Beads of cold sweat mingled with the congealing blood on Grimus’ face.
– Why, Mr Grimus, said Flann O’Toole. I do believe you’re frightened.
– Not I, said Grimus. Him.
– Is there a fire lit anywhere in the house? asked Flann O’Toole.
– I saw one, said Peckenpaw. In the entrance hall.
– Good, said Flann O’Toole.
As the three assassins moved away, down the stone steps, the great ash blazed behind them, and the body of a man, ridiculously small against the trunk to which it had been tied, grew charred and blackened in the flames. Suddenly it fell, as the fire licked through the rope which held it, and lay on the ground as the blaze grew stronger. Branches crashed in showers of sparks and smoke around and over him, forming an incandescent tomb. And around the column of smoke, a great dark cloud of circling, shrieking birds, swooping and shrieking, pronounced his epitaph.
There was no Gate now. Calf Island was one place again. The steps led down to Liv’s house, which was solid, visible. With the end of the whine had come the end of the Sub-dimension. There were no ghosts now.
Bird-Dog sat slumped against the foot of the steps, and stiffened as the three men reached her. They passed her without speaking.
The blackveiled woman came out of her small black house. Bird-Dog watched her speak to the trio, followed O’Toole’s pointing arm to the rising pillar of smoke. Liv nodded, quickly, and went indoors. The assassins continued down the Mountain to K.
A moment later, Liv Sylwan Jones emerged once more. She held a knife in her right hand, a knife which had carved innumerable ugly things from the wood of the encroaching trees. She sat down on the ground.
With the knife in her right hand, and with intense concentration, she slit the vein in her left wrist. Then she transferred the knife to that hand and set about slashing the right wrist, equally methodically.
Bird-Dog came over to her and stood in front of her, saying nothing, silently looking on. Liv Sylwan Jones returned her gaze.
– It’s done now, she said, jerking her head at the column of smoke.
Like Grimus, Liv had chosen her moment of death. Death on the Mountain of Kâf must be chosen. A selected violence against the body.
With exaggerated care, she drew a red line with the knife, a thin, leaking red mouth, grinning bloodily from ear to ear, beneath her chin.
Bird-Dog watched it drip.
A small mound of disturbed earth, freshly-turned, stood in the forest behind the blackwashed house. A wooden carving lay upon it, a distorted, open-mouthed death’s head.
A woman in a black robe, her face hidden behind a black veil, walked away from it, away into the black house, averting her eyes from the rising smoke and sat, perfectly still, upon the one chair, amid the filth and mould, and began to chant an old, half-forgotten, half-remembered Axona hymn to death.
– My God, said Nicholas Deggle.
Virgil Jones turned towards him, slowly.
– The Stem, said Deggle. It’s gone. Quite gone.
He began to search desperately around the small, rickety shack. Virgil hauled himself out of his rocking-chair and went outside.
– Well done, he said, looking up the Mountain. Well done.
Deggle came out to join him. -It’s nowhere to be found, he said.
– The Rose has been broken, said Virgil Jones.
– What do you mean?
– I mean that Flapping Eagle has succeeded. Brilliantly.
Nicholas Deggle charged into the forest.
A while later, he returned, full of bewildered surprise.
– There’s no whine, he said. Nothing. We can go up to K.
– I’m going to the beach, said Virgil Jones.
Mr Virgil Jones, a man devoid of friends and with a tongue rather too large for his mouth, was fond of descending this cliff-path on Tiusday mornings, to indulge his liking for Calf Island’s one small beach. Below him, under the shifting greysilver sands, lay the body of Mrs Dolores O’Toole.
Mr Jones stood, facing away from the sea, looking towards the massive forested rock of Calf Mountain, which occupied most of the island except for the small clearing, directly above the beach, where Mr Jones and Dolores had lived. The body of Mrs O’Toole lay between him and the forested slopes.
– Crestfallen, murmured Mr Jones to himself, with his back to the sea. Crestfallen, the sea today.
Well, well, thought the Gorf Koax. A fascinating new status quo. Flapping Eagle and the girl Media replacing Grimus and Bird-Dog. Bird-Dog replacing Liv. Elfrida Gribb replacing Media. Virgil Jones returned to the foot of the island. And the other, earlier re-orderings: Alexei Cherkassov replacing his father. Mr Moonshy replacing Mr Page.
But most interesting of all is the fate of the Rose. Without it, Flapping Eagle is powerless. He is an exile at the top of the mountain. The peak implies no kind of superiority now.
– What are you going to do? Media had said.
Outside, the assassins faced the feathered Grimus.
Inside, in the secret room, I (I-Eagle) was engaged in a furious battle with the I-Grimus within.
– You must preserve the Rose, said I-Grimus. You need it for the constant re-conceptualization of the island. As I explained. You must preserve the Rose. Relativity holds good even between dimensions. They exist only in conjunction with one another, as functions of one another. Destroy the Rose, and you destroy our link with the Dimensión-continua. We cannot survive that.
– Grimus misused the Rose, remembered I-Eagle. The blinks are proof that it is both damaged and being stretched to breaking-point. We cannot continue to use it as Grimus did.
– The Gorfs made the Rose to link the Dimensions, cried I-Grimus inside me. Break it and you break us. Dota could not conceive of a Dimension without an Object.
– But he said that he could conceive of a Dimension-dweller devising such a Concept, said I-Eagle.
Then the I-Grimus ceased to reason with I-Eagle and flooded me with thought-forms. The Rose enables you to travel, said the forms, and showed I-Eagle a thousand beautiful worlds, a thousand universes to explore. The Rose enables you to learn, said the thought-forms, and revealed a hundred new sciences and a hundred new art-forms, the cream of the infinite galaxies. You have one life, Said the thought-forms. With the Rose you can enter into, and become, a thousand thousand other people, live an infinity of lives, and acquire the wisdom and power to shape your own. And they showed I-Eagle some of the people Grimus had watched and understood, showed the vicarious joys and agonies of countless lives. And one day, said the thought-forms, when you have done all you wished to do, been all you wished to be, you can pass this supreme gift on to another, choose the moment and manner of your going and give the Phoenix a new life, a new beginning.
But I-Eagle had seen too much on Calf Island and outside it, seen too much of the way I-Grimus had ruined lives for the sake of an idea. To I-Grimus ideas, discoveries, learning; these were all-important. I-Eagle saw the centuries of wretched wandering that preceded my arrival, saw the people of K reduced to a blind philosophy of pure survival, clutching obsessively at the shreds of their individuality, knowing within themselves that they were powerless to alter the circumstances in which they lived. The combined force of unlimited power, unlimited learning, and a rarefied, abstract attitude to life which exalted these two into the greatest goals of humanity, was a force I-Eagle could not bring himself to like. I-Eagle saw its effect on Virgil Jones, on Dolores O’Toole, on Liv Jones, on Bird-Dog, his sister even though they had long been estranged. No, I-Eagle thought, the Rose is not the supreme gift.
Then all discussion, whether rational or thought-formal, ceased, and the I-Grimus within released upon I-Eagle the full force of his formidable will. Media saw me (us) stagger and lurch as the war raged within, and she grasped my hand.
Perhaps that was what turned the tide towards I-Eagle. I was not alone. Media was there. Media, one of the many whose lives he had distorted. Media, one of the many to whom I-Eagle felt responsible. The guilt of recent events was still there. I was fighting for the island. He was fighting for himself. And he lost.