He was upset by his own actions and could hardly explain them to himself. An ironic game with the palace guard, conceived out of impatience and hurt pride-so it had seemed at the time-but now he felt like a man who, falling down a hole in a familiar street, discovers some artful yet not quite successful mimicry of the world he has known above. In his new subterranean existence he quarrels with familiar objects or alienates his friends-he yearns for escape but quickly finds he can no longer control events; cause and effect separate like worn-out old lovers. But it was not simply that he was out of temper with himself. The temper of the palace puzzled him, too.
Its previous calm beauty, ordered and formalistic, had become icy; monstrous passions seemed about to crystallise in its interstices. Something had invaded the corridors where the whispering light sculptures drifted about (their laughter so ancient and inscrutable that it no longer recalled anything human); something was abroad in the sudden nautiloid spaces, chilly and nacreous. Stumbling along in his dusty leather gear he had experienced a sudden gauntness, the feeling that he had allowed to go unnoticed some change which, though vast, showed itself only in the subtlest of signs: the dream of an old dwarf in a high place; a red-haired man in a market; footsteps in an empty passageway. The sounds of pursuit had for a moment mutated into a strange dry rustle, the geometry of the corridor into a mathematics, pure and bony and beyond him, and he had fancied himself the last human survivor on some craft spinning slowly through infinite space, rigging full of frozen sailors and royal faces staring from the windows at its stern…
I am a dwarf, not a philosopher. He touched the cold wall behind him. He had got his breath back. Since his arrival in the alcove the old machine had been making soft, persuasive little noises at him, as if it needed his help to attain some self-fulfilment he could never imagine; now it abandoned him abruptly. Oogabourundra! it whispered. Mourunga! it laughed, and extended a curious yellow film of light like a wing. Tomb stuck his head out and peered down the passage. A figure appeared, strange at first, warped by the unsteady yellow gleam into a shape like a praying mantis; the dwarf waited until it had become that of a young guard-a boy still, self-conscious in lacquered black mail and pewter-coloured cloak, new boots ringing on the worn flagstones, and on the thin chain round his neck a peculiar silver medallion-then withdrew. His grinning and apparently disembodied head snapped back into the corridor wall to leave a tunnel of bland saffron light, a throat down which the boy strode unaware. Tomb let the footsteps come level with him. He waited for perhaps fifty heartbeats, then slipped out.
The machine clucked disappointedly after him.
From corridor to corridor went the boy, up and down narrow flights of stairs and through abandoned halls-all the while moving towards the centre of the palace. Flickering columns of light accosted him, but he ignored them; the soft pleas of old machines he ignored. And after him came Tomb the Dwarf, hands like two bunches of bones and a grin like death- alert for the sound of voices, sidling round corners and hanging back at intersections, hoping the boy would flush up any guard that might be mounted there. The corridors were as cold as an omen, haunted by an ancient grief. Here, stairs spiralled into the upper gloom of the shell; there, faint footsteps vibrated in another passage, footsteps that might have been made in another age. As his confidence increased, Tomb began to play with the boy: scuttling up until he was only a few inches behind him, making obscene faces and gestures (and once touching the hem of his cloak) before falling back again. Success only whetted his appetite. He dodged in and out of alcoves, his head poked like a gargoyle’s round each new corner. He aped the boy’s stiff walk, pointing his toes extravagantly and sticking his nose in the air. He quite forgot about using him to reach the Queen unchallenged and set about tormenting him instead.
He hid behind a sculpture. He sniggered softly. When the boy looked round: nothing.
He let his feet scrape, with a horrible purpose.
He made quiet animal noises.
He was everywhere and nowhere; it was a cruel charade. The boy knew. He hurried: stopped: listened: stared over his shoulder, his hand feverishly clutching the pommel of his brand-new sword. He said nothing, because that would have been an admission. His eyes were round, glistening in the white like a boiled egg, boiled and shelled like a fresh egg. He touched the silver insect medallion at his throat; he began to run. Tomb only let him hear another chuckle. Their merged shadows fled away beneath them as they crossed a high elegant bridge, parted at a crossroads unused for two hundred years, only to join again and vanish at the moment of joining in a silent flare of purple light vented from some ancient artefact. Tomb grew careless. Swaggering along like the tame midget of some Southern prince in cockerel-coloured doublet and yellow stockings, he came abruptly face to face with his victim, who-finding himself confronted by an old mad dwarf with a knife in his gnarled hand and a series of peculiarly childish grimaces chasing themselves across his features-stared, appalled.
“I-” said Tomb. He looked down at his hand. He wondered how long he had been carrying the knife without knowing it.
The boy meanwhile trembled despairingly. His eyes were watering. He made a painful effort to draw his sword.
“Don’t!” said Tomb. “I didn’t mean-” And it might have rested there had he not heard the sound of feet coming along the corridor toward them.
“I’m sorry,” he told the boy, kicking him beneath the left kneecap. The boy lay on the floor, motionless, looking up at him like a hurt animal. Tomb hauled the new sword from its scabbard and tried it for balance. He had some idea of using it in the absence of his axe. “Rubbish,” he said, and threw it clattering across the passage out of harm’s way. “Get something decent as soon as you can afford it.” He knelt on the floor close to the boy, who made no move to stop him, set the point of his knife against his throat, and stared into the round hopeless eyes. “What’s this round your neck?” But the boy couldn’t speak. “Don’t worry,” said Tomb, “please.” In this manner both of them awaited the arrival of the footsteps.
Not long after, a Reborn Man came striding towards them down the corridor. He had on the fantastic blood-red plate armour of an important House, its contorted yellow ideograph flaming on the black cloak that billowed out behind him. The trembling glow of the armour made his image seem mythical, transitory, as if he flickered in and out of Time as we know it; its curious blunt shoulder spikes and elongated joints gave him the look of some mutated crustacean. His head was bare, his expression beleaguered, and his companions were an ill-assorted lot, comprising a woman of his own race, bitterly thin, shaven-headed, her gait awkward and un-graceful, as if her skeleton worked in a new, untested way (her smile was empty, and she was singing softly, We are off to Vegys now, Fal di la di a); a gutter bravo from the Low City, with the walk of a frustrated predator and the spoilt features of a minor aristocrat; and a dark silent figure wrapped like a corpse in an embroidered cloak.
Tomb started up with a cry. He took a pace forward, blinking and confused.
“Cromis?” he whispered.
Pain filled him and he forgot the boy on the floor. He went up close to Galen Hornwrack (for it was him, of course, morose as a wolf, petulant as an adolescent girl at finding himself so unmoved by his ancient bugbear the palace, which after all was only a place) and touched the wrecked metal bird that hung from his belt in lieu of a sword. He looked up into the assassin’s face for a moment, then sighed: there was little similarity once you looked closely, and he could find there only an anguished savagery he had never found in the face of the dead poet-hero. He shook his head and turned to Alstath Fulthor.