A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison 


A Storm of Wings Š1980 by M.John Harrison 

ˇ Chapter One 
ˇ Chapter Two 
ˇ Chapter Three 
ˇ Chapter Four 
ˇ Chapter Five 
ˇ Chapter Six 
ˇ Chapter Seven 
ˇ Chapter Eight 
ˇ Chapter Nine 
ˇ Chapter Ten 
ˇ Chapter Eleven 
1: The Moon Looking Down 
In the dark tidal reaches of one of those unnamed rivers which spring from the mountains behind Cladich, 
on a small domed island in the shallows before the sea, fallen masonry of a great age glows faintly under 
the eye of an uncomfortable Moon. A tower once stood here in the shadow of the estuarine cliffs, made 
too long ago for anyone to remember, in a way no-one left can understand, from a single obsidian 
monolith fully two hundred feet in length. For ten thousand years wind and water scoured its southern 
face, finding no weakness; and at night a yellow light might be discerned in its topmost window, coming 
and going as if someone there passed before a flame. Who brought it to this rainy country, where in 
winter the gales drive the white water up the Minch and fishermen from Lendalfoot shun the inshore 
ground, and for what purpose, is unclear. Now it lies in five pieces. The edges of the stone are neither 
shattered nor worn, but melted like candlewax. The causeway that once gave access here - from a beach 
on the west bank where lumps of volcanic glass are scattered on the sand - is drowned now, and all that 
comes up it from the water is a strange lax vegetation, a sprawl of giant sea-hemlock which for some 
reason has forsaken the mild and beneficial brine of the estuary to colonise the beach, spread its pale and 
pulpy stems over the shattered tower, and clutch at a stand of dead, white pines. 

In this time, in the Time of the Locust, when we have nothing to ourselves but the hollowness within us, in 
the Time of Bone, when we have nothing to do but wait, nothing human moves here. Nothing human has 
moved here for eighty years. Fire, were it brought here, would be pale and dim, hard to kindle. Passion 
would fade here on a whisper. Something in the tower's fall has poisoned the air here, and drained the 
landscape of its power. White and sickly and infinitely slow, the hemlock creeps out of the water to run 
sad rubbery fingers over the rubbish in the fallen rooms. The collapse of the tower seems complete, the 
defeat of artifice accomplished. 

Yet in the Time of the Locust are we not counselled to patience? Eighty years have passed since 
tegeus-Cromis broke the yoke of Canna Moidart, since the Chemosit fell and the Reborn Men came 
among us; and in the deeps of this autumn night, under the aegis of an old and bitter geology, we witness 
here in events astronomical and enigmatic an intersection crucial to both the Earth and the precarious 


foothold on it of the adolescent Evening Cultures. 'Wait! Things are. Things happen. Only wait!'The 
estuarine cliffs impend, black, expectant; the air is full of frost and anticipation... 

foothold on it of the adolescent Evening Cultures. 'Wait! Things are. Things happen. Only wait!'The 
estuarine cliffs impend, black, expectant; the air is full of frost and anticipation... 

Not many hours later, as the thin, uncertain light of day spreads like smoke between the soft fat stems, 
limning the fallen column of the tower, a figure emerges from the hemlock thickets - puzzled and reluctant 
as if harried from a deep sleep - to scan the southern sky where the Moon is still a bone-white image, the 
cankered face which lingers in a dream. The old man shivers a little, and settles his cloak about his 
shoulders; they confront for a time, man and planet. But then in an instant, sunrise proper has splattered 
everything below with blood - the sea, the shore, the hemlock and the old man's cloak all smeared and 
dappled with it - and he turns urgently away to drag from cover a small crude wooden boat. Its keel 
grates on the shingle, oars fall whitely on the water. The day brightens, but as he rows, the old man 
winces from the ominous sky. Beaching his boat on the western shore, muttering and panting with the 
effort, he pauses at the water's edge for a final glimpse of the tower, locked in its long struggle with 
decay; then shrugs and hurries up a flight of steps cut long ago into the cliff. While behind him, a single 
fish eagle with wings of a curious colour beats up out of the bright south and swoops over the island like 
a valediction. 

In the Time of the Locust it is given to us to see such things. 

The Reborn Men do not think as we do. They live in waking dreams, pursued by a past they do not 
understand, harried by a birthright which has no meaning to them: taunted by amnesia of the soul. 

Alstath Fulthor, the first of them to be drawn by Tomb the Iron Dwarf from millenial interment in the 
Lesser Rust Desert, remembered nothing of his previous life: instead, his steps were dogged by a 
suspicion he could not make plain even to himself. His body, his blood, his very germ cells knew (or so it 
seemed to him), but could find no everyday language in which to tell him what his life had been like during 
the frigid lunacy of the Afternoon. Dark hints reached him. But the quivering fibrils of his nervous system 
were adjusted to receive messages dispersed a thousand or more years before, intimations faded on the 
winds of time. 

In the months following his revival he dreamt constantly: Sometimes of a large silver insect, clicking and 
metallic, the life-cycle of which he was able to observe in all its main aspects; at others of a woman (who 
sat alone in a room so tall that its ceiling was a web of shadow, spinning a golden thread which, of its 
own accord, rose and flickered from her hands until it filled all that mysterious, immense, whispering 
space above her). In the ruck and ruin of Soubridge, with its warehouses full of rotting fish and 
massacred children, during the long icy march through the Monar Mountains in winter, and at the 
storming of the North-East Gate, these images came repeatedly between him and the battle: the insect 
with its expressionless faceted eyes, the woman with her jewelled spinaret. (Often he inflicted dreadful 


cuts on its carapace; or smeared her sleeve with blood; and once, as he fought his way through the 
streets of Viriconium to shake the hand of Tomb the Dwarf over a heap of Northmen's corpses, the 
flames along the Proton Circuit merged for a moment with the woman's strange writhing skein, so that his 
past and his present crackled in a lightning arc through his mind and he fell on his face blinded, and was 
taken for dead, no longer able to tell which was real - the airy whisper of the city fires or the roaring of 
that golden cloud . . . ) Steadily though, as if he were leaving the haven of some second childhood, even 
these reference points seemed to be withdrawn from him, to be replaced by a rushing chaos, the sense of 
an act of memory continually performed without relief, a hidden river in the night, from which might 
sometimes surface unbidden some fragment of an event drifting like a dead branch amid the unidentifiable 
rubbish of the tides... 

cuts on its carapace; or smeared her sleeve with blood; and once, as he fought his way through the 
streets of Viriconium to shake the hand of Tomb the Dwarf over a heap of Northmen's corpses, the 
flames along the Proton Circuit merged for a moment with the woman's strange writhing skein, so that his 
past and his present crackled in a lightning arc through his mind and he fell on his face blinded, and was 
taken for dead, no longer able to tell which was real - the airy whisper of the city fires or the roaring of 
that golden cloud . . . ) Steadily though, as if he were leaving the haven of some second childhood, even 
these reference points seemed to be withdrawn from him, to be replaced by a rushing chaos, the sense of 
an act of memory continually performed without relief, a hidden river in the night, from which might 
sometimes surface unbidden some fragment of an event drifting like a dead branch amid the unidentifiable 
rubbish of the tides... 

'What are you doing?'someone asked him. They were outside the walls but he didn't know where.. 

He stumbled through the arteries of his home, his brain buzzing and vibrating with a new vigour, 
discovering chambers and oubliettes he had never seen before. At every turn hands beckoned him in... 

Here, organic towers, tall shapeless masses of tissue cultured from the plasm of ancient mammals, 
trumpeted and moaned across the abandoned wastes of another continent, their huge cynical voices 
modulating on the wind, now immensely distant, now close at hand. Natural philosophy, they maintained 
(holding him to be in heresy), is a betrayal of invention. It is an edifice of clay. It was always night 
there... 

A city spread itself before him in the wet, equivocal afternoon light like interrupted excavations in a 
sunken garden. It could be reached by a ladder of bone. 'I will go down into that place!' 

With these poor and misleading relics of a dead culture he tried to create a past for himself and so 
achieve, like any other human being, some experiential perspective from which to judge his own actions; 
crouching, as it were, on the banks of his own internal stream and scooping from the water those things 
which floated closest. They rarely helped him in dealing with the new reality of the Evening Cultures. And 
at least one of the catches he made in this manner came to haunt him, a dead thing risen from the 
bottom-mud of one incarnation to infect his perception of the other. It was not a normal memory, 
rendered as an image - a sound, a scent, a vision of a face or place: rather it came as an act he felt 
compelled to perform - or one which his body might perform quite of its own accord, as if his muscles 
remembered what he did not - and in performing, recall. 

Eighty years, then, had passed since tegeus-Cromis broke the yoke of Canna Moidart, since the 
Chemosit fell and dragged the North down with them; and Aistath Fulthor, first among the Reborn Men, 
heir to a technology whose power he could not really appreciate, a lord respected among the councils of 
the Pastel City, was running through the foothills of the Monar as if his life depended upon it, without any 
knowledge of why he ran or what compelled him to do it. 

He was a tall man, as are all the Reborn, and a thin one, clad in tunic and trousers of black satin, the 
contorted yellow crest or ideograph of his House writhing over his breast. On his feet were the curious 
flimsy shoes his race wears in preference to boots, and at his waist hung a short force knife or baan, dug 
up along with its ancient ceramic scabbard from some desert. His long coarse yellow hair was tangled 
and damp, and sweat filmed his prominent birdlike features. He came into Dyke Head Moss over the 
steep and dangerous ground at the head of Rossett Gill, the low rounded hills about him browned with 
autumn; shot the screes at Surgeon's Gate with arms windmilling to keep his balance and grey dust 


exploding round him as he went; and gained the valley path in a few long, energetic strides. That the pace 
he set would have crippled an ordinary man he was unaware. His queer green eyes were blank and 
unfocused, but with a psychic rather than a physical weariness. In the more foolish and fashionable salons 
of Viriconium he was held to be the 'most human'of the Reborn; but this was a silly expression (not to say 
a meaningless one), and if there was anything more or less human in his face now it was only despair. 

exploding round him as he went; and gained the valley path in a few long, energetic strides. That the pace 
he set would have crippled an ordinary man he was unaware. His queer green eyes were blank and 
unfocused, but with a psychic rather than a physical weariness. In the more foolish and fashionable salons 
of Viriconium he was held to be the 'most human'of the Reborn; but this was a silly expression (not to say 
a meaningless one), and if there was anything more or less human in his face now it was only despair. 

A hundred and forty miles he had come, or more, in a long loop through the hills, old landscapes 
fomenting in his brain: but the fit was leaving him as he descended Dyke Head Moss, and his senses were 
returned to him one by one. A stream glittered beside him. Sheep were bleating distantly as the 
shepherds drove them down from the upland turf to winter pasture in the valley. The air was harsh with 
the scent of peat and ling-heather, and below him the path fell away in a series of curves and re-entrants 
and gentle descents to the distant city. Weariness was replacing the mixture of elation and dread which 
had filled him while he ran. From a state of black exultation he tumbled into one of puzzlement. He had 
run like this a thousand years before: but from what? Where had he run to? What fears had pullulated in 
his brain? What curious joy? 

Under the brow of Hollin Low Moor he slowed to a walk. His feet and ankles hurt. He sat on a rock by 
the path to massage them, and his attention was captured by the City, waiting there in its mantle of 
stillness and distance. Light flared through the haze: heliographing from the riverine curves of the Proton 
Circuit; phosphorescing from the pleasure-canal at Lowth where, under a setting sun, banks of anemones 
glowed like triumphal stained glass; signalling from the tiered vivid heights of Minnet-Saba, from the 
inconceivable pastel towers and plazas of the Atteline Quarter. All was immaculate - illuminated, 
transfigured, miniature. It attracted him not as a refuge (although he saw himself as a refugee), nor by its 
double familiarity, but by its long strangeness and obstinacy in the face of Time, celebrated here in the 
generation (or so it seemed) rather than the reflection of light. Viriconium, the Pastel City; a little cryptic, 
a little proud, a little mad. Its histories, as forgotten as his own, made of the air a sort of amber, an 
entrapment; the geometry of its avenues was a wry message from one survivor to another: and its 
present, like his own, was but an implication of its past - a dream, a prediction, a brief possibility to be 
endured. 

Thus he fell into a reverie of dispossession, a thin man sitting on a rock in the red wash of sunset, heraldic 
yellow blazing across his chest, while in his face puzzlement contended with weariness and a certain awe. 
The light began to fail about him. The valley sounds intensified then died away. A cool wind sprang down 
from Rossett Gill to rustle like a small animal in the bracken. When he looked up again the City was lost, 
the evening grey and chilly, and an old man in a long cloak was walking up the path towards him. 

He got to his feet and stretched his stiff limbs, Covertly he studied the newcomer's apparel for the Sign of 
the Locust. When he could not find it he let his hand drop from the hilt of his baan. 

'Hello, old man,'he said. 

The old man stopped. He was barefooted and dusty, bent as if from a long journey undertaken in haste 


and poverty, and his face was hidden in the depths of his hood. Fulthor would have taken him for a 
tenant farmer, or one of the small shopkeepers of the south, called away from Soubridge or Lendalfoot 
to bring a dowry to the wedding of a favourite daughter (copper in the shape of a dolphin, long-hoarded; 
a small piece of steel equal to the profits of one fig tree), tears and unbleached cloth to the funeral of a 
younger son. But his cloak was of good fabric, and woven with odd mathematical designs which seemed 
to ebb and flow in the receding light. And, 'You cannot always be running, Alstath Fulthor,'he whispered, 
his eyes glittering brightly from the darkness of the hood. 'Why do you waste your time - and the time of 
your adopted city not less! - away in the brown hills like this?' 

and poverty, and his face was hidden in the depths of his hood. Fulthor would have taken him for a 
tenant farmer, or one of the small shopkeepers of the south, called away from Soubridge or Lendalfoot 
to bring a dowry to the wedding of a favourite daughter (copper in the shape of a dolphin, long-hoarded; 
a small piece of steel equal to the profits of one fig tree), tears and unbleached cloth to the funeral of a 
younger son. But his cloak was of good fabric, and woven with odd mathematical designs which seemed 
to ebb and flow in the receding light. And, 'You cannot always be running, Alstath Fulthor,'he whispered, 
his eyes glittering brightly from the darkness of the hood. 'Why do you waste your time - and the time of 
your adopted city not less! - away in the brown hills like this?' 

'Why do you waste yours in asking, old man?'he answered. 

The old man shivered, and with a quick unconscious movement of the head glanced up at the southern 
sky before he spoke again. The high, naked shriek of a fish eagle echoed over the fells; but there was no 
moon yet in the sky. 

In a palace like a shell - in Methven's Hall where the Proton Circuit draws itself up into a spiral on a 
hundred pillars of thin black stone - Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, Queen in Viriconium, who in her youth 
had taken to the windy birch-stands and glacial lakes of the Rannoch Moor, hunted away by the 
Chemosit and wild as any moss-trooper's daughter (with the last of the Methven limping and scarred to 
guard her, a poet and a dead metal bird to guide her, and a giant dwarf to expedite her passage), sat 
before five false windows in a tall room floored with cinnabar crystal. She was surrounded by precious, 
complex objects of forgotten use - machines or sculptures excavated from ruined cities in the Rust Desert 
beyond Duirinish; curtains of pale, fluctuating light drifted irregularly about the chamber like showers of 
rain; and through the dreamlike shadows thus created shambled the Queen's Beast-one of the great white 
sloths of the southern forests, who are said to be the fallen remnants of a star-faring race invited or lured 
to Earth during the madness of the Afternoon. 

Eighty years had passed since Usheen, the first of her beasts, died on Canna Moidart's knife, and in 
dying sealed the final defeat of the North. Tegeus-Cromis, lay two decades still and dead beneath the 
fields of sol d'or at Lowth. Methvet Nian was no longer young, even by the standards of the Evening. 
Still, in her purple eyes there might yet be discerned something of the girl who in the space of one year 
lost and gained the Last Kingdom of the world: and in the dreaming light where those five false windows 
showed landscapes to be found nowhere in Viriconium, her age weighed only lightly on her - like the 
hand of some imaginary child. Inside, the windows flickered. Outside it was autumn; and under a cold 
moon processions of men with insect faces went silently through the streets. 

A curious thing happened to her. 

Often in that flickering room the past had come to touch her with quiet persistence, tugging at her sleeve 
in the effort to capture her attention: white hares in the twilight at Shining Clough Moss or Torside Naze; 
the long brown sweep of the Rannoch peat moors like a brush stroke in some enormous written 
language; desert dust piling itself noiselessly in the bleak plazas of ruined Drunmore. But these were no 
more or less than the sad fingerprints of memory on her brain (she remembered the verses tegeus-Cromis 
made, the ancient cry of the fish eagles, and his voice out of night and morning): tonight it was something 
more. The windows flickered; the windows shimmered: the windows said 

'Methvet Nian.' 

All five went blank and dark. 


'Methvet Nian!' 

'Methvet Nian!' 

Fused sand, and a sky filled with mica, the rolling dunes and dry saline wadis of the sempiternal erg. In 
the fierce air hung a perfect mirage of the City, pastel towers tall and mathematical, cut with strange 
designs. The wind stooped likeahawk- 'Methvet Nian!' 

She approached the windows fatalistically, and with a sense of being drawn or invoked (seeing herself 
perhaps walk complaisantly through them and out into some other time). Now they poured out on her a 
green and submarine radiance, as if the palace she stood in truly were a shell, or a ship full of drowned 
sailors spinning forever beneath the ancient clammy sea. All other lights in the throne room were dimmed; 
the sloth whimpered, rearing puzzledly up on its hind legs, great ambered claws extending and retracting 
nervously. 

'Hush,'she said: 'Who wishes to speak to me?'and was still. 

'Methvet Nian.' 

The deep-sea gloom surged, foamed, blew away, like spindrift off a wave in the invisible wind, only to be 
replaced by the image of a cavernous, ruined room which seemed to be full of dusty stuffed birds. 
Moonlight filtered through rents in the walls. An old man stood before her, pentadic, five-imaged. His 
long domed skull was yellow and fleshless, his eyes green and his lips thin. His skin was so fine and tight 
as to be translucent, the bones shining through it like jade. His age, she thought, has outstripped mere 
physical symptoms, and exalted him. His robe was embroidered with subtle gold designs having this 
property, that in every draught of air they seemed to shift and flow, responsive to each movement of the 
cloth but independent of it. 

She trembled. She put out a hand to touch cold glass. 

The cry of gulls rang in her ears, and the sound of a cold grey sea lapping on black sand far away and 
long ago. 

'Do the dead live in that country, then?'she whispered, twisting her fingers in the white fur of the sloth. 
'Beyond the windows?' 

'Methvet Nian.' 

East and South of Monar runs a strip of heathland whose name, when it still had one, was a handful of 
primitive syllables scattered like a question into the damp wind. It is a deserted and superseded country, 
that one, full of the monuments and inarticulate ghosts of a race older than Viriconium, younger than the 
Afternoon Cultures, and possibly more naive than either: a short-lived nation of tribal herdsmen who 
buried their dead once-yearly in tiered barrows and knew nothing more of their heritage than that it 
should be avoided. Of the future they knew nothing at all. Worked metal was the death-knell of them, 
tolling from the crude and ceaseless smithies of the North. Their works, ridge-path and necropolis alike, 
have now taken on the air of natural features and, overgrown with gorse and young beech, become one 
with the sombre expanse of long mounds and shallow valleys sloping away to merge imperceptibly with 
the Rannoch beyond. 

This place avoided the poisoned hands of the Afternoon only to age and grow enfeebled instead. 
Curlews make free of its sad desuetude; hares play in the deep cloughs and sheltered hollows of a land 
which has quietly exhausted itself; it ignores the traveller, and gently seeks the night. Here on many an 


evening in the latter part of the year darkness visits the earth while the pale wreck of the sunset still 
commands the sky. The air is suffused with brightness yet somehow lacks the power to illuminate. In a 
moment each declivity has brimmed up with shadow and become the abode of mumbling wind and the 
shy thin ghosts who never cireamed of the Afternoon or knew its iron, at first or second hand. On just 
such an evening one autumn, eighty years after the Fall of the North, grey smoke might have been seen 
issuing from the chimney of a small red caravan parked on an old ridgeway deep in the heart of the heath; 
and from a considerable hole newly-dug in the ground nearby, the chink of metal on metal -It was a 
four-wheeled caravan of the type traditionally used by the Mingulay tinker to move his enormous family 
and meagre equipment along the warm summer roads of the south. Indeed, the south vibrated in it, every 
panel and peg, lively atrocious designs in electric blue rioting over its sides, its thick spokes picked out in 
canary yellow, the curved roof a racy purple to throw back the last of the light in a challenge to the 
sombre crawling umbers of the heath. The hilarious, slovenly children, it seemed, were not long departed, 
run off snot-nosed to go blackberrying among the brambles. Smoke rose, and a smell of food. Two 
dusty ponies tethered to the backboard with a bit of frayed rope cropped the short ridgeway turf in noisy 
self-absorbtion, lop ears cocked to catch the voice of their master who, though rendered invisible by the 
embankment of fresh sandy soil surrounding his pit, could be heard from time to time punctuating with vile 
threats and oaths the low monotonous humming of some Rivermouth dirge. But no children returned from 
the bracken (we hear their voices fade and recede across the long darkness of the heath); and this 
impatient excavation continued unwearyingly until the light had almost left the sky. Long shadows 
engulfed the caravan; its chimney ceased to smoke; the ponies shuffled at the end of their tether. Fresh 
showers of earth added height to the ramparts. Then a peculiar thing happened. 

evening in the latter part of the year darkness visits the earth while the pale wreck of the sunset still 
commands the sky. The air is suffused with brightness yet somehow lacks the power to illuminate. In a 
moment each declivity has brimmed up with shadow and become the abode of mumbling wind and the 
shy thin ghosts who never cireamed of the Afternoon or knew its iron, at first or second hand. On just 
such an evening one autumn, eighty years after the Fall of the North, grey smoke might have been seen 
issuing from the chimney of a small red caravan parked on an old ridgeway deep in the heart of the heath; 
and from a considerable hole newly-dug in the ground nearby, the chink of metal on metal -It was a 
four-wheeled caravan of the type traditionally used by the Mingulay tinker to move his enormous family 
and meagre equipment along the warm summer roads of the south. Indeed, the south vibrated in it, every 
panel and peg, lively atrocious designs in electric blue rioting over its sides, its thick spokes picked out in 
canary yellow, the curved roof a racy purple to throw back the last of the light in a challenge to the 
sombre crawling umbers of the heath. The hilarious, slovenly children, it seemed, were not long departed, 
run off snot-nosed to go blackberrying among the brambles. Smoke rose, and a smell of food. Two 
dusty ponies tethered to the backboard with a bit of frayed rope cropped the short ridgeway turf in noisy 
self-absorbtion, lop ears cocked to catch the voice of their master who, though rendered invisible by the 
embankment of fresh sandy soil surrounding his pit, could be heard from time to time punctuating with vile 
threats and oaths the low monotonous humming of some Rivermouth dirge. But no children returned from 
the bracken (we hear their voices fade and recede across the long darkness of the heath); and this 
impatient excavation continued unwearyingly until the light had almost left the sky. Long shadows 
engulfed the caravan; its chimney ceased to smoke; the ponies shuffled at the end of their tether. Fresh 
showers of earth added height to the ramparts. Then a peculiar thing happened. 

A great white light came up out of the pit and flared soundlessly into the sky like a signal to the stars. . 

(Simultaneously an enormous voice could be heard to shout, OOGABOURINDRA! BORGA! 
OOGABOURINDRA-BA!) -

And a small figure dressed in the leather leggings of a metal prospector was hurled out of the hole 
cartwheeling like a horse-chestnut leaf in a March wind, to fall heavily in a heap of harness near the 
tethered ponies, (who bared their old yellow teeth in brief contempt and immediately resumed their 
greedy pulling at the turf), its beard smouldering furiously, its long white hair alight, and all its 
accoutrements charred. For a moment it sat on the ground as if stunned; beat feebly at itself, muttering 
the foulest of marsh-oaths from Cladich; then sank back, insensible, silent, smoking. All around, the light 
that had come up from the earth was fading from white and the invisible colours through a strange series 
of violets and pinks to darkness and vanishment. A small breeze searched the rowan and thorn for it; 
shrugged; and departed. 

Tomb the Iron Dwarf, acting at the lean end of his life on an impulse he didn't fully understand, had left 
the Great Brown Waste, his longtime prospecting ground, and in his one-hundred-and-fiftieth year 
travelled through Methedrin in the spring; where amid the tumbling meltwater and shortlived flower 
meadows he recalled other times and other journeys. Surprised by his own sentimentality and suddenly 
aware he was seeking something special, he'd dawdled south down the Rannoch, warming his old bones. 
'One last discovery,'he had promised himself, one last communion with ancient metal, and then an end to 
arthritic nights; but this seemed a strange place to make it. What he might find in a land that hadn't known 
industry for millenia, what he might return with for the last time to the Pastel City, he couldn't imagine. He 
had not seen the City for twenty years, or his friend Fulthor. He had never seen the Sign of the Locust. 

When he woke up, it was dark, and he was inside his caravan. A tall old man in a hooded cloak bent 
over him like a question mark in the orange lamplight. Strange designs worked into the weave of the 


garment seemed to shift and writhe as he moved. 

garment seemed to shift and writhe as he moved. 

'We thought you were dead,'he said. 'We thought you were dead!'And slept 


2: Galen Hornwrack and the Sign of the Locust 
Autumn. Midnight. The eternal City. The moon hangs over her like an attentive white-faced lover, its light 
reaching into dusty corners and empty lots. Like all lovers it remarks equally the blemish and the beauty 
spot - limning the iridium fretwork and baroque spires of the fabled Atteline Plaza even as it silvers the 
fishy eye of the old woman cutting fireweed and elder twigs among the ruins of the Cispontine Quarter, 
whose towers suffered most during the War of the Two Queens. The City is a product of her own 
dreams, a million years of them: now she turns in her sleep, so quietly you can hear the far-off rumour of 
the newest: white bones, the Song of the Locust, dry mandibles rubbing together in desert nights . . . or is 
it only a wind out of Monar, and autumn leaves filling the air, to scrape and patter in the side streets? 

In the Artists'Quarter it is that hour of the night when all and nothing seems possible. The bistros are 
quiet. The entertainments and smoking-parlours are all closed. Even Fat Main Etteilla the fortune teller 
has shipped her wicked pack of cards, put up for a few hours the shutters of her grubby satin booth and 
waddled off with her aching ankles and her hacking cough, which is bad tonight. Canker, the Dark Man 
of the cards, has her by the lungs; she leans against a wall to spit in a puddle of moonlight, whispering the 
word that will hold him back; it falls hollowly into the vibrant, vacant street. The canker, she confides to 
her shadow, will take her in its own good time; at present she is less concerned about herself than her last 
customer of the evening. She has a wan belief in her own efficacy, and tells the silent Quarter, 'I did my 
best, I did my best -, 

She did her best -'There is nothing good in the cards spread thus. 

'Bogrib, NOTHINGNESS, crosses you, and here is NUMBER FOUR, called by some the Name 
Stars: beware a fire. 

'A woman shadows you, POVERTY lies behind you, the Lessing; and before you a discussion, or it may 
be water. 

'Nothing is clear tonight - who is that, running in the alley? I heard steps for a moment in the alley - but 
see the MANTIS here, praying at the Moon beneath three arches. The first is for something new; the 
second for injustice; under the third arch all will be made different. Something taken away long ago is 
now returned. 

'These are your thoughts on the matter, to turn this card I must have something more. Thank you. FIVE 
TOWERS! Do nothing, I beseech you, that you might regret. Fear death from the air, and avoid the 
North -'Wait! We have hardly begun! Three more cards remain to be turned!' 

-But he went all the same, rapidly down the street and into the Alley of Bakers: a dark self-sufficient 
figure whose face she never clearly saw, going with a light and dangerous tre ad. 
Once in the alley and out of Main Etteilla's earshot (for fear perhaps she might pursue him, predicting, 


haranguing, or merely coughing up her lungs) he allowed himself to laugh a little, baring his teeth wryly to 
the grim City, the walls which contained him, the towers which had failed him, the night which covered 
him; and he quickened his pace, making for the Bistro Californium, that home of all errors and all who 
err. The air had stilled itself; it was sharp and cold, and his breath hung about him in a cloud. He did not 
enter the Californium at once but hung like a bird of prey on the edge of the lamplight to see who might 
await him inside. In this bright, static quadrant of the night's existence the City seemed shattered and 
fragmentary, tumbled into hard meaningless patterns of light and shade, blue and grey and faded 
gamboge, grainy of texture and difficult of interpretation. Stray beams of smoky lemon-yellow barred his 
harsh worn features, his tired hooded eyes. When a dog barked down in the Cispontine Quarter desultory, 
monotonous, distant - he seemed to stiffen for a moment; pass his hand over his face; and look 
puzzledly about him, for all the world like a man who wakes from a nightmare to an empty, buzzing 
dream, and wonders briefly how his life has led him here . . . 

haranguing, or merely coughing up her lungs) he allowed himself to laugh a little, baring his teeth wryly to 
the grim City, the walls which contained him, the towers which had failed him, the night which covered 
him; and he quickened his pace, making for the Bistro Californium, that home of all errors and all who 
err. The air had stilled itself; it was sharp and cold, and his breath hung about him in a cloud. He did not 
enter the Californium at once but hung like a bird of prey on the edge of the lamplight to see who might 
await him inside. In this bright, static quadrant of the night's existence the City seemed shattered and 
fragmentary, tumbled into hard meaningless patterns of light and shade, blue and grey and faded 
gamboge, grainy of texture and difficult of interpretation. Stray beams of smoky lemon-yellow barred his 
harsh worn features, his tired hooded eyes. When a dog barked down in the Cispontine Quarter desultory, 
monotonous, distant - he seemed to stiffen for a moment; pass his hand over his face; and look 
puzzledly about him, for all the world like a man who wakes from a nightmare to an empty, buzzing 
dream, and wonders briefly how his life has led him here . . . 

His name was Galen Hornwrack. He was a lord without a domain, an eagle without wings; and he did 
not fear the air, he loved it. The Way of the Two Queens had ended his boyhood without hope: and he 
had spent the slow years since hidden away in the mazy alleys of the Artists'Quarter, the better to regret 
an act of fate which (so it appeared to him) had robbed his existence of any promise or purpose before it 
was fairly begun. Out of spite against himself or against the world, he never knew which, he had not 
taken up a profession, learning to use the steel knife instead to cut a living from the streets, shunning his 
peers and watching himself turn from a young man full of dreams into an older one stuffed with emptiness 
and fear. Fear death from the air! He feared it at every corner - it yawned at him from every alley's 
mouth - but never from there, where he would willingly have burned or bled or hung like a corpse from 
the million-year gallows of his own pain! 

Presently he shook himself, laughed harshly, and, certain that the Californium contained no obvious trap 
or enemy, abandoned the shadows like a viper. One hand hung visible by his side while the other, 
beneath his threadbare grey cloak, rested on the hilt of his good plain knife. In that manner he made his 
way through the notorious chromium portals behind which Rotgob Mungo, a Captain of the North, had in 
the last days of Canna Moidart's rule laid his vain and valiant plans to break the siege of the 
Artists'Quarter, only to bleed out his life - albeit more honourably than many of his kin - under the strange 
axe of Alstath Fulthor. 

Californium! The very word is like a bell, tolling all the years of the City - tolling for the mad poets of the 
Afternoon with all their self-inflicted wounds and desperate drugged sojourns at its rose-coloured glass 
tables; tolling for their skinless jewelled women who, lolling beneath the incomprehensible frescoes, took 
tea from porcelain as lucid as a baby's ear; tolling forJiro-San and Adolf Ableson, for Clane and Grishkin 
and the crimes which sickened their minds in the rare service of Art - their formless, quavering light 
extinguished now, their names forgotten, their feverish stanzas no more than a faint flush on the face of the 
world, a fading resonance in the ears of Time! 

Californium! - a knell for the new nobles of Borring's court, the unkempt rural harpists who only five 
centuries ago filled the place with sawdust and thin beer and vomit, beating out their sagas and great lying 
epics like swords on a Rivermouth anvil while Viriconium, the only city they had ever seen, refurbished 
itself around them, (remembering, perhaps, its long declining dream) and, at the head of Low Leedale, 
the cold stronghold of Duirinish levered its way upward stone by stone to bar the way to the wolves of 
the North. They were here! 

Here too came the young tegeus-Cromis, a lord in Methven's halls before the death of his proud sister, 
morose and ascetic in a bice velvet cloak, eager to stitch the night through with the eerie self-involved 


notes of a curious Eastern gourd . . . Californium! Philosophers and tinkers; poetry, art and revolution; 
princes like vagrants and migrant polemicists with voices soft as a snake's; the absolute beat and quiver 
of Time, the voice of the City; millennia of verse echo from its chromium walls, drift in little dishonest 
flakes of sound from that peculiarly frescoed ceiling! 

notes of a curious Eastern gourd . . . Californium! Philosophers and tinkers; poetry, art and revolution; 
princes like vagrants and migrant polemicists with voices soft as a snake's; the absolute beat and quiver 
of Time, the voice of the City; millennia of verse echo from its chromium walls, drift in little dishonest 
flakes of sound from that peculiarly frescoed ceiling! 

Tonight (with the night in the grip of the Locust, at the mercy of a poetry as icy and formal as an instinct) 
it was filled with the singular moonlight, bright yet leaden, arctic and elusive, that seeped in from the 
street. It was cold. And from its windows the City was a broad ingenuous diorama, blue-grey, 
lemon-yellow, textured like crude paper. Each table cast a precise dull shadow on the floor, as did each 
table's occupant, caught in frozen contemplation of some crime or moral feebleness; Lord Mooncarrot, 
he with the receding brow and rotting Southern estates (gardens filled with perspiring leaden statuary and 
wild white cats), pondering the blackmail of his wife; Ansel Verdigris the derelict poet, head like an 
antipodean cockatoo's, fingering his knife and two small coins; Chorica nam Vell Ban, half-daughter of 
the renegade Norvin Trinor, forgiven but shunned by the society she craved: the persistent moon 
illuminated them all, and shadows ate their puzzled faces, a handful of rogues and poseurs and failures 
watching midnight away in the security of their own sour fellowship. 

Lord Galen Hornwrack found an empty table and settled himself among them to drink cheap wine and 
stare impassively into the lunar street, waiting for whatever the long empty night might bring. 

(It was to bring him three things: the Sign of the Locust; a personal encounter wan and oblique enough for 
the bleak white midnight outside; and a betrayal.) 

The Sign of the Locust is unlike any other religion invented in Viriconium. Its outward forms and 
observances - its liturgies and rituals, its theurgic or metaphysical speculations, its daily processionals seem 
less an attempt by men to express an essentially human invention than the effort of some raw and 
independent Idea - a theopneustia, existing without recourse to brain or blood: a Muse or demiurge - to 
express itself It wears its congregation like a disguise: we did not so much create the Sign of the Locust 
as invite it into ourselves, and now it dons us nightly like a cloak and domino to go abroad in the world. 

Who knows exactly where it began, or how? For as much as a century (or as little as a decade: estimates 
vary) before it made its appearance on the streets, a small group or cabal somewhere in the City had 
propogated its fundamental tenet - that the appearance of 'reality'is quite false, a counterfeit or artefact of 
the human senses. How hesitantly they must have crept from alley to alley to confirm one another in their 
grotesque beliefs! How shy to confide them! And yet: the War had left our spirits as ruinous as the 
Cispontine Quarter. We were tired. We were hungry. The coming of the Reborn Men was disheartening, 
unlooked for, punitive. It left us with a sense of having been replaced. How eagerly in the end we 
clutched at this pitiless, elegant systemization of one simple nihilistic premise! 

'The world is not as we perceive it,'maintained the early converts, 'but infinitely more surprising. We must 
cultivate a diverse view.'This mild (even naive) truism, however, was to give way rapidly - via a series of 
secret and bloody heretical splits - to a more radical assertion. A wave of murders, mystifying to the 
population at large, swept the City. It was during this confused period that the Sign itself first came to 
light, that simple yet tortuous adaptation of the fortune teller's MANTIS symbol which, cut in steel or 
silver, swings at the neck of each adherent. Ostlers and merchant princess, soldiers and shopkeepers, 
astrologers and vagabonds, were discovered sprawled stiffly in the gutters and plazas, strangled in an 
unknown fashion and their bodies tattooed with symbolical patterns, as the entire council of the Sign, 
elected by secret ballot from the members of the original cabal, tore itself apart in a grotesque 
metaphysical dispute. A dreadful sense of immanence beset the City. 'Life is a blasphemy,'announced the 
Sign. 'Procreation is a blasphemy, for it replicates and fosters the human view of the universe.' 


Thus the Sign established itself; coming like a coded message from nowhere. Now its apologists range 
from wheelwright to Court ascetic; it is scrawled on every alley wall to fluoresce in the thin bluish 
moonlight; it rustles like a dry wind - or so it's said - even in the corridors of Methven's hall. Its 
complicated sub-sects, with their headless and apparently aimless structures, issue many bulletins. We 
counterfeit the 'real', they claim, by our very forward passage through time, and thus occlude the actual 
and essential. One old man feeding a dog might by the power of his spirit maintain the existence of an 
entire street - the dog, the shamble of houses with their big-armed women and staring children, the 
cobbles wet with an afternoon's rain, the sunset seen through the top of a ruined tower; and what 
mysteries lie behind this imperfect shadow-play? What truths? They process the streets impulsively, trying 
to defeat the Real, and hoping to come upon a Reborn Man. 

Thus the Sign established itself; coming like a coded message from nowhere. Now its apologists range 
from wheelwright to Court ascetic; it is scrawled on every alley wall to fluoresce in the thin bluish 
moonlight; it rustles like a dry wind - or so it's said - even in the corridors of Methven's hall. Its 
complicated sub-sects, with their headless and apparently aimless structures, issue many bulletins. We 
counterfeit the 'real', they claim, by our very forward passage through time, and thus occlude the actual 
and essential. One old man feeding a dog might by the power of his spirit maintain the existence of an 
entire street - the dog, the shamble of houses with their big-armed women and staring children, the 
cobbles wet with an afternoon's rain, the sunset seen through the top of a ruined tower; and what 
mysteries lie behind this imperfect shadow-play? What truths? They process the streets impulsively, trying 
to defeat the Real, and hoping to come upon a Reborn Man. 

Since their condition allows them no deeper relief, the merely selfish are raddled with superstition; salt, 
mirror, 'touch wood'are ritual bribes, employed to ensure the approval of an already indulgent continuum. 
The true solepsist, however, has no need of such toys. His presiding superstition is himself. Galen 
Hornwrack, then, cared as much for the Sign of the Locust as he did for anything not directly connected 
with himself or his great loss: that is to say, not in the least. So the first clue to their coming confrontation 
went unrecognised by him - how could it be otherwise? 

Glued to its own feeble destiny in the leaden blue moonlight, the clique at the Bistro Californium regarded 
its navel with surprised disgust. Verdigris the poet was trying to raise money against the security of a 
ballad he said he was writing. He bobbed and hopped fruitlessly from shadow to harsh shadow, 
attempting first to cheat the fat Anax Hermax, epileptic second-son of an old Mingulay fish family, then a 
sleepy prostitute from Minnet-Saba who only smiled maternally at him, and finally Mooncarrot, who 
knew him of old. Mooncarrot laughed palely, his eyes focused elsewhere, and flapped his gloves. 'Oh 
dear, oh no, old friend,'he whispered murderously. 'Oh dear, oh no!'The words fell from his soft mouth 
one by one like pieces of pork. Verdigris was frantic. He plucked at Mooncarrots sleeve. 'But listen!'he 
said. He had nowhere to sleep; he had - it has to be admitted - debts too large to run away from; worse, 
he actually did feel verses crawling about somewhere in the back of his skull like maggots in a corpse, 
and he needed refuge from them in some woman or bottle. He nodded his head rapidly, shook that dyed 
fantastic crest of hair. 'But listen!'he begged; and, standing on one leg in a pool of weird moonlight, he put 
his hands behind his back, stretched his neck and recited, 

My dear when the grass rolls in tubular billows 

And the face of the ewe lamb bone white in the meadows 

Sickens and slithers down into the mallows 

Murder will soothe us and settle our fate; 

Hallowed and pillowed in the palm of tomorrow 

We tremble and trouble the hearts of the hollow: 

The teeth of the tigers that stalk in the shallows Encrimson the foam at the fisherman's feet! 


No-one paid him any attention. Hornwrack sat slumped at the edge of the room where he could keep an 
eye on both door and window (he expected nobody - it was a precaution - it was a habit), his long white 
hand curled round the handle of a black jug, a smile neglected on his thin lips. Though he loathed and 
mistrusted Verdigris he was faintly amused by this characteristic display. The poet now choked on his 
horrid extemporary, mid-line. He was becoming exhausted, staring about like a bullock in an abattoir, 
moving here and there in little indecisive runs beneath the strange Californium frescoes. Only Hornwrack 
and Chorica nam Veil Ban were left to importune; he hesitated then turned to the woman, with her 
pinched face and remote eyes. She will give him nothing, thought Hornwrack. Then we shall see how 
badly off he really is. 

No-one paid him any attention. Hornwrack sat slumped at the edge of the room where he could keep an 
eye on both door and window (he expected nobody - it was a precaution - it was a habit), his long white 
hand curled round the handle of a black jug, a smile neglected on his thin lips. Though he loathed and 
mistrusted Verdigris he was faintly amused by this characteristic display. The poet now choked on his 
horrid extemporary, mid-line. He was becoming exhausted, staring about like a bullock in an abattoir, 
moving here and there in little indecisive runs beneath the strange Californium frescoes. Only Hornwrack 
and Chorica nam Veil Ban were left to importune; he hesitated then turned to the woman, with her 
pinched face and remote eyes. She will give him nothing, thought Hornwrack. Then we shall see how 
badly off he really is. 

'Muck and filth!'screamed Verdigris. 'I didn't ask for a social calendar!' 

Shivering, he forced himself to face Hornwrack. 

A grey shadow materialized behind him at the door and wavered there like some old worn lethal dream. 

Hornwrack flung his chair back against the wall and fumbled for his plain steel knife. (Moonlight trickled 
down its blade and dripped from his wrist.) Verdigris, who had not seen the shadow in the doorway, 
gaped at him in grotesque surprise. 'No, Hornwrack,'he said. His tongue, like a little purple lizard, came 
out and scuttled round his lips. 'Please. I only wanted -' 

'Get out of my way,'Hornwrack told him. 'Go on.' 

Scarlet crest shaking with relief, he gave a great desperate 'shout of laughter and sprang away in time to 
give Hornwrack one good look at the figure which now tottered through the door. 

A thin skin only, taut as a drumhead, separates us from the future: events leak through it reluctantly, with 
a faint buzzing sound, if they make any noise at all - like the wind in an empty house before rain. Much 
later, when an irreversible process of change had hold of them both, he was to learn her name - Fay 
Glass, of the House of Sleth, famous thousand and more years ago for its unimaginably oblique acts of 
cruelty and compassion. But for now she was a mere taint echo of the yet-to-occur, a Reborn Woman 
with eyes of a fearful honesty, haphazardly cropped hair an astonishing lemon colour, and a carriage 
awkward to the point of ugliness and absurdity (as if she had forgotten, or somehow never learned, how 
a human-being stands). Her knees and elbows made odd and painful angles beneath the thick 'velvet 
cloak she wore; her thin fingers clutched some object wrapped in waterproof cloth and tied up with a bit 
of coloured leather. Muddy and travel stained, there she stood, in an attitude of confusion and fear, 
blinking at Hornwrack's knife proferred like a sliver of midnight and true murder in the eccentric 
Californium shadows; at Verdigris'disgusting red crest; at Mooncarrot and his kid gloves, smiling and 
whispering delightedly, 'Hello my dear. Hello my little damp parsnip -' 

'I,'she said. She fell down like a heap of sticks. 

Verdigris was on her at once, slashing open the bundle even as her fingers relaxed. 

'What's this?'he muttered to himself. 'No money! No money!'With a sob he threw it high into the air. It 
turned over once or twice, landed with a thud, and rolled into a corner. 

Hornwrack went up and kicked him off. 'Go home and rot, Verdigris.'He gazed down thoughtfully. 


Perhaps a decade after the successful conclusion of the War of the Two Queens it had become apparent 
that a large proportion of the Reborn could not manage the continual effort neccessary to separate their 
dreams, their memories and the irrevocable present in which they now discovered themselves. Some 
illness or dislocation had visited them during the long burial. No more, it was decided, should be 
resurrected until the others had found a cure for this disability. In the interim the worst afflicted would 
leave the City to form communes and self-help groups dotted across the uplands and along the littorals of 
the depopulated North. It was a callous and unsatisfactory solution, except to those who felt most 
threatened by the Reborn; ramshackle and interim as it was, however, it endured - and here we find them 
seventy years on, in deserted estuaries full of upturned fishing boats and hungry gulls, under fretted 
fantastic gritstone edges and all along the verges of the Great Brown Waste - curious, flourishing, 
hermetic little colonies, some dedicated to music or mathematics, others to weaving and the related arts, 
others still to the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the Waste. 
All practise, besides, some form of the ecstatic dancing first witnessed by Tomb the Dwarf in the Great 
Brain Chamber at Knarr in the Lesser Rust Desert. 

Perhaps a decade after the successful conclusion of the War of the Two Queens it had become apparent 
that a large proportion of the Reborn could not manage the continual effort neccessary to separate their 
dreams, their memories and the irrevocable present in which they now discovered themselves. Some 
illness or dislocation had visited them during the long burial. No more, it was decided, should be 
resurrected until the others had found a cure for this disability. In the interim the worst afflicted would 
leave the City to form communes and self-help groups dotted across the uplands and along the littorals of 
the depopulated North. It was a callous and unsatisfactory solution, except to those who felt most 
threatened by the Reborn; ramshackle and interim as it was, however, it endured - and here we find them 
seventy years on, in deserted estuaries full of upturned fishing boats and hungry gulls, under fretted 
fantastic gritstone edges and all along the verges of the Great Brown Waste - curious, flourishing, 
hermetic little colonies, some dedicated to music or mathematics, others to weaving and the related arts, 
others still to the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the Waste. 
All practise, besides, some form of the ecstatic dancing first witnessed by Tomb the Dwarf in the Great 
Brain Chamber at Knarr in the Lesser Rust Desert. 

From one of these communities Fav Glass had come, down all the long miles to the south. The 'weird 
filaments of silver threading the grey velvet of her cloak; her inability to articulate; her palpable confusion 
and petit mal: all spoke eloquently of her origins. But there was nothing to explain what had brought her 
here, or why she had failed to contact the Reborn of the City (who without exception - full of guilt 
perhaps over their abandonment of their cousins - would have feted and cared for her as they did every 
visitor from the North); nothing to account for her present pitiable condition. Hornwrack touched her 
gently with the toe of his boot. 'Lady?'he said absently. He did not precisely 'care'-he was, after all, 
incapable of that; but the night had surprised him, preseintiing him with a face he had never seen (or 
wanted to see) before: his curiosity had been piqued for the first time in many years. 

The City caught its breath; the blue hollow lunar glow, streetlight of some necrotic, alternate Viriconium, 
flickered; and when at last something prompted him to look up again, the servants of the Sign were 
before him, filing in dumb processional through the chromium Californium door. 

Chorica nam VeIl Ban left her table hurriedly and went to sit beside Lord Mooncarrot, whom she 
loathed. Her shoulders were as thin as a coat-hanger and from the folds of her purple dress there 
fluttered like exotic moths old invita tion cards with deckled edges and embossed silver script. 
Mooncarrot for his part dropped both his rancid smile and his yellow gloves - plop! - and now found 
himself too rigid to pick them up again. Under the table these two fumbled for one another's shaking 
hands, to clasp them in a tetanus of anxiety and self-interest while their lips curled with mutual distaste 
and their curdled whispers trickled across the room. 

'Hornwrack, take care!' 

(Much later he was to realise that even this simple counsel was enmeshed in incidental entendres. Not 
that it matters: at the time it was already too late to follow.) 

'Take care, Hornwrack!'advised a voice of wet rags and bile; a voice which had plumbed the gutters of 
its youth for inspiration and never clambered out again. It was Verdigris, sidling up behind him to hop and 


shuffle like a demented flamingo at the edge of vision. What abrupt desperate betrayal was he nerving 
himself up for? What unforgivable retreat? 'Oh, go away,'said Hornwrack. He felt like a man at the edge 
of some crumbling sea-cliff, his back to the drop and the unknown waves with the foam in their teeth. 
'What do you want here?'he asked the servants of the Sign. 

shuffle like a demented flamingo at the edge of vision. What abrupt desperate betrayal was he nerving 
himself up for? What unforgivable retreat? 'Oh, go away,'said Hornwrack. He felt like a man at the edge 
of some crumbling sea-cliff, his back to the drop and the unknown waves with the foam in their teeth. 
'What do you want here?'he asked the servants of the Sign. 

'You do not exist,'it said, in a voice like a starving imbecile, articulating slowly and carefully, as if speech 
were a new invention, a new unlooked-for interruption of the endless reedy Song. 'You are dreaming 
each other.'It pointed to the woman. 'She is dreaming you all. Give her up.'It swallowed dryly, clicking its 
lips, and became still. 

Before Hornwrack could reply, Verdigris - who, filled by circumstance with a bilious and lethal despair, 
had indeed been nerving himself up, although not for a betrayal -stepped unexpectedly out of the 
shadows. He had had a bad afternoon at the cards with Fat Main Etteilla; verse was scraping away at the 
wards of his skull like a picklock in a rusty keyhole; he was a rag of a man, in horror of himself and 
everything else that lived. To the spokesman of the Sign he offered a ridiculous little bow. 'Pigs are 
dreaming you, you tit-suckers!'he sneered; and, squawking like a drunken juggler, winked up at 
Hornwrack. 

Hornwrack was astonished. 

'Verdigris, are you mad?' 

'You're done for, at least!'was all the poet said. 'It's black murder now.'A perverted grin crossed his 
face. 'Unless -Suddenly he extended a dirty avaricious claw, palm upwards, calloused and ink-stained 
from the pen. 'If you want her you'll have to pay for her, Hornwrack!'he hissed. 'You can't fight them on 
your own.'He glanced sideways at the Sign, shuddered. 'Those eyes!'he whispered. 'Quick,'he said, 
'before my guts turn to prune juice. Enough for a bed, enough for a bottle and I'm your man! Eh?'As he 
watched Hornwrack's incomprehension dissolve into disgust, he shivered and sobbed. 'You can't fight 
them on your own!' 

Hornwrack looked at him. He looked down at Fay Glass, insensible yet invested - a mysterious engine of 
fate. He looked at the spokesman of the Sign. He shrugged. 

'Peddle your knife somewhere else,'he told the poet. 'These people have never had cause to quarrel with 
me. They should remember that. They have made a simple mistake in the identity of this unfortunate 
woman (who is a cousin of mine, I now see, from Soubridge), and they are leaving.' 

He stood there feeling surprised. He had meant to say something else. 

'You do not exist,'whispered the Sign. Ansel Verdigris chuckled. 


Shadows flickered on the wall. Knives were out in the eerie light. 

Shadows flickered on the wall. Knives were out in the eerie light. 

Possessed by the sudden instinctive cannibalism of the baboon (our unshakeable mahout, seated in the 
skull these million centuries) the combatants throw themselves at one another: the flesh parting like lips, 
wounds opening like avid mouths, precious fluids of the heart spent in one quick salivation; the bloody 
flux . . . 

Hornwrack watches at the celebration of his own genius, helpless and a little awed. He has done nothing 
during his self-imposed exile from humanity if not learn his trade. A cold, manufactured rage, counterfeit 
of an emotion without which he cannot do his work, laps him round. The good steei knife, conjured from 
its sheath like a memory, settles comfortably in his hand. He can no longer influence himself, and treads 
the measures of his trade - the cut, the leap, the feint. Like ajuggler in the Atteline Plaza he tumbles to 
avoid the despairing counterstroke (the blade whickering in beneath his cheekbone, the displaced air 
brushing feather-like his hollowed cheek). Blood fountains in the mad Californium light, the colour of old 
plums. That is no new colour. (All the while the girl lay between his shuffling feet like a stone, her eyes full 
of pain and disbelief.) The knife goes home, and goes home again in the queasy gloom. His blood is now 
inextricably mixed with that of the Sign, daubed on his bare forearms, greasy underfoot, a fraternity of 
murder and pain . . . 

(Somewhere behind him Verdigris was struggling, his face luminous with terror, his mouth a gargoyle's 
spouting a filth of verses, some drainpipe lyric of relaxing sphincters and glazed eyes. 'Remember this, 
Hornwrack!'he shouted. 'Remember this!' 

Hornwrack never heard him.) Three, perhaps four, fall before him, and then the mouthpiece of the Sign 
squeezes into view from the bloody melee like a face surfacing from the bottom of a dream - long, 
yellow, smeared with blood, triangular and expressionless as a wasp's - the breath huffing in and out like 
dry inhalations of some machine, the breath of the insect whispering the deadly symbolic secrets of the 
cabal, the arid rustling visions of bone and desert - until Hornwrack's knife thumps him squarely in the 
hollow between collarbone and trapezoid with a sound like a chisel in a block of wood, to end eighty 
years of fear and doubt. At the point of his death, electricity flares between them, as it the whole cabal 
gave up its heart in the one despairing, vomited word which was simultaneously his warning and his 
triumph. 

Hornwrack supported the corpse by its throat, struggling to pull out his knife. The yellow face grinned at 
him, laved by its own punctured carotid. He let it slip away, back down into his nightmares. 

For a moment he felt quite old and hopeless. All around him shadows were slipping from the place in 
defeat -silently, like sapient grey baboons quitting some foggy midnight rock in a warmer latitude, fur 
blood-streaked, the game up. In the middle of the room Verdigris had fallen to his knees and, clutching 
one gory thigh to stem the bleeding, was slashing feebly at retreating hamstrings. As Hornwrack watched 
he fell on his face and dragged himself off into a corner. Hornwrack ran out into the street, shouting. 
Brought up short by the dazzle of moonlight, he could hear only the rapid patter of feet. He stood there 
for a long time, shaking his head puzzledly, growing cold as the clock moved from midnight to one, the 
knife forgotten in his hand; then he went back inside. 

Verdigris had gone, through the rear entrance and out into the thousand gutters'of the Quarter, the girl's 
bundle with him; even now he would be trying to sell it in some derelict shambles at the dark end of an 
alley. Mooncarrot and Chorica nam Vell Ban were gone, to spend the rest of the night together in grey, 
narcissistic embrace, each seeing in the other's unresponsive face a mirror - and part with revulsion as the 
spasm of fear which had briefly united them faded in the spreading light of dawn. The Sign had gone, and 


its dead with it. The queer Californium frescoes looked down on an empty and echoing space, and, 
standing awkwardly at the hub of it, staring about her in characteristic frozen panic, the Reborn Woman 
Fay Glass, a harbinger, a messenger in a velvet cloak. Her cropped yellow hair was spiky with 
congealing blood and she was trying desperately to speak. 

its dead with it. The queer Californium frescoes looked down on an empty and echoing space, and, 
standing awkwardly at the hub of it, staring about her in characteristic frozen panic, the Reborn Woman 
Fay Glass, a harbinger, a messenger in a velvet cloak. Her cropped yellow hair was spiky with 
congealing blood and she was trying desperately to speak. 

'Look,'he told her, 'you had better leave before they come back.'A place in his left side ached 
unbearably. He felt dull '. and fatigued. 'I'm sorry about the bundle,'he said. 'If I see Verdigris . . . but I 
expect your people can help you.'He put his hand through the rip in his soft leather shirt. It came out 
warm and sticky. He bit his knuckles. 'I'm hurt,'he explained, 'and I can't help you any more. ' 

'In my youth I - ' 

She was plainly mad (and attracted madness too, focusing all the long lunacies of the City like a glass 
catching the rays of some ironic invisible sun). He wanted no dependants. He put out a hand to touch her 
shoulder. 

Immediately he experienced a shocking moment of blankness, a lapse like the premature tumble into 
sleep of an overtired brain. It was accompanied by something which resembled an intense flash of light. 
He heard himself say, quite inexplicably: 'There are no longer any walls.'Shadows rushed out of the 
Californium corners and swallowed him: the Afternoon was vibrating in him like a malign chord. 
Somewhere out there in the millenial dark night, tall ancient towers howled on a rising wind. He 
approached them over many days, fearfully, across tracts of moorland and dissected peat, scoured 
ridges and deep sumps. The 'water was corrupted and undrinkable, the paths difficult to find. Finally the 
hidden city composed itself before him like a dream, but by then it was too late . . . Simultaneously (in a 
vision overlaid like delicately coloured glass) he was in some other place. A settlement huddled on the 
verge of the Great Brown Waste. Behind it steep slopes covered with sickly dwarf-oak swept up to an 
extensive gritstone escarpment running north and south, its black bays and buttresses looming up against 
the fading light. A few flakes of snow hung in the bitter air: and, silhouetted against the pale-green sky, 
enormous insectile shapes marched in slow processions across the clifftop. 

'No,'cried Galen Hornwrack. He shook himself like a dying rat and pushed the woman away. 'What?'he 
said, staring at her. He was trembling all over. Then, with his hand clapped to his left side and his face 
haggard, he staggered out of the Californium, feeling the dry, febrile touch of wings or madness on his 
skin. 

Behind him the Reborn Woman moved her lips desperately, a child making faces into a mirror. 

'In my youth,'she said to his retreating back, 'I made my small contribution. Venice becomes like 
Blackpool, leaving nothing for anybody. Rebellion is good and necessary. I -'The Californium became 
silent about her. There was nothing left but the doorway, a trapezium of blue and grey and faded 
gamboge - the reflection of the City in a deep well of moonlight on an autumn night. Nothing was left but 
the wind out of Monar, a little blood, the falling leaves. She began to weep with frustration. 

'I-'. 

Viriconium. Hornwrack. Three worlds colliding in his head. As he rain aimlessly up and down the 
alleyways at the periphery of the Quarter, dark, viscid peat groughs yawned like traps beneath his feet. 
The wind hissed in his ears. Looming against an electric sky, that terrible haunted crag with its slow 
purposeful visitation! In the shattered moonlight of the City he stumbled into doors and walls, his limbs 
jerking erratically as if the vision accidentally vouchsafed him had been accompanied by some injection of 
poison into his nervous system. His clothes were torn and he was caked with blood; he couldn't 


remember where he lived; he couldn't imagine where he'd been. It was this fatal disorientation which 
camouflaged the sound of footsteps following him: and by the time he had remembered who he was - by 
the time those other landscapes had faded sufficiently for him to appreciate his situation - it was too late. 

remember where he lived; he couldn't imagine where he'd been. It was this fatal disorientation which 
camouflaged the sound of footsteps following him: and by the time he had remembered who he was - by 
the time those other landscapes had faded sufficiently for him to appreciate his situation - it was too late. 

The hands which now scuttled over him were lean and fearful, full of horrible vitality. They discovered his 
purse and emptied it. They stumbled on his knife; retreated in confusion; then snatched it up and drove it 
repeatedly against the flagstones until it shattered. Overcome by this ambitious tactic they abandoned him 
suddenly, like frightened rats. Something heavy and foul was flung down on the pavement near his head. 
A single exotic shriek of laughter split the night: running footsteps, the signature of the Low City, faded 
into echoes, stranding him sick and helpless on this barren, reeling promontory of his empty life. 

Now he realised that he had been stabbed a second time, close to the original wound. He grinned 
painfully at the ironical shards of his own blade, winking up at him from the cracked flags, each one 
containing a'tiny, perfect reflection of the mad retreating figure of the balladeer, coxcomb flapping in the 
homicidal night. 'I'll have your lights, you bloody cockatoo, you rag,'he whispered, 'you bloody poet!'But 
now he wanted only his familiar quarters in the Rue Sepile, the dry rustle of mice among the dead 
geraniums and the murmured confidences of the whores on the upper stair. 

After a while this hallucination of security became so magnetic that he hauled himself to his feet and began 
the journey, clinging to the alley wall for comfort. Almost immediately he was enveloped in a foul reek. 
He had stumbled over Verdigris'abandoned rubbish: the Reborn Woman's bundle, still wrapped in its 
waterproof cloth. For the life of him he couldn't think why it should stink so of rotting cabbage. 

When he unwrapped it to find out he discovered the hacked-off head of an insect, rotting and seeping 
and fully eighteen inches from eye to globular eye. 

He dropped it with a groan and fled, through the warrens behind Delphin Square, past the grubby silent 
booth of Fat Main Etteilla and the crumbling cornices of the Camine Auriale, his feet echoing down the 
empty colonnades, his wounds aching in the cold. Things pass behind me when my head is turned, he 
thought, and he knew then that the future was stalking him; that a consummation lay in ambush. He stared 
wildly up at the Name Stars in case they should reflect the huge unnatural change below. From Delphin 
all the way to the Plaza of Unrealized Time he went, straight as an arrow across the Artists'Quarter to the 
narrow opening of the Rue Sepile, to those worm-eaten rooms on the lower landing with the ceilings that 
creaked all night . . . 

. . . Where the dawn found him out at last and his eighty year exile ended (although he was not to know 
that at the time) . 

All night he had lain in a painful daze broken by short violent dreams and fevers in which he received hints 
and rumours of the World's end. Fire shot from the ruined observatory at Alves, and a great bell tolled 
where none had hung for millenia. A woman with an insect's head stuffed his wounds with sand; later, 
she led him through unfamiliar colonnades scoured by a hot dry wind - the streets crackled underfoot, 
carpeted with dying yellow locusts! Main Etteilla, sweating in the prophetic booth - 'Fear death from the 
air!'- opened her hands palm upwards and placed them on the table. He was abandoned by his 
companions in the deep wastes and crawled about groaning while the Earth flew apart like an old bronze 
flywheel under the wan eye of a moon which resolved itself finally into the face of his boy, impassive in 


the queasy light of a single candle. 

the queasy light of a single candle. 

It was the last hour of the night, when the light creeps up between the shutters and spreads across the 
damp plaster like a stain, musty and cold. Outside, the Rue Sepile lay exhausted, prostrate, smelling of 
stale wine. He coughed and sat up, the sheets beneath him stiff with his own coagulating blood. Pulling 
himself, hand over hand, out of the hole of sleep, he found his mouth dry and rancid, his injured side a 
hollow pod of pain. 

'There are people to see you,'said the boy. And, indeed, behind his expressionless face other faces 
swam, there in the corner beyond the candlelight. Hornwrack shuddered, clawing at the bloody linen. 

'Do nothing,'he croaked. 

The boy smiled and touched his arm, with 'Better get up my lord,'the gesture ambivalent, the smile 
holding compassion perhaps, perhaps contempt; affection or embarrassment. They knew nothing about 
one another despite a hundred mornings like this, years of stiff and bloody sheets, delirium, hot water and 
the stitching needle. How many wounds had the boy bound, with pinched face and capable 
undemonstrative fingers? How many days had he spent alone with the dry smell of the geraniums, the Rue 
Sepile 'buzzing beyond the shutters, waiting to hear of a death? 

'Better get up. ' 

'Will you remember me?' 

He shivered, and his hand found the boy's thin shoulder. 'Will you remember me?'he repeated, and when 
no answer was forthcoming swung his legs over the edge of the bed. 

'I'm coming,'he said with a shrug; so they waited for him in the shadows of his room, silent and attentive 
as the boy bathed and dressed his wounds, as the candle faded and grey light crept in under the door. 
Fay Glass the madwoman with her message from the North; Alstath Fulthor, lord of the Reborn and a 
great power in Viriconium since the War of the Two Queens; and between them the old bent man in the 
hooded robe, who peered out through a chink in the mouldy shutter and said dryly, 'I can connect 
nothing with nothing today. But look how the leaves fall!' 


3: A Fish Eagle in Viriconium 
Tomb the Dwarf's return to Viriconium, his adoptive city, was accomplished at no great pace. The 
passage of two or three days placed the site of his abortive excavations and near-incineration behind him 
to the south-east. The Monar massif was on his right hand (its peaks as yet no more than a threat of ice, 
a white hanging frieze hardly distinguishable from a line of cloud), while somewhere off to his left ran that 
ancient, paved and - above all - crowded way which links the Pastel City with its eastern dependencies -
Faldich, Cladich and Lendalfoot by the sea. This latter route he avoided, preferring the old drove-roads 
and greenways, out of sentimentality rather than any conscious desire to be alone. He remembered 
something about them from his youth. Although he was not quite sure what it might be, he sought it 
stubbornly in the aimless salients and gentle swells of the dissected limestone uplands which skirt the 
mountains proper, haunted by the liquid bubble of the curlew and the hiss of the wind in the blue 
moor-grass. 

He gave little thought to his rescuer from the past. The man had vanished again while he slept, leaving 
nothing but a half-dream in which the words 'Viriconium'and 'Moon'were repeated many times and with a 
certain sense of urgency. (Tomb had woken ravenous in the morning, abandoned the new pit 
immediately, despite its promise, and gone in search of him - full at first of a curious joy, then at least in 


hope; and finally when he failed to find so much as a footprint in the newly-turned earth, with a wry 
amusement at his own folly.) He was, as he had put it more than once, a dwarf and not a philosopher. 
Events involved him utterly; he encountered them with optimism and countered them with instinct; in their 
wake he had few opinions, only memories. He asked for no explanations. 

hope; and finally when he failed to find so much as a footprint in the newly-turned earth, with a wry 
amusement at his own folly.) He was, as he had put it more than once, a dwarf and not a philosopher. 
Events involved him utterly; he encountered them with optimism and countered them with instinct; in their 
wake he had few opinions, only memories. He asked for no explanations. 

Fissuring the high plateau, so that from above it looked like a grey and eroded cheese, these deep little 
dry-bottomed valleys were dreamy and untenanted. Hanging thickets of thorn and ash made them difficult 
of access (except where some greenway deserted impulsively its grassy sheep-run to follow an empty 
stream bed, plunge through tumbled and overgrown intake walls, and nose like a dog among the mossy 
ruins of some long-abandoned village): and each was guarded by high, white, limestone bastions. Into 
one such came the dwarf at the end of a warmish October afternoon, the wheels of his caravan creaking 
on a disused track drifted with ochre leaves. Reluctant to disturb the elegant silence of the beechwoods, 
he descended slowly, looking for a place to pass the night. The air was warm, the valley dappled with 
honey-coloured light. Summer still lived here in the smell of the wild garlic, the dance of the insects in the 
steep glades, and the slow fall of a leaf through a slanting ray of sun. 

The curves of the track revealed to him first a forgotten hamlet in the valley floor - then, swimming above 
that in a kind of amber glow, the enormous cliff which dominated it. 

The village was long dead. Past it once had flowed a stream called the Cressbrook: but there was no-one 
left now to call it anything, and it had retreated shyly underground leaving only a barren strip of stones to 
separate the relics of human architecture from the vast limestone cathedral on its far bank. There was no 
water for his ponies, but Tomb turned them out of their shafts anyway; he felt magnetized, drawn, on the 
verge of some discovery. For this they bore him no more or less ill-will than usual, and he could hear 
them tearing at the damp grass as he pottered along the bank of the vanished brook. But he couldn't get 
comfortable 'there, or amid the contorted and lichenous boughs of the reverted orchard with its minute 
sour apples - and after a while he shook his head, staring puzzledly about him. Something had attracted 
him, and yet the place was nothing more than a collection of bramble-filled intakes, grassy mounds, and 
heaps of stone colonized by nettle and elderberry, its air of desuetude and loss magnified by the existence 
of the cliff above -That cliff! That aching expanse of stone, with its ancient jackdaw colonies, its great 
ragged swathes of ivy and its long mysterious yellow stains! It hung up there, every line of it precise in the 
amber glow, every scalloped overhang thick with brown darkness, every leaning ash tree, golden and 
exact against its own black shadow. Every buttress was luminous. The gloomy and suggestive caves 
worn in its face by a million years of running water seemed more likely places of habitude than the pitiful 
handful of relics facing it across the dry stream: the shadow of a bird, flickering for a moment across an 
acre of vibrant white stone, invested it with some immemorial yet transitory significance (some distillation 
or heirloom of a thousand twilights, a billion such shadows fossilized impalpably in the rock): it was like a 
vast old head - imperial, ironic and compelling -Eventually he cooked himself a meal and ate it squatting 
comfortably on the step of the caravan. Smoke from his fire became trapped in the inversion layers and 
drifted down the little valley. Evening came closer and yet never seemed to arrive - as if the valley and its 
great white guardian were removed from the ordinary passage of time. The sun dipped forever into the 
greyness and yet never sank. The air cooled, but so slowly. No wind came. Tomb the Dwarf scratched 
his crotch, yawned. He stood up to massage the deep ache of an old back-wound. 

He fed the ponies. Then he went to look at the cliff. 

At first, a little out of breath after the ascent of the vegetated scree beneath, he was content merely to 


stand at the bottom of it and crane his neck to watch the jackdaws. The rock was warm: he placed the 
palm of his hand against it, flat. The earth beneath his boots was filled with the smell of autumn: he 
breathed deeply, cocking an eye at a hanging rib, a soaring corner, an ivy-filled crack. 

stand at the bottom of it and crane his neck to watch the jackdaws. The rock was warm: he placed the 
palm of his hand against it, flat. The earth beneath his boots was filled with the smell of autumn: he 
breathed deeply, cocking an eye at a hanging rib, a soaring corner, an ivy-filled crack. 

He had remembered what was haunting him. 

He climbed slowly and amiably, placing his feet with care; here jamming a fist into a crack, there 
balancing his way across some steep slab while empty space burnt away beneath him like a fuse: and 
with him as he climbed went the long barren limestone scars of his youth, burning and distant under a 
foreign sun - the baking hinterlands of the Mingulay Peninsula in summer - the stones so bright at midday 
they hurt the eyes - the tinkers'caravans string 'themselves out like gems across the Mogadon Littoral the 
sea-cliffs blaze in a fifty mile arc from Radiopolis to Thing 10, while, high above the stoneheaps and 
the thorny rubbish in the dry gullies, patrols a single lammergeyer, a speck on the burning bowl of the air! 
Each place or event he now saw miniaturised and arid, as if sealed in clear glass. He regretted none of 
them - but he was glad on the whole to have . exchanged them for the softer airs of the north; and the 
memory identified, the haunting laid, he let it slip away . . . Soon he was able to rest on a shaggy platform 
some three 'hundred feet from his starting point and perhaps two hundred more above the caravan on the 
valley floor. Here there was a cool breeze, and he could watch the jackdaws pursue their millenial 
evening squabble beneath him; 'harrying one another from roost to roost then exploding away into the 
clear air in a clatter of wings and sneers - to soar and drift and drop like stones into the treetops below 
before returning to the bramble-ledges to begin the whole tedious argument over again . . . He took off 
his belt and with it anchored himself among the roots of the yew with which he shared his perch. The air 
around him cooled; the light . began imperceptibly to fade; the long shoulders of the plateau receded 
north before him, horizon after horizon like grey pigeon feathers set against the enamelled blues and 
yellows of the sky. Across the valley he could no longer distinguish individual ash trees - crowned with a 
continuous lacy fretwork of branches, the sun red and unmoving above it, the far slope rose dark and 
sullen like a vast earthwork. 

. And as he watched, a head began to raise itself above that earthwork. 

It was such a brief glimpse that later he was unable to describe it coherently - by then, of course, it no 
longer mattered. The thing revealed itself in total silence, and by parts. First the drooping, jointed 
antennae, in constant nervous motion, were lifted above the trees; then the great globular eyes followed 
them, dull and faceted, set in a wedge-shaped carapace like the stained and polished skull of a dead 
horse; finally came the mouthparts, working like a machine. Two trembling, oddly-curved forelimbs 
appeared, and, braced against the earth's dark edge (although they left not the slightest mark), levered 
this shocking mask high above the dwarf's stance. He never saw the rest of the creature. The valley 
winked out below him; the cliff lurched and spun; he shuddered, and heard a thin piping noise coming out 
of his own mouth -Then it was gone. 

He retained the impression of something fading, of a noise he had never actually heard gradually 
diminishing from some unimaginable crescendo - as if an invisible energy dissipating itself like water 
dribbling away under a stone: then he felt the rough powdery bark of the yew against his sweating hand; 
the cry of the jackdaws came back to him (faint at first, as though from a vast distance); the valley of the 
Cressbrook was once more as it had been -Such a brief glimpse. 

The sun sank, the dark welled in: but the small hunched figure on the cliff remained - chin on knees, 
singed grey hair moving in the night wind, expression quizzical. When he eventually got up to leave his 
ledge and begin the careful retreat, he saw suddenly that it was scattered with hundreds of little luminous 
insects. Leaping and glittering in an excess of life and energy, they scuttled over his feet, flickered 


between the roots of the yew, and tumbled in a constant rain over the edge, spilling into the depths like 
sparks. He could not see where they came from; and when he tried to pick some of them up they evaded 
him. 

between the roots of the yew, and tumbled in a constant rain over the edge, spilling into the depths like 
sparks. He could not see where they came from; and when he tried to pick some of them up they evaded 
him. 

* 

In a languor of puzzlement and dried blood, then, his wounds gaping at him every time he closed his eyes, 
Galen Hornwrack abandoned his familiar rooms, his stale but bearable captivity. Nothing was said. 
Nothing was explained. The shrewd whores watched him go (moving abstractedly from window to 
window, fingers raised to a drooping underlip, a leaded cheek, a favourite comb). The boy, too, followed 
him with uncommunicative eyes. Did he understand what had happened? Would he wait for as much as a 
day before drifting away into some desperate, motiveless new liaison? Hornwrack could not care for him 
(both of them bore too obviously the signature of the City, the impassive self-indulgence, the narcissism 
which precludes compassion): but he'had a sudden quick vision of the boy's thin shoulders hunched 
against a corrosive yellow lamplight; of dripping brickwork and energetic shadows; and he found himself 
searching for something to say in farewell, some gift or acknowledgement. Nothing came, so he said 
nothing, and let the inevitable profitless curves of the Rue Sepile carry him out of sight. 

Eventually, he knew, his present inertia would be replaced by a faint bitterness, a sense of betrayal which, 
though directed away from himself, would yet be experienced on behalf of the boy. In this way he 
managed his crippled emotions. For now he could only watch covertly the faces of his unwelcome 
companions, waiting for some indication of their purpose. Beneath his cloak he had hidden his second 
best knife, a thing with a peculiar hilt and an old black stain he could not remove. 

They had fetched him a horse, though he hated that method of travel, and urged him silently to get up on 
it. Now, the Plaza of Unrealized Time and its shabby dependencies behind them, they shepherded him 
through the Low City. Alves passed like a dream, its breached copper dome and sprawling rookeries 
lapped in the silence of desuetude. Along the Camine Auriale a drizzling rain commenced. The earthy 
wounds of the Cispontine Quarter opened before them like a freshly-dug graveyard. 

. . Eastward, where the Artists'Quarter huddles up to the skirts of the High City (and Carron Ban, it's 
said, deserted by her sour daughter, still waits for Norvin Trinor in the inexpressibly sad shadows 
beneath the heights of MinnetSaba), dawn had filled the streets with faces Hornwrack knew. The curdled 
horizontal light picked out a wicked jaw, an eyebrow like a punctuation mark - here a blanched cheek, 
there a goitre like a pregnancy or some prodigal carious baring of the teeth. Deformed and weary, furtive 
or gleeful, they were the faces of usurers and wastrels, of despairing cannibals and blemished martyrs, all 
corroded in the moral marrow and burnt to the underlying bone with the City's mark: Equipot the 
one-eyed merchant with his sardonic grin and rotting septum; pale Madam 'L', her haematitic eyes full of 
fever, hurrying to keep an appointment in the Boulevard Aussman; Paulinus Rack the undertaker's agent, 
his very large head covered with broken veins, carrying a short jade cane . . . 

They were customers of his for the most part, though none of them seemed to know him now. It was as if 
the events of the night had removed him from his proper sphere. 

No such sleight had operated in the case of Alstath Fulthor, however much he might have wished it 
otherwise. From booth and gutter the eyes of the Low City stared out, to pass incuriously over Fay Glass 
and her outlandishly cropped hair; dwell a little longer on the old man who rode by her side (puzzled 
perhaps by the strange geometries on his robe, and briefly disconcerted by his tranquil yellow features 
and impenetrable smile); then fasten greedily on the Reborn Man like the eyes of communicants or at 


least the spectators at an execution. 

least the spectators at an execution. 

He was the enigma of the Low City, the meat and drink of their gossip. In the streets beneath 
Minnet-Saba all motion ceased at his comings and goings, whatever the hour. The constant bedlam of the 
gutters abated as he rode by, wrapped in his queer diplomatic status and his queerer armour with its 
strangely elongated joints at knee and elbow and its tremulous blood-red glow. Who was he? Did he 
serve the City, or it him? He was like some living flaw in time, through which leaked faint poisonous 
memories of the Afternoon - its fantastic conspiracies and motiveless sciences, all its frigid cruelties and 
raging glory. Since his triumphant entry at the head of the Reborn Armies eighty years ago (the Northern 
wolves driven before him to be caught at last between his hammer and the anvil of Tomb the Giant 
Dwarf), he had gone about Viriconium like the courier of a God, the very beat of his heart a response to 
some lost prehistoric cue. He was a miasmal past and an ambivalent future, a foreign prince in a familiar 
city. He was, and always had been, the repository of more fears than hopes. 

So they quietened as he passed. It was like an embarrassment in them. A few smiled up at him. Some 
spat. Others fingered thoughtfully the metal pendant at their necks and wished, perhaps, for the night. 

If Hornwrack was disposed to a certain cynical amusement at this reception of the Queen's favourite 
advisor, it was dispelled when their destination became plain. Fulthor led his little group first to 
Minnet-Saba by a northward traverse - the precipitous Rivelin Way being at this hour impassable for the 
stalls of a makeshift but flourishing fish market; then on to the Camine again; and by this indirect and 
ill-chosen route (like a main remembering quite another city) brought them finally to the Proton Circuit: a 
road which has only one ending, there in the great filigree metal shell of Methven's hall. Dwarfed by the 
vast curve of that airy way, spiralling above the lesser thoroughfares on its hundred fragile stone pillars, 
they inched their way towards the palace under a sky like red lead, four small figures imprisoned in a 
monstrously beautiful geometry. Above them orbited a solitary fish eagle, raucous and lost here on the 
edge of the mountains, making long white arcs against the clouds. 

Hunched up on his horse in the wind and the rain, Hornwrack perceived simultaneously his destination 
and his mistake. He nodded bitterly to himself. He looked up at the fish eagle to remind himself of old 
freedoms cruelly taken away. Then he reached deliberately over to his left where the old man rode by his 
side; hooked one arm round the ancient neck; and brought his second-best knife smoothly from its place 
of concealment beneath his wet woollen cloak. His own horse halted in confusion, but the old man's 
continued to move in a nervous circle. This had the effect of dislodging him from its saddle, so that his 
weight was completely supported by Hornwrack's stranglehold - while Hornwrack's flawed blade, 
flickering in the ashy light, pricked his yellow skin; and Hornwrack's flawed laugh died in his face like a 
poisoned dog. 

'I'll go no further on this bloody road,'cried Hornwrack, 'until you tell me why, Aistath Fulthor! What 
have I ever had here but disappointments?' 

Above him, closer now, it seemed, the fish eagle screamed. Its cries caused a kind of elation to spill 
through him, briefly anaesthetising the ache of his wounds and strengthening him if need be for another 
murder. 

'I've not ridden this road for eighty years. I know you, Fulthor. Give me a reason why I should come with 
you now!' 

But a chill went through him as he spoke; and though his words were for the Reborn Man, he found 
himself staring into the parchment face of his impassive hostage. The old man had spoken not once since 


his cryptic greeting of the dawn in Hornwrack's rooms - not once in all that long ride across the City: but 
now he opened his mouth and gave vent to a sudden mewing wail, a cry with no speech in it at all, which 
rose inhumanly into the sky and fled away'like an ancient bird. This done, he became still again, his lips 
dry and bluish, his rheumy eyes fixed vacantly on the empty air. The queer geometrical embroidery on his 
robe seemed to settle itself slowly, as if a moment before it had been in violent and independent motion. 

his cryptic greeting of the dawn in Hornwrack's rooms - not once in all that long ride across the City: but 
now he opened his mouth and gave vent to a sudden mewing wail, a cry with no speech in it at all, which 
rose inhumanly into the sky and fled away'like an ancient bird. This done, he became still again, his lips 
dry and bluish, his rheumy eyes fixed vacantly on the empty air. The queer geometrical embroidery on his 
robe seemed to settle itself slowly, as if a moment before it had been in violent and independent motion. 

Alstath Fulthor, caught between one tepid nightmare and the next: 

For two days a scene from his previous life had hung at the outside edge of perception, giving him the 
impression that he was accompanied everywhere by one or two partly visible companions. They were tall 
and whitish - candle-like figures resembling the drawings of the insane - and whenever he turned his head 
they vanished immediately. At unexpected moments the scene would submerge him completely, and he 
would become aware that they were walking in some sort of sunken ornamental garden planted with 
flowers whose names he could not remember and filled with a smell of horsehair and mint which varied in 
intensity with the wind from beyond the walls. Across it floated the voices of his companions, engaged in 
some half-serious philosophical or religious dispute. His relationship to them, whilst not precisely sexual, 
could be described in only the most complex and emotional of terms; and his constant attempts to see 
them more clearly had given his head a slight sideways tilt, and lent to his expression an even more 
withdrawn quality than was usual. 

It was symptomatic, perhaps, of a sudden self-doubt. The old man in the embroidered robe - guarded as 
to his immediate origins, secretive of purpose though evidently benign - had issued from the recent history 
of Viriconium with all the force of a living myth. And on that high path under the brow of Hollin Low 
Moor, less than a week before (night coming on, the sweat drying on him, and the distant shriek of a fish 
eagle making alien the bleating of the autumn flocks), Alstath Fulthor had relinquished to him what he 
secretly saw as the stewardship of the empire. He did not quite understand how this had come about. 
Only that he had fought so long against the quicksand of his Afternoon memories (because after the 
passing of tegeus-Cromis and the vanishing of Tomb the Iron Dwarf who else was left to advise the 
Queen?) and now the fight was failing and he was tired to death. Only that the old man's charisma was 
immense, his frail old figure looming somehow over every foreseeable future, a warning or a threat. 

So, even before the appearance at his house in the early hours, of the woman Fay Glass, incoherent and 
alone, he had begun to act in a stupor, consumed by the feeling that there was nothing to choose between 
the fevers of his skull and those of the world outside it. When he closed his eyes strange waxen figures 
moved through a garden; when he opened them again he found that he had allowed the girl (like some 
demented diviner) to lead him half-way across the city in search of a cheap assassin. Somewhere along 
the way he had collected the old man, who now watched him sardonically and offered him no assistance . 
. . 'I can connect nothing with nothing . . .'The tenement in the Rue Sepile filled him with disgust for the 
people among whom he must now make his life. Its stairways wound like a tedious . argument, luring part 
of his brain along with them until he found himself thinking, apropos of nothing, If the dead have a city it 
is like this one, and it smells of rats and withered geraniums . . . 'But look how the leaves fall . . 
.'While his boy bled him patiently the assassin groaned and whispered from the disordered bed. Fulthor 
eyed the process with distaste, noting how the boy's face, delicate and womanish in the unsteady light, 
filled with a strange detached sympathy. Later, watching the assassin dress, he felt only impatience at the 
Low City swagger of him, and missed the hidden knife . . . 

Now Hornwrack closed on his victim like a rat-trap. 

There was a sudden hiss of indrawn breath. A flurry of hooves. The knife flickered out from somewhere, 


a blemished steel tongue in the grey light. The old man gasped once and was silent. They remained 
locked together for a long moment, like lovers. Above them, somewhere up in the dark morning, a huge 
bird shrieked. The madwoman began to ride round them in circles, whimpering and waving her arms. 
Hornwrack laughed madly. 'I'll go no further, Fulthor! I've been this way before. It's a road to 
nothing!'Suddenly he stared into the face of his hostage as if he saw his own death there. 'What?'Fear 
stretched his thin brutalised features. 

a blemished steel tongue in the grey light. The old man gasped once and was silent. They remained 
locked together for a long moment, like lovers. Above them, somewhere up in the dark morning, a huge 
bird shrieked. The madwoman began to ride round them in circles, whimpering and waving her arms. 
Hornwrack laughed madly. 'I'll go no further, Fulthor! I've been this way before. It's a road to 
nothing!'Suddenly he stared into the face of his hostage as if he saw his own death there. 'What?'Fear 
stretched his thin brutalised features. 

'Oh! Oh! Oh!'cried Fay Glass, staring upward. 

Alstath Fulthor, his brain an empty beach across which were scattered the bones of understanding, felt, 
rather than saw, something detach itself from the racing clouds above. 

It fell slowly at first, toppling languidly off one great wing, giving vent to a high wailing cry (thus do the fish 
eagles of the Southern Marches plummet almost lazily a thousand yards into the cold salt water of their 
native sea-lochs: but this one was fully five feet from wingtip to wingtip, and of an odd grey colour); 
plunged quicker and quicker until Fulthor was sure it must bury itself in the paving of the Circuit; then in 
the final instant shot horizontally across his field of vision in a rush of displaced air, to smash into the 
assassin's ribcage with a noise like an axe going into an oak door. Shouting in rage and fright, Hornwrack 
fell backwards off his horse. He lost his hold on the old man, hit the wet road, and was bowled over in a 
mist of blood and feathers. 

Relieved - if astonished - at this turn of events, Fulthor drew his powered blade and cursed his horse in 
close; found that he could get a clear stroke at neither assassin nor bird, and swept the old man up to 
safety instead. This gave him the illusion, at least, of participation. 

In the immediate aftermath of its strike the hawk had the advantage of momentum: with its talons fastened 
in his face Hornwrack went rolling and bellowing about the roadway, knife-arm flailing while he tried with 
the other to protect his eyes and throat. There was little to choose between them for ferocity. The bird 
shrieked and croaked; the man groaned and wept; rain fell on them both. Alstath Fulthor stared appalled. 
Eventually, blood streaming from his face and forearms, the man wriggled into a kneeling position. He 
grasped the bird by its neck and pulled it off him. Time after time he drove the knife into its body, but it 
was like stabbing a brick wall. The huge wings buffeted him. Their faces were inches apart, and both of 
them were screaming now as if they had finally recognised one another from some other country and 
were continuing a quarrel begun there long ago . . . Suddenly the man threw his knife away, transferred 
both hands to the bird's neck, and twisted it once. 

They raised their bloody heads and shrieked together. The man choked. The bird was still. 

Fulthor rode over, dismounted, and watched Hornwrack get unsteadily to his feet. His cloak was ripped, 
his shoulders a mantle of blood. He looked round him like an idiot, empty-eyed. 'Yours, I suppose,'he 
said to Fulthor, his voice thick and dull. He hardly seemed to notice the powered blade flickering and 
spitting at his throat. He held out the dead bird. 'Some bloody thing dug up out of the ground.' 

The Reborn Man stared at it in silence. It was a perfect image of a bird made all in metal: a fantasy 
with armoured wings, every feather beaten from wafer-thin iridium, the fierce raptorial beak and talons 
forged from steel and graven with strange delicate designs. It hung from Hornwrack's hand, though, like 
anything newly dead - loose of limb, open-mouthed and vulnerable (as if in the moment of death it had 
been surprised by some truth which made nothing of beaks and claws), one great wing hanging in a slack 
double curve. He shook his head stupidly and turned away. 

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. ' 

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. ' 

'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-Iamb bone white in the mallows! 
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 brough 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: 

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: 

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: In the Corridors 
Tomb the Dwarf came in through the south-eastern 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 demi-monde 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? 

theatrical airs of dawn? 

Beneath Minnet-Saba the Rivelin market spilled across his path like the encampment of a besieging army, 
dotted with paling flares and the little warm enclaves of charcoal braziers. It was a good-natured, 
anarchical siege, noisy and stinking, full of laughter and mock acrimony. Fish stalls predominated, but 
among them were distributed the kerbside pitches of tattooist and juggler, prostitute and priest; together 
with the booths of those deft-fingered old women who are equally happy to play at the cards for 
whatever stakes you name, or with them tell your fortune to the accompaniment of a practised homily. 
The gutters were filled with fish-heads, with sneaking cats and unconscious thieves. Fishwives rubbed 
elbows with boys selling anemones from neck trays (while others offered filthy marzipan, or caramelized 
locusts like intricate jewellery from the forgotten towns of the dusty East). Over it all hung a marine reek, 
a pall of hot cooking fat, and reedy, disconnected music. 

Into this came the dwarf's caravan like a spirit of chaos -pushing aside tottering stalls, running over 
unguarded feet, impervious to abuse, drawing forth as it passed each brazier the ironic catcalls of idlers 
and the shrieks of fishwives (who required that the dwarf come behind a booth with them and there bash 
the dents out of a pot they would show him). The anemone-boys rode his tall yellow wheels, grinned into 
his face, lost their balance and fell into the street. All the while he moved steadily up the hill toward 
Minnet-Saba, the crowds eddying in his wake, until he came to the upper limit of the market; and there 
on the precise interface of High and Low Cities, chanced on the booth of Fat Main Etteilla. 

Despite the coming and going about the booth, it had attracted few onlookers. Wan torches set at its 
corners guttered in the growing light. Its greasy satin curtains were drawn back to reveal the Main herself, 
billowing over her three-legged stool and coughing like a horse in the raw air. In her vast lap sat a small 
drunken man with a depraved triangular face, from the top of which stuck straight up a stiff brush of 
almost crimson hair. His bottle-green jerkin was not only encrusted with old filth, but sticky besides with 
new foulness; and he seemed to be confessing his part in some brawl or murder the night before. Tears 
were running down his cheeks; great twitches racked his body; odd spasms of free verse left him now 
and then like vomit. ('I renounce the blessed face,'he intoned, 'the silent sister veiled in white and 
blue;'and made a sound like a choking cat. 'What else could I do? He was no friend to me!') 

Before them on a flimsy baize-covered table were arranged the cards - four Urns above him; behind him 
the Conjuror reversed; the MANTIS crossing him: and many others. Each strange little scene glowed up 
from the grubby pasteboard as if viewed in a reducing mirror - leaning columns clustered beneath a 
vanished constellation, extinguished suns and naked supplicants, the shadowy hierarchical figures of a 
symbology as old or older than Viriconium, legacy perhaps of some Afternoon parlour game. 'This,'she 
whispered, 'is your card, MALADIE; and here are three towers and a dog, the future as yet unrevealed, 
also disgrace. (Another account speaks of greed frustrated.) Look! Here's a deserted beach, and in the 
tide a hermit crab. Above fly three swans: APPU 1. Between the alternatives there is no marriage 


possible - on the one hand magnificence; on the other, disease. (Also a certain clouded joy.)'The man 
with the red hair, though, would look anywhere but at the cards. If his glance fell on them by accident he 
would pretend to see someone he knew in the crowd. 

possible - on the one hand magnificence; on the other, disease. (Also a certain clouded joy.)'The man 
with the red hair, though, would look anywhere but at the cards. If his glance fell on them by accident he 
would pretend to see someone he knew in the crowd. 

At this Fat Main Etteilla shook herself as if surfacing from a dream. She looked down at the little drunk in 
her lap and put one of her great fat hands over his. 'I wish I could help you, dearie,'she said with a sigh; 
and set him carefully on his feet. A fit of coughing overtook her as he bobbed about in front of her trying 
to bow. 'Piss and blood!'he screamed suddenly. 'I saw it!'He ran offinto the market and vanished. 

'Wait!'cried Tomb, any talk of insects having recently become of interest to him. 'Stop! -, More to 
himself than to the retreating figure. The caravan was being carried forward, despite his best efforts, by 
the sheer weight of humanity behind it. He stood up on his seat to get a better view: nothing but a red 
coxcomb and a despairing cry. 'Its head twice bigger than a man's!'And then nothing at all but heads, 
bobbing and eddying; the market had ejected him and he was alone in the bleak formalistic spaces of the 
High City. The wind ruffled the puddles, and the Proton Circuit rose like a question mark into the air 
before him. 

No-one recognized him at the palace gates. An officer made him wait while they verified a complex 
sequence of passwords given him twenty years ago by someone who might have been dead for ten of 
them. His ponies fidgeted, and furtively bit one another. Servants came and went, but none of them 
looked at him. 'It won't take long. Look, can you move the caravan? We really need the room.'The 
City's sudden indifference hurt him, although he pretended to take it with a certain stoical amusement. 'Oh 
well,'he told the officer. 'Oh well.'Then he jumped out of the caravan, ducked the presented arms of the 
gate-guard, and ran off into the palace. Old wounds had given him a dragging, unsteady gait so that he 
looked from behind like some escaped ape. After a shocked silence a lot of shouting began. 

A little while later he stopped to get his breath back in a corridor where the light fell as if strained through 
muslin. He had lost himself quite quickly in the maze of passageways which riddled the outer regions of 
the building like the interstices in a piece of pumice - quickly enough at any rate to evade the detachment 
which had tried to catch him at the front door. He grinned. He could still hear them faintly, crashing about 
in the empty lobbies and forgotten storerooms of quite another quarter, moving away from him all the 
time. But he realized now that he couldn't reach the Queen without moving into the more frequented 
passages and thus being sighted. An undignified homecoming. His chest hurt. He leant against the back 
wall of the alcove, staring at some old machine and trying to remember with half his mind whether he or 
someone else had dug it up and brought it back here; and when finally he decided he did indeed 
recognize it, he found he had forgotten which desert had given it up to him, back when he was young. 
Whole sections of the palace were 'his'in this respect, which only galled him further... 

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... 

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... 

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 artifact. 


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. 

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. 

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 ungraceful, 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 Ia 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. 

'I'm sorry, old friend. I thought for a moment -Fulthor smiled absently down at him. 

'I know,'he said. 'The similarities are superficial. What were you doing on the floor with that boy?' 

He tilted his head to one side as if he were listening to something no-one else could hear, and seemed to 
forget what he had been saying. There was an awkward pause. Then he went on, 'You should be more 
patient, Dwarf. I heard there was a maniac or an ape of some kind loose in the corridors. When I saw 
the little caravan, I -'Fulthor shook his head as though to clear it of some double image - 'I knew it must 
be you. Are you going to murder this lad, or can he get back to his post?'His tone was curious, friendly 


but ironical: absent. 

but ironical: absent. 

Light streamed suddenly down the corridor, the colour of murder. It rushed over them like smoke, to be 
sucked away into the outer maze and there dissipate: their shadows followed it. The old machine from 
which it had issued, so long denied its proper function, began to shriek in horror and frustration, flailing its 
corroded limbs as if waking after millenia to the truth of its position. Echoes fled like bats. 

Out of this abrupt madness crept a party of ten or fifteen men. A squad of the palace guard, they wore 
the same black and pewter uniforms as the boy, but their faces were distorted by the unsteady glare salient 
features drifting into repulsive new relationships - and they came on not with a military gait but with 
a curious tip-toed tread, their eyes fixed on the dwarf with a feral yet somehow inorganic intensity. Had 
they shadowed him even as he shadowed the boy, passage to passage, all the way from the outer halls? 
How had he not felt those eyes like the empty lambent eyes of animals on a dark night? (Or perhaps he 
had.) 

'Fulthor?' 

But Fulthor was gazing emptily into the air again, his lips moving silently. There was no help there. 

The dwarf shuddered, ambushed by circumstances. The City's web was now complete, and he found 
himself enmeshed. It wasn't much of a homecoming. Yet it would not be the first time he had fought his 
way down these corridors. He stood forward a little so as not to prolong the waiting. Nothing much was 
in his mind. 

They were almost upon him when Fulthor whispered 'Stop.'His voice seemed to come from a long way 
off, and he looked almost surprised to hear it. 'Stop!'For a moment nothing changed. Tomb snarled; 
Fulthor touched the hilt of his sword, faced with the motiveless slaughter of his own men. But then the 
world shook itself and threw off the nightmare. The old machine wailed despairingly, sagged, and was 
silent (in its frenzy it had melted parts of its own spine and now, bent double like a crone, it twitched and 
contracted as the hot metal cooled). The evil light faded. The approaching men looked uncertainly at one 
another and put up their swords. 

It was little enough, and grudgingly done: their captain nodded woodenly, staring straight ahead, while 
behind him they shuffled into two columns, looking embarrassed and elbowing one another sullenly. Each 
wore a medallion like the boy's, a curious complex twist of silver the meaning of which retreated from its 
seeker like a vacant perspective. 'Call off the search,'Fulthor ordered them. He spoke reluctantly, like a 
main hard put to control some pain or intense desire. 'A mistake has been made. This is the Iron Dwarf, 
who has returned to help the City in its hour of need.'They regarded him warily for a few seconds, then 
turned their heads away as one man and marched off. When they had gone'some distance down the 
corridor the boy leapt abruptly to his feet; flung the Reborn Man a glance of bitter hatred; and was off, 
flying down the passage after them, his sword abandoned where Tomb had thrown it. Tomb picked it up. 
'What do you make of all this?'he asked Fulthor. Fulthor stared blindly after the boy, his thin hands like a 
layer of white wax over bone. 

'I am lost,'he said, and turned his face to the corridor wall. 'They no longer accept my leadership. Soon 


one of them will disobey and I shall have to kill him.'He made a noise that might have been a laugh or a 
sob. 

one of them will disobey and I shall have to kill him.'He made a noise that might have been a laugh or a 
sob. 

We are off to Vegys now 

Fal di la di a 

We are off to Vegys now 

Faldiladia 

On the shores of the diamond lake 

We shall watch the fishes 

On the summits of the mountains 

Cry 'Erecthalia!' 

Faldiladia 

Fal di la di a 

Di rol 

Hearing this, Alstath Fulthor put his hands over his ears and groaned. 'I cannot forget the people in the 
beautiful gardens!'he exclaimed. He hit the side of his head with the heel of his fist. 'Arnac san Tehin! 
How long is it since - saw your sweet mad face at midnight, or trod with you the 'pavements of the Rue 
Morgue Avenue?'And still groaning he ran away down the corridor toward the outside world, stripping 
off his armour as he went. 

A thin wind passed down the corridor, smelling of dust and hyacinth; with it came silence, a substance 
not an absence, to fill the ears with empty rooms and abandoned stairs and the motionless unspeaking 
figures of the Earth's innocence. In this silence Tomb the Dwarf sought desperately for reassurance. But 
the woman had retreated into her own memories, shoulders hunched and eyes hooded secretively, a 
ghost of tenderness playing about the corners of her mouth; nothing she said made sense anyway. And 
the assassin merely smiled sardonically, shrugging as if to absolve himself of this responsibility at least (the 
movement appeared to hurt him somewhere in the region of his lower ribs and his expression immediately 
became sour and self-involved). 

'Is everybody insane, then?'Tomb asked himself irritably, turning in the end - though something made him 


reluctant - to the man in the shroud-like cloak, who stood a little way off examining the distraught 
machine as ifit might help him break the universe's last mad code. The machine was crooning to him out 
of its incomprehensible pain, and he, standing like a mysterious parcelled statue, was whispering back; 
neither of them would ever understand the other. Tomb went up and stood between them, arms akimbo, 
staring aggressively into the unrelieved darkness of the man's hood. 

reluctant - to the man in the shroud-like cloak, who stood a little way off examining the distraught 
machine as ifit might help him break the universe's last mad code. The machine was crooning to him out 
of its incomprehensible pain, and he, standing like a mysterious parcelled statue, was whispering back; 
neither of them would ever understand the other. Tomb went up and stood between them, arms akimbo, 
staring aggressively into the unrelieved darkness of the man's hood. 

Silence. 

'Very well, then: if you are a friend of Fulthor's, at least tell me when his illness began. I am the Iron 
Dwarf (of whom you may have heard), who woke him from his aeon-sleep to help defeat the North 
(which I did by means of knowledge gained from an old man).' 

He craned his neck, but no face was visible despite that he felt eyes focused on him from somewhere 
under the hood. At this, his temper went. He pulled out his knife. 

'Say something, you cold pudding, or I'll serve you up in slices! Are you all ignorant or loony in here?' 

But the man only chuckled and said, 'You knew me last time we met, Dwarf, with your beard on fire and 
your broken head! Have you forgotten so soon? I would have asked you then, only there was no time: 
how has it been with you since our other fateful parting, there beneath the sad tower eighty years ago? 
What a change you and I have wrought in the world by our doings then! Do you see any of my children 
as you go about from desert to desert, from Waste to Waste? 

And he threw back his hood, laughing his dry old enigmatic laugh, and became Cellur, the Lord of the 
Birds... 


5: Galen Hornwrack and Metkvet Nian 
Cellur the Bird Lord: he has lived for aeons in a five-sided tower full of undersea gloaming. Instruments 
flickered and ticked about him all that time, while his sensors licked the unquiet air, detecting new forms 
and seasons. Out of the cold reaches of salt marsh and estuary, out of the long cry of the wind, out of the 
swell of the sea and the call of the winter tern he comes to us now: out of the War of the Two Queens, 
with his thousand dying metal birds; out of the long forgotten dream of the Middle Period of the Earth, 
shaking his head over the pain and beauty, twin demiurgi of Mankind's enduring Afternoon! 

What has he witnessed, that we shall never see? Forgotten, that we could hardly imagine? 

The lines and figures on his marvellous robe writhe and shiver like tortured alien animals. Geometry 
remembers, though he may not. 'Nothing is left as it was,'they sigh, 'in that final perfect world. The towers 
that ruled these wastes have fallen now. The world, which they halted for a millenium in its tracks has 
begun to turn again. We find here no compassion as savage and sterile as theirs; no cruelty as structured 
or formal; no art. The vast air is stilled, where they lowed beneath five artificial planets, trumpeting verse 
into the frozen distance. Their libraries lie open like the pages of a book abandoned to the desert wind, 
their last dry whispers fade; philosophers and clowns alike, fade; that febrile clutching at the stars...' 

Cellur. Ten thousand seasons once were his, years beating like hearts! These geometries could tell us. 
They are the spoor of Time itself, did we but know. Cellur the Bird Lord! Now he speaks -All are 
assembled in the throne-room but Alstath Fulthor. (Rumour has him running through the filthy alleys of the 
Artists'Quarter, up the hill at Alves and through the grounds of the derelict observatory, expressions of 
madness eroding his proud features; rumour had him leaving Viriconium for the third time in a month - no 
horse, no armour, only his heaving lungs, and his past in close pursuit. The Low City is entranced.) 


The Queen sits with her calm hands in her lap; at her feet kneels Tomb the Dwarf, picking his teeth with 
the point of his knife; Fay Glass of the vanished House ofSleth, dressed in a new cloak, whispers 
nonsense to the Queen's Beast: while Galen Hornwrack stands apart, with a face like death. All wait, 
except perhaps the madwoman. Round them hover curtains of mercurial light, twists of mirror'd air. 
Before them five false windows tremble with views of a landscape to be found nowhere in the kingdom. 

The Queen sits with her calm hands in her lap; at her feet kneels Tomb the Dwarf, picking his teeth with 
the point of his knife; Fay Glass of the vanished House ofSleth, dressed in a new cloak, whispers 
nonsense to the Queen's Beast: while Galen Hornwrack stands apart, with a face like death. All wait, 
except perhaps the madwoman. Round them hover curtains of mercurial light, twists of mirror'd air. 
Before them five false windows tremble with views of a landscape to be found nowhere in the kingdom. 

'I had, as you know, some small part in the war against the North. But that war was almost my death - as 
I shall tell -and it destroyed both my refuge and my birds, which hurt me grievously. I have been many 
years coming to terms with this and my life has been a curious one since then. I return to find the kingdom 
much changed, and I am afraid my very coming heralds further uncertainty. It is eighty years since I sent 
the iridium vulture to Tegeus-Cromis in his tower at Balmacara among the rowan woods: I wish he were 
here today to answer a similar summons. Although I believe he thought of himself as a poet, he had a 
great gift for murder. Events again require such a captain. If I am to explain why, I must return for a 
moment to the War of the Two Queens -'That I survived the onslaught of Canna Moidart's forces 

was as much a surprise to me as it is to you, who last saw me beleagured and without hope. My birds 
were long dead, or else scattered. The Geteit Chemosit held the causeway. Their airboat, though 
grounded during the early part of the exchange, mounted weapons of which I could not conceive. I was 
trapped in my tower, whose armoury I had never had the wit to investigate. A battle began in which the 
sole true flesh and blood at stake was mine, yet I looked on impotently, terrified. Stone dripped and 
sputtered in the face of their cannon; the estuary brine boiled and threshed with the power of mine! The 
watching cliffs echoed and roared with it, dust trickling down their immemorial buttresses like mortar 
from a rotten wall. All across the water hung a pall of glowing smoke, through which I caught briel 
glimpses of those dreadful automata coming and going about their vessel, their yellow eyes baleful. A 
curious armour seemed to protect them against my beams. 

'Day gave way to a long night of blue fogs and drifting corrosive lights. The tower began to show signs of 
strain. It hooted mournfully into the wrack. Its summit revolved erratically, threatening non-existent 
enemies. Every five or six minutes its armaments blazed forth like crooked lightning, but every time a little 
duller. Soon its foundations began to shift. It was doomed. I knew I could not survive a night above 
ground, even if it should achieve some Pyrrhic victory: two hours after tegeus-Cromis had led you to 
safety over the estuarine cliffs, the air and water had become contaminated with some energy which 
poisons the fish even now, so many years on. The tower moaned, its trapped electrical voices pleading 
with me in strange militaristic languages, whether for advice or relief I could not tell. I could do nothing. I 
left it, feeling like a traitor, for the cellars beneath, reasoning that I might make my escape through the 
very tunnels you had used on the previous day.. 

'It was useless. The estuary floor had subsided. Those passages which had not collapsed were blocked 
with hot mud or full of boiling water. Only one would admit me, and down that I wandered for some 
time, the distant thud of weapons to spur me on, until I realized I had entered a part of the system 
unknown to me. I say little of what I found there. Much I did not understand. Much I would not even 
wish to remember. The sounds of conflict above grew steadily more muffled, progressively more 
dreamlike; until I could hear it no longer. How long it continued I do not know. Which side had the 
victory, I am at a loss to say. By the time I found my way back to the surface the melted stone was cold 
again, the tower like a snuffed candle, the Chemosit and their weapons gone. Two fish eagles patrolled 
the grey water; the cliffs were quiet. This was much later. 

'I had known for some time of the existence of such regions beneath the tower. They had lain beneath me 


like a new continent, but something had kept me from exploring them. They were, I sensed, still too close 
to the millenial past. Echoes of the Afternoon had not yet died in them. But such echoes are not, after all, 
confined beneath the surface of the earth; they move above it, too: wherever one goes there is always 
that sense of a door closed but a moment since. And I had little choice, for only my death waited above. 
Therefore I went down. 

like a new continent, but something had kept me from exploring them. They were, I sensed, still too close 
to the millenial past. Echoes of the Afternoon had not yet died in them. But such echoes are not, after all, 
confined beneath the surface of the earth; they move above it, too: wherever one goes there is always 
that sense of a door closed but a moment since. And I had little choice, for only my death waited above. 
Therefore I went down. 

'In these nitid quarters I was to spend many years. Here I confronted myself (although this meeting was 
more metaphorical than literal, and ultimately barren. I remain an enigma). Here also I learned the thing 
which has brought me to you today. It was here that I came to curse the monstrous burden of immortality 
and the fatal snare of compassion. For I am sure now that I am immortal, though I have no idea of where 
or when my life began. I no longer believe myself to be human. But it is human beings who have kept me 
here for so long. 

'I entered, then. I was tired and hungry. The place was full of moving lights which took the form of 
columns, diffuse spheres or dancing lampyrines. My uneasiness communicated itself to them immediately. 
They flickered in the cold sour air, drifting agitatedly about and whispering in secret electrical voices. 
Each was the outward form or 'personality'of a different machine. One might listen to the earth, another 
the air; while a third measured the stars themselves: they were possessed of an excitable, nervous 
curiosity, like thoroughbred horses. An endless ritual interweaving allowed them to exchange information 
or - should the situation demand it - compound their functions, so multiplying their great native 
percipience. One however was supreme above the rest. It was a magnificent ivory column over twenty 
feet tall. Out of the hubbub of voices -which by now rose like flood water or the wind at night among 
alders - this one addressed me. All the others ceased immediately, as though in deference. 

'I was astonished, for it spoke with my own voice. It maintained its superiority over the others by virtue 
of being the keeper of my memory. The skull, you see, cannot contain the years. Memory fades or is 
destroyed in periodic bouts of madness and self-disgust. Before this happens the best must be consigned 
to some archive. Luck or perhaps an instinct brings me to that room every hundred years or so, to be 
relieved of the burden. In that column of ivory light reside the dry fragments of all my former selves, like a 
cache of earthenware shards in the foundations of an old house. I learned this with horror (and with what 
horror have I contemplated it since!): an emotion that was as nothing to the misery with which I 
confronted the incompleteness of the record itself... For more than ten millenia this machine has lodged 
beneath the estuary - gaps have now appeared in its own memory! Something in the machine is broken; 
many times too I have lost the material before it could be transferred; and there have been, it seems, 
deliberate deletions. A decade is missing here, there a century has 


slipped quietly away, leaving no clues. At the beginning of the record (if it can be said ever to have had 
one) only tantalising glimpses remain to imply a period half as long again as its entire span! What remains 
is like a tapestry holed and flimsy with age (torn too, here and there, in senile rage), through which one 
must stare forever at the great void. In each new incarnation I must learn afresh how to operate the 
machinery. That is not hard. But to understand my purpose in being here at all... I can review ten 
thousand years, but I have no identity beyond that which I can scrape together in any one incarnation. I 
am, in short, nothing but what you see before you, an old man who has wandered into the City from the 
past... 

slipped quietly away, leaving no clues. At the beginning of the record (if it can be said ever to have had 
one) only tantalising glimpses remain to imply a period half as long again as its entire span! What remains 
is like a tapestry holed and flimsy with age (torn too, here and there, in senile rage), through which one 
must stare forever at the great void. In each new incarnation I must learn afresh how to operate the 
machinery. That is not hard. But to understand my purpose in being here at all... I can review ten 
thousand years, but I have no identity beyond that which I can scrape together in any one incarnation. I 
am, in short, nothing but what you see before you, an old man who has wandered into the City from the 
past... 

'Do not pity me, my lady. I have pity enough for myself. 

'Months passed. I learned. The machines cared for me. They passed their secrets on to me, willingly. 
During the long hopeless nights I sought an image of myself in the foxed mirror of the past; but by day I 
learned to interrogate the natural world. I became an inexpert ear cupped to that silence which has 
overcome the Earth since the end of the Afternoon. Where once the air sang, now only thin electrical 
noises came from my instruments, like the cries of dead children. When Tomb the Dwarf disarmed the 
great brain in the Lesser Rust Desert, I overheard. Lights flickered in my cavern. All over the empire 
clusters of signals faded abruptly - the Chemosit going out like corpse candles. Later I followed his 
triumphant progress across the continent, Alstath Fulthor with him. From site to secret site they went, 
awakening the Reborn Men. For a while the aether was full of voices. Then, as the tragedy became 
apparent and the rebirth complexes shut themselves down one by one, silence fell again. It lasted until ten 
or eleven years ago when I picked up the first of the transmissions that have brought me'here. 

'I could hear it only when the Moon was in the sky. It came as a hollow whisper, filling the stony 
sub-estuarine chambers. It was a strange, unreliable, inhuman voice, speaking a dozen made-up 
languages. Had it not so obviously belonged to a man I might have taken it for the monologue of some 
stranded alien demiurge, leaking accidentially into the void between Earth and her wan satellite. I cannot 
tell you how it excited me, that voice! Feverishly, I interrogated my machines. They knew nothing, they 
could not advise me. I answered it, on all wavelengths: nothing! 

'Septemfasciata, it whispered, over and again: Guerre! Guerre! The machines remember every 
syllable. Dai e quita Ia rnerez.. . a hundred years in the cold side of the Mloon... the veiny wing . . . 
the heaven whose circles narrowest run . . . I saw the garden that lies behind the World. There 
the cisterns turn against the men . . . nomadacris septemfasciata . . . colonnesfleuries (douloureux 
paradis!), temps plus n'adore... Oh, the filmy wing! Cold ravages me... And then, dreadfully loud: 
Sepiemfasciata! The outer planets! Mlethven! 

'For a year I suffered this monologue, with its meaningless warnings, its references to a search for the 
metaphysical nature of space, to madness and death between the stars. I tired of its chuckled 
obscenities and cabalistic circumlocutions, its mad prophecies. I despaired of making any sense of it, and 
began to believe that the Moon had been infiltrated by some vast corrupt cosmic imbecile. Attemps to 


make contact were fruitless: there was never a break in the flow in which to admit of my existence. It 
ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I rushed to the machines - nothing but an empty hiss. For three days 
the cavern was silent and dark. The machines would not respond to me. It was as if the ending of the 
monologue had been a cue. I sensed that they were not so much dormant as fascinated; their attention 
was focused elsewhere. On the fourth day a purple mist sprang up, a pure and sourceless illumination; 
through this there danced excited rods and lampyrines of light, spinning, whirling, and interpenetrating in a 
mad quick ballet. I had never seen them so agitated. They spilled from the cavern and out into the 
surrounding corridors, whispering hysterically their single message. 

make contact were fruitless: there was never a break in the flow in which to admit of my existence. It 
ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I rushed to the machines - nothing but an empty hiss. For three days 
the cavern was silent and dark. The machines would not respond to me. It was as if the ending of the 
monologue had been a cue. I sensed that they were not so much dormant as fascinated; their attention 
was focused elsewhere. On the fourth day a purple mist sprang up, a pure and sourceless illumination; 
through this there danced excited rods and lampyrines of light, spinning, whirling, and interpenetrating in a 
mad quick ballet. I had never seen them so agitated. They spilled from the cavern and out into the 
surrounding corridors, whispering hysterically their single message. 

'I have never heard that demented lonely voice again. But every lunar month since then has seen a fresh 
launching, a new landing. I have watched them, my lady! They are like puffs of white smoke issuing from 
the Moon's bony grin; they are like clouds of pollen. They fall to Earth here in the Empire. I do not know 
exactly where. My instruments are confused, their findings incomplete and contradictory. They report 
interference, of a kind not encountered in ten thousand years of operation. But listen: yesterday I spoke 
with Alstath Fulthor the Reborn Man, in his house above the Artists'Quarter. From him I learned that 
some unknown force is harrassing the Reborn communities in the Great Brown Waste. We have agreed as 
he would tell you if he were here - that these events must be linked. And though my instruments cannot 
agree on its location or its origin, they report that a city is being built somewhere in the north and west of 
Viriconium. 

'My lady, it is not being built by men.' 

Cellur's eye is like a bird's, ironical and bright; his profile aquiline. It was different when we thought him 
human. His expression betrays so little now that we know he is not. Having delivered himself of his 
revelation he drinks some wine and looks about him to gauge or enjoy its effect. 

The Queen sits with her calm hands in her lap. At her feet kneels Tomb the Dwarf, his mouth open and 
his knife forgotten in his hand; he is actually trying to remember something, but it will not come to him until 
a day or two later. Fay Glass, of the vanished House of Sleth, what is she trying to remember? It is 
immaterial. She sits singing to an imperturbable sculpture of steel and white light dug up long ago in the 
ruins of Glenluce, while Galen Hornwrack stands apart - wounds griping, expression cynical and amused. 
(It's clear he has forgotten the events of the Bistro Californium, and thinks the old man mad.) Round them 
hover curtains of mercurial light, bright primary colours flecked for a moment - like flawed but vital ores with 
the reflected uncertainties of the room. 

No-one knows what to say. 

'Viriconium,'remarks Ansel Verdigris in his last ironic essay Allies, 'is a world trying to remember itself. 
The dumb stones perform an unending act of recall.'This pervasive awareness of the past, recent or 
distant, informed the personality of all its rulers, not least that of Methvet Nian. Cellur had pricked old 
memories back to life. Her mood, when Galen Horn-wrack was brought to her in the side chamber or 
salle she used as a library and sitting room, was already a nostalgic one. This affected her opinion of him, 
perhaps: although events, in the end, might be said to have borne her out. 

She knew little enough about him. Alstath Fulthor, returning whey-faced and muddy from some 
unexplained errand only an hour before, had outlined their dependence on him as a witness to the incident 
in the Low City. 'The girl herself found him, by luck or instinct; she insisted that he came with us (though 
we'd have brought him anyway). It is hard to know why. He seems to have fought on her behalf- and 
thinks well of himself for it - but he will say nothing about the fate of the message she carried; and that is 
the important thing. His motives for refusing seem confused.' 


Of Hornwrack's history he had been reluctant to say anything save, 'A disaffected lordling from the 
midlands near Soubridge. After the war he seems to have wiped the clay off his boots and tried to drink 
himself to death in the Low City.'Nevertheless, when pressed, he admitted, 'Hornwrack was the 
youngest son. His brothers fell with the rest of Waterbeck's ploughboys in the Great Brown Waste. His 
mother and sisters were murdered later, when the Chemosit invested Soubridge. At the outset of the war 
he was an apprentice airboatman with the prospect of his own command; but he saw no service as such. 
Initially he was too young, later - with the destruction of its vessels - the whole Corps was dismantled. 
This he appears to regret more than the deaths of his family. After the defeat of the North he seems to 
have failed as a farmer, and the family estate was forfeit to the Crown when debts made it unworkable. 
Now he lives by his knife in the Artists'Quarter, retaining his title perhaps as an advertisement, more likely 
as an insult to the empire that bestowed it on his grandfather. 

Of Hornwrack's history he had been reluctant to say anything save, 'A disaffected lordling from the 
midlands near Soubridge. After the war he seems to have wiped the clay off his boots and tried to drink 
himself to death in the Low City.'Nevertheless, when pressed, he admitted, 'Hornwrack was the 
youngest son. His brothers fell with the rest of Waterbeck's ploughboys in the Great Brown Waste. His 
mother and sisters were murdered later, when the Chemosit invested Soubridge. At the outset of the war 
he was an apprentice airboatman with the prospect of his own command; but he saw no service as such. 
Initially he was too young, later - with the destruction of its vessels - the whole Corps was dismantled. 
This he appears to regret more than the deaths of his family. After the defeat of the North he seems to 
have failed as a farmer, and the family estate was forfeit to the Crown when debts made it unworkable. 
Now he lives by his knife in the Artists'Quarter, retaining his title perhaps as an advertisement, more likely 
as an insult to the empire that bestowed it on his grandfather. 

I will at least understand his bitterness, she had thought. 

Now she looked up from a sheet of music as he came in. His demeanour was a sham, or so it seemed to 
her: he affected the braced instep of the professional dancer; his long grey hair he wore gathered in a 
steel clasp, in imitation of those doomed airboat captains who had flown their final sorties over the Great 
Brown Waste at the height of the war; his cloak was the crude meal-coloured garment of the hired 
bravo, tailored for swagger, its hem dyed with sardonic vulgarity to the exact shade of dried blood. How 
could he mean anything to her, this ageing assassin with bones as raw ~ as a jeer? He filled the sitting 
room like a murder. His very 

existence was too much for her delicate little coralline ornaments and collection of antique musical 
instruments; he overpowered them at once. It cannot be said that she saw through the Low City and the 
failed lordling, through the trappings to the man beneath: there was, after all, hardly any of him left to see. 

Yet rather than simply walking through a door, he seemed to rush out at her from the past. His hair blew 
back in the wind of time! She saw him for a moment silhouetted against some vanished dawn - the tall 
thin body held with a helpless formality, the misery in the eyes, the great ruined metal bird hanging from 
his belt. Only a moment, but in it she mistook self-concern for dignity; wept for the dead poet 
tegeus-Cromis; and wondered briefly why this tired hooligan should remind her of winter hyacinths 
blooming in a tower by the sea. 

It passed, of course. 

Alstath Fulthor followed the assassin in. Beyond the threshold they regarded one another like wary 'dogs; 
then Hornwrack shrugged and smiled slightly, and Fulthor turned away, looking disgusted. She offered 
them refreshment. Fulthor refused, picked up a book bound in olive leather and stared angrily at it; while 
Hornwrack stood in front of her, swaying a little. He would not look at her. He smelt of death. Presently, 
Cellur and Tomb entered the room. Cellur took a little Mingulay wine, sighed - 'These lamps somehow 
recall my buried life -'and sat down in the shadows. The dwarf made her a pretentious intricate bow then 
leant against the wall, one leg bent to rub his calf. 

'You feel your House was wronged by mine,'she began without preamble. 'We confiscated your estates. 
Our wars robbed you of your family.' 

Hornwrack favoured her with a bitter smile. 

'Houses?'he said. 'Madam, my family were farmers.'He fingered his jaw where, she saw, something had 
recently laid it open to the bone. 'Every airboat in the kingdom was destroyed so that you might keep 


your throne.'He stared over her head. 'It was my freedom you robbed me of.' 

your throne.'He stared over her head. 'It was my freedom you robbed me of.' 

'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 sne?) 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; 
anc. 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. 

door. The powered blade came out, evil sparks dripping from it in the gloom. 

'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 

ˇ 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 accipitrene 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!' 

nightmare. His skin was grey. His accipitrene 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!' 

'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 heirophant 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 rediscovered a 
symbolic re-enactment 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. 

His short legs were clad in cracked black leather, his thick trunk in a sleeveless jerkin of some woven 
material, green with age; his bare forearms were brown and gnarled; and his hands resembled a bunch of 
hawthorn roots. Indeed he looked very like a small tree, planted up against the throne-room doors, 
stunted and unlovely against their serpentine metallic inlays and ornamental hinges. On his head was a 
curious truncated conical hat, also of leather and much worn. 

'Here is our bravo, with his new sword,'he said matter-offactly. 

'So the dwarf says,'murmured Hornwrack, pleasantly enough. 'Let me pass. ' 


The dwarf sniffed. He looked along the passage, first one way and then the other. He crooked a finger, 
and when Hornwrack bent down to listen, whispered, 'The thing is, my lord assassin, that I understand 
none of this.' 

The dwarf sniffed. He looked along the passage, first one way and then the other. He crooked a finger, 
and when Hornwrack bent down to listen, whispered, 'The thing is, my lord assassin, that I understand 
none of this.' 

'Pardon?' 

'Voices, from above. Insects. Madmen, and mad women too. One comes back from the dead (albeit 
he's a good friend of mine), while another runs like a greyhound at the sound of a song. Both old friends 
of mine. What do you think of that?' 

He looked around. 

'The Qyeen,'he said, lowering his voice, 'gives away the sword of tegeus-Cromis!' 

He laughed delightedly at Hornwrack's start of surprise, revealing broken old teeth. 

'Now you and I are plain men. We're fighting men, I think you'll agree. Do you agree?' 

'This sword,'said Hornwrack. 'I - ' 

'That being so, us being ordinary fighting men, we must have an understanding, you and I. We must treat 
gently with one another on this daft journey north. And we must look after the mad folk; for after all, they 
cannot look after themselves. Eh?' 

Hornwrack made as if to pass into the throne-room. 

'I'll make no journey with you or anyone else, Dwarf. As for gifts, they can be easily returned. You are all 
madmen to me!' 

He had not gone so much as a step towards the inlaid doors when a terrific blow in the small of his back 
pitched him forward on to his face. Tears filled his eyes. Astonished and desperate - he thought the dwarf 
had stabbed him - he fumbled for his knife and scrabbled into a kneeling position: 

only to find his tormentor grinning ironically at him, unarmed but for those disproportionate arthritic 
hands. Before he could haul himself to his feet, the dwarf- whose head was now on a level with his own had 
first embraced him lightly, then spat in his ear and hit him again, this time somewhere down below his 
ribs. His knife clattered away. His breath deserted him. Through his own heaving and choking he heard 
the dwarf say coldly -'I like you, Galen Hornwrack. But that is the sword of my 

old friend, which was given you in good faith.' 

Hornwrack shook his head and took his chance. He reached forward and clasped with both hands the 
nape of the dwarf's neck; then pulled him forward sharply. As their heads connected, the dwarf's nose 
broke like a dry stick. 

'Black piss,'he said surprisedly, and sat down. They went seriously at it then, and neither could get the 
advantage: for though the dwarf was cunning, old and hard, the assassin was as quick as a snake; and 
both of them knew well the culde-sacs and wineshop floors where the anonymous chivalry of the Low 
City settles its quarrels amid the slime and the sawdust. 

It was Cellur who discovered them there twenty minutes later. There was a yellow malice in their eyes as 
they staggered about in the bloody-mouthed gloom taunting one another in hoarse, clogged voices - but it 


was fading like a sunset, and as he watched, in the puzzled manner of someone who doesn't quite know 
what it is he's watching, he heard this final exchange: 

was fading like a sunset, and as he watched, in the puzzled manner of someone who doesn't quite know 
what it is he's watching, he heard this final exchange: 

'My brain is as addled as a harlot's egg. Get me out of this place, Dwarf. It stinks of kindness. North if 
you like. What do I care?' 


6: The Sudden Embodiment of Benedict Paucemanly 
Cellur could not (or would not) articulate his fears more clearly. He questioned Fay Glass it is true: but 
nothing was revealed, her contribution being only a babble of archaisms and ancient songs; bits and 
pieces - or so Alstath Fulthor maintained - plucked from the racial memory as she pursued her lonely 
temporal descent. 'She understands us: but speaks from a vast distance, no longer sure what language to 
use, or what to say.'Despite this, Cellur argued, it was clear that she knew the secret of the insect's head 
-why else should she show such distress at her own failure to communicate? Since she could not tell them 
what had happened there, it was, he repeated, essential to follow her back to the North. 

'She is in herself the message: and a call for help.' 

When Fulthor protested that, as seneschal, he could not abandon the Queen while the Sign of the Locust 
grew so in power, harassing daily the Reborn of the City and infiltrating its prime functions, Cellur only 
said: 'I shall need you. Your people in the Great Brown Waste will not treat with me. They are too far 
gone on this road to the Past you describe. When we have discerned the meaning of the insect's head, 
that will be the time; when we have understood the warning from the Moon, and discovered the landing 
sites in the North: then we shall know what to do about the Sign of the Locust.' 

And Fulthor could only stare out into Viriconium, where at night in a lunar chiaroscuro of gamboge and 
blue, the long processions wound silently from one street to another, to the accompaniment of a small 
aimless wind. 

The weather deteriorated as he watched, a raw air piling up against the massif of the High City and filling 
the Low with damp. Beneath a thick grey sky the watery plazas took on a wan and occult look; while in 
the pensions of the Rue Sepile the old women coughed all day over their affairs, and the atmosphere 
became adhesive with the smell of cabbage. The walls seeped. It was, all agreed, no time to be living in 
the Artists'Quarter; and, perhaps as an addendum to this theory, gossip remarked the sudden 
disappearance of Galen Hornwrack. Had he indeed quarrelled with Ansel Verdigris his erstwhile crony 
(some said over a coin, though others maintained it was a woman from the North, or even the wording of 
a verse in a ballade of smoked fish)? Up and down the hill from Minnet-Saba, huddling closer to brazier 
and guttering cresset, his enemies and rivals scratched their heads - or else, distempered, fought among 
themselves. 

The object of this attention, meanwhile, languished in the draughty corridors of Methven's hall, where he 
examined his wounds from hour to hour and honed morosely his knife, gripped by the phthisis and 
melancholy of early winter. He had little contact with his new companions. He avoided Fuithor and thus, 
of neccessity, the discussions in the throne-room. Once or twice he heard the madwoman singing in some 
chamber. Of Tomb, who had in such a peculiar manner befriended him (at least he supposed it was that), 
he had no news. Methvet Nian having at last agreed to an expedition, therefore provision must be made 
of food, horses, weapons, and such safe-conducts as were necessary. The dwarf had concerned himself 
with this, and with preparations of his own, and was not much about the palace. 

Hornwrack shrugged; paced the corridors at night, gazing in a sort of savage abstraction at the old 
machines and whispering sculptures; and refused to answer his door. On the day of their departure he 


had to be fetched from his apartment (he was staring into a mirror). On the day of their departure, sleet 
fell, quickly soaking the striped awnings in the street markets and filling the gutters with a miserable slush. 
On the day of their departure a vision was vouchsafed to them; Tomb the Dwarf remembered a legend at 
whose birth he had presided long ago; and their ill-fated expedition acquired its tutelary or presiding spirit 
-

had to be fetched from his apartment (he was staring into a mirror). On the day of their departure, sleet 
fell, quickly soaking the striped awnings in the street markets and filling the gutters with a miserable slush. 
On the day of their departure a vision was vouchsafed to them; Tomb the Dwarf remembered a legend at 
whose birth he had presided long ago; and their ill-fated expedition acquired its tutelary or presiding spirit 
-

This apparition, which was to remain with them until the peculiar termination of their journey, manifested 
itself first in the throne-room at Viriconium. Besides Cellur the birdmaker, only Hornwrack was present. 
(Methvet Nian was to watch their departure from the City by the Gate of Nigg, and had gone there early. 
Alstath Fulthor fretted in an outer yard with Fay Glass and the horses. Tomb the Dwarf, having worked 
all night in his caravan - white heat flickering out over the tailboard to the accompaniment of a sad 
hammer - was dozing in some corner.) It was not yet light: the palace was chilly, echoic, nautiloid. Cellur, 
hoping to contact his own machines in their redoubt beneath the Lendalfoot estuary, passed a yellow 
hand through his beard. 'Brown, green, counting,'he whispered, and in response a flock of grey images 
twittered like bats across the five false windows of the throne room. Clearly this was not the result he had 
forecast. 'Do you see nothing?'he said impatiently. 'I must have fresh news!' 

'Be quick old man,'said Hornwrack neutrally. He yawned and rubbed his face, feeling an obscure tension 
in the muscles of his neck. This he put down to being woken early. Like Fulthor, for reasons more or less 
complex, he was anxious to be off. Alone with wound, knife and mirror over the last twenty-four hours, 
he had been surprised to find that he no longer regretted his psychic severance from the Low City. He 
thought now only rarely of the boy in the Rue Sepile, the bitter smell of dead geraniums: instead looked 
forward with a dry eagerness, curious as to the fate of his obsessions now that their confining frame had 
been removed. He massaged his neck. The old man muttered fractiously. In the upper air of the throne 
room the light was becoming stratified, bands of very ˇ pale pink and yellow leaking through the high 
eastern skylights. Dawn had arrived early. Fresh news! 'Be quick!' 

'Abrogate all rituals,'said a soft confidential voice from somewhere above him. He looked up, startled. 
It sniggered. 'What a lovely piece of meat!' 

Up near the vaulted ceiling a salmon-coloured layer of light had begun curdling into grey muculent lumps 
and 

strings which floated about like bits of fat in a lukewarm soup, bumping one another gently. After a 
minute or two of slow tidal effort, these in their turn merged to form a thick, lobed nucleus: from which 
presently evolved the crude figure of a man. Hornwrack studied this process with disgust; noting how, as 
they strained to become arms and legs, the lobes heaved and struggled like something trapped in an 
elastic bag. He caught the birdmaker staring puzzledly upwards and sniffed sarcastically. 

'Have you finished tampering, old man?' 

Cellur made an impatient movement with one hand. 

'Hush!' 

The man hanging in the air above them (if it was a man) wore clothes of some rough faded material, 
originally black,tailored in a fashion which had not been common in the City for over a century. Where it 
could be seen, his skin was pallid, greenish, covered in withered silvery patches. Over his face was 
clamped a kind of mask or breathing apparatus from the black snout of which sprouted many truncated 


tubes and proboscides; this was attached by four black straps which, cutting into the swollen flesh of his 
cheeks, met in the straggling yellow hair at the back of his head. He was enormously fat, as if he had 
passed much of his life in a sphere where human conditions of growth no longer pertained: his 
hypertrophied buttocks floated over their heads like shadowy moons, accompanied by a thin monologue, 
cabalistic and futile, of which no sense might be made whatever -'Here I sit, an old man in the Neant of 
the wind (Prima 

tubes and proboscides; this was attached by four black straps which, cutting into the swollen flesh of his 
cheeks, met in the straggling yellow hair at the back of his head. He was enormously fat, as if he had 
passed much of his life in a sphere where human conditions of growth no longer pertained: his 
hypertrophied buttocks floated over their heads like shadowy moons, accompanied by a thin monologue, 
cabalistic and futile, of which no sense might be made whatever -'Here I sit, an old man in the Neant of 
the wind (Prima 

-And so on, punctuated by roars of pain or rage as rolling slowly from one corner of the room to 
another, he attempted to right his huge floundering bulk or adjust its height from the floor. At times he 
seemed quite solid, while at others an appalling smell filled the throne-room and his outlines became 
vague and mucous again. In moments of solidity he would struggle and thresh; he waved his arms, 
perhaps for attention, perhaps to keep his balance in whatever grotesque medium he was floating. (It was 
plain that the air of Earth could not support so gross a body - he wallowed rather in some mysterious 
waterglass, some dimension of his own.) When he faded, his voice faded too, becoming feeble and 
distant and distorted, as if by passage through some inhospitable aether. 
Cellur the birdmaker was transfixed. 'This is none of my doing!'he cried, full of an ancient excitement. 
'Hornwrack, it is the voice from the Moon!' 

('It's a voice from a sewer,'declared Hornwrack, and, sotto voce: 'A voice from a pantomime.') 

Cellur addressed the floating man. 'Many nights I listened to you. What have you to tell me? Speak!' 

'Blork,'said the floating man. 

Thereafter he disregarded Cellur, but courted Hornwrack vigorously, his eyes ingenuous and fishy behind 
the tinted faceplate of his mask. Sidling up to the assassin he would wink coyly and embark on some 
earnest incoherent suit; only to topple helplessly over on his side before he could complete it, like the 
corpse of some small decomposing whale. 'Listen to me, my lad (black buggery!) I can see you're a flier. 
Listen, the regenerated word burrows within me! We must have a talk, you and I - 'Then, making a 
terrified pushing motion: 'No more, no more of that!'And off he would go, bobbing about the 
throne-room at the height of Hornwrack's head, a sour fluid dribbling from the edges of his mask. 

This was too much for Hornwrack, who, eyeing the apparition superstitiously, got out the sword of 
tegeusCromis and followed it about, making lethal cuts at the air. 'Back to your sewer!'he shouted. 'Back 
to your madhouse!'while Cellur in an attempt to restrain him plucked feebly at his cloak and 'the 
apparition evaded them both, chuckling and sneezing. 

Nothing could be got from it. If they left it alone, it harangued them mercilessly, in fragments of infernal 
languages. When they pursued it, Cellur in a spirit of conciliation, Hornwrack with murderous blows, it 
merely hiccupped behind its mask and blundered off. For half-an-hour this pantomime continued, until, in 
the face of the growing daylight, its periods of stability became fewer, it. outline grey and debatable. Its 
voice faded into an enormous echoing distance in which might be heard quite distinctly the sound of 
waves on some unimaginable shore. Eventually it vanished into the same odd brew of light as had 
engendered it, and they were left stranded in the empty throne-room, furious and futile. 

This was how Alstath Fulthor found them: staring breathlessly into the vacant air. Had he listened 


carefully, as they begged him, he might have heard a feeble buzzing voice exhorting him to 'Fear death 
from the air!'The sound of waves, or something like it. Silence. But what were voices 'to him, who now 
heard them constantly in his head? 

carefully, as they begged him, he might have heard a feeble buzzing voice exhorting him to 'Fear death 
from the air!'The sound of waves, or something like it. Silence. But what were voices 'to him, who now 
heard them constantly in his head? 

ˇ In the event they saw very little of her, for it was a brutally cold day: only a white face in a window near 
the top of a tower; a white hand raised; and then nothing. Alstath Fulthor, his great black horse and 
blood-red armour glowing heraldically beneath the overcast, drew an ironic cheer from the handful of 
Low City dwellers who stood in the slush to watch them through the Gate of Nigg. Viriconium, 
foundered across the stream of time behind them, like some immense royal barge abandoned to winter! 
This zone of monstrous narcissism and gigantic depressions behind him, Hornwrack sensed the 
beginnings of the new phase signalled by the manifestation in the throne-room. We are all mad now, he 
thought. On an impulse he unsheathed the old steel sword and held it high. But when he looked back 
Methvet Nian had already left the tower. 

Outside on the low brown foothills of Monar lay the first snow of the season, drifted up against the stone 
intake walls and sheep enclosures. The pack animals were fractious, the wind bitter. They travelled 
slowly; but the dwarf, who had been sleeping in some straw, did not catch up with them until much later. 

When he did, he said, 'This bloated ghost you speak of: he was the finest airboatman of them all.' 

And that night, huddled by a dying fire in the hills above the distant City, he continued: 'At Mingulay he 
flew one machine against eight. Cooking rats in the sun at noon we watched, my long-dead friends and I, 
from the beleagured city. His boat was old, his crew haggard; the drugs he took to stay awake had made 
him shake and stagger: but how that boat spun and turned, how it dropped like a hawk amid the violet 
bolts of the power cannon! How the brassy light of the South glanced off its crystal hull! Benedict 
Paucemanly: seven wrecks dotted the arid plain before the siege was lifted; the eighth he rammed 
afterwards, in an oversight. 

'But war was never enough for Paucemanly. When the world was still young (and the Methven still 
casting their shadows across it) he flew round it. I know, for I was with him, a dwarf of few summers 
who fancied himself an adventurer. We crossed the oceans, Hornwrack, and all the broken continents! 
Deserts drifted beneath our hull, rapt in their millenial declining dream. At the poles, aurorae cascaded 
and roared above us like spectral rivers. We sampled the tropics; the equatorial air burned about us. 
That was Paucemanly's first flight in the Heavy Star. But if war failed to satisfy him, so did the world. He 
grew bored. He grew melancholy and thin. 

'He began to stare each night at the wan and sovereign Moon. 

'Oh, he yearned after that sad planet. His plan was to go there. The mysterious navigators of the 
Afternoon, he reasoned, had commerce with it daily, in just such boats as these. The space outside the 
Earth was of no consequence to them. Perhaps, he persuaded himself, the boats remember the way. 
We watched him leave on a black night, in that famous ship. She rose into the darkness, hunting like a 
compass needle. Old senses revived in her. She trembled in anticipation, and strange new lights 
glimmered at her stern. 

'We never saw her again, any of us. The Heavy Star, the Heavy Star! That was a hundred years ago 
-The old dwarf's eyes were red and flat in the gloom, 

reflecting the firelight like the eyes of an animal. 'Hornwrack,'he whispered, 'she knew her way. Don't 
you 


see? This bloated ghost you describe is Benedict Paucemanly returned to us. He has been a hundred 
years in the Moon!' 

see? This bloated ghost you describe is Benedict Paucemanly returned to us. He has been a hundred 
years in the Moon!' 

the dwarf these memories, with which he had nothing to compare): 'But what has he brought with him 
past the gates of Earth? And why is he a gibbering idiot?' 

The dwarf looked at him thoughtfully. 

Later, Cellur the Bird Lord was to describe their journey north in these terms: 

'Among the stone crowns and aimless salients of the empty foothills we received hints of some state of 
being we could not imagine. The world was bleached of its old meanings even for those of us who had 
previously accepted them. (I do not count myself among these. How could I?) This happened 
immediately we left the City. It was as if a protection had been removed from us. Mosaic eyes seemed to 
observe us from behind the dry-stone walls. In the outline of a ridge or a wayfarer's tree might be 
contained the suggestion of quite another object - a folded wing, for instance, or the coiled tongue of a 
moth. 

'Alstath Fulthor led the way. Some internal process held him rapt. He had begun, perhaps, to map the 
paths inside himself which led to the Past. This gave him an absentminded air, and an irritable one, as if 
by our presence we interrupted some private conversation - although had anyone suggested this he 
would have rejected it angrily. Attempting to live simultaneously in two worlds, he rode moodily ahead 
and seemed to see nothing - head bowed into the rain, blood red armour pulsing like a beacon. If it was 
madness then it was only the madness that has infected all his people since their Rebirth. They will learfi in 
the end that the journey they long for is impossible; and accept the world as it is. 

'The unmarked journeys of the soul: as we descended the foothills, we came upon old roads lined with 
sagging yews and blunt formless stone beasts. Here there is little left to humanize the debased earth; this 
is the beginning of the end, where the Empire wastes away with its own geography. On the narrow strip 
between the mountains and the coastal flats only the giant hemlock grows now; and among it the ruins of 
the Afternoon are rotting, cities made of bloody glass submerged beneath cold and muddy lagoons: the 
ancient Fen Cities, among whose broken towers now creep the black wherries of the Evening, tacking 
and creaking from staithe to staithe in pursuit of a bleak diminishing trade. Of the old roads none are 
whole. The wide fused highways of the Afternoon peter out into shattered flags or limestone cobbles laid 
in Borring's day; eventually into sheep-trod, nettle and smallholding. 

'The best of them, though, skirting warily both salt marsh and massif, makes its way to Duirinish, that grey 
outpost of former kings which is gateway to the Great Brown Waste and to the old cities of the North; 
and along this we took ourselves, under the patronage of the hallucinatory pilot Benedict Paucemanly. 
Exorting, demanding, mumbling eternally in its strange self-constructed language, vanishing at intervals 
only to return refreshed, his ghost (if indeed it was his) had haunted us for a hundred miles or more. Now 
it wallowed above us like a waterlogged tree; now hid like a girl among the fleshy etiolated hemlock 
stems; now muttered, On the Moon it was like white gardens. Pork. It would not answer Alstath 
Fulthor, which put him out of temper; nor would it speak to me: Tomb the Dwarf it actively avoided, as 
though embarrassed by his persistence, sidling away down the hemlock glades grinning and breaking 
wind apologetically. And if he spoke to it of the old days it regarded him with wide panicky eyes and 
flapped deprecatingly its awkward great hands. 

'Galen Hornwrack, however, it courted ardently, trying to capture his attention with a wink or a whistle. 
Land ho, lad! it would cry; and, bobbing in the air before him, make an elaborate mime of discovering 


some terra incognita: shading its eyes with one hand while with the other it pointed north and west. 
(Fulthor made light of this mummery, arguing that the thing was mad if it could be said to exist at all: yet 
after a few repetitions one felt a profound sense of urgency, as if some fading fragment of the original 
airboatman was struggling to act out or insinuate something he could no longer articulate.) Hornwrack's 
response was characteristic. He hated to appear a fool. The more the thing wooed him the more he 
averted his gaze. And at night when he thought himself unobserved he stalked it patiently through the 
firelight, the partly healed scars on his cheeks burning like the ritual stigmata of some primitive hunter. 
Each failure to kill or confine it increased his anger: when the girl Fay Glass sang We are off to Vegys 
now, and smiled at him - which was some days her only human contact - he would not smile back, 
which made her fractious and difficult to manage in her turn. 

some terra incognita: shading its eyes with one hand while with the other it pointed north and west. 
(Fulthor made light of this mummery, arguing that the thing was mad if it could be said to exist at all: yet 
after a few repetitions one felt a profound sense of urgency, as if some fading fragment of the original 
airboatman was struggling to act out or insinuate something he could no longer articulate.) Hornwrack's 
response was characteristic. He hated to appear a fool. The more the thing wooed him the more he 
averted his gaze. And at night when he thought himself unobserved he stalked it patiently through the 
firelight, the partly healed scars on his cheeks burning like the ritual stigmata of some primitive hunter. 
Each failure to kill or confine it increased his anger: when the girl Fay Glass sang We are off to Vegys 
now, and smiled at him - which was some days her only human contact - he would not smile back, 
which made her fractious and difficult to manage in her turn. 

'Shrewd sea winds courted us. On our right marched a line of tall cliffs. Originally deposited as a 
limestone reeffront some hundreds of miles long, these had been worked during Earth's long Afternoon 
into a chain of quarries broken here and there by little steep-sided valleys with crumbling mossy 
headwalls. In and out of the hidden caves and sinkholes of this region (in effect the lip of a vast plateau, 
stretching a mile or so back inland before being buried under the culm measures and doomed black soils 
of the Great Brown Waste) there flowed whitish polluted streams. The trees were grey and dry. Now we 
moved deeper into it, and into a kind of psychic dislocation, picking a way through the gummy, lifeless, 
tidal pools while mirages came and went over our bowed heads. 

'We had no idea of what might disclose itself from day to day. At evening we left the beach and lit fires in 
the tottering mazes where interleaving bituminous strata had made the rock rotten and easily-eroded. But 
the flames were hard to kindle. They were pale and cool. Later, the echo of falling rocks clattered 
through the dark like the sound of skittles falling in a deserted alley. From the upper ledges there drifted 
down an endless rain of tiny luminous beetles. All night long the wind shook the skeins of dead ivy; and in 
the morning, as the sea-fogs cleared, vast insects would appear in the distance, their reflections perfect in 
the wet sand of the tidal flats; they moved ponderously away before we could identify them. All this, as I 
have said, was contained at first in the outlines of ordinary things, much as a shadowy architecture of 
colonnades and alien galleries can be made out in the walls of an empty quarry: but as we moved north 
the landscape itself became thin and grey, textured like mucus, with the bones of some other landscape 
showing more or less clearly through: 

'The World is coming to bits, said Galen Hornwrack; and someone answered dryly. The world is 
being exchanged for something else. 

'It comes to me that each of us suffered during this northern transit an emptying or bleaching of the 
identity in preparation for a future we could not describe. Viriconium was behind us. (Even those of us 
who returned there never saw it again; but found a changed City, one in which we were not comfortable.) 
In the sense that it no longer filled our day-to-day thoughts, we had forgotten our purpose. We existed 
simply to slip through the rain, a handful of salt-lipped figures beneath the unending cliffs, speaking in low 
sepulchral voices. Before went like a banner, the raging glory of the Afternoon, with its great horse and 
scarlet armour; while a sniggering dwarf in a leather hat brought up the rear on a pony no bigger than a 


dog: and above us floated the baloonlike form of the ancient airman, chivvied like a dying whale by gangs 
of raucous gulls. Cyphers, we pass beneath the hungry ironic eyes of the gannets and guillemots - the 
assassin resentful and disfigured; the woman who believes herself lost in time; and myself- a thing, alive 
beyond its rightful years, far beyond its rightful place! The landscape, though, anticipates our release: this 
preparation or interlude is drawing to a close... 

dog: and above us floated the baloonlike form of the ancient airman, chivvied like a dying whale by gangs 
of raucous gulls. Cyphers, we pass beneath the hungry ironic eyes of the gannets and guillemots - the 
assassin resentful and disfigured; the woman who believes herself lost in time; and myself- a thing, alive 
beyond its rightful years, far beyond its rightful place! The landscape, though, anticipates our release: this 
preparation or interlude is drawing to a close... 

'That was evening or late afternoon. The light was fading. Squalls of rain blew out of the advancing 
sea-fog, dotted with large wet flakes of snow. A melancholy heath dipped away inland - shadowy, 
sheep-cropped turf, black gorse and bent hawthorn trees. Northwards and at right-angles to the coast, 
defile succeeded narrow defile, each one cutting through the limestone to the underlying metamorphic 
shales and broadening as it reached the sea. The landscape was scattered with old metal bridges. It had a 
discarded air. We passed the night huddled at the foot of a ruined stone wall, unaware that a mile or so 
ahead lay the port of Iron Chine, nexus of a strange war, with its weird banners and demented prince. 
Rusty iron creaked in the wind.' 

Cellur does not relate how on the next morning they found that Paucemanly's ghost had abandoned them, 
or how they slumped on their soaked and surly animals staring dully at the desolation which stretched 
away inland: that half-fertile strip of dissected peat and tough ling-heather pocked with lethal seepage 
hollows which was the merest periphery of the Great Waste. Unpredictable soughs full of brown water 
threaded its endless slopes of sodden tussocky grass; and queer rocks were embedded along its rheumy 
skylines, eroded by the wind into vague and organic silhouettes. This was their ultimate destination (it is, 
in another way the ultimate destination of everything, as the Earth enters its long Evening), or so they 
imagined: but in the face of its winter they faltered. Instead of turning eastward Alstath Fulthor led them 
first along the cliffs and then down into Iron Chine. They followed him like a handful of refugees from 
some chronological disaster, heads bowed against the bitter blow of Time. 

The cyclopean quays of Iron Chine are older than the Afternoon. No-one knows who built them, or for 
what crude purpose. The massive untrimmed blocks which comprise them are not native to this coast but 
cut from granites formed much further north. Who brought them down from there to bind them with iron 
and pile them in the cold sea, or when, is not known. They are black, and wet with fog, like the vertical 
walls of the fjord which contains them, the archaean unvegetated slates of which sweep down to an ebon 
sea. The enormous quayside buildings are also black; their purpose is quite lost and most of them have 
fallen into decay. The modern port subsists on fish, gulls'eggs, and mutton. Cowed by geography, time 
and the sea, its limewashed cottages huddle uneasily amid a greater architecture; above them a road has 
been pushed through the rotting slates, and winds its way perilously up to the clifftop pastures. 

Down this Galen Hornwrack now rode (the dwarf beside him croaking tunelessly), puzzled by the mist 
that lay in the trough of the fjord. It was ashen and particulate. Inner currents stirred it sluggishly. A gust 
of wind, exploding over the lip of the cliffs and roiling down past him, parted it for a moment, but 
revealed only black water patterned by the rain. Yet he sensed it was occupied (although he could hardly 
have said by what): he stopped his horse, stood up in his stirrups, and craned his neck anxiously until the 


rift had closed again. 'What's this then?'he asked himself. He shook his head. 'Fulthor,'he called back, 
'this may be unwise. Further down, where the air was calmer, he smelt smoke, urgent and powdery at the 
back of his nose. Now the dwarf became agitated too, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, 
squinting and sniffing about him like a nervous dog. Behind the smell of smoke was something sharper, 
less easy to identify. 

rift had closed again. 'What's this then?'he asked himself. He shook his head. 'Fulthor,'he called back, 
'this may be unwise. Further down, where the air was calmer, he smelt smoke, urgent and powdery at the 
back of his nose. Now the dwarf became agitated too, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, 
squinting and sniffing about him like a nervous dog. Behind the smell of smoke was something sharper, 
less easy to identify. 

rotting pears - a moist and chemical odour which sought out and attacked the sensitive membranes of the 
body. The light was sourceless, and had the effect of sharpening outlines while blurring the detail 
contained within them: on Hornwrack's right, the dwarf looked as if he had been cut from grey paper a 
moment before - a tall queer hat, a goblin's profile, an axehead bigger than his own. Beyond this paper 
silhouette the path fell away into a whitish void in which Hornwrack made out now and then a localized 
and fitful carmine glow. While he was trying to remember what this reminded him of, Alstath Fulthor took 
station on his left. Their throats raw, their eyes streaming and their noses running, they advanced in a 
cautious formation until the path began to level out and they found themselves without warning on a wide 
stone concourse bordering the estuary. 

Here the mist was infused with a thin yellow light. But for the slap of the waves on the waterstair below, 
but for the silence and the smell of the fog, they might have been in the Low City on any cold October 
night. Hornwrack led them to the water's edge, the hooves of the horses clacking and scraping nervously 
across an acre of worn stone slabs glistening with shallow puddles. A languor of curiosity came over 
them. Despite their forebodings they tilted their heads tQ hear the distant thud of wood on wood, the 
faint cries of men echoing off the estuary. Even Fay Glass was quite silent. 

Hornwrack narrowed his eyes. 'Fulthor, there are no longer fishermen in this place.'Distances were 
impossible of judgement. He wiped his eyes; coughed. 'Something is on fire out there.' 

The smell of smoke had thickened perceptibly, perhaps carried to them by some inshore wind. With it 
came a creaking of ropes and a. smell of the deep sea; groans and shouts startlingly close. Now a node 
of carmine light appeared, expanding rapidly. A cold movement of the air set the mist bellying like a 
curtain. Hornwrack shook his head desperately, looking about him in panic: abruptly he sensed an 
enormous object moving very close to him. The mist had all along distorted his perspectives -

'Back!'he shouted. 'Fuithor, get them back from the water!'Even as he spoke the mist writhed and broke 
apart. Out of it thrust the foreparts and figurehead of a great burning ship. 

Its decks were deep with blood. Once it had been white. Now it rushed to destruction on the waterstair, 
spouting cinders. Its strange slatted metal sails, decorated with unfamiliar symbols, were melting as they 
fell. Captained by despair, it emerged from the mist like a vessel from hell, its figurehead an 
insect-headed woman who had pierced her own belly with a sword (her mouth, if it could be called a 
mouth, gaped in pain or ecstasy). 'Back!'cried Galen Hornwrack, tugging at his horse's head: 'Back!' 

Fay Glass, though, only stared and sneezed like an animal, transfixed by the mad carven head gaping 
above her. Dying men tumbled over the sides of the ship, groaning. 'Back!'as the jean, charred hull drove 
blindly at the shore; 'Back!'as it smashed into the waterstair and with its bow torn open immediately 


began to sink. 

began to sink. 

'Hornwrack!' 

The burning ship reminded him of some childhood ritual, some solstitial bonfire lit in the wet dark 
ploughland. He turned almost reluctantly from it, his face stiff with heat. Fulthor, Tomb and the old man 
stood a little way off; toward them across the gleaming concourse men were running. 'To you, Fulthor!'he 
cried, just as he might have done beneath the heights of Minnet-Saba, where the rival factions of the Low 
City clash without chivalry at night; and, encumbered by the madwoman, promptly dropped the 
unfamiliar sword. 'Black filth, girl. Let go.'The weapon tolled like a bell on the worn flagstones. His horse 
trod on it. A fit of coughing racked him. 

As he disentangled himself, though, he realised that the mist was dwindling round him like a dream, to 
reveal the giant quays and boatsheds; the little town; the slatey cliffs. 

Seabirds called as they skimmed the water. Even the clouds were blowing away. For all the fears of the 
dead sailor, nothing floated out there on the roadstead. But for the bubbling wreck on the waterstair the 
estuary was empty of menace, quite empty. Puzzled, he drew his knife and urged forward his horse. 


7: Saint Elmo Bujfin and the Navigators of Iron Chine 
With the mist dispersed the village smelt of smoked fish and salt. Fulthor and his party stood 
outnumbered and uncertain at the centre of an unarmed crowd. Hornwrack had put up his knife. Like the 
survivors of some forgotten colonial war (desultory, expedient, never quite resolved) the occupants of 
Iron Chine drew round him: thin intelligent women, a few bare-limbed children. There were no young 
men present, only some old ones who stamped their feet and turned up their heavy collars, faded blue 
eyes watering in the cold wind. They stared up at him with a defiant incuriosity and he stared back 
embarrassed, although he could not have said precisely why. It was a mixed community; at the periphery 
of the crowd a handful of the Reborn hovered like strange, long-necked animals, their delicate features 
coarsened a little by an unrelenting deprivation. What had they left behind them in the Afternoon, what 
mad sophistications exchanged for the smell of dead fish? 

A few sailors who had escaped the wreck now swam ashore. 

No-one offered them any help; nor did they seem to expect it, but pulled themselves up on to the quay 
and sprawled there with the blind, open-mouthed look of the exhausted. After a moment two of them got 
up again and between them pulled out a third. He kept trying to thank them. They knelt by his atrociously 
burnt head until a trickle of clear fluid ran out of the corner of his mouth; then they left him to stare 
sightlessly at a flock of gulls tearing pieces off something out on the estuary. They were yellow-haired, 
guileless, hardly more than children, but their faces were full of despair, as if they had fought a lifetime of 
holding actions and unplanned retreats. Alstath Fulthor observed them gravely for a minute or two then, 
finding no other authority and extricating himself with difficulty from the civilian crowd, presented them 
with his safe conducts. 


'Our mission is one of importance,'he told them. 

'Our mission is one of importance,'he told them. 

'Captain, they come from the capital -' 

But he only wiped his mouth and laughed wildly. 'Ay, and look at them! Some yellow old man, and a 
woman. Two city lordlings and their dwarf!' 

A fit of dry retching shook him. 'There will never be any help from Viriconium,'he said indistinctly. There 
was self-pity in his voice, and after a moment or two he acknowledged it with a disgusted twist of his 
mouth. 'Did you see anything out there?'he asked; and when the other shook his head, whispered, 'I pity 
those that did.' 

He tried to squeeze the salt water from his hair. 

'One of our own vessels rammed us, that's certain,'he continued thoughtfully. 'But by then we were 
already burning.' 

He shrugged. 

'It was as usual. Those who saw anything were struck mad immediately. Those who did not got lost in 
the mist.' 

Thus the defeated, locked in their dreams of defeat. 

'You are bound to help us!'shouted Alstath Fulthor suddenly. 

'Leave them alone, Fulthor,'advised Hornwrack. Often enough he had been among the defeated himself. 
His sudden compassion surprised him nevertheless; and that he should recognise it as such surprised him 
even further. He looked sidelong at Tomb the Dwarf to see if he had noticed anything, but the dwarf 
wasn't interested - he only grinned pleasantly and unforgivingly down at the sailors and said, 'There is no 
enemy in sight now.' 

'They are bound by those signatures to help us,'said the Reborn Man less loudly. 

They regarded him with puzzlement, and some scorn. 

'Go up to the new hall,'was all they said, 'and leave us alone.'And they wandered off along the quay to 
where the remaining mast of the foundered ship poked up at a strange angle from a scum of floating 
wreckage. There a smell of lemons clung, as if some bitter dew had condensed on that doomed hull 
during its confused final voyage. It was an unearthly, chemical smell. The horses hated it. 

The crowd, sensing a termination, looked on emptily for a minute or two, then began to disperse - the 
children drawn by a kind of magnetism toward the wreck while their elders took to the cobbled road 
which wound up into Iron Chine proper, where they vanished in twos and threes among the little 
two-storey houses with the wet slate roofs, the drying nets and lines of flaccid laundry. Dulled by the cold 
and continual privation, they seemed unable to react to a tragedy which, -as someone in Fulthor's party 
pointed out later, must have involved them all. One woman did stand for a time staring out into the 
estuary, a few tears drying on her cheeks in the wind. Only then did Hornwrack realise that more than 
one vessel had been involved. A spatter of rain blew out of the west (where like a great ancient fish there 
lay in wait the island continent of Fenlen) and into his face. He could see the 'new hall'on a rise above the 


village. He felt wretched. 

village. He felt wretched. 

It came on to rain in earnest as they passed through the Chine. The peeling walls had once been gaily 
whitewashed, the window-boxes tended; now pale faces observed them from behind the streaming 
windows. Higher, they found they could look down into the boatyards of St Elmo Buffin, from which 
rose the masts and spars of his white and fated fleet - rakish three-hulled craft fitted with those peculiar 
slatted metal sails over which rioted orange lizards, green beetles glowing like fresh tattoos, and subtly 
distorted geometrical figures. Designed by the Afternoon, built by the Evening, blessed by a new 
madness of both, they were arming for some invisible war. 'DEATH'proclaimed one sail, and 
'LIFE'another, in calligraphies rich and outlandish; while on the decks beneath shipwrights and sailors 
swarmed like rats. 

'No hint of this war has ever come to us in the High City,'said Alstath Fulthor wonderingly. 'It is no 
wonder they are poverty stricken here.' 

Higher still the 'new hall'hung above them like a threat. Sombre, columnar, mysterious of purpose, it had 
about it a most appalling air of age, an age which emptied out the cultural luggage of Alstath Fulthor's 
vanished race - all the moral atrocities and philosophical absurdities and expired technologies - and found 
it meaningless; rendering meaningless in the end even the deserts which were their only legacy to the 
Evening. As he approached it, wincing from the weather, huddling into his cloak against a wind a million 
years old, it spoke to Galen Hornwrack from an age fully as naive but by no means as puzzled as his 
own. It was a survivor of the Morning. 

There was a ramshackle new construction perched on its roof like a greenhouse; from this flags were 
flying which no-one could identify, though Fulthor and the dwarf argued desultorily over their 
provenance. And down at its ancient front door, his big-knuckled hands clasped like a bunch of dice, 
stood the solitary principal of that lost maritime demesne, genius of a doomed fleet, St Elmo Buffin. 

Elmo Buffin, that sad travesty, with his limbs like peeled sticks! He was seven feet tall and a yellow cloak 
was draped eccentrically about his bony shoulders. Plate armour of a dull-green colour encased him, 
sprouting all manner of blunt horns and spurs, little nubs and bosses which seemed chitinous and organic. 
It pulsed and shivered in its colour, for it had come to him from his father, a Reborn Man of the defunct 
House of medina-Clane, one of the first to be resurrected by Tomb the Dwarf and now dead. What his 
mother - a dour Northwoman and fishwife of Iron Chine, whose first husband had died in the War of the 
Two Queens - had bequeathed him is hard to say. Neither strain had bred true, for between Afternoon 
and Evening there is a great genetic as well as temporal gulf. Epilepsy racked him twice a week. His eyes 
were yellow and queer in that slack clownish face which seemed too large for his thin limbs. His brain 
heaved like the sea; across it visions came and went like the painted sails of his own fleet. Of years he 
had twenty-six; but his insanity made of that forty or fifty. Since the death of his father (himself an 
eccentric but principled man, who had consented to the miscegenation in order to cement the two halves 
of his bi-racial community) the whole weight of the Chine had rested on his shoulders. 

How many of the villagers actually believed in his invisible enemy, or his experimental fleet? It seems 
immaterial. Those who died at sea knew the truth, as do we. Those that did not were nonetheless 
inspired by him. And if it did not thrive, well then the village survived. Buffin's success was as a symbol queasy 
but enduring - which enabled past and present to collaborate. (His failure lay in underestimation; 
in being, if you like, not quite mad enough: but that was not to become clear until later, and who anyway 
could have been quite so mad as to imagine the actual state of affairs?) Now he stood in the doorway of 


the ancient ball, with its dreadful disregard for the passage of time and its rooftop contraptions worn with 
the air of a rakish hat, watching from the corner of his eye Fulthor's party as it approached. He was 
dwarfed by the dark columns. He could not keep still. He rubbed his hands to warm them in the cold air. 
He leant unconcernedly on the doorpost. Then he must look at his feet to admire his boots. Then, 
muttering to himself, jerk upright and practise a handshake with some imaginary visitor. 

the ancient ball, with its dreadful disregard for the passage of time and its rooftop contraptions worn with 
the air of a rakish hat, watching from the corner of his eye Fulthor's party as it approached. He was 
dwarfed by the dark columns. He could not keep still. He rubbed his hands to warm them in the cold air. 
He leant unconcernedly on the doorpost. Then he must look at his feet to admire his boots. Then, 
muttering to himself, jerk upright and practise a handshake with some imaginary visitor. 

'Oh, what shall I say!' 

Suddenly he dodged back among the columns and was lost to view. (Though it had no basis, Hornwrack 
retained for some time an impression of him huddled up there somewhere in the gloom the way a child 
might huddle breathless and white-faced behind the great half-opened doors of some echoing abandoned 
palace into which it has wandered; that palace being the world.) 

After a moment he called querulously, 'Hello?' 

No-one answered. Except for Fay Glass they had all got down from their horses and were staring 
astonished into the massive fluted shadows. Out popped his head like a crumpled leather bag on a stick, 
and he tapped the side of it mournfully. 'We're all mad here,'he sighed, as if the village, the boatyards and 
the ancient stones were all in some way contained within it: which, Hornwrack supposed, in a way they 
were. Now he recovered himself, smiling ironically; came forward and clasped Fulthor's hands. 'The 
briefest of aberrations,'he apologized (at this the mad woman pursed her lips enviously, and sniffed); 
'Please forgive me:'and never referred to it again. 'Viriconium has sent observers then, at last!' 

Under this misapprehension he led them up a monstrous flight of stairs. They could not correct it because 
he would not let them speak. He had, he explained, given up hope of ever getting help from the capital. 
He did not blame the High City for this. Messengers had been sent every six months to Duirinish, which 
was the regional centre, but patently the messages had not been sent on. This was understandable. In 
Duirinish they seined to believe that he was quarrelling with some other coastal village. This had not been 
at all uncommon in the years immediately following the War. What could he do but maintain a 
philosophical attitude? 

Up the vast stairs they went behind him, listening to his monologue float down. His laughter was strained. 
'Still, now you have come -His rooms were full of bald light, strange navigational instruments, clutter. In 
one room the charts had peeled from the wall and lay all along its foot in odd folds. He took them to a 
thing like a conservatory built right out on to the roof. 

'From here I can see twenty miles out to sea.'He smiled proudly, a little pathetically. 'I expect you have 
more profound instruments in the South.'There was a great maze of tubing made of brass into which he 
invited them tO look. They bent one by one to the eyepiece. When it was Hornwrack's turn to look, all 
he saw was a sad reticulated greyness, and, suspended indistinctly against it in the distance, something 
like a chrysalis or cocoon, spinning and writhing at the end of a thread. 'Success is slow to come with this 
particular instrument.'Hornwrack shook his head; but Cellur seemed to be fascinated. As they moved 
from exhibit to exhibit like reluctant tourists in some artist's studio, Buffin sat on a stool with his limbs 
tense. He was like an exhibit himself in the direct odd light filtering through the whitish panes, legs wound 
tensely round one another, his face like an apologetic bag. 'It is not an ordinary telescope.'Out to sea. 
nothing moved. 

.. The rooms were draughty and seemed deserted. When he ordered refreshments they were brought by 


an old woman but he served them himself. 'Would you like some of this dried herring?'Money and men 
were his most urgent requirements, he said (there was besides a shortage of timber). The fleet was fitted 
but under-crewed. 'Pardon?'He showed them charts; designs; plans for a strategy they could not 
comprehend. On these maps an unconventional symbol depicted 'mist'. The island continent of Fenlen 
was not marked. Hornwrack looked for it but he could not find it. 

an old woman but he served them himself. 'Would you like some of this dried herring?'Money and men 
were his most urgent requirements, he said (there was besides a shortage of timber). The fleet was fitted 
but under-crewed. 'Pardon?'He showed them charts; designs; plans for a strategy they could not 
comprehend. On these maps an unconventional symbol depicted 'mist'. The island continent of Fenlen 
was not marked. Hornwrack looked for it but he could not find it. 

Buffin looked surprised. 

'Why, it is precisely as you have seen. That is the extent of it.' 

He thought for a long time. Then he said that his ships went out well-armed. They were captained by 
crafty men. At sea they encountered first rough water and adverse currents: then a mist. In the mist was 
some enemy no-one had ever seen. 'A madness comes over them, and they throw themselves into the 
water.'Those that did not drown were destroyed by fire; by unimaginable weapons. Some returned. A 
strange smell clung to their vessels; and they spoke of sounds so appalling as to be beyond description 
(though they were not loud). 

Fulthor began to show signs of impatience. This sort of conjecture was not to his taste. He looked 
sideways at Hornwrack, who shrugged. Cellur the birdmaker, however, had been listening to every 
word. 'Have you ever been attacked on land?'he asked. 

'For ten years now,'Buffin said absently, 'we have fought a war we cannot see. Since the death of my 
father something has been out there.' 

Fulthor stirred, drew in his breath. 'I can make nothing of this,'he said brusquely to Cellur. 'We cannot 
concern ourselves with this.' 

Buflin blinked at him and went on, 'When the mist rolls inshore at night we can sometimes sense them 
down there in the fjord, sailing stealthily inland. Where they are going we do not know.'He smiled tiredly. 
'I'm sorry, the fish is awful.'Momentarily sponged of its lines, his face regained a young and pliant air. 'I'm 
glad you've come at last.' 

Fulthor got up. He handed over his safe-conducts and his letters of introduction. 'Our mission is 
urgent,'he said. 'I should like fresh horses if you have them. Otherwise nothing. I'm sorry we cannot 
help.' 

There was a silence. 

'That was badly done, Alstath Fulthor,'said Cellur. 

Buffin looked at them both. Sleet tapped the milky panes of the greenhouse. Outside, the wind tossed the 
strings of pennants, and set to swaying the distant mast-tops of the half-completed fleet. A mist was 
coming in off the sea. 

'I dreamt last night of a fatal blunder made while asleep,'said Cellur as they made their way back up to 
the cliff-top in the blowing sleet. 'A sleepwalker murdered his own son.' 

'We have done nothing decent here,'agreed Hornwrack a bit absently. Watching with horror the torment 
of St Elmo Buffin, he had suddenly begun to think of his own youth, a faithless season spent in the wet 
plough of the midlands. He could not quite connect the two except in their antithesis. 'That's certain. Only 
co-operate in one more High City betrayal.'It was later in the day. They were all mounted on fresh 
animals. Out of his reverie he gave Alstath Fulthor a look of dislike. (He remembered when it came to it 


only a touch of dead crysanthemums on the skin in some still-aired room; rooks sweeping over the heavy 
earth. What he had taken to be unsentimentality with regard to this had turned out to be quite the reverse. 
In turn, this caused him to think about the Rue Sepile, and all that implied.) 

only a touch of dead crysanthemums on the skin in some still-aired room; rooks sweeping over the heavy 
earth. What he had taken to be unsentimentality with regard to this had turned out to be quite the reverse. 
In turn, this caused him to think about the Rue Sepile, and all that implied.) 

'Quite.' 

'I cannot shake off a sense of foreboding.' 

At the top of the cliff, about to turn inland, they were accosted by the spectre of the ancient airboatman. 
Opening and shutting its mouth like a deformed goldfish, it approached them out of the eddying sleet, 
rotating slowly about its vertical axis. Although, as before, it appeared to maintain only the most 
precarious contact with the World, a thin grey snow seemed to be settling on its shoulders, the ghostly 
precipitate of some foreign continuum. It was agitated. It came very close to Hornwrack and plucked at 
his cloak. (He felt nothing until he tried to beat it offwith the flat of his hands, when there was some slight, 
gelatinous resistance.) 

'Few lawn!'it shouted through its cupped hands, as from a great distance. 'Fog . . Forn . . . Fenling. Oh 
crikey. 'It pointed desperately out to sea. It looked inland and shook its head. 'FENGLIN! nuktis 
'agalma.. . 254 da parte.. . ten cans for a boat load... Fengle!' 

And it took up station above his head like a fat angel, staring tragically backwards as they moved inland 
and signing madly whenever it caught his eye. 

Still later, Tomb the Dwarf rode up to his side. He held out the weapon Hornwrack had lost on the 
quayside. 

'You dropped your sword, soldier.' 

Hornwrack said bitterly, 'Listen old Dwarf, I thought I had got rid of that. I am not him. Whatever he 
was to you. Don't you understand that?' 

The dwarf grinned and shrugged, still holding the sword out expectantly. 

Hornwrack looked up at the thing floating above him. Seeing this, it steered itself rapidly toward him, 
clearing its throat. He groaned, accepted the sword. Both his spectres had returned to haunt him. 

The weather now changed. Low cloud and sleet rolled away east and south to be replaced by a pale sky 
and good visibility. A wind like a razor blew from the north. On a succession of bright but bitterly cold 
days they penetrated the habitable margin of the Great Brown Waste, to find a frozen crust over deep, 
wet peat. Progress was slow. Ifa bird called, tak tak like an echo in a stony gully, the madwoman 
followed it with her eyes, tilting her head; smiled. She was nervous, but now rode ahead of Alstath 
Fulthor. She had led them into a region of high dissected plateaux over which hummed the icy wind, and 
then cast about over the bleak hillsides for a while like a lost bitch. Little paths ran everywhere, 
contouring the salients. As far as anyone could make out she followed them randomly. They led her in the 
end to a stone-crowned, steep-streamed escarpment which sheltered among its boulder-fields sparse 
woods ofstunted oak. On its lower slopes might be discerned the lanes and enclosures of a settlement; 
the walls toppled, the sheepfolds in poor repair. Behind the village rose the eroded shapes of the Agdon 
Roches, from which it took its name: a string of gritstone outcrops quarried long ago for building stone so 
that they formed a succession of bays and shattered promontories. 


'This is a vile bloody place.' 

'This is a vile bloody place.' 

'I've seen worse,'said the dwarf speculatively, as if he wondered whether he had. He wore his leather hat 
at a queer angle; his arms were empurpled with the cold. 

The wreckage of an ancient landscape lay across their path. 

The metaphysical disputes of the late Afternoon Cultures, raging here across the flood-plain of some 
vanished river, had turned it into a corridor of black ash strewn with rounded stones. It was zoned and 
undulating; in places stripped to the underlying rock, ten or twenty feet thick in places. Every summer a 
little more of it dried up and blew away into the Waste. Some of the stones were quite large, some no 
bigger than a fist, and each stood on a little pediment of wind-smoothed ash. Some isolated colonies of 
bilberry and ling grew here and there, raised by the same erosive process until they resembled a chain of 
hairy islets Outlier or prefigurement of the deeper Waste to come, it was a little less than two miles wide, 
and across it could be seen the cracked buttresses of the Agdon Roches, brushed at their summits with 
rosy light. A thin white mist flowed down the gullies and stony cloughs at their feet, drifting through the 
hanging oakwoods and filling up the village street so that only the roofs and upper storeys of the cottages 
were visible. 'Through the still air a dog could be heard barking; sheep bleated from the intakes. In a 
small field stood one cow. All this one might almost have touched, so precisely-enamelled did it seem on 
the bright surface of the air: but Fay Glass would make no move towards it. 

'She is frightened of the maze.' 

'And yet,'said Fulthor, returning from a brief foray, 'her own people must have made it.'Damp ash was 
caked between the fingers of his gauntlets. The discovery of the earthwork had filled him with an obscure 
excitement. Her subsequent refusal to enter or even pass it seemed only to have sharpened this. 'They 
were obsessed by patterns, those who came north in the final desperate days of the Resurrection 
determined to discover a way back.'He smiled whitely. 'As if the fingers of the Past do not already brush 
our cheeks, waking or sleeping - 'He stared back into the maze. 'She is a child, I'm afraid.' 

('We gave them life,'the dwarf said. 'How were we to know they would go mad?'No-one answered 
him.) 

'It is not just the woman,'said Cellur. 'I feel it too.'And he looked out over the little strip of land. 'Error is 
piled on error.' 

'Nevertheless, we go through,'announced Fulthor, setting the madwoman on her horse. 

'There. You shall sit safely. It was bravely done to guide us so far.' 

She looked at him as if he were a stone. 

The basic earthwork, cut into the compacted ash, was supplemented partly by piles of stones, partly by 
raised banks or dykes: the whole being roughly radial in character and some fifteen feet deep. Are we to 
guess its purpose? In the Time of the Locust sign and substance become fatally blurred together: it was 


not so much a maze, perhaps, as a great ideogram, a design representing some barely-achievable state of 
mind; but this said, we have said nothing. Down in the trenches the ash showed evidence of regular 
traffic, and cold, damp airs moved purposelessly. Fulthor's motives were unclear. He could equally well 
have crossed the plain to reach the village. He would not discuss this. He became lost but was slow to 
admit it. When he did the girl would not help him, though she had plainly been in the maze before. He set 
Tomb to climbing one of the walls, but the stuff fell away in fibrous lumps when he was near the top and 
he slid down in a shower of it without having seen anything. 'I seemed to be facing south.' 

not so much a maze, perhaps, as a great ideogram, a design representing some barely-achievable state of 
mind; but this said, we have said nothing. Down in the trenches the ash showed evidence of regular 
traffic, and cold, damp airs moved purposelessly. Fulthor's motives were unclear. He could equally well 
have crossed the plain to reach the village. He would not discuss this. He became lost but was slow to 
admit it. When he did the girl would not help him, though she had plainly been in the maze before. He set 
Tomb to climbing one of the walls, but the stuff fell away in fibrous lumps when he was near the top and 
he slid down in a shower of it without having seen anything. 'I seemed to be facing south.' 

An hour passed (they came upon the hoofprints of their own animals, travelling in the opposite direction) 
and then another. 

A bird flying overhead; the exchange of arguments at a junction; all normal events receded and became 
stripped of meaning. Queer contractile sensations in Hornwrack's skull recalled to him his colourless Low 
City fevers with their intimations of failure and death. (At these times a desultory buzzing had filled his 
ears, as of a wasp trapped among the dry geraniums in some airless attic: he heard it now.) Looking 
uncomfortably round he saw that the others were similarly affected. The whole party had halted. Near 
him the dwarf was shaking his big head about and blinking desperately. Fay Glass had somehow fallen 
off her horse and lay on the ground glaring madly up at the sky. The walls of the maze began to mutate, 
and beckoned Hornwrack with limbs like the first delicately-curled fronds of a fern in spring. 

Now the world toppled sideways with a jolt, as it sometimes does on the verge of sleep. Simultaneously 
he began to perceive it as if through a cluster of tiny hexagonal lenses: for a moment he looked out with 
horror on to a faceted universe. He could make nothing of it. He though he was dying. 

Fay Glass vomited suddenly; leapt to her feet and ran off down the passage. Hornwrack followed more 
slowly, leading his horse, concentrating very carefully in case the ground should tilt further and spill him 
off into the mosaic void he now conceived to be surrounding him. He could hear the other three tottering 
along behind him, crying out like the newly blind. 

The maze, he now understood, had lain in wait for him since his flight from the Bistro Californium, its 
centre coexistent with the hub of that affair. As he struggled down its cindery passageways he imagined 
himself stabbed again and again, a half successful execution presided over by the mad laughter of the 
poet Ansel Verdigris. He lost his horse. Clutching the phantom wound in his side he groaned and drew 
his flawed steel knife (as if a gesture remembered from one maze might release him from the complexities 
of another) . Despairing, he stumbled out into a circular space about thirty feet across; where he was 
relieved abruptly of the mosaic universe, and saw normally again. This central stage or arena was raised a 
few inches above the level of the surrounding maze, and in the middle of it there waited an insect larger 
than a man -The violation, if there was one, was hieratic, notional. Fay 

Glass lay like a corpse. The creature crouched over her. It resembled no insect Hornwrack had ever 
seen but was rather a composite of all insects. From it segmented thorax, which was of a curious 
smokyyellow colour and as shiny as lacquered bamboo, sprang the veiny wings of the ichneumonfly, 
the wedge shaped mask of the common wasp, the mysterious upcurved abdomen of the mantis like a 
symbol from a forbidden language. Its eyes were lit from within, or seemed to be. They were pale 
green, and streaked with orange. A mass of palps and maxillae hung beneath its head, clattering 
spasmodically. He though of the wasteland grasshopper with its serrated legs and arid stridulations. He 
thought of flight through vast abandoned regions, and the world he knew fell away from him so suddenly 
that he was sick. When he could see again, the madwoman had come back to life. 

She made no attempt to get from beneath the insect; but, like something emerging painfully from a larval 


stage, groped and writhed about until she lay on her stomach, her neck twisted so that her white 
motionless face was turned to the assassin. 

stage, groped and writhed about until she lay on her stomach, her neck twisted so that her white 
motionless face was turned to the assassin. 

'I can't help you,'said Hornwrack. 

The insect, he saw, was damaged. The raised and elongated prothorax from which issued its frail 
forelimbs was covered in cuts and gouges, some of them deep enough to reveal the whitish stored fat 
beneath. Crusted secretions rimmed its unearthly eyes. From time to time it scraped aimlessly in the ashes 
at its feet or beat wildly its filmy wings. 

'We see your world,'said the madwoman. 'Killing is all dead world. World killed. We are all killed here.' 

Her voice was flat and mournful. It seemed to come from a huge distance away. In the pauses between 
the words Hornwrack himself became an insect. He flew through the great derelict spaces, shaken by 
compulsions he did not understand. Many others were there with him. A hunger drove them, presiding 
and unproductive. They fell into a choking air and were consumed. 

'We now press your heads. Our words are pressing your heads. Your world presses us. Oh. Gah. ' 

The creature flailed its forelimbs against the ground until one of them fell off. 

'Gah,'said Fay Glass. 'Help. Oh.' 

Hornwrack rushed forward and tried to haul her from under the clattering mandibles. She would not 
come. He felt the huge triangular mask dip toward him. He shouted and ran away again, slashing out 
blindly with his knife. Tomb the Dwarf came out of the maze and touched his elbow. They both ran 
forward and this time pulled her out. The dwarf lost his hat. 'I. We. Oh,'whined Fay Glass; while the 
insect's nervous system underwent some fresh deterioration, causing it to writhe, fan the air, and curl its 
abdomen repeatedly over its head. These spasms were replaced by a curious immobility which in turn 
affected the madwoman. She lay on the floor like a pupating grub, the ends of her fingers bleeding where 
she had bitten them. The insect looked like a great enamelled brooch dug up from some depraved old 
city. Hornwrack and the dwarf watched it warily. It stared back, its eyes enigmatic, crusted. A faint smell 
of lemons hung about it: and behind that rotting cabbage. 

'It sees us,'whispered Tomb. He licked his lips. 'What did she say?'Then: 'Can it see us?' 

Hornwrack was too out of breath to speak. 

The Reborn Men do not think as we do, but live -pursued by an incomprehensible past - among 
distempered waking dreams. Alstath Fulthor wanderd into the centre of the maze from quite another 
entrance, his gait stilted. He stared at the insect in astonishment, flung a hand up in front of his face: a long 
groan came out of his mouth. He looked like some exotic mantis in his blood red armour. Attracted 
perhaps by this the insect turned with a clack clack of coxal joints to face him. (Hornwrack and the 
dwarf were now able to see the curious markings on its abdomen, the three black diagonal bars or fascia 
running across each wing.) He walked round it groaning, his head working as if his neck contained bent 
clockwork. Plainly he thought he was in a dream of the Afternoon, for he murmured to himself of Arnac 
san Tehn and the 'Yellow Gardens'. Now they faced one another again; and if Fulthor looked like an 
insect, then the thing before him with its hacked yellow prothorax resembled an armoured man. Fulthor 
glanced down at the energy blade spitting and fizzing in his hand. He hit the insect across the head with it, 
bursting an eye, cutting into the thorax and shearing off one of its legs. 


It fell over on its side and dragged itself round in a circle, a high whining sound coming from its wings. 
Fay Glass darted about shrieking. Fulthor hit it again; watched its redoubled frenzies with his head tilted 
intelligently on one side; then dropped his weapon, which immediately began fusing the ash around it into 
glass. 'Oh, the great cups!'he cried. 'The thousand flowers and roses! The thought with the force of a 
sensation!'He stared imploringly over at Hornwrack then picked up his sword again and ran off into the 
maze, his eyes wide and his body leaning at an incredible angle to the vertical. 

It fell over on its side and dragged itself round in a circle, a high whining sound coming from its wings. 
Fay Glass darted about shrieking. Fulthor hit it again; watched its redoubled frenzies with his head tilted 
intelligently on one side; then dropped his weapon, which immediately began fusing the ash around it into 
glass. 'Oh, the great cups!'he cried. 'The thousand flowers and roses! The thought with the force of a 
sensation!'He stared imploringly over at Hornwrack then picked up his sword again and ran off into the 
maze, his eyes wide and his body leaning at an incredible angle to the vertical. 

Hornwrack stared at the churned earth; the wreckage of the insect. He shuddered. 

'Look after her,'he told Tomb the Dwarf. 'Try and find Cellur. Tell him about this. He may understand 
what is happening here.'And with that he set off into the maze in search of the Reborn Man. 


8: Galen Hornwrack and the New Invasion 
Down ran Alstath Fulthor, last representative of his House, a scarlet figure with a stride like an ostrich's; 
and down ran Hornwrack the assassin after him, the breath rattling in his lungs. The maze was behind 
them, the village before. In the maze, fearing the hidden junction, the sudden mad leap and mantid clutch, 
the bared teeth of an ambush, Hornwrack had drawn the old sword; out there on the plain it dragged 
down his arm. Westward the land was all as dark as the sky, long black salients reaching back beneath 
the cold clouds, their flanks scored by steep-sided valleys and dotted with piles of haunted stones. In the 
east a little of the early brightness remained to pick out the shattered towers of the Agdon Roches, to 
touch the escarpment and its oakwoods with a lichenous grey. Mist still choked the village beneath, thick 
and slow; but a new wind had stirred out in the Waste and was beginning to tease its edges out in 
streamers, like sheep's wool caught on a fence. The light infused these strands with a delicate yellow; and 
they smelt strongly of lemons. 

Alstath Fulthor flung up his arms and was engulfed. Hornwrack followed, with a desperate cry. 

The mist enwrapped them, it stuffed their lungs with cotton wool. They passed like two coughing ghosts 
along the silent village street. The cottages that loomed on either side were tenantless, dusty and cold, 
their front doors lodged open and creaking in the small winds which seemed to inhabit the inside of the 
mist. From the empty rooms behind issued dry smells. Birdlime was spattered beneath the eaves, and the 
gutters were choked with old nests. Sacking lifted in the wind; lifted, dropped, and lifted again. 

Alstath Fulthor drew ahead. He became a shadow, and then only a thud of footfalls. Hornwrack ran on, 
isolated and a little afraid. Death, he saw, had been there before them; perhaps a month, perhaps two 
months before. A dead man hung half in and half out of a broken window beneath the spattered eaves. 
Another sat like a bundle of sticks propped up in the angle of a stone wall. They observed one another 
dryly, as if some old joke had recently passed between them. Their weapons were orange with rust but 
their bodies, instead of decomposing, seemed to have shrunk, and were as intact as tight old sheaves of 
straw tied up in ancient sacking; as though the mist in advancing one process of decay had retarded the 
other. The village was full of corpses, staring out of doorways, caught in contorted attitudes on the grass 
round the horse trough - looking surprised or complacent or out of breath. Others had drawn their knives 
and had been about to throw themselves on some enemy. A few children had fallen down during a game 


in which they followed one another stealthily among the houses, hands held hooked above their heads. 

in which they followed one another stealthily among the houses, hands held hooked above their heads. 

They had been coming here. Wherever they had come from they had ended up here, standing at salient 
junctions like abandoned machines, their broken antennae and cracked wings dangling in the wind, their 
compound eyes as dull as stones. Patches of corruption darkened the ground beneath them like tarry 
shadows, as if vital fluids had bled slowly from abdomen and thorax to fertilize a crop of bluish 
mushrooms and unearthly moulds before drying-up altogether. With this dessication had come the slow 
retreat of the intelligence into the husk, the drying up of the violent insectile telepathies received by 
Hornwrack and the others in the maze, those incidental broadcasts from the mosaic universe which had 
driven Buffin's sailors to burn their own ships or drown themselves in the fogbound sea. 

At night, its mad energy not quite spent, a disembodied head bounced down the gutters of Hornwrack's 
Low City dreams, accompanied by the laughter of the crackpot poet: plainly it had originated here among 
these dilapidated hulks, one out of three of which had fallen under the energy blades of the Reborn 
villagers and, curious viscera exposed in section, now lay surrounded by a litter of amputated limbs. 
Someone had cut it off and sent it south as a call for help. The rest of them, though they showed a few 
shallow cuts and scrapes made by less exotic weapons, like violent scribbles on a lacquered screen - had 
evidently succumbed to the same disease as the lone survivor in the maze. Crusted discharges had 
swollen their joints. Strings of hardened mucus hung from the curious appendages attached by leather 
straps to their facial parts. They faced one another in the mechanistic postures of their death, and a faint 
whisper of telepathy was draped about them like a cobweb. It touched the inside of his skull as he ran 
dreaming between them, afraid they would come back to life if he lingered. 

He ducked beneath a complicated snout. He pushed aside a canted crackling wing. He waved the old 
sword about until his arm ached. Later he might recall this: now he knew nothing. The wings of the 
wasteland locust rustled uneasily in his head, gathering for some vast migration. He no longer cared about 
Alstath Fulthor, running ahead in the mist. He leapt and sang like a grasshopper, and his progress had 
become a flight. 

(Alive or dead, he managed to think, they have altered the Earth; they have changed it manifestly. 
Something has come into it . . . 

. . . And thinking this, emerged from the village.) It was like a door opening and closing. When he looked 
back the mist was streaming away along the foot of the escarpment in the new wind, and the three small 
figures of Cellur, Tomb and Fay Glass, issuing uncertainly from the maze, had begun to cross the plain. 

Hornwrack and Fulthor confronted in a stony cleft among dwarf birch and oak. A chalky light, slanting 
down between the brittle boughs on to banks of heather and bilberry, revealed the Reborn Man sitting 
quietly on an unfinished millstone, his features as white and careworn as those of a praying king. A pied 
bird absorbed his attention: it hopped from stone to stone, tilting its small bright eye to watch him. Chill 
airs rattled the twigs above his head, stirred his yellow hair. The baan in his hand flickered like a firework 
in the hand of a child; he had forgotten it. Votive and calm in his scarlet armour, he looked like the invalid 
knight in the old painting; and the overhanging towers of the Agdon Roches, with their silent gullies and 
damp sandy courses, rose up behind him through a screen of black branches like the buttresses of an 
ancient chapel. 

When Hornwrack pushed his way through the oaks, old leaves and lichenous dust showered down; and 
the little bird flew away. 


'Fulthor?' 

'Fulthor?' 

'Hornwrack! Am I mad?'A bitter laugh. 'Another dream. More days lost in the absolute abyss of Time. 
Oh, the fiery woman, with her expressionless eyes! How long have I been away?' 

And he advanced dreamily on Hornwrack, still swinging the energy blade. 

'Fulthor!'screamed Hornwrack, who saw no magical king (who could blame him? He had been born 
three millenia too late) and who failed to hear the hum of that long declining dream: 'It's me!'He ducked 
the lethal stroke; offered the old steel sword (its tip was lopped off instantly); stepped in desperately 
close and hammered Fulthor's wrist with the pommel of his trusty knife. Nerveless, the white hand 
opened. The baan fell. Fulthor gave a howl of despair and sat down suddenly. 'Must I always choose 
between there and here?'He regarded Hornwrack from between his hands. 'Kill me then.'He looked 
round. 'Where are we?' 

Hornwrack, however, was no longer interested. 

The ghost of Benedict Paucemanly had reappeared, to float over the oakwood mouthing like a drowned 
sailor; and through its unsteady, half-transparent shape he had caught a sudden glimpse of the horizon. 
There, insectile silhouettes processed slowly against a greenish sky, full of bitter snow. They seemed to 
carry with them an unquiet cobalt halo; along their sides flared sphenograms of an acid green; they held 
their forelegs delicately raised. Over the summits of the Agdon Roches they went, southwards, with an 
exquisite mechanical concentration, looking neither left nor right. 

The world started to melt like candle wax. 

Hornwrack got Fulthor somehow to his feet. Unspeaking, they descended the hill. 

Snow whirled round them. Roots caught at their feet. Paucemanly encouraged them with whistles and 
farts. 

'I really mean it, you blokes - ten thousand nights were put in one! There I lay, listening to the winds 
gathering in the dry places, the abandoned places. We're all in it now, us and them, raw-blind on the 
waterstair at Shadwell Pier like burnt rats! Phew! The white Moon makes thus the stair of our descent . 
. . There was more of this. 'Ooh, what you must think of me I don't know,'he would exclaim fishily; and 
then, screwing up his eyes behind the faceplate of his abominable mask, bawl -'Felneck! Fandle! 
FENLEN!' 

-his queer epicene voice hooting across the hillside like a signal while, above, the insectile procession 
moved on imperturbably: south, south, south . . . 
The new wind, rushing blindly out of the east under a cavernous overcast, had brought black obscurity to 
the village, whose streets were now full of flying chemical ice blown in from the Deep Waste. The dead 
insects at each corner creaked and shifted in the gale. Their eyes were pitted and stony. Above them 
splinters of chitin, sections of antennae and shattered veiny wing floated and spun in the rooftop eddies 
like the rubbish of the Low City rattling round the chimneys below Alves on a blustery night. Hornwrack 
leaned on Alstath Fulthor, his eyes rimed with urgent ice, the words blown out of his mouth and every 


thought out of his skull. They came down the main street like drunks in the weak glow of Fulthor's 
armour. All else was shadowy, hard to interpret. Dead men leaned conversationally forward as they 
passed, then toppled on to empty faces, limbs breaking away like the rotten limbs ofscarecrows to go 
bounding off down the road and lodge in a fence. 

thought out of his skull. They came down the main street like drunks in the weak glow of Fulthor's 
armour. All else was shadowy, hard to interpret. Dead men leaned conversationally forward as they 
passed, then toppled on to empty faces, limbs breaking away like the rotten limbs ofscarecrows to go 
bounding off down the road and lodge in a fence. 

tTomb 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 shell: 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 tosit 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.' 

Fulthor. Up on the escarpment he tried to kill me.' 

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 todo?' 

'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 on to 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. Still: one way or another I dare say 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. ' 

We are off to Vegys now. ' 

All this time, off at the edge of his awareness, faint telepathies crawled like maggots round the rim of a 
saucer. Up there on the Agdon scarp was a stealthy and purposeful movement, too far away to hurt him 
yet, too close for comfort. Suddenly he became frightened that. they would come down unexpectedly 
and discover him among their dead. What delicate revenge might they take? In any case he could not 
bear their thoughts in his skull. Two horses had been left him for three people. Feverishly he urged the 
madwoman up on to one of them; and then with his hand on his knife approached the Reborn Man, 
wishing the dwarf had captured the baan during their brief scuffle beneath the horse. Eyeing him with a 
sad amusement, Fulthor said, 'I will run beside you. It is not so far.' 

The ramshackle conservatory of St Elmo Buflin, with its invented flags and fantastic telescopes, teetered 
high above the fish docks of the port, full of silence, brackish air and the smell of the food they had been 
served there a week or more ago. Buffin sat as if he had not moved since then, in a high-backed chair 
surrounded by plates of congealed herring. He had taken off his, father's armour and underneath was 
swathed in some dirty white stuff, linen or flannel, as if he suffered with his joints. He was staring at 
nothing, his long thin legs thrust out in front of him and crossed as though they belong to someone else, his 
baglike face crumpled and desperate. His instruments lay smashed. They were no more or less 
meaningful for it: nests of bent brass tubing, complex coloured lenses pulled apart like sugared anemones 
underfoot. The charts he had ripped down, to reveal the walls beneath. He had lost his patience with 
them, perhaps. 

Hornwrack wiped the condensation from a cracked pane, looked out. 

'You need not have done this to yourself,'he said. 

It was such a waste. He felt hot and angry, cold and remote, all at once. 

'What happened here?' 

Buffin did not answer for a long time. The Afternoon had betrayed him again, and the old powered 
knife with which he had tried to kill himself now lay sputtering feebly in his lap, its energies spent 
at last. Some blood had flowed, then dried brown. He did not seem to be able to move his head. The 
silence drew out. Wondering if he was already dead, Hornwrack waited, breathing evenly and trying to 
make out what was happening in the port below. 

'What does it matter?'came the eventual answer. Then, after another long pause: 'Of the fleet I 
ordered the uncompleted part destroyed. It is of no use now. Viriconium will never help us 
now.'He laughed quietly. 'The rest has sailed, into madness and death. The mist surrounds us (can 
you not hear it? It is like bells!) and all has failed.' 

He bit his bottom lip. 'I dare not move my head,'he said, staring forward at nothing, fingering the hilt of 


the useless knife. 'Can you see what I have done?' 

the useless knife. 'Can you see what I have done?' 

If he wiped a circle on the glass with the palm of his hand he could see framed in it the black 
original buildings of the fjord squatting like toads on the lower slopes. To his right a cliff swept up, also 
black, and laced for five hundred feet with icy ledges. Until recently ice had locked the harbour: now 
churned and broken sheets of it bobbed in the black channels cut by the departed fleet. Beneath him 
banks of white vapour hung, drifting sluggishly down the cobbled slopes toward the shrouded quays. In 
places it was deep enough to cover the upper casements of the cottages as it was driven reluctantly 
between them by the bitter intermittent wind; in others, where it was shallower, he thought he could 
see heads and torsos going about above it on some cryptic dislocated errand. The suggestion of 
movement beneath it he tried to ignore. Above all this in the green subarctic sky, aurorae flickered, 
and great streaks of red and black cloud mimicked the flame and smoke beneath, where men ran 
despairingly among the boatyards with torches, setting fire to their labour of years. 

Death was written in the scrollwork at the bows, death on the painted sterns and the ornate 
brass bells.'DEATH', proclaimed the painted sails, while the white decks beneath bubbled and 
charred, generating a heat fierce enough to melt the metal masts. Ash whirled into the air, unknown 
incandescent alloys showered down, last fruit of that doomed collaboration between Afternoon and 
Evening (which now pursue their separate courses, as we know). Rolling into the flames, the mist turned 
them instantly green and blue; and was itself transformed with a roar into a greyish powdery smoke 
which, sucked up in the merciless updraughts, bellied out above the doomed craft in a choking spherical 
cloud. Spars flared and fell. Ratlines parted with the sound of a broken violin. Here and there a man was 
trapped in a tangle of ropes, or caught among the stays beneath a blazing bowsprit with 
no-one to hear his cries. At the height of the fire a single painted sail escaped its ties, unfurled, billowed 
upward. For a brief moment a pair of great illusory lizards danced in the air! only to sink with a 
regretful whisper and be consumed, writhing amid the smoke in a counterfeit of the pain in St Elmo 
Buffin's frigid, frightened stare. 

'I had no life,'said Buffin, 'even as a child.'Hornwrack bent close to the cold lips to hear. 'My father bade 
me, Watch the sea.' 

'I've had no life either,'said Hornwrack. 

He forced himself to look through the one surviving telescope. At first he could see nothing. A sailor 
rushed into the room behind him shouting, 'Buffin, they are among us in the fog!'Seeing Hornwrack he 
halted uncertainly. A pleading note entered his voice. 'Buflin, only one ship 

remains. Let us take you aboard her!' 

'He is dead,'said Hornwrack, who now discerned a sad grey ground, and against that something 
spinning at the end of a thread. 'What's happened here?' 

'A fog followed us ashore this morning. The women and children are all dead of it.'He stared at 
Hornwrack's back. 'Great locusts inhabit it!' 

'They are your longtime enemy. Where does this last ship sail?' 

'West, after the fleet, as he would have wished.' 

Spinning, spinning. 


'Take me then,'said Hornwrack, 'instead.' 

'Take me then,'said Hornwrack, 'instead.' 

During the journey from Agdon Roches, Alstath Fulthor had regained a measure of his sanity - that is to 
say he now remembered where and, to an extent, who he was; but the girl had chopped his hair to a 
ragged stubble one night while he slept, giving him something of her own hollow-eyed, 
perpetually-surprised expression; and his skin had taken on a bleached unearthiy look, like a saint's. They 
were often together, reciting the rhymes that comprised her vocabulary, practising the scraps of 
meaningless dialogue and lists of non-existent cities which seemed to be her 'keys'to the Past. Fulthor 
was learning, in the way the child of an exile learns those bits and pieces of its heritage that remain (and 
which, after so much repetition, undergo a sea-change, bearing less and less relationship to a vanished 
culture in a land it has never seen). Hornwrack tried to ignore their public tendernesses, their strange, 
almost unemotional sexual contacts; and clothed his embarrassment in a characteristic surliness. 

He found them now down in the port, two tall, awkward figures wrapped in cloaks, standing 
uncomfortably near the burning boatyards. Despite the heat and smoke they were waiting exactly where 
he had left them, the flames reflected in their calm odd eyes. Later, at the rail of the last ship, watching the 
sailors warp her sadly from the bleak shore, Fulthor seemed disposed to talk. He was lucid, polite, 
aware: 

but each new immersion in the stream of memory had carried him further from his Evening existence and 
its events; and he had forgotten his earlier shoddy treatment of St Elmo Buffin. So when he asked, 'How 
then did the shipwright die?'it was cruel of Hornwrack to reply, 

. 'He cut his own throat, but it was you he died of.' 

Iron Chine would not survive him. Fires had now sprung up among the cottages, set by the sailors before 
they left; and small flames danced behind the panes of the dilapidated conservatory above the town. The 
strip of black water between the boat and the quay grew wider. The frigid cliffs slipped past; the curious 
flags and strips of coloured rag flying over the conservatory blazed up one by one; above everything 
burned the clouds, like the bloody auroral sunset of some other planet. 

What happened to the fleet of St Elmo Buffin? It was not provisioned well. He had given small thought to 
navigating 

it. Much of it was lost immediately amid the white water and foul ground, the atrocious currents and 
uncharted islands which outlie the jagged coast of Viriconium. Much of it, hampered by the ice which 
formed on decks and rigging, turned quietly turtle in the gelid sea. There were fogs, too, lying in 
hundred-mile banks across the straits which separate Fenlen from Iron Chine; and in these the greatest 
loss was incurred. Each ship fought alone, wrapped in a dreamlike shroud of pearly light. Ice burned like 
alum on the ratlines and stays. There were collisions, mutinies, accidental fires and shouts as of other men 
desperate and dying beyond the nacreous wall of fog. It was in all aspects a lost venture. The fog smelled 
of rotting fruit; and at the sound of wings men leapt overboard or cut their own throats, staring dumbly for 
a last few seconds at a universe faceted like an insect's eye. One ship survived. 

Imagined a low dark coastline shelving back through a series of eroded fossil beaches into a desolation 
which makes the deepest waste of Viriconium seem like a water-meadow. Nothing lives about these 
beaches but limpets and kelp; a few curiously furtive terns which survive for the most part by eating one 
another's eggs; and in season a handful of deformed seals. Chemical rivers make their way here from the 
continental marshes north and west; tars and oils from sumps a thousand years old and a thousand miles 


inland trickle sluggishly down the terraces of black pumice, staining them emerald green, ochre, purple. 
Imagine a glaucous ocean; a low swell at the freezing point, lapping at the brutal shore. Strings and bulbs 
of mineral pigment wave beneath the water like weed, growing from the chemical silt. There is no wind to 
speak of. Out to sea about a mile, a bank of mist is rolling south, parallel to the coast. 

inland trickle sluggishly down the terraces of black pumice, staining them emerald green, ochre, purple. 
Imagine a glaucous ocean; a low swell at the freezing point, lapping at the brutal shore. Strings and bulbs 
of mineral pigment wave beneath the water like weed, growing from the chemical silt. There is no wind to 
speak of. Out to sea about a mile, a bank of mist is rolling south, parallel to the coast. 

Her deckplates are up, buckled like lead foil, her wheelhouse blackened by the same fire which lately ate 
into her hull amidships. Her figurehead hangs loose in a wreck of stays, a partly human form difficult of 
exact description. She is down at the stern and listing to starboard. Silently, captured by some current 
invisible from the shore, she is drawn in toward the beach; quicker and quicker until she rams the stained 
pumice shelves with a groan and, ripped open, goes over by the bow and begins to sink. A few birds fly 
up from her yards. Chips of ice rattle down. A sail, partly unfurled by the shock of the collision, shows a 
great drunken beetle to the empty beach. Bedded in the poisonous silt, she will settle no further, but 
nudges the shore with every wave. 

After a few minutes a grotesque shape begins to form in the cold air above her shattered deck, like a 
crude figure of a man projected somehow on a puff of steam. 


9: The Explanations of the Ancient Airboatman 
Midwinter clutches the Pastel City, cold as thought. 

In the Cispontine Quarter the women have been to and fro all day gathering fuel. By afternoon they had 
stripped the empty lots to the bare hard soil, bobbing in ragged lines amid the sad induviate stems of last 
year's growth, their black shawls giving them the air of rooks in a potato field. Not an elder or bramble is 
left now but it is a stump; and that will be grubbed up tomorrow by some enterprising mattock in a bony 
hand. At twilight, which - exhaled, as it were, from every shattered corner - comes early to the City's 
broken parts, they filled the nearby streets for half-an-hour, hurrying westwards with their unwieldy 
bundles to where, along the Avenue Fiche and the Rue Sepile, Margery Fry Road and the peeling old 
'Boulevard Saint Ettiene', the old men sat waiting for them with souls shrivelled up like walnuts in the 
cold. Now they sit by reeking stoves, using the ghost of a dog-rose to cook cabbage! 

Cabbage! The whole of the Low City has smelt of this delicacy all winter. It is on everyone's breath and 
in everyone's overcoat. It has seeped into the baize cloth of everyone's parlour. It has insinuated itself into 
the brickwork of every privy, coagulated in alleys, hung in unpeopled corners and conserved its virtues, 
waiting for the day when it might come at last to the High City. This evening, like an invisible army, it 
filtered by stages along the Boulevard Aussman, where it woke the caged rabbits in the bakers'back 
yards and caused the chained dogs to whimper with excitement; flowed about the base of the hill at 
Alves, investing the derelict observatory with an extraordinary new significance; and passed finally to the 
heights of Minnet-Saba, where it gathered in waves to begin its stealthy assault on the High Noses. On 
the way it informed some strange crannies: inundating for instance a little-used arm of the pleasure canal 
at Lowth, where its spirit infected incidentally a curious tragedy on the ice. 

The air was bitter inside the nose, the sky as black as anthracite. The Name Stars glittered cynically, 
commemorating some best-forgotten king. Down below on the frozen canal a grubby satin booth was 
pitched, its yellow shutters up, its cressets cold. From its door a long-legged brazier, kept fed with frigid 
horse dung, looked out like a red eye. In it, under the zodiacal representations and the testimonials to its 
proprietor's efficacy, a poet and a for tune teller sat, cheating one another feverishly at 'blind Michael'. 

The poet was a rag of a man, little, and hollow-cheeked from a life of squalor, with his bright red hair 
stuck up on his head like a wattle and greed lurking in the corners of his grin. He gave his small hands no 
rest - when he was not trying to palm cards or filch the bottle, he was flapping them about like a wooden 


puppet's. At slow moments during the play he would stare silently into the air with his face empty and his 
mouth slack; then, catching himself, leap up from the three-legged stool on which he sat and go jigging 
round the booth until by laughing and extemporizing he had got his humour back. In mirth, or delivering 
doggerel, his voice had a penetrating hysterical timbre, like a knife scraped desperately on a plate. He 
had made a 'ballade of stewed cabbage'earlier that evening, but seemed to hate and fear the smell of the 
stuff, grimacing with dilated nostrils and turned-down mouth when a wave of it passed through the booth. 
His name was Ansel Verdigris, and the fat woman across the card table was his last resort. 

puppet's. At slow moments during the play he would stare silently into the air with his face empty and his 
mouth slack; then, catching himself, leap up from the three-legged stool on which he sat and go jigging 
round the booth until by laughing and extemporizing he had got his humour back. In mirth, or delivering 
doggerel, his voice had a penetrating hysterical timbre, like a knife scraped desperately on a plate. He 
had made a 'ballade of stewed cabbage'earlier that evening, but seemed to hate and fear the smell of the 
stuff, grimacing with dilated nostrils and turned-down mouth when a wave of it passed through the booth. 
His name was Ansel Verdigris, and the fat woman across the card table was his last resort. 

At midnight he scratched his armpits and parted for the hundredth time the grubby satin curtains. The 
gravestones seemed to stretch back indefinitely under the moonlight. Where they ceased the 
Artists'Quarter began, its piebald roofs hanging on the dark skyline like an evil conundrum. Up the slope 
went his eyes, through the graves and into the city; back again. 'You sleep well enough out there!'he 
jeered, and then said a name the fortune teller could not catch. His narrow angular shoulders shuddered 
convulsively. She called him back but he hardly heard. He had not slept well himself since the night he 
murdered Galen Hornwrack. It was a yellow night, that one, grimed into his raddled brain and smelling of 
that unspeakable bundle with its rotting eyes. Ever since, he had had a feeling of being followed around. 
'Someone walked over my grave,'he said. He laughed. 'Well I'll not mourn!'The moonlight flooding past 
him into the booth was of a peculiar cast: in it, as we shall soon see, things seemed almost more solid than 
they did in broad daylight. 'They sleep well enough out there on All Men's Heath,'he said, and made to 
draw the satin closed. 

Instantly the reek of stewed cabbage redoubled, rooting him to the spot. A lethal claustrophobia 
overcame him. 'Hornwrack!'he shrieked. He spun round, blundered past the fortune teller (who had got 
laboriously to her feet and spread her arms in an elephantine gesture of comfort), and tumbled out on to 
the ice, where his feet slipped from under him. In an attempt to keep his balance he grabbed the brazier 
by one of its iron legs. This only served to upset it over him. Squealing with pain and fear he slid out of 
the light, plucking feverishly at the glowing embers in his clothing. 

The Fat Main was used to his convulsions. Grumbling hardly at all she righted the table. Queer little 
scenes glowed up at her from the scattered cards, ancient hieratic conjunctions of tower and insect 
stimulating her to worn prophecies. A good marriage, she thought, and a bad one: and there a 
blond-haired man. (Each card was like a small bright doorway at the end of a corridor. She was perhaps 
too old now to step through and be enshrined in pasteboard with a hermit crab and a flight of swans.) On 
her way to the back of the booth to see what had upset him this time she stopped to turn one card at 
random; stare at it for a moment, panting; and nod heavily to herself. Then she parted the curtains and 
looked out. 

For a month or more, agents and emmissaries of the Sign of the Locust - now grown massively in power 
though its outlook became daily more esoteric, and seeking revenge for (among other things) the bloody 
confrontation in the Bistro Californium - had sought Ansel Verdigris through the warrens of the Low City. 


They were oblique but patient. Every clue had pointed to the pleasure canal. Now, their gait curious in 
the extreme, they raced silently down the slope of All Men's Heath toward the quivering Main. They 
were wrapped in rags and bandaged about their peculiarly misshapen heads, and as they hopped high in 
the air over the graves their arms flew out at odd angles and their knives were white in the moonlight. 

They were oblique but patient. Every clue had pointed to the pleasure canal. Now, their gait curious in 
the extreme, they raced silently down the slope of All Men's Heath toward the quivering Main. They 
were wrapped in rags and bandaged about their peculiarly misshapen heads, and as they hopped high in 
the air over the graves their arms flew out at odd angles and their knives were white in the moonlight. 

Soon after they had entered it the booth began to agitate itself in a violent and eccentric fashion, lifting its 
skirts and tottering from side to side as if it was trying to remember how to walk - while out of it came a 
steady rhythmical thumping sound, like two or three axes hitting a wet log. A dreadful astonished wail 
rose up in accompaniment to this, modulating with each blow. Verdigris bit his lips and drew back further 
into the weeds. He put his hands over his ears, but this changed nothing. The knives of the Sign rose and 
fell regularly; and the booth, like some remarkable engine in the night, continued to propel itself with an 
uncertain shuffling motion this way and that across the ice. After a little while, having reached the centre 
of the canal (where only lately it had been all boiled chestnuts and skating anemone-boys), it collapsed. 
Amorphous figures struggled momentarily beneath it; then it gave them up and they poured away through 
the cemetery in a quiet tattered wave, like the shadow of a cloud crossing a stony field. The booth 
gurgled and was still. It had somehow become tangled in the legs of the spilt brazier. Fire licked, 
reluctantly at first, at its grubby skirts. Then it was engulfed in a sudden silent rush of flames. 

Ansel Verdigris stood on the ice in the unsteady yellow glow. He drew his knife and, in an access of 
some emotion he did not quite recognize, went off shouting up the hill and was ambushed and killed 
among the gravestones. 

Not far away from All Men's Heath in the sharp and cabbagey night, Tomb the Dwarf kicked at his 
pony. His feet were cold. He had recently entered the City through the Gate ofNigg after three or four 
weeks in the deep wastes with Cellur the Bird Lord. Adventures and privations had attended him there, 
as they always did: old lizards following his steps, blinking at night in the small light of the fire; the pony 
quagged perpetually to its elbows in seepage hollows; and a great bird, first hanging high up in the air 
above them then settling nervously on a rock to inspect them from intelligent puzzled eyes, every feather 
made of metal! He had a friend buried in every acre of the North - knights of the Methven, sour old 
prospectors, all the thieves and princes who had traipsed with him at one time or another the useless 
places of the Empire. They had followed him too, as night drew in across the old battlefields of the Great 
Brown Waste. 

The season now teetered on the cold iron pivot of the solstice, and Viriconium was asleep for once, 
huddled against the cold; you could hear its catarrhal snores from upper windows. The mosaic of its 
roofs, whited by moonlight and last week's frozen snow, lay like the demonstration of some equivocal 
new geometry. The Low City had retreated from him even as he entered it (dogs shivering outside the 
gatehouse, no other sign of life; the tunnel smelling of pee, black ice and that merciless vegetable), so that 
he seemed always to view it at a distance. He did not understand its mood. A muted expectancy, a cold 
glamour resistant to his dwarfish intuition, vibrated in its surfaces: he had for a moment (it was a moment 
only) a sense of two cities, overlapping in a sprawl of moonlit triangles and tangled thoroughfares. This 
conceit caused him to smile but remained with him nevertheless, quite distinctly, as if he had seen the 
future as a composite city uninhabited by human beings. 

More beggars were abroad than a single city had a right to, moving quietly about in ones and twos, the 
deformities that would by day be displayed up on Chamomile Street outside the pot-house doors, now 
half-hidden, under scalloped rags and strange tight bandages - as if when left to themselves they sought a 
finer aesthetic of suffering, and a subtler performance of it. Tomb stood up in his stirrups to see over the 


parapet of a bridge. (Toc toc went the pony's hooves, little and sharp on the cobbles.) 'Someone at least 
is keeping the night alive,'he observed. Underneath him the Pleasure Canal diminished toward Lowth in 
an icy curve, its surface tricked out with dim reflections of the Moon. 'The ice is miraculously hard. 
They've lit a brazier down there on it.'Cellur, though, seemed preoccupied. 'Now it's spilt!'Faint shouts 
and wails, as of laughter, floated up. 'Look here, Cellur - some fool's set fire to a conjuror's booth!' 

parapet of a bridge. (Toc toc went the pony's hooves, little and sharp on the cobbles.) 'Someone at least 
is keeping the night alive,'he observed. Underneath him the Pleasure Canal diminished toward Lowth in 
an icy curve, its surface tricked out with dim reflections of the Moon. 'The ice is miraculously hard. 
They've lit a brazier down there on it.'Cellur, though, seemed preoccupied. 'Now it's spilt!'Faint shouts 
and wails, as of laughter, floated up. 'Look here, Cellur - some fool's set fire to a conjuror's booth!' 

'You wish to see nothing. You are a dreary companion, I can tell you that. It's all gone dark now 
anyway,'said the dwarf disappointedly. He craned his neck. Nothing. His pony drifted to a standstill. 
When he caught up again the old man was hemming and clucking nervously. 

'Those alms-men are following us now. Be ready with your axe. I do not believe they are what they 
seem.' 

'Arms-men! Bloody beggars, more like.'He shifted the axe from one shoulder to the other. 'Black 
piss!'He had looked back and got a glimpse of the beggars hopping after him, soft-boned and 
ricketty-kneed, their arms flying out this way and that for balance. It was a horrible sight. 'There are not 
that many beggars in the entire world!'They were all humps and goitres. Their mis-shapen heads were 
concealed under crusty swathes of muslin and hats with ragged brims. Up in the Artists'Quarter and all 
around the derelict observatory at Alves they were gathering in large groups, lurching crazily about in 
white-breathed circles, watching idly as Tomb and Cellur rode past, joining the quiet procession behind. 
An occasional soft groan came from amongst them. Cellur's horse slithered and stumbled from rut to 
frozen rut; and though the pony was surer-footed they still went slowly up the Rivelin Hill between the 
shuttered booths and empty taverns. 

Into the High City they went, but it proved to be no sanctuary. When they quickened their pace, the 
beggars . quickened theirs, breaking into the parody of a run. Through the elegant deserted plazas 
ofMinnet-Saba (where the road is made of something that muffles the sound of hooves and the wind has 
mumbled puzzledly for millenia round the upper peculiarities of the Pastel Towers) they poured, and out 
on to the great exposed spiral of the Proton Circuit: reeling from side to side, jumping and hopping and 
tripping themselves up, always out of the power-axe's reach: 

maintaining a zone ofquarantine about the old man and the dwarf, sweeping them along by the mere 
promise of contact. Tomb bit his lip and belaboured the pony's sides. All around him was a sort of dumb 
rustling noise, punctuated by the gasps and quiet desperate groans of the deformed. (Above and behind 
that he thought he heard a parched whisper, as if some enormous insect hovered above the chase on 
huge thoughtful wings.) 

Ahead, lights glimmered. In the gusty winds at the summit of the spiral, the overlapping filigree shells of 
the palace creaked as if they were part of some flimsier structure. Methven's hall: the Moon hung above it 
like a daubed head. 'Look!'For a moment its image wavered - two palaces were superimposed, behind it 
another landscape showed through. Blue particles showered from its upper regions, a rain of tiny 
luminous insects. They galloped toward it nevertheless. Where else could they go? It trembled like a 
dragonfly's wing; was refracted like something seen through running water on a sunny day; and accepted 
them almost reluctantly. New Palace Yard was almost deserted. Tomb's caravan still stood there, its 
shafts empty and its colours dimmed by the smoke of winter. No guards were there to observe the 
sparks fly up from the pony's hooves or watch the dwarf- axe in hand and white hair streaming out 
behind 

-tumble to the ground and hurl himself back through the gate they had just come through, determined to 
hold it at all costs. 

The beggars, though, had forgotten about him the moment he entered the palace, and now idled about 
outside, staring blankly at one another. They were not beggars, he saw: they were bakers and 
greengrocers, in the remnants of striped aprons; they were dukes and moneylenders: they were butchers. 
The Sign of the Locust peeped through their curious rags. They stood in the bluish moonlight and they 
seemed to be waiting for something; he couldn't tell what. (They no longer had any reasons for the things 
they did, but he wasn't to know that. A white and single instinct had them now, like a thin song in the 
brain.) He watched them for five or six minutes, feeling the sweat dry on him as the seconds stretched 
uneventfully out and his body relaxed. Cellur came up behind him and looked over his head. 'You can put 
up the axe,'he said with a certain morose satisfaction. 'The City is theirs, High and Low.'And he strode 
rapidly off into the outer corridors, heading for the throne-room. Tomb backed away from the gate with 
a half-hearted snarl and, stopping to collect the bundle of long silver rods he had carried behind his 
saddle to the Agdon Roches and back, followed him. 

The beggars, though, had forgotten about him the moment he entered the palace, and now idled about 
outside, staring blankly at one another. They were not beggars, he saw: they were bakers and 
greengrocers, in the remnants of striped aprons; they were dukes and moneylenders: they were butchers. 
The Sign of the Locust peeped through their curious rags. They stood in the bluish moonlight and they 
seemed to be waiting for something; he couldn't tell what. (They no longer had any reasons for the things 
they did, but he wasn't to know that. A white and single instinct had them now, like a thin song in the 
brain.) He watched them for five or six minutes, feeling the sweat dry on him as the seconds stretched 
uneventfully out and his body relaxed. Cellur came up behind him and looked over his head. 'You can put 
up the axe,'he said with a certain morose satisfaction. 'The City is theirs, High and Low.'And he strode 
rapidly off into the outer corridors, heading for the throne-room. Tomb backed away from the gate with 
a half-hearted snarl and, stopping to collect the bundle of long silver rods he had carried behind his 
saddle to the Agdon Roches and back, followed him. 

'They have let us in,'he said: 'But they will not let us out again so easily. I wonder what they are waiting 
for.' 

(Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, waited also, in a cold room with five false windows. It had been a long time 
to wait at the heart of emptiness, nothing human moving in the corridors outside.) 

Elsewhere, three figures cross our field of vision like the vanguard of an as-yet-distant refugee column. 
The deep wastes of Fenlen roll away from them in the weak, variable light of late afternoon, hollow as a 
fevered cheek. Their faces are haggard but human. They walk - if walk is the word for this slithering, 
staggering progress through the mud - heads down into the rain and some yards apart. They rarely speak 
to one another. Madness and pain have divided them and they will not now be brought back together. All 
day long they have followed a fourth figure (there! - bobbing in the saturated air above them, like some 
great inflated spectral frog!) through a belt ofderelict factories. Often they halt and stare anxiously about, 
in case this floating guide has abandoned them: for they are forty days out from the wreckage of Iron 
Chine, and they have almost forgotten who they are. The moor ahead of them is scattered with interlacing 
ashpits, chancred with shallow albescent tarns, and strewn as far as the eye can see with broken 
earthenware pipes - the detritus, it may be, of some ancient ill-fated reclamation project. From the 
continental marshes and sumps to the north, the wind brings a deadly metallic reek; and mixed with that 
more often than not comes the faint smell of lemons, to usher in another period of delirium. 

The woman imagines she is the spokesman of some alien race. Her cropped hair is daubed with mud, 
and she makes complicated motions of the fingers to symbolize the actions of wings or antennae. She 
speaks of a city on the plain. 'We lid not wish to come here,'she says reasonably, 'this is not our 
place!'There is a cold-sore at the corner of her mouth. For the last half-hour her gait had grown steadily 
more disconnected. 'Your breath burns us!'she exclaims with a light laugh, as if stating some principle so 
obvious as to need no demonstration; and she collapses into the mud. Her limbs move feebly then stop. 
Broken pipes are dislodged and roll down on to her. Her companions continue their ascent of the low 
ridge before them. At last one of them looks back. 

'Fulthor,'he says dully, 'she can't go any further unaided;'and the other replies, 'I see the great-breasted 
chimerae with their ironic eyes, but I cannot go to them! This morning early I had a vision of Arnac san 
Tehn - him with the head like a god - sitting in a garden.' 

He strikes himself repeatedly about the face and head. 'Dust and hyacinths in my father's library; dust and 


hyacinths my proud inheritance!'This litany seems to give him doubtful comfort. For some time he runs in 
erratic circles in the mud, his neck bent and his face pulled over to one side of his skull as if he has 
suffered a stroke. Eventually he joins the first figure (who has sat down wearily to watch him) and with 
much fumbling they raise the woman by her legs and shoulders. Their farting guide, meanwhile, hectors 
them in a language not heard on Earth before or since. He waves a fat, admonitory hand and they must 
follow; slower than before, up the dip of the long low ridge, sliding into peat groughs and shallow hidden 
pools, their eyes on their feet and the woman slung between them like a rotting hammock . . . Imagine 
that our field of vision is static, and that they have almost moved out of it, creeping across from left to 
right as the light fades. They crest the ridge. We see only their uncomprehending faces, made tiny and 
grey by distance; while they see only the city which spreads itself suddenly below them like excavations in 
a sunken garden. 

hyacinths my proud inheritance!'This litany seems to give him doubtful comfort. For some time he runs in 
erratic circles in the mud, his neck bent and his face pulled over to one side of his skull as if he has 
suffered a stroke. Eventually he joins the first figure (who has sat down wearily to watch him) and with 
much fumbling they raise the woman by her legs and shoulders. Their farting guide, meanwhile, hectors 
them in a language not heard on Earth before or since. He waves a fat, admonitory hand and they must 
follow; slower than before, up the dip of the long low ridge, sliding into peat groughs and shallow hidden 
pools, their eyes on their feet and the woman slung between them like a rotting hammock . . . Imagine 
that our field of vision is static, and that they have almost moved out of it, creeping across from left to 
right as the light fades. They crest the ridge. We see only their uncomprehending faces, made tiny and 
grey by distance; while they see only the city which spreads itself suddenly below them like excavations in 
a sunken garden. 

The throne-room at Viriconium, on a cold and desultory afternoon three or four days after the death of 
the Fat Main: 

three o'clock, and the night was already closing in, diffusing through the draughty passages where the old 
machines muttered and drew about themselves their meagre shawls of light. Methvet Nian: nine steel rings 
glittered cold and grey on her thin stiff fingers. She wore a cloak made from white fur clasped with amber 
and iron, and took her chocolate from a rare grey china cup. Her eyes were purple and depthless. Cellur 
the birdmaker sat with her, leaning forward a little, his face beaky and hollow in the weak light admitted 
by the clerestory windows high above. Their murmurs echoed in the chilly air. 'We know nothing but that 
the world is invaded.''Our fate in St Elmo Buffin's hands.' 

'Nothing seen from the outer wall.''Great insects, marching south. The Queen held out one hand, palm 
flat, to the small blue flames of the fire, feeling an uncertain, transitory w armth. 

j Around them the palace was quiet, though not unpopulated. The Queen's guard had, it turned out, 
destroyed 

some weeks before in a series of bloody, motiveless purges and episodic defections to the Sign of the 
Locust: the day after his arrival, Tomb the Dwarf had brought his caravan in from the courtyard, 
established himself like a nomadic warlord somewhere in the littered outer corridors, and taken charge of 
the handful of disorientated survivors he found living rough in the guardrooms and abandoned mess halls. 
It was a situation which suited both his inclinations and his experience. At night the dull ring of his hammer 
penetrated the intervening walls; he was rearming his little force. During the morning he made the round of 
his defences - which consisted mainly in barricades constructed from old machinery - or stared from the 
judas-hole he had contrived in the main gates at the silent 'beggars'without. In the afternoons he would 
knock on the throne-room door and allow Methvet Nian to serve him lukewarm chamomile which he 
compounded with a violent brandy from Cladich. I expect an attack soon,'he would report, and another 
day would pass without event. 'It can't be long in coming.'He was happier, he explained, with something 
to do. Never-theless he dreamed a lot, of the lost excitements of his youth. 

Leaving the palace for the city was like entering a dark crystal (especially at night, under the 'white pulpy 
spectre'the Moon); the shape of things became irregular, refracted; sudden astonishing mirages 
swallowed the Pastel Towers or engulfed the denizens of the streets beneath them. It was as if Viriconium 
(the physical city, that is, the millenial artifact which sums up a thousand dead cultures) had suffered some 
sort of psychic storm, and forgotten itself. Its very molecules seemed to be creeping apart. 'As you 
walk,'the dwarf tried to explain after a single clandestine excursion to the Artists'Quarter, 'the streets 
create themselves around you. When you have passed everything slips immediately back into chaos 
again.'Many of the Reborn had abandoned their houses in Minnet-Saba and were making their way 


north, a trickle of great horses, big-wheeled carts and vibrantly coloured armour: they carried their 
strange weapons with care. Down in the Low City the alleys were empty and stuporous - no-one was 
coming out except for coke or cabbage. Outside the palace waited the devotees of the Sign, becoming 
more mis-shapen beneath their cloaks and bandages every day . . . 

north, a trickle of great horses, big-wheeled carts and vibrantly coloured armour: they carried their 
strange weapons with care. Down in the Low City the alleys were empty and stuporous - no-one was 
coming out except for coke or cabbage. Outside the palace waited the devotees of the Sign, becoming 
more mis-shapen beneath their cloaks and bandages every day . . . 

'It isn't yet four. He never comes sooner than four.' 

'He seems late this afternoon.' 

As the clerestory dimmed, weighting the upper air with shadows, and the chocolate cooled in its china 
cups, the flames in the hearth achieved a transitory, phthisic prominence; and, one by one, like the 
compartments of a dream, the five false windows of the throne-room were filled with a grey and 
tremulous glow. Against this fitful illumination moved the silhouettes ofCellur and the Queen, nodding 
murmurous figures of a shadow play. The bird lord's success in controlling the windows - through which 
it was possible to see sometimes long lines of insects moving across an unknown terrain - had .been only 
partial. He could turn them neither on nor off. And though three out of five of them could lately be 
compelled to show some recognizable part of the Empire, how these views were selected was not clear 
to him. Since coming here he had sought: 

Contact with his own machines beneath the estuary at Lendalfoot; 

Views of St Elmo Buffin's fleet; 

Some intimation of the circumstances in which Horn-wrack and his charges now found themselves. 

Luck had not been with him. This was now to change, but not in a way he could have foreseen. 

The windows were arranged in a high narrow bay which resembled the stern lights of an old ship. The 
glow in them grew gelid and shifty. In the third pane from the left (for two hundred years prior to 
Methven's reign it had depicted the same view, becoming known as the 'Pane ofiars'and giving rise to a 
common proverb) it condensed into three or four muculent lumps, drifting like fish in a polluted tank. 
After a moment this activity had spread to the four other panes, and a further refining or condensation 
had revealed the lumps to . be the salient features of five deformed heads - or five images of the same 
head (two of them upside down). The head was in pain. A dark rubbery device had been forced over its 
nose and mouth. The straps securing this gag or mask cut deeply into the plump flesh of its cheeks, which 
was of a mouldy, greenish-white colour patched with silvery acne. Whether the expressions that 
contorted the visible features reflected hope or fatalism, anger or panic, it was impossible to tell. Its yes, 
though watery, were urgent. 

For some minutes this apparition struggled silent and unnoticed behind the glass as though trying to 
escape into the throne-room. A psychic gulf of such vastness separated spectre from substance that it 
seemed to be maintained in 

focus only by its own desperation; by some debilitating and debasing act ofwill. It could see Cellur and 
the Queen and it was trying to speak. Eventually it whispered a little, a syllable like a trickle of vomit in a 
voice quite at odds with the amount of effort needed to produce it. 


Gorb, it said. 

Gorb, it said. 

Gorb. 

The head flung itself about, its hidden mouth gaping, until 

'GORB!' 

fell into the room like a corpse. 

The windows flickered dementedly, shuffling views of the head like Fat Mam Etteilla shuffling the trumps. 
Cellur jumped to his feet, his cloak knocking the china on to the floor. 'It sees us! At last the windows 
have come to their full function!'(This was a guess: he was still in the dark.) Five panes showed the awful 
mutated face of the ancient airboatman - left profile, right threequarter profile. They showed sudden 
random close-ups of individual features - an ear, an eye, the mask with its proliferating tubes and cillia. 
Pentadic, huge, it winked down into the throne-room. 'Is it the man from the Moon?''Speak!' 

Speak? . 

All this time he has been struggling to speak! 

Now at last he masters the language - Benedict Paucemanly with his message from a white and distant 
planet: 

'Gorb,'he said. 'Fonderia diferro in Venezia . . . mi god guy . . . non-articulated constituent elements . . 
. Here lie I in the shadows of the veinous manna, burrowed into the absolute ABRACADAVER of the 
Earth . . . Earth! - all things are one to the Earth . . . mi god guy im all swole up . . . Fear deat hftom the 
air!' 

He giggled weakly and shook his head. 'It's simpler than that.'He tried again. 'In the Time of Bone, in the 
Time of Dreams, when, on the far side of the Moon. I lay like a cheese, blue-veined and with a loop of 
blue wire for a brain . . . No. Simpler than that, too -'Look, as a young man I flew to the Moon. I would 
not do such a thing now. Something happened to me there, some transformation peculiar to the airs of 
that sad planet, and I fell asleep. I fell into a rigor, sank without trace into a trance in which I perceived 
for a hundred years the singing latticework of my own brain. It was a gift, do you see, or a punishment. (I 
no longer care which, though the question perplexed me then for its metaphysical implications if nothing 
else.) There, I was no longer a man at all but a theory, I was a thought received with the clarity of a 
sensation - hard, complex, resonant with proof. I was a crystal-set, and I thought that I could hear the 
stars. 

'I lay on a marble slab in a paved garden among formal perspectives, my naked body citronised by the 
light falling down from space. At my side a single rose grew like an alum cyst on a long stem. Sometimes 
it emitted a quiet but intolerably beautiful melody comprising four or five notes on a vanished musical 
scale. The frozen air filled my mouth. I soon forgot my ship, the Saucy Sal. I communicated with the 
spare, bony winds of that region, blowing in from between the stars. The Moon is a strange place. Up 
there, shadows fall motionless and subtly awry. It is a nexus. It was changed by many races who tried to 
come to Earth (or to leave it) during the long downfall of the Afternoon Cultures. It is a listening ear. It is 
an outpost.' 


In the throne-room hearth the small blue flames were exchanged mysteriously for a heap of orange 
embers. Dark seeped in through the clerestory windows. The dwarf did not come. Outside, the evening 
wind had brought more snow into the numbed city, hurrying it along as a guide hurries tourists down the 
picturesque but dangerous streets of some revolution-torn capital. (Streets that would turn later into black 
and silver geometrical proofs under the sovereign influence of the moonlight.) Benedict Paucemanly 
whispered like the waves on a distant beach, sometimes audible, sometimes not. He suffered frequent 
bouts of aphasia. Obscenities, mingled with a dubious lyricism, still made up much of his vocabulary. He 
still confused the grammar of a dozen old languages with that of a score of invented ones. But the 
backbone of his monologue was comprehensible. Cellur and the Queen, hypnotised by his awful pentadic 
image, listened to it and later reported it: 

In the throne-room hearth the small blue flames were exchanged mysteriously for a heap of orange 
embers. Dark seeped in through the clerestory windows. The dwarf did not come. Outside, the evening 
wind had brought more snow into the numbed city, hurrying it along as a guide hurries tourists down the 
picturesque but dangerous streets of some revolution-torn capital. (Streets that would turn later into black 
and silver geometrical proofs under the sovereign influence of the moonlight.) Benedict Paucemanly 
whispered like the waves on a distant beach, sometimes audible, sometimes not. He suffered frequent 
bouts of aphasia. Obscenities, mingled with a dubious lyricism, still made up much of his vocabulary. He 
still confused the grammar of a dozen old languages with that of a score of invented ones. But the 
backbone of his monologue was comprehensible. Cellur and the Queen, hypnotised by his awful pentadic 
image, listened to it and later reported it: 

'Ten thousand sentient races populate the stars. All their mad jargons lace the aether. Paucemanly 
listened, but was unable to answer them. All were distant, dreadfully distant. Their voices were a fading, 
incomprehensible whisper; a sickening rumour of otherness. Thus he lay there on his catafalque: far 
enough from the human Umwelt to perceive the myriad realities of the cosmos; not far enough to be able 
to forget his own humanity. This state persisted for a hundred years or a little less, until new, strong 
transmissions invaded local space. 

'At first, new voices sang to him. This was the first feathery touch of their spiritual envelope or 
atmosphere. Latterly, he saw them, as a great filmy wing stretched across the cruel lunar meridian. 
Closer, they were a vast wave. He was soon inundated, sodden with their new reality. All other 
transmissions ceased. The rose which had bloomed beside his slab shattered with a sound of unearthly 
grief. A fine tracery of cracks appeared in the slab itself. The white gardens fell to dust around him. He 
was free. In that moment he lost his humanity for good. (But could not as yet attain any other form. The 
flesh has an inertia.) His .broadcasts to the Earth were begun too late: by then, the tenuous wave-fronts 
of the new consciousness had brushed the Pastel City, and in its gutters and alleyways and great Houses 
was conceived the Sign of the Locust - immaculate and ravishing, a philosophy like a single drop of 
poison at the centre of a curved mirror, an imperfect intuition of the alien Umwelt and of its implications 
for our own; the first infection of the human reality! 

'They were insects long ago. They need no vehicles, but slip like a swarm of locusts down the faults and 
cleavage zones of space (which they conceive of as an extensive empty wasteland littered with the stony 
rubbish of planets and echoing with their own dry stridulations). Their motives are unclear: instinct - or 
something resembling it - compels them to search the continuum endlessly for some solution they cannot 


even define to themselves. Now, that cold passion is in ruins, and they are trying to live on the Earth. 
They were never meant to come down here and build a city. It is their tragedy as much as ours. 

even define to themselves. Now, that cold passion is in ruins, and they are trying to live on the Earth. 
They were never meant to come down here and build a city. It is their tragedy as much as ours. 

'Already it is too late for human consciousness ever to fully repossess the World; the new dream pours 
out like mist to envelope and mutate it. Yet the swarm had been contaminated in its turn: Where once it 
boasted the horny membranes of the locust, the mantis or the wasp, now it imagines flesh, skin, hair. It 
regards itself with horror. It is losing the struggle to maintain its inner vision, its hermetic certainty in the 
face of the void.' 

'In the grip of this perceptual stalemate the very substance of the planet had begun to fade, stretch and 
tear, like an old net curtain at a window in the Boulevard Auss-man. If it continued, the conflict between 
Man and Insect would become nothing more than a jumble of meaningless shadowy events pivoting 
round a decaying point in space and time. In areas of major confrontation, matter, in its attempts to 
accommodate both realities, was already distorting, drifting into new forms and miscegenations. New 
ranges of mountains had appeared in the north; coastlines had taken on new forms, plastic, curious, 
undependable, draped with a new vegetation which had come up out of the sea along the flight-paths of 
the insects and now assumed a grey, etiolated, mucoid transparency; vast hallucinatory displays filled the 
skies at night, great shifting modular curtains like the view from a mosaic eye. All this had been added to 
the minor symptoms already observed, the Sign of the Locust, the rains of lights. In addition, the conflict 
of two dreams had woken older dreams: the factories of the Afternoon rebuilt themselves fragmentarily in 
the Great Wastes, producing clouds of corrosive vapour; strangely-dressed figures speaking ancient 
languages were posturing in the streets of Lendalfoot and Duirinish. 

'The World, whispered Benedict Paucemanly, is desperately trying to remember itself... blork.. . 
nomadacris septemfasciata!. . . what a lovely bit of meat... 

Embers settled in the hearth. The doors of the throne-room rattled suddenly, their brass motifs of 
coelacanths and mermen shifting uneasily in the bluish gloom, and were still. It was the wind, perhaps; or 
perhaps something had fallen against them. From the passage outside was heard briefly an indistinct 
groaning; a dull clamour far off; silence. Something was happening out there, but those within were 
captivated by the wavering pentadic spectre of the old airman, his voice faint and his flesh tortured by the 
mask which, he explained, was now his sole means of perceiving the 'real', the human world. Methvet 
Nian said nothing, but only watched in horror and compassion the nodding of that wounded, debased 
head; and gently shook her own, while Cellur the birdmaker tugged his robe tighter round his thin chest 
and shivered. His head ached with the cold, and with the effort of following that faded cloacal whisper. 
He had recognized in the spectre's antics a certain self-consciousness. There was an archness in its winks 
and gross nods; the narcissism of the confessional informed its breakings of wind. 

'What must we do, then?'he asked, a little impatiently. 

Paucemanly gave a loud belch. His image swam, retreated, and was replaced by something quite new: 
great dragonflies, jewelled and crippled, dragged themselves across the shivering panes while behind 
them the landscape heaved and humped itself into shapes nascent and organic. 'They mutate and die in 
the new vapours of Earth: but their breeding cells are full.'Wingless and melting, the insects were 
swallowed by the curious hills about them. These in turn folded back to reveal a face, brown and 


bony-looking like the stripped and varnished skull of a horse into which had been inserted two 
half-pomegranates for eyes. It stared into the throne-room. 'Oops,'it said. 'Green, brown, testing. 
Hello?'Paucemanly reappeared in a glutinous yellow fog, looking puzzled. 'Whatever emerges from 
them,'he went on, 'will wrest the world to its own purposes... testing. ... 

bony-looking like the stripped and varnished skull of a horse into which had been inserted two 
half-pomegranates for eyes. It stared into the throne-room. 'Oops,'it said. 'Green, brown, testing. 
Hello?'Paucemanly reappeared in a glutinous yellow fog, looking puzzled. 'Whatever emerges from 
them,'he went on, 'will wrest the world to its own purposes... testing. ... 

In the remaining panes a tarry smoke obscured intermittently the greenish image of the airman. A clump 
of fat sinister fingers - his own - appeared, feeling their way over his face as if trying to remember it from 
some previous encounter. They rested thoughtfully on the mask; then with a quick, predatory motion 
clutched it by the straps and tugged it oW Vomit sprayed from the defaced features beneath. Paucemanly 
vanished instantly. 

'Is the world ending, then?'asked Cellur. 

'I want only death,'came the answer, a distant whisper clogged with self-pity and guilt. 'A hundred years 
in the Moon! Only death.' 

In the windows appeared a series of faded pictures of ordinary insects, the dry husks ofwasps crushed 
underfoot in an attic long ago, and hawkmoths like flower-pressings in an old book. A wind stirred them. 
They darkened one by one until there was nothing left at all. Cellur stood for a long time in the gloom, 
thinking of nothing. He could not make himself say anything to the Queen. 

The dwarf came in with his axe in one hand and a bundle of thin shiny steel rods in the other. He was out 
of breath and there was blood in his hair. He drank his lukewarm chamomile with a grimace. When he 
noticed the dark windows and broken glass he nodded grimly. 'They had the signal to pass the gates half 
an hour ago,'he said. 'We're done for in here.' 

He dropped the steel rods on the floor and, with a packet of tools he took from under his jerkin, set 
about assembling them. It was quick work. Soon he had in front of him a half-human skeleton ten or 
eleven feet tall - his famous 'mechanical wife', grubbed up long ago from some frigid desert in the far 
North. It was quiet in the room as he coupled its metal bones. Nevertheless he paused every so often to 
tilt his head on one side and listen; and at one point said casually: 'Someone will have to bolt the doors. I 
can't reach them, and the lads out there won't last much longer.'(Cellur did not answer. Little motes of 
blue light like luminous beetles had begun to spill from the shattered window. They fell faster and faster, 
like rain. They filled the room with a queer glow which lit the white cheek of Methvet Nian as she sat 
staring silently at nothing.) 

A distant shout filtered through from the beleagured outer corridors. The whole palace seemed to 
shudder. The dwarf scratched his head. After a long life his understanding of such situations was 
preternatural. Steel scraped on steel, on stone, as he hurriedly spread the mechanical wife on the floor so 
that its legs stuck straight out and its arms were set close to its sides. He did something to it until it 
hummed and sent up motes of its own. Then he lowered himself down so that he lay limb for limb on its 
cold bones. A harness fastened his upper body into its flaring ribcage; its jawless skull he hinged forward 
to fit over his head like a helmet. 'It is my cold companion, that I thought I would never embrace again,'he 
murmured. Certain levers enabled him to control it, but for the moment he lay still in the curious blue light, 
performing some act of memory. Ozone, and a low buzzing, filled the air. The skeleton snapped its 
fingers inadroitly. It shivered and stretched, and of its own accord made grasping motions; but when he 
moved the levers at last, it failed to respond. 


Something threw itself with a crash against the throne-room doors. 

Something threw itself with a crash against the throne-room doors. 

neither of them seemed to be able to move. Their faces were waxy with despair, their eyes like lemurs'. 
For Tomb it was only a physical disaster, it was only another war; for them it was a disaster of meaning. 
They murmured in low, slurred voices to one another, like old intelligent animals - 'Saint Elmo Buffin'; 'a 
fatal chance'. Tomb broke his nails on the ancient machinery. He was a dwarf not a philosopher; it was 
just another war: and he thought he still had time to win it ... 

He strapped himself back into the harness. The mechanical wife lifted itself from the flagstones with a 
groan and an ungainly lurch, like an overloaded camel. It was worn out, like all the other machinery in 
Viriconium. No-one knew what it had been used for all those centuries ago in the doomed Afternoon 
Kingdoms. It flailed clumsily about, smashing pieces of furniture in its efforts to stay upright. It fumbled on 
the floor until it came up with the dwarf's power-axe, which it proceeded to swing in dangerous, humming 
arcs. 'Ha ha,'laughed the dwarf. He pulled the skull-piece down over his head. His old eyes blinked 
redly. He felt alive. He only had to stamp his feet and the walls shook. He moved his levers. Trailing 
creamy white motes like cabbage moths, the mechanical wife shambled over to the doors, one enormous 
hand reaching triumphantly for the upper bolts... 

Outside in a victorious gloom, the remnants of the palace guard bubbling to death at their feet, were 
gathered the devotees of the Sign. Since the murder on the Pleasure Canal they had lost touch with their 
ruling echelon in the fluorescing windy mazes of the Artists'Quarter; their ideological priorities had 
become unfathomable, even to themselves; and their very flesh had suffered violent and useless 
evolutions. In their endless quartering of the Low City they had uprooted railings, constructed wooden 
clubs studded with bits of broken glass, helped themselves to butchers'cleavers and old kitchen knives 
black with corrosion; gathering an army fit for the mutated, the motivationally-bankrupt and the burst. 
The pain of their transformation had caused them to loosen or unwind the bandages which had previously 
disguised their humps and tumours, and these now flapped about them in crusty strips as they hopped 
and sprang erratically along the palace corridors on their strong, bent legs. 

Their eyes were puzzled and full of agony. They could not become insects. The flesh, ultimately, resists: 
there is a conservatism of cell and marrow. But they would never again be human - From wounds like 
women's lips had bloomed a fantastic, irrelevant anatomy: drooping feathery antennae, trembling 
multi-jointed legs, a thousand mosaic eyes, vibrating palps and purposeless plates of chitin. Where these 
new deformed organs merged into the original flesh was a transitional substance, pinkish grey, weeping 
like an unsuccessful graft. None of them were in the right place. From a mutilated torso sprang six thin 
legs, rattling like dry sticks in a wind. (They seemed to be beckoning. The man from whom they had 
grown screamed involuntarily whenever he caught sight of himself.) Here rubbery, saw-edged mandibles 
had burst from flower-like lesions at knee or nape and were now speaking unknown languages in reedy, 
creaking voices, there a gristly membrane flapped like a mantle, dotted with the abortive stumps of wings. 
For the genitals of a magistrate from Alves had been substituted a coiled mothlike tongue. which poked 
out uncontrollably at intervals. Some of them leapt and sprang about unpredictably, like grasshoppers on 
a sunny day; others had lost completely the power of upright locomotion and dragged themselves round 
in circles like crippled blowflies. This degradation was not wholly their own: behind the desperate 
murmurs that escaped them could be sensed the rustling whisper of some crippled demiurge: the pain of 
the Idea striving to clothe itself. 


Propelled by a black horror of their own state, dimly but bitterly aware of the humanity they had willingly 
discarded, they broke down the doors and bore the mechanical wife of Tomb the Dwarf back across the 
throne-room, beating at it with their old shovels and broken swords. Hung up there among its gleaming 
limbs he swung his axe; tottered; retreated. While behind him Cellur the birdmaker woke from a dream 
of dissolution and found it to be real. 

Propelled by a black horror of their own state, dimly but bitterly aware of the humanity they had willingly 
discarded, they broke down the doors and bore the mechanical wife of Tomb the Dwarf back across the 
throne-room, beating at it with their old shovels and broken swords. Hung up there among its gleaming 
limbs he swung his axe; tottered; retreated. While behind him Cellur the birdmaker woke from a dream 
of dissolution and found it to be real. 
10: All the Wounds of the Earth 
Galen Hornwrack came down into the mysterious City like some legendary failed conquistador. (Fever 
and magic have defeated his skills. The waste lands he set out to cross in his youth have shown him no 
enemy but his own ambition. All wells were poisoned; sand has swallowed his troops and his hopes. He 
lurches back alone into the country of his birth only to find that it too has become shifting, unreliable, 
changed forever... ) The scars left by his fight with the metal bird, an encounter which he recalled only 
dimly, had diverted and hardened the characteristic lines of his face, so that a strange asceticism now 
modified his habitual expression of petulance and seW-involvement. His nose was running. The sword of 
tegeus-Cromis he carried in his left hand, having lost its scabbard somewhere in the rotting landscapes 
behind him. His torn cloak revealed the mail the Queen had given him, now rusty. His eyes were empty 
and his gaze appallingly direct; as if, tiring of the attempt to winnow the real from the unreal, he now 
assigned exactly the same value to every object entering his visual field: as if he had suspended judgement 
on events, and now merely lived through them. 

His desire to see the City had kept him from sleep. 

Alstath Fulthor followed him, supporting the woman and her endless prophecies. A radiance, colourless 
in itself, issuing no doubt from his horned and lobed crustaceal armour, appeared to fill both their bodies, 
illuminating from beneath the things they wore, crimson and blue, as in some old painting. The alien 
presence of the City, its equivocal contract with 'reality', had lent new energy to - their madness. 'In my 
youth,'sang the woman, 'I made my small contribution. Blackpool and Chicago become as nothing, their 
receding colonnades echo to the sound of vanished orchestras.'At this they stopped to regard one 
another half in delight, half in horror, their cropped spiky hair and long restless hands giving them the air 
of children caught in some game of conspiracy. (It was only that they hoped to manipulate time, as we 
know: believing that by combination and recombination of a few common images - which are themselves 
only the symbols rather than the actual memories of acts peculiar to the Afternoon Cultures - they might 
obtain the 'code'which would liberate them from the Evening. Thus Main Etteilla, shuffling her pasteboard 
cards...) 

They dawdled, and Hornwrack sat tiredly in the mud to wait for them. 

'That's enough of that!'he said sharply. He treated them for the most part with a gruff indulgence, but tried 
to prevent their odd and embarrassing sexual encounters, chasing the woman away with the flat of his 
sword while being careful to keep his eye on Fulthor's own great weapon. 

'That's enough!'they mimicked. 'That's enough!' 

He did not know why he was here, heading into the world's deep wound. Bankrupt of purpose when 
they had fetched him that morning from the rooms in the Rue Sepile, he had maintained himself on the 
energy of old betrayals and resentments, none of which had survived the journey through the Deep 
Wastes. He shrugged. He was a husk. Above him hung the torpid and corrupt manifestation of Benedict 
Paucemanly which was his only hope. Since dawn it had been undergoing a crisis of will, dissolving 
sporadically into a mass of greyish curds and losing the power of speech. It would reassemble itself 
slowly after such a bout, beckon Hornwrack on toward the City, belch tragically. 'I want only death,'it 
would explain. And Hornwrack with a sigh would lead his mad proteges a little closer. 


This City had appeared on the plain with the descent of the insects a decade before, growing from the 
worn stone nubs, tilted columns and submerged pavements of an ancient Afternoon site. They had not so 
much built it as expected it. It was not so much a City as a response of ordinary matter to their instinctive 
metaphysical demands, the warping pressures of their 'new reality'. Originally it had consisted of a 
number of large but flimsy structures arranged without apparent thought on and around a low mound. The 
biggest of these were perhaps a hundred feet tall. They were like dry wasps'nests, and of the same 
papery, cellular construction. They rustled in the wind. The insects went leaping among them on curiously 
aimless pathways, along the sides of which had been built up over the years peculiar crystalline 
accretions, hanging reefs and tottering spires, galleries composed of crumbling metallic oxides veined with 
serpentines and alien glasses. Smaller structures had eventually grown up in the shadows of this 
development: partly-roofed eccentric hexagons formed of impacted sand mixed with certain bodily 
secretions of their inhabitants, who forced themselves in and out of small openings in the walls. 

This City had appeared on the plain with the descent of the insects a decade before, growing from the 
worn stone nubs, tilted columns and submerged pavements of an ancient Afternoon site. They had not so 
much built it as expected it. It was not so much a City as a response of ordinary matter to their instinctive 
metaphysical demands, the warping pressures of their 'new reality'. Originally it had consisted of a 
number of large but flimsy structures arranged without apparent thought on and around a low mound. The 
biggest of these were perhaps a hundred feet tall. They were like dry wasps'nests, and of the same 
papery, cellular construction. They rustled in the wind. The insects went leaping among them on curiously 
aimless pathways, along the sides of which had been built up over the years peculiar crystalline 
accretions, hanging reefs and tottering spires, galleries composed of crumbling metallic oxides veined with 
serpentines and alien glasses. Smaller structures had eventually grown up in the shadows of this 
development: partly-roofed eccentric hexagons formed of impacted sand mixed with certain bodily 
secretions of their inhabitants, who forced themselves in and out of small openings in the walls. 

Gravity had imprisoned them: here they had first felt its pull, and lost the power of extra-atmospheric 
flight. It had suddenly become necessary for them to breathe, yet they could not breathe air, and must 
invent some substitute: here they had built the chugging machinery to disseminate it. (It never worked very 
well.) Fluids had been unknown to them during their frigid millennial migration through the barren spaces: 
here they had first filled their tissues with them as a buffer against the poisons of Earth. Here they had put 
on their breathing masks and built their weapons, seeing themselves as beleaguered, unwilling colonists, 
victims of a cosmic accident: which they were. Here the human Umwelt had first penetrated their strange 
nervous systems, working a madness on them so that they could not understand what they saw or felt, 
and began to die of a new disease. 

At the time Galen Hornwrack met his end here, all order and sense of purpose had vanished from the 
place. The buildings, alien to begin with, had begun to subside like hot glass, as if searching for a new 
centre of gravity. A partly transparent architecture of nightmarish balconies and over hanging walls had 
formed as Matter, struggling to find a compromise between human and insect demands, began to teeter 
and grope toward verticals and horizontals that satisfied neither. Streets laid down under no wholesome 
plan ended in pits, or in staircases which themselves petered out after a turn or two up the sides of some 
enormous windowless cylinder. The towers shuddered and quaked, vibrating between human and alien 
states; then slumped and dissolved like jelly. A languorous buzzing sound accompanied this process, and 
beneath that the clangour of enormous bells, as if matter were trying to toll itself apart. Appalling winds 
howled down the changing thoroughfares. Streams of tiny blue motes tumbled from the higher cornices; 
out in the open squares (through which, as in a dream, could be discerned the equivalent plazas of 
Viriconium - opposite pole, node of nightmares, sister city) struggled the changed individuals of the 
swarm; while among the alleys of this disintegrating province proliferated the thick, yellow stems of some 
mutated plant. 

Above, vast clouds of the insects hung in the throbbing purple sky, making adventive, meaningless 
patterns as they attempted to replicate or restart the endless spatial pilgrimage. They hurled themselves 
into huge pits dug in the desert. They invented useless vehicles which rolled like mouldy grapefruit 
between the dunes, rising a few feet above the ground to emit foul gases. ('Regretfully,'whispered the 
madwoman, 'it is part of a scheme you cannot understand.') Into this chaos Galen Hornwrack was 
persuaded to lead his party, unaware that circumstances were about to return to him a fragment or two of 
his distant - indeed by now almost imaginary - adolescence. 

Under a sky like a glass mantle, at an intersection in the disintegrating ground plan of the city, two insects 
performed a dance in the suicidal light. Disease had maimed them, their eyes were like rotting melons; yet 


vivid heraldic insignia flared along their blue and green flanks like the lights of deep-sea fishes. Stiff and 
quivering, with curled abdomens and spread wings, moving one damaged limb at a time, they had the air 
of being painted on one of Elmo Buffin's sails, or tattoed in glowing inks on an upper arm. through this 
architecture of melting wax by small energetic movements of its finny hands. 

vivid heraldic insignia flared along their blue and green flanks like the lights of deep-sea fishes. Stiff and 
quivering, with curled abdomens and spread wings, moving one damaged limb at a time, they had the air 
of being painted on one of Elmo Buffin's sails, or tattoed in glowing inks on an upper arm. through this 
architecture of melting wax by small energetic movements of its finny hands. 

Out of this, wreathed in a glutinous yellow fog, some clumsy insects dragged themselves. There were 
three or four of them. Alstath Fulthor put his hands to his head and fell down. 'Oh oh oh,'he cried. 'Oh, 
oh,'whispered the insects. They approached with a peculiar reluctance, dipping their great masks. Their 
grey wing-cases and armoured yellow underparts were cross-hatched with self-inflicted wounds. From 
these wounds were growing like buds a variety of pink new half-human limbs, joined to the pricked and 
rotting carapaces by a transitional substance, membranous, neither flesh nor chitin. There were clumps of 
little hands with mobile, perfect fingers, each one having a tiny fingernail like mother-of-pearl. There were 
the faces of very young children with closed eyes. There were eyes alone (as indeed there were legs and 
torsos and internal organs), gummy with post-natal sleep, and of a very distinct blue like enamelling on an 
old brooch. Some of the faces murmured drowsily. 

Whether these insects were ambassadors or soldiers was not clear. They had recognised Hornwrack's 
party as human, and been attracted by the magistral lustre of the Reborn Man's scarlet armour. (When 
they approached him their own insignia flared up along their sides, orange and emerald.) They could not 
speak, though, and he could not help them. They remained: immobile, at once heraldic and debased. It 
was the madwoman who sat up suddenly to speak on their behalf. 

'We did not ask to come here,'she said. She watched Hornwrack, who in his turn licked his lips and 
stared at the travesty of a baby's head. 

'What?'he said. 

'Go away and wait,'she begged. 'Leave us to be finished here. We cannot live here much.'She opened 
her mouth and blood trickled from her lacerated tongue. 'Give us in peace,'she whispered, holding her 
head on one side in a listening attitude, her mouth full of crushed flowers. 'Oh!' 

At the end of this speech she was standing with her back to the insects, her eyes bright with a horrifying 
intelligence. Their own great faceted orbs observed Hornwrack calmly over her shoulders. They were 
motionless. Hornwrack began to back away, laughing. 'No more of this!'he heard himself exclaim. He 
held up his hands. 'I don't want to hear any more.'He looked round for guidance, but Fulthor was 
grunting on the floor, and the spectre of the ancient airman had inconveniently vanished. Suddenly a kind 
of fake anger overcame his fright. He dragged the sword of tegeus-Cromis from his belt, shoved the 
woman aside, and waded into them with it. But it was only steel, and quickly broke in half. The 
ambassadors fell back without resisting him, rustling, bearing their dreadful human buds. (One of the 
heads woke up. Leave us alone, it whispered, looking directly at him.) Then another wave of 
disintegration surged out of the core of the city, which was now very close. Hornwrack staggered. The 
ambassadors writhed and thrashed, their joints gouting fluid. Fay Glass screamed. 

'Leave us alone! We will soon die here!' 

Hornwrack could bear no more of it. He was used to a less equivocal violence. Retching, he stumbled 
over to Fulthor's inert body and got the powered broadsword from its ceramic sheath. He had never 
used one before. He went back and cut inexpertly at the flailing forelimbs and compound eyes of the 
ambassadors. This time they made a half-hearted fight of it as they backed into the purple gloom. But 
their odd, gnarled weapons only sputtered feebly in the damp.air; gave up strings of pale light: and failed 


utterly. They tumbled on to their sides as he chopped off their legs. They whirred round in circles, pushing 
the earth up into irregular mounds. Soon they were all dead. He stared at them in astonishment; at the 
artifact fizzing in his hand; at Fay Glass. At the last moment they had tried to direct his attention away 
from the hulk of Benedict Paucemanly's airboat, the Heavy Star. 

utterly. They tumbled on to their sides as he chopped off their legs. They whirred round in circles, pushing 
the earth up into irregular mounds. Soon they were all dead. He stared at them in astonishment; at the 
artifact fizzing in his hand; at Fay Glass. At the last moment they had tried to direct his attention away 
from the hulk of Benedict Paucemanly's airboat, the Heavy Star. 

'Fear death from the air!'shouted Hornwrack. He laughed. He took hold of the madwoman's wrist in 
his enthusiasm and pulled her along after him. 'Fear death from the air!'He thought of Fat Main Etteilla, 
and the Bistro Californium with its clientele of perverts and poseurs. He thought of the dwarf who had 
beaten him up in the palace and then abandoned him in the shadow of the Agdon Roches. He thought of 
the High City, which had wooed him merely to betray him. He thought of the Low City, of the boy in the 
Rue Sepile, the drifts of sodden chestnut leaves in the late-afternoon light of November, the women 
laughing in the upstairs rooms. He though of the candle at night, a cat sneaking into the room, the smell of 
geraniums - one dawn following another until they made eighty years of wounds and fevers. None of it 
meant anything. It was as if he had been relieved of these things, only to have them changed somehow 
and given back to him merely as memories. 'If I can rip her loose we'll fight our way out of this 
madhouse!'he said. He would fly down to the Pastel City in the last airboat left in the kingdom. There he 
would speak with the dwarf, perhaps even the Queen. There he'd state his terms. 'She'll never take to 
space again,'he said, rubbing his thumb over the thin, whitish, lichen-like growths, the network of tiny 
cracks that dulled the crystal skin. Even this slight contact made him shiver with excitement. He kicked at 
a door in the stern to see if it would open, and was rewarded by a hollow boom. 'But her motors still 
work. Look!' 

He dropped the High City sword suddenly, grasped the girl by her upper arms. She stared blankly at 
him. 'Once I flew such vessels!'he cried: 'Don't you believe me?'And then: 'That ghost has given me back 
the sky. It has given me back the sky!' 

Alstath Fulthor came up behind him on all fours and picked up the discarded baan. Some nightmare of 
the past had him by the head. He sniggered. 

'I'll suffer nothing at the hands of those beautiful philosophers,'he said. 'I'll promenade no more in their 
metallic gardens!' 

He jumped to his feet, whirling the blade in sputtering arcs round his head. Sparks showered from it into 
the dead wet air. Discovering no other enemy he advanced on Hornwrack, who produced defensively his 
steel knife, shouting. 'Fulthor, no more grudges! Stop!' 

Fulthor could not stop. Hornwrack allowed him to get in close; ducked the baan as it swung in towards 
his collar bone; and slashed out at Fulthor's hand, taking off two fingers and severing all the major 
tendons. Fulthor dropped the power blade. He studied his hand in wonder. 

'That hand will never annoy me again,'he said. 

Before they could stop him he had run off into the gloom, singing. 

Hornwrack said, 'I did not mean to do that. This knife had betrayed me.'He threw it down and stepped 
on it; but the blade would not break despite its flaw, and after a moment he forgot it. He retrieved the 


baan and set about chopping his way into the Heavy Star through the stern door. His blows set up a 
resonant groaning in the crystal hull. He pulled the madwoman in after him. She stared back over her 
shoulder. 

baan and set about chopping his way into the Heavy Star through the stern door. His blows set up a 
resonant groaning in the crystal hull. He pulled the madwoman in after him. She stared back over her 
shoulder. 

He swallowed. 

'Sit still,'he told the woman. 

He tried to remember what to do. 

Under his clumsy hands the vessel groaned and shook. (It was old. In the Moon something vital had gone 
out of it, some millennial reservoir had been emptied.) Down below, its motors pulsed, leaking light and 
generating a rapid percussive shudder. This continued for some minutes, and, transmitted to the outer 
hull, split it open with a high ringing sound. Splinters of dark glass flew about the bridge; a fissure twenty 
inches wide appeared in the wall beside Hornwrack's shoulder, admitting foetid gases; Fay Glass was 
picked up and flung against a bulkhead, and thereafter lay on the deck like a discarded towel, her thin 
bruised legs drawn up under her chin. The boat lifted an inch or two and was stationary again. Gelatinous 
fluids streamed off the forward portholes and slopped into the bridge where, mixed with the sand from 
the wall outside, they formed a foul and slimy secretion. Hornwrack clung to his seat. 

'You bitch,'he said. 'You old bitch.' 

Outside, sand could be seen fountaining up against a purple sky. With a despairing groan Heavy Star 
pulled free of the retaining wall and hurled itself into the mad airs above. Hornwrack sobbed with relief. 
Around him, instruments were demanding his attention in hysterical whispers, but he had forgotten what 
most of them were for. The smell of the stuff in the cabin was making him feel sick. He leaned forward to 
look out of the portholes. The boat was wallowing above an elliptical walled pit about a hundred yards 
long. This was filled with a grey, viscous, partly-organic substance which was now leaking from the 
breached wall like the white of an egg. As the level of this putrid stuff fell it revealed by stages a colossal 
human figure stretched out in the pit. 

Benedict Paucemanly! 

A monstrous and corrupt flowering of his flesh had taken place in all those white years on the Moon. 
Constrained by a thick rubber suit in case he burst, studded with new sensory organs, whorls and ropes 
of flesh which reported only mutation and pain, he lay there prostrate. He had tried to become something 
else and failed. His arms were by his sides and his vast corpulent legs apart. It was from here that he had 
broadcast his despairing spectre, to Viriconium and beyond. 'I want only death.'Teetering between two 
realities, he could perceive neither of them except as an agonizing dream - and yet here he was half a 
god, a demiurge or source, out from which spread like the ripples on a stagnant pond all the new 
nightmares of Earth: he had become, unwillingly enough, the amplifier of the swarm's Umwelt, as he had 


once been an ear that listened to the stars. He had lain like this for ten years, groaning and whimpering 
and vomiting into the mask which had long ago been forced over his bloated head so that he could see 
something of the world surrounding him. Worse: through his great corroded bulk burrowed the parasitic 
larvae of the swarm, deposited there when gravity first sucked them down and mortalized them. A 
thousand miles away, in the false windows of the throne-room at Viriconium, his other image was telling 
Cellur: 'The breeding cells are full. Whatever emerges will wrest the Earth to its own purposes. 

once been an ear that listened to the stars. He had lain like this for ten years, groaning and whimpering 
and vomiting into the mask which had long ago been forced over his bloated head so that he could see 
something of the world surrounding him. Worse: through his great corroded bulk burrowed the parasitic 
larvae of the swarm, deposited there when gravity first sucked them down and mortalized them. A 
thousand miles away, in the false windows of the throne-room at Viriconium, his other image was telling 
Cellur: 'The breeding cells are full. Whatever emerges will wrest the Earth to its own purposes. 

A gust of wind caught the airboat, causing it to spin slowly through a few degrees of arc. A smell came 
up. Hornwrack shuddered. The enormous half-corpse swung beneath him, displaying its fermented sores, 
the cratered flesh that bulged between the straps. The larvae forced themselves in and out. How long had 
it sought him, before it came upon him in Methven's Hall? What psychic bond now linked them? As he 
stared down, the spectre formed again behind him, attempting to attract his attention by snapping its 
fingers and coughing softly. He knew it was there. He didn't dare look back. 

'Bugger me, lad,'it said, 'but we've seen some queer berths, you and I.' 

He turned against his will to face it. It was bobbing about under the ceiling, making embarrassed washing 
motions with its fat hands. 

'Now you've seen me as I am lad, would you do me a favour?' 

'Go away. Why have you brought me here?' 

'Pork!'it choked. 'Porcit me te bonan... Death!... There's only the jungle out there, son. The water 
barrel's contaminated and the captain's got the clap...' 

'What are you saying? Leave me alone!' 

.... hung up there raw-blind in the ratlines like the corpse of a dog.'The spectre quivered suddenly; 
sniffed, as if scenting something new in the air. 'The lee shore!'it screamed. 'The lee shore!'Then, quieter: 
'And only we two left abroad, matey.' 

It put its head intelligently to one side. 

'Christ, listen to those parrots!'it said in a hoarse whisper. 

(While down in the pit, trapped among these metaphors and invented languages, Paucemanly strove to 
overcome his madness and communicate. His colossal limbs, partly submerged in milky grey slime, 
kicked and waved. Behind the eyepieces of his mask - which, like the panes of an aquarium abandoned 
in some dusty room, were occluded by a green deposit - his weak blue eyes rolled and bulged. The wind 
stank of delirium, gangrene and false compass bearings. A tear of self-pity trickled down his cheek. He 
was adrift between universes.) 

'Kill me,'the spectre implored at last. 'Kill me, lad. You can do it.' 

Hornwrack advanced on it with flailing arms. It shied away from him, belching morosely. 

'Is that why you led me here?'he asked it. 

It faded abruptly and he never saw it again. He bit his lip and went back to the controls. 

'I'm commandeering this boat,'he said. 


He sent the Heavy Star lumbering away from that City and out into the calm emptiness beyond. He 
could not bear the ancient airman's degradation. He could not bear his own despair (which he conceived 
of as compassion). Behind him in the pit a great hand came up, fumbled, ripped away the tormenting 
mask: and with a terrible lowing sound that echoed across the shallow poisoned tarns and endless 
peathags of the continental waste, Benedict Paucemanly plunged into the full nightmare of his own decay. 

He sent the Heavy Star lumbering away from that City and out into the calm emptiness beyond. He 
could not bear the ancient airman's degradation. He could not bear his own despair (which he conceived 
of as compassion). Behind him in the pit a great hand came up, fumbled, ripped away the tormenting 
mask: and with a terrible lowing sound that echoed across the shallow poisoned tarns and endless 
peathags of the continental waste, Benedict Paucemanly plunged into the full nightmare of his own decay. 

On the shores of the diamond lake 

We shall watch the fishes 

Faldiladia 

All decisions were postponed. After half an hour of this they came upon the Reborn Man. 

He was running north among the deep peat-groughs which here wind their way back to a flat and boggy 
watershed dotted with foundering cairns and rotten wooden posts. His limbs were shadowy, but on the 
loose black stuff he had worn beneath his armour there flared like a beacon the ideograph of his House. 
For some minutes he seemed unaware of the arrival of the Heavy Star, and ran on ignoring it, his arms 
windmilling for balance as he picked his way among the steep-sided channels and fibrous mounds. Then 
he looked up, staggered, and shook his fist. His mouth opened and shut angrily. He swayed, cupping his 
ears with his hands: and fell into the bed of a narrow stream, where he lay with his head in the peaty 
water for a moment or two, looking confused. By the time Hornwrack, having landed the machine a little 
way off, had found him again, he was back on his feet. 

'Where have I been?'he asked. 

'I don't know,'said Hornwrack. 'Look, I am sorry to have cut off your fingers. I no longer bear you any 
grudge.'(He examined this statement with surprise. It was true.) 

Fulthor looked down at his maimed hand. 

'My mind feels very clear,'he said. 'Where is the Dwarf?'He had forgotten everything, and could not take 
in Hornwrack's explanations. Causality meant nothing to him. 'Have we been to Iron Chine already, 
then?'he would ask: 'Or have we yet to see those burning sails?'Or, holding his head tenderly as if he 
could feel Time coiled and knotted there in it like purple braid, 'We've to meet Arnac san Tehn. Tonight, 
in the garden of Empty Wounds!'Smiling secretively, the madwoman took his hand and affected to count 
the fingers. He bore this calmly. The two of them stood there against black waste and obsidian sky; and 
in Hornwrack's imagination a light surrounded them. It was as though they had already separated 
themselves from the world in preparation for their descent into the past. He was filled with a deep 
resentment of their beauty (in response to which images of the Rue Sepile passed through his brain like 
fatal playing cards, or the lines extemporised by some bad poet in the purgatorial night - 'Here is the smell 
of fog; I see dead geraniums on your window sill: and women whisper in the lighted rooms'); but this was 
suppressed immediately by a corresponding urge to protect them, both from the world and his own 


envy. 

envy. 

He tried to think of something else to say. 

'Good luck.' 

They watched puzzledly as he trudged back to the Heavy Star, which was sinking a little under its own 
weight in the mud. For a moment it looked as if the madwoman might run after him. An expression of 
ordinary human intelligence crossed her face. Then she laughed. The old machine rose gracelessly into the 
air and turned towards the City. 

The City! Its, end is near. It expands and contracts, like a lung. Regular spasms of dissolution shake it 
like the vomits and distempers of a dying king. It is full of fires, not all of them real; memories of a history 
never achieved, a future unrealised. Sketchy and counterfeit, the towers of its sister city Viriconium 
advance and recede through a roseate smoke. Up from the buildings come fountains of earth! They pour 
into the sky as if gravity had been reversed, and where they fall on the surrounding plain a litter of insects 
is deposited, bits of dead insects which lie like ruined machinery amid the crude stones. At the height of 
each spasm the ground tolls like a bell; deep in the streets inexplicable phantoms stalk (headless women, 
their jewelled sandals sinking into a carpet of dusty grasshopper husks, rains of stinking skulls and 
luminous beetles, a sail moving down some non-existent Pleasure Canal: failed dreams of a compromise 
with the bony skeleton of Earth); and a great mad hooting goes up from the heart of the City, a groan of 
pain and horror in which may be distinguished the voice of the mutated airboatman calling to the assassin 
he has lured across a thousand miles to serve him -Kill me. 

The insects ignored this lowing call - as of some large but delicately-organized animal being 
disembowelled - and forced themselves in and out like wasps round a rotting apple. They buzzed 
erratically across the plain; hurled themselves into the pits they had dug; and gathered in the dark air in 
diffuse humming clouds. Meanwhile, the Heavy Star, stern down, fabric wounded by the curious stresses 
of space, floundered toward them with blue lights leaking from its engine rooms. They were aware of it. It 
fascinated them. They made sudden abortive darts and forays in its direction. Did they link it with their 
flight down from the Moon? Did they perceive Galen Hornwrack encysted at the heart of its simple 
nervous system? Some of the more daring individuals threw themselves against its hull, only to topple 
away into the convection currents and streams of floating debris; which consumed them. This agitation 
grew as Hornwrack approached the erupting City. Their forays became more purposeful, and more 
prolonged. The City pulsed and heaved, generating a savage mauve glare, and they came up from it like 
smoke. 

Up on the watershed Fulthor and the madwoman, interrupted in some partial rite of the Afternoon, some 
fragment of an old sin, shaded their eyes against the novel light. (Their iconic calm now representing a 
wiser - or at least more ordered - station of the world, a culture which would surely have taken such 
fireworks in its stride...) The plain was alive with crippled insects, tiny as aphids and bathed in the 
magnetic radiations of the City. A cold wind sprang up, lashed the boggy waste, and - rolling their 
wingless corpses before it like the discarded regalia of a mystery play - rushed away into the north; while 
above, the Heavy Star, a wobbling black mote in the hectic air, rose to meet the spreading swarm, and 
was engulfed. 

They fastened themselves on to its outer hull like locusts on a branch. It strained forward as if the air had 
solidified around it; and was brought to a standstill above the perimeter of the City, where the hulk of 


Benedict Paucemanly greeted it with booms and roars of self-pity, waving his infested limbs. (From up on 
the watershed this activity seemed like the movements of some tiny damaged mechanical toy.) He had 
replaced his mask but was unable to secure it, so that it hung awry on his blubbering tublike head like the 
woollen cap on the head of a retarded child. His new organs pulsed, engorging themselves in time to the 
rhythms of the City. 'In the Moon,'he said, 'it was like white gardens.'He begged for freedom in an 
abandoned language. He blinked up, watching the insects as they continued to alight on his old ship. 
When they could find no further space to settle they attached themselves to one another in a parody of 
copulation. Beneath this rustling layer the Heavy Star struggled to gain height. Suddenly, violet bodides 
arced from its bows! Caught up in the discharge of the ancient cannon many of the insects dropped away 
crackling and roasting and setting fire to their neighbours, so that they fell about the ears of the decaying 
airboatman like burning leaves. 

Benedict Paucemanly greeted it with booms and roars of self-pity, waving his infested limbs. (From up on 
the watershed this activity seemed like the movements of some tiny damaged mechanical toy.) He had 
replaced his mask but was unable to secure it, so that it hung awry on his blubbering tublike head like the 
woollen cap on the head of a retarded child. His new organs pulsed, engorging themselves in time to the 
rhythms of the City. 'In the Moon,'he said, 'it was like white gardens.'He begged for freedom in an 
abandoned language. He blinked up, watching the insects as they continued to alight on his old ship. 
When they could find no further space to settle they attached themselves to one another in a parody of 
copulation. Beneath this rustling layer the Heavy Star struggled to gain height. Suddenly, violet bodides 
arced from its bows! Caught up in the discharge of the ancient cannon many of the insects dropped away 
crackling and roasting and setting fire to their neighbours, so that they fell about the ears of the decaying 
airboatman like burning leaves. 

Fay Glass, shading her eyes, looked out across the plain. 

The City was a throbbing sepulchre of light. At the height of every spasm light vomited from it into the 
world, bringing a chaotic new reality and causing vast attenuated shadows to flicker across the stony 
plain; while above it hovered the swarm like an antithetical twin, a giant shadowy planet composed of 
interlocking wings, curled abdomens and entangled insectile legs, from which glittered thousands of 
mosaic eyes. Deep inside it was buried the Heavy Star, the whine and groan of its engines overlaid by an 
unearthly stridulation - a dry, triumphant song like the song of the wasteland locust as it rushes over the 
bony spaces of the south. Lulled by its own barren psalm, the swarm basked in the light of its coming 
transformation, anticipating the day when its larvae, made over entirely, should leave the refuge of the 
mutated airman and come forth into a reality neither human nor insect; and themselves bask in the warmth 
of a totally unknown sun. 

'Such a long way,'she said dreamily (and apropos, perhaps, of something else: for what could she 
know?) 'Such a long way, and so many wings.'. 

But now the Heavy Star tapped some final resource. The swarm, caught unawares, shook itself out into 
the density of a cloud of winter smoke. From this burst Galen Hornwrack and his legendary craft which, 
devouring its own substance, was spilling a lemon-yellow light from every rift and porthole! 

There was a thoughtful pause, as if he were surveying his chances. 

Then, before the swarm could act again, he switched off the motors, and the boat began to fall straight 


down toward the city; slowly at first, then faster and faster. 

down toward the city; slowly at first, then faster and faster. 

In the Artists'Quarter, in the Bistro Californium, they stare at one another and the door; sitting in the blue 
and gamboge shadows like wax figures waiting for a murder, for their own long-sensed termination which 
at once fascinates and frightens them. 'I dined with the hertis-Padnas.''Oh, shut up.'Unearthly structures 
have insinuated themselves between the towers on the hill at Minnet-Saba: hanging galleries under the fat 
white Moon, like veins of quartz; sandy domes and papery things like wasps'nests. All have an immaterial 
feel, the air of an intrusion from some other imagination: but the Low City streets are generally so cold 
that there is nobody in them to notice. And the Reborn have gone. (All night long on the high paths of the 
Monar their columns move uneasily north. Many will die of cold. Out among the tottering seracs of the 
glaciers, their advance parties report mirages.) So there is no-one abroad in the High City to see the 
palace of Methvet Nian pulsing like a great alchemical rose up there at the summit of the Proton Way, its 
filigree outer shell warping with light. No stars are visible above that hall, only there is a feeling of some 
heavy weight, some great uncommon cloud balanced above it. Its corridors are deserted but for the 
crawling survivors of the Sign trying to become insects -The palace awaited its end, breathing like an old 
woman: 

and with every shallow inspiration a yellow cabbagey air was drawn in from the city outside, to trickle 
down the passageways, chill the devotees of the Sign where they crouched in corners over their dragging 
abdominal sacs or quivering elytra, and come eventually through a region of old machines in niches, to the 
throne-room of the Queen -that room which Tomb the Dwarf had barricaded with corpses, and in which 
he now lay unable to get up. 

In the end it hadn't been much ofa fight; better than some he'd had, worse than many. The usual shouts 
and stinks; some hot work with the axe in a corner; the room frozen at sudden odd angles as the 
mechanical wife bore him to conclusions in the bluish gloom: shadows teetering on the walls. When it 
came down to it the servants of the Sign had behaved more like its victims - curiously lethargic and 
selfinvolved, as if trying to recover their human state. Those lucky enough to be unimpeded by their 
deformities had been preoccupied with them nevertheless, and had found it difficult to defend themselves 
against the axe; the rest had welcomed it quite openly. That axe! He remembered it now. How it hissed 
and sputtered in the dark, dripping with St Elmo's Fire! He recalled its evil light in the dim depopulated 
Soubridge streets at the conclusion of the War of the Two Queens. It had been with him on the Proton 
Circuit, when he stood on a heap of corpses to shake the hand of Alstath Fulthor; it had been with him at 
Waterbeck's rout, when with tegeus-Cromis the legendary swordsman he had watched a thousand 
farm-boys slaughtered in ten minutes: 

and both these friends now lost to him through death or madness. He remembered distinctly how he had 
first dug it up; but he could not think where... At any rate it had been a terrible thing to unleash on a 
handful of deformed shopkeepers, who could meet it only with kitchen knives and nightmares, in a 
shadowy room at the 'smoky candle end of time'. He could not understand how they had brought him 
down. 


There was a strong smell of death in the room, and his view of it was obscured by the dead themselves. 
They surrounded him like an earthwork topped with a fringe of stiffened limbs which framed part of a 
tapestry here, there a broken high-backed chair; and the blue light lay on their waxy skin like a bruise. 
The mechanical wife embraced him. Her delicate spars had snapped like icicles when she fell; her spine 
was cracked: and up from her mysterious centres of power came a thin stream of whitish motes, 
interrupted every so often by a sluice of yellow radiation and a momentary lifelike twitching of her limbs. 
Cellur and the Queen had tried and failed to free him, passing to and fro in front of him, their distracted 
expressions like those of illuminated figures on a grubby pasteboard playing card. 

There was a strong smell of death in the room, and his view of it was obscured by the dead themselves. 
They surrounded him like an earthwork topped with a fringe of stiffened limbs which framed part of a 
tapestry here, there a broken high-backed chair; and the blue light lay on their waxy skin like a bruise. 
The mechanical wife embraced him. Her delicate spars had snapped like icicles when she fell; her spine 
was cracked: and up from her mysterious centres of power came a thin stream of whitish motes, 
interrupted every so often by a sluice of yellow radiation and a momentary lifelike twitching of her limbs. 
Cellur and the Queen had tried and failed to free him, passing to and fro in front of him, their distracted 
expressions like those of illuminated figures on a grubby pasteboard playing card. 

'Birds no longer come to see me out of the high air,'whispered one; while the other smiled regretfully and 
said: 

'A dead bird swung at his belt during all that journey down the Rannoch. I did not hate my cousin, but it 
was a hard winter. 

Tomb licked his lips. He was dying. The excitement of murder, which had come back to him like a 
familiar old pain, was now ebbing. He was stranded on the shore of himself, hollowed out yet filled with 
enigmas which he recognised dimly as the evidence of his own unwounded psyche. He had made few 
judgements, before or after the fact: thus the events of his life, and the figures in it, retained their 
wholeness, remaining - he was surprised to find - like icons in the brain, sharp and brightly lit. Now they 
presented themselves to him as a series of unexpected gifts - a spring shower making paste out of the 
pink dust of the Mogadon Littoral, where the enamelled hermit crabs run up sideways out of the sea; the 
smell of whitebait frying in some cafe on the Rue Montdampierre; someone saying 'Here the 
anemone-boy spilt wine on her cloak'- shy, unbidden, peripheral little memories. He was captivated. 
While he waited, he reviewed them. He attended them with a shyness of his own, a pure and unironic 
affection for his own past. 

(Tomb the Dwarf! Much later, Methvet Nian discovered his caravan undamaged in Old Palace Yard. Its 
vulgar colours were st~ill bright beneath the winter's grime. The inside of it was very clean. She could find 
in none of its cleverly-designed cupboards and hiding places anything personal to him, anything he might 
have kept out of sentiment. His old spade was there, but it was simply a spade. His belongings were 
utilitarian, or else had myths -and thus existences - of their own: the little furnace, for instance, which had 
reforged the Nameless Sword all those years ago. There was nothing here to remember him by -this was 
how she put it to herself. Nevertheless, rather than leave she turned over the cold bed-linen, or touched a 
small pewter cup. Out in the courtyard there was clinging rain; yellow light and footsteps on the cobbles; 
night drawing in. Sitting alone in the dark she wondered what had become of his ponies.) 

City, dwarf, Queen: all waited. 

Cellur the old man, alien millenia fading in his brain, waited. 

Up in the north, Fay Glass and Alstath Fulthor waited on the quaking plain. Demented, pained, tortured 
by the persistence of the universe, Benedict Paucemanly could only wait. 

Hornwrack himself waited, falling eternally toward the mysterious city. 

He had pulled his hair ruthlessly back and fastened it with a steel clasp in imitation of the doomed 
captains of a now-forgotten war. About him he had drawn the meal-coloured cloak of the Low City 
bravo (which with its grotesquely-dyed hem signifies that he has wallowed in-the blood of fifty men). His 


hands, he discovered, had betrayed him over the breaking of the knife. They had hidden it in his cloak. 
Now it lay in his lap, flawed blade black and enigmatic. In all, he was as the Queen has seen him last, in 
her drawing room at Viriconium. He had rejected the myth she had offered him and adhered to his own. 
These symbols of the pose which had sustained him through eighty years of wet dawns in the Rue Sepile 
now served, perhaps, to reassure him of that. 

hands, he discovered, had betrayed him over the breaking of the knife. They had hidden it in his cloak. 
Now it lay in his lap, flawed blade black and enigmatic. In all, he was as the Queen has seen him last, in 
her drawing room at Viriconium. He had rejected the myth she had offered him and adhered to his own. 
These symbols of the pose which had sustained him through eighty years of wet dawns in the Rue Sepile 
now served, perhaps, to reassure him of that. 

We are not talking of his motives. All his life he had looked not for life itself but for some revelation to 
unify it and give it meaning: some - any - significant occurrence. Whether he was able or willing to 
recognise it now it had come, we cannot say. It is immaterial anyway. In the event he sacrificed himself to 
release the old airboatman from an undeserved nightmare. It was a rescue. 

At the instant of impact the boat split open around him like an empty gourd, but he did not feel it. 

Instead, as the crystal splinters entered his brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, 
coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved 
across the ceiling-frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited 
his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes 
and smiled; or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips. Viriconium, with all 
her narcissistic intimacies and equivocal invitations, welcomed him again. He had hated that city, yet now 
it was his past and it was all he had to regret... The second of these visions was of the Rue Sepile. It was 
dawn, in summer. Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. 
An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally profitless perspectives seemed to 
lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous City - and fell across the fronts of the houses 
where he had once lived, warming the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour. 

Up at the second floor casement window a boy was busy with the bright red geraniums arranged along 
the outer sill in lumpen terracotta pots. He looked down at Hornwrack and smiled. Before Hornwrack 
could speak he drew down the lower casement and turned away. The glass which now separated them 
reflected the morning sunlight in a silent explosion; and Hornwrack, dazzled, mistaking the light for the 
smile, suddenly imagined an incandescence which would melt all those old streets! 

Rue Sepile; the Avenue of Children; Margery Fry Court: all melted down! All the shabby dependencies 
of the Plaza of Unrealized Time! All slumped, sank into themselves, eroded away until nothing was left in 
his field of vision but an unbearable white sky above and the bright clustered points of the chestnut leaves 
below - and then only a depthless opacity, behind which he could detect the beat of his own blood, the 
vitreous humour of the eye. He imagined the old encrusted brick flowing, the glass cracking and melting 
from its frames even as they shrivelled away, the shreds of paint flaring green and gold, the geraniums 
toppling in flames to drop like comets through the fiery air; he imagined the chestnuts fading to nothing, 
not even white ash, under this weight of light! All had winked away like reflections in ajar of water glass, 
and only the medium remained, bright, viscid, vacant. He had a sense of the intolerable briefness of 
matter, its desperate signalling and touching, its fall; and simultaneously one of its unendurable durability. 

He thought, Something lies behind all the realities of the universe and is replacing them here, 
something less solid and more permanent. Then the world stopped haunting him forever. 

It is so hard to convey simultaneity: 

As Hornwrack dreamed, so did Tomb the Iron Dwarf, dying a thousand miles away in his one hundred 


and fiftieth year, old friend of kings and princes; as Cellur and the Queen stood in the chilly throne-room, 
staring into the north and whispering in the dry voices of the old, so Fay Glass and Alstath Fulthor stood 
in the distant waste and watched Benedict Paucemanly open his arms as if to embrace the falling airboat. 
His voice hooted morosely across to them on the wind. 'You've come home,'he tried to say: to whom or 
what is unclear, unless it was himself. It was too late anyway. The Heavy Star buried itself in the bloated 
arch of his chest and broke apart with a muffled thud. He rolled like a stricken whale with this enormous 
blow, making a soft almost female noise of grief or pleasure; and a white light issued suddenly from him, a 
nimbus which filled the pit and spread so rapidly that within a minute the whole of the city had been 
transfigured, its alien arcades and papery constructions appearing to glow from within. 

and fiftieth year, old friend of kings and princes; as Cellur and the Queen stood in the chilly throne-room, 
staring into the north and whispering in the dry voices of the old, so Fay Glass and Alstath Fulthor stood 
in the distant waste and watched Benedict Paucemanly open his arms as if to embrace the falling airboat. 
His voice hooted morosely across to them on the wind. 'You've come home,'he tried to say: to whom or 
what is unclear, unless it was himself. It was too late anyway. The Heavy Star buried itself in the bloated 
arch of his chest and broke apart with a muffled thud. He rolled like a stricken whale with this enormous 
blow, making a soft almost female noise of grief or pleasure; and a white light issued suddenly from him, a 
nimbus which filled the pit and spread so rapidly that within a minute the whole of the city had been 
transfigured, its alien arcades and papery constructions appearing to glow from within. 

(Out there on the alien plain, Fay Glass and Alstath Fulthor felt it pulse through them, and were pulled 
away into the past. 'Arnac san Tehn!'he called triumphantly: 'We meet in the Garden of Women! 
Midnight!'But she whispered, 'So many wings,'a little sad, perhaps, to leave. 'So many wings,'seeing the 
cruelty of it all. They lingered for a while as grey phantoms amid the sinking cairns of the watershed, the 
Afternoon Cultures reclaiming them by degrees. Now they are lost to us for good.) 

Benedict Paucemanly writhed silently as if determined to vomit something up. All was done but this one 
thing: his death. He groaned and strained. Abruptly the larvae of the swarm burst out of his distended 
pores, fell off him into the pit and dried up like dead leeches. He hooted in triumph. The light fountained 
up from him for some minutes more, all the light he had absorbed during his long imprisonment in the 
Moon, all his pain. He was beatified, dissolving in his own light. Repository and symbol, he released all 
the energies of the two realities colliding within him: and in releasing them released the Earth. 

The plain darkens. We see it from a long way off. The old airboatman is dead. There is a slow fading of 
the sky, a cold wind springing up; a deeper night arrives. The mysterious City winks like an ember on the 
edge of the plain, fading from white to purple to a dim red and then nothing. For a moment the swarm 
hangs above this its first and last stronghold, forming itself into a complex gridlike pattern in the obsidian 
air - some last attempt to communicate with the human world, a glowing symbol, meaningless yet full of 
import against the darkness. Down floats its stridulant hymn, bony celebration of the waste spaces of the 
universe. Then, its ontological momentum lost, its position in the material continuum untenable, the life 
goes out of it. Those individuals which survive will become mere insects and wander about the plain 
forever with folded wings, as lost as all the other races that ever came down to the Earth, and whose 
descendants now inhabit the Deep Wastes. When they meet they will stare lengthily at one another as if 
trying to remember something; or, copulating hopelessly beneath a black rain, become suddenly 
immobile, so that they resemble tangled silver brooches mislaid on the desert by the hetaerae of some 
vanished civilisation... 


EPILOGUE 

Viriconium. 


Its achingly formal gardens and curious geometries, its streets that reek of squashed fruit and fish; its 
(lowers like purple wounds on the lawns of the 'Hermitage'at TroisVertes; its palace like a shell: how can 
one deal with it in words? 

Its achingly formal gardens and curious geometries, its streets that reek of squashed fruit and fish; its 
(lowers like purple wounds on the lawns of the 'Hermitage'at TroisVertes; its palace like a shell: how can 
one deal with it in words? 

If you go and stand up in the foothills of Monar you can see it hanging below you wrapped in a mantle of 
millenial calm. From the brow of Hollin Low Moor you may watch it fade into another night. Its histories 
make of the very air about it an amber, an entrapment. Light flares from the vivid tiered heights of 
Minnet-Saba, from the riverine curve of the Proton Circuit, the improbable towers and plazas of the 
Atteline Quarter; under a setting sun banks of anemones and sol d'or planted about the graves of 
tegeus-Cromis and Tomb the Dwarf glow like triumphal stained glass; and someone far off in the still 
twilight is reading aloud a verse of Ansel Verdigris, the poet of the City. 

Viriconium. 

Spring. Down in the Cispontine Quarter the vegetation has begun to flourish again. The fuel-gathering 
women are no longer seen. Ragwort clothes all the fallen walls and earthy scars, its stems already infested 
with black and yellow caterpillars (later in the year these become an attractive crimson moth which was 
once the symbol of the City). Up at Alves, jackdaws are squabbling all day over nesting sites in the 
cracked dome of the observatory. And in that demimonde which has its centre at the Plaza of Unrealized 
Time, the women smile down from their casement windows, lifting a hand to pat newly-washed hair. 
Humanity has recolon ized the inconceivable avenues of the High City - gaping up open-mouthed at the 
inexplicable architecture of the Afternoon Cultures while it empties its bladder in their millennial gutters and 
hung out its washing again in the Low. The 'Winter of the Locust'is over. Only a sudden increase in 
the number of beggars (some of whom have the most novel deformities) along the Rivelin Way persuades 
us that it ever took place, that we ever listened to that white thin song. 

We hear that Lord Mooncarrot is seen about with Chorica nam VeIl Ban, that cold fish. He has received 
her mother at his house in Minnet-Saba: rumour is rife. We hear that the feverish Madame 'L'has ceased 
her visits to the Boulevard Aussman, is cured of all but her bad taste, and this week reopens her salon. 
We hear that Paulinus Rack, the fat poetaster and undertaker's agent has come by a packet of 
manuscript in not-unquestionable circumstances, and plans soon to edit a volume of the cockatoo's work. 
He can be seen any day, with his fat hands and jade cane, drinking lemon gin at the Bistro Californium. 
(He has theory of the Locust Winter and its madness. Who does not? Invite him to dinner and he will spill 
it on his waistcoat with the custard.) As for the rest of the Low City: the younger poets favour a Bistro 
gnosticism - the World, they say, has already ended, and we are living out hours for which no chronology 
allows. They cut atrocious figures as they swagger about the Artists'Quarter practising their polemic. And 
these days so many poseurs are wearing the meal-coloured cloak that the bravos have taken in defence 
to yellow velvet. 

In short, the Eternal City stands as it once did, infuriating, beautiful, vulgar by turns. Only the Reborn are 
missing. You do not see them now in the Atteline Quarter, or on the Proton Circuit hurrying from the 
palace on an errand of Alstath Fuithor's. (He has never returned. The Low City always knew something 
like this would happen. It taps the side of its nose: sniffs.) After the persecutions they endured at the 
hands of the Sign, the majority of them will never come here again. They will live now in the deserts for 
many generations, their germ-plasm becoming as alien as that of the big lizards of the Great Brown 
Waste, refining their theory of Time, redefining their heritage, growing mad and strange. 

In the evenings Queen Jane, Methvet Nian of Viriconium, sits in the side chamber or salle she uses as a 
library and drawing room, sometimes meditating this loss, which is one of many in her life. 'A world trying 
to remember itself:'surrounded by her sheets of music and delicate little corals, she has the wry but supple 


calm ofan ageing danseuse; keeps in a rosewood chest with copper reinforcing bands a gourd-shaped 
musical instrument from the deep East; hears the past in every passing footstep, and wonders often what 
became of the sword and the mail and the assassin she gave them to. 

calm ofan ageing danseuse; keeps in a rosewood chest with copper reinforcing bands a gourd-shaped 
musical instrument from the deep East; hears the past in every passing footstep, and wonders often what 
became of the sword and the mail and the assassin she gave them to. 

She closes her eyes. 

'They enriched us even so. Can you still see them, Cellur, when Tomb woke them first? What a pageant 
they made, there in the brain chamber at Knarr, with all their strange weapons!' 

He can see nothing. He was not there. But he has forgotten even that (or perhaps he realizes that she has) 
and with a small diffident movement of his hands says, 'I am sure I do, my lady;'then, remembering 
something else, smiles suddenly. 'Did I not live then in a tower by the sea?' 

Ten thousand grey wings beat down the salty wind, like a storm in his head! 


.