“Yes,” said the Sarjeant. “Everything the family does is right, because we’re Droods. Nothing else matters.”

“We’re supposed to protect Humanity, not rule them!”

“Sheep need shepherds,” said the Sarjeant. “And a little culling now and then, to improve the stock.”

I strode right up to him and punched him in the face. But my hand passed straight through him, as though he were only a vision or a ghost. I snatched my hand back, and the Sarjeant looked at me almost sadly.

“Good punch, Edwin. Just like I taught you. But that won’t help you here. You can’t fight us. You can’t stop us. Tell us what we want to know. Tell us all your secrets. It’s the only way you’ll ever be free of this place.”

“You’re not the Sarjeant-at-Arms,” I said. “He’d die before he betrayed a single Drood secret to an outsider.”

“You can’t escape us,” said Walker.

“Yeah?” I said. “Kiss my arse.”

I sprinted past him, up the stairway and onto the next floor. Only the next floor wasn’t there; instead I stumbled to a halt inside the War Room, the nerve centre of the family, where all the really important decisions are made: looking after the hundreds of field agents out in the world, stamping out supernatural brush fires and slapping down the bad guys. Brown-trousering the ungodly, as my uncle James liked to put it. The War Room was usually packed with people at their work, full of sound and fury; but now it was deserted, silent. All the workstations were empty, the computer monitors and the scrying balls left unattended. All the lights were out on the great world map, and all of the clock faces, showing the time in every country in the world, were blank, without hands. Time had stopped here, too.

The work surfaces were layered with frost, and the communication systems were thickly coated with ice. (Part of me wondered where the blue moonlight was coming from to illuminate the War Room, but I’d made a conscious decision to worry only about those things that mattered immediately.) I wrote my name with my fingertip on the frost covering one monitor screen, but I couldn’t feel the cold of the ice.