‘We get them from time to time, but if it had been a credible sighting Jonesy would have made more of a hoo-hah. Megafauna are too smart to be out, but Winter nomads have been known to move through. We leave them be, and even scavengers are not particularly disliked, so long as they don’t enter buildings. Villains are something else entirely: no rules outside their own society and a strange mix of violent ruthlessness, decorum and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. There’s been an uneasy truce these past three years with Lucky Ned.’

‘What were the terms?’

‘Exclusion zones. We don’t go on to their patch if they don’t come on ours. It means admitting that there are areas that are no-go in Mid-Wales, but Toccata can work with that, she says.’

Fodder lapsed into silence and we joined the long straight road that led towards the gardens and the museum, the only sound the breath of our exertions and our feet as we tramped through the snow. I had a thought.

‘You have the right to Morphenox but don’t use it, do you?’

‘Is it that obvious that I don’t?’

‘You live in the Siddons,’ I said, ‘a Sub-beta payscale Kipshop – but you’re a Consul. I put two and two together.’

‘It’s an honest place to sleep. The soft rasp of natural snoring is comforting, like rain on a tin roof. Morphenox dulls the subconscious,’ he added, ‘and steals your dreams. I like to dream.’

‘And do you?’

‘Every night, always the same. The Ottomans used to hit us with their Gigawatt Highrollers. I’m in the forward OP in a six-by-six Bedford softside, reporting on incoming size and velocity. There’s no moisture so the pulse rings are visible only as faint ripples in the hot air, a couple of hundred yards wide. I report on a stonker that’s coming our way but it’s faster and tighter than the rest, and by a thousand yards out it starts to cone. By the time it reaches me the torus has a spin so tight that implosive collapse is inevitable. No time to run – pointless anyway – and then my eardrums burst and I’m waking in the sand, alone, with the sun already overhead and the Bedford upside down two hundred yards away. I’ve lost my foot and most of my clothes and part of my skin is blasted off. Worst of all, I can feel the moisture leaching out of my body. My eyes crisp over, my tongue feels like leather, my skin blisters and then cracks, like mud on a dry lake bed.’

‘You want to dream that?’

‘It stops me dreaming about the really unpleasant stuff. Nightmares are catharsis; they purge the mind to make the day bearable.’

‘Oh,’ I said, not wanting to think what his other dreams might be. ‘Do you dream of anything else? Like  . . . blue Buicks, for instance?’