Buflin blinked at him and went on, 'When the mist rolls inshore at night we can sometimes sense them down there in the fjord, sailing stealthily inland. Where they are going we do not know.'He smiled tiredly. 'I'm sorry, the fish is awful.'Momentarily sponged of its lines, his face regained a young and pliant air. 'I'm glad you've come at last.'

Fulthor got up. He handed over his safe-conducts and his letters of introduction. 'Our mission is urgent,'he said. 'I should like fresh horses if you have them. Otherwise nothing. I'm sorry we cannot help.'

There was a silence.

'That was badly done, Alstath Fulthor,'said Cellur.

Buffin looked at them both. Sleet tapped the milky panes of the greenhouse. Outside, the wind tossed the strings of pennants, and set to swaying the distant mast-tops of the half-completed fleet. A mist was coming in off the sea.

'I dreamt last night of a fatal blunder made while asleep,'said Cellur as they made their way back up to the cliff-top in the blowing sleet. 'A sleepwalker murdered his own son.'

'We have done nothing decent here,'agreed Hornwrack a bit absently. Watching with horror the torment of St Elmo Buffin, he had suddenly begun to think of his own youth, a faithless season spent in the wet plough of the midlands. He could not quite connect the two except in their antithesis. 'That's certain. Only co-operate in one more High City betrayal.'It was later in the day. They were all mounted on fresh animals. Out of his reverie he gave Alstath Fulthor a look of dislike. (He remembered when it came to it only a touch of dead crysanthemums on the skin in some still-aired room; rooks sweeping over the heavy earth. What he had taken to be unsentimentality with regard to this had turned out to be quite the reverse. In turn, this caused him to think about the Rue Sepile, and all that implied.)

'I thought I recalled the man,'Cellur said. 'Perhaps it was a story, heard long ago. And yet the face was very familiar.'

'Quite.'

'I cannot shake off a sense of foreboding.'

At the top of the cliff, about to turn inland, they were accosted by the spectre of the ancient airboatman. Opening and shutting its mouth like a deformed goldfish, it approached them out of the eddying sleet, rotating slowly about its vertical axis. Although, as before, it appeared to maintain only the most precarious contact with the World, a thin grey snow seemed to be settling on its shoulders, the ghostly precipitate of some foreign continuum. It was agitated. It came very close to Hornwrack and plucked at his cloak. (He felt nothing until he tried to beat it offwith the flat of his hands, when there was some slight, gelatinous resistance.)

'Few lawn!'it shouted through its cupped hands, as from a great distance. 'Fog.. Forn… Fenling. Oh crikey. 'It pointed desperately out to sea. It looked inland and shook its head. 'FENGLIN! nuktis 'agalma… 254 da parte… ten cans for a boat load… Fengle!'

And it took up station above his head like a fat angel, staring tragically backwards as they moved inland and signing madly whenever it caught his eye.

Still later, Tomb the Dwarf rode up to his side. He held out the weapon Hornwrack had lost on the quayside.

'You dropped your sword, soldier.'

Hornwrack said bitterly, 'Listen old Dwarf, I thought I had got rid of that. I am not him. Whatever he was to you. Don't you understand that?'

The dwarf grinned and shrugged, still holding the sword out expectantly.

Hornwrack looked up at the thing floating above him. Seeing this, it steered itself rapidly toward him, clearing its throat. He groaned, accepted the sword. Both his spectres had returned to haunt him.

The weather now changed. Low cloud and sleet rolled away east and south to be replaced by a pale sky and good visibility. A wind like a razor blew from the north. On a succession of bright but bitterly cold days they penetrated the habitable margin of the Great Brown Waste, to find a frozen crust over deep, wet peat. Progress was slow. Ifa bird called, tak tak like an echo in a stony gully, the madwoman followed it with her eyes, tilting her head; smiled. She was nervous, but now rode ahead of Alstath Fulthor. She had led them into a region of high dissected plateaux over which hummed the icy wind, and then cast about over the bleak hillsides for a while like a lost bitch. Little paths ran everywhere, contouring the salients. As far as anyone could make out she followed them randomly. They led her in the end to a stone-crowned, steep-streamed escarpment which sheltered among its boulder-fields sparse woods ofstunted oak. On its lower slopes might be discerned the lanes and enclosures of a settlement; the walls toppled, the sheepfolds in poor repair. Behind the village rose the eroded shapes of the Agdon Roches, from which it took its name: a string of gritstone outcrops quarried long ago for building stone so that they formed a succession of bays and shattered promontories.

'This is a vile bloody place.'

Hornwrack: Paucemanly's ghost had left him alone for a while, vanishing with a wet pop and a feeble grin as if remembering a prior appointment. He was relieved, but found himself with nothing to think about but the cold. He was used to the city, where winter is episodic. The wind whistles across the junction of the Rue Sepile and Vientiane Avenue. The women clutch their shawls tightly and dash laughing from house to house. There is always a window to watch them from while you drink mulled wine prepared by a boy. Not so here: his fingers were welded to the reins like the fingers of a stone horseman falling apart in some provincial square. He had been miserable for days.

'I've seen worse,'said the dwarf speculatively, as if he wondered whether he had. He wore his leather hat at a queer angle; his arms were empurpled with the cold.

The wreckage of an ancient landscape lay across their path.

The metaphysical disputes of the late Afternoon Cultures, raging here across the flood-plain of some vanished river, had turned it into a corridor of black ash strewn with rounded stones. It was zoned and undulating; in places stripped to the underlying rock, ten or twenty feet thick in places. Every summer a little more of it dried up and blew away into the Waste. Some of the stones were quite large, some no bigger than a fist, and each stood on a little pediment of wind-smoothed ash. Some isolated colonies of bilberry and ling grew here and there, raised by the same erosive process until they resembled a chain of hairy islets Outlier or prefigurement of the deeper Waste to come, it was a little less than two miles wide, and across it could be seen the cracked buttresses of the Agdon Roches, brushed at their summits with rosy light. A thin white mist flowed down the gullies and stony cloughs at their feet, drifting through the hanging oakwoods and filling up the village street so that only the roofs and upper storeys of the cottages were visible. 'Through the still air a dog could be heard barking; sheep bleated from the intakes. In a small field stood one cow. All this one might almost have touched, so precisely-enamelled did it seem on the bright surface of the air: but Fay Glass would make no move towards it.

'She is frightened of the maze.'

'And yet,'said Fulthor, returning from a brief foray, 'her own people must have made it.'Damp ash was caked between the fingers of his gauntlets. The discovery of the earthwork had filled him with an obscure excitement. Her subsequent refusal to enter or even pass it seemed only to have sharpened this. 'They were obsessed by patterns, those who came north in the final desperate days of the Resurrection determined to discover a way back.'He smiled whitely. 'As if the fingers of the Past do not already brush our cheeks, waking or sleeping – 'He stared back into the maze. 'She is a child, I'm afraid.'