I squinted and ran my eyes over the dunes beyond the one I was on, and then my heart leapt, for sure enough, the sandstorm had uncovered the top of another post, two dunes away. I made my way across to it, noting that the two together pointed more directly north than north-east, which meant Ahmedri had gone the wrong way.

I turned to go back and tell the others what I had found, only to be confronted by a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a silver safesuit and some sort of large silver helmet that hid his face.

An efari, I thought, seconds before there was a flash of light from his head and then something thudded into my body.

I fell into unconsciousness like an arrowed bird.

EPILOGUE

Epilogue

My mind drifted aimless as a shipboat without master or tiller.

I dreamed of Ahmedri walking over moonlit dunes with Darga, but there was no sign of Rasial or Gavyn. The dream slipped silkily away and I seemed to float down and down.

I dreamed of a wolf padding along a black road through a Beforetime city. Rising up on either side of the road were the same high square towers as in drowned Newrome under Tor, but instead of the walls being broken and crumbled away to expose the rusted metal frame underneath, many sections of the towers stood sharply intact, and where the wall had crumbled, the metal bones gleamed silver, reflecting the light of a fingernail moon.

The city was abandoned. It was not only that streets and buildings were deserted but the black roads were covered here and there in white sand that had run up against the sides of walls in bleached mounds, and there were tumbleweeds rolling unchecked along paths where a sparse fringe of dun-coloured saltweed grew up through a multitude of small cracks.

Beyond the city I saw a plain shining white in the moonlight.

I saw Maruman leap up onto a large Beforetime machine sitting on the side of the black road. Parts of it were rotted to black lace but I guessed by its shape and position at the side of the road that it was one of the machines the Beforetimers had used to ride along the ground. Horseless carriages, as Garth named them.

Sitting neatly atop the immobile hulk, the old cat looked utterly at home in the deserted city lit by its many reflected moons, yet his ears pricked and twitched and his eye was dark and there was an alertness to his bearing that told me he was in the midst of stalking something.

But what? I wondered, as the dream slipped away and once again I floated in the vast darkness. I could not find the levels of my own mind. I did not know which way was up or down. A great heavy stupidity seemed to possess me.