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regarding his dim surroundings, grey surfaces in the torch’s meagre light. Then he hesitantly parted the eyelids of the outer pair of new eyes. At first, same as his own original eyes, except that there was an extra sense of solidity to objects, conferred by a four-way ocularity, illuminated by the pale halo of Yash’s torch from which tenuous shadows spread. There was stillness, the sound of Yash’s breathing, the faint pulse of his own heartbeat which seemed to slow, then slow further, the beat low and languid, slowing down …
    Then leaped back to normal again, as the walls suddenly flickered with shifting strands and clusters of glowing threads, and the air shimmered with glimmering outlines of shapes in motion, moving together or through one another, lines writhing across the walls and ceiling, tangled meshes, quivering webs hurrying to and fro …
    He gasped, closing his eyes tightly. It was too much, too overwhelming – Focus on the now, the here, and the vital, sift out the discord – yet he steadied himself, breathed deeply and opened his eyes again. And saw ghosts.
    Saw a group of nebulous forms made of those same fine outlines, which he now realised were the residue of past occupants, just as Yash said. The forms grew more detailed, became three Uvovo bent to the task of pushing a loaded cart along the corridor towards where Chel and Yash stood.
    ‘What do you see?’ Yash murmured.
    Chel held up a silencing finger, keeping his eyes on the approaching trio, standing aside as they drew near and passed by. On the cart was a large device of some kind, its details vague apart from hints of flanges, spikes and what looked like twisted limbs. The faces of the Uvovo were indistinct but there was a certain urgency to their posture as they faded into the dark end of the corridor.
    What am I seeing and why? It must be important for it to be still playing out after so many centuries, but why ?
    ‘Looks as if we may have woken someone,’ Yash muttered beside him. ‘Now what’s that he’s got … no, wait, stop! …’
    Chel turned and for a moment saw one of his Artificer scholars standing next to the chamber door with a crowbar wedged behind one of the stone pillar uprights. The scholar’s face was blank as he put his full weight behind the crowbar and wrenched at the pillar. There was a grinding sound, then the lintel and the wall and ceiling above caved in with a roaring rumble, falling rubble throwing up clouds of dust.
    Yash dragged him back, shouting about a weakened ceiling, and Chel complied while in his mind’s eye he saw again the scholar, this time with a violet nimbus about him. Then Yash ignored his own advice and advanced through the dusty haze, coughing as he shone his narrow torch beam on the collapse. Chel was still looking through his outer new eyes and could see gleams and splinters of amber light slipping past gaps in the rubble that blocked the chamber entrance.
    ‘I can hear their voices, Chel!’ cried the Voth.
    But Chel’s senses, alerted by his enhanced vision, quivered in warning as he saw it – a shimmering outline flowing across the shadowy wall away from the fallen masonry. He concentrated his awareness on it, letting his perceptions draw the vision into his mind, as the outline took on hazy details, took on an odd, flattened form. A figure that dipped in and out of the wall as if it were no more solid than a barrier of smoke. Could this be the watcher?
    ‘Help me, Chel! – we can dig them out!’
    But the shimmering figure was heading along towards the big hall down from the mountainside entrance, from where several passages branched out.
    ‘I have to follow it, Yash – it’s the watcher!’
    ‘The what?’
    Chel shook his head and hurried after the apparition, ignoring the Voth’s increasingly angry shouts. As he strode off into the darkness his new eyes laid bare a scattering of details, motes, nuances, an opaque rendering of his surroundings in which the mysterious