Cuckoos - with their taste for zoos, freak-shows and carnivals - invading this territory did not much amuse her.

‘You're right,' she said. ‘We have to be quick,' and together they went up from the lake towards Capra's House.

2

As they walked Suzanna had answered several questions that had been vexing her since the unweaving. Chief amongst them: what had happened to the portion of the Kingdom that the Fugue had invaded? It was not well populated certainly -there was the considerable acreage of Thurstaston Common behind the Auction House, and fields to either side; but the area was not entirely deserted. There were a number of houses in the locality, and up towards Irby Heath the population grew denser still. What had happened to those residences? And indeed to their occupants?

The answer was quite simple: the Fugue had sprung up around them, accommodating their existence with a kind of wit. Thus a line of lamp-posts, their fluorescence extinguished, had been decorated with blossoming vines like antique columns; a car had been almost buried in the side of a hill, another two had been tipped on their tails and leaned nose to nose.

The houses had been less recklessly treated; most were still complete, although the flowerage of the Fugue reached to their very doorsteps, as if awaiting an invitation inside.

As to the Cuckoos, she and Jerichau encountered a few, all of whom seemed more puzzled than fearful. One man, dressed only in trousers and braces, was complaining loudly that he'd lost his dog - ‘Damn fool mutt,' he said. ‘You seen him?' -and seemed indifferent to the fact that the world had changed around him. It was only after he'd headed off, still calling after the runaway, that Suzanna wondered if the fellow was seeing what she saw, or whether the same selective blindness that kept the haloes from human eyes was at work here. Was the dog-owner wandering familiar streets, unable to see beyond the cell of his assumptions? Or perhaps just glimpsing the Fugue from the corner of his eye, a glory he'd remember in his dotage, and weep over?

Jerichau had no answers to these questions. He didn't know, he said, and he didn't care.

And still the visions unfurled. With every step she took her astonishment grew at the variety of places and objects the Seerkind had saved from the conflagration. The Fugue was not, as she'd anticipated, simply a collection of haunted groves and thickets. Holiness was a far more democratic condition; it informed fragments of every kind: intimate and momentous, natural and artificial. Each corner and niche had its own peculiar mode of rapture.

The circumstances of their preservation meant that most of these fragments had been torn from their context like pages from a book. Their edges were still raw with the violence of that removal, and the haphazard way they'd been thrown together only made their disunity seem more acute. But there were compensations. The very disparity of the pieces - the way the domestic abutted the public; the commonplace, the fabulous - created fresh conundrums; hints of new stories that these hitherto unconnected pages might tell.

Sometimes the journey showed them collisions of elements so unlikely they defied any attempt to synthesize them. Dogs grazing beside a tomb, from the fractured lid of which rose a fountain of fire that ran like water; a window set in the ground, its curtains billowing skyward on a breeze that carried the sound of the sea. These riddles, defying her powers of explanation, marked her profoundly. There was nothing here that she hadn't seen before - dogs, tombs, windows, fire - but in this flux she found them re-invented, their magic made again before her eyes.

Only once, having been told by Jerichau that he had no answers to her questions, did she press him for knowledge, and that was regarding the Gyre, whose covering of cloud was perpetually visible, its brightest lightning bursts throwing hill and tree into relief.

That's where the Temple of the Loom is,' he said. ‘The closer you get to it the more dangerous it becomes.'

She remembered something of this from that first night, when they'd talked of the carpet. But she wanted to know more.

‘Why dangerous?' she asked.

The raptures required to make the Weave were without parallel. It required great sacrifice, great purity, to control them and knit them. More than most of us would ever be capable of. Now the power protects itself, with lightning and storms. And wisely. If the Gyre's broken into, the Weave rapture won't hold. All we've gathered here will come apart; be destroyed.'

‘Destroyed?'

‘So they say. I don't know if it's true or not. I've got no grasp of the theoretical stuff.'

‘But you can perform raptures.'

The remark seemed to baffle him. That doesn't mean I can tell you how,' he said. ‘I just do ‘em.'

‘Like what?' she said. She felt like a child, asking for tricks from a magician, but she was curious to know the powers residing in him.

He made an odd face; one full of contradictions. There was a shyness there; something quizzical; something fond.

‘Maybe I'll show you,' he said. ‘One of these times. I can't sing or dance, but I've got ways with me.' He stopped speaking, and walking too.

She didn't need any sign from him to hear the bells that were in the air around them. They were not the bells of a steeple - these were light and melodic - but they summoned nevertheless.

‘Capra's House,' he said, striding ahead. The bells, knowing they were heard, rang them on their way.

III

DELUSIONS

1

The bulletin that had gone out from Hobart's Division announcing the escape of the anarchists had not gone unheard; but the alarm had come a little before eleven, and the patrols were dealing with the nightly round of fist-fights, drunken driving and theft which climaxed about that time. In addition there'd been a fatal stabbing on Seel Street, and a transvestite had been the cause of a near-riot in a pub on the Dock Road. Thus, by the time any serious attention had been paid to the alarm-call, the escapees were long gone; slipped through the Mersey Tunnel on their way to Shearman's house.

But on the opposite side of the river, just outside Birken-head, a vigilant patrolman by the name of Downey caught sight of them. Leaving his partner in a Chinese restaurant ordering Chop Suey and Peking Fried Duck, Downey gave chase. The radio alert warned that these miscreants were extremely dangerous, and that no attempt should be made to apprehend them single-handed. Patrolman Downey therefore kept a discreet distance, aided in this by a thorough knowledge of the area.

When the villains finally reached their destination, however, it became apparent that this was no ordinary pursuit. For one, when he reported his location to Division he was told that things there were in considerable disarray - could he hear a man sobbing in the background? - and that this matter would be dealt with by Inspector Hobart in person. He was to wait, and watch.

It was while he was waiting and watching that he had his second proof that something untoward was in the air.

It began with lights flickering in the second-storey windows of the house; then exploding into the outside world, taking wall and window with it.

He got out of his car and began to walk towards the house. His mind, used to filing reports, was already scrabbling for adjectives to describe what he was seeing, but he kept coming up empty-handed. The brilliance that spilled from the house did not resemble anything he had witnessed or dreamt of before.

He was not a superstitious man. He immediately sought a secular explanation for the things he saw, or almost saw, all around him; and seeking, found. He was viewing UFO activity; that was surely it. He'd read reports of similar events happening to perfectly ordinary Joes like himself. It was not God or lunacy he was facing, but a visitation from a neighbouring galaxy.