In the end Dalacott had committed himself to the course of rationality, not even trying to see his son, and the years had slipped by and his abilities had brought him the deserved rank of general. Now, at this late stage of his life, the entire episode had many of the qualities of a dream and might have lost its power to engender pain — except that other questions and doubts had begun to trouble his hours of solitude. All his protestations notwithstanding, had he really intended to marry Aytha? Had he not, in some buried level of his consciousness, been relieved when her death had made it unnecessary for him to make a decision one way or the other? In short, was he — General Risdel Dalacott — the man he had always believed himself to be? Or was he a…?

“There you are!” Conna said, approaching him with a glass of wheat wine which she placed firmly in his free hand while depriving him of the fruit juice. “You’ll simply have to mingle with the guests, you know. Otherwise it will look as though you consider yourself too famous and important to acknowledge my friends.”

“I’m sorry.” He gave her a wry smile. “The older I get the more I look into the past.”

“Were you thinking about Oderan?”

“I was thinking about many things.” Dalacott sipped his wine and went with his daughter-in-law to make Smalltalk with a succession of men and women. He noticed that very few of them had army backgrounds, possibly an indication of Conna’s true feelings about the organisation which had taken her husband and was now turning its attention to her only child. The strain of manufacturing conversation with virtual strangers was considerable, and it was almost with relief that he heard the summons to go to the table. It was his duty now to make a short formal speech about his grandson’s coming-of-age; then he would be free to fade into the background to the best of his ability. He walked around the table to the single high-backed chair which had been decked with blue spearflowers in Hallie’s honour and realised he had not seen the boy for some time.

“Where’s our hero?” a man called out. “Bring on the hero!”

“He must have gone to his room,” Conna said. “I’ll fetch him.”

She smiled apologetically and slipped away from the company. There was delay of perhaps a minute before she reappeared in the doorway, and when she did so her face was strangely passive, frozen. She pointed at Dalacott and turned away again without speaking. He went after her, telling himself that the icy sensation in his stomach meant nothing, and walked along the corridor to Hallie’s bedroom. The boy was lying on his back on his narrow couch. His face was flushed and gleaming with sweat, and his limbs were making small uncoordinated movements.

It can’t be, Dalacott thought, appalled, as he went to the couch. He looked down at Hallie, saw the terror in his eyes, and knew at once that the twitching of his arms and legs represented strenuous attempts to move normally. Paralysis and fever! I won’t allow this, Dalacott shouted inwardly as he dropped to his knees. It isn’t permitted!

He placed his hand on Hallie’s slim body, just below the ribcage, immediately found the telltale swelling of the spleen, and a moan of pure grief escaped his lips.

“You promised to look after him,” Conna said in a lifeless voice. “He’s only a baby!”

Dalacott stood up and gripped her shoulders. “Is there a doctor here?”

“What’s the use?”

“I know what this looks like, Conna, but at no time was Hallie within twenty paces of a globe and there was no wind to speak of.” Listening to his own voice, a stranger’s voice, Dalacott tried to be persuaded by the stated facts. “Besides, it takes two days for pterthacosis to develop. It simply can’t happen like this. Now, is there a doctor?”

“Visigann,” she whispered, brimming eyes scanning his face in search of hope. “I’ll get him.” She turned and ran from the bedroom.

“You’re going to be all right, Hallie,” Dalacott said as he knelt again by the couch. He used the edge of a coverlet to dab perspiration from the boy’s face and was dismayed to find that he could actually feel heat radiating from the beaded skin. Hallie gazed up at him mutely, and his lips quivered as he tried to smile. Dalacott noticed that the Ballinnian ptertha stick was lying on the couch. He picked it up and pressed it into Hallie’s hand, closing the boy’s nerveless fingers around the polished wood, then kissed him on the forehead. He prolonged the kiss, as though trying to siphon the consuming pyrexia into his own body, and only slowly became aware of two odd facts — that Conna was taking too long to return with the doctor, and that a woman was screaming in another part of the house.

“I’ll come back to you in just a moment, soldier,” he said. He stood up, tranced, made his way back to the dining room and saw that the guests were gathered around a man who was lying on the floor.

The man was Gehate: — and from his fevered complexion and the feeble pawing of his hands it was evident that he was in an advanced stage of pterthacosis. While he was waiting for the airship to be untethered, Dalacott slipped his hand into a pocket and located the curious nameless object he had found decades earlier on the banks of the Bes-Undar. His thumb worked in a circular pattern over the nugget’s reflective surface, polished smooth by many years of similar frictions, as he tried to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened in the past nine days. The bare statistics conveyed little of the anguish which was withering his spirit.

Hallie had died before the end of the littlenight of his coming of age. Gehate and Ondobirtre had succumbed to the terrifying new form of pterthacosis by the end of that day, and on the following morning he had found Hallie’s mother dead of the same cause in her room. That had been his first indication that the disease was contagious, and the implications had still been reverberating in his head when news had come of the fate of those who had been present at the celebration.

Of some forty men, women and children who had been in the villa, no fewer than thirty-two — including all the children — had been swept away during the same night. And still the tide of death had not expended its fell energies. The population of the hamlet of Klinterden and surrounding district had been reduced from approximately three-hundred to a mere sixty within three days. At that point the invisible killer had appeared to lose its virulence, and the burials had begun.

The airship’s gondola lurched and swayed a little as it was freed from its constraints. Dalacott moved closer to a port hole and, for what he knew would be the last time, looked down on the familiar pattern of red-roofed dwellings, orchards and striated fields of grain. Its placid appearance masked the profound changes which had taken place, just as his own unaltered physical aspect disguised the fact that in nine days he had grown old.

The feeling — the drear apathy, the failure of optimism — was new to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying it because, for the first time ever, he could see cause to envy the dead.