Hurriedly we pass the spot, and the town is not far beyond it, materializing building by building out of the fog, behind many lower mounds of earth, so that I am walking a cobbled street before I know it. Everything is made of tiny ash-colored bricks, like metal ingots. Dusk, and these black doorways and small-paned windows, one precise edge after another as we walk up the street. Houses and low-walled square yards, a shop on a corner. The street is bare, though many of the houses show doors fallen in flat and broken glass in the panes. I don’t feel sheltered by these buildings, they have only added their dead stares to the dead stare that might as well be the fog, all around.

From somewhere above me and to the right a sound like the glass chimes that used to hang from the eaves of the old narrator’s house, and something else, like the noise of coins poured out spattering in a heap. It whirrs and peters out almost at once; an alarm phantom.

We are to break up and take shelter in the houses, as though the pretext of our being soldiers were abandoned. My fingers reach out and touch a piece of metal that has been welded to a window frame, as a patch or crude decoration maybe. Unlike the frame, this metal is unrusted; I brush irregularities on the surface and, bending near, I see stamped there characters I know are ancient. I touch the metal again, thinking this was made by human hands since turned to dust, before the Limiters. In the metal or in the fingers I feel that age feebly answering my thought; it stirs, then sinks too quickly away again.

Black doorway before me and I have to force myself to cross the threshold. But I am stupid and weary, not my legs they never tire, but my mind is too tired to sleep but then I will. I enter, my feet scraping loudly on the floor, and lie down not far from the door. My gaze wanders out over these tiny, carefully laid tiles, leaves and fishes; I wonder about the hands that laid them, what a waste now. Thrushchurl tosses and lifts his matted head looking for mice. A wind I don’t feel makes the metal casement creak, the window sways. I close my eyes and feel a familiar rushing sensation, like canting forward down a steep hill, just begin to.

Now I am asleep. My breast rises and falls, pulling and tossing little mouthfulls of this spellbound air. My face has slackened, and the night’s lustre confuses my face and makes it a corpse’s—if I could see myself how horrifying I would find this sight, I look like someone who’s been broken on the rack.