Now Hornwrack closed on his victim like a rat-trap.

There was a sudden hiss of indrawn breath. A flurry of hooves. The knife flickered out from somewhere, a blemished steel tongue in the grey light. The old man gasped once and was silent. They remained locked together for a long moment, like lovers. Above them, somewhere up in the dark morning, a huge bird shrieked. The madwoman began to ride round them in circles, whimpering and waving her arms. Hornwrack laughed madly. 'I'll go no further, Fulthor! I've been this way before. It's a road to nothing!'Suddenly he stared into the face of his hostage as if he saw his own death there. 'What?'Fear stretched his thin brutalised features.

The old man opened his throat, retched; squawked inhumanly; then seemed to smile.

'Oh! Oh! Oh!'cried Fay Glass, staring upward.

Alstath Fulthor, his brain an empty beach across which were scattered the bones of understanding, felt, rather than saw, something detach itself from the racing clouds above.

It fell slowly at first, toppling languidly off one great wing, giving vent to a high wailing cry (thus do the fish eagles of the Southern Marches plummet almost lazily a thousand yards into the cold salt water of their native sea-lochs: but this one was fully five feet from wingtip to wingtip, and of an odd grey colour); plunged quicker and quicker until Fulthor was sure it must bury itself in the paving of the Circuit; then in the final instant shot horizontally across his field of vision in a rush of displaced air, to smash into the assassin's ribcage with a noise like an axe going into an oak door. Shouting in rage and fright, Hornwrack fell backwards off his horse. He lost his hold on the old man, hit the wet road, and was bowled over in a mist of blood and feathers.

Relieved – if astonished – at this turn of events, Fulthor drew his powered blade and cursed his horse in close; found that he could get a clear stroke at neither assassin nor bird, and swept the old man up to safety instead. This gave him the illusion, at least, of participation.

In the immediate aftermath of its strike the hawk had the advantage of momentum: with its talons fastened in his face Hornwrack went rolling and bellowing about the roadway, knife-arm flailing while he tried with the other to protect his eyes and throat. There was little to choose between them for ferocity. The bird shrieked and croaked; the man groaned and wept; rain fell on them both. Alstath Fulthor stared appalled. Eventually, blood streaming from his face and forearms, the man wriggled into a kneeling position. He grasped the bird by its neck and pulled it off him. Time after time he drove the knife into its body, but it was like stabbing a brick wall. The huge wings buffeted him. Their faces were inches apart, and both of them were screaming now as if they had finally recognised one another from some other country and were continuing a quarrel begun there long ago… Suddenly the man threw his knife away, transferred both hands to the bird's neck, and twisted it once.

They raised their bloody heads and shrieked together. The man choked. The bird was still.

Fulthor rode over, dismounted, and watched Hornwrack get unsteadily to his feet. His cloak was ripped, his shoulders a mantle of blood. He looked round him like an idiot, empty-eyed. 'Yours, I suppose,'he said to Fulthor, his voice thick and dull. He hardly seemed to notice the powered blade flickering and spitting at his throat. He held out the dead bird. 'Some bloody thing dug up out of the ground.'

The Reborn Man stared at it in silence. It was a perfect image of a bird made all in metal: a fantasy with armoured wings, every feather beaten from wafer-thin iridium, the fierce raptorial beak and talons forged from steel and graven with strange delicate designs. It hung from Hornwrack's hand, though, like anything newly dead – loose of limb, open-mouthed and vulnerable (as if in the moment of death it had been surprised by some truth which made nothing of beaks and claws), one great wing hanging in a slack double curve. He shook his head stupidly and turned away.

The old man seemed little the worse for his adventure, though the strain seemed to have accentuated something not quite human in the set of his features, the way his almost-saffron skin clung to cheekbone and jaw, taut as an oiled silk lampshade. 'You had better tell him why we need him, Alstath Fulthor,'he whispered hoarsely. He massaged his scraggy neck and chuckled. 'I believe he will not come except of his own accord. And I would rather he destroyed no more of my property. '

Fulthor failed to hide his surprise. 'You made the bird?'he said.

'Long ago. There may be a few more left – 'He looked up into the grey sky – 'but they have grown shy since the War. They are less dependable, and no longer speak.'He nodded to himself, remembering something. Then: 'Tell him why we need him.'

Fulthor could think of nothing to say. He looked from the old man to the ruined bird and back 'again; then at Hornwrack (who, far from showing any further signs of fight, had begun to shiver volcanically).

'The girl,'he began. 'She was sent here with a message, we think, vital to the City, to the Empire. To all of us in these peculiar times. But look at her! The rest of her party must have wandered off somewhere between here and the Great Brown Waste: they are far along the road to the Past in her village, and it is hard for them to concentrate for long on what they judge to be nine tenths dream.'(Waxen figures were at that moment processing through his own skull, carrying something wrapped in a fantastically decorated sheet, all of them leaning at thirty degrees to the vertical; they were singing. Nine-tenths dream! He had placed her by the weave of her cloak. He could find the place but would he ever leave it again?) 'You must know what they are like out there. '

The assassin seemed preoccupied. With the hem of his cloak he was dabbing at his lips, his cheeks; the lobe had been torn off his left ear. He fought off a fresh bout of shivering (looked for a second hunted and afraid, like a man who suspects in himself a fatal disease). 'She said nothing to me. Nothing but gibberish.'He touched white bone where his jawline had been laid open, winced. 'Look at me! I am already bleeding for her. Three times now she has brought me to this, though that bastard Verdigris had his dirty hands in the matter.'He sneered. “'The face of the ewe-Iamb bone white in the mallows”! Gibberish!'

Fulthor could follow little of this. He thought privately that the man was mad.

'It is not what she has said,'he explained carefully, 'but what she brought with her, that is of significance. Had she anything with her? I thought as much! You are the only one who saw it. We must know. You owe us this, if only because you were the cause of its loss!'

This seemed to enrage the assassin.

'Then ask her, Reborn!'he shouted. He spat blood into the road at Fulthor's feet. 'It is I who am owed. I killed five of the Sign last night on her behalf and my palm is empty. One of them at least would have fetched twenty pounds of steel in the open market. Martin Fierro under my knife! That was a black madness. Here!'He stuck out his cupped right hand. 'Black bloody madness! I am sick of doing the work of the High City and reaping only their sanctimonious stares!'He turned away disgustedly and made to pick up his knife. When Fulthor's weapon pricked the small of his back, he froze. He looked back over his shoulder, a sneer spreading across his lacerated face. 'Are you frightened of a steel knife now, up there in the High City? You could chop me like an onion with that thing if I had fifty knives like this!'He bent down quickly and snatched it up. 'Look, blunted at the tip.'It had vanished under his cloak before Fulthor could protest. He had sensed now to what extent he was needed; to what extent safe.