Suddenly they both began singing, 'We are off to Vegys now.'Hornwrack looked on appalled. 'Fal di la di a.'

(When he fled through the High City like a bleeding king, in a sweat of fear in the middle of the night, and hoped no-one would notice; when he muttered in the palace the nine, long, alchemical names of his House, and hoped no-one would hear: all heard, all knew but himself. Alstath Fulthor:

the past was pulling him down.)

'When we first met,'said Cellur, 'he spoke to me often of memory, which he conceived of as a hidden stream, himself perched on its bank looking into the water. Also of something which hovered like a dragonfly over the moment of his reawakening in the desert at Knarr.'He sighed. 'What did he kill down there in the maze? Nothing you or I saw. All this has hastened the inevitable.

'Soon he will be as mad as the woman. She will help him. You must help them both. It is why I brought you.'

'I brought myself, old man.'

'Be that as it may.'

'What am I todo?'

'Earn what you were given,'said Tomb the Dwarf, and meant, perhaps, the sword. 'I believe you'll get no other pay.'He was in a bad temper. He wiped his pocked old nose on the back of his hand to show what he thought of it all, and pushed his sodden conical hat firmly down on to his head. 'You were not brought but bought,'he said with a hard grin. 'Goodbye Hornwrack.'Hauling himself up into his saddle he added, 'We'll go back across the Waste to Duirinish – for it's quicker if you know the paths and don't mind old battles or old lizards – and thence to Viriconium. Cellur fears the Sign of the Locust. He fears for the Queen. He does not quite know what he fears.'He looked about him like a man expecting rain. 'I fear this. Still: one way or another I dare say we shall all have some heads to cut off before long. Do you look after the mad folk.'And he gave the pony vigorous kicks until it consented to move off into the weather. Teetering on the edge of visibility for a moment, dwarf and pony made a curious uncouth silhouette, a composite creature above which flew like a flag on its long haft the curved evil blade of the power-axe. 'Never say I disliked you!'The eyes of the pony before it turned its head away were a flat and empty green.

Out there Cellur waited impatiently, staring west or south. 'Rouse Iron Chine!'came a faint cry through the crack and belly of the gale. Hornwrack never saw either of them again. 'On the shores of the diamond lake,'sang the madwomen in a weird voice,

'We shall watch the fishes, On the summits of the mountains Cry “Erecthalia!”

We are off to Vegys now. '

The weather closed in. He was alone. Even the ghost of Benedict Paucemanly, part at least of its purpose accomplished, had gone out like a candle. In the deserted village it might as easily have been evening as afternoon. Out of the crepuscular sky issued a thin snow which drifted up behind the dry corpses, blew into the empty rooms, and plastered itself to the windward eaves. Every so often the wind from the Deep Waste mingled with it a scatter of old ice, flinging it down the street like two handfuls of dirty glass beads. He rubbed the back of his neck. How had he come to be stranded in the cold north with two lunatics, and no option but to go and look for a third? After Iron Chine he would make his way south along the coast, since he knew no other route (that inhospitable strand, with its distant illusions and tottering cliffs, now seemed familiar and comforting); he would lose himself again in the Low City. Perhaps he would find the boy. He would kill the dwarf if he ever had the chance.

All this time, off at the edge of his awareness, faint telepathies crawled like maggots round the rim of a saucer. Up there on the Agdon scarp was a stealthy and purposeful movement, too far away to hurt him yet, too close for comfort. Suddenly he became frightened that. they would come down unexpectedly and discover him among their dead. What delicate revenge might they take? In any case he could not bear their thoughts in his skull. Two horses had been left him for three people. Feverishly he urged the madwoman up on to one of them; and then with his hand on his knife approached the Reborn Man, wishing the dwarf had captured the baan during their brief scuffle beneath the horse. Eyeing him with a sad amusement, Fulthor said, 'I will run beside you. It is not so far.'

The ramshackle conservatory of St Elmo Buflin, with its invented flags and fantastic telescopes, teetered high above the fish docks of the port, full of silence, brackish air and the smell of the food they had been served there a week or more ago. Buffin sat as if he had not moved since then, in a high-backed chair surrounded by plates of congealed herring. He had taken off his, father's armour and underneath was swathed in some dirty white stuff, linen or flannel, as if he suffered with his joints. He was staring at nothing, his long thin legs thrust out in front of him and crossed as though they belong to someone else, his baglike face crumpled and desperate. His instruments lay smashed. They were no more or less meaningful for it: nests of bent brass tubing, complex coloured lenses pulled apart like sugared anemones underfoot. The charts he had ripped down, to reveal the walls beneath. He had lost his patience with them, perhaps.

Hornwrack wiped the condensation from a cracked pane, looked out.

'You need not have done this to yourself,'he said.

It was such a waste. He felt hot and angry, cold and remote, all at once.

'What happened here?'

Buffin did not answer for a long time. The Afternoon had betrayed him again, and the old powered knife with which he had tried to kill himself now lay sputtering feebly in his lap, its energies spent at last. Some blood had flowed, then dried brown. He did not seem to be able to move his head. The silence drew out. Wondering if he was already dead, Hornwrack waited, breathing evenly and trying to make out what was happening in the port below.

'What does it matter?'came the eventual answer. Then, after another long pause: 'Of the fleet I ordered the uncompleted part destroyed. It is of no use now. Viriconium will never help us now.'He laughed quietly. 'The rest has sailed, into madness and death. The mist surrounds us (can you not hear it? It is like bells!) and all has failed.'

He bit his bottom lip. 'I dare not move my head,'he said, staring forward at nothing, fingering the hilt of the useless knife. 'Can you see what I have done?'

'Your throat is cut,'said Hornwrack, breathing on the glass. 'But not well.'

If he wiped a circle on the glass with the palm of his hand he could see framed in it the black original buildings of the fjord squatting like toads on the lower slopes. To his right a cliff swept up, also black, and laced for five hundred feet with icy ledges. Until recently ice had locked the harbour: now churned and broken sheets of it bobbed in the black channels cut by the departed fleet. Beneath him banks of white vapour hung, drifting sluggishly down the cobbled slopes toward the shrouded quays. In places it was deep enough to cover the upper casements of the cottages as it was driven reluctantly between them by the bitter intermittent wind; in others, where it was shallower, he thought he could see heads and torsos going about above it on some cryptic dislocated errand. The suggestion of movement beneath it he tried to ignore. Above all this in the green subarctic sky, aurorae flickered, and great streaks of red and black cloud mimicked the flame and smoke beneath, where men ran despairingly among the boatyards with torches, setting fire to their labour of years.

Death was written in the scrollwork at the bows, death on the painted sterns and the ornate brass bells.'DEATH', proclaimed the painted sails, while the white decks beneath bubbled and charred, generating a heat fierce enough to melt the metal masts. Ash whirled into the air, unknown incandescent alloys showered down, last fruit of that doomed collaboration between Afternoon and Evening (which now pursue their separate courses, as we know). Rolling into the flames, the mist turned them instantly green and blue; and was itself transformed with a roar into a greyish powdery smoke which, sucked up in the merciless updraughts, bellied out above the doomed craft in a choking spherical cloud. Spars flared and fell. Ratlines parted with the sound of a broken violin. Here and there a man was trapped in a tangle of ropes, or caught among the stays beneath a blazing bowsprit with no-one to hear his cries. At the height of the fire a single painted sail escaped its ties, unfurled, billowed upward. For a brief moment a pair of great illusory lizards danced in the air! -only to sink with a regretful whisper and be consumed, writhing amid the smoke in a counterfeit of the pain in St Elmo Buffin's frigid, frightened stare.