A Storm of Wings

10: All the Wounds of the Earth

Galen Hornwrack came down into the mysterious City like some legendary failed conquistador. (Fever and magic have defeated his skills. The waste lands he set out to cross in his youth have shown him no enemy but his own ambition. All wells were poisoned; sand has swallowed his troops and his hopes. He lurches back alone into the country of his birth only to find that it too has become shifting, unreliable, changed forever… ) The scars left by his fight with the metal bird, an encounter which he recalled only dimly, had diverted and hardened the characteristic lines of his face, so that a strange asceticism now modified his habitual expression of petulance and seW-involvement. His nose was running. The sword of tegeus-Cromis he carried in his left hand, having lost its scabbard somewhere in the rotting landscapes behind him. His torn cloak revealed the mail the Queen had given him, now rusty. His eyes were empty and his gaze appallingly direct; as if, tiring of the attempt to winnow the real from the unreal, he now assigned exactly the same value to every object entering his visual field: as if he had suspended judgement on events, and now merely lived through them.

His desire to see the City had kept him from sleep.

Alstath Fulthor followed him, supporting the woman and her endless prophecies. A radiance, colourless in itself, issuing no doubt from his horned and lobed crustaceal armour, appeared to fill both their bodies, illuminating from beneath the things they wore, crimson and blue, as in some old painting. The alien presence of the City, its equivocal contract with 'reality', had lent new energy to – their madness. 'In my youth,'sang the woman, 'I made my small contribution. Blackpool and Chicago become as nothing, their receding colonnades echo to the sound of vanished orchestras.'At this they stopped to regard one another half in delight, half in horror, their cropped spiky hair and long restless hands giving them the air of children caught in some game of conspiracy. (It was only that they hoped to manipulate time, as we know: believing that by combination and recombination of a few common images – which are themselves only the symbols rather than the actual memories of acts peculiar to the Afternoon Cultures – they might obtain the 'code'which would liberate them from the Evening. Thus Main Etteilla, shuffling her pasteboard cards…)

They dawdled, and Hornwrack sat tiredly in the mud to wait for them.

'That's enough of that!'he said sharply. He treated them for the most part with a gruff indulgence, but tried to prevent their odd and embarrassing sexual encounters, chasing the woman away with the flat of his sword while being careful to keep his eye on Fulthor's own great weapon.

'That's enough!'they mimicked. 'That's enough!'

He did not know why he was here, heading into the world's deep wound. Bankrupt of purpose when they had fetched him that morning from the rooms in the Rue Sepile, he had maintained himself on the energy of old betrayals and resentments, none of which had survived the journey through the Deep Wastes. He shrugged. He was a husk. Above him hung the torpid and corrupt manifestation of Benedict Paucemanly which was his only hope. Since dawn it had been undergoing a crisis of will, dissolving sporadically into a mass of greyish curds and losing the power of speech. It would reassemble itself slowly after such a bout, beckon Hornwrack on toward the City, belch tragically. 'I want only death,'it would explain. And Hornwrack with a sigh would lead his mad proteges a little closer.

This City had appeared on the plain with the descent of the insects a decade before, growing from the worn stone nubs, tilted columns and submerged pavements of an ancient Afternoon site. They had not so much built it as expected it. It was not so much a City as a response of ordinary matter to their instinctive metaphysical demands, the warping pressures of their 'new reality'. Originally it had consisted of a number of large but flimsy structures arranged without apparent thought on and around a low mound. The biggest of these were perhaps a hundred feet tall. They were like dry wasps'nests, and of the same papery, cellular construction. They rustled in the wind. The insects went leaping among them on curiously aimless pathways, along the sides of which had been built up over the years peculiar crystalline accretions, hanging reefs and tottering spires, galleries composed of crumbling metallic oxides veined with serpentines and alien glasses. Smaller structures had eventually grown up in the shadows of this development: partly-roofed eccentric hexagons formed of impacted sand mixed with certain bodily secretions of their inhabitants, who forced themselves in and out of small openings in the walls.

But if the insects had first begun to change the Earth at this spot, so it had begun to change them; and matter's accommodating plasticity had turned suddenly into a trap.

Gravity had imprisoned them: here they had first felt its pull, and lost the power of extra-atmospheric flight. It had suddenly become necessary for them to breathe, yet they could not breathe air, and must invent some substitute: here they had built the chugging machinery to disseminate it. (It never worked very well.) Fluids had been unknown to them during their frigid millennial migration through the barren spaces: here they had first filled their tissues with them as a buffer against the poisons of Earth. Here they had put on their breathing masks and built their weapons, seeing themselves as beleaguered, unwilling colonists, victims of a cosmic accident: which they were. Here the human Umwelt had first penetrated their strange nervous systems, working a madness on them so that they could not understand what they saw or felt, and began to die of a new disease.

At the time Galen Hornwrack met his end here, all order and sense of purpose had vanished from the place. The buildings, alien to begin with, had begun to subside like hot glass, as if searching for a new centre of gravity. A partly transparent architecture of nightmarish balconies and over hanging walls had formed as Matter, struggling to find a compromise between human and insect demands, began to teeter and grope toward verticals and horizontals that satisfied neither. Streets laid down under no wholesome plan ended in pits, or in staircases which themselves petered out after a turn or two up the sides of some enormous windowless cylinder. The towers shuddered and quaked, vibrating between human and alien states; then slumped and dissolved like jelly. A languorous buzzing sound accompanied this process, and beneath that the clangour of enormous bells, as if matter were trying to toll itself apart. Appalling winds howled down the changing thoroughfares. Streams of tiny blue motes tumbled from the higher cornices; out in the open squares (through which, as in a dream, could be discerned the equivalent plazas of Viriconium – opposite pole, node of nightmares, sister city) struggled the changed individuals of the swarm; while among the alleys of this disintegrating province proliferated the thick, yellow stems of some mutated plant.

Above, vast clouds of the insects hung in the throbbing purple sky, making adventive, meaningless patterns as they attempted to replicate or restart the endless spatial pilgrimage. They hurled themselves into huge pits dug in the desert. They invented useless vehicles which rolled like mouldy grapefruit between the dunes, rising a few feet above the ground to emit foul gases. ('Regretfully,'whispered the madwoman, 'it is part of a scheme you cannot understand.') Into this chaos Galen Hornwrack was persuaded to lead his party, unaware that circumstances were about to return to him a fragment or two of his distant – indeed by now almost imaginary – adolescence.

Under a sky like a glass mantle, at an intersection in the disintegrating ground plan of the city, two insects performed a dance in the suicidal light. Disease had maimed them, their eyes were like rotting melons; yet vivid heraldic insignia flared along their blue and green flanks like the lights of deep-sea fishes. Stiff and quivering, with curled abdomens and spread wings, moving one damaged limb at a time, they had the air of being painted on one of Elmo Buffin's sails, or tattoed in glowing inks on an upper arm. through this architecture of melting wax by small energetic movements of its finny hands.

Evening came, and with it a purple gloom through which darted curious flames.

Out of this, wreathed in a glutinous yellow fog, some clumsy insects dragged themselves. There were three or four of them. Alstath Fulthor put his hands to his head and fell down. 'Oh oh oh,'he cried. 'Oh, oh,'whispered the insects. They approached with a peculiar reluctance, dipping their great masks. Their grey wing-cases and armoured yellow underparts were cross-hatched with self-inflicted wounds. From these wounds were growing like buds a variety of pink new half-human limbs, joined to the pricked and rotting carapaces by a transitional substance, membranous, neither flesh nor chitin. There were clumps of little hands with mobile, perfect fingers, each one having a tiny fingernail like mother-of-pearl. There were the faces of very young children with closed eyes. There were eyes alone (as indeed there were legs and torsos and internal organs), gummy with post-natal sleep, and of a very distinct blue like enamelling on an old brooch. Some of the faces murmured drowsily.

Whether these insects were ambassadors or soldiers was not clear. They had recognised Hornwrack's party as human, and been attracted by the magistral lustre of the Reborn Man's scarlet armour. (When they approached him their own insignia flared up along their sides, orange and emerald.) They could not speak, though, and he could not help them. They remained: immobile, at once heraldic and debased. It was the madwoman who sat up suddenly to speak on their behalf.

'We did not ask to come here,'she said. She watched Hornwrack, who in his turn licked his lips and stared at the travesty of a baby's head.

'What?'he said.

'Go away and wait,'she begged. 'Leave us to be finished here. We cannot live here much.'She opened her mouth and blood trickled from her lacerated tongue. 'Give us in peace,'she whispered, holding her head on one side in a listening attitude, her mouth full of crushed flowers. 'Oh!'

At the end of this speech she was standing with her back to the insects, her eyes bright with a horrifying intelligence. Their own great faceted orbs observed Hornwrack calmly over her shoulders. They were motionless. Hornwrack began to back away, laughing. 'No more of this!'he heard himself exclaim. He held up his hands. 'I don't want to hear any more.'He looked round for guidance, but Fulthor was grunting on the floor, and the spectre of the ancient airman had inconveniently vanished. Suddenly a kind of fake anger overcame his fright. He dragged the sword of tegeus-Cromis from his belt, shoved the woman aside, and waded into them with it. But it was only steel, and quickly broke in half. The ambassadors fell back without resisting him, rustling, bearing their dreadful human buds. (One of the heads woke up. Leave us alone, it whispered, looking directly at him.) Then another wave of disintegration surged out of the core of the city, which was now very close. Hornwrack staggered. The ambassadors writhed and thrashed, their joints gouting fluid. Fay Glass screamed.

'Leave us alone! We will soon die here!'

Hornwrack could bear no more of it. He was used to a less equivocal violence. Retching, he stumbled over to Fulthor's inert body and got the powered broadsword from its ceramic sheath. He had never used one before. He went back and cut inexpertly at the flailing forelimbs and compound eyes of the ambassadors. This time they made a half-hearted fight of it as they backed into the purple gloom. But their odd, gnarled weapons only sputtered feebly in the damp.air; gave up strings of pale light: and failed utterly. They tumbled on to their sides as he chopped off their legs. They whirred round in circles, pushing the earth up into irregular mounds. Soon they were all dead. He stared at them in astonishment; at the artifact fizzing in his hand; at Fay Glass. At the last moment they had tried to direct his attention away from the hulk of Benedict Paucemanly's airboat, the Heavy Star.

The hull of this ship loomed over him, crawling with the enigmatic corrosions of its hundred-year sojourn in the Moon. It was embedded in a tall bulwark of compacted sand which curved away right and left like the shell of some huge stadium. Hornwrack walked round it, awed, exultant. That famous machine! Lights were dimly visible through its fissured outer skin; pulpy vines enwrapped it; a few flakes of black and silver paint adhered to its stern – the colours of the House of Methven, set there at the height of the air-siege of Mingulay.

“'Fear death from the air!”'shouted Hornwrack. He laughed. He took hold of the madwoman's wrist in his enthusiasm and pulled her along after him. “'Fear death from the air!”'He thought of Fat Main Etteilla, and the Bistro Californium with its clientele of perverts and poseurs. He thought of the dwarf who had beaten him up in the palace and then abandoned him in the shadow of the Agdon Roches. He thought of the High City, which had wooed him merely to betray him. He thought of the Low City, of the boy in the Rue Sepile, the drifts of sodden chestnut leaves in the late-afternoon light of November, the women laughing in the upstairs rooms. He though of the candle at night, a cat sneaking into the room, the smell of geraniums – one dawn following another until they made eighty years of wounds and fevers. None of it meant anything. It was as if he had been relieved of these things, only to have them changed somehow and given back to him merely as memories. 'If I can rip her loose we'll fight our way out of this madhouse!'he said. He would fly down to the Pastel City in the last airboat left in the kingdom. There he would speak with the dwarf, perhaps even the Queen. There he'd state his terms. 'She'll never take to space again,'he said, rubbing his thumb over the thin, whitish, lichen-like growths, the network of tiny cracks that dulled the crystal skin. Even this slight contact made him shiver with excitement. He kicked at a door in the stern to see if it would open, and was rewarded by a hollow boom. 'But her motors still work. Look!'

He dropped the High City sword suddenly, grasped the girl by her upper arms. She stared blankly at him. 'Once I flew such vessels!'he cried: 'Don't you believe me?'And then: 'That ghost has given me back the sky. It has given me back the sky!'

Alstath Fulthor came up behind him on all fours and picked up the discarded baan. Some nightmare of the past had him by the head. He sniggered.

'I'll suffer nothing at the hands of those beautiful philosophers,'he said. 'I'll promenade no more in their metallic gardens!'

He jumped to his feet, whirling the blade in sputtering arcs round his head. Sparks showered from it into the dead wet air. Discovering no other enemy he advanced on Hornwrack, who produced defensively his steel knife, shouting. 'Fulthor, no more grudges! Stop!'

Fulthor could not stop. Hornwrack allowed him to get in close; ducked the baan as it swung in towards his collar bone; and slashed out at Fulthor's hand, taking off two fingers and severing all the major tendons. Fulthor dropped the power blade. He studied his hand in wonder.

'That hand will never annoy me again,'he said.

Before they could stop him he had run off into the gloom, singing.

Hornwrack said, 'I did not mean to do that. This knife had betrayed me.'He threw it down and stepped on it; but the blade would not break despite its flaw, and after a moment he forgot it. He retrieved the baan and set about chopping his way into the Heavy Star through the stern door. His blows set up a resonant groaning in the crystal hull. He pulled the madwoman in after him. She stared back over her shoulder.

The boat was abandoned and empty. Its motors sent up slow violet motes through a rift in the deck: small worms of light that clung to the metal surfaces, fastened on Hornwrack's mail shirt, and clustered round the steel fillet which bound back his hair. Further in, navigation instruments ticked and sang; he could hear them. It was thick with dust in there. He moved about quietly, touching the things with which he was familiar. He shivered a little. In the command-bridge was a light like sunshine filtered through bottle-green glass. 'Go and sit down,'he told Fay Glass. (An insect had entered through the damaged hatch; he could hear it moving about in the hold.) The bow of the boat projected right through the wall of the 'stadium'he had seen outside, but nothing was visible through the port-holes, which seemed to be covered by some gelatinous medium like agar. Aft, the insect scratched its way across the hold; paused. Its wings whirred faintly. It departed. Hornwrack let out his breath.

He swallowed.

'Sit still,'he told the woman.

He tried to remember what to do.

Under his clumsy hands the vessel groaned and shook. (It was old. In the Moon something vital had gone out of it, some millennial reservoir had been emptied.) Down below, its motors pulsed, leaking light and generating a rapid percussive shudder. This continued for some minutes, and, transmitted to the outer hull, split it open with a high ringing sound. Splinters of dark glass flew about the bridge; a fissure twenty inches wide appeared in the wall beside Hornwrack's shoulder, admitting foetid gases; Fay Glass was picked up and flung against a bulkhead, and thereafter lay on the deck like a discarded towel, her thin bruised legs drawn up under her chin. The boat lifted an inch or two and was stationary again. Gelatinous fluids streamed off the forward portholes and slopped into the bridge where, mixed with the sand from the wall outside, they formed a foul and slimy secretion. Hornwrack clung to his seat.

'You bitch,'he said. 'You old bitch.'

Outside, sand could be seen fountaining up against a purple sky. With a despairing groan Heavy Star pulled free of the retaining wall and hurled itself into the mad airs above. Hornwrack sobbed with relief. Around him, instruments were demanding his attention in hysterical whispers, but he had forgotten what most of them were for. The smell of the stuff in the cabin was making him feel sick. He leaned forward to look out of the portholes. The boat was wallowing above an elliptical walled pit about a hundred yards long. This was filled with a grey, viscous, partly-organic substance which was now leaking from the breached wall like the white of an egg. As the level of this putrid stuff fell it revealed by stages a colossal human figure stretched out in the pit.

Benedict Paucemanly!

A monstrous and corrupt flowering of his flesh had taken place in all those white years on the Moon. Constrained by a thick rubber suit in case he burst, studded with new sensory organs, whorls and ropes of flesh which reported only mutation and pain, he lay there prostrate. He had tried to become something else and failed. His arms were by his sides and his vast corpulent legs apart. It was from here that he had broadcast his despairing spectre, to Viriconium and beyond. 'I want only death.'Teetering between two realities, he could perceive neither of them except as an agonizing dream – and yet here he was half a god, a demiurge or source, out from which spread like the ripples on a stagnant pond all the new nightmares of Earth: he had become, unwillingly enough, the amplifier of the swarm's Umwelt, as he had once been an ear that listened to the stars. He had lain like this for ten years, groaning and whimpering and vomiting into the mask which had long ago been forced over his bloated head so that he could see something of the world surrounding him. Worse: through his great corroded bulk burrowed the parasitic larvae of the swarm, deposited there when gravity first sucked them down and mortalized them. A thousand miles away, in the false windows of the throne-room at Viriconium, his other image was telling Cellur: 'The breeding cells are full. Whatever emerges will wrest the Earth to its own purposes.

He was the breeding cell. It was a strange end for a legendary man.

A gust of wind caught the airboat, causing it to spin slowly through a few degrees of arc. A smell came up. Hornwrack shuddered. The enormous half-corpse swung beneath him, displaying its fermented sores, the cratered flesh that bulged between the straps. The larvae forced themselves in and out. How long had it sought him, before it came upon him in Methven's Hall? What psychic bond now linked them? As he stared down, the spectre formed again behind him, attempting to attract his attention by snapping its fingers and coughing softly. He knew it was there. He didn't dare look back.

'Bugger me, lad,'it said, 'but we've seen some queer berths, you and I.'

He turned against his will to face it. It was bobbing about under the ceiling, making embarrassed washing motions with its fat hands.

'Now you've seen me as I am lad, would you do me a favour?'

'Go away. Why have you brought me here?'

'Pork!'it choked. 'Porcit me te bonan… Death!… There's only the jungle out there, son. The water barrel's contaminated and the captain's got the clap…'

'What are you saying? Leave me alone!'

… hung up there raw-blind in the ratlines like the corpse of a dog.'The spectre quivered suddenly; sniffed, as if scenting something new in the air. 'The lee shore!'it screamed. 'The lee shore!'Then, quieter: 'And only we two left abroad, matey.'

It put its head intelligently to one side.

'Christ, listen to those parrots!'it said in a hoarse whisper.

(While down in the pit, trapped among these metaphors and invented languages, Paucemanly strove to overcome his madness and communicate. His colossal limbs, partly submerged in milky grey slime, kicked and waved. Behind the eyepieces of his mask – which, like the panes of an aquarium abandoned in some dusty room, were occluded by a green deposit – his weak blue eyes rolled and bulged. The wind stank of delirium, gangrene and false compass bearings. A tear of self-pity trickled down his cheek. He was adrift between universes.)

'Kill me,'the spectre implored at last. 'Kill me, lad. You can do it.'

Hornwrack advanced on it with flailing arms. It shied away from him, belching morosely.

'Is that why you led me here?'he asked it.

It faded abruptly and he never saw it again. He bit his lip and went back to the controls.

'I'm commandeering this boat,'he said.

He sent the Heavy Star lumbering away from that City and out into the calm emptiness beyond. He could not bear the ancient airman's degradation. He could not bear his own despair (which he conceived of as compassion). Behind him in the pit a great hand came up, fumbled, ripped away the tormenting mask: and with a terrible lowing sound that echoed across the shallow poisoned tarns and endless peathags of the continental waste, Benedict Paucemanly plunged into the full nightmare of his own decay.

A single erratic line of footprints crossed the waste. Along it at intervals were strewn items of plate armour which lay like shards of scarlet porcelain amid the blowing dust, glowing faintly as if by their own light. It was night, now; or the end of the World. The sky, drained of its aching purples except where the enigmatic city festered on the horizon, was of a green so dark as to be almost black; it had the shine of a newly-cracked flint. Beneath this pall, files of insects entered the city from all directions, accompanied by occasional enormous mirages and flashes of rose-coloured light. The silence of the caesura was over everything; judgement in abeyance. Hornwrack, remote and unimpassioned, allowed the vessel to drift along at walking pace above the footprints while the madwoman, recovered from her latest malaise, pressed her face to the portholes and sang in a small bruised voice,

On the shores of the diamond lake

We shall watch the fishes

Faldiladia

All decisions were postponed. After half an hour of this they came upon the Reborn Man.

He was running north among the deep peat-groughs which here wind their way back to a flat and boggy watershed dotted with foundering cairns and rotten wooden posts. His limbs were shadowy, but on the loose black stuff he had worn beneath his armour there flared like a beacon the ideograph of his House. For some minutes he seemed unaware of the arrival of the Heavy Star, and ran on ignoring it, his arms windmilling for balance as he picked his way among the steep-sided channels and fibrous mounds. Then he looked up, staggered, and shook his fist. His mouth opened and shut angrily. He swayed, cupping his ears with his hands: and fell into the bed of a narrow stream, where he lay with his head in the peaty water for a moment or two, looking confused. By the time Hornwrack, having landed the machine a little way off, had found him again, he was back on his feet.

'Where have I been?'he asked.

'I don't know,'said Hornwrack. 'Look, I am sorry to have cut off your fingers. I no longer bear you any grudge.'(He examined this statement with surprise. It was true.)

Fulthor looked down at his maimed hand.

'My mind feels very clear,'he said. 'Where is the Dwarf?'He had forgotten everything, and could not take in Hornwrack's explanations. Causality meant nothing to him. 'Have we been to Iron Chine already, then?'he would ask: 'Or have we yet to see those burning sails?'Or, holding his head tenderly as if he could feel Time coiled and knotted there in it like purple braid, 'We've to meet Arnac san Tehn. Tonight, in the garden of Empty Wounds!'Smiling secretively, the madwoman took his hand and affected to count the fingers. He bore this calmly. The two of them stood there against black waste and obsidian sky; and in Hornwrack's imagination a light surrounded them. It was as though they had already separated themselves from the world in preparation for their descent into the past. He was filled with a deep resentment of their beauty (in response to which images of the Rue Sepile passed through his brain like fatal playing cards, or the lines extemporised by some bad poet in the purgatorial night – 'Here is the smell of fog; I see dead geraniums on your window sill: and women whisper in the lighted rooms'); but this was suppressed immediately by a corresponding urge to protect them, both from the world and his own envy.

'You will have to look after each other now,'he told Fulthor. He stared at the City fulminating like a spot of phosphorus on the horizon. 'I don't know how you'll get back to Viriconium, even if you want to go there.'

He tried to think of something else to say.

'Good luck.'

They watched puzzledly as he trudged back to the Heavy Star, which was sinking a little under its own weight in the mud. For a moment it looked as if the madwoman might run after him. An expression of ordinary human intelligence crossed her face. Then she laughed. The old machine rose gracelessly into the air and turned towards the City.

The City! Its, end is near. It expands and contracts, like a lung. Regular spasms of dissolution shake it like the vomits and distempers of a dying king. It is full of fires, not all of them real; memories of a history never achieved, a future unrealised. Sketchy and counterfeit, the towers of its sister city Viriconium advance and recede through a roseate smoke. Up from the buildings come fountains of earth! They pour into the sky as if gravity had been reversed, and where they fall on the surrounding plain a litter of insects is deposited, bits of dead insects which lie like ruined machinery amid the crude stones. At the height of each spasm the ground tolls like a bell; deep in the streets inexplicable phantoms stalk (headless women, their jewelled sandals sinking into a carpet of dusty grasshopper husks, rains of stinking skulls and luminous beetles, a sail moving down some non-existent Pleasure Canal: failed dreams of a compromise with the bony skeleton of Earth); and a great mad hooting goes up from the heart of the City, a groan of pain and horror in which may be distinguished the voice of the mutated airboatman calling to the assassin he has lured across a thousand miles to serve him -Kill me.

The insects ignored this lowing call – as of some large but delicately-organized animal being disembowelled – and forced themselves in and out like wasps round a rotting apple. They buzzed erratically across the plain; hurled themselves into the pits they had dug; and gathered in the dark air in diffuse humming clouds. Meanwhile, the Heavy Star, stern down, fabric wounded by the curious stresses of space, floundered toward them with blue lights leaking from its engine rooms. They were aware of it. It fascinated them. They made sudden abortive darts and forays in its direction. Did they link it with their flight down from the Moon? Did they perceive Galen Hornwrack encysted at the heart of its simple nervous system? Some of the more daring individuals threw themselves against its hull, only to topple away into the convection currents and streams of floating debris; which consumed them. This agitation grew as Hornwrack approached the erupting City. Their forays became more purposeful, and more prolonged. The City pulsed and heaved, generating a savage mauve glare, and they came up from it like smoke.

Up on the watershed Fulthor and the madwoman, interrupted in some partial rite of the Afternoon, some fragment of an old sin, shaded their eyes against the novel light. (Their iconic calm now representing a wiser – or at least more ordered – station of the world, a culture which would surely have taken such fireworks in its stride…) The plain was alive with crippled insects, tiny as aphids and bathed in the magnetic radiations of the City. A cold wind sprang up, lashed the boggy waste, and – rolling their wingless corpses before it like the discarded regalia of a mystery play – rushed away into the north; while above, the Heavy Star, a wobbling black mote in the hectic air, rose to meet the spreading swarm, and was engulfed.

They fastened themselves on to its outer hull like locusts on a branch. It strained forward as if the air had solidified around it; and was brought to a standstill above the perimeter of the City, where the hulk of Benedict Paucemanly greeted it with booms and roars of self-pity, waving his infested limbs. (From up on the watershed this activity seemed like the movements of some tiny damaged mechanical toy.) He had replaced his mask but was unable to secure it, so that it hung awry on his blubbering tublike head like the woollen cap on the head of a retarded child. His new organs pulsed, engorging themselves in time to the rhythms of the City. 'In the Moon,'he said, 'it was like white gardens.'He begged for freedom in an abandoned language. He blinked up, watching the insects as they continued to alight on his old ship. When they could find no further space to settle they attached themselves to one another in a parody of copulation. Beneath this rustling layer the Heavy Star struggled to gain height. Suddenly, violet bodides arced from its bows! Caught up in the discharge of the ancient cannon many of the insects dropped away crackling and roasting and setting fire to their neighbours, so that they fell about the ears of the decaying airboatman like burning leaves.

Fear death ftom the air! Up there, we can see, Hornwrack fears nothing. He makes the boat his own. Powerplants enfeebled by its unimaginable journeys, substructure creaking like an old door, it nevertheless wriggles ecstati-cally under his hands, light flaring off its stern. We see it even now, long after the fact, rolling and spinning against the southern quadrant of the sky. The patterns it is making are gay, adventive, dangerous. It tumbles off the top of a loop and falls like a. stone. It soars eighteen hundred feet vertically upwards, spraying violet fire almost at random into the dark green varnished sky. Persistence of vision makes of it a paintbrush, violet strokes on an obsidian ground, while the insects fall like comets all around it, trailing a foul black smoke, to shatter and burst pulpily on the plain beneath! Even the watchers on the watershed have abandoned their cruel calm. He may yet escape! something whispers inside them. He might yet escape!… But now the energy cannon has stopped working, and he seems to have undergone a fatal faltering or change of heart. They bite their lips and urge him on. Some listlessness, though, prevents him: something inhaled from the cabbagey air of the Low City long ago. Now the Heavy Star drifts immediately above Paucemanly's carcass like an exhausted pilot fish. The insects descend. All Hornwrack's efforts have made no impression on their numbers. One by one they approach the wallowing vehicle. One by one they settle on its creaking, riven old hull and commence to bear it down…

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 ofViriconium – 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 Way, 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 ofa 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 selfinvolved, 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 farm-boys 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.

(Tomb the Dwarf! Much later, Methvet Nian discovered his caravan undamaged in Old Palace Yard. Its vulgar colours were st~ill bright beneath the winter's grime. The inside of it was very clean. She could find in none of its cleverly-designed cupboards and hiding places anything personal to him, anything he might have kept out of sentiment. His old spade was there, but it was simply a spade. His belongings were utilitarian, or else had myths -and thus existences – of their own: the little furnace, for instance, which had reforged the Nameless Sword all those years ago. There was nothing here to remember him by -this was how she put it to herself. Nevertheless, rather than leave she turned over the cold bed-linen, or touched a small pewter cup. Out in the courtyard there was clinging rain; yellow light and footsteps on the cobbles; night drawing in. Sitting alone in the dark she wondered what had become of his ponies.)

City, dwarf, Queen: all waited.

Cellur the old man, alien millenia fading in his brain, waited.

Up in the north, Fay Glass and Alstath Fulthor waited on the quaking plain. Demented, pained, tortured by the persistence of the universe, Benedict Paucemanly could only wait.

Hornwrack himself waited, falling eternally toward the mysterious city.

He had pulled his hair ruthlessly back and fastened it with a steel clasp in imitation of the doomed captains of a now-forgotten war. About him he had drawn the meal-coloured cloak of the Low City bravo (which with its grotesquely-dyed hem signifies that he has wallowed in-the blood of fifty men). His hands, he discovered, had betrayed him over the breaking of the knife. They had hidden it in his cloak. Now it lay in his lap, flawed blade black and enigmatic. In all, he was as the Queen has seen him last, in her drawing room at Viriconium. He had rejected the myth she had offered him and adhered to his own. These symbols of the pose which had sustained him through eighty years of wet dawns in the Rue Sepile now served, perhaps, to reassure him of that.

The ship fell. He would not touch the controls. He held the knife tightly to keep his hands occupied. One moment his thin face was in eclipse. The nextit had been thrown into prominence by a flash of rose-red light from the decaying node beneath.

We are not talking of his motives. All his life he had looked not for life itself but for some revelation to unify it and give it meaning: some – any – significant occurrence. Whether he was able or willing to recognise it now it had come, we cannot say. It is immaterial anyway. In the event he sacrificed himself to release the old airboatman from an undeserved nightmare. It was a rescue.

At the instant of impact the boat split open around him like an empty gourd, but he did not feel it.

Instead, as the crystal splinters entered his brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved across the ceiling-frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes and smiled; or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips. Viriconium, with all her narcissistic intimacies and equivocal invitations, welcomed him again. He had hated that city, yet now it was his past and it was all he had to regret… The second of these visions was of the Rue Sepile. It was dawn, in summer. Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street – so that its long and normally profitless perspectives seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous City – and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour.

Up at the second floor casement window a boy was busy with the bright red geraniums arranged along the outer sill in lumpen terracotta pots. He looked down at Hornwrack and smiled. Before Hornwrack could speak he drew down the lower casement and turned away. The glass which now separated them reflected the morning sunlight in a silent explosion; and Hornwrack, dazzled, mistaking the light for the smile, suddenly imagined an incandescence which would melt all those old streets!

Rue Sepile; the Avenue of Children; Margery Fry Court: all melted down! All the shabby dependencies of the Plaza of Unrealized Time! All slumped, sank into themselves, eroded away until nothing was left in his field of vision but an unbearable white sky above and the bright clustered points of the chestnut leaves below – and then only a depthless opacity, behind which he could detect the beat of his own blood, the vitreous humour of the eye. He imagined the old encrusted brick flowing, the glass cracking and melting from its frames even as they shrivelled away, the shreds of paint flaring green and gold, the geraniums toppling in flames to drop like comets through the fiery air; he imagined the chestnuts fading to nothing, not even white ash, under this weight of light! All had winked away like reflections in ajar of water glass, and only the medium remained, bright, viscid, vacant. He had a sense of the intolerable briefness of matter, its desperate signalling and touching, its fall; and simultaneously one of its unendurable durability.

He thought, Something lies behind all the realities of the universe and is replacing them here, something less solid and more permanent. Then the world stopped haunting him forever.

It is so hard to convey simultaneity:

As Hornwrack dreamed, so did Tomb the Iron Dwarf, dying a thousand miles away in his one hundred and fiftieth year, old friend of kings and princes; as Cellur and the Queen stood in the chilly throne-room, staring into the north and whispering in the dry voices of the old, so Fay Glass and Alstath Fulthor stood in the distant waste and watched Benedict Paucemanly open his arms as if to embrace the falling airboat. His voice hooted morosely across to them on the wind. 'You've come home,'he tried to say: to whom or what is unclear, unless it was himself. It was too late anyway. The Heavy Star buried itself in the bloated arch of his chest and broke apart with a muffled thud. He rolled like a stricken whale with this enormous blow, making a soft almost female noise of grief or pleasure; and a white light issued suddenly from him, a nimbus which filled the pit and spread so rapidly that within a minute the whole of the city had been transfigured, its alien arcades and papery constructions appearing to glow from within.

This light rippled out over the Earth, thinning as it went. By the time it had crossed the bitter coasts of Fenlen it was nothing more than a faint disturbance of matter which, speeding through the very stones of the world, liberated everything in its path from the 'new reality'. It cleansed the ruins of Iron Chine, where for a month great green beetles had fumbled through the whitish remains of Elmo Buffin's ill-starred fleet. Spilling over the battlements of the cold city of Duirinish it relieved the proctors there of their visions -craneflies stalking distant fantastic littorals, trees into men, men into geometrical figures. It swept between the shattered buttresses of the Agdon scarp, and when it had passed the stunted oakwoods on the slopes below were untenanted again. It flickered among the high passes of the Monar, scouring them with a glacial light; and finally crossed the walls of the Pastel City to empty those ancient streets of all illusions but their proper human ones.

(Out there on the alien plain, Fay Glass and Alstath Fulthor felt it pulse through them, and were pulled away into the past. 'Arnac san Tehn!'he called triumphantly: 'We meet in the Garden of Women! Midnight!'But she whispered, 'So many wings,'a little sad, perhaps, to leave. 'So many wings,'seeing the cruelty of it all. They lingered for a while as grey phantoms amid the sinking cairns of the watershed, the Afternoon Cultures reclaiming them by degrees. Now they are lost to us for good.)

Benedict Paucemanly writhed silently as if determined to vomit something up. All was done but this one thing: his death. He groaned and strained. Abruptly the larvae of the swarm burst out of his distended pores, fell off him into the pit and dried up like dead leeches. He hooted in triumph. The light fountained up from him for some minutes more, all the light he had absorbed during his long imprisonment in the Moon, all his pain. He was beatified, dissolving in his own light. Repository and symbol, he released all the energies of the two realities colliding within him: and in releasing them released the Earth.

The plain darkens. We see it from a long way off. The old airboatman is dead. There is a slow fading of the sky, a cold wind springing up; a deeper night arrives. The mysterious City winks like an ember on the edge of the plain, fading from white to purple to a dim red and then nothing. For a moment the swarm hangs above this its first and last stronghold, forming itself into a complex gridlike pattern in the obsidian air – some last attempt to communicate with the human world, a glowing symbol, meaningless yet full of import against the darkness. Down floats its stridulant hymn, bony celebration of the waste spaces of the universe. Then, its ontological momentum lost, its position in the material continuum untenable, the life goes out of it. Those individuals which survive will become mere insects and wander about the plain forever with folded wings, as lost as all the other races that ever came down to the Earth, and whose descendants now inhabit the Deep Wastes. When they meet they will stare lengthily at one another as if trying to remember something; or, copulating hopelessly beneath a black rain, become suddenly immobile, so that they resemble tangled silver brooches mislaid on the desert by the hetaerae of some vanished civilisation…