They had been there... they did not know how long. Quiss had found himself there first, and after a little while, when he realised that there was no night and day, just the one flat, monotone light always there beyond the windows, he had started to keep a tally of the number of times he slept. The record was scratched on the floor of a small cell in a corridor off the games room; his bedroom. There were nearly five hundred scratches on the glass floor now.

Ajayi arrived, seemingly deposited on one of the castle's high, flat, rubble-strewn roofs one night, when Quiss had made eighty-three scratches. They had bumped into each other that "day', and were delighted to find each other. Quiss had been lonely with only the castle's shy and dwarfish attendants for company, and Ajayi was pleased to find somebody who already knew their way round the cold, forbidding stump of rock, iron, glass, slate and paper which was the castle.

It had taken them only a short time to realise they were from opposite sides in the Therapeutic Wars, but it had caused little friction. They had both heard of this place, they both knew why they were here. They both knew what they had to do, and how hard it was going to be to escape; they knew they needed each other.

They had been Promotionaries, on their respective sides of the Wars (which were not, of course, between Good and Evil at all, as non-combatants of every species always assumed, but between Banality and Interest), with great things expected of them once their training and indoctrination was completed; but they had each done something silly, something which called into question their very suitability for exalted rank, and now they were here, in the castle, with a problem to solve and games to play, being given one last chance; a long shot, an unlikely appeal procedure.