“Look down there,” said Tomb, as they veered over the scene of Waterbeck’s rout. “What do you think of that?”
The valley was a gaping wound filled with Northerners and dead men and thick white smoke which surged up from wrecked airboats, obscuring the dark figures of the geteit chemosit as they performed their acts of skull rape. The waste surrounding the battlefield was crawling with reptiles: hundreds of stiff, dust-coloured forms, converging slowly from south, east, and west, their motions stilted and strange.
“Every lizard in the Great Brown Waste must be down there. What are they doing?”
“They seem to be watching,” said Cromis. “Nothing else.” And, indeed, the ridges that flanked the valley were already lined with them, their stony heads unmoving as they gazed at the ruin, their limbs held rigid like those of spectators at some morbid religious observance.
“We fascinate them,” said Birkin Grif bitterly. With the boat’s return to stability, he had regained his feet. His leg was still bleeding freely. “They are amazed by our propensity for self-destruction.” He laughed hollowly. “Tomb, how far can we get in this machine?”
The ship drifted aimlessly, like a waterbird on a quiet current. The waste moved below, haunted by the gathering reptiles.
“Duirinish,” said the dwarf. “Or Drunmore. We could not make Viriconium, even if Paucemanly had postponed his flight to the Moon, and sat here at the controls in my place.”
Methvet Nian was kneeling over the dead courier, closing his eyes. Her hood was thrown back and her autumn-rowan hair cascaded about her face. Cromis turned from the strange sight of the monitor lizards, his earlier fears returning as he looked at her.
“There is nothing for us in Duirinish,” he said, addressing himself only partly to Tomb. “Shortly, it will fall. And I fear that there is little point in our going to the Pastel City.” He shook his head. “I suspect you had a reason for coming here, Your Majesty?”
Her violet eyes were wide, shocked. He had never seen anything so beautiful or so sad. He was overcome, and covered his emotion by pretending to hunt in the wreckage of the cabin for his sword.
He came upon the limp carcass of Cellur’s metal vulture: like the young courier, it had been torn open by a shard of crystal; its eyes were lifeless, and pieces of tiny, precise machinery spilled out of its breast when he picked it up. He felt an absurd sympathy for it. He wondered if so perfect an imitation of organic life might feel a perfect imitation of pain. He smoothed the huge pinions of its wings.
“Yes, Lord Cromis,” whispered the Young Queen. “This morning, the rebels rose again. Canna Moidart will find resistance only in Duirinish. Viriconium is in the hands of her supporters “My lords,” she appealed, “what will become of those people? They have embraced a viper-”
And she wept openly.
“They will be bitten,” said Birkin Grif. “They were not worthy of you, Queen Jane.”
She wiped her eyes. The Rings of Neap glittered on her thin fingers. She drew herself up straight and gazed steadily at him.
“You are too harsh, Birkin Grif. Perhaps the failure was not in them, but in their queen.”
They drifted for some hours over the waste, heading south. Tomb the Dwarf nursed his failing vehicle with a skill almost matching that of his tutor and master (no one knew if Paucemanly had actually attempted the moon trip in his legendary boat Heavy Star: certainly, he had vanished from the face of the earth after breaking single-handed Carlemaker’s air siege of Mingulay, and most fliers had a fanatical faith in the tale…) and brought them finally to Ruined Drunmore in the Pass of Methedrin, the city thrown down by Borring half a century before.
During that limping journey, they discussed treachery:
“If I had Norvin Trinor’s neck between my hands, I would break it lightheartedly,” said Birkin Grif, “even with pleasure, although I liked him once.”
He winced, binding up his leg.
“He has blackened all of us,” murmured Cromis. “As a body, the Methven have lost their credibility.”
But the Queen said, “It is Carron Ban who has my sympathy. Women are more used to betrayal than men, but take it deeper.”
It is the urgent and greedy desire of all wastes to expand and eat up more-fertile lands: this extension of their agonised peripheries lends them a semblance of the movement and life they once possessed. As if seeking protection from the slow southward march of the Rust Desert, Ruined Drunmore huddled against an outflung spur of the Monar Mountains.
In this, it failed, for drifts of bitter dust topped its outer walls, spilling and trickling into the streets below every time a wind blew.
The same winds scoured its streets, and, like an army of indifferent housekeepers, swept the sand through the open doors and shattered roofs of the inner city, choking every abandoned armoury and forge and barracks. The erosion of half a millennium had etched its cobbled roads, smoothed and blunted the outlines of its ruins, until its once-proud architecture had become vernacular, fit for its equivocal position between the mountains and the waste.
Even as a ruin, Drunmore was pitifuclass="underline" Time and geography had choked it to death.
Towards the end of the flight, a wide rift had appeared suddenly in the deck of the airboat, exposing the ancient engines. Now, as they hovered over the city, flecks of coloured light, small writhing worms of energy, rose up out of the crack, clung to the metal surfaces of the command bridge, fastened on the inert carcass of the mechanical vulture, and clustered about the Queen’s rings.
Tomb grew nervous. “Corpse lights,” he muttered. He brought the machine down in Luthos Plaza, the four-acre field of Time-polished granite from which Borring had organised the destruction of Drunmore so many generations before.
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 thin 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-”