“A vulture flew over Viriconium this morning,” he said. “Watch.”
A street scene in the Artists’ Quarter: Thing Alley, or Soft Lane perhaps. The tottering houses closed tight against a noiseless wind. A length of cloth looping down the gutter; a cat with an eye like a crooked pin flattens itself on the paving, slips out its tongue and devours a morsel of rancid butter. Otherwise, nothing moves.
Coming on with an unsteady rolling gait from the West End of the quarter: three Northmen. Their leather leggings are stiff and encrusted with sweat and blood and good red wine. They lean heavily against one another, passing a flask. Their mouths open and shut regularly, like the mouths of fish in a bowl. They are oblivious.
They have missed a movement in a doorway, which will kill them.
As crooked and silent as the cat, a great black shadow slips into the road behindthem. The immense energy blade swings up and down. The silly, bemused faces collapse. Hands raised helplessly before eyes. Their screams are full of teeth. And the triangle of yellow eyes regards their corpses with clinical detachment…
“It has begun, you see,” said the Birdmaker. “This is happening all over the city. The automata fight guerilla engagements with Canna Moidart’s people. They do not fully understand what is happening as yet. But she is losing control.”
Birkin Grif got to his feet, stared at the false windows with loathing, and limped out.
“I would give an arm never to have come here, Birdmaster,” he said as he left the room. “Never to have seen that. Your windows make it impossible for me to hate the enemy I have known all my life; they present me with another that turns my legs to water.”
Cellur shrugged.
“How soon can we move?” Cromis asked.
“In a day, perhaps two. The dwarf is nearly ready. I am calling in all my birds. Whatever your Lord Grif thinks, I am not some voyeur of violence. I no longer need to watch the Moidart’s fall. The birds will be more useful if I redeploy them over the route you must shortly take.
“Make sure you are watching when they return, Lord Cromis. It will be a sight not often seen.”
Cromis and Methvet Nian left the room together. Outside, she stopped and looked up into his eyes. She had aged. The girl had fallen before the woman, and hated it. Her face was set, the lips tight. She was beautiful.
“My lord,” she said, “I do not wish to live with such responsibilities for the rest of my life. Indirectly, all this is my fault. I have hardly been a strong queen.
“I will abdicate when this is over.”
He had not expected such a positive reaction.
“Madam,” he said, “your father had similar thoughts on most days of his life. He knew that course was not open to him. You know it, too.”
She put her head on his chest and wept.
For twenty-four hours, the sky about the tower was black with birds. They came hurling down the wind from the north:
Bearded vultures and kites from the lower slopes of the Monar Mountains;
Eagle owls like ghosts from the forests;
A squadron of grim long-crested hawk eagles from the farmlands of the Low Leedale;
A flight of lizard buzzards from the reaches of the Great Brown Waste;
A hundred merlins, two hundred fish hawks-a thousand wicked predatory beaks on a long blizzard of wings.
Cromis stood with the Young Queen by a window and watched them come out of night and morning: circling the tower in precise formation; belling their wings to land with a crack of trapped air; studding the rocks and dark beaches of the tiny island. They filled the pines, and he saw now why every tree was dead-Cellur had had need of his birds some long time before, and their talons had stripped every inch of bark, their steel bodies had shaken every branch.
“They are beautiful,” whispered the Queen.
But it was the birds, despite their beauty, that destroyed their maker.
… For in the stripped lands south of Soubridge, where the villagers had burned their barns before the enemy arrived, a hungry Northman fired his crossbow into a flock of speeding owls. A certain curiosity impelled him: he had never seen such a thing before. More by luck than judgement, he brought one down.
And when he found he could not eat it, he screwed his face up in puzzlement, and took it to his captain…
Dawn came dim and grimy over the basalt cliffs of the estuary. It touched the window from which Cromis had watched all night, softening his bleak features; it stroked the feathers of the birds in the pines; it silvered the beaks of the last returning flight: seventy cumbersome cinereous vultures, beating slowly over the water on their nine-foot wings.
And it touched and limned the immense shape which drifted silently after them as they flew-the long black hull that bore the mark of the wolf’s head and three towers.
Cromis was alone; the Queen had retired some hours earlier. He watched the ship for a moment as it trawled back and forth over the estuary. Its shell was scarred and pitted. After two or three minutes it vanished over the cliffs to the west, and he thought it had gone away. But it returned, hovered, spun hesitantly, hunting like a compass needle.
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, like a haunting, over the causeway that joined the tower to the mainland. 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 gun-metal 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 clenched 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.