Transition

At the Final Terminus, the station – seemingly made entirely of dinosaur bones – where the guests were deposited, a wide moat had been dug across the park in front of the entrance to the University’s Great Hall. Beneath the water lay a system of pipes which fed marsh gases and flammable oils to the surface, where they were lit or detonated by floating bundles of burning rags containing clockwork mechanisms that made them jerk and move and appear briefly human.

Guests proceeded across a bridge bowed out across this waste of sporadic conflagration and entered the Great Hall through a recently constructed ill-lit tu

The great iron doors behind swung shut on each batch of two dozen or so guests, leaving them looking nervously round, unable to see a way out. Streamers of fire appeared twenty metres above them, all around the top of the vast bowl they found themselves trapped within, while the small bridge that had led them from the tu

The burning oils quickly covered most of the bowl’s curtain wall and started to pool on the surface of the water at the foot, spreading slowly towards the low island of dry stone in the middle where the now-fearful group of guests huddled, begi

Just when the guests could feel the heat from the wall of flame around them starting to become uncomfortable and were genuinely begi

Servants dressed as ghosts and the risen dead – a few of them equipped with fire extinguishers, just in case – beckoned the by now usually highly relieved and indeed cheering partygoers over the stone bridge and into the throat of another dark tu

A short walk away down a corridor lined with skulls gleaned from catacombs across the continent another only slightly smaller hall held a collection of circular drink, food, drug and smoking bars around which people milled like magnetic particles ricocheting within some colossal game. Further away, up some wide steps turned into an uphill slalom slope by dense wavy lines of antique funeral urns, the way led to the great circular space underneath the Dome of the Mists itself.

This space too had been waterproofed and filled with a little artificial sea a metre deep; a circular lake over a hundred metres across was covered with fragrant floating plants and dotted with tiny islands covered in food and tinkling fountains of wine. Skiffs, rowing boats and barges rowed by exotically uniformed children plied the placid waters while, above, tumbling and high-wire acts were performed, surrounded by make-believe shooting stars composed of great fireworks raining sparks and ru

A porcelain coracle rowed by a preposterously dressed dwarf bumped very gently into the rushes-bundle fenders lining the wooden quay near the hall’s entrance. The miniature man toked on a tube sticking out from a frill on one of his sparkling concentric collars. “Mr Oh?” he asked in a helium-high voice.

“Good evening.”

“Madame d’Ortolan awaits, sir.” He nodded at the other man’s shoes. “Boat’s a bit delicate, squire. You’ll have to take those off.” Oh undid his shoes. He had dressed conservatively in his old Speditionary Faculty dress uniform, having no particular intention of joining in the ball and – slightly to his own surprise – no desire to dress in a fancy costume. “You can leave them with the quay master, sir,” the dwarf said when Oh went to take his shoes with him. “You won’t be needing them on the barge.”

Oh handed his shoes to the cadaverously dressed man in charge of the little pier. He stepped carefully into the fur-lined interior of the bizarrely fragile craft. The ceramic hull was so thin that, where the furs did not cover it, you could see the shadow of the waters lapping around its waterline from inside. The dwarf took a breath from a different tube and said in an unfeasibly deep voice, “Off we go, sir. Please do sit still and don’t touch the sides.”

Oh sat patiently where he was, legs and arms crossed, and let the dwarf row him slowly out over the gently chopping water towards the most extravagantly decorated vessel on the whole lake. It was made of ice and glided unhurriedly across the waves in its own surrounding skirt of curling mists. It was sculpted to look like an ancient royal barge: its carriage-like superstructure was covered in gold leaf and it bore at its centre a great square sail on which was projected a filmed performance of a famously sensual and erotic ballet.

The air grew noticeably colder as the dainty coracle approached the ice barge; the dwarf used one oar to prevent his frangible craft hitting the larger vessel’s hull. Servants dressed like skeletons helped Oh up to the deck and the dwarf rowed slowly away again. The barge’s deck covering looked like some form of dark skin, and felt as warm.

Madame d’Ortolan reclined with a few other members of the Central Council in a nest of glistening blood-red cushions inside the main cabin of the craft, surrounded by canted gilt poles holding furled curtains of gold-threaded purple material. The tented ceiling of the enclosure appeared insubstantial, made from thousands of little black and white pearls threaded on silver wires.

The raised, airy cabin afforded views out across the lake, its tiny jewel-like islands and the flotilla of slowly swirling vessels. Oh recognised the others of the Council who were present and greeted them individually: Mr Repton Bik, Madama Gambara-Cilleon, Lord Harmyle, Professor Prieska Dottlemien, Comptroller Lapsaline-Hregge, Captain Yollyi Suyen and of course Madame d’Ortolan herself, who, with the latest changes to the Council, was now its acknowledged if unofficial head.

She was dressed in some ancient wildly complicated costume, all frills and ruffles and floaty films of material, the outer layers of which which seemed barely heavier or less transparent than the air. Jewels glittered on the lacy extremities of her pooled skirts and on her fingers, ears, throat, forehead and nose. She had lately been accorded the privilege of moving from her earlier, aged body – already her second since she had been invited to join the Council – and was now a curvaceously beautiful white-ski