'She cannot tell us, Hornwrack,'said Fulthor tiredly. 'You can. That is why she brough us to you. It was her only means of communication. At least come to the palace to discuss it. I agree that you may have been treated unfairly.'

Hornwrack ignored him. He shook the carcass of the metal bird. He put it to his ear. 'It hums still. It hummed even as I strangled it.'His hands trembled, then stilled. 'I feel my death in all this.'He walked off a few paces and stared up at the palace, a mile distant and misty through the blowing rain. 'Methven's hall!'they heard him say. He seemed to be listening. 'I was once one of you,'he said. 'I was one of the rulers. I chose to become one of the ruled.'Then:

'To hell with all of you,'he said. 'I'll come because you have the weight of that behind you -'pointing to the palace -'and because you have the baan. But I'll tell you nothing.'He regarded Fulthor with a cold smile, drew his ragged sleeve across his red-daubed face. 'You had better watch me, Reborn Man,'he threatened. 'You had better watch me all the time.'

I would rather be a ghost than play such hollow games, thought Alstath Fulthor.

Hornwrack: The horse had run off and he refused to try and catch it on foot.

'Then walk,'the Reborn Man told him.

He writhed his bruised lips and spat. (If he shut his eyes the bird came at him still, tearing long elastic strips of flesh from his chest until the ribs showed through.)

'So,'he said. He shrugged.

Lord Galen Hornwrack, scion of a respected – if relict -House, one-time officer and pilot of the Queen's Flight, now a professional assassin of some repute in the Low City, made his way for the first time in eighty years to the palace at Viriconium. He walked. His wounds throbbed and chafed. Memories of the night gnawed him. But at his belt hung a metal bird he had ruined with his own bare hands, and he felt this to be the symbol of a continuing defiance: though he now had to admit that control of his own destiny had passed from him. Occasionally, small wheels spilled from somewhere deep within the bird to run soundlessly in diminishing circles until the wind whirled them away like chaff across the Proton Circuit. Before he went into the hall, of Methven he looked up at the sky. What had begun at least in light was now dull and unpromising. Even the deadly litharge stain of dawn had faded from the cloud-layer; so that, grey and solid, it capped the earth like an enormous leaden bowl, a single thin crescent of silver showing at its tilted northern extremity. And as he watched even that faded.

4: In the Corridors

Tomb the Dwarf came in through the south-eastern or 'Gabelline'gate of the City, just before dawn, some two weeks after his strange meeting on the edge of the Rannoch. A fine rain was falling as he led his ponies beneath the heavy seeping curve of masonry – more tunnel than arch – where the guard dozed in a wicker cubicle and old men, woken by the rattle of wheel on cobble, squatted under their dripping felt hats and stared incuriously at him as he passed. Here, in an alcove in the wall of the arch, had once hung the notorious Gabelline Oracle, sought out and yet dreaded by all who entered or left the City: the severed head of a child hanging from a hook, beneath which had been constructed an alchemical 'body'composed of yew twigs bound together by certain waxes and fats. A lamp being lit beneath the oracle, or in more special circumstances an inscribed wooden spatula being forced under its tongue, it would give in a low but penetrating voice the fortune either of the consultant or of the City itself. No-one who had ever heard that voice could forget it; many would take the Gate of Nigg to avoid it.

Tomb heard nothing, though he cocked his head for echoes; but a breath of the past followed him a little way beyond the gate, a cold and depressing air generated in those outer regions, overflowing into the alleyways and peeling demi-monde avenues of the suburbs where geranium leaves were turning ochre and a faint smell like cat's urine issued from the mouldy brick. Viriconium, sump of time and alchemical child; sacrificer of children and comforter of ghosts – who can but shiver and forgive in the damp theatrical airs of dawn?

A red stain grew in the sky above the Haunted Gate. Against it floated the airy towers, suspended as if in water glass, while below were conjured shabby reflections – a glitter of fishscales, olive oil, broken glass, and the west wind shivering the wide shallow puddles in the empty squares. Asleep one minute and aware the next, the Pastel City woke like a whore, to commerce and betrayal, to pleasure and misery – to rare metals and offal, velvet and sackcloth, lust and holiness, litharge, lithia salts and horse cures. The red stain spread until it had filled the sky. Wormeaten floorboards groaned. Gummy eyes gazed forth, half-blind already with boredom and disgust, to watch the dawn drop dead among the sodden chestnut leaves in the Rue Montdampierre! Tomb the Dwarf, recognizing in this suburb the same slut who had emptied the pockets of an impressionable Mingulay tinker's son a hundred years before, was overcome by sentiment. He took deep delighted breaths; spoke almost kindly to his ponies; and grinned about like ajuggler.

Beneath Minnet-Saba the Rivelin market spilled across his path like the encampment of a besieging army, dotted with paling flares and the little warm enclaves of charcoal braziers. It was a good-natured, anarchical siege, noisy and stinking, full of laughter and mock acrimony. Fish stalls predominated, but among them were distributed the kerbside pitches of tattooist and juggler, prostitute and priest; together with the booths of those deft-fingered old women who are equally happy to play at the cards for whatever stakes you name, or with them tell your fortune to the accompaniment of a practised homily. The gutters were filled with fish-heads, with sneaking cats and unconscious thieves. Fishwives rubbed elbows with boys selling anemones from neck trays (while others offered filthy marzipan, or caramelized locusts like intricate jewellery from the forgotten towns of the dusty East). Over it all hung a marine reek, a pall of hot cooking fat, and reedy, disconnected music.

Into this came the dwarf's caravan like a spirit of chaos -pushing aside tottering stalls, running over unguarded feet, impervious to abuse, drawing forth as it passed each brazier the ironic catcalls of idlers and the shrieks of fishwives (who required that the dwarf come behind a booth with them and there bash the dents out of a pot they would show him). The anemone-boys rode his tall yellow wheels, grinned into his face, lost their balance and fell into the street. All the while he moved steadily up the hill toward Minnet-Saba, the crowds eddying in his wake, until he came to the upper limit of the market; and there on the precise interface of High and Low Cities, chanced on the booth of Fat Main Etteilla.

Despite the coming and going about the booth, it had attracted few onlookers. Wan torches set at its corners guttered in the growing light. Its greasy satin curtains were drawn back to reveal the Main herself, billowing over her three-legged stool and coughing like a horse in the raw air. In her vast lap sat a small drunken man with a depraved triangular face, from the top of which stuck straight up a stiff brush of almost crimson hair. His bottle-green jerkin was not only encrusted with old filth, but sticky besides with new foulness; and he seemed to be confessing his part in some brawl or murder the night before. Tears were running down his cheeks; great twitches racked his body; odd spasms of free verse left him now and then like vomit. ('I renounce the blessed face,'he intoned, 'the silent sister veiled in white and blue;'and made a sound like a choking cat. 'What else could I do? He was no friend to me!')