"How do you explain that?"
"What I care about," the dwarf said, "is having a piss." He walked off a little way and gasping with satisfaction sent a thick yellow stream into the ground. "Foo!" Afterwards he poked the cinders with his foot and said, "It takes it up, this stuff. Look at that. You could water it all day and never tell. Hallo, I think I can see something growing there already! Dwarfs are more fertile than ordinary people." (That night he sat awake again, slumped sideways, his arms wrapped round his tucked-up knees, watching Vera Ghillera with an unidentifiable expression on his face. When he happened to look beyond her, or feel the wind on his back, he shuddered and closed his eyes.)
"When I first saw you," Vera told Egon Rhys, "you had cut your check. Do you remember? A line of blood ran down, and at the end of it I could see one perfect drop ready to fall."
"That excited you, did it?"
She stared at him.
He turned away in annoyance and studied the Heath. They had been on it now for perhaps three, perhaps four days. He had welcomed the effort, and gone to sleep worn out; he had woken up optimistic and been disappointed. Nothing was moving. The dwarf did not seem to be able to give him a clear idea of what to look for. He had thought sometimes that he could see something out of the corner of his eye; but this was only a kind of rapid, persistent fibrillating movement, never so much an insect as its ghost or preliminary illusion. Though at first it had aggravated him, now that it was wearing off he wished it would come back.
"My knee was damaged practicing to dance Fyokla in The Battenberg Cake. That was chain after chain of the hardest steps Lympany could devise, they left your calves like blocks of wood. It hurt to run down all those stairs to help you."
"Help me!" jeered Rhys.
"I'm the locust that brought you here," she said suddenly.
She stood back on the hard cinders. One two three, one two three, she mimicked the poverty-stricken skips and hops that pass for dance at the Allotrope Cabaret; the pain and lassitude of the dancer who performs them. Her feet made a faint dry scraping sound.
"I'm the locust you came to see. After all, it's as much as she could do."
Rhys looked alertly from Vera to the dwarf. Ribbons of frayed red silk fluttered from his sleeve in the wind.
"I meant a real insect," he said. "You knew that before we started."
"We haven't been lucky," Kiss-O-Suck agreed.
When Rhys took hold of his wrist he stood as still and compliant as a small animal and added, "Perhaps we came at the wrong time of year."
Something had gone out of him: Rhys gazed down into his lined face as if he was trying to recognize what. Then he pushed the dwarf tenderly onto the cinders and knelt over him. He touched each polished check, then ran his fingertips in bemusement down the sides of the jaw. He seemed to be about to say something: instead he flicked the razor into his hand with a quick snaky motion so that light shot off the hollow curve of the blade. The dwarf watched it; he nodded. "I've never been in a desert in my life," he admitted. "I made that up for Vera. It sounded more exotic."
He considered this. "Yet how could I refuse her anything? She's the greatest dancer in the world."
"You were the greatest clown," Rhys said.
He laid the flat of the razor delicately against the dwarf's cheekbone, just under the eye, where there were faint veins in a net beneath the skin.
"I believed all that."
Kiss-O-Suck's eyes were china-blue. "Wait," he said. Look!"
Vera, who had given up trying to imitate locust or danseuse or indeed anything, was en pointe and running chains of steps out across the ash, complicating and recomplicating them in a daze of technique until she felt exactly like one of the ribbons flying from Rhys's sleeve. It was a release for her, they were always saying at the Prospekt Theater, to do the most difficult things, all kinds of allegro and batterie bewilderingly entangled, then suddenly the great turning jump forbidden to female dancers for more than a hundred years. As she danced she reduced the distinction between Heath and sky. The horizon, never convinced of itself, melted. Vera was left crossing and recrossing a space steadily less definable. A smile came to Kiss-O-Suck's lips; he pushed the razor away with one fat little hand and cried:
"She's floating!"
"That won't help you, you bastard," Egon Rhys warned him.
He made the great sweeping cut which a week before had driven the razor through the bone and gristle at the base of Toni Ingarden's throat.
It was a good cut. He liked it so much he let it pass over the dwarf's head; stopped the weapon dead; and, tossing it from one hand to the other, laughed. The dwarf looked surprised. "Ha!" shouted Rhys. Suddenly he spun around on one bent leg as if he had heard another enemy behind him. He threw himself sideways, cutting out right and left faster than you could see. "And this is how I do it," he panted, "when it comes down to the really funny business." The second razor appeared magically in his other hand and between them they parceled up the emptiness, slashing wildly about with a life of their own while Rhys wobbled and ducked across the surface of the desert with a curious, shuffling, buckle-kneed, bent-elbowed gait. "Now I'll show you how I can kick!" he called.
But Kiss-O-Suck, who had watched this performance with an interested air, murmuring judicially at some difficult stroke, only smiled and moved away. He had the idea it had never been done before to link in sequence a medley of cartwheels, "flying Dementos," and handsprings, which would bounce him so far into the smoky air of the arena, spinning over and over himself with his knees tucked into his stomach, that eventually he would be able to look down on the crowd, like a firework before it burst. "Tah!" he whispered, as he nerved himself up. "Codpoorlie, tah!"
Soon he and Rhys were floating too, leaping and twirling and wriggling higher and higher, attaining by their efforts a space that had no sense of limit or closure. But Vera Ghillera was always ahead of them, and seemed to generate their rhythm as she went.
Deserts spread to the northeast of the city, and in a wide swathe to its south.
They are of all kinds, from peneplains of disintegrating metallic dust out of which rise at intervals lines of bony incandescent hills to localized chemical sumps, deep, tarry and corrosive, over whose surfaces glitter small flies with papery wings and perhaps a pair of legs too many. These regions are full of old cities that differ from Vriko only in the completeness of their deterioration. The traveler in them may be baked to death; or, discovered with his eyelids frozen together, leave behind only a journal which ends in the middle of a sentence.
The Metal Salt Marches, Fenlen Island, the Great Brown Waste: the borders of regions as exotic as this are drawn differently on the maps of competing authorities: but they are at least bounded in the conventional sense. Allmans Heath, whose borders can be agreed on by everyone, does not seem to be. Neither does it seem satisfactory now to say that while those deserts lie outside the city, Allmans Heath lies within it.
The night was quiet.
Five to eleven, and except where the weir agitated its surface, the canal at Allmans Reach was covered with the lightest and most fragile web of ice. A strong moon cast its blue and gamboge light across the boarded-up fronts of the houses by the towpath. "They don't look as if much life ever goes on in them," thought the watchman, an unimaginative man at the beginning of his night's work, which was to walk from there up to the back of the Atteline Quarter (where he could get a cup of tea if he wanted one) and down again. He banged his hands together in the cold. As he stood there he saw three figures wade into the water on the other side of the canal.