Luminous fish lived in the salt water. They swam like long rubbery strip-lights through the water's gentle currents, and kept the rooms, corridors and towers of the castle bathed in a silky, pervasive light which sometimes made distances hard to measure and gave the air a thick sort of look. When Ajayi had first arrived the games room had been just right, held at a pleasant temperature by the warm fluid circulating above and below, and enjoyably light as well, thanks to the fish. The odd system had seemed to work.

But now there was something wrong, and most of the fish had retreated to the castle's still warm lower levels. The castle's black-cloaked seneschal had scowled darkly on the previous occasions when Quiss had tracked him down in the kitchens and asked him what was going on and what he intended to do about it; he made dour excuses and talked of the corrosive effects of salt water and what a mess it made of his pipes and anyway materials were very hard to come by these days - What days? Quiss had exploded. There was only one day, wasn't there, or did they have days here but they were just very long? The seneschal had gone quiet at that and sunk his thin grey face back into his hooded cape, while the huge human stood glaring at him, quivering with impotent rage.

Time was another problem in the Castle Doors. It went quicker the closer you were to a clock. The further away from a time-piece you were, the more it not only seemed to but did drag. The clocks in the castle were immovable, and erratic too, going sometimes faster, sometimes slower. There was one great clock mechanism buried deep in the warmer depths of the place, some vast assemblage of gears and creaking cogs which powered all the clock faces in the ramshackle shell of the castle. Rotating shafts buried in the walls transmitted the energy from the central machinery to the faces, and rumbled in some places, squeaked in others, and leaked oil ubiquitously.