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.
'I – 'said Tomb. He looked down at his hand. He wondered how long he had been carrying the knife without knowing it.
The boy meanwhile trembled despairingly. His eyes were watering. He made a painful effort to draw his sword.
'Don't!'said Tomb. 'I didn't mean -, And it might have rested there had he not heard the sound of feet coming along the corridor toward them.
'I'm sorry,'he told the boy, kicking him beneath the left kneecap. The boy lay on the floor motionless, looking up at him like a hurt animal. Tomb hauled the new sword from its scabbard and tried it for balance. He had some idea of using it in the absence of his axe. 'Rubbish,'he said, and threw it clattering across the passage out of harm's way: 'Get something decent as soon as you can afford it.'He knelt on the floor close to the boy, who made no move to stop him, set the point of his knife against his throat and stared into the round hopeless eyes. 'What's this round your neck?'But the boy couldn't speak. 'Don't worry,'said Tomb, 'please.'In this manner both of them awaited the arrival of the footsteps.
Not long after, a Reborn Man came striding towards them down the corridor. He had on the fantastic blood-red plate armour of an important House, its contorted yellow ideograph flaming on the black cloak that billowed out behind him. The trembling glow of the armour made his image seem mythical, transitory, as if he flickered in and out of Time as we know it; its curious blunt shoulder-spikes and elongated joints gave him the look of some mutated crustacean. His head was bare, his expression beleaguered, and his companions were an ill-assorted lot, comprising a woman of his own race, bitterly thin, shaven-headed, her gait awkward and 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 ironicaclass="underline" absent.
Tomb bared his rotten old teeth. He was a little disconcerted by such a reception after twenty years. 'I'm too old for patience, Reborn,'he said gruffly. 'Are you all right?'When no answer came he turned his attention almost gratefully to the boy (who had risen to his knees: colour was coming back into his face), thinking: the whole city is in a dream which it will not share with me; these corridors are cursed. 'Get up,'he told him. 'What is that thing round your neck?'When the boy wouldn't answer he asked Fulthor, but Fulthor didn't hear.
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.