As they grew nearer to their objective, the major hills preceding the Watcher gave way to other forms that reflected its own idiosyncratic physics. It was impossible to tell exactly where the body of the Watcher began. Gullies and ridges folded the land like eddies in water, combining to make a labyrinth floored with the now ubiquitous black glass that further complicated their path. Most of the slopes were too tiresome to climb and they were compelled to walk their convoluted length.

How must they look to the seers in the Tower of Observation? Pallin asked himself. Were they absurd as ants? In fiction, adventurers were always impulsively charging their obstacles, but the reality of the Night Land, and particularly the reality of the maze of the Watcher, was different. He charted the options for the soldiers under his command as he had in the past, and communicated his directions with a few quick Night-Speech signals and hand gestures. A Watchman under his command years ago, dead now, had been a musician, and had quipped that he might have been a conductor of great orchestras, a maestro. He had laughed then, but from what he guessed of the art the man was not far wrong. Despite himself, he was impressed at the efficiency and co-ordination of the Quintessent, but he was still disturbed by their eerie silence; they did not even dislodge pebbles - but then they no longer walked on the known Earth.

It became apparent that the black dust and glass had certain mimetic qualities: footprints would be repeated and elaborated, while colours and tints would be taken from the armour of the company to sparkle here and there. At first it was red, but then it was the grey of his own costume and the vermillion and gold of Lyreia’s own suit, even though she did not set foot upon the ground.

Drifts and low ripples of the dust seemed to concatenate and solidify into a duricrust, which crunched under their boots. As they walked, they saw that there were things embedded in it, things that were not worn rocks that seemed to resemble bones. Pallin picked up one object that sent a twinge of eerie recognition down his spine. It was like a porcelain vase of the finest quality, its structure delicate and smooth. Complicated and almost translucent vanes and struts of a beautiful flowing form ornamented a roughly spherical volume. Three ports, again beautifully framed, were grouped to one end. It was a human skull, and it was relatively fresh, not a fossil. It might have been the remains of one of his men from a previous expedition, or it might have been a casting of the Watcher, a stray memory dropped like a flake of dead skin. They came across more skulls nearby, half buried in the dust, and each bearing some deformity. Some were as small as marbles, others were bigger than barrels, some were truly made of porcelain, and of glass and jade and other substances too. So they were idle thoughts. The Watcher might not even have been conscious of these ideas. Most likely the black dust was some form of nanotechne continuing in a now unco-ordinated fashion its replicative function as part of the body and mind of the Watcher.

As if to confirm Pallin’s deductions, they next came across piles of glass spheroids, some barely more than grains of sand, others like transparent pearls bigger than a man’s head. When they brought Lyreia out of her case to see, she picked up one that fitted her palm and looked inside to see a form rather like a black metallic rosebud. As the company bent over to look with her, it seemed to move and unfolded petals like feathers, but that might have been an effect of refractive distortion as they shifted their perspectives. Presently it melted, trickled between her fingers like mercury and soaked into the dust.

He found one that showed something knotted, from which something a little like a rounded human face emerged and opened pinkish eyes. He dropped it instantly and it rolled away. One of the Quintessent stopped to pick it up for him, but he barked harshly at the man and he left it where it lay.

The wind blew through the holes carved in standing ventifacts, its moaning an accompaniment to the invisible chanters. “Eram’nay, eram’nay, carl’l’eyn’far… sey’farrr…”

They also found things like slugs that crawled over the black vitreous surfaces of outcrops breaking through the dust drifts that might have been folds in the Watcher’s body proper. The slugs came in two basic varieties: one elongated with a blunt head and the other more of a leaf shape. They left wet trails and as they flowed over each other, some of the long, blunt ones slipped into folds in the backs of the leaf-shaped ones, making a sort of simple knot that writhed before they either disengaged or consumed each other.

They were parodies of human sexual organs, of course, and while their purpose was obscure, it seemed to Pallin that there were a direct product of the Watcher's thoughts rather than mere reflex as the skulls had been. Sexuality was a constant of the human hive and the Watcher had most likely become fascinated by the action of conjunction. More of the slugs were seen in increasingly baroque elaboration and more energetic engagement. Some of them had faces and these they destroyed.

The path from the cluster of black lakes took them up the slopes of the Watcher itself and it became apparent that something very strange was happening to their external reference points. For some time the transmissions from the Redoubt had been rising in frequency and the ratio of signal to noise had dropped exponentially so that now only the random static of the Land was audible through their equipment. Spieking was completely ineffective, a similar effect occurring in the minds of those who tried to open mental channels to the seers in the Tower. Most attempts only resulted in torrents of raving, requiring again the application of the apotropaic chant Pallin had used with Lyreia. Almost the last transmission that he had been able to make was a request for the Final Light to have a regular modulation added to its shine so that it marked time like an optical metronome. As its colour rose from the usual verdant green in the exact centre of the visible spectrum to blue, indigo, halyon and then jale before, incredibly, becoming invisible, the pulses became more and more rapid. The inescapable conclusion was that time in the Last Redoubt was passing more and more rapidly relative to their own perceptions or conversely that their own experience was slowing.

He set up his prismatic apparatus again and took more careful readings. “Asymptotic ergocity, quasi-relativistic,” was all he said, and then he packed it away.

Almost as strange were the effects on perspective: the Land seemed to tilt and curl up upon itself in a huge bowl, the small points and veins of light marking volcanism and concentrations of bioluminescence resembling an insane planetarium. Meanwhile, though the party had expected to be climbing a slope, they found that the surface that they traversed seemed to be more or less level. They had hoped to be able to reach the borders of its body, but incredibly they were now climbing across its skin as if it were a landscape of its own - which in fact it was.

“Should this continue,” Pallin told Lyreia, “we may find ourselves standing upon the very orbits of whatever the beast uses for a skull, looking into its eyes as if they were mountain lakes…”

“Would you swat an insect that crawled across your face?” she asked him.

He nodded. “I would sweep away an insect before it climbed so far. But we are to the Watcher as the smallest insects are to human beings only in scale. There is another quality present…”

The skin of the Watcher seemed still like stone, randomised by age and covered here and there with drifts of the omnipresent black dust. A Praetorian took samples and showed the vials to Pallin. He grunted disinterestedly and had them packed away for analysis back in the laboratories of the Barbican. They climbed on, following the ridge of what might have been, at a distance, the representation of one of Lyreia’s braids. Close by, under their feet, it was simply landscape, the fibres that were analogous to hair thicker than tree trunks and covered with ragged scales.

They went on, and met their first wild Eater.

Whirlwinds and eddies stalked the glass gullies. In one the knotted swirls of the black dust seemed to form into something more substantial than a mere dust devil. It came upon them without warning. The Quintessent clustered about Lyreia and Pallin, raising their weapons. Lyreia gazed at it. It was a beautiful thing in its way. It glistened in the dim ambient light, rainbows of diffraction shimmering about its bell-shaped corona. It resembled a flower, or a being like a flower, like a fossilised entity that she had seen called a crinoid. It shuddered and buzzed and unfurled its fronds to their full extent. Perhaps it was like a butterfly? Were metamorphoses and fertilisations promised? Why did she think this?

The air seemed to ripple about the thing and its appearance altered again. Now it was a swirl of smoke, an almost transparent but indelible stain upon the air. This confused her for a moment; it was so fragile, so ambiguous; all seeming and likeness with no sure mass. It might have been as frail as ash, so how could it harm her? She was hypnotised by the thing, she realised, it held her already. The thing touched her like the breath of a lover, passing through the bodies of her guardians and the plates of her armour as if they had a different kind of existence. Tendrils invaded her nostrils, caresses fell upon her thighs like currents of cool air, lines of darkness attempted to parody her tattoos and corrupt the elaborated runes of the Master Word imprinted amongst their lines.

This is an Eater, she thought, an Eater - the poisoner of stars, the murderer of the Sun, the very name of evil. Most jealous thing, sinner, rapist. Its nature was a hateful litany, but recited by her mind as if it were a distant memory.

Pallin was barking orders, but she didn’t hear him. The whisperers now howled. “Ay’errr! Ke’ire’in, ull ull! Ay’errr!”

It continued its insinuations, translating her writings, iterating its own meanings, consuming her. A chill invaded her as elements of its being penetrated her eyes, her ears, her throat, bowels and genitals. Icicles seemed to drive themselves like nails into her scalp. A dirty rime of ice began to prickle her skin, her heart laboured and her blood slowed and became viscous. A cry cracked her throat, lodged there, burning and freezing at once.

A reaction finally stirred at this, real, hot, bubbling hate at last. The Eater was a lewd, filthy and inhuman thing and she despised it! It was a thing that she should destroy! The anger grew like a fire and the chill was dispelled in successive waves of a furious internal heat. She reached out to stroke what might be its central stalk and calyx and her hands fell though it was if through shadow. Something flickered as the Quintessent leapt into motion and sliced the thing to tatters and wisps.

She staggered, stains upon her hands, and gaped. Black frost crackled and fell from her armour and exposed skin. Pallin was at her side immediately, asking questions that she still could not hear, so she blinked and nodded dazedly. He was hardly assured, but apparently determined that the immediate threat was passed and turned to his soldiers for explanations. More sounds were made, heard a little more clearly now, as if only through deep water. She waited until she remembered how to understand them again and presently words of the Set Speech emerged, but still she could not answer. Sweat fell from her brow, ran in rivulets down her flanks and breasts and she began to shiver violently. Swiftly her guards took her and bundled her in the thick quilts inside the palanquin. Presently the spasms subsided and she slept.