He hid behind a sculpture. He sniggered softly. When the boy looked round: nothing.

He let his feet scrape, with a horrible purpose.

He made quiet animal noises.

He was everywhere and nowhere; it was a cruel charade. The boy knew. He hurried: stopped: listened: stared over his shoulder, his hand feverishly clutching the pommel of his brand-new sword. He said nothing, because that would have been an admission. His eyes were round, glistening in the white like a boiled egg, boiled and shelled like a fresh egg. He touched the silver insect medallion at his throat; he began to run. Tomb only let him hear another chuckle. Their merged shadows fled away beneath them as they crossed a high elegant bridge, parted at a crossroads unused for two hundred years, only to join again and vanish at the moment of joining in a silent flare of purple light vented from some ancient artifact. Tomb grew careless. Swaggering along like the tame midget of some southern prince in cockerel-coloured doublet and yellow stockings, he came abruptly face to face with his victim, who – finding himself confronted by an old mad dwarf with a knife in his gnarled hand and a series of peculiarly childish grimaces chasing themselves across his features – stared appalled.

'I – 'said Tomb. He looked down at his hand. He wondered how long he had been carrying the knife without knowing it.

The boy meanwhile trembled despairingly. His eyes were watering. He made a painful effort to draw his sword.

'Don't!'said Tomb. 'I didn't mean -, And it might have rested there had he not heard the sound of feet coming along the corridor toward them.

'I'm sorry,'he told the boy, kicking him beneath the left kneecap. The boy lay on the floor motionless, looking up at him like a hurt animal. Tomb hauled the new sword from its scabbard and tried it for balance. He had some idea of using it in the absence of his axe. 'Rubbish,'he said, and threw it clattering across the passage out of harm's way: 'Get something decent as soon as you can afford it.'He knelt on the floor close to the boy, who made no move to stop him, set the point of his knife against his throat and stared into the round hopeless eyes. 'What's this round your neck?'But the boy couldn't speak. 'Don't worry,'said Tomb, 'please.'In this manner both of them awaited the arrival of the footsteps.

Not long after, a Reborn Man came striding towards them down the corridor. He had on the fantastic blood-red plate armour of an important House, its contorted yellow ideograph flaming on the black cloak that billowed out behind him. The trembling glow of the armour made his image seem mythical, transitory, as if he flickered in and out of Time as we know it; its curious blunt shoulder-spikes and elongated joints gave him the look of some mutated crustacean. His head was bare, his expression beleaguered, and his companions were an ill-assorted lot, comprising a woman of his own race, bitterly thin, shaven-headed, her gait awkward and ungraceful, as if her skeleton worked in a new, untested way (her smile was empty, and she was singing softly, We are off to Vegys now, Fal di Ia di a); a gutter bravo from the Low City, with the walk of a frustrated predator and the spoilt features of a minor aristocrat; and a dark silent figure wrapped like a corpse in an embroidered cloak.

Tomb started up with a cry. He took a pace forward, blinking and confused.

'Cromis?'he whispered.

Pain filled him and he forgot the boy on the floor. He went up close to Galen Hornwrack (for it was him, of course, morose as a wolf, petulant as an adolescent girl at finding himself so unmoved by his ancient bugbear the palace, which after all was only a place) and touched the wrecked metal bird that hung from his belt in lieu of a sword. He looked up into the assassin's face for a moment, then sighed: there was little similarity once you looked closely, and he could find there only an anguished savagery he had never found in the face of the dead poet-hero. He shook his head and turned to Alstath Fulthor.

'I'm sorry, old friend. I thought for a moment -Fulthor smiled absently down at him.

'I know,'he said. 'The similarities are superficial. What were you doing on the floor with that boy?'

He tilted his head to one side as if he were listening to something no-one else could hear, and seemed to forget what he had been saying. There was an awkward pause. Then he went on, 'You should be more patient, Dwarf. I heard there was a maniac or an ape of some kind loose in the corridors. When I saw the little caravan, I -'Fulthor shook his head as though to clear it of some double image – 'I knew it must be you. Are you going to murder this lad, or can he get back to his post?'His tone was curious, friendly but ironical: absent.

Tomb bared his rotten old teeth. He was a little disconcerted by such a reception after twenty years. 'I'm too old for patience, Reborn,'he said gruffly. 'Are you all right?'When no answer came he turned his attention almost gratefully to the boy (who had risen to his knees: colour was coming back into his face), thinking: the whole city is in a dream which it will not share with me; these corridors are cursed. 'Get up,'he told him. 'What is that thing round your neck?'When the boy wouldn't answer he asked Fulthor, but Fulthor didn't hear.

Light streamed suddenly down the corridor, the colour of murder. It rushed over them like smoke, to be sucked away into the outer maze and there dissipate: their shadows followed it. The old machine from which it had issued, so long denied its proper function, began to shriek in horror and frustration, flailing its corroded limbs as if waking after millenia to the truth of its position. Echoes fled like bats.

Out of this abrupt madness crept a party of ten or fifteen men. A squad of the palace guard, they wore the same black and pewter uniforms as the boy, but their faces were distorted by the unsteady glare – salient features drifting into repulsive new relationships – and they came on not with a military gait but with a curious tip-toed tread, their eyes fixed on the dwarf with a feral yet somehow inorganic intensity. Had they shadowed him even as he shadowed the boy, passage to passage, all the way from the outer halls? How had he not felt those eyes like the empty lambent eyes of animals on a dark night? (Or perhaps he had.)

'Fulthor?'

But Fulthor was gazing emptily into the air again, his lips moving silently. There was no help there.

The dwarf shuddered, ambushed by circumstances. The City's web was now complete, and he found himself enmeshed. It wasn't much of a homecoming. Yet it would not be the first time he had fought his way down these corridors. He stood forward a little so as not to prolong the waiting. Nothing much was in his mind.

They were almost upon him when Fulthor whispered 'Stop.'His voice seemed to come from a long way off, and he looked almost surprised to hear it. 'Stop!'For a moment nothing changed. Tomb snarled; Fulthor touched the hilt of his sword, faced with the motiveless slaughter of his own men. But then the world shook itself and threw off the nightmare. The old machine wailed despairingly, sagged, and was silent (in its frenzy it had melted parts of its own spine and now, bent double like a crone, it twitched and contracted as the hot metal cooled). The evil light faded. The approaching men looked uncertainly at one another and put up their swords.

It was little enough, and grudgingly done: their captain nodded woodenly, staring straight ahead, while behind him they shuffled into two columns, looking embarrassed and elbowing one another sullenly. Each wore a medallion like the boy's, a curious complex twist of silver the meaning of which retreated from its seeker like a vacant perspective. 'Call off the search,'Fulthor ordered them. He spoke reluctantly, like a main hard put to control some pain or intense desire. 'A mistake has been made. This is the Iron Dwarf, who has returned to help the City in its hour of need.'They regarded him warily for a few seconds, then turned their heads away as one man and marched off. When they had gone'some distance down the corridor the boy leapt abruptly to his feet; flung the Reborn Man a glance of bitter hatred; and was off, flying down the passage after them, his sword abandoned where Tomb had thrown it. Tomb picked it up. 'What do you make of all this?'he asked Fulthor. Fulthor stared blindly after the boy, his thin hands like a layer of white wax over bone.