I am stumbling. I must not fall.

I was once a creature of the air, and it remembers me. When I climb to the city heights and lean out into the wind, it tickles me with currents and vectors from my past. I can smell and see the passage of predators and prey in the eddying wash of this atmosphere.

I am like a diver who has lost his suit, who can still gaze through the glass bottom of a boat and watch the creatures of the upper and deeper darkness, can trace their passage and feel the tug of the tides, even though distorted and distant, veiled and half hidden.

I know that something is wrong in the sky.

I can see it in the disturbed flocks of birds, that shy suddenly away from random patches of air. I can see it in the panicked passage of wyrmen that seem to glance behind them as they fly.

The air stills with summer, is heavy with heat and now with these newcomers, these intruders I cannot see. The air is laden with menace. My curiosity rises. My hunting instincts stir.

But I am earthbound.

PART FOUR

A Plague of Nightmares

Chapter 27

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Something uncomfortable and insistent prodded Benjamin Flex awake. His head rocked nauseously, his stomach plunged.

He was sitting strapped to a chair in a small, antiseptic white room. On one wall was a window of frosted glass, admitting light but no sights, no clue at all as to what lay outside. A white-coated man stood over him, poking him with a long shard of metal attached by wires to a humming engine.

Benjamin looked up into the man’s face and saw his own. The man wore a mask of perfectly smooth, rounded mirror, a convex lens that sent Benjamin’s distorted face back at him. Even bowled and ridiculous, the bruises and blood that discoloured Benjamin’s skin shocked him.

The door was open slightly and a man was standing half in, half out of the room. He held the door and faced back the way he had come, speaking to someone in the corridor or main room beyond.

“. . . glad you like it,” Benjamin heard. “. . . off to the playhouse with Cassandra tonight, so you never know . . . no, these eyes are still killing me . . .” The man laughed briefly in response to some unheard pleasantry. He waved. Then he turned and entered the little room.

He turned towards the chair, and Benjamin saw a figure that he recognized from rallies, from speeches, from massive heliotypes plastered around the city. It was Mayor Rudgutter.

The three figures in the room were still, regarding each other.

“Mr. Flex,” said Rudgutter eventually. “We must talk.”

“Got word from Pigeon.” Isaac waved the letter as he returned to the table he and David had set up in Lublamai’s corner of the ground floor. It was where they had spent the hours of the previous day uselessly scrabbling for plans.