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.
Through all this, Fulthor's companions had hardly moved, but looked on with fear or irony or whatever emotion seemed appropriate. Now the Reborn Woman, sensing his distress, came forward and put one hand uncertainly on his shoulder. 'I – 'she said, and then something in a language Tomb could not follow. 'Mein Herz hat seine Liebe. In my youth I made -'It was clear she could not help him, which distressed her in her turn. She shook him. She looked around for help. 'In my youth I made my small contribution. Blackpool and Venice become as one. Above the night the stars revolve, in circuits of the shuddering bear!'This last a shout. She wept. Oddly enough it was the assassin from the Low City who moved to comfort her. He touched her hand and his bloody, spoilt features writhed briefly: after a second's puzzlement Tomb decided this was an attempt to smile. The woman smiled back, and her face was transfigured – where the dwarf had previously seen only a chilling vacancy there now flared delight, and an intelligence like a lamp uncovered. She let go of the assassin's hand and danced away from him, singing,
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.
'Leave that, sir,'he said, 'although I'm sure it must be very interesting, and tell me: has the City lost its senses?'
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…'