Fulthor was intrigued, and a little taken aback. It was a strange place for such a meeting. He shrugged and smiled,
'Why do you waste yours in asking, old man?'he answered.
The old man shivered, and with a quick unconscious movement of the head glanced up at the southern sky before he spoke again. The high, naked shriek of a fish eagle echoed over the fells; but there was no moon yet in the sky.
In a palace like a shell – in Methven's Hall where the Proton Circuit draws itself up into a spiral on a hundred pillars of thin black stone – Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, Queen in Viriconium, who in her youth had taken to the windy birch-stands and glacial lakes of the Rannoch Moor, hunted away by the Chemosit and wild as any moss-trooper's daughter (with the last of the Methven limping and scarred to guard her, a poet and a dead metal bird to guide her, and a giant dwarf to expedite her passage), sat before five false windows in a tall room floored with cinnabar crystal. She was surrounded by precious, complex objects of forgotten use – machines or sculptures excavated from ruined cities in the Rust Desert beyond Duirinish; curtains of pale, fluctuating light drifted irregularly about the chamber like showers of rain; and through the dreamlike shadows thus created shambled the Queen's Beast-one of the great white sloths of the southern forests, who are said to be the fallen remnants of a star-faring race invited or lured to Earth during the madness of the Afternoon.