Hornwrack supported the corpse by its throat, struggling to pull out his knife. The yellow face grinned at him, laved by its own punctured carotid. He let it slip away, back down into his nightmares.
For a moment he felt quite old and hopeless. All around him shadows were slipping from the place in defeat -silently, like sapient grey baboons quitting some foggy midnight rock in a warmer latitude, fur blood-streaked, the game up. In the middle of the room Verdigris had fallen to his knees and, clutching one gory thigh to stem the bleeding, was slashing feebly at retreating hamstrings. As Hornwrack watched he fell on his face and dragged himself off into a corner. Hornwrack ran out into the street, shouting. Brought up short by the dazzle of moonlight, he could hear only the rapid patter of feet. He stood there for a long time, shaking his head puzzledly, growing cold as the clock moved from midnight to one, the knife forgotten in his hand; then he went back inside.
Verdigris had gone, through the rear entrance and out into the thousand gutters'of the Quarter, the girl's bundle with him; even now he would be trying to sell it in some derelict shambles at the dark end of an alley. Mooncarrot and Chorica nam Vell Ban were gone, to spend the rest of the night together in grey, narcissistic embrace, each seeing in the other's unresponsive face a mirror – and part with revulsion as the spasm of fear which had briefly united them faded in the spreading light of dawn. The Sign had gone, and its dead with it. The queer Californium frescoes looked down on an empty and echoing space, and, standing awkwardly at the hub of it, staring about her in characteristic frozen panic, the Reborn Woman Fay Glass, a harbinger, a messenger in a velvet cloak. Her cropped yellow hair was spiky with congealing blood and she was trying desperately to speak.
. 'I,'she said. 'In my youth,'she whispered. Her eyes were blue as acid.
'Look,'he told her, 'you had better leave before they come back.'A place in his left side ached unbearably. He felt dull '. and fatigued. 'I'm sorry about the bundle,'he said. 'If I see Verdigris… but I expect your people can help you.'He put his hand through the rip in his soft leather shirt. It came out warm and sticky. He bit his knuckles. 'I'm hurt,'he explained, 'and I can't help you any more. '
'In my youth I – '
She was plainly mad (and attracted madness too, focusing all the long lunacies of the City like a glass catching the rays of some ironic invisible sun). He wanted no dependants. He put out a hand to touch her shoulder.
Immediately he experienced a shocking moment of blankness, a lapse like the premature tumble into sleep of an overtired brain. It was accompanied by something which resembled an intense flash of light. He heard himself say, quite inexplicably: 'There are no longer any walls.'Shadows rushed out of the Californium corners and swallowed him: the Afternoon was vibrating in him like a malign chord. Somewhere out there in the millenial dark night, tall ancient towers howled on a rising wind. He approached them over many days, fearfully, across tracts of moorland and dissected peat, scoured ridges and deep sumps. The 'water was corrupted and undrinkable, the paths difficult to find. Finally the hidden city composed itself before him like a dream, but by then it was too late… Simultaneously (in a vision overlaid like delicately coloured glass) he was in some other place. A settlement huddled on the verge of the Great Brown Waste. Behind it steep slopes covered with sickly dwarf-oak swept up to an extensive gritstone escarpment running north and south, its black bays and buttresses looming up against the fading light. A few flakes of snow hung in the bitter air: and, silhouetted against the pale-green sky, enormous insectile shapes marched in slow processions across the clifftop.
'No,'cried Galen Hornwrack. He shook himself like a dying rat and pushed the woman away. 'What?'he said, staring at her. He was trembling all over. Then, with his hand clapped to his left side and his face haggard, he staggered out of the Californium, feeling the dry, febrile touch of wings or madness on his skin.
Behind him the Reborn Woman moved her lips desperately, a child making faces into a mirror.
'In my youth,'she said to his retreating back, 'I made my small contribution. Venice becomes like Blackpool, leaving nothing for anybody. Rebellion is good and necessary. I -'The Californium became silent about her. There was nothing left but the doorway, a trapezium of blue and grey and faded gamboge – the reflection of the City in a deep well of moonlight on an autumn night. Nothing was left but the wind out of Monar, a little blood, the falling leaves. She began to weep with frustration.
'I-'.
Viriconium. Hornwrack. Three worlds colliding in his head. As he rain aimlessly up and down the alleyways at the periphery of the Quarter, dark, viscid peat groughs yawned like traps beneath his feet. The wind hissed in his ears. Looming against an electric sky, that terrible haunted crag with its slow purposeful visitation! In the shattered moonlight of the City he stumbled into doors and walls, his limbs jerking erratically as if the vision accidentally vouchsafed him had been accompanied by some injection of poison into his nervous system. His clothes were torn and he was caked with blood; he couldn't remember where he lived; he couldn't imagine where he'd been. It was this fatal disorientation which camouflaged the sound of footsteps following him: and by the time he had remembered who he was – by the time those other landscapes had faded sufficiently for him to appreciate his situation – it was too late.
Out of the shadows that curtained the alley wall another shadow hurled itself; across a band of moonlight a white perverted face was launched at his own; he was carried to the floor by a tremendous blow in his damaged side, as if someone had run full-tilt into him in the bruised yellow gloom. Thin, hispid arms embraced him, and close to his ear a voice that smelt of wet rags and bile – a voice pulped by self-indulgence and curdled with vice – hissed, 'Pay up, Hornwrack, or you'll rot in the gutter! I swear it!'
The hands which now scuttled over him were lean and fearful, full of horrible vitality. They discovered his purse and emptied it. They stumbled on his knife; retreated in confusion; then snatched it up and drove it repeatedly against the flagstones until it shattered. Overcome by this ambitious tactic they abandoned him suddenly, like frightened rats. Something heavy and foul was flung down on the pavement near his head. A single exotic shriek of laughter split the night: running footsteps, the signature of the Low City, faded into echoes, stranding him sick and helpless on this barren, reeling promontory of his empty life.
Now he realised that he had been stabbed a second time, close to the original wound. He grinned painfully at the ironical shards of his own blade, winking up at him from the cracked flags, each one containing a'tiny, perfect reflection of the mad retreating figure of the balladeer, coxcomb flapping in the homicidal night. 'I'll have your lights, you bloody cockatoo, you rag,'he whispered, 'you bloody poet!'But now he wanted only his familiar quarters in the Rue Sepile, the dry rustle of mice among the dead geraniums and the murmured confidences of the whores on the upper stair.
After a while this hallucination of security became so magnetic that he hauled himself to his feet and began the journey, clinging to the alley wall for comfort. Almost immediately he was enveloped in a foul reek. He had stumbled over Verdigris'abandoned rubbish: the Reborn Woman's bundle, still wrapped in its waterproof cloth. For the life of him he couldn't think why it should stink so of rotting cabbage.