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is a Greme, from the clan of Matriarch Wellfair, and, though stubborn like all his kind, has learned the Books and has fair mastery of Inkage. We shall begin, as the Law demands, with the Incantatory Preface in the Old Language. Venx Bilhatta, Venx lux Bilhatta, carpen hos …
    A pig’s arse to the Incantatory Preface.
    This second voice cut in so brusquely that Philip was almost pitched headfirst out of dreamland. It was both light and hoarse, like the voice of a child suffering from mild laryngitis. At the same moment, the penmanshipchanged: the flowing diagonals became fast slashes, the elaborate circles and rhomboids were reduced to quick wedges, dashes and curls. The ink writhed on the paper, trying to keep up.
    The poor old darkler will never know what I’m writing anyturn. Long as he hears nibscratch he’ll just keep droning on. All Doom and Gloom it’ll be. Which is square enough, the fluking state we’re in. The fluking state he’s in. Beard-ends full of bits from the floor, and a clump of bleddy moss growing under his lip. His hatstrings dangle in his posset when I can get him to feed, and when I tell him so he just sighs and shakes his head like a fly-naggled goat. He arsebleats like there’s no tomorrow, never mind my sensitive Greme nosehole. Sometimes he’ll sleep two days or more at a stretch, only waking to use his foulpot (which I have to empty, and me a Full Clerk). When he’s awake, it’s gripe and bleddy groan about being stuck here in what he calls ‘Subterranean Exile’ living like a tunnel-fumbler. Comes natural to me, of course. And when I urge him on to cheerfulness, he gets the growls on and tells me I have to learn the Higher Resignation and accept that the Powers have changed their allegiance. And when I say a pig’s arse to all that he’ll put an Ache on me, which I hate, and call me a stubborn Greme like all Gremes. Well, maybe I am and maybe we are.
    The pen raced on; behind it the inkage jostled itself into position.
    Maybe that’s why there’s still some of us left. He blames hisself, is what it is. Broods on Ifs like they were
eggs. If he had expunged Morl from the College when he whiffed what he was up to. If he had entrusted Cadrel with the Four Devices of the Amulet. If he’d twigged the shapeshifter Mellwax. Iffing hisself round in a circle till he meets hisself coming back. Does no bleddy good. Ifs is thorns, as my old Dame used to say.
    So if I let him tell it we’ll never get to the end. He’ll be all Digressions Major and Digressions Minor and Reversed buggering Rhetoric and Footnotes and Pendicles like in the Ledgers and we’ll never get at the meat of the matter. And it’s maybe we don’t have time enough. Morl’s Swelts are everywhere, even here in Farrin. I’ve clocked them overhead, and I can’t be sure the Library Seal will hold, not if they call in bleddy occulators. Listen to him. Still mumbling away in the Old Language. That Preface goes on for seventeen bleddy sheets. Why bother, I asked him, once. I got an Ache for my pains.
    The pen paused and the ink caught up, but the voice continued; and in the depths of his coma Philip understood that it was addressing
him
.
    Now then. What you need is a Layout. Can’t know what happens less you know where you is, as the old Greme saying goes. We’ll project.
    Had Philip been awake, he’d have screamed. He seemed to rise, as if in a rocket-propelled transparent elevator, through rock strata and thick veins of earth, past the mouths of labyrinthine tunnels and burrows, past boulder-grasping roots of mighty trees. Pocket’s voice came with him.
    This is a Greme trick. Even Pellus can’t do this. It naggles him, though he’s too hoity to admit it. Right, here we be.
    Philip experienced a silent bursting forth, and then he passed through a band of glow and came to rest hovering above a vast, impossibly beautiful landscape. It was lit by gently shifting beams of multi-coloured light, as though the sun shone