Grif and Cromis dragged the dead courier from his ruined ship and buried him in a deep drift of loess on the southern side of the Plaza. It was a queer and sombre business. The Queen looked on, her cowl pulled forward, her cloak fluttering. They were impelled to work slowly, for they had only their hands for shovels. As they completed the interment, great white sparks began to hiss and crackle between the shattered crystal hull and the surrounding buildings.
'We would be wiser out of this,'suggested Tomb, who had been carrying out salvage work, as was his nature, and promptly rushed back into the wreckage to steal more tools and retrieve his exoskeleton. After that, they made their way through the bone-smooth streets until Grif could walk no further, the damp wind mourning about them and Tomb's armour clanking funereally as he dragged it along.
Under the one unbroken roof that remained (like a static stone haunting, like a five-hundred year memory) in the city, amid piles of dust younger than the Waste but older than the empire, they lit a fire and prepared a meal from the miserable stores of the wrecked machine. Shadows danced crudely, black on the black walls. The sun had gone down in a gout of blood.
At the prompting of some impulse he did not quite understand, Cromis had rescued the corpse of Cellur's bird from the ship. While they ate, he explained its nature to the Young Queen, and Tomb probed its mechanisms with a tlmin steel knife.
'… We know nothing more of this man. But by sending the bird, he warned us – the fact that I did not heed the warning in no way devalues it – of the geteit chemosit. It may be that he has some way of dealing with them.'
Birkin Grif chewed a strip of dried meat. He laughed.
'That is pure conjecture,'he said.
'It is the only hope we have. Grif. There is nothing else.'
'He is very clever with his hands,'cackled Tomb the dwarf, poking at the innards of the bird. He thought for a moment. 'Or, like Canna Moidart, good at digging.'
'So, if you do not object, My Lady, we will travel to Girvan Bay and solicit his aid. Should there be some secure place to which we can deliver you first -'
'Places do not guarantee security, Lord Cromis, only people – 'Here, she smiled at him '- a thing we have both learned recently, I think – 'He reflected ruefully that it was unwise to forget the astuteness of the House of Methven '- and, besides, I have been safe for seventeen years. I think I would like to be at risk for a while.'
A huge, urgent lurching motion manifested itself on the other side of the fire like a local geological disturbance. Birkin Grif had heaved himself to his feet. He looked down at the Young Queen, mumbling subterraneanly to himself. He bowed from the waist.
'Madam,'he said, 'You have the courage of your father. That is a brave attitude.'He sat down again. 'Mind you,'he added in a low voice to Tomb, 'it's a bloody long trip for a man in my condition.'
Queen Jane of Viriconium laughed for the first time since she had lost her empire. Which shows at least, thought Cromis, the resilience of youth. He did not mean to condescend.
They stayed in that city for five days. A processing-centre in the heyday of the Northmen, perhaps it welcomed the ring of Tomb's hammer as he worked on his damaged armour – a loop in Time, a faint, distorted echo from a past in which other mechanics had beaten the subtle artefacts of the Afternoon Cultures into cruder, more vital forms.
Grif's leg was slow to heal; exertion reopened it; the blood seemed slow to clot, and he found walking difficult. Like a convalescing child, he was prone to brief, silly rages. He limped and fretted about, railling at his own limitations. Finally, he forced himself to walk to the wreck in Luthos Plaza, tear a slim cobalt girder from the destroyed enginehousing, and bend it into a crutch.
It was an unfortunate admission. His gait thereafter was laborious, unsteady – and Tomb, a cruel humourist, imitated it gleefully, stumbling and capering like a crippled acrobat. That parody was a horrid work of art. Grif lost his temper, and implied that the power-armour was a less respectable kind of crutch. They went for one another murderously, all hooked hands and cunning blows, and had to be separated forcibly. They took to cutting each other dead in the bleak streets.
'You are preposterous,'Cromis told them.
To Methvet Nian he said, 'They are bored with inaction, we will leave here tomorrow;'but later that day two airboats bearing the Moidart's sigil ghosted in off the Waste and hung over the Plaza. Northmen swarmed down rope ladders to examine the burnt-out launch, kicked noisily through the wreckage, looking for souvenirs.
Cromis took his small party to earth in the archaic suburbs of Drunmore. But it became apparent that the airborne force was the vanguard of an attempt to re-occupy the city after half a millennium's absence; so they left the place that night, and went undetected into the cold spaces of the Pass of Methedrin.
They began their journey down the Rannoch:
It was a land of immense, barely-populated glacial moors, flanked by the tall hills – of bogs and peat-streams – of granite boulders split from the Mountains of Monar during slow, unimaginable catastrophes of ice, deposited to wear away in the beds of wide, fast, shallow rivers;
Of bright green moss, and coarse, olive-green grass, and delicate, washed-out winter flowers discovered suddenly in the lee of low, worn drumlins – of bent thorn and withered bullace, of damp prevailing winds that searched for voices in stands of birch and pine;
Of skylines, wrinkled with ridges;
Of heather and gorse, grey cloud and weather - of sudden open stretches of white water that would swell in Spring, dwindle and vanish with the coming of Summer – mysterious waterways;
It was green and brown, green and grey; it grew no crops; it constituted one quarter of the Empire of Viriconium.
At dawn each day, Cromis would leave his blankets, shivering, to inspect whatever snares he had set the night before:
generally, he caught rabbits and waterlogged his boots: but he took a morose pleasure in these solitary outings. Something in the resigned, defeated landscape (or was it simply waiting to be born? Who can tell at which end of Time these places have their existence?) called out to his senses, demanded his attention and understanding.
He never found out what it was. Puzzling, he would return with his catch, to wake the camp and initiate another day of walking.
They were a ragged crew, a queer crew to be walking down the Rannoch like that: Tomb crucified in his leather leggings against the metal tree of his exoskeleton, never tiring, going like a machine over bog and river, leaping ravines and cutting down whole spinneys with his axe; Birkin Grif in the ruins of his splended cobalt mail, hopping and lurching, cursing his crutch like a mad scarecrow; Cromis, his beautiful black hair lank in the damp wind, the dead metal bird dangling limply by its neck from his belt, stopping to gaze at waterworn stone by the hour -And Methvet Nian in her purple cloak, discovering a portion of her lost Empire, and of herself. 'Towers are not everything, Lord Cromis!'she laughed, and she took his arm. 'They are not!'She brought him flowers and was disappointed when he could not identify them for her. He showed her crows and mountains, and expected no identification at all. He smiled; he was not used to that. They were thrown together by small observations.
In this way, they covered twenty miles a day.
During the third week, it snowed. Ice crusted the rivers, rock cracked and broke above the thousand-foot line of the flanking hills. Cromis found his traps full of white hares and albino foxes with red, intelligent eyes. Birkin Grif killed a snow-leopard with his crutch: for ferocity, it was an even match until the last blow.