Place · Book 6, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

The Great Race

The seventh floor, a new level Borant finished just in time with Valtay capital, so that the planned seventh floor became the eighth; named after a fairy tale about a boy in a maze whose tunnels seal behind him: crawlers wake in glass pods on a spiral over a string of portal stairwells, to be slid one by one into hundreds of kilometres of tubes with pitstop saferooms, danger ratings and paths that close behind a party. It lasts ten minutes. Prepotente, holding Pole Position and a hammer and a stick from the masquerade's sponsors, cracks the resurrection chamber and every wall on the level explodes.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 2 — Hills Cyclops
• Chapter 21 — The warlords' table
• Chapter 72 — Falling Up

Progression

Mordecai was a slime for the ten minutes the seventh floor was open, and Donut never got her book-of-the-floor delivery from it (ch. 2); it was Cascadia's baby, and its ruin was the stunt that brought the ships early (ch. 21); Carl had thought the eighth floor would catch up on the death missed there, and the count, 38,532 down to 33,804, says otherwise (ch. 72).