'Nobody's going to spy on us?' Rosa was asking him.

'I've paid all the guards to go and drink themselves stupid,' he told her. 'We've got four hours before the morning crowd starts to come and gawp. We can do what we like in here.'

She slipped the hood back off her head, and combed her hair out with her fingers so that it lay abundantly about her shoulders. 'Is there a bedroom?' she said.

He smiled. 'Oh yes, there's a bedroom. And a big four-poster bed, all carved out of ice.'

'Take me to it,' she said, catching hold of his hand.

Into the palace they ventured, through the receiving room, which was handsomely appointed with mantelpiece and furniture; through the vast ballroom with its glittering stalactite chandelier; through the dressing room, where there was arranged a wardrobe of coats and hats and shoes, all perfectly carved out of ice.

'It's uncanny,' Jacob said, glancing back towards the front door, 'the way the light refracts.' Though they had ventured deep into the heart of the structure, the glow from the torches set all around the palace was still bright, flickering through the translucent walls. To other eyes it would surely have aroused only wonder; but Jacob was discomfited. Something about the place awoke in him a memory he couldn't name.

'I've been somewhere like this before,' he said to Rosa.

'Another ice-palace?' she said.

'No. A place that's as bright inside as it is out.'

She ruminated on this for a moment. 'Yes. I've seen such a place,' she said. She wandered from his side and ran her palm over the crystalline wall. 'But it wasn't made of ice,' she said. 'I'm sure not...'

'What then?'

She frowned. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Sometimes, when I try to remember things, I lose my way.'

'So do L'

'Why is that?'

'Consorting with Rukenau maybe.'

She spat on the floor at the sound of his name. 'Don't talk about him,' she said.

'But there's a connection, sweet,' Steep said. 'I swear there is.'

'I won't hear you talk about him, Jacob,' she said, and hurried away, her skirts hissing across the icy floor.

He followed her, telling her he'd say no more about Rukenau if it troubled her so much. She was angry now - her rages were always sudden, and sometimes brutal - but he was determined to placate her, as much for his own equilibrium as for hers. Once he had her on the bed, he'd kiss her rage away, easily; open her warm body to the cold air and lick her flesh till she sobbed. Her flesh could stand to be naked here. She complained of the cold, of course, and demanded he buy her furs to keep her from freezing, but it was all a sham. She'd heard other women demand such things from their husbands, and was playing the same petulant game. And just as it seemed to be her wifely duty to pout and stamp and flee him in some invented tantrum, so it was his to pursue and coerce, and end up taking her body - forcibly, if necessary - until she confessed that his only errors were errors of love, and she adored him for them. It was an absurd rigmarole, and they both knew it. But if they were to be husband and wife, then they were to play out the rituals as though they came naturally. And in truth, some portion of them did. This part, for instance; where he caught up to her and held her tight; told her not to be a ninny, or he'd have to fuck her all the harder. She squirmed in his arms, but made no attempt to escape him. Only told him to do his worst, his very worst.

'I'm not afraid of you, Jacob Steep,' she said. 'Nor your fucks.'

'Well, that's good,' he said, lifting her up and carrying her through to the bedroom. The bed itself was in every way a perfect replica of the real thing, even to the dent in the pillow, as though some frigid sleeper had a moment past risen from the spot. He gently laid her there, her hair spread upon the snowy linen, and began to unbutton her. She had forgiven his talk of Rukenau already, it seemed. Forgotten it, perhaps, in her hunger to have Steep's flesh in her, a desire as sudden as her rages, and sometimes just as brutal.

He had bared her breasts, and put his mouth to her nipple, sucking it into the heat of his mouth. She shuddered with pleasure, and pressed his head to the deed, reaching down to pull at his shirt. He was as hard as the bed on which they lay. Eschewing all tenderness, he hoisted up her skirt, found the place beneath where his prick ached to go, and slid his fingers there, whispering in her ear that she was the finest slut in all of Christendom, and deserved to be treated accordingly. She caught his face in her hands and told him to do his worst, at which invitation he removed his fingers and pressed his prick to service, so suddenly her cry of complaint echoed through the glacial halls.

He took his time, as she demanded he did, laying his full weight upon her as he climbed to his discharge. And as he climbed, and her shouts of pleasure came back to him off the ceiling and walls, the feeling that had caught him in the passageway came again: that he had been in a place which this palace, for all its glories, could not approach in splendour.

'So bright- he said, seeing its luminescence in his head.

'What's bright?' Rosa gasped.

'The deeper we go ...' he said '... the brighter it gets ...'

'Look at me!' she demanded. 'Jacob! Look at me!'

He thrust on mechanically, his arousal no longer in service of her pleasure, or even his own, but fuelling the vision. The higher he climbed, the brighter it became; as though the spilling of his seed would bring him into the heart of this glory. The woman was writhing under his ass. cult, but he paid her no mind; just pressed on, and on, as the brightness grew, and with it his hope that he would know this place by and by; name it, comprehend it.

The moment was almost upon him; the blaze of recognition certain. A few more seconds, a few more thrusts into her void, and he'd have his revelation.

Then she was pushing him away from her, pushing his body with all her strength. He held on, determined not to be denied his vision, but she was not going to indulge him. For all her squealing and sobbing, she only ever played at subjugation - the way she played at the lost girl, or the needy wife - and now, wanting him away from her, she had only to use her strength. Almost casually, she threw him out and off her, across the gelid bed. Instead of spilling his seed in the midst of revelation, he discharged meekly, in half-finished spurts, too distracted by her violence to catch the vision that had been upon him.

'You were thinking of Rukenau again!' she yelled, sliding off the bed and tucking her breasts from view. 'I warned you, didn't I? I warned you I'd have no part of it!'

Jacob sealed his eyes, hoping to catch a glimpse of what had just escaped him. He'd been so close, so very close. But it had gone, like a firework dying in the heavens.

And in the dark, the sound of water, splashing down over him. He opened his eyes - and found that he'd slumped down in the shower, while the icy water continued to berate his skull.

'Christ...' he murmured, reaching up feebly and shutting off the flow. Then he lay gasping and shuddering in the draining water. What the hell was happening to him? First dreams within dreams. Now visions within visions? He was either having the mother of all nervous breakdowns, which was an unpalatable thought to say the least, or else - or else what? That Lord Fox was right? Was that even an option? Was it remotely possible that whatever the animal was -symptom or spirit - it was telling him some kind of metaphysical truth, and all that his skull contained was, like a Russian doll, itself contained? Or rather, that his mind's contents, which included his memories of Steep and a bloodysnouted fox, were paradoxically enveloped by some portion of those contents; Steep indoctrinating him with his own mythology, in which that same bloodysnouted fox had been raised to lordship?