He came to his linen shop. The light was dim, silvery, for the accumulated snow was piled high against the panes of the shop’s glass front, higher than he was tall, leaving only a strip of blue daylight visible at the very top. The shop was mostly untouched, though his guests in the warehouse had robbed some of his cloth swathes for clothing and bedding – and, he had discovered, some of it had been nibbled by desperate rats or mice. The shop had a privy, with a drain beneath that you could reach by lifting a tile. Here he dumped the contents of the buckets. The drain was surely blocked and frozen, but they hadn’t managed to fill it yet, and this was a better solution for disposing of their waste than any other they had found – at least it couldn’t be detected by any others still surviving in the Wall.

As he worked, he thought of Rina. Wondered what she and the twins were doing right now. If he knew Rina she would have landed on her feet, she always did; she was probably running Carthage by now. And he wondered what she would think if she could see her husband on his hands and knees, pouring the shit and piss of forty people down this old drain in the back of the shop.

The buckets emptied, he wiped them with a scrap of outrageously expensive Carthaginian cloth, and threw it aside into a gathering heap. He made for the front door and pulled it open slightly – he always flinched when he did this, expecting to be buried by the infall – but the fallen snow had frozen to a hard wall that blocked the doorway almost from top to bottom, and he was in no danger. A few flakes drifted down from the looser, fresher stuff at the top, though, and this was what he had come for. He reached up with his mittened hand and scooped handfuls of loose snow into the buckets. This was the only way to get fresh water; the piped supply to the old cistern had, miraculously, worked for a while, but the water had soon turned foul, then failed altogether.

‘Thaxa!’

The whispered voice came from above his head. He dropped the buckets and stumbled back, heart pounding. ‘What? Who?’

A face appeared above the snow, from outside the door, surrounded by a hood from which grey-blonde hair curled. ‘Thaxa! It’s me!’

‘Xree? What are you – we thought you were lost! What happened to you? Where did you go?’

She lay flat on the snow, grinning, pleased with herself. ‘There’s more than one way out, you know. I wanted to check on the Archive.’

‘The what?’

‘In its new store, deep in the Wall. To see if it’s safe. Dry. No mice or ice or other problems.’

‘That’s insane.’