The season now teetered on the cold iron pivot of the solstice, and Viriconium was asleep for once, huddled against the cold; you could hear its catarrhal snores from upper windows. The mosaic of its roofs, whited by moonlight and last week's frozen snow, lay like the demonstration of some equivocal new geometry. The Low City had retreated from him even as he entered it (dogs shivering outside the gatehouse, no other sign of life; the tunnel smelling of pee, black ice and that merciless vegetable), so that he seemed always to view it at a distance. He did not understand its mood. A muted expectancy, a cold glamour resistant to his dwarfish intuition, vibrated in its surfaces: he had for a moment (it was a moment only) a sense of two cities, overlapping in a sprawl of moonlit triangles and tangled thoroughfares. This conceit caused him to smile but remained with him nevertheless, quite distinctly, as if he had seen the future as a composite city uninhabited by human beings.

More beggars were abroad than a single city had a right to, moving quietly about in ones and twos, the deformities that would by day be displayed up on Chamomile Street outside the pot-house doors, now half-hidden, under scalloped rags and strange tight bandages – as if when left to themselves they sought a finer aesthetic of suffering, and a subtler performance of it. Tomb stood up in his stirrups to see over the parapet of a bridge. (Toc toc went the pony's hooves, little and sharp on the cobbles.) 'Someone at least is keeping the night alive,'he observed. Underneath him the Pleasure Canal diminished toward Lowth in an icy curve, its surface tricked out with dim reflections of the Moon. 'The ice is miraculously hard. They've lit a brazier down there on it.'Cellur, though, seemed preoccupied. 'Now it's spilt!'Faint shouts and wails, as of laughter, floated up. 'Look here, Cellur – some fool's set fire to a conjuror's booth!'

'I see nothing.'

'You wish to see nothing. You are a dreary companion, I can tell you that. It's all gone dark now anyway,'said the dwarf disappointedly. He craned his neck. Nothing. His pony drifted to a standstill. When he caught up again the old man was hemming and clucking nervously.

'Those alms-men are following us now. Be ready with your axe. I do not believe they are what they seem.'

'Arms-men! Bloody beggars, more like.'He shifted the axe from one shoulder to the other. 'Black piss!'He had looked back and got a glimpse of the beggars hopping after him, soft-boned and ricketty-kneed, their arms flying out this way and that for balance. It was a horrible sight. 'There are not that many beggars in the entire world!'They were all humps and goitres. Their mis-shapen heads were concealed under crusty swathes of muslin and hats with ragged brims. Up in the Artists'Quarter and all around the derelict observatory at Alves they were gathering in large groups, lurching crazily about in white-breathed circles, watching idly as Tomb and Cellur rode past, joining the quiet procession behind. An occasional soft groan came from amongst them. Cellur's horse slithered and stumbled from rut to frozen rut; and though the pony was surer-footed they still went slowly up the Rivelin Hill between the shuttered booths and empty taverns.

Into the High City they went, but it proved to be no sanctuary. When they quickened their pace, the beggars. quickened theirs, breaking into the parody of a run. Through the elegant deserted plazas ofMinnet-Saba (where the road is made of something that muffles the sound of hooves and the wind has mumbled puzzledly for millenia round the upper peculiarities of the Pastel Towers) they poured, and out on to the great exposed spiral of the Proton Circuit: reeling from side to side, jumping and hopping and tripping themselves up, always out of the power-axe's reach:

maintaining a zone ofquarantine about the old man and the dwarf, sweeping them along by the mere promise of contact. Tomb bit his lip and belaboured the pony's sides. All around him was a sort of dumb rustling noise, punctuated by the gasps and quiet desperate groans of the deformed. (Above and behind that he thought he heard a parched whisper, as if some enormous insect hovered above the chase on huge thoughtful wings.)

Ahead, lights glimmered. In the gusty winds at the summit of the spiral, the overlapping filigree shells of the palace creaked as if they were part of some flimsier structure. Methven's hall: the Moon hung above it like a daubed head. 'Look!'For a moment its image wavered – two palaces were superimposed, behind it another landscape showed through. Blue particles showered from its upper regions, a rain of tiny luminous insects. They galloped toward it nevertheless. Where else could they go? It trembled like a dragonfly's wing; was refracted like something seen through running water on a sunny day; and accepted them almost reluctantly. New Palace Yard was almost deserted. Tomb's caravan still stood there, its shafts empty and its colours dimmed by the smoke of winter. No guards were there to observe the sparks fly up from the pony's hooves or watch the dwarf- axe in hand and white hair streaming out behind

– tumble to the ground and hurl himself back through the gate they had just come through, determined to hold it at all costs.

The beggars, though, had forgotten about him the moment he entered the palace, and now idled about outside, staring blankly at one another. They were not beggars, he saw: they were bakers and greengrocers, in the remnants of striped aprons; they were dukes and moneylenders: they were butchers. The Sign of the Locust peeped through their curious rags. They stood in the bluish moonlight and they seemed to be waiting for something; he couldn't tell what. (They no longer had any reasons for the things they did, but he wasn't to know that. A white and single instinct had them now, like a thin song in the brain.) He watched them for five or six minutes, feeling the sweat dry on him as the seconds stretched uneventfully out and his body relaxed. Cellur came up behind him and looked over his head. 'You can put up the axe,'he said with a certain morose satisfaction. 'The City is theirs, High and Low.'And he strode rapidly off into the outer corridors, heading for the throne-room. Tomb backed away from the gate with a half-hearted snarl and, stopping to collect the bundle of long silver rods he had carried behind his saddle to the Agdon Roches and back, followed him.

The corridors were full of rubbish, mounds of decaying vegetables and heaps of ashes. Everywhere were the discarded uniforms of the palace guard. Much of the food was spoiled, half-eaten, as if whoever had prepared it was unused to human provisions; or had forgotten what to do with them. Cellur shook his head.

'They have let us in,'he said: 'But they will not let us out again so easily. I wonder what they are waiting for.'

(Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, waited also, in a cold room with five false windows. It had been a long time to wait at the heart of emptiness, nothing human moving in the corridors outside.)

Elsewhere, three figures cross our field of vision like the vanguard of an as-yet-distant refugee column. The deep wastes of Fenlen roll away from them in the weak, variable light of late afternoon, hollow as a fevered cheek. Their faces are haggard but human. They walk – if walk is the word for this slithering, staggering progress through the mud – heads down into the rain and some yards apart. They rarely speak to one another. Madness and pain have divided them and they will not now be brought back together. All day long they have followed a fourth figure (there! – bobbing in the saturated air above them, like some great inflated spectral frog!) through a belt ofderelict factories. Often they halt and stare anxiously about, in case this floating guide has abandoned them: for they are forty days out from the wreckage of Iron Chine, and they have almost forgotten who they are. The moor ahead of them is scattered with interlacing ashpits, chancred with shallow albescent tarns, and strewn as far as the eye can see with broken earthenware pipes – the detritus, it may be, of some ancient ill-fated reclamation project. From the continental marshes and sumps to the north, the wind brings a deadly metallic reek; and mixed with that more often than not comes the faint smell of lemons, to usher in another period of delirium.