'I am lost,'he said, and turned his face to the corridor wall. 'They no longer accept my leadership. Soon one of them will disobey and I shall have to kill him.'He made a noise that might have been a laugh or a sob.

Through all this, Fulthor's companions had hardly moved, but looked on with fear or irony or whatever emotion seemed appropriate. Now the Reborn Woman, sensing his distress, came forward and put one hand uncertainly on his shoulder. 'I – 'she said, and then something in a language Tomb could not follow. 'Mein Herz hat seine Liebe. In my youth I made -'It was clear she could not help him, which distressed her in her turn. She shook him. She looked around for help. 'In my youth I made my small contribution. Blackpool and Venice become as one. Above the night the stars revolve, in circuits of the shuddering bear!'This last a shout. She wept. Oddly enough it was the assassin from the Low City who moved to comfort her. He touched her hand and his bloody, spoilt features writhed briefly: after a second's puzzlement Tomb decided this was an attempt to smile. The woman smiled back, and her face was transfigured – where the dwarf had previously seen only a chilling vacancy there now flared delight, and an intelligence like a lamp uncovered. She let go of the assassin's hand and danced away from him, singing,

Hearing this, Alstath Fulthor put his hands over his ears and groaned. 'I cannot forget the people in the beautiful gardens!'he exclaimed. He hit the side of his head with the heel of his fist. 'Arnac san Tehin! How long is it since – saw your sweet mad face at midnight, or trod with you the 'pavements of the Rue Morgue Avenue?'And still groaning he ran away down the corridor toward the outside world, stripping off his armour as he went.

A thin wind passed down the corridor, smelling of dust and hyacinth; with it came silence, a substance not an absence, to fill the ears with empty rooms and abandoned stairs and the motionless unspeaking figures of the Earth's innocence. In this silence Tomb the Dwarf sought desperately for reassurance. But the woman had retreated into her own memories, shoulders hunched and eyes hooded secretively, a ghost of tenderness playing about the corners of her mouth; nothing she said made sense anyway. And the assassin merely smiled sardonically, shrugging as if to absolve himself of this responsibility at least (the movement appeared to hurt him somewhere in the region of his lower ribs and his expression immediately became sour and self-involved).

'Is everybody insane, then?'Tomb asked himself irritably, turning in the end – though something made him reluctant – to the man in the shroud-like cloak, who stood a little way off examining the distraught machine as ifit might help him break the universe's last mad code. The machine was crooning to him out of its incomprehensible pain, and he, standing like a mysterious parcelled statue, was whispering back; neither of them would ever understand the other. Tomb went up and stood between them, arms akimbo, staring aggressively into the unrelieved darkness of the man's hood.

'Leave that, sir,'he said, 'although I'm sure it must be very interesting, and tell me: has the City lost its senses?'

Silence.

'Very well, then: if you are a friend of Fulthor's, at least tell me when his illness began. I am the Iron Dwarf (of whom you may have heard), who woke him from his aeon-sleep to help defeat the North (which I did by means of knowledge gained from an old man).'

He craned his neck, but no face was visible despite that he felt eyes focused on him from somewhere under the hood. At this, his temper went. He pulled out his knife.

'Say something, you cold pudding, or I'll serve you up in slices! Are you all ignorant or loony in here?'

But the man only chuckled and said, 'You knew me last time we met, Dwarf, with your beard on fire and your broken head! Have you forgotten so soon? I would have asked you then, only there was no time: how has it been with you since our other fateful parting, there beneath the sad tower eighty years ago? What a change you and I have wrought in the world by our doings then! Do you see any of my children as you go about from desert to desert, from Waste to Waste?

And he threw back his hood, laughing his dry old enigmatic laugh, and became Cellur, the Lord of the Birds…

Cellur the Bird Lord: he has lived for aeons in a five-sided tower full of undersea gloaming. Instruments flickered and ticked about him all that time, while his sensors licked the unquiet air, detecting new forms and seasons. Out of the cold reaches of salt marsh and estuary, out of the long cry of the wind, out of the swell of the sea and the call of the winter tern he comes to us now: out of the War of the Two Queens, with his thousand dying metal birds; out of the long forgotten dream of the Middle Period of the Earth, shaking his head over the pain and beauty, twin demiurgi of Mankind's enduring Afternoon!

What has he witnessed, that we shall never see? Forgotten, that we could hardly imagine?

The lines and figures on his marvellous robe writhe and shiver like tortured alien animals. Geometry remembers, though he may not. 'Nothing is left as it was,'they sigh, 'in that final perfect world. The towers that ruled these wastes have fallen now. The world, which they halted for a millenium in its tracks has begun to turn again. We find here no compassion as savage and sterile as theirs; no cruelty as structured or formal; no art. The vast air is stilled, where they lowed beneath five artificial planets, trumpeting verse into the frozen distance. Their libraries lie open like the pages of a book abandoned to the desert wind, their last dry whispers fade; philosophers and clowns alike, fade; that febrile clutching at the stars…'

Cellur. Ten thousand seasons once were his, years beating like hearts! These geometries could tell us. They are the spoor of Time itself, did we but know. Cellur the Bird Lord! Now he speaks -All are assembled in the throne-room but Alstath Fulthor. (Rumour has him running through the filthy alleys of the Artists'Quarter, up the hill at Alves and through the grounds of the derelict observatory, expressions of madness eroding his proud features; rumour had him leaving Viriconium for the third time in a month – no horse, no armour, only his heaving lungs, and his past in close pursuit. The Low City is entranced.)

The Queen sits with her calm hands in her lap; at her feet kneels Tomb the Dwarf, picking his teeth with the point of his knife; Fay Glass of the vanished House ofSleth, dressed in a new cloak, whispers nonsense to the Queen's Beast: while Galen Hornwrack stands apart, with a face like death. All wait, except perhaps the madwoman. Round them hover curtains of mercurial light, twists of mirror'd air. Before them five false windows tremble with views of a landscape to be found nowhere in the kingdom.

In the Time of the Locust it is given to us to see such things. 'My Lady'(began Cellur, bowing to Methvet Nian):

'I had, as you know, some small part in the war against the North. But that war was almost my death – as I shall tell -and it destroyed both my refuge and my birds, which hurt me grievously. I have been many years coming to terms with this and my life has been a curious one since then. I return to find the kingdom much changed, and I am afraid my very coming heralds further uncertainty. It is eighty years since I sent the iridium vulture to Tegeus-Cromis in his tower at Balmacara among the rowan woods: I wish he were here today to answer a similar summons. Although I believe he thought of himself as a poet, he had a great gift for murder. Events again require such a captain. If I am to explain why, I must return for a moment to the War of the Two Queens -'That I survived the onslaught of Canna Moidart's forces