Fay Glass, shading her eyes, looked out across the plain.
The city was a throbbing sepulchre of light. At the height of every spasm, light vomited from it into the world, bringing a chaotic new reality and causing vast attenuated shadows to flicker across the stony plain; while above it hovered the swarm like an antithetical twin, a giant shadowy planet composed of interlocking wings, curled abdomens, and entangled insectile legs, from which glittered thousands of mosaic eyes. Deep inside it was buried the Heavy Star, the whine and groan of its engines overlaid by an unearthly stridulation-a dry, triumphant song like the song of the wasteland locust as it rushes over the bony spaces of the South. Lulled by its own barren psalm, the swarm basked in the light of its coming transformation, anticipating the day when its larvae, made over entirely, should leave the refuge of the mutated airman and come forth into a reality neither human nor insect, and themselves bask in the warmth of a totally unknown sun.
“Such a long way,” she said dreamily (and apropos, perhaps, of something else: for what could she know?). “Such a long way, and so many wings.”
But now the Heavy Star tapped some final resource. The swarm, caught unawares, shook itself out into the density of a cloud of winter smoke. From this burst Galen Hornwrack and his legendary craft-which, devouring its own substance, was spilling a lemon-yellow light from every rift and porthole!
There was a thoughtful pause, as if he were surveying his chances.
Then, before the swarm could act again, he switched off the motors, and the boat began to fall straight down toward the city; slowly at first, then faster and faster.
What of Viriconium-Pastel City and erstwhile centre of the world-at this desperate conjunction, amid the mass abdication of real things and the triumph of metaphysics? Twin sister of the city on the distant plain, she nevertheless approaches her dissolution with a kind of fatalistic calm (stemming perhaps from a sense of history-“an irony in the very stones”-and the feeling that it may all have happened before. Who has lived here for long, Ansel Verdigris asks us, in the fragmentary polemic Answers, without experiencing some such sensation?). Her cold plazas and antique alleys reeking of cabbage accept their fate. Her geometries accept their fate. Her people accept their fate: they are so superstitious that they believe almost everything, and so vulgar they have noticed hardly anything.
In the Artists’ Quarter, in the Bistro Californium, they stare at one another and the door; sitting in the blue and gamboge shadows like wax figures waiting for a murder, for their own long-sensed termination which at once fascinates and frightens them. “I dined with the hertis-Padnas.” “Oh, shut up.” Unearthly structures have insinuated themselves between the towers on the hill at Minnet-Saba: hanging galleries under the fat white moon, like veins of quartz; sandy domes and papery things like wasps’ nests. All have an immaterial feel, the air of an intrusion from some other imagination, but the Low City streets are generally so cold that there is nobody in them to notice. And the Reborn have gone. (All night long on the high paths of the Monar their columns move uneasily north. Many will die of cold. Out among the tottering seracs of the glaciers, their advance parties report mirages.) So there is no one abroad in the High City to see the palace of Methvet Nian pulsing like a great alchemical rose up there at the summit of the Proton Circuit, its filigree outer shell warping with light. No stars are visible above that hall; only there is a feeling of some heavy weight, some great uncommon cloud balanced above it. Its corridors are deserted but for the crawling survivors of the Sign trying to become insects The palace awaited its end, breathing like an old woman: and with every shallow inspiration a yellow cabbagey air was drawn in from the city outside, to trickle down the passageways, chill the devotees of the Sign where they crouched in corners over their dragging abdominal sacs or quivering elytra, and come eventually through a region of old machines in niches, to the throne room of the Queen-that room which Tomb the Dwarf had barricaded with corpses, and in which he now lay unable to get up.
In the end it hadn’t been much of a fight; better than some he’d had, worse than many. The usual shouts and stinks; some hot work with the axe in a corner; the room frozen at sudden odd angles as the mechanical wife bore him to conclusions in the bluish gloom; shadows teetering on the walls. When it came down to it the servants of the Sign had behaved more like its victims-curiously lethargic and self-involved, as if trying to recover their human state. Those lucky enough to be unimpeded by their deformities had been preoccupied with them nevertheless, and had found it difficult to defend themselves against the axe; the rest had welcomed it quite openly. That axe! He remembered it now. How it hissed and sputtered in the dark, dripping with St. Elmo’s fire! He recalled its evil light in the dim depopulated Soubridge streets at the conclusion of the War of the Two Queens. It had been with him on the Proton Circuit, when he stood on a heap of corpses to shake the hand of Alstath Fulthor; it had been with him at Waterbeck’s rout, when with tegeus-Cromis the legendary swordsman he had watched a thousand farmboys slaughtered in ten minutes: and both these friends now lost to him through death or madness. He remembered distinctly how he had first dug it up, but he could not think where… At any rate it had been a terrible thing to unleash on a handful of deformed shopkeepers, who could meet it only with kitchen knives and nightmares, in a shadowy room at the “smoky candle end of time.” He could not understand how they had brought him down.
There was a strong smell of death in the room, and his view of it was obscured by the dead themselves. They surrounded him like an earthwork topped with a fringe of stiffened limbs which framed part of a tapestry here, there a broken high-backed chair; and the blue light lay on their waxy skin like a bruise. The mechanical wife embraced him. Her delicate spars had snapped like icicles when she fell; her spine was cracked; and up from her mysterious centres of power came a thin stream of whitish motes, interrupted every so often by a sluice of yellow radiation and a momentary lifelike twitching of her limbs. Cellur and the Queen had tried and failed to free him, passing to and fro in front of him, their distracted expressions like those of illuminated figures on a grubby pasteboard playing card.
Now they were waiting calmly for the end, staring into the invisible North as if they might by force of will understand what was happening there; as if they sensed Galen Hornwrack perched there on the edge of his long fall. Their voices were desultory in the gloom.
“Birds no longer come to see me out of the high air,” whispered one; while the other smiled regretfully and said, “A dead bird swung at his belt during all that journey down the Rannoch. I did not hate my cousin, but it was a hard winter.”
Tomb licked his lips. He was dying. The excitement of murder, which had come back to him like a familiar old pain, was now ebbing. He was stranded on the shore of himself, hollowed out yet filled with enigmas which he recognised dimly as the evidence of his own unwounded psyche. He had made few judgements, before or after the fact: thus the events of his life, and the figures in it, retained their wholeness, remaining-he was surprised to find-like icons in the brain, sharp and brightly lit. Now they presented themselves to him as a series of unexpected gifts-a spring shower making paste out of the pink dust of the Mogadon Littoral, where the enamelled hermit crabs run up sideways out of the sea; the smell of whitebait frying in some cafe on the Rue Montdampierre; someone saying, “Here the anemone boy spilt wine on her cloak”-shy, unbidden, peripheral little memories. He was captivated. While he waited, he reviewed them. He attended them with a shyness of his own, a pure and unironic affection for his own past.