In short, the Eternal City stands as it once did, infuriating, beautiful, vulgar by turns. Only the Reborn are missing. You do not see them now in the Atteline Quarter, or on the Proton Circuit hurrying from the palace on an errand of Alstath Fuithor's. (He has never returned. The Low City always knew something like this would happen. It taps the side of its nose: sniffs.) After the persecutions they endured at the hands of the Sign, the majority of them will never come here again. They will live now in the deserts for many generations, their germ-plasm becoming as alien as that of the big lizards of the Great Brown Waste, refining their theory of Time, redefining their heritage, growing mad and strange.
In the evenings Queen Jane, Methvet Nian of Viriconium, sits in the side chamber or salle she uses as a library and drawing room, sometimes meditating this loss, which is one of many in her life. 'A world trying to remember itself:'surrounded by her sheets of music and delicate little corals, she has the wry but supple calm ofan ageing danseuse; keeps in a rosewood chest with copper reinforcing bands a gourd-shaped musical instrument from the deep East; hears the past in every passing footstep, and wonders often what became of the sword and the mail and the assassin she gave them to.
'I had hoped for so much from the Reborn,'she confides to her new advisor, the old man who is so very rarely seen in public. 'We might have rebuilt our culture. Yet they were perhaps too concerned with their own salvation to teach us… And we always too uncomplicated for their delicate nerves…'
She closes her eyes.
'They enriched us even so. Can you still see them, Cellur, when Tomb woke them first? What a pageant they made, there in the brain chamber at Knarr, with all their strange weapons!'
He can see nothing. He was not there. But he has forgotten even that (or perhaps he realizes that she has) and with a small diffident movement of his hands says, 'I am sure I do, my lady;'then, remembering something else, smiles suddenly. 'Did I not live then in a tower by the sea?'
Ten thousand grey wings beat down the salty wind, like a storm in his head!