When Hornwrack pushed his way through the oaks, old leaves and lichenous dust showered down; and the little bird flew away.

'Fulthor?'

The wounded king wakes and slates about him with a newfear. He has risen from the devotions of one nightmare into the ruins of another. 'Where is this place?'he'll whisper. None will speak. 'Back then!'he'll cry, sweeping the great baan round his head in an arc which makes the sound of panicked wings. Shadows fly like wounded doves from horizon to horizon. Precarious flowers bloom in his secret heart …

'Hornwrack! Am I mad?'A bitter laugh. 'Another dream. More days lost in the absolute abyss of Time. Oh, the fiery woman, with her expressionless eyes! How long have I been away?'

And he advanced dreamily on Hornwrack, still swinging the energy blade.

'Fulthor!'screamed Hornwrack, who saw no magical king (who could blame him? He had been born three millenia too late) and who failed to hear the hum of that long declining dream: 'It's me!'He ducked the lethal stroke; offered the old steel sword (its tip was lopped off instantly); stepped in desperately close and hammered Fulthor's wrist with the pommel of his trusty knife. Nerveless, the white hand opened. The baan fell. Fulthor gave a howl of despair and sat down suddenly. 'Must I always choose between there and here?'He regarded Hornwrack from between his hands. 'Kill me then.'He looked round. 'Where are we?'

Hornwrack, however, was no longer interested.

The ghost of Benedict Paucemanly had reappeared, to float over the oakwood mouthing like a drowned sailor; and through its unsteady, half-transparent shape he had caught a sudden glimpse of the horizon. There, insectile silhouettes processed slowly against a greenish sky, full of bitter snow. They seemed to carry with them an unquiet cobalt halo; along their sides flared sphenograms of an acid green; they held their forelegs delicately raised. Over the summits of the Agdon Roches they went, southwards, with an exquisite mechanical concentration, looking neither left nor right.

The world started to melt like candle wax.

Hornwrack got Fulthor somehow to his feet. Unspeaking, they descended the hill.

Snow whirled round them. Roots caught at their feet. Paucemanly encouraged them with whistles and farts.

'I really mean it, you blokes – ten thousand nights were put in one! There I lay, listening to the winds gathering in the dry places, the abandoned places. We're all in it now, us and them, raw-blind on the waterstair at Shadwell Pier like burnt rats! Phew! The white Moon makes thus “the stair of our descent…“ There was more of this. 'Ooh, what you must think of me I don't know,'he would exclaim fishily; and then, screwing up his eyes behind the faceplate of his abominable mask, bawl -'Felneck! Fandle! FENLEN!'

– his queer epicene voice hooting across the hillside like a signal while, above, the insectile procession moved on imperturbably: south, south, south…

The new wind, rushing blindly out of the east under a cavernous overcast, had brought black obscurity to the village, whose streets were now full of flying chemical ice blown in from the Deep Waste. The dead insects at each corner creaked and shifted in the gale. Their eyes were pitted and stony. Above them splinters of chitin, sections of antennae and shattered veiny wing floated and spun in the rooftop eddies like the rubbish of the Low City rattling round the chimneys below Alves on a blustery night. Hornwrack leaned on Alstath Fulthor, his eyes rimed with urgent ice, the words blown out of his mouth and every thought out of his skull. They came down the main street like drunks in the weak glow of Fulthor's armour. All else was shadowy, hard to interpret. Dead men leaned conversationally forward as they passed, then toppled on to empty faces, limbs breaking away like the rotten limbs ofscarecrows to go bounding off down the road and lodge in a fence.

Cellur the birdmaker awaited them at the centre of the village, where the wind was whipping spray off the horse trough and the front doors were banging on rooms inhabited only by mice and suffocated children. He had with him Tomb the Dwarf. From the debacle in the maze they had retrieved three horses and the pony, which now stood in the street shifting bad-temperedly with each fresh gust of wind:

tTomb was redistributing the surviving baggage between them as if in preparation for a further journey into the deep madness of the World. This activity made an island of humanity in the rushing gloom, at the approaches of which hovered the madwoman, wrapped from head to foot in a thick whitish garment and turning aimlessly this way and that like something hanging from a privet branch.

Alstath Fulthor looked emptily at this scene as if he recognized no-one in it, then sat down in the road. Hornwrack, tugging at his arm, heard the birdmaker shout 'Ride! West, for your life!'He shook his head. 'Wait!'He wasn't sure he had heard correctly. The old man had got up on his horse now and was watching them impatiently, his embroidered cloak streaming in the wind. The dwarf ran round checking saddlebags, tightening girths, and urging the inert Fay Glass into her saddle by means of pantomimic threats. The wind rose and fell cynically, tugging at the dry husks of the insects. The horses milled about, sensing an imminent departure. Hornwrack let go of Fulthor's wrist (“Black piss! Stay there, then, if you must!”) and caught at the birdmaker's stirrup instead. The horse dragged him off his feet, the old man's yellow face swam above him, alive with what he took to be fear. They were in an eddy or pocket in the gale.

'In the maze,'said Cellur, 'my errors were made plain. Much, if not all, is now clear to me. I cannot yet explain the ghost – 'he prodded Hornwrack's shoulder, pointed up into the wrack where Paucemanly bobbed, smirking and bowing like a butler – 'but I have at last learnt what he was trying to tell us.

'You must go and rouse Iron Chine. Pray that St Elmo Buffin, a man ill-used by circumstance, is not as mad as he seems! Tell him the time has come to launch his fleet. Tell him help is on its way.'He smiled bitterly. 'Lunatics and ghosts – all along they have had the right of it!'For a second he stared slack-faced and frightened into the west, his hooded eyes human for once. (After all, he is out in the world now, thought Hornwrack – who sympathized, being newly out in it himself- like a crab out of its shell: what guarantees has he left? And again: What can he fear after ten thousand years?) He made a cutting motion with his hand. 'Still. I was slow to connect these things. I have been too content tosit by and let Fulthor lead. Now Fulthor has failed me, and there it

Is.

'Fenlen, the island continent, is infested. They have been established there since they poured down from the Moon eleven years ago. (I looked on like a fool. What else could I have done? I forget.) But they cannot bear Earth's airs: and when their scouts fly inland low over the sea, which they do night and day, they do so surrounded by an atmosphere of their own manufacture. By day they blunder into Buffin's sailors. They are as motiveless and mad as the men they kill. They do not belong here.'

He gestured at the empty village, the creaking husks. 'Can you doubt it? Yet they are trying to make the air over to suit them. This is only the beginning.'He shuddered. 'They will remake the Earth, if they can. Rouse Iron Chine, Hornwrack. I ride now to the capital. Delay me no longer!'

Hornwrack hung on to the stirrup. All he could think of to say was, 'Something is the matter with Alstath Fulthor. Up on the escarpment he tried to kill me.'

'Oh, I am in hell,'said Alstath Fulthor, shaking his head. He had come up behind them silently, the baan like a live thing in his hand. 'I am not myself.'Tomb the Dwarf, who had tightened the final strap, tried to take the weapon away from him for his own good. 'Come on, old friend.'They rolled about in the road, cursing and biting. Fulthor wriggled away and got up again. 'Come down off your horse,'he ordered, 'and explain all this. Why, up there, great cock-a-roaches walk along the ridge!'He pointed in the wrong direction. (The dwarf crawled away holding his face and spitting.) 'Or is it in my head?'He shrugged, smiled shyly; lurched off. Fay Glass woke up and looked at him sharply. Keeping a wary eye on the dwarf, she got off her horse.