'Get out of my way,'Hornwrack told him. 'Go on.'

Scarlet crest shaking with relief, he gave a great desperate 'shout of laughter and sprang away in time to give Hornwrack one good look at the figure which now tottered through the door.

A thin skin only, taut as a drumhead, separates us from the future: events leak through it reluctantly, with a faint buzzing sound, if they make any noise at all – like the wind in an empty house before rain. Much later, when an irreversible process of change had hold of them both, he was to learn her name – Fay Glass, of the House of Sleth, famous thousand and more years ago for its unimaginably oblique acts of cruelty and compassion. But for now she was a mere taint echo of the yet-to-occur, a Reborn Woman with eyes of a fearful honesty, haphazardly cropped hair an astonishing lemon colour, and a carriage awkward to the point of ugliness and absurdity (as if she had forgotten, or somehow never learned, how a human-being stands). Her knees and elbows made odd and painful angles beneath the thick 'velvet cloak she wore; her thin fingers clutched some object wrapped in waterproof cloth and tied up with a bit of coloured leather. Muddy and travel stained, there she stood, in an attitude of confusion and fear, blinking at Hornwrack's knife proferred like a sliver of midnight and true murder in the eccentric Californium shadows; at Verdigris'disgusting red crest; at Mooncarrot and his kid gloves, smiling and whispering delightedly, 'Hello my dear. Hello my little damp parsnip -'

'I,'she said. She fell down like a heap of sticks.

Verdigris was on her at once, slashing open the bundle even as her fingers relaxed.

'What's this?'he muttered to himself. 'No money! No money!'With a sob he threw it high into the air. It turned over once or twice, landed with a thud, and rolled into a corner.

Hornwrack went up and kicked him off. 'Go home and rot, Verdigris.'He gazed down thoughtfully.