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Deeper.

The grey gives way suddenly to a different world where the ground is red, as if the Bleeding is in the ground. The red glow is coming up through the stone of the Mortis around me like the sky has been plated into the floor, and the sky where the sky should be is black. Not night-black, the deeper black of nothing at all, of an abyss, of an endless void, and the Mortis itself is here but ruined. There is water everywhere. The lower levels are flooded. The whole building seems to lean. The bone saints in the walls are facing the wrong way, their faces turned to the stone, their bone-backs turned to the hall, a sight more disturbing than you’d think.

The Mire, I hear my grandmother say in the back of my head. The place between.

I am in the Mire.

It is a bad place, her voice echoes, where no living should go.

Too late for that.

The ravens turn down into the school and I follow.

As I come down the staircase, I pause. There are a few figures in the long hall, pale things with broken bodies, waxy skin and white eyes. They are the dregs of the living, The Hollow People, standing or shuffling in no pattern, not aware of me, not even aware of each other. One is facing a wall, staring at nothing.

The ravens stream past them and the Hollows do not turn. I hold my breath as I pass closest to the one at the wall and I see that his jaw is unhinged in a way that would be impossible on a living man. I have the sudden inkling that he could just turn and bite my arm off with a jaw like that.

I keep moving, down the staircase, then down the next one. The water starts at the second landing from the bottom, lapping at the stone, and the ravens dive into it ahead of me and I understand that I have no choice but to go in the water.

The water is not cold or warm. Like the air in this place, if there is even any air, it has no temperature. It is black with the red of the ground glowing up from somewhere far below, and I swim. I am not a strong swimmer despite being raised on an island, but I am buoyant thanks to my breasts and my rear and I kick toward the far side of what was the lower hall of the Mortis, where another staircase rises up out of the water. The ravens are already there, perched along the banister with wet feathers, calling me on.

Then something passes right beneath me.

My heart thuds.

It feels like a pressure wave, the water rising around me, my body lifting an inch, and I can’t help but look down into the water. There is a sheen of pale scales moving under me, long and segmented, lit by the red glow of the ground beneath. The texture is strange, not quite a fish or a snake, something between a giant prawn and an eel, and it has segments. Large segments. The whole creature is longer than the hall is wide, and it keeps moving.

It does not pause, nor does it notice me. Or if it does notice me, I’m not worth stopping for. At least there is some sort of luck on my side here.

I take in a deep breath, trying to steady my nerves best I can, and keep swimming because stopping is not an option. I reach the staircase and drag myself up out of the water onto the steps, shaking so hard my teeth are clicking, and the ravens close around my head and call me on.

Up, they say. You must go up.

So I work my way up to the next landing and I am inside Mortis proper again, dry air, no water, only the red glow in the stone beneath my feet.

Then I look up at the black sky above where the roof of the Mortis has crumbled away and I see a glowing branching discharge of red filaments reaching upward across the void, like a nervous system laid out across the dark. It’s stunning, beautiful, and oh so terrible. The sort of thing I’ve only ever heard sailors describe over red storms at sea.

Then one of its filaments moves.

Not the way a lightning sprite moves. Not the brief flicker of discharge before it disappears, not something that is only the weather. No, this movement is deliberate. One of the filaments bends at a joint I did not know a filament could have, and it raises up and shifts position in the black above me as if a leg is being raised to step, and for a moment I see the base of it where it meets something else above the black, something so much bigger, and then the whole thing goes out.

A red sprite, I say to myself. It was a red sprite. It’s a type of lightning, it’s weather.

I need it to have been a red sprite. My brain cannot comprehend anything more than that.

The ravens pull me on.

We go up another staircase. The next landing has a window that’s tall and arched, built into the Mortis the way the north window of the Midnight Classroom is built, but much larger, and through it, far in the distance, I see another light.

This time the light is warm, gloriously so. Gold at its edges, soft at its center, nothing like the chartreuse of my spell or the red of the sprite. It’s coming from somewhere I cannot reach. Through it I hear the faint sounds of a child laughing, and water babbling, and a woman in a serene voice saying something I can’t make out, and all of it carries a quality I know even if I have no name for the place.

The Fair Country, I think, the islander’s word for heaven and the afterlife.

I would like to go there.

I just won’t be going there today.

And neither will Baz, if I can help it.