The bird waddled forward, firelight spraying off its folded wings.
'That is not given to me,'it said. 'It will not be given to you, if you fail the real task implicit in this war: fear the geteit chemosit; travel at once to the tower of Cellur, which you will find - '
Filled with a horrible depression, Cromis dropped the shards of his sword and left the fire. From his saddlebag he took his curious eastern instrument. He bit his lip and wandered past the picket line and the perimeter guards. With death in his head, he sat on a stone. Before him, huge loops of sand-polished girder dipped in and out of the dunes like metal worms. They are frozen, he thought: Caught on a strange journey across an alien planet at the forgotten end of the universe.
Shivering, he composed this:
'Rust in our eyes… metallic perspectives trammel us in the rare earth north… we are nothing but eroded men… wind clothing our eyes with white ice… we are the swarfeaters… hardened by our addiction, tasting acids… Little to dream here, our fantasies are iron and icy echoes of bone… rust in our eyes, we who had once soft faces.'
'Rust in our eyes – ' he began again, preparing to repeat the chant in the Girvanian Mode: but a great shout from the camp drove it out of his skull. He jumped to his feet.
He saw the metal bird explode into the air, shedding light like a gunpowder rocket, its wings booming. Men were running about the encampment, casting febrile shadows on the ancient walls. He made pitiful grabbing motions at his empty scabbard, hurrying toward the uproar. Over a confusion of voices he heard Grif bellow suddenly:
'Leave it alone! Oh, you stupid pigs, leave it alone!'
Obsessed by his fantasies of an alien world, Cromis was for a moment unable to identify the dark, massive shape fidgeting and grunting in the gloom of the dead building. Drawn out of the inhospitable dunes by the warmth or the light and surrounded by men with swords, it seemed to be mesmerised and bemused by the fire – a lean, heavy body slung low between queerly-articulated legs, a twenty foot denizen of his own imagination.
He was almost disappointed to recognise it as one of the black reptiles of the Waste, huge but harmless, endowed by the folk-lore of Viriconium with the ability to eat metal.
'Big lizard,'muttered one of Grif's brigands, with sullen awe: 'Big lizard.'
Cromis found himself fascinated by the flat, squat head with its wicked undershot lower jaw and rudimentary third eye. He could discern none of the spines and baroque crests traditional in illustrations of the beast, simply a rough hide with a matt, non-reflective quality.
'Pull back,'ordered Grif, quietly.
The men obeyed, keeping their weapons up. Left to itself, the reptile closed determinedly on the fire: finally, the flames leapt, perfectly reflected, in each of its eyes. There it stood for some minutes, quite still.
It blinked. Cromis suspected that whatever sluggish metabolic desires the fire had aroused were unfulfilled. Laboriously, it backed away. It shuffled back into the night, moving its head slowly from side to side.
As his men turned to follow, Grif said sharply, 'I told you no. Just leave it be. It has harmed nothing.'He sat down.
'We don't belong here any more,'he said.
'What do you suppose it saw in there?'Cromis asked him.
Two days out into the barrens. It seemed longer.
'The landscape is so static,'said Grif, 'that Time is drawn out, and runs at a strange, slow speed.'
'Scruffy metaphysics. You are simply dying of boredom. I think I am already dead.'Old Theomeris slapped his pony's ruimmp. 'This is my punishment for an indiscreet life. I wish I had enjoyed it more.'
Since noon that day they had been travelling through a range of low, conical slag hills, compelled by a surface of loose slate to lower their speed to. a walk. The three-hundred-foot heaps of grey stone cast back bell-like echoes from the unsteady hooves of the horses. Landslips were frequent; limited, but unnerving.
Cromis took no part in the constant amiable bickering: it was as unproductive as the sterile shale. Further, he was concerned by the odd behaviour of the lammergeyer.
Ten or fifteen minutes before, the bird had ceased flying its customary pattern of wide circles, and now hung in the air some eight hundred feet up, a silver cruciform slipping and banking occasionally to compensate for a thermal current rising from the slag tips. As far as he could tell, it was hovering above a point about a mile ahead of their present position and directly on their route.
'The bird has seen something,'he said to Grif, when he was sure. 'It is watching something. Call a halt and lend me a sword – no, not that great lump of iron, the horse will collapse beneath it – and I'll go and find out what it is.'
It was queer, lonely excursion. For half an hour he worked along the precarious spiral paths, accompanied only by echoes. Desolation closed oppressively round him.
Once, the terrible, bitter silence of the slag hills was broken by a distant rhythmic tapping; a light, quick, mysterious ring of metal on metaclass="underline" but a brief fall of rock drowned it out. It returned later as he was urging his horse down the last slope of the range, the Great Brown Waste spread once more before him, Cellur's metal vulture hanging like an omen five hundred feet above his head.
At the bottom of the slope, two horses were tethered.
A pile of dusty harness lay near them, and a few yards away stood a small red four-wheeled caravan of a type usually only seen south of Viriconium – traditionally used by the tinkers of Mingulay for carrying their large families and meagre equipment. Redolent of the temperate south, it brought to his mind images of affectionate gypsy slatterns and their raucous children. Its big, thick-spoked wheels were picked out in bright yellow; rococo designs in electric blue rioted over its side panels; its curved roof was painted purple. Cromis was unable to locate the source of the tapping sound (which presently stopped), but a thin, blue-grey spire of smoke was rising from behind the caravan.
He realised that it was impossible to conceal his presence from whoever was camped down there – his horse's nervous, crabbing progress down the decline was dislodging continuous slides of rock which bounded away like live things – so he made no effort, coming down as fast as possible, gripping his borrowed sword tightly.
On the last five yards of the slope, momentum overcame him: the horse's rear hooves slid from beneath it; it pecked; and he rolled out of the saddle over its shoulder. He landed dazed and awkward in the gritty, sterile sand of the Waste, and dropped his sword. Fine, stinging particles of dust got into his eyes. He stumbled to his feet, eyes blind and streaming, unpleasantly aware of his bad tactical position.
'Why don't you just stand there quietly,'said a voice he thought he knew, 'and make no attempt to regain that rather clumsy sword? Eb?'And then: 'You caused enough fuss and furore for ten men coming down that hill.'
Cromis opened his eyes.
Standing before him, a power-axe held in his knotty, scarred hands, was a thin figure no more than four feet high, with long white hair and amused, pale grey eyes. His face was massively ugly – it had an unformed look, a childlike, disproportionate caste to its planes – and the teeth revealed by his horrible grin were brown and broken. He was dressed in the heavy leather leggings and jerkin of a metal-prospector, and standing on end the haft of his axe would have topped him by a foot.
'You,'said Cromis, 'could have done no better. You are as insubordinate as ever. You are a pirate. Put up that axe, or my familiar spirit – 'Here, he pointed to the vulture spiralling above them '- will probably tear the eyes from your unfortunate face. I have a great deal of trouble in restraining it from such acts.'