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.
Verdigris, with one short anticipatory gurgle, squirmed further into the shadowy undergrowth on the far bank of the canal…
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!'
'I see nothing.'
'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.