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:
'I beg My Lord the sheep's arse to change his mind.'
'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 -
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 · pale pink and yellow leaking through the high eastern skylights. Dawn had arrived early. Fresh news! 'Be quick!'