“Mornings,” he whispered feverishly, “chafe me still. I wake, and look into the empty air, and wonder if throne and empire were worth it-the burning boys and crystal ships.”
He curled his lip and looked about him.
“I would not come here again for fear of finding it was not.”
His hand went quickly under his cloak.
“Fulthor, do nothing!” he hissed. “I’ll kill you here, if I have to!”
He wiped the back of his hand across his lacerated cheeks. Outside in the corridor a cold draught spoke of a change in the wind, a new weather. Inside, Alstath Fulthor let his baan drop back into its sheath. The dwarf cocked his head like a starling. The old man looked on from the shadows. Hornwrack relaxed slowly.
“Madam,” he said, “your next family quarrel will have to be fought on the ground.”
“Yet wrongs are not righted by hiding in the Low City,” Methvet Nian told him patiently.
He shrugged.
“Can you give me back the sky? If not, pay me for the service I did you last night and let me go. I believe the girl is worth something to you, and I bled for her. I do not hide in the Low City: I reject the High.”
She would not believe him. (How could she?) Instead she offered him a myth of his own: a place among the hieratic furniture and exemplary figures of a long-declining dream In a rosewood chest with copper reinforcing bands she kept three things: a gourd-shaped musical instrument from the East; a short coat of mail, lacquered black; and an unpretentious steel sword with a sweat-darkened leather grip. Now she bit her lip, and went over to the chest, and took from it the sword and mail. For a moment she stood uncertainly with them in the centre of the room, facing first the Reborn Man-who would not meet her eyes-then Tomb (the old dwarf glanced at Hornwrack and made a sudden half-amused movement of his head) and Cellur, who only stared impassively at her-and finally the assassin himself.
“Will these serve as payment?” she asked. “They are all I have.”
Hornwrack looked surprised. He accepted the sword, hefted it; the mail coat he flexed with experienced fingers. He took a little rat’s tail file from under his cloak and nicked them with it.
“They are steel,” he admitted, and shrugged. “A fair price, though I’d have preferred it as an ingot.” He stared at her, puzzled now. “If that is all, I’ll go.”
“It is not all!” exclaimed Fulthor. “Methvet Nian, the message!” He stood between Hornwrack and the door. The powered blade came out, evil sparks dripping from it in the gloom.
“Here’s a High City trick if you like!” laughed Hornwrack, who hadn’t a hope against it. He looked down at the old steel sword in his hand. “Still-”
“Stop!” cried Methvet Nian. “Alstath Fulthor, are you mad?”
His thin face white and sullen with confusion and rage, Fulthor let the baan fall to his side.
“Do not touch him. He has done us a service.” And to Hornwrack: “My lord, I see you are wounded. Visit the hospitallers before you leave here.”
Hornwrack nodded curtly. “Don’t come near the Low City after dark, Fulthor,” he said. At the door he paused, looked back. “I would prefer to owe the House of Nian nothing,” he told the Queen. He threw the mail coat on the floor and dropped the sword carefully on top of it.
“The girl carried a bundle tied up in cloth,” he said. “A poet called Verdigris stole it. When he opened it he found an insect’s head the size of a melon. He couldn’t sell it anywhere.”
Methvet Nian gazed at him in horror. He seemed unaware of it, leaning against the doorpost and staring into space. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so frightened,” he mused. He looked at her. “It’s in the gutter now, somewhere in the Low City. I left it there to rot, my lady. Goodbye.”
Out beyond Monar the wind was shifting uncertainly, picking the first sleet of the season from the frigid summits and sea-lanes of the North. Later it would invest the city with rime, freezing airs, and a faint smell of rust; now it nosed like a cold black dog among the vast dunes and endless empty rubbish heaps of the Great Brown Waste, visiting the drab stones and foundered pylons, the half-buried wreckage of ten thousand years. What else moved up there, throwing its equivocal shadow over the Reborn communes (and mimicking the jerky, hesitant gait of the votaries of the Sign as they trod at night the streets of Viriconium, the measures of the dream)? The implications of Hornwrack’s statement were colder than any wind.
“What can they have meant?” whispered Fulthor. “To send that?”
But Tomb was intrigued by the departed assassin, and stared pensively after him. He went over and closed the door. “ Does he know whose sword it was?” he asked Fulthor absently. “Did he guess?” But Fulthor only rubbed his eyes tiredly and said, “He is a liar and a jackal.”
The dwarf sniggered. “So am I.” He picked up the discarded sword and mail, smiled at Methvet Nian. “That was a valiant try, my lady. A stone would have unbent to you. Shall I put these away?”
“One of you go after him and give them to him,” she replied. “Wait. I will do it.”
When they stared at her, she laughed. “I meant him to have them.” She would let them say no more, but finished: “He saved the girl out of compassion, though he will never understand that.”
But for a peculiar interruption, Fulthor, at least, would have pursued the matter: indeed his mouth was already open to form a protest when Cellur-who had been slumped for some minutes in his chair, a variety of expressions, each more unreadable than the last, chasing themselves across his face-gave a queer high-pitched cry and struggled to his feet as if he had woken suddenly from some implacable nightmare. His skin was grey. His accipitrine eyes were fixed on the door, as though Hornwrack still stood there; they were bright with anguish. When Methvet Nian touched his shoulder he hardly seemed to notice her (beneath the odd embroidery of his robe, the bones were thin and unpredictable; brittle), but muttered desperately, “Fulthor! Tomb! No time to lose!”
“Old man, are you ill?”
“You did not hear it, Methvet Nian, the voice from the moon, with its ‘great wing against the sky.’ The insect’s head; the landings at night; the Sign of the Locust: all are one! I must go north immediately. All are one! ”
“Cellur, what is it?” begged the Queen.
“It is the end of the world if we are too late.”
We value our suffering. It is intrinsic, purgative, and it enables us to perceive the universe directly. Moreover, it is a private thing which can neither be shared nor diminished by contact. This at least was Galen Hornwrack’s view, who, by the very nature of his calling, had been much concerned with pain. It was a view enshrined in the airless room above the Rue Sepile, and in his relationship with the boy, whose function had been less that of a nurse than of hierophant at his master’s lustral agonies. As Hornwrack had grown used to the smell of self-recrimination-which in the Rue Sepile as nowhere else is compounded of dead geraniums, dry rot, and one’s own blood squeezed out of towels-he had also grown to welcome it, as he welcomed the black fevers of his deeper wounds, in which he rediscovered a symbolic reenactment of his crimes.
In Methvet Nian’s infirmary, however, he had found none of this, but instead open casements and cheerful voices and, worst of all, that good-humoured competence by which the professional nurse-who otherwise could not bear it-demeans the pain and indignity suffered by her charge. In short: they had stitched him up but refused to let him brood. Some three days after the events in the Queen’s sitting room, therefore, he had extricated himself from the place and now stalked the corridors of the palace in an uncertain temper.
His cloak had been returned to him, washed and mended. Beneath it he wore the mail of Methvet Nian, and at his side hung the unaccustomed sword. Both chafed, as did the manner in which he had come by them. He had, it is true, gone to some trouble to find for the sword a scabbard of dull moulded leather, and it looked well on him. Nevertheless, the sword is a weapon chiefly of the High City, and he felt ill-at-ease with it. He had had little training in its use. As he hurried toward the throne room for what he hoped would be the last time, he touched the knife hidden beneath his cloak, to assure himself he was not unarmed. As for the Queen’s intentions, he understood none of them. She had first tried to bribe and latterly to patronize him; he was full of resentment. It was a dangerous frame of mind in which to encounter the Queen’s dwarf, who had on his face a sardonic grin.