The woman imagines she is the spokesman of some alien race. Her cropped hair is daubed with mud, and she makes complicated motions of the fingers to symbolize the actions of wings or antennae. She speaks of a city on the plain. 'We lid not wish to come here,'she says reasonably, 'this is not our place!'There is a cold-sore at the corner of her mouth. For the last half-hour her gait had grown steadily more disconnected. 'Your breath burns us!'she exclaims with a light laugh, as if stating some principle so obvious as to need no demonstration; and she collapses into the mud. Her limbs move feebly then stop. Broken pipes are dislodged and roll down on to her. Her companions continue their ascent of the low ridge before them. At last one of them looks back.

'Fulthor,'he says dully, 'she can't go any further unaided;'and the other replies, 'I see the great-breasted chimerae with their ironic eyes, but I cannot go to them! This morning early I had a vision of Arnac san Tehn – him with the head like a god – sitting in a garden.'

He strikes himself repeatedly about the face and head. 'Dust and hyacinths in my father's library; dust and hyacinths my proud inheritance!'This litany seems to give him doubtful comfort. For some time he runs in erratic circles in the mud, his neck bent and his face pulled over to one side of his skull as if he has suffered a stroke. Eventually he joins the first figure (who has sat down wearily to watch him) and with much fumbling they raise the woman by her legs and shoulders. Their farting guide, meanwhile, hectors them in a language not heard on Earth before or since. He waves a fat, admonitory hand and they must follow; slower than before, up the dip of the long low ridge, sliding into peat groughs and shallow hidden pools, their eyes on their feet and the woman slung between them like a rotting hammock… Imagine that our field of vision is static, and that they have almost moved out of it, creeping across from left to right as the light fades. They crest the ridge. We see only their uncomprehending faces, made tiny and grey by distance; while they see only the city which spreads itself suddenly below them like excavations in a sunken garden.

A mist drifts over the scene – particulate, sullen, smelling of lemons.

The throne-room at Viriconium, on a cold and desultory afternoon three or four days after the death of the Fat Main:

three o'clock, and the night was already closing in, diffusing through the draughty passages where the old machines muttered and drew about themselves their meagre shawls of light. Methvet Nian: nine steel rings glittered cold and grey on her thin stiff fingers. She wore a cloak made from white fur clasped with amber and iron, and took her chocolate from a rare grey china cup. Her eyes were purple and depthless. Cellur the birdmaker sat with her, leaning forward a little, his face beaky and hollow in the weak light admitted by the clerestory windows high above. Their murmurs echoed in the chilly air. 'We know nothing but that the world is invaded.''Our fate in St Elmo Buffin's hands.'

'Nothing seen from the outer wall.''Great insects, marching south. The Queen held out one hand, palm flat, to the small blue flames of the fire, feeling an uncertain, transitory w armth.

Around them the palace was quiet, though not unpopulated. The Queen's guard had, it turned out, destroyed

some weeks before in a series of bloody, motiveless purges and episodic defections to the Sign of the Locust: the day after his arrival, Tomb the Dwarf had brought his caravan in from the courtyard, established himself like a nomadic warlord somewhere in the littered outer corridors, and taken charge of the handful of disorientated survivors he found living rough in the guardrooms and abandoned mess halls. It was a situation which suited both his inclinations and his experience. At night the dull ring of his hammer penetrated the intervening walls; he was rearming his little force. During the morning he made the round of his defences – which consisted mainly in barricades constructed from old machinery – or stared from the judas-hole he had contrived in the main gates at the silent 'beggars'without. In the afternoons he would knock on the throne-room door and allow Methvet Nian to serve him lukewarm chamomile which he compounded with a violent brandy from Cladich. I expect an attack soon,'he would report, and another day would pass without event. 'It can't be long in coming.'He was happier, he explained, with something to do. Never-theless he dreamed a lot, of the lost excitements of his youth.

Leaving the palace for the city was like entering a dark crystal (especially at night, under the 'white pulpy spectre'the Moon); the shape of things became irregular, refracted; sudden astonishing mirages swallowed the Pastel Towers or engulfed the denizens of the streets beneath them. It was as if Viriconium (the physical city, that is, the millenial artifact which sums up a thousand dead cultures) had suffered some sort of psychic storm, and forgotten itself. Its very molecules seemed to be creeping apart. 'As you walk,'the dwarf tried to explain after a single clandestine excursion to the Artists'Quarter, 'the streets create themselves around you. When you have passed everything slips immediately back into chaos again.'Many of the Reborn had abandoned their houses in Minnet-Saba and were making their way north, a trickle of great horses, big-wheeled carts and vibrantly coloured armour: they carried their strange weapons with care. Down in the Low City the alleys were empty and stuporous – no-one was coming out except for coke or cabbage. Outside the palace waited the devotees of the Sign, becoming more mis-shapen beneath their cloaks and bandages every day…

In the room at the centre of the palace the light had almost gone. Draughts ran about like mice in the corners. White stiff fingers retreated beneath the fur cloak she clasped about her: 'It is so cold this afternoon. On the Rannoch Moor when I was little more than a child, Lord Birkin Grif killed a snow-leopard. It was not so cold then. He spun me round by the arms crying “Hold on, hold tight!” (That was earlier still.) The dwarf is late this afternoon.'

'It isn't yet four. He never comes sooner than four.'

'He seems late this afternoon.'

As the clerestory dimmed, weighting the upper air with shadows, and the chocolate cooled in its china cups, the flames in the hearth achieved a transitory, phthisic prominence; and, one by one, like the compartments of a dream, the five false windows of the throne-room were filled with a grey and tremulous glow. Against this fitful illumination moved the silhouettes ofCellur and the Queen, nodding murmurous figures of a shadow play. The bird lord's success in controlling the windows – through which it was possible to see sometimes long lines of insects moving across an unknown terrain – had.been only partial. He could turn them neither on nor off. And though three out of five of them could lately be compelled to show some recognizable part of the Empire, how these views were selected was not clear to him. Since coming here he had sought:

Contact with his own machines beneath the estuary at Lendalfoot;

Views of St Elmo Buffin's fleet;

Some intimation of the circumstances in which Horn-wrack and his charges now found themselves.

Luck had not been with him. This was now to change, but not in a way he could have foreseen.

The windows were arranged in a high narrow bay which resembled the stern lights of an old ship. The glow in them grew gelid and shifty. In the third pane from the left (for two hundred years prior to Methven's reign it had depicted the same view, becoming known as the 'Pane ofiars'and giving rise to a common proverb) it condensed into three or four muculent lumps, drifting like fish in a polluted tank. After a moment this activity had spread to the four other panes, and a further refining or condensation had revealed the lumps to. be the salient features of five deformed heads – or five images of the same head (two of them upside down). The head was in pain. A dark rubbery device had been forced over its nose and mouth. The straps securing this gag or mask cut deeply into the plump flesh of its cheeks, which was of a mouldy, greenish-white colour patched with silvery acne. Whether the expressions that contorted the visible features reflected hope or fatalism, anger or panic, it was impossible to tell. Its yes, though watery, were urgent.