Autumn. Midnight. The eternal City. The moon hangs over her like an attentive white-faced lover, its light reaching into dusty corners and empty lots. Like all lovers it remarks equally the blemish and the beauty spot – limning the iridium fretwork and baroque spires of the fabled Atteline Plaza even as it silvers the fishy eye of the old woman cutting fireweed and elder twigs among the ruins of the Cispontine Quarter, whose towers suffered most during the War of the Two Queens. The City is a product of her own dreams, a million years of them: now she turns in her sleep, so quietly you can hear the far-off rumour of the newest: white bones, the Song of the Locust, dry mandibles rubbing together in desert nights… or is it only a wind out of Monar, and autumn leaves filling the air, to scrape and patter in the side streets?

In the Artists'Quarter it is that hour of the night when all and nothing seems possible. The bistros are quiet. The entertainments and smoking-parlours are all closed. Even Fat Main Etteilla the fortune teller has shipped her wicked pack of cards, put up for a few hours the shutters of her grubby satin booth and waddled off with her aching ankles and her hacking cough, which is bad tonight. Canker, the Dark Man of the cards, has her by the lungs; she leans against a wall to spit in a puddle of moonlight, whispering the word that will hold him back; it falls hollowly into the vibrant, vacant street. The canker, she confides to her shadow, will take her in its own good time; at present she is less concerned about herself than her last customer of the evening. She has a wan belief in her own efficacy, and tells the silent Quarter, 'I did my best, I did my best -,