'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.
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…
In the room at the centre of the palace the light had almost gone. Draughts ran about like mice in the corners. White stiff fingers retreated beneath the fur cloak she clasped about her: 'It is so cold this afternoon. On the Rannoch Moor when I was little more than a child, Lord Birkin Grif killed a snow-leopard. It was not so cold then. He spun me round by the arms crying “Hold on, hold tight!” (That was earlier still.) The dwarf is late this afternoon.'
'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.
Its eyes widened triumphantly. Gorb. Cellur and the Queen murmured on. The cups clinked, the day darkened and slipped inevitably into night; thin blue flames danced in the hearth, leaving delicate indelible images on the surface of the eye.
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.