Tears forced their way through my closed lids and trickled down my cheeks, and for a moment the grief I felt at having left him was unendurable. For until now, the thought that he had been somewhere in the world, living and breathing and walking in the sunlight, linked to me by a golden spirit cord, had given me a bridge across the abyss of pain and loss that our parting had opened, so that I might do what I must do despite knowing what it had cost. But if Rushton truly had died in a storm, I did not know how to bear it.

I clenched my teeth and told myself fiercely that what I had seen had been only a nightmare borne of being buried alive. It was I who had been dying, not Rushton. Had I not many times had ordinary dreams full of the garbled matter of the day where something irksome or troubling had cavorted masked in some queer guise?

I willed myself to sleep, drawing on the dark spirit-force at the depths of my will to sink swift and inviolable through the layers of my mind, but as I came to hover above the mindstream, a bubble of silver dream matter rose so quickly to envelope me, it was almost as if I had summoned it.

I dreamed of a woman in Land clothes trudging along a black road. White sand lay on either side of the road and across it in some places, and grey Beforetime poles made from some smooth stonelike material rose up at regular intervals beside it.

At first I thought it was Hannah Seraphim, but although she bore a passing resemblance to the woman I had seen in my past-dream with Cassandra at the Reichler Clinic Reception Centre in Newrome, it was not her. The mouth was quite a different shape and the eyes were the wrong colour, yet this woman was old, too, with grey hair cut short, and she was leaning heavily on the sort of carved stick some highland herders used. She carried a hempen bag of sticks slung over her shoulder and I wondered why she did not push them into the thin pack she wore. Belted at her waist was what looked like some sort of small Beforetime machine. It was familiar to my eyes and I puzzled at this until it occurred to me that I had seen a similar device drawn in Jacob Obernewtyn’s journal. I was sure he had scribed that it was a machine for locating ground water. Or had it been the device for checking the level of taint in earth and water, which Jacob called contamination?

I willed myself closer, but instead the dream dissolved and I spilled into another dream that was almost exactly the same as the first except there was less sand on the road. Coming towards me was a tall, thin, older man. He was very erect and had a handsome, rather sad face and blue eyes under a shock of thick white hair. He was pulling a strange cart that seemed to glide along behind him. A small dog ran at his heels.