‘You… you see the future then?’

‘Farseeing,’ said Ravenor. ‘My personal heresy. My vice in the eyes of the ordos. That’s the walk into dark places that I’m going to take, because of this. Trapped in that box, struggling to free my mind and see into… into anything. It will damn me, and the ordos will have the leverage they need to make me track you down and finish you.’

‘If you see the future,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘Tell me this… Who is the King in Yellow?’

Ravenor smiled.

‘Haven’t you figured that out for yourself yet?’ he asked. ‘He’s been there all the time. Since the earliest days of everything.’

‘I feared he was me,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘What I would become somehow.’

‘Oh, he’s that too,’ said Ravenor. ‘Come on now, you know what you are. Forget the future, Gregor. No man ever really prospered knowing that. The past is much more interesting. Think hard. There are only seconds left. Think hard and see yourself. Consider the possibility that Master Imus was right.’

‘No, he–’

‘Just recognise what you’ve always been,’ said Ravenor. ‘It’ll make it easier for you. No more doubts, no more struggles. Your way will be clear. And it will make it far easier on me too, when the time comes.’

He looked up. They could both hear the screaming note of aircraft engines as they began their low pass along the avenue. Lightnings, twelve of them. There were petals in the air.

‘Here it comes,’ he said. He held out his hand.

Eisenhorn reached out to take it, but his hand met metal. He was looking at the armoured box of Ravenor’s support chair.

‘Transformation,’ the chair’s voxponders crackled. ‘Fire. Rebirth.’

Eisenhorn felt the flash. It was so bright he could see nothing but searing white.

Then the flames came. The flames and the wind and the shock wave. His clothes burned away, blowing like ash from his body. His skin blistered, peeled back and shredded. Muscle and sinew disintegrated. His bones, black with heat, buckled and flew like twigs in the wind.

She was holding his hand.

‘That was all a long time ago,’ she said.

Alizebeth.

The sky was white. Old trees shivered in the cold wind. They swayed, their leaves rustling like the chorus of insects. She led him across the wild fell towards the dark valley below.

‘Do you not suppose,’ she said, ‘it’s ironic? The only woman… the only person… you ever loved was a pariah? Untouchable and cast out, anathema to human contact?’

‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ he said.

‘The fire will end soon,’ she promised.

‘Too late,’ he replied. ‘It has unmade me. I have raked through my own ashes and I understand.’