Strewn haphazardly round the room were the curious flannel bandages in which he had swaddled himself for the “rescue” of Audsley King. Ashlyme stared dumbly at them. In his mind’s eye he could see Buffo quite clearly: arguing with the women on the dusty staircase; pushing the empty handcart in erratic spurts along the Rue Serpolet in the rain; hopping from one foot to the other in the deserted observatory as he fought to free himself from the stinking confinement of the horse’s-head mask. How long had he waited for Ashlyme to come and reassure him he was safe?
The observatory was in disorder. The roof lights had been left open to admit a wet, chilly air, which had stripped from the walls the last of Buffo’s charts. Some crisis in his illness had prompted him to stagger in here and collapse among his telescopes: or perhaps he had simply destroyed them out of despair. Bent brass tubing littered the floor, and when he went over to examine it, Ashlyme felt the little lenses crush beneath his feet like sugared anemones. He rubbed the condensation from a pane of glass and looked out over the Low City. He could see nothing. He could feel nothing. Night was approaching. The ramshackle greenhouse seemed to rush through the twilight like a ship. He had an overwhelming sense of disaster. He knew that if he admired Audsley King, then he had loved Emmet Buffo.
He bent to the eyepiece of one of the broken telescopes.
For a second he thought he could see a vast white plain, arranged geometrically, on which were hundreds of stone catafalques, stretching away to a curved horizon. An implacable light slanted down on them, but it began to fade before he had understood the scene before him.
He heard a sound in the other room.
When he went to see what it was he found that a detachment of the quarantine police had arrived. They filled the place up. Black uniforms, blue-tinted spectacles, and huge dogs on leads gave them an air of bravado and efficiency. But behind the spectacles their eyes were harassed and nervous, and after a hurried examination of Buffo’s corpse two of them began pouring oil on the bedclothes, the woodwork, and the walls above the bed. Two more pushed past Ashlyme into the observatory and set about smashing windows to create a good through draught. The rest stood about, chuckling over Buffo’s underwear, riffling through his papers, and dragging the dogs off the stale food in the alcove. Despite all this they were not unkind men, and they were surprised to find Ashlyme in the house.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Leave those things alone! Who sent you here?”
They took him quietly aside. In cases like this, they explained, cremation was the rule: although they didn’t, personally, enjoy the work. “Your father died three days ago, we don’t know what of,” they said. They had only just got round to him, due to pressure of work. “It’s so difficult now to get places to burn properly.” Recently an old woman in Henrietta Street had taken three attempts; a baker’s family at the lower end of the Margarethestrasse, five: all this was very time-consuming. “These rooms should have been sealed until we arrived.” They didn’t know how Ashlyme had got in. It was not that they didn’t admire his courage. But there was nothing he could do here now.
“He wasn’t my father,” said Ashlyme dully. “Why are you burning him? At least his work should be saved! Look, this is his ‘exterior brain’: it’s not by any means an ordinary library.”
“It all has to go,” they repeated patiently. They were used to the protests of the bereaved. “We don’t know what he died of, you see. Alves is in the plague zone now. You want to foot it while you can!”
The plague zone.
A few minutes later Ashlyme stood in the street staring up at the top of the building. A subdued, almost reluctant explosion shook it suddenly, and glass showered down from the penthouse. Strange slow blue flames issued from the upper windows, flames so pale they seemed transparent against the great black bulk of the hill behind.
“This house was always in a plague zone,” said Ashlyme bitterly. “That is why all our schemes came to nothing.”
All at once he was terrified that the same thing might be happening across the city at Audsley King’s house: the thick oil, the smashed windows, the dilatory flames. The only person he could think of who might help him prevent that was the Grand Cairo. He ran off down the hill. When he looked back, the peculiar fire had already lost its force and he could see only a knot of dark figures in the middle of the avenue.
The High City was cold and bright under the colourless moon of autumn. The echo of Ashlyme’s footsteps came back to him changed and muffled, as if from a place a long distance away. We were all accomplices to Buffo’s death, he thought wildly as he ran, we are all to blame. He had no idea what he meant by this, and it gave him no relief. When at last he came to the Grand Cairo’s tower in Montrouge, he was frightened to go in. All its doors and windows hung open in the pitiless light.
Inside, hundreds of the dwarf’s followers had killed each other during the early part of the night. They lay mainly on the stairs and in the corridors between the hastily constructed offices and interrogation rooms, their violent and confused shadows frozen on the walls. They had not had time to prepare. Some of them clutched handfuls of hair pulled out or collars torn off during the fighting; others had knives or razors, or improvised strangling cords; most were bitten about the face and hands. Huge glittering unearthly flies, their energy dulled a little by the cold, went from wound to wound in strict rotation in the bright moonlight, making a dry, desultory buzzing as they rose and fell.
Ashlyme looked at them numbly. He got himself upstairs to a room he recognised from a previous visit, hoping to find someone there who could take him to the Grand Cairo. Attempts had been made to set it on fire. Its occupants had smashed the desk open and soaked their own coats in oil, then applied the charred garments to the flimsy partition wall, which was now full of blackened holes. They had also attempted to burn the documents which spilled out of the fireplace and across the floor. In the end they had given up and killed each other with a paper knife before the flames could take hold. Ashlyme picked up some of the documents.
Day by day our position becomes more precarious… The Barley brothers have named names… We now have a handpicked guard at every gate… He threw them down again, but not before they had set up in his head a kind of hideous drone which followed him from corridor to corridor and staircase to staircase up the tower.
All the offices were the same. From a brass voice pipe Ashlyme thought he heard a whisper, but when he spoke into it there was no answer, only a long echoic sigh. He knew that he was now in the country the dwarf had spoken of so often. Intrigue and backstabbing and great flies in everything you eat. Ashlyme wiped his hand over his face: if he wasn’t careful, he knew, he could be caught there forever. It was a country that accompanied the dwarf wherever he went; it was an atmosphere that surrounded him, miasmic and pervasive, like the smell of Altaean Balm; he had brought it with him, down from the North or the sky, and visited it on the city. Two thousand men were thrown into fires in one day. Those people had abandoned themselves to conspiracy.
Flies rose in clouds as Ashlyme made his way into the older places of the tower. Even there, dead men lay facedown among the orange peel and other rubbish in the gloomy carmine-lit passageways. They had daubed slogans on the walls in their own fluids as they waited to dieUp the North, Ya bas, Go back, yellows -their motives so tribal as to be indistinguishable from motivelessness. We are the boys from the second floor!
A fly settled on his wrist. Its wings were long and papery, and it seemed to have more legs than any fly he had seen in Viriconium. He shuddered and threw it off. Its eyes glittered at him.
Eventually he found his way into the Grand Cairo’s suite, where for a week or more the dwarf, afraid of the plague, afraid of the Barley brothers and their informants who by now knew almost everything, afraid most of all of his own disintegrating gang, had forbidden anyone to enter. The rooms were dirty and cold, and he had allowed his cats (who, he said, were the only creatures you could trust in this life) the run of them. Just inside the door a servant was sprawled. He had been there for some days. Someone had passed a piece of stiff wire through his head from one ear to the other. A thick sour smell rose from the polished floor, where the cats had dragged chop bones and pies from among the broken crockery on the tray he had been carrying and dipped their unfastidious little tongues in the long sticky spill of “housemaid’s coffee.” Ashlyme went to open the windows.