Pitying her, he reached out his hand, but just before his fingers closed on the waxy stem he remembered another young woman, high and fair, to whom he owed something. His hand paused, and then he remembered what someone had told him so long ago: Accept no gift!

I cannot, he said. I am sorry.

Her face changed then, from that of a mortal woman into something older and much more hungry. Her body twisted and lengthened into a feral shape with achingly scrawny limbs and reaching claws. It snapped and fluttered before him like a scorched insect, writhed until his eyes blurred watching it, then smeared away into the twilight, leaving nothing behind but a thin shriek of misery and rage.

Shaken and sad, he walked on.

On the outskirts of the city, among the midden heaps and boneyards, where a few ragged sleepers huddled around flickering, smoky fires, he at last found the one he had glimpsed across the river, although that now seemed an entire lifetime ago. This sleeper was an old man, with hands that had been large and powerful now knotted with age, and shoulders that had been wide and a back that had been straight now coarsely bent, so that he had the shape of a bird huddling in its own feathers against the cold. Ferras Vansen could see the pale, slow shimmer of the fires through the man’s substance, as if the old fellow were no more tangible than mist.

Father, he said, but he was suddenly unsure. Tati, he asked like a child, is it really you? Do you know me?

The old man looked at him, or at least turned blind eyes in the direction of the questions. His face was not merely translucent, it shifted like oil on rippling water.

I am no one. How could I know you?

No. You are Pedar Vansen. I am your son, Ferras.

The old man shook his head. No. I am Perinos Eio, the great planet. I died and lay four days in a stone casket surrounded by darkness and distant stars. Then I awoke again into the light of what is true. He sighed and a tear escaped his tight-shut eye. But I have forgotten it all again, and now I am lost…

You died in your own bed, Tati. I didn’t have the chance to say farewell. For a moment Ferras Vansen could feel tears stinging painfully in his own eyes, as if in this place to cry was to pierce the flesh and let out blood, not water. There was no stone coffin. We were poor people, and I did not come back in time to pay for even a wooden box, although I would have done so gladly. You were buried in a winding sheet. He hung his head. I am sorry, Tati. I was far away…

Help me. The old man reached out a hand, but where it touched him it was no more substantial than a tongue of fog, cool and slightly damp. Help me to find my way back, to learn the answers again so that I can pass on.