Joseph struggled up off the floor, gasping for breath. A string of stuttering shots—katokkatokkatokkatok—went off like firecrackers. More animal shapes were picking their way through the scattered remnants of the fire; he could hear men shouting, then more shots. Several human figures were pushing through the doorway into the smoke-clouded room. To Joseph's blurred eyes there seemed too many, far more than four.

Not right! he wanted to shout but his mouth was burning, his throat constricted. Del Ray crouched trembling beside him, the pistol with its one remaining bullet in his outstretched hand. Joseph couldn't hear him fire it over the noise of the other guns, didn't even see a flash from the muzzle, but two of the dogs fell.

Two with one shot, Joseph marveled, dazed by smoke in his lungs and in his thoughts. Just like you said. How can you do that, Del Ray?

But before he could make sense of it another mutant dog came up out of the smoke and over the wall of desks and mattresses, striking Joseph like a thunderbolt and hurling him back onto the ground. A grunting head shoved up toward his face, dug its hot, wet muzzle into Long Joseph's throat, and took away his air.

Paul Jonas lay at Sam's feet, twitching and moaning like a man who had received a terrible electric shock. Sam herself had only recovered a few moments earlier after her abrupt ejection from the Well, and now she struggled to make sense of what was happening. The weeping angel had flickered and vanished from the air above the Well. The Twins, in the form of Jack Sprat and his wife, were shrieking in wordless fury at her disappearance, snatching up screaming refugees and throwing them into the flaring pit as though that might force her to return. But none of the hapless creatures who fell into the pit came up again and the angel did not reappear.

"Sam Fredericks!" It was Martine's voice. Sam could not see her through the stampede of terrified creatures. She tried to get a grip on Paul's arm to drag him to safety but he was slippery with sweat, writhing like a man in the grip of nightmare. Someone pushed in beside her to help her pull and together they managed to drag Jonas back from the worst of the crush, to a spot on the very edge. After the lunatic events of the last minutes Sam was only mildly surprised to discover that her helper was Felix Jongleur.

"We must get away from this," he snapped. "I have no control over this version of Finney and Mudd. Where are your friends?"

Sam shook her head. It seemed impossible to locate anyone in the chaos; it was all she could do to stand her ground and protect Paul from being trampled by maddened milkmaids and panicked dwarfs.

"Fredericks!" Martine was shouting for her again, but this time Sam spotted her a dozen meters farther down the shoreline, crowded with several others along a dip in the rim that seemed only a handspan above the surface of the Well. Sam bent and grabbed Paul under the arms, straining to lift his upper body. His head lolled but his eyes were open, staring at the sky. Jongleur took his feet and they half-carried, half-dragged him toward the spot where Martine and the others huddled, temporarily out of the worst of the chaos.

Paul Jonas' face swung toward her. For a moment his eyes appeared to focus.

"Tell him to turn off the window. . . ." he said urgently, as though it meant something sane and useful, then his eyes rolled up and his words fell away again into murmuring nonsense.

They made it a dozen awkward steps before something grabbed Sam's ankle and dragged her to the ground.

"Bring back the princess!" a voice hissed behind her. She tried to crawl forward but the grip on her leg was painful and strong; it flipped her on her back as though she were a rag. "We want the princess!" demanded Jack Sprat and shook something at her. It was another victim—a small, bulge-eyed man dressed in green, dangling by the neck from the monster's other hand. Jack Sprat leaned closer, blind face as grainy as old, white wood. So frightened she could not take in enough breath to scream, Sam kicked, but could not dislodge the twining fingers. The tree-tall creature yanked her into the air and dangled her upside down, then his attention wandered to the struggling, green-clad man. He squeezed the prisoner's neck in a gentle, almost experimental way, watching with interest as the little man's struggles first sped, then slowed.

"The blade!" shouted Felix Jongleur. "Give me the sword!"

Sam could only wonder why the old man had remembered the broken sword but she hadn't. She fumbled it out of her belt and let it drop to the ground. Jongleur snatched it up with such a look of triumph that for a moment Sam could only curse her own stupidity.

That's the last I'll see of him. . . . she thought, her head roaring and aching as she swung like a pendulum two meters above the ground. But Jongleur surprised her by leaping forward to hack hard at the twiggy hand pinioning her ankle. Still fascinated by the death throes of its other prisoner, Jack Sprat scarcely even seemed to notice what Jongleur had done, but his fingers popped and parted; Sam fell to the ground so hard it took her a moment to know which way was up.

"Hurry!" Jongleur shouted. "Help me with Jonas!"

Reeling, Sam climbed to her feet. They lifted Paul and stumbled to the edge of the well, shoving their way between yelping, sobbing refugees. Hands reached up from the low spot along the shoreline and helped Paul down, then Sam too was assisted over the edge and onto a narrow shelf scarcely three paces wide and a dozen paces long, the whole thing only a few meters below the rim of the pit and less distance than that above the glimmering surface of the Well. Jongleur climbed down after her and crouched beside her on the ledge, panting, ignoring startled or even hostile glances from the others.

Martine, Florimel, T4b, even Mrs. Simpkins and Nandi were already crammed along the ledge with chittering Wicked Tribe monkeys perched on several of them. The strange boy named Cho-Cho huddled beside Martine, his back against the gray earth, eyes wide with terror.

"Do we just wait here until they find us?" Bonnie Mae Simpkins demanded in a breathless whisper.

"What are those things?" said Florimel. "Where did such monsters come from?"

Nandi Paradivash looked down at where Paul lay beside Sam's feet, still locked in some miserable dream. "They are copies of the real Twins—the men who have followed Jonas through the network. Apparently there are many of these duplicate versions, all obsessed with Jongleur's daughter, but usually harmless. Dread has control of the system, even though for the moment the Other is keeping him at bay. Apparently he has found a way to mutate these copies."

"But why?" Florimel demanded. She flinched as a long, choking scream cut through the already terrible noises above them, then plucked a nervously fidgeting monkey off her forehead and deposited it back on her shoulder. "He cannot destroy the operating system this way—all he is doing is killing the children! Is he simply mad?"

"He wants us to give up," Martine said in a slow, dead voice. "He wants us to surrender, to save the children."

"But even if we did they'd never survive." Sam waved her hands, trying to get the others to listen. "He's killing the what-do-you-call-it—the operating system! They'll all die anyway!"

"Perhaps . . . perhaps Dread is being more clever than we give him credit for." Martine sounded frighteningly hollow, as if she no longer cared about anything. That scared Sam badly. "He was clearly startled and very angry to find that the Other was still resisting him, but it he destroys it completely, he loses control of the network. Maybe he is not really expecting to lure us out. Maybe by doing this terrible thing to these children the Other is protecting, he is trying to drive the operating system insane."