‘You can imagine my surprise,’ Swallow said, taking up the tale smoothly, ‘when I rode away from Obernewtyn, headed for the high mountains, to come upon a woman who turns out to be the very person Rushton believed you had gone seeking in the lowlands. I asked where she was bound and she gave me the sharp edge of her tongue for my impertinence and bade me be on my way.’ He laughed and gave Analivia a teasing smile.

She shook her head but laughed softly. ‘We talked at odds and in riddles for a little, until I got sick of it and demanded to know if he knew where you were.’

‘It was cleverly done,’ Swallow approved. ‘For it could have been merely an ordinary query, but to one who had dreamed of voices, it suggested she might be another dreamer.’

‘So you came here together and found the others?’ I asked.

‘We arrived first but it was not until the others came that I had the nightmare again, only it was part of a different dream,’ Analivia said. ‘There was a young cat in it very like to the old cat that you brought here with you, but the dream was not about you. It was a past-dream and the cat was sleeping in the arms of an older woman with very pale skin. It must have been hurt because its head was bandaged. With them was a gypsy girl but both of them had long dark hair and they wore Beforetime clothes. They were in a small dim room looking at a computermachine that was showing them visions of the very same desolation I had seen, over and over in my nightmare.

‘The older woman said that if the Seeker who would come failed in her quest, the result of it would be that all that remained of the battered world would be destroyed. The gypsy girl said that they must prepare all that the Seeker would need to locate Sentinel and make sure it could never be used to bring upon the world a greater and more final doom than they had endured. Then she shivered and said it was hard to believe there was anywhere left that was green and clean, seeing what they were seeing. But the older woman said her visions had shown there were such places left, and that Obernewtyn was one of them, but that they had been of little interest to anyone and so there were no pictures of them. The younger woman asked how she could think of going back to Obernewtyn, knowing everyone would be dead, even Jacob. The older woman said calmly that she had foreseen that in spite of everything that had happened there was joy in the future for both of them, as well as sorrow. But above all else, it was her duty to go back. Then she began to speak of the journey they would have to make to reach the Land where Obernewtyn stood. “I will go no further,” the older woman said to the younger. “But you will travel beyond that Land to another and another still, before your work is done.” Then she looked down at the cat and the younger woman said that its journeying was done, poor thing, since it had not awoken. But the older woman stroked it and said the cat was travelling in its dreams, as was its gift, and that it would sleep until they brought it to the one who could wake it, though not with a kiss.’