Cellur the Birdmaker awaited them at the centre of the village, where the wind was whipping spray off the horse trough and the front doors were banging on rooms inhabited only by mice and suffocated children. He had with him Tomb the Dwarf. From the debacle in the maze they had retrieved three horses and the pony, which now stood in the street shifting bad-temperedly with each fresh gust of wind: Tomb was redistributing the surviving baggage between them as if in preparation for a further journey into the deep madness of the world. This activity made an island of humanity in the rushing gloom, at the approaches of which hovered the madwoman, wrapped from head to foot in a thick whitish garment and turning aimlessly this way and that like something hanging from a privet branch.
Alstath Fulthor looked emptily at this scene as if he recognized no one in it, then sat down in the road. Hornwrack, tugging at his arm, heard the birdmaker shout, “Ride! West, for your life!” He shook his head. “Wait!” He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. The old man had got up on his horse now and was watching them impatiently, his embroidered cloak streaming in the wind. The dwarf ran round checking saddlebags, tightening girths, and urging the inert Fay Glass into her saddle by means of pantomimic threats. The wind rose and fell cynically, tugging at the dry husks of the insects. The horses milled about, sensing an imminent departure. Hornwrack let go of Fulthor’s wrist (“Black piss! Stay there, then, if you must!”) and caught at the birdmaker’s stirrup instead. The horse dragged him off his feet, the old man’s yellow face swam above him, alive with what he took to be fear. They were in an eddy or pocket in the gale.
“In the maze,” said Cellur, “my errors were made plain. Much, if not all, is now clear to me. I cannot yet explain the ghost”-he prodded Hornwrack’s shoulder, pointed up into the wrack where Paucemanly bobbed, smirking and bowing like a butler-“but I have at last learnt what he was trying to tell us.
“You must go and rouse Iron Chine. Pray that St. Elmo Buffin, a man ill-used by circumstance, is not as mad as he seems! Tell him the time has come to launch his fleet. Tell him help is on its way.” He smiled bitterly. “Lunatics and ghosts-all along they have had the right of it!” For a second he stared slack-faced and frightened into the west, his hooded eyes human for once. (After all, he is out in the world now, thought Hornwrack-who sympathized, being newly out in it himself-like a crab out of its shelclass="underline" what guarantees has he left? And again: What can he fear after ten thousand years?) He made a cutting motion with his hand. “Still, I was slow to connect these things. I have been too content to sit by and let Fulthor lead. Now Fulthor has failed me, and there it is.
“Fenlen, the island continent, is infested. They have been established there since they poured down from the moon eleven years ago. (I looked on like a fool. What else could I have done? I forget.) But they cannot bear earth’s airs: and when their scouts fly inland low over the sea, which they do night and day, they do so surrounded by an atmosphere of their own manufacture. By day they blunder into Buffin’s sailors. They are as motiveless and mad as the men they kill. They do not belong here.”
He gestured at the empty village, the creaking husks. “Can you doubt it? Yet they are trying to make the air over to suit them. This is only the beginning.” He shuddered. “They will remake the earth, if they can. Rouse Iron Chine, Hornwrack. I ride now to the capital. Delay me no longer!”
Hornwrack hung on to the stirrup. All he could think of to say was, “Something is the matter with Alstath Fulthor. Up on the escarpment he tried to kill me.”
“Oh, I am in Hell,” said Alstath Fulthor, shaking his head. He had come up behind them silently, the baan like a live thing in his hand. “I am not myself.” Tomb the Dwarf, who had tightened the final strap, tried to take the weapon away from him for his own good. “Come on, old friend.” They rolled about in the road, cursing and biting. Fulthor wriggled away and got up again. “Come down off your horse,” he ordered, “and explain all this. Why, up there, great cock-a-roaches walk along the ridge!” He pointed in the wrong direction. (The dwarf crawled away, holding his face and spitting.) “Or is it in my head?” He shrugged, smiled shyly, lurched off. Fay Glass woke up and looked at him sharply. Keeping a wary eye on the dwarf, she got off her horse.
Suddenly they both began singing, “We are off to Vegys now.” Hornwrack looked on, appalled. “Fal di la di a.”
(When he fled through the High City like a bleeding king, in a sweat of fear in the middle of the night, and hoped no one would notice; when he muttered in the palace the nine long alchemical names of his House, and hoped no one would hear: all heard, all knew but himself. Alstath Fulthor: the past was pulling him down.)
“When we first met,” said Cellur, “he spoke to me often of memory, which he conceived of as a hidden stream, himself perched on its bank looking into the water. Also of something which hovered like a dragonfly over the moment of his reawakening in the desert at Knarr.” He sighed. “What did he kill down there in the maze? Nothing you or I saw. All this has hastened the inevitable.
“Soon he will be as mad as the woman. She will help him. You must help them both. It is why I brought you.”
“I brought myself, old man.”
“Be that as it may.”
“What am I to do?”
“Earn what you were given,” said Tomb the Dwarf, and meant, perhaps, the sword. “I believe you’ll get no other pay.” He was in a bad temper. He wiped his pocked old nose on the back of his hand to show what he thought of it all, and pushed his sodden conical hat firmly down onto his head. “You were not brought but bought,” he said with a hard grin. “Goodbye, Hornwrack.” Hauling himself up into his saddle he added, “We’ll go back across the waste to Duirinish-for it’s quicker if you know the paths and don’t mind old battles or old lizards-and thence to Viriconium. Cellur fears the Sign of the Locust. He fears for the Queen. He does not quite know what he fears.” He looked about him like a man expecting rain. “I fear this. Stilclass="underline" one way or another I daresay we shall all have some heads to cut off before long. Do you look after the mad folk.” And he gave the pony vigorous kicks until it consented to move off into the weather. Teetering on the edge of visibility for a moment, dwarf and pony made a curious uncouth silhouette, a composite creature above which flew like a flag on its long haft the curved evil blade of the power-axe. “Never say I disliked you!” The eyes of the pony before it turned its head away were a flat and empty green.
Out there Cellur waited impatiently, staring west or south. “Rouse Iron Chine!” came a faint cry through the crack and belly of the gale. Hornwrack never saw either of them again. “On the shores of the diamond lake,” sang the madwomen in a weird voice,
“We shall watch the fishes,
On the summits of the mountains
Cry Erecthalia!
We are off to Vegys now.”
The weather closed in. He was alone. Even the ghost of Benedict Paucemanly, part at least of its purpose accomplished, had gone out like a candle. In the deserted village it might as easily have been evening as afternoon. Out of the crepuscular sky issued a thin snow which drifted up behind the dry corpses, blew into the empty rooms, and plastered itself to the windward eaves. Every so often the wind from the Deep Waste mingled with it a scatter of old ice, flinging it down the street like two handfuls of dirty glass beads. He rubbed the back of his neck. How had he come to be stranded in the cold North with two lunatics, and no option but to go and look for a third? After Iron Chine he would make his way south along the coast, since he knew no other route (that inhospitable strand, with its distant illusions and tottering cliffs, now seemed familiar and comforting); he would lose himself again in the Low City. Perhaps he would find the boy. He would kill the dwarf if he ever had the chance.