The old man seemed little the worse for his adventure, though the strain seemed to have accentuated something not quite human in the set of his features, the way his almost-saffron skin clung to cheekbone and jaw, taut as an oiled-silk lampshade. “You had better tell him why we need him, Alstath Fulthor,” he whispered hoarsely. He massaged his scraggy neck and chuckled. “I believe he will not come except of his own accord. And I would rather he destroyed no more of my property.”
Fulthor failed to hide his surprise. “You made the bird?” he said.
“Long ago. There may be a few more left”-he looked up into the grey sky-“but they have grown shy since the war. They are less dependable, and no longer speak.” He nodded to himself, remembering something. Then: “Tell him why we need him.”
Fulthor could think of nothing to say. He looked from the old man to the ruined bird and back again, then at Hornwrack (who, far from showing any further signs of fight, had begun to shiver volcanically).
“The girl,” he began. “She was sent here with a message, we think, vital to the city, to the empire. To all of us in these peculiar times. But look at her! The rest of her party must have wandered off somewhere between here and the Great Brown Waste: they are far along the road to the Past in her village, and it is hard for them to concentrate for long on what they judge to be nine-tenths dream.” (Waxen figures were at that moment processing through his own skull, carrying something wrapped in a fantastically decorated sheet, all of them leaning at thirty degrees to the vertical; they were singing. Nine-tenths dream! He had placed her by the weave of her cloak. He could find the place, but would he ever leave it again?) “You must know what they are like out there.”
The assassin seemed preoccupied. With the hem of his cloak he was dabbing at his lips, his cheeks; the lobe had been torn off his left ear. He fought off a fresh bout of shivering (looked for a second hunted and afraid, like a man who suspects in himself a fatal disease). “She said nothing to me. Nothing but gibberish.” He touched white bone where his jawline had been laid open, winced. “Look at me! I am already bleeding for her. Three times now she has brought me to this, though that bastard Verdigris had his dirty hands in the matter.” He sneered. “ ‘The face of the ewe lamb bone white in the meadows’! Gibberish!”
Fulthor could follow little of this. He thought privately that the man was mad.
“It is not what she has said,” he explained carefully, “but what she brought with her, that is of significance. Had she anything with her? I thought as much! You are the only one who saw it. We must know. You owe us this, if only because you were the cause of its loss!”
This seemed to enrage the assassin.
“Then ask her, Reborn!” he shouted. He spat blood into the road at Fulthor’s feet. “It is I who am owed. I killed five of the Sign last night on her behalf and my palm is empty. One of them at least would have fetched twenty pounds of steel in the open market. Martin Fierro under my knife! That was a black madness. Here!” He stuck out his cupped right hand. “Black bloody madness! I am sick of doing the work of the High City and reaping only their sanctimonious stares!” He turned away disgustedly and made to pick up his knife. When Fulthor’s weapon pricked the small of his back, he froze. He looked back over his shoulder, a sneer spreading across his lacerated face. “Are you frightened of a steel knife now, up there in the High City? You could chop me like an onion with that thing if I had fifty knives like this!” He bent down quickly and snatched it up. “Look, blunted at the tip.” It had vanished under his cloak before Fulthor could protest. He had sensed now to what extent he was needed; to what extent safe.
“She cannot tell us, Hornwrack,” said Fulthor tiredly. “You can. That is why she brought us to you. It was her only means of communication. At least come to the palace to discuss it. I agree that you may have been treated unfairly.”
Hornwrack ignored him. He shook the carcass of the metal bird. He put it to his ear. “It hums still. It hummed even as I strangled it.” His hands trembled, then stilled. “I feel my death in all this.” He walked off a few paces and stared up at the palace, a mile distant and misty through the blowing rain. “Methven’s hall!” they heard him say. He seemed to be listening. “I was once one of you,” he said. “I was one of the rulers. I chose to become one of the ruled.” Then: “To hell with all of you,” he said. “I’ll come because you have the weight of that behind you”-pointing to the palace-“and because you have the baan . But I’ll tell you nothing.” He regarded Fulthor with a cold smile, drew his ragged sleeve across his red-daubed face. “You had better watch me, Reborn Man,” he threatened. “You had better watch me all the time.”
I would rather be a ghost than play such hollow games, thought Alstath Fulthor.
Hornwrack:
The horse had run off and he refused to try and catch it on foot.
“Then walk,” the Reborn Man told him.
He writhed his bruised lips and spat. (If he shut his eyes the bird came at him still, tearing long elastic strips of flesh from his chest until the ribs showed through.)
“So,” he said. He shrugged.
Lord Galen Hornwrack, scion of a respected-if relict-House, one-time officer and pilot of the Queen’s Flight, now a professional assassin of some repute in the Low City, made his way for the first time in eighty years to the palace at Viriconium. He walked. His wounds throbbed and chafed. Memories of the night gnawed him. But at his belt hung a metal bird he had ruined with his own bare hands, and he felt this to be the symbol of a continuing defiance: though he now had to admit that control of his own destiny had passed from him. Occasionally, small wheels spilled from somewhere deep within the bird to run soundlessly in diminishing circles until the wind whirled them away like chaff across the Proton Circuit. Before he went into the hall of Methven he looked up at the sky. What had begun at least in light was now dull and unpromising. Even the deadly litharge stain of dawn had faded from the cloud layer, so that, grey and solid, it capped the earth like an enormous leaden bowl, a single thin crescent of silver showing at its tilted northern extremity. And as he watched even that faded.
4
Tomb the Dwarf came in through the southeastern or Gabelline Gate of the city, just before dawn, some two weeks after his strange meeting on the edge of the Rannoch. A fine rain was falling as he led his ponies beneath the heavy seeping curve of masonry-more tunnel than arch-where the guard dozed in a wicker cubicle and old men, woken by the rattle of wheel on cobble, squatted under their dripping felt hats and stared incuriously at him as he passed. Here, in an alcove in the wall of the arch, had once hung the notorious Gabelline Oracle, sought out and yet dreaded by all who entered or left the city: the severed head of a child hanging from a hook, beneath which had been constructed an alchemical “body” composed of yew twigs bound together by certain waxes and fats. A lamp being lit beneath the oracle, or in more special circumstances an inscribed wooden spatula being forced under its tongue, it would give in a low but penetrating voice the fortune either of the consultant or of the city itself. No one who had ever heard that voice could forget it; many would take the Gate of Nigg to avoid it.
Tomb heard nothing, though he cocked his head for echoes; but a breath of the past followed him a little way beyond the gate, a cold and depressing air generated in those outer regions, overflowing into the alleyways and peeling demimonde avenues of the suburbs where geranium leaves were turning ochre and a faint smell like cat’s urine issued from the mouldy brick. Viriconium, sump of time and alchemical child, sacrificer of children and comforter of ghosts-who can but shiver and forgive in the damp theatrical airs of dawn?