They clashed.
Behind the windows, queer objects stirred and drifted, on currents of thick liquid.
Two blades made white webs in the air. The Northmen cheered, and made bets. They cut, and whirled, and leapt-Grif cumbersome, Trinor lithe and quick. Fifteen years or more before they had fought thus side by side, and killed fifty men in a morning. Against his will, Cromis drew closer, joined the combat ring, and marked the quick two-handed jab, the blade thrown up to block…
Grif stumbled.
A thin line of blood was drawn across his chest. He swore and hacked.
Trinor chuckled suddenly. He allowed the blow to nick his cheek. Then he ducked under Grif’s outstretched arms and stepped inside the circle of his sword. He chopped, short-armed, for the ribs.
Grif grunted, threw himself back, spun round, crashed unharmed into the ring of Northmen.
And Trinor, allowing his momentum to carry him crouching forward, turned the rib cut into an oblique, descending stroke that bit into the torn mail beneath his opponent’s knees, hamstringing him.
Grif staggered.
He looked down at his ruined legs. He showed his teeth. When Trinor’s sword couched itself in his lower belly, he whimpered. A quick, violent shudder went through him. Blood dribbled down his thighs. He reached slowly down and put his hands on the sword.
He sat down carefully. He coughed. He stared straight at Cromis and said clearly: “You should have killed him when you had the chance. Cromis, you should have done it-”
Blood filled his mouth and ran into his beard. tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of the Pastel City, who imagined himself a better poet than swordsman, clenched his long, delicate fingers until their rings of intagliated, non-precious metal cracked his knuckles and his nails made bloody half-moons on his palms.
A huge, insane cry welled up out of him. Desolation and murder bloomed like bitter flowers in his head.
“Trinor!” he bawled. “Grif! Grif!”
And before the turncoat’s hand had time to reach the energy blade his victim had discarded-long, long before he had time to form a stroke with his arm, or a word with his lips-the nameless blade was buried to its hilt in his mouth. Its point had levered apart the bones of his neck and burst with a soft noise through the back of his skull. tegeus-Cromis shuddered. He threw back his head and howled like a beast. He put his foot against the dead man’s breastbone and pulled out his blade.
“You were never good enough, Trinor,” he said, savagely. “Never.”
He turned to face his death and the death of the world, weeping.
“Come and kill me,” he pleaded. “Just come and try.”
But the Northmen had no eyes for him.
12
His face fired up with hate and madness, the nameless sword quivering before him, he watched them back away, toward the chamber of the brain. So he kicked the stiff, bleeding face of their dead captain. He crouched like a wolf, and spat: he presented them with lewd challenges, and filthy insults.
But they ignored him, and stared beyond him, their attitudes fearful; and finally he followed the direction of their gaze.
Coming on from the direction of the door, moving swiftly through the milky light, was a company of men.
They were tall and straight, clothed in cloaks of black and green, of scarlet and the misleading colour of dragonfly armour. Their dark hair fell to their shoulders about long, white faces, and their boots rang on the obsidian floor. Like walkers out of Time, they swept past him, and he saw that their weapons were grim and strange, and that their eyes held ruin for the uncertain wolves of the North.
At their head strutted Tomb the Dwarf.
His axe was slung jauntily over his thick shoulder, his hair caught back for battle. He was whistling through his horrible teeth, but he quieted when he saw the corpse of Birkin Grif.
With a great shout he sprang forward, unlimbering his weapon. He fell upon the retreating Northmen, and all his strange and beautiful crew followed him. Their curious blades hummed and sang.
Like a man displaced amid his own dreams, Cromis watched the dwarf plant himself securely on his buckled, corded legs and swing his axe in huge circles round his head; he watched the strange company as they flickered like steel flames through the Northmen. And when he was sure that they had prevailed, he threw down the nameless sword.
His madness passed. Cradling the head of his dead friend, he wept. When Methvet Nian discovered him there, he had regained a measure of his self-possession. He was shivering, but he would not take her cloak.
“I am glad to see you safe, my lady,” he said, and she led him to the brain chamber. He left his sword. He saw no use for it.
In the centre of the chamber, a curious and moving choreography was taking place.
The brain danced, its columns of light and shadow shifting, shifting; innumerable subtle graduations of shape and tint, and infinitely various rhythms.
And among those rods and pillars, thirteen slim figures moved, their garments on fire with flecks of light, their long white faces rapt.
The brain sang its single sustained chord, the feet of the dancers sped, the vaulting dome of diamond threw back images of their ballet.
Off to one side of the display sat Tomb the Dwarf, a lumpen, earthbound shape, his chin on his hand, a smile on his ugly face, his eyes following every shade of motion. His axe lay by his side.
“They are beautiful,” said tegeus-Cromis. “It seems a pity that a homicidal dwarf should discover such beauty. Why do they dance in that fashion?”
Tomb chuckled.
“To say that I appreciated that would be a lie. I suspect they have a method of communication with the brain many times more efficient than crude passes of the hand. In a sense, they are the brain at this moment-”
“Who are they, Tomb?”
“They are men of the Afternoon Cultures, my friend. They are the Resurrected Men.”
Cromis shook his head. The dancers swayed, their cloaks a whirl of emerald and black. “You cannot expect me to understand any of this.”
Tomb leapt to his feet. Suddenly, he danced away from Cromis and the Queen in a queer little parody of the ballet of the brain, an imitation full of sadness and humour. He clapped his hands and cackled.
“Cromis,” he said, “it was a master stroke. Listen-”
He sat down again.
“I lied to Trinor. Nothing was simpler than dealing with the geteit chemosit. Those golems stopped operating twenty minutes after I had entered this room. Wherever they were, they froze, their mechanisms ceased to function. For all I know, they are rusting. Cellur taught me that.
“What he did not tell me was that a dialogue could be held with the brain: that, I learnt for myself, in the next twenty minutes. Then “Cromis, Cellur was wrong. One vital flaw in his reasoning led to what you have seen today. He regarded the chemosit as simple destroyers, but the Northmen were nearer to the truth when they called them the brain-stealers. The chemosit are harvesters.
“It was their function in the days of the Afternoon Cultures not to prevent the resurrection of a warrior, but to bring the contents of his skull here, or to a similar centre, and give it into care of the artificial brain. This applied equally to a dead friend or a foe actually slain by the chemosit -I think they saw war in a different way to ourselves, perhaps as a game.
“When Canna Moidart denied the chemosit their full function by using them solely as fighters, she invited destruction.
“Now. Each of the ‘windows’ in this place is in reality a tank of sustaining fluid, in which is suspended the brain of a dead man. Upon the injection of a variety of other fluids and nutrients, that brain may be stimulated to re-form its departed owner.
“On the third day of our captivity here, the artificial brain reconstructed Fimbruthil and Lonath, those with the emerald cloaks.