now emerged; a woman with a branch in one hand, heavy with figs, and in the other, clutched tightly, a fat salmon thrashing and glistening as though it had moments before been snatched from a river.

'Diane?' Ted said.

It was she. And seeing her ragged, tear-stained husband the woman dropped her bounty and went to him, opening her arms. 'Ted?' she said, as though she didn't quite believe what she was seeing. 'Is it you?'

She might in other circumstances have been quite a plain woman. But the light loved her. It clung to her weight as her sodden clothes clung; it ran over her full breasts, it played around her groin and lips and eyes. No wonder she'd been seduced by the place, Will thought. It had made her radiant, glorifying her substance without cavil or complaint. She was impermanent, of course; no less than the fish or the figs. But in the space between birth and dissolution, this life called Diane, she was made marvellous.

Ted was a little afraid to put his arms around her. He held back, puzzling out what he was seeing.

'Are you my wife?' he said.

'Yes, I'm your wife,' she said, plainly amused.

'Will you come with me, out of here?' he asked her.She glanced back the way she'd come. 'Are you leaving?' she said.'We all are,' Ted replied.She nodded. 'I suppose ... yes ... I'll come with you,' she said, 'if you want me to.''Oh-' he caught hold of her hand. 'Oh God, Diane.' Now he embraced her. 'Thank you. Thank you-

We'd better move, the fox murmured in Will's head, Steep's not far behind.'I have to go,' he said to Ted, slapping him on the back as he moved on past the couple.

'Don't go any further,' Diane said to him. 'You'll get lost,'