Eighty years had passed since Usheen, the first of her beasts, died on Canna Moidart's knife, and in dying sealed the final defeat of the North. Tegeus-Cromis, lay two decades still and dead beneath the fields of sol d'or at Lowth. Methvet Nian was no longer young, even by the standards of the Evening. Still, in her purple eyes there might yet be discerned something of the girl who in the space of one year lost and gained the Last Kingdom of the world: and in the dreaming light where those five false windows showed landscapes to be found nowhere in Viriconium, her age weighed only lightly on her – like the hand of some imaginary child. Inside, the windows flickered. Outside it was autumn; and under a cold moon processions of men with insect faces went silently through the streets.

A curious thing happened to her.

Often in that flickering room the past had come to touch her with quiet persistence, tugging at her sleeve in the effort to capture her attention: white hares in the twilight at Shining Clough Moss or Torside Naze; the long brown sweep of the Rannoch peat moors like a brush stroke in some enormous written language; desert dust piling itself noiselessly in the bleak plazas of ruined Drunmore. But these were no more or less than the sad fingerprints of memory on her brain (she remembered the verses tegeus-Cromis made, the ancient cry of the fish eagles, and his voice out of night and morning): tonight it was something more. The windows flickered; the windows shimmered: the windows said

'Methvet Nian.'

All five went blank and dark.

'Methvet Nian!'

Smoke and snow filled them, a pearly-grey light like dawn over the tottering seracs of some marine glacier in the north beyond the North. It shivered and was wrenched away -'Methvet Nian!'

Fused sand, and a sky filled with mica, the rolling dunes and dry saline wadis of the sempiternal erg. In the fierce air hung a perfect mirage of the City, pastel towers tall and mathematical, cut with strange designs. The wind stooped likeahawk- 'Methvet Nian!'