And that was how Scribe came to be standing in a cave on a ledge on top of one of the highest cliffs in the Broken Mountains, staring at the sky. He was already fairly soaked but he didn't mind; it kept him alert. The herbs were making him feel drowsy and strangely at peace with himself. At no point in the conversation did Tracy ever actually confirm that the herbs had no dangerous side-effects. All she had said was that they wouldn't kill him outright. He found himself having to fight to remember that death was bad, and would result in serious consequences of the litigious and infernal variety, and not in just another sleep, possibly with pleasant dreams, as his mind was trying to convince him.

He almost fell off the cliff in sheer surprise when he saw the first rainbow shower of birds scatter across the sky like glittering jewels on blue silk. It was working; what had previously looked like a flock of birds now had a radiant aura of the kind that could only be emitted by a divine animal. His spirits rose. After he had observed the birds for a while, he would be able to pick out the divine ones from the mundane, follow them to their nests and either find a dropped feather or persuade them to lend him one. Then, he would ask Tracy's help in demonstrating to the examiners that it was a divine bird, and he would pass with the same flying colours as he currently saw wheeling in the sky all around him. His grandfather would surely forgive him, and he would lend his aid in the Celestial Court, and then Scribe could die happily, knowing that…

He screamed. The sudden lurching sensation, combined with the force of the blow as something slammed into him, then grabbed him by the shoulders and hoisted him into the air, followed by a sickening vertigo, immediately sobered him up. Some of the birds still glowed as they whipped around his face and hair in their desperate scramble to flee from the new threat. The eagle-like bird holding Scribe in its razor-sharp talons did not glow. It was mundane, solid and three times his size. Its cry was as deafening as an entire hall full of apprentices.

Instinct made him struggle but it did nothing other than cause the claws to dig into his shoulders. It then occurred to him that he did not want the bird to loosen its grip on him while it was several thousand feet above the ground, neither did he want it to think of him as an annoyance. If he was a bird and something in his talons kept wriggling and annoying him, his first act would be to make it keep still, and things stopped moving the best when they were dead. However, he was also aware that the bird's plans for his immediate future probably weren't ones that he wanted to go along with; they probably involved eating him or feeding him to smaller giant birds.

What kind of idiot goes off to catch a bird and then gets caught by a bird himself? He imagined that Tracy was probably laughing at him. Later, she would say that the Lady Defeat planned this from the beginning, to teach him a lesson in humility, or something along those lines. If he ever returned. He wondered if Tracy would actually be worried if he didn't return, or if she would simply switch from talking to him in one plane of existence to talking to his spirit in another. Why are you thinking about Tracy at a time like this? You're supposed to be a servant of the Library! How can you claim to know everything if you don't even know how to keep yourself alive in a crisis situation?

The bird screeched again and plummeted almost vertically downwards. Scribe's stomach felt as though it was going to escape and abandon him to his fate. His vision swam, then he blacked out and instinct took over again, a different kind of instinct, older and deeper and more hard-wired. He was falling through a thick, inky blackness, as though he was dropping off to sleep after several days of insomnia. Chanting echoed all around him, words in no language he understood. The words filled his mind, becoming tangible. Speeding up, building in loudness and intensity, they buffeted him like a tidal wave. Suddenly his eyes were open and the words were coming from his mouth. He felt in perfect control, as though the world was his lucid dream. His arms outstretched, he spoke the words and they flowed into the air towards the bird. He didn't speak the language but he understood what the words did. They were words of banishment, absolute and final. The words whirled around the bird and formed a ring that spun in the air faster and faster, until the space inside turned into a black vortex. The bird screamed in frustration and confusion as it was dragged inside the portal, which then closed up like the aperture of a camera. The chanting stopped. Scribe was completely awake. The only thing he had time to register was that something odd had happened to him, there was no bird where a bird should be, and there was nothing around him except sky, which he was now rapidly falling out of. He resumed screaming.

"Captain, unidentified object approaching from above!"

"You can't make it out at all?"

He adjusted his telescope and squinted, "Its too far away, ma'am, and quite small. Judging by its speed and acceleration, I'd say its falling. Its likely to hit us if we don't pick up speed!"

"More speed!" she yelled to the helmsman, "And get some more fuel loaded down there!" A cabin boy ran to deliver the message to the engine room, "Keep monitoring it. What happened to that large bird, by the way?"

"Ma'am, it… its not here!" he said, "I thought it was the bird that started falling, but this thing is much smaller!"

"Birds don't just disappear or turn into smaller birds!" she said, "Someone's playing tricks on us! A rival, I expect!"

"By faking a disappearing bird?" the navigator, despite his loyalty to his Captain, didn't look overwhelmingly convinced by her conspiracy theory.

"The Trading Guild of Casandora has magicians. They're mostly elementalists, hired to calm winds and drive the turbines and such, but they might also know some illusions. Who knows what the Guild is secretly dabbling in? I wouldn't put anything past them! I expect this falling thing is supposed to hit us."

"Its almost close enough to make out…" he said, frowning as he focussed on the fast-moving, blurry object, "Captain! Its a person!"

"What the… release the nets! Bring him in!" yelled the Captain. The airship was suddenly alive with movement and noise as the crew scurried here and there, tying and untying ropes, relaying messages from one side of the ship to the other. They buzzed with excitement at their new discovery and wild rumours were already spreading about sky-ghosts and fallen Gods from the lands above the clouds. Upon the Captain's signal, the vast nets were cast. Smaller versions of the ship's motor tied to each corner of the nets kept them aloft. By now, the falling figure was clearly visible to the naked eye. The net caught him and the sky-sailors pulled on the ropes to bring it back in. The figure, who turned out to be an adolescent boy, was carefully extracted from the net and laid onto the deck. After a brief examination by the Navigator, who had some medical training, he was pronounced alive but deeply unconscious and badly wounded. The Captain exhaled sharply; she hadn't realised that she had been holding her breath. Even though she didn't know the stranger who had decided to fall out of the sky onto her ship, she didn't want him to die.

"Put him in the passenger quarters and do what you can with his wounds," she ordered, "Full speed ahead. We're going to stop off at the nearest town and get this boy a doctor."

"But, ma'am, that's Casandora and we're not allowed in Casandora…"said the Navigator.

"No buts! A customer's life in danger!"

"He's got no money on him…" muttered the helmsman.

"Then he owes us! Debtors can't pay you back if they die on you!" she snapped, "Full speed ahead, and the next person to contradict my orders gets thrown over the side!"

The Navigator briefly wondered why customers weren't allowed to fall to their deaths but crewmen were, but he decided not to push it. Following his directions, the ship was steered towards Casandora.

In his dreams, he was falling through darkness filled with chanting voices again, but it was someone else's chanting, and someone else's darkness. Red glowing eyes that could see into his soul watched him, grasping hands clawed at him. His hands and arms were stained black with the words.

Then reality lurched like an out-of-focus picture and he fell through the floor of the pit and out of the ceiling of a stark white room.

"I wouldn't get this close to death again if I were you," said a sombre voice. A man sat cross-legged on a white rug in the middle of the room, his arms folded into the wide sleeves of his long black robes. Scribe recognised him. He was Lord Broken of the Broken City, the Celestial Bureaucrat he once assisted on a mission to replace a cog in the machinery of the world. It was on this mission that they became involved in inter-department conflict with the Infernals, who considered the world to be beyond repair and wanted to dismantle it entirely. Scribe had been forced to act without proper authorisation in order to finish Lord Broken's quest for him while he fought off the Infernals. The incident had led to his soul being put on trial. Lord Broken didn't look so majestic now, although his long wavy hair, sharp emerald eyes and delicate features were still fairly striking. Mostly, he just looked tired. He must be defending me in court, thought Scribe. He had a vague idea of how stressful court cases were from the times when he was sent to record the minutes for one, and he imagined they were thousands of times worse in the Celestial Court, where souls were at stake.

"I'm a lot further away than I expected," said Scribe.

"It only takes a push," he said, "And you should stop using the Word so blatantly. You're not supposed to have it. You're attracting attention to yourself."

"So, I'm not supposed to die but I'm not supposed to save my life?" he gave the man a puzzled look.

"If you need to use it, try and learn to use it subtly," he said, "You Banished that poor thing onto my desk."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"You're sorry? I'm the one who had to pick up all the papers again and issue it with some compensation money!"

"It was going to kill me," he repeated, sounding rather more sullen than he would have liked.

He sighed and shook his head, "Listen, I haven't forgotten about you and I'll try to help you as best I can. But you have to start helping yourself a little. You seem to have some friends in high places, otherwise you wouldn't have survived half of the trouble you get yourself into, but but you're making a lot of powerful enemies as well. And one day someone is going to ask you to repay the favours you owe them. Incidentally, if anyone asks, we never spoke. Understand?"

"If I had my way, I'd never speak to or have anything to do with any of you, ever again," he said.

"Yes, yes, a lot of us feel the same way. But I'm afraid that's rather out of the question now," he said, a note of irritation in his voice, "Anyway, its time to return to your body. Whoever saved your life must be worried sick about you."

"I wonder who it must be? I mean, I was falling several thousand feet out of the sky!"

"It would only be polite to find out," he said, dismissing the boy with a sweep of his long-sleeved wrist.

Scribe was falling again, but this time the darkness was receding and the light rapidly approaching.