“What is it?” Toller said.

Dalacott shook his head. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. I found it in Redant province many years ago, on the banks of the Bes-Undar, and nobody has ever been able to tell me what it is.”

Toller closed his fingers around the warm object and found his thumb beginning to move in circles on the slick surface. “One question leads to another, sir. Why do you want me to have this?”

“Because—” Dalacott gave him a strange smile — “you might say it brought your mother and I together.”

“I see,” Toller said, speaking mechanically but not untruthfully as the general’s words washed through his mind and, like a strong clear wave altering the aspect of a beach, rearranged memory fragments into new designs. The patterns were unfamiliar and yet not totally strange, because they had been inherent in the old order, needing only a single rippling disturbance to make them apparent. There was a long silence broken only by a faint popping sound as an oilbug blundered against a lamp’s flame tube and slid down into the reservoir. Toller gazed solemnly at his father, trying to conjure up some appropriate emotion, but inside him there was only numbness.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” he admitted finally. “This has come so… late.”

“Later than you think.” Again, Dalacott’s expression was unreadable as he raised the cup of wine to his lips. “I had many reasons — some of them not altogether selfish — for not acknowledging you, Toller. Do you bear me any ill will?”

“None, sir.”

“I’m glad.” Dalacott rose to his feet. “We will not meet again, Toller. Will you embrace me… once… as a man embraces his father?”

“Father.” Toller stood up and clasped his arms around the sword-straight, elderly figure. During the brief period of contact he detected a curious hint of spices on his father’s breath. He glanced down at the cup waiting on the desk, made a half-intuitive mental leap, and when they parted to resume their seats there was a prickling in his eyes.

Dalacott seemed calm, fully composed. “Now, son, what comes next for you? Kolcorron and its new ally — the ptertha — have achieved their glorious victory. The soldiers’ work is all but done, so what have you planned for your future?”

“I think I wasn’t intended to have a future,” Toller said. “There was a time when Leddravohr would have slain me in person, but something happened, something I don’t understand. He placed me in the army and I believe it was his intention that the Chamtethans would do his work at a remove.”

“He has a great deal to occupy his thoughts and absorb his energies, you know,” the general said. “An entire continent now has to be looted, merely as a preliminary to the building of Prad’s migration fleet. Perhaps Leddravohr has forgotten you.”

“I haven’t forgotten him.”

“Is it to the death?”

“I used to think so.” Toller thought of bloody footprints on pale mosaic, but the vision had become obscured, overlaid by hundreds of images of carnage. “Now I doubt if the sword is the answer to anything.”

“I’m relieved to hear you say that. Even though Leddravohr’s heart is not really in the migration plan, he is probably the best man to see it through to a successful conclusion. It is possible that the future of our race rests on his shoulders.”

“I’m aware of that possibility, father.”

“And you also feel you can solve your own problems perfectly well without my advice.” There was a wry twist to the general’s lips. “I think I would have enjoyed having you by me. Now, what about my original question? Have you no thought at all for your future?”

“I would like to pilot a ship to Overland,” Toller said. “But I think it is a vain ambition.”

“Why? Your family must have influence.”

“My brother is the chief advisor on the design of the skyships, but he is almost as unpopular with Prince Leddravohr as I am.”

“Is it something you genuinely desire to do, this piloting of a skyship? Do you actually want to ascend thousands of miles into the heavens? With only a balloon and a few cords and scraps of wood to support you?”

Toller was surprised by the questions. “Why not?”

“Truly, a new age brings forth new men,” Dalacott said softly, apparently speaking to himself, then his manner became brisk. “You must go now — I have letters to write. I have some influence with Leddravohr, and a great deal of influence with Carranald, the head of Army Air Services. If you have the necessary aptitudes you will pilot a skyship.”

“Again, father, I don’t know what to say.” Toller stood up, but was reluctant to leave. So much had happened in the space of only a few minutes and his inability to respond was filling him with a guilty sense of failure. How could he meet and say goodbye to his father in almost the same breath?

“You are not required to say anything, son. Only accept that I loved your mother, and.…” Dalacott broke off, looking surprised, and scanned the interior of the tent as though suspecting the presence of an intruder.

Toller was alarmed. “Are you ill?”

“It’s nothing. The night is too long and dark in this part of the world.”

“Perhaps if you lay down,” Toller said, starting forward.

General Risdel Dalacott halted him with a look. “Leave me now, lieutenant.”

Toller saluted correctly and left the tent. As he was closing the entrance flap he saw that his father had picked up his pen and had already begun to write. Toller allowed the flap to fall and the triangle of wan illumination — an image seeping through the gauzy folds of probability, of lives unlived and of stories never to be told — swiftly vanished. He began to weep as he moved away through the star-canopied dimness. Deep wells of emotion were at last being tapped, and his tears were all the more copious for having come too late.

Night, as always, was the time of the ptertha.

Marnn Ibbler had been in the army since he was fifteen years old, and — like many long-serving soldiers — had developed a superb personal alarm system which told him when one of the globes was near. He was rarely conscious of maintaining vigilance, but at all times he had a full-circle awareness of his surroundings, and even when exhausted or drunk he knew as if by instinct when ptertha were drifting in his vicinity.

Thus it was that he became the first man to receive any inkling of yet another change in the nature and ways of his people’s ancient enemy.

He was on night guard at the Third Army’s great permanent base camp at Trompha in southern Middac. The duty was undemanding. Only a few ancillary units had been left behind when Kolcorron had invaded Chamteth; the base was close to the secure heartland of the empire, and nobody but a fool ventured abroad at night in open countryside.

Ibbler was standing with two young sentries who were complaining bitterly and at great length about food and pay. He secretly agreed with them about the former — never in his experience had army rations been so meagre and hard to stomach — but, as old soldiers do, he persistently capped every grievance of theirs with hardship stories from early campaigns. They were close to the inner screen, beyond which was a thirty-yard buffer zone and an outer screen. The fertile plains of Middac were visible through the open meshworks, stretching away to the western horizon, illuminated by a gibbous Overland.

There was supposed to be no movement in the outer gloaming — discounting the near-continuous flickering of shooting stars — so when Ibbler’s finely attuned senses detected a subtle shifting of shade upon shade he knew at once that it was a ptertha. He did not even mention the sighting to his companions — they were safe behind the double barrier — and he continued the conversation as before, but a part of his consciousness was now engaged elsewhere.