"I wish that I remembered," he replied sadly. "Just?of your courtesy, what do you know of the evil our friend tells me is abroad in the city?"

"More than I wish to," she replied in a breath. "Something terrible has come, bound in a strong box of iron and guarded by men in steel, hedged about with spell and sword. We dare draw no nearer to it than the island on which it dwells."

For once, he felt a stirring of hope. There were enough Christian mages in the city, surely there was no need for one broken old man! "If it is hedged about?" he began.

"The hedges are… peculiar," the Silvani said, frowning severely. "And among the guardians at least one is unclean. Perhaps more." The Silvani looked so human it was easy to read their expressions, and this one assumed an air of pleading. "Let me speak for those of the air, the Silvani, the Laura, the Folletti and Folletto?you must come again into your powers! The path of the future is shrouded, and the one who veils it from us is?" She shivered, and clearly was not willing to say more.

Well, he could hardly blame her. He suspected he knew the name she would not speak, even though he could not remember it himself. Did not, indeed, want to remember it. But he had a momentary image of something huge and monstrous, squatting in a dark forest littered with rotting tree stumps and shattered bones, devouring…

The image fled. Or, perhaps, he fled from it.

"Thank you," he said, his spirits sinking. There was no choice then; it would be more of the rue and the fennel and the fly agaric; more of the visions to sort through looking for what was memory and what was hallucination…

The Silvani took his thanks as a farewell, and vanished, leaving him once more alone.

Chiano remained on the hummock for some time thereafter, thinking through his course of action. By sunset, he had come to one definite conclusion.