When Peter recovered consciousness he found himself propped up in the inner sanctum of the Temple Of November, his back flat against an icy stone wall and his legs stretched out in front of him. Cerylia was sitting in the same position on his right hand side. He was relieved to hear that she was breathing easily but her head was slumped on her shoulder and she was still clearly out cold. Cold was the operative word. The thick frost covering the interior of the Temple reminded Peter of nothing so much as the inside of a refrigerator's ice box. It felt like they'd been thrown into the deep freeze.

He looked around. The room was deserted although there were signs of recent occupation. His own scabbard and sword were leaning against the wall. The remains of a camp fire and a miscellany of small items of rubbish littered the floor by the open door which looked out onto the grand front entrance. A low circular brick wall in the centre of the room might have marked the top of a well. Cerylia's pack had been dumped next to this wall, together with her daggers. There were a few oddly shaped and partially formed statues in niches round the room. A black stone slab squatting flat against the far wall might have been an altar of some sort and there was an empty stone archway above it. Opposite the door was a white stone altar, capped by another archway which Peter guessed correctly to be the Christmas Passage. It was pulsing with a sinister bright white light and he could see the interior of a dark cave on the other side.

He eased himself backwards into a more upright position, heard the hard clink of iron and felt something heavy and solid shift on to his shoulder blade. He lifted his hands to his neck. It was encircled by a thick metal collar. When he twisted his head he could see that a length of iron chain looped away from the back of the collar and was locked on to a black metal ring set into the wall a  couple of meters up from the floor. A second chain came from the same ring and was attached to a similar collar around Cerylia's neck.

Peter bent his knees back and felt a stab of pain from his left leg - the one that the ice warrior had kicked. When he tried to put some pressure on it, the pain increased and the leg collapsed. But that was only his first attempt to stand. For his second try, he put his hands palm down on the frozen floor and straightened his elbows to leaver himself up sufficiently for his right leg to take the weight. This worked after a fashion and he fell back standing against the wall, feeling a wave of pins and needles rush though all his limbs.

There was a moan from Cerylia and she opened her eyes.

"Are you alright?" he asked anxiously.

She twisted her neck awkwardly and gripped the arm which Peter knew the ice warrior had struck. She winced.

"It depends what you mean by alright."

Peter helped her to her feet and they assessed the situation. It was difficult to tell whether the injuries they had received had done any permanent damage but they certainly still hurt and Peter didn’t think he'd be able to manage anything in the way of walking or running that didn’t involve a nasty limp for a while. The collars and chains allowed the prisoners just enough movement to pace in a tight semicircle round the wall but there was nothing in reach which might help them to escape.

They checked for any flaw in the fastening of one another's collars. They tested the strength of the connections to the ring on the wall and the strength with which the ring was fastened to the wall by simultaneously pulling at the chains with all their strength. Finally, they even investigated the integrity of the iron chains themselves but there were no obvious weak links which offered any prospect of breaking.

A tall figure in a white suit entered the Temple from the other side of the Christmas Passage. He glanced at the prisoners briefly but didn't seem interested and walked straight out of the door without a word. A few moments later, a steady stream of tall pale blue warriors began to march through the Gateway and out of the Temple. They, too, said nothing but their silent menacing gait did as much to freeze Peter's heart as the chill in the air.

"They can't hear us," Cerylia said. "They operate on sight alone. And they aren't intelligent. They're only a kind of robot that can respond to limited orders. That's why I was hoping to outrun them on the moors. I thought if we got out of the range of their controller they might fall back on their default programming and give up on the hunt. It was just a theory. I'm afraid I underestimated them."

Peter had another idea. He dug the ice away from round the base of the iron loop, breathing out over the harder parts to warm them a little and make it easier for his scrabbling fingers to shift them. Perhaps the loop could be undermined at the wall? He was running his fingers over the newly exposed stonework when Cerylia nudged him and they turned round to meet their captors.

At last they were face to face with the Agents they had come so far to confront, but hardly in the circumstances they had hoped for. There were three men. Peter studied them carefully, trying to match the descriptions he had been given to the names he knew.

"I wouldn’t do that if I were you," said the first man.

He was short and stout with plump features and a receding hairline but his arms were muscular and he looked like the sort of thug it might be a bad idea to get into a fight with.

"It won't work but if you persist we'd have to tie your arms and legs just in case. You wouldn’t want that, would you?"

"Is that Browning? Or is it Jepson?" Cerylia said. "I always get you two mixed up. I'm surprised you're allowed to speak at all without your master's permission. You certainly never did at the Moot. Did you say your flunkies could speak Kark?"

"That's Mr. Jepson to you," said the fat man. "I'm nobodies flunky and I think the Stability Council heard what I had to say quite well at the end of the Moot. Actions speak louder than words, eh Cerylia?"

Cerylia yawned provocatively.

"Well let me know when you've got something interesting to say, Brownson or Jeping or whoever you are, 'cos if it's just a version of His Master's Voice, I'd rather listen to Kark. And he's a psychopathic lunatic."

"How about this bitch!"

She had succeeded in riling the fat man and he came over intent on delivering a stinging slap across her face. Peter intervened and a short struggle ensued, at the end of which he received a punch in the solar plexus for his pains (literally) which sent him tumbling to the ground and  left him winded. Another kick between the legs had him doubled over in agony. Cerylia turned as white as the frost on the stone but Jepson retreated after this, satisfied to have taken his anger out on one of the prisoners.

I could have done without that, Peter thought as he recovered slowly. His initial assessment of Jepson had been spot on. It had been a very bad idea to get into a fight with him and it hadn’t done his wounded leg any good either. Thanks Cerylia.

"Careful with the prisoners. We haven't interrogated them yet. I don’t want them damaged. Not until we're finished anyway."

This was Kark, Peter knew at once. And dangerous as Jepson was there was something infinitely worse in the measured calm of this man's voice. And something almost familiar too… It was impossible for Peter to have seen Kark before but when he raised his head he saw a face which reminded him of someone - lean, angled and utterly lacking in compassion. He couldn’t think who but he felt it was important.

"I want to see Sunanon. Where is he?"

This time Cerylia's tone of voice was altogether more humble but she kept her nerve and Peter couldn’t hear any hint of a tremor although he had known her long enough to realise that this was a very low moment.

"And so you shall," Kark said. "And so you shall. All in good time. He's rather busy at the moment. With Eryndra.

You know you're a very lucky girlie because Sunanon insists that you should come to no harm. He hasn’t said anything about him, though so I expect I'll be arranging for his harm first.

I must say though Cerylia, you're something of a disappointment to me and I should imagine Sunanon will be very unhappy too, when he finds out. I'd heard you were a good girl but here you are picking up with the first man to cross your path as soon as your boyfriend left you, just like any old trollop eh? Who is he by the way?"

"It's not like that!" she said confused. "He's just Pendramon. He's just helping me, that's all. I mean there's nothing going on between us. Really."

Oh don’t fall for it, Peter thought in despair as he listened to her flounder. This Kark really was a nasty piece of work and he'd struck a vulnerable spot. He knew Cerylia's weakness where Sunanon was concerned and he was exploiting it ruthlessly. Cerylia was an intelligent young woman and she really ought to understand how he was playing with her mind but somehow that wasn't helping her.

"That's just as well," Kark said in a matter of fact voice. "You won’t mind when I torture this 'Pendramon' to find out the truth then. I don’t like Stability Council agents following me and I am going to find out what's going on."

Fantastic, Peter thought. Remind me not to get caught up in any adventures again. As if he'd had any choice in the matter.

"There'll be plenty of time for all that later. No need to rush. Let's have a look through your stuff and see if you're carrying anything dangerous first shall we?" Kark continued.

 He emptied Cerylia's pack onto the icy stone Temple floor and began to rummage through the contents. There was a flat black disk some ten centimetres across. He picked it up and span it end over end as though he were tossing a coin.

"You should be more careful with your cross-passage token," he mocked.

"Don’t you know that if someone were to take this from you, you  wouldn’t be able to function as an Agent as at all? Unless you were a natural born Realm Runner, that is and I don’t believe you have the same talent as Sunanon, do you my dear?

"If someone were to take your cross-passage token from you, you'd only be able to use a Gateway to transfer between Realms like any other mortal. Very careless. Perhaps I'd better hang on to this for safe keeping, eh? Wouldn't want you running out on the party now would we?"

He tucked it into a waistcoat pocket and grinned.

All the fight seemed to have ebbed out of Cerylia but Peter was starting to get riled.

"You might have her token but you'll never get mine," he tried.

"That's because you haven’t got one you stupid little man," Kark said. "You're no Agent are you? You're just something she's dragged along like a lost lamb. So stop bleating, little lamb, and let me finish!"

He turned back to the objects scattered on the ground.

"Well, well, what have we here?"

"A glamour weaver, Kark, as you know full well."

It was a woman's voice and one which Peter had no trouble identifying. Even if he hadn’t felt the sudden surge in signal strength from the Token's tracing link he would have recognised her instantly. It was Eryndra - flamboyant, voluptuous, manipulative, cunning and utterly immoral. She was wearing her 'trademark' red cat suit complete with the crimson cowboy hat and bright green feather.. Tarragon stood beside her looking grim and there was another man in the doorway who must have been…

"Sunanon! Sunanon! Sunanon are you alright?"

Cerylia's voice was shaky with emotion and longing.

"I'm fine thank you," he said in a curiously formal way and he favoured Cerylia with a pasty smile. His voice was flat and lacked affect and the smile was crooked and unnatural.

"You shouldn't have come here," he said. "This is a dangerous place."

O, oh, Peter thought, experiencing a terrible intimation. There was something dreadful in Sunanon's voice. Maybe it was the effect of the Glamour. And maybe not…

"I know it's dangerous sweetheart. That's why I had to come. I've got to get you out of here."

She spoke gently and patiently as though to a relative who has been ill for a long time, has lost their memory and is only now convalescing slowly.

"No Cerylia," Sunanon said heavily. "You don't understand. You really shouldn't have come. Really."

"Why don't you tell Cerylia what you've been doing, Sunanon?" Eryndra said with a sly smile. "She's come all this way to see you. I think she deserves that much at least."

Sunanon turned a venomous look on his blonde companion.

"Shut up Eryndra. I don’t need your advice."

Oddly, this show of rebellion disconcerted Cerylia badly. It didn’t fit with her preconceptions, but Peter was beginning to entertain another theory.

Eryndra glared at the glamour weaver and then a slow smile crossed her face.

"Do you know what I think?" she said. "I think that Cerylia has come here to kidnap you Sunanon. That's why she's brought this Dream Ring, isn’t it?"

She turned to address her prisoner.

"Forget it dear. I'm sorry for you of course but that really is a sign of desperation isn’t it? If you can't hold on to your boyfriend you shouldn't start using a glamour weaver to do it for you. The Stability Council would never approve!"

"Hypocritical bitch!"

Cerylia was almost spitting with anger now. Peter laid a restraining arm on her shoulder to stop her wrenching her neck against the collar in an effort to get to the malicious agent.

Eryndra just smiled.

"Hypocritical eh?" she said. Then she turned to Kark and continued as if surprised.

"You know what I think, Kark? I think Cerylia doubts my integrity. Shame on her! Give her the Dream Ring. Go on!"

"What! Are you mad?" Kark spat. "After all the trouble we've gone to capture these two you just want to hand back a token like that?"

"Do it Kark and don’t argue. I've told you before about arguing. And try not to be so stupid as well. How can our silly young captive use the token when there are five of us in the room at the same time. She couldn’t even start to spellbind one of us before the others would cut her off. Now give her the Dream Ring!"

The delicate metal ring was thrown through the air and Cerylia caught it in the cold and trembling fingers of her right hand.

"I don’t know what you're playing at Eryndra", she muttered under hear breath, but Peter could hear the uncertainty in her voice.

"I've just realised why you brought the token," Eryndra said, brash and confident. "Go on then. Use it! And Sunanon, this is something you have to do. You owe it to the girl."

Peter watched with the squeamish fascination of a stranger accidentally caught up in the intimate agony of someone else's moment of collapse. And at that moment he knew what was coming and he fervently wished for Cerylia's sake that it was otherwise. Sunanon came to stand in front of his former lover and caught her eyes in his own blank stare. Cerylia raised the token and let the spokes spin, her hand now oddly calm again. She was going thorough a programmed routine, like a doctor monitoring a strange stethoscope of the soul. And eventually she let out the dreadful wail Peter had been anticipating.  And it was all the more dreadful for the wait. Then she began to sob.

"You thought I'd put Sunanon under a Glamour, didn't you? I didn't need a Glamour," Eryndra gloated. "It's just that he preferred a real woman to a girl. That's all it is."

"You always had a wild imagination, Cerylia," Sunanon was saying. His voice was not without a certain compassion mingled with sorrow but there was also a degree of impatience in there.

 "You were brought up on all those romantic stories of kidnapping and double dealing. When will you grow up, eh? Sometimes, you know, the simplest explanation is the best. I went with Eryndra because I didn’t love you anymore. I was tired of your goody two shoes attitude to the Stability Council. You couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was going on across the Realms. You know that don’t you? That's why we argued, wasn't it? Admit it now. You were simply wrong, that's all. I made a choice. I chose to go where I can influence the course of history. The Stability Council is finished. The future belongs to the Proton King."

Cerylia's crying had subsided to a silent and steadily stream as she listened to Sunanon and her face was turned to the floor. But she managed to lift her head sufficiently when he paused to spit in his eye; a gesture which made Peter cheer inwardly.

Sunanon shrugged coldly and turned away. "You shouldn’t have come here", he repeated as though it were a mantra and a sign of Cerylia's mental instability rather than a measure of her loyalty and love.

Eryndra came over and kissed him ostentatiously.

"Since you have come here," she said. "Then you night as well know what we're doing. It won’t make any difference now. We've already won and it's all over bar the shouting. Tell her Sunanon, darling."

"We're helping the Proton King to take control of the Autumn Country as I expect you must have guessed by now."

"It will never work", Cerylia said. Peter didn’t like the deadness in her voice. It was so unlike her normal vivacity and all it carried were the empty husks of meaning floating away on a river of indifference.

"Oh but it will work," Sunanon said, and by contrast his own voice was full of a feverish animation - the animation of one who has contemplated a speculative and ambitious plan for too long and now sees it coming to fruition. "You're not thinking big enough Cerylia are you? That's the trouble with the Stability Council. They know the way that things have always been done and they're too conservative. It's all tradition, tradition, tradition with them isn’t it? But there's more to life than the Conventions. And there's more to the Realms than polling a bunch of idiotic Citizens to manufacture a stagnant backwater or plastering a few binding rules over the top of a gaping wound in reality. Much more.

"You aren’t taking this seriously enough, Cerylia. You probably think this is just some minor move in the game of Clients and Patrons, don’t you. You probably think this is just the Winter Country deciding to run a few raids and win a few bargaining chips in the way these things are usually done. You probably think I've opened the Christmas Passage just to let a few ice warriors through, to harry the locals, take a few hostages and then retreat back into Winter again. You do ,don’t you?"

"Don’t presume to know what I think, Sunanon," Cerylia managed with admirable composure in the circumstances.

"Well you're wrong!" Sunanon exulted, absorbed in his monologue now and completely ignoring her. "You think your precious Laws Of Form will prevent anything serious from happening, don’t you? You think they'll preserve the fundamental character of the Realm and defend it better than any warrior could ever do. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

You see, I found something out about this Wedge Token which the Council had stored in its dusty vaults."

Sunanon pointed dramatically at the black cylinder which was slowly revolving inside the stone of the archway of the Christmas Passage

 "I found out that a Wedge Token can be a pivot when it's used in the right way with a Gate. The Stability Council think that Wedge Tokens will force an opening in a locked Gate and they're right. But a Wedge Token can do so much more if you know how to use it properly! A Wedge Token can make a Gate act as a thoroughfare for Laws as well as people. It's how some of the Realms must have been created.

"That's what we're doing here. We're letting alien Laws of Form invade the Autumn Country from the Christmas Passage. And we're playing to win. When the Proton King has finished he'll own the Autumn Country! And he'll reward the Agents that helped him far better than the Stability Council were ever going to do for me.

"That's why I was the one to contact the Proton King and I was the one to arrange for the Wedge Token to be used as the Stability Council's deposit at the Moot. The whole point of the Moot was to steal the Wedge Token so that we could use it here. And now we are on brink of victory."

Peter was tempted to start a slow ironic hand clap at this point but thought better of it. "Well I hope you enjoy your reward then," Cerylia said. Her tone was so hollow that it sounded like mockery although Peter suspected it was simple despair.

"She doesn't seem very impressed," Eryndra said.

"I bet I could I could make her react more strongly," Kark said with a leer. "In fact I'd enjoy that."

"You'd have to get past me first," Peter said. He didn’t know why he felt compelled to utter this empty platitudinous threat. It sort of came to his lips unbidden.

"Like that's supposed to be difficult is it?" Kark said contemptuously. "Shut up little lamb kin until I'm ready to hear you bleat. You'll have plenty of time to make a contribution when I'm ready for you."

Peter was suitably crushed but now Cerylia rallied a little. It was almost as though the prisoners drew some sort of psychological strength from the need to defend one another, verbally if not physically.

"And what's your reason for defecting to this bunch of losers, Tarragon?" she said to the Count's councillor. The normally imperturbable old man seemed ill at ease.

"The Owner isn't managing this place properly," he said. "He's let far too many gnomes infect the woods. They need purging and the Proton King's the one to do it."

"What have you got against gnomes?" Cerylia said incredulously.

"They're vermin, that's what!"

There was no reasoning with that answer.

"Tarragon isn’t flavour of the month at the moment," Eryndra said. "He's been a bad boy."

The elderly councillor gave her a look sour enough to curdle spring water.

"Tarragon was supposed to prevent this idiotic and incompetent Count Arcturus from coming round to see us. He was supposed to have subverted the Count's spies but he didn’t manage to do anything about his flock of personally trained crows. Very careless. Luckily I remembered that the correct collective noun for crows wasn't 'flock' it was 'murder'. So I had my own murder of crows.

"When you two turned up out of the blue, Tarragon was supposed to keep an eye out and make sure you didn’t get anywhere near the Temple before the King arrives. He arranged that little party for you all with the mist wolves but unfortunately it just wasn't good enough to stop you, was it?

"But most of all, Tarragon was supposed to prevent the Count from making an alliance with the local gnomes and it would seem that that is exactly what's happened. So Tarragon has failed on all counts with the Count, and failed very badly indeed. I'm not best pleased with him."

"If you let me go back I could still be useful to you."

"No, Tarragon. You're staying here now. Colonel Frost has decided."

"Look what I've found?" Kark interrupted. The Recorder Token had rolled in the direction of the Christmas Passage but now he retrieved it and held it out for them all to see.

"Now we've got both the Tokens from the Moot. Excellent!"

"Give me that!"

Tarragon's voice shook with excitement. Kark immediately saw the opportunity for a new game.

"I don't think so, Tarragon," he said with a flashy grin. "You've been a bad boy after all and bad boys don't get to play with their toys."

Kark sat on the edge of the well and held the crystal out over the middle of the shaft.

"What are you doing?" the old man demanded frantically.

"I'm not sure we really need both Tokens. This one has given us quite a bit of trouble after all. I think it will make quite a splash, don't you?"

"That Token is unique and beyond any price! Are you mad?"

"Yes," said Kark simply. "I'm mad."

He smiled again and let the Token fall from his fingers accompanied by a farewell whistle as in accelerated down the well.

"Phweeeeeee…." Splash.

And suddenly it vanished from the Realm. Peter felt the Token's passing with the same strange sense that connected him to Eryndra. He exchanged a glance with Cerylia. She had felt it too.

It was a moment of revelation. Ah, he realised. So that's where the lost seventh Gateway is! It's at the bottom of the well.

Clearing up one of the Autumn Country's minor mysteries might be interesting enough but it didn't help them in any way. Peter and Cerylia had far more practical concerns at the moment. Escape seemed impossible, the Proton King was on his way and who was this Colonel Frost, Eryndra had mentioned? They were about to find out the answer to that question…

Two ice warriors entered the Temple accompanying the commanding figure of the tall man in the white suit whom they had earlier witnessed stepping out of the Christmas Passage. He'd ignored them before but now he introduced himself and made it perfectly clear who was in charge.

"You are prisoners of war", Colonel Frost said. "Tarragon tells me that one of you is from a Stable Realm called Earth. I have visited this 'Earth' myself. An interesting place. I believe they have a code on Earth for the treatment of prisoners of war. Unfortunately for you, we don't follow the Geneva convention here. I shall be allowing Kark to torture you if I deem it necessary and you will be used as hostages should the occasion arise. Still, on the whole I think you should consider yourselves fortunate."

When the Colonel grinned his glacier white teeth shone like a macabre toothpaste advert.

"Look on the bright side. At least you won’t be involved in the fighting, will you?"