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messages from Arkhangelsk’s honoured dead. Why had the Ancestors picked on her ? she wondered. Why her, of all people? She did not want to be important. . .
    “This is a warning, Great Carn,” Tharp was saying. “The Ancestors have spoken to us from the World Without Time. They have shown this maiden a vision of the future. We must not ignore it.”
    “But what can we do?” asked the Great Carn, fingering his beard. He was a soldier: technomancy gave him the jitters.
    Tharp looked briefly blank. It was Cluny’s father who answered in the end. “We should ask Cluny, shouldn’t we?” he said. “It is her dream. What do you think we should do about it, Cluny-my-daughter?”
    Cluny laughed nervously. She thought it was one of her father’s jokes. She knew nothing about politics and tactics. She was just a maiden. She’d have been given in marriage and busy with babies by now if she hadn’t been her father’s favourite. Yet they were all looking at her, even the Great Carn himself, waiting for her to tell them what should be done.
    She remembered the thoughts that had come to her three nights before, up on the sterncastle. She said, “We must start telling people what the new London means. Not just our own people. Everyone. We must send envoys to the Suomi, the Novaya-Khazak, even to the Movement.”
    “We are at war with the Suomi and the Novaya-Khazak!” roared the Great Carn. “It is the Movement who are building this crazy city!”
    “Those wars must cease,” said Cluny. “This is more important. And not everyone in the Movement can want this new thing. They cannot all be crazy.”
    Both the Carn and Cluny’s father looked outraged. They had not got where they were today by imagining that the enemies of Arkhangelsk could be anything but crazy. Talk of ending wars was womanish.
    But Nintendo Tharp raised his bony hands, as if to warm them in front of Cluny’s wisdom. “It is the will of our Ancestors!” he said. “Let it be done! Let Cluny herself go to the Suomi, and the Novaya-Khazak, and the Movement. Let her tell them in her own voice of this thing the Ancestors have shown to her!”

5
VICTORY BALL
    n London the year went on its way, down into the cold and dark of winter. Construction work continued by night and by day, the noise so ceaseless that Fever had quickly stopped noticing it. She worked with her father, drawing up plans, designing things, telling herself that this was what she liked doing best; it was like being small again, and back in Godshawk’s Head. Sometimes when she looked at the new city it seemed wonderful that human beings could build such things. Sometimes it looked like a madman’s nightmare coming to life. She still did not know what to feel about it, so she settled for feeling nothing.
    From the north came word of battles and volcanoes. New fire-mountains were sprouting in Heklasrand, and their upflung ashes painted the sunsets gold and carmine. Up in the Fuel Country the Movement’s northern army was warring with the Arkhangelsk; there had been huge battles at a place they called Hill 60, and the reports said that the enemy had found a new type of weapon, an electric gun which scrambled the brains of the Movement’s Stalkers, destroying them or sending them flailing back in mindless fury through their own ranks. Twice, Hill 60 had almost been overrun; if it fell, the way would lie open for the Arkhangelsk to pour south across the dry North Sea to London.
    So the militias trained each morning at the edge of town, target-shooting with their new Bugharin rifles. Wavey took Fever to watch them one chilly morning. They sat in her sedan chair at the edge of Hamster’s Heath and watched the lines of men marching and wheeling on the snowy commons as if it were all a display which Wavey had laid on for her daughter’s entertainment. After the things she must have seen, Fever wondered how her mother could be so light-hearted about the prospect of another war. But when she