Thoughtfully, he made his way 'to the workshop on the fifth floor. He drew his sword and rapped with its pommel on the door.
'Cellur!'he called. 'We are discovered!'
He looked at the nameless blade, then put it away.
'Possibly, we can hold them off. The tower has its defences. It would depend on the type of weapon they have.'
They had gathered in the upper room, Methvet Nian shivering with cold, Birkin Grif complaining at the earliness of the hour. Dry-mouthed and insensitive from lack of sleep, Cromis found the whole situation unreal.
'One such boat could carry fifty men,'he said.
It hung now over the causeway that joined the tower to the mainland; like a haunting. It began to descend, slowed, alighted on the crumbling stone, its bow aimed at the island.
'Footmen need not concern us,'said Cellur. 'The door will hold them: and there are the birds.'
Beneath the weight of the boat, the causeway shifted, groaned, settled. Chunks of stone broke away and slid into the estuary. In places, a foot of water licked the dark hull. Behind it, the hills took on a menacing gunmetal tint in the growing light. Cellur's fish-eagles began their tireless circling.
Five false windows showed the same view: the water, the silent launch.
A hatch opened in its side, like a wound.
From it poured the geteit chemosit, their blades at high port.
Birkin Grif hissed through his clcnched teeth. He rubbed his injured leg. 'Let us see your home defend itself, Birdmaker. Let us see it!'
'Only two humans are with them,'said the Queen. 'Officers: or slaves?'
They came three abreast along the causeway; half a hundred or more energy blades, a hundred and fifty yellow, fathomless eyes.
The birds met them.
Cellur's hands moved across his instruments, and the dawn faltered as he lifted his immense flock from the island and hurled it at the beach. Like a cloud of smoke, it stooped on the chemosit, wailing and screaming with one voice. The invader vanished.
Blades flickered through the cloud, slicing metal like butter. Talons like handfuls of nails sought triplet eyes. Hundreds of birds fell. But when the flock.drew back, twenty of the automata lay in shreds half in and half out of the water, and the rest had retreated to their ship.
'Ha,'said Grif in the pause that followed. 'Old man, you are not toothless, and they are not invulnerable.'
'No,'said the Birdmaster, 'but I am frightened. Look down there. It seems to me that Canna Moidart dug more than golems from the Desert -'
He turned to Cromis.
'You must go! Leave now. Beneath the tower are cellars. I have horses there. Tunnels lead through the basalt to a place half a mile south of here. The dwarf is as ready as he ever will be. Obey his instructions when you reach the site of the artificial brain.
'Go. Fetch him now, and go! His armour I have serviced. It is with the horses. Leave quickly!'
As he spoke, his eyes dilated with fear.
Despite repeated attacks by the birds, the chemosit had gained a little space on the causeway beside their ship. In this area, four of them were assembling heavy equipment. They worked ponderously, without haste.
'That is a portable energy-cannon,'whispered Birkin Grif. 'I had not thought that such things existed in the Empire.'
'Many things exit under it, Lord Grif,'Cellur told him 'Now go!'
The tower shuddered.
Violet bolides issued from the mouth of the cannon. Rocks and trees vaporised. Five hundred birds flashed into a golden, ragged sphere of fire, involuntary phoenixes with no rebirth. Cellur turned to his instruments.
The tower began to hum. Above their heads, at the very summit, something crackled and spat. Ozone tainted the air. Lightning leapt across the island, outlined the hull of the airboat with a wan flame.
'I have cannon of my own,'said the Birdmaker, and there was a smile on his ancient face. 'Many of those birds were so complicated they had learned to talk. That is as good a definition of life as I have ever heard.'
The water about the causeway had begun to boil.
Cromis took the Queen's arm.
'This is no place for us. The old weapons are awake here. Let them fight it out.'
The rock beneath the tower trembled ominously. 'Should we not bring the old man with us? They will kill him in the end -'
'I do not think he would come,'said Cromis, and he was right.
Tomb the dwarf was dull-eyed and bemused.
'I have wasted fifty years of my life,'he said. 'We must go, I suppose.'
One hundred steps led to the caverns beneath.
It was a queer journey. The horses were skittish from lack of exercise, the tunnels ill-lit. Moisture filmed the walls, and fungus made murals from the dreams of a madman. Huge, silent machines stood in alcoves melted from the living rock.
The vibrations of the battle above died away.
'We are beneath the estuary. It is the underside of the world, where the dead men lose their bones.'
They were forced to ride through a column of cold fire. They discovered these things:
The white skeletons of a horse and its rider; a sword too big for any of them to lift; an immmense web; the mummified body of a beautiful princess.
Sounds that were not echoes followed them down the twisted corridors.
'I could believe we are out of Time,'said tegeus-Cromis.
Finally, they came up out of the earth and stood on the lip of the Western cliffs, gazing down. The tower of Cellur was invisible, wrapped in a pall of coloured smoke, through which the lightnings flashed and coruscated. The causeway had sagged, in places its stones were melted. Steam hung over the estuary.
A cold mist drew round them as they turned their horses South and West, making for Lendalfoot, and then the Forest of Sloths. As they left Cellur to his vain battle, one fish-eagle was hanging high above the smoke: circling.
Tomb the dwarf never spoke to anyone of his sojourn on the fifth floor, or of what he had learned there. It is certain that he absorbed more than the knowledge required by his task, and that the Birdmaker found him an apt and willing pupil. Nor could he be persuaded to say anything of Cellur, the man who had forgotten his age and his origin. But in his later life, he often murmured half to himself:
'We waste our lives in half truths and nonsense. We waste them.'
Chapter Ten
Canna Moidart's long thrust into the South reached Mingulay and guttered. The town fell, but in the bleak streets behind the sea-front, the chemosit sensed there was nowhere further to go: they slaughtered the civilians, and then, quite without purpose or emotion, turned on their masters, who died in a smell of blood and fish…
While, in the back alleys of Soubridge and the Pastel City, death wore precise, mechanical limbs… A greater war had begun… Or perhaps it had never finished, and the automata were completing a task they had started over a thousand years before… The Northmen desperately needed enemies…
'A forbidding prospect.'
tegeus-Cromis and Tomb the dwarf stood at the summit of a rainswept ridge in the South of that narrow neck of land which separates the Monadliath Mountains from the sea.
The country around them was alkaline and barren, an elevated limestone region seamed and lined with deep gullies by the almost constant rain: in areas, rock strata that had resisted the erosion of millennia made tall, smooth, distorted columns which stood out above time surmounding land.
'An old road runs through it, according to the Birdmaster. What we seek is at the end of it – perhaps. You are sure you will recognise it?'