The last thing he saw was a nebulous, shield-like bubble rise through the stone like some phantom created by a master of the Art. A corner of it enveloped him just as his head thudded into the wall. Nish roused to the odours of burning cloth and smouldering leather. He lifted his head but it hurt. He was lying on what had been the floor of the lookout, but was now a jumble of cracked and broken slabs collapsed onto the domed ceiling of the secret chamber below. An edge of rough stone dug into his ribs. Nish slid off it onto a flat slab, which proved to be uncomfortably warm. He rolled onto a cooler one and looked straight through the wall. A triangle of stone had fallen out leaving a hole he could have put his head through. He moved and the walls appeared to shift before his eyes. No, the top section of the tower was tilted and was surely going to collapse.

The slab under him was growing hotter. Nish rolled off onto the next without checking it first, and pain seared through his back and buttocks. He pulled himself to his feet and picked his way across the rubble, his boot soles smoking. The floor in the centre was burning hot. The blast had made an inferno of Yggur's secret chambers and the floor could collapse through the dome at any moment. He could feel the stone quivering.

He sprang across to the nearest embrasure, where the floor seemed a little more solid, and began beating at the smoking cuffs of his trousers. A section of cloth the size of a saucer fell out and the skin underneath began to blister. He pressed it against the damp stone, then did the same with his boots until the fumes disappeared.

His calf was really stinging now. Scrambling from slab to slab around the perimeter of the chamber to what looked like a marginally safer position, Nish discovered that seepage had frozen on the inner lip of one embrasure to form grey ice. He broke off a piece and held it to the blistered flesh until the burning eased, though as soon as he took the ice away the pain came back, worse than before.