A Storm of Wings

3: A Fish Eagle in Viriconium

Tomb the Dwarf's return to Viriconium, his adoptive city, was accomplished at no great pace. The passage of two or three days placed the site of his abortive excavations and near-incineration behind him to the south-east. The Monar massif was on his right hand (its peaks as yet no more than a threat of ice, a white hanging frieze hardly distinguishable from a line of cloud), while somewhere off to his left ran that ancient, paved and – above all – crowded way which links the Pastel City with its eastern dependencies – Faldich, Cladich and Lendalfoot by the sea. This latter route he avoided, preferring the old drove-roads and greenways, out of sentimentality rather than any conscious desire to be alone. He remembered something about them from his youth. Although he was not quite sure what it might be, he sought it stubbornly in the aimless salients and gentle swells of the dissected limestone uplands which skirt the mountains proper, haunted by the liquid bubble of the curlew and the hiss of the wind in the blue moor-grass.

He gave little thought to his rescuer from the past. The man had vanished again while he slept, leaving nothing but a half-dream in which the words 'Viriconium'and 'Moon'were repeated many times and with a certain sense of urgency. (Tomb had woken ravenous in the morning, abandoned the new pit immediately, despite its promise, and gone in search of him – full at first of a curious joy, then at least in hope; and finally when he failed to find so much as a footprint in the newly-turned earth, with a wry amusement at his own folly.) He was, as he had put it more than once, a dwarf and not a philosopher. Events involved him utterly; he encountered them with optimism and countered them with instinct; in their wake he had few opinions, only memories. He asked for no explanations.

Still, curiosity was by no means dead in him; and since he could not go to the Moon he moved west across the uplands instead, toward Viriconium, In a region of winding dales a further queer event overtook him.

Fissuring the high plateau, so that from above it looked like a grey and eroded cheese, these deep little dry-bottomed valleys were dreamy and untenanted. Hanging thickets of thorn and ash made them difficult of access (except where some greenway deserted impulsively its grassy sheep-run to follow an empty stream bed, plunge through tumbled and overgrown intake walls, and nose like a dog among the mossy ruins of some long-abandoned village): and each was guarded by high, white, limestone bastions. Into one such came the dwarf at the end of a warmish October afternoon, the wheels of his caravan creaking on a disused track drifted with ochre leaves. Reluctant to disturb the elegant silence of the beechwoods, he descended slowly, looking for a place to pass the night. The air was warm, the valley dappled with honey-coloured light. Summer still lived here in the smell of the wild garlic, the dance of the insects in the steep glades, and the slow fall of a leaf through a slanting ray of sun.

The curves of the track revealed to him first a forgotten hamlet in the valley floor – then, swimming above that in a kind of amber glow, the enormous cliff which dominated it.

The village was long dead. Past it once had flowed a stream called the Cressbrook: but there was no-one left now to call it anything, and it had retreated shyly underground leaving only a barren strip of stones to separate the relics of human architecture from the vast limestone cathedral on its far bank. There was no water for his ponies, but Tomb turned them out of their shafts anyway; he felt magnetized, drawn, on the verge of some discovery. For this they bore him no more or less ill-will than usual, and he could hear them tearing at the damp grass as he pottered along the bank of the vanished brook. But he couldn't get comfortable 'there, or amid the contorted and lichenous boughs of the reverted orchard with its minute sour apples – and after a while he shook his head, staring puzzledly about him. Something had attracted him, and yet the place was nothing more than a collection of bramble-filled intakes, grassy mounds, and heaps of stone colonized by nettle and elderberry, its air of desuetude and loss magnified by the existence of the cliff above -That cliff! That aching expanse of stone, with its ancient jackdaw colonies, its great ragged swathes of ivy and its long mysterious yellow stains! It hung up there, every line of it precise in the amber glow, every scalloped overhang thick with brown darkness, every leaning ash tree, golden and exact against its own black shadow. Every buttress was luminous. The gloomy and suggestive caves worn in its face by a million years of running water seemed more likely places of habitude than the pitiful handful of relics facing it across the dry stream: the shadow of a bird, flickering for a moment across an acre of vibrant white stone, invested it with some immemorial yet transitory significance (some distillation or heirloom of a thousand twilights, a billion such shadows fossilized impalpably in the rock): it was like a vast old head – imperial, ironic and compelling -Eventually he cooked himself a meal and ate it squatting comfortably on the step of the caravan. Smoke from his fire became trapped in the inversion layers and drifted down the little valley. Evening came closer and yet never seemed to arrive – as if the valley and its great white guardian were removed from the ordinary passage of time. The sun dipped forever into the greyness and yet never sank. The air cooled, but so slowly. No wind came. Tomb the Dwarf scratched his crotch, yawned. He stood up to massage the deep ache of an old back-wound.

He fed the ponies. Then he went to look at the cliff.

At first, a little out of breath after the ascent of the vegetated scree beneath, he was content merely to stand at the bottom of it and crane his neck to watch the jackdaws. The rock was warm: he placed the palm of his hand against it, flat. The earth beneath his boots was filled with the smell of autumn: he breathed deeply, cocking an eye at a hanging rib, a soaring corner, an ivy-filled crack.

He stood there at the beginning of it where every line led upward, then he began to climb.

He had remembered what was haunting him.

He climbed slowly and amiably, placing his feet with care; here jamming a fist into a crack, there balancing his way across some steep slab while empty space burnt away beneath him like a fuse: and with him as he climbed went the long barren limestone scars of his youth, burning and distant under a foreign sun – the baking hinterlands of the Mingulay Peninsula in summer – the stones so bright at midday they hurt the eyes – the tinkers'caravans string 'themselves out like gems across the Mogadon Littoral – the sea-cliffs blaze in a fifty mile arc from Radiopolis to Thing 10, while, high above the stoneheaps and the thorny rubbish in the dry gullies, patrols a single lammergeyer, a speck on the burning bowl of the air! Each place or event he now saw miniaturised and arid, as if sealed in clear glass. He regretted none of them – but he was glad on the whole to have. exchanged them for the softer airs of the north; and the memory identified, the haunting laid, he let it slip away… Soon he was able to rest on a shaggy platform some three 'hundred feet from his starting point and perhaps two hundred more above the caravan on the valley floor. Here there was a cool breeze, and he could watch the jackdaws pursue their millenial evening squabble beneath him; 'harrying one another from roost to roost then exploding away into the clear air in a clatter of wings and sneers – to soar and drift and drop like stones into the treetops below before returning to the bramble-ledges to begin the whole tedious argument over again… He took off his belt and with it anchored himself among the roots of the yew with which he shared his perch. The air around him cooled; the light. began imperceptibly to fade; the long shoulders of the plateau receded north before him, horizon after horizon like grey pigeon feathers set against the enamelled blues and yellows of the sky. Across the valley he could no longer distinguish individual ash trees – crowned with a continuous lacy fretwork of branches, the sun red and unmoving above it, the far slope rose dark and sullen like a vast earthwork.

. And as he watched, a head began to raise itself above that earthwork.

It was such a brief glimpse that later he was unable to describe it coherently – by then, of course, it no longer mattered. The thing revealed itself in total silence, and by parts. First the drooping, jointed antennae, in constant nervous motion, were lifted above the trees; then the great globular eyes followed them, dull and faceted, set in a wedge-shaped carapace like the stained and polished skull of a dead horse; finally came the mouthparts, working like a machine. Two trembling, oddly-curved forelimbs appeared, and, braced against the earth's dark edge (although they left not the slightest mark), levered this shocking mask high above the dwarf's stance. He never saw the rest of the creature. The valley winked out below him; the cliff lurched and spun; he shuddered, and heard a thin piping noise coming out of his own mouth -Then it was gone.

He retained the impression of something fading, of a noise he had never actually heard gradually diminishing from some unimaginable crescendo – as if an invisible energy dissipating itself like water dribbling away under a stone: then he felt the rough powdery bark of the yew against his sweating hand; the cry of the jackdaws came back to him (faint at first, as though from a vast distance); the valley of the Cressbrook was once more as it had been -Such a brief glimpse.

The sun sank, the dark welled in: but the small hunched figure on the cliff remained – chin on knees, singed grey hair moving in the night wind, expression quizzical. When he eventually got up to leave his ledge and begin the careful retreat, he saw suddenly that it was scattered with hundreds of little luminous insects. Leaping and glittering in an excess of life and energy, they scuttled over his feet, flickered between the roots of the yew, and tumbled in a constant rain over the edge, spilling into the depths like sparks. He could not see where they came from; and when he tried to pick some of them up they evaded him.

During his descent he had expected to see them falling past him into space: but when a few minutes later the difficulties eased and he was able to look up, they had gone, and he couldn't even see the ledge.

In a languor of puzzlement and dried blood, then, his wounds gaping at him every time he closed his eyes, Galen Hornwrack abandoned his familiar rooms, his stale but bearable captivity. Nothing was said. Nothing was explained. The shrewd whores watched him go (moving abstractedly from window to window, fingers raised to a drooping underlip, a leaded cheek, a favourite comb). The boy, too, followed him with uncommunicative eyes. Did he understand what had happened? Would he wait for as much as a day before drifting away into some desperate, motiveless new liaison? Hornwrack could not care for him (both of them bore too obviously the signature of the City, the impassive self-indulgence, the narcissism which precludes compassion): but he'had a sudden quick vision of the boy's thin shoulders hunched against a corrosive yellow lamplight; of dripping brickwork and energetic shadows; and he found himself searching for something to say in farewell, some gift or acknowledgement. Nothing came, so he said nothing, and let the inevitable profitless curves of the Rue Sepile carry him out of sight.

Eventually, he knew, his present inertia would be replaced by a faint bitterness, a sense of betrayal which, though directed away from himself, would yet be experienced on behalf of the boy. In this way he managed his crippled emotions. For now he could only watch covertly the faces of his unwelcome companions, waiting for some indication of their purpose. Beneath his cloak he had hidden his second best knife, a thing with a peculiar hilt and an old black stain he could not remove.

They had fetched him a horse, though he hated that method of travel, and urged him silently to get up on it. Now, the Plaza of Unrealized Time and its shabby dependencies behind them, they shepherded him through the Low City. Alves passed like a dream, its breached copper dome and sprawling rookeries lapped in the silence of desuetude. Along the Camine Auriale a drizzling rain commenced. The earthy wounds of the Cispontine Quarter opened before them like a freshly-dug graveyard.

.. Eastward, where the Artists'Quarter huddles up to the skirts of the High City (and Carron Ban, it's said, deserted by her sour daughter, still waits for Norvin Trinor in the inexpressibly sad shadows beneath the heights of MinnetSaba), dawn had filled the streets with faces Hornwrack knew. The curdled horizontal light picked out a wicked jaw, an eyebrow like a punctuation mark – here a blanched cheek, there a goitre like a pregnancy or some prodigal carious baring of the teeth. Deformed and weary, furtive or gleeful, they were the faces of usurers and wastrels, of despairing cannibals and blemished martyrs, all corroded in the moral marrow and burnt to the underlying bone with the City's mark: Equipot the one-eyed merchant with his sardonic grin and rotting septum; pale Madam 'L', her haematitic eyes full of fever, hurrying to keep an appointment in the Boulevard Aussman; Paulinus Rack the undertaker's agent, his very large head covered with broken veins, carrying a short jade cane…

They were customers of his for the most part, though none of them seemed to know him now. It was as if the events of the night had removed him from his proper sphere.

No such sleight had operated in the case of Alstath Fulthor, however much he might have wished it otherwise. From booth and gutter the eyes of the Low City stared out, to pass incuriously over Fay Glass and her outlandishly cropped hair; dwell a little longer on the old man who rode by her side (puzzled perhaps by the strange geometries on his robe, and briefly disconcerted by his tranquil yellow features and impenetrable smile); then fasten greedily on the Reborn Man like the eyes of communicants or at least the spectators at an execution.

Fulthor, that myth!

He was the enigma of the Low City, the meat and drink of their gossip. In the streets beneath Minnet-Saba all motion ceased at his comings and goings, whatever the hour. The constant bedlam of the gutters abated as he rode by, wrapped in his queer diplomatic status and his queerer armour with its strangely elongated joints at knee and elbow and its tremulous blood-red glow. Who was he? Did he serve the City, or it him? He was like some living flaw in time, through which leaked faint poisonous memories of the Afternoon – its fantastic conspiracies and motiveless sciences, all its frigid cruelties and raging glory. Since his triumphant entry at the head of the Reborn Armies eighty years ago (the Northern wolves driven before him to be caught at last between his hammer and the anvil of Tomb the Giant Dwarf), he had gone about Viriconium like the courier of a God, the very beat of his heart a response to some lost prehistoric cue. He was a miasmal past and an ambivalent future, a foreign prince in a familiar city. He was, and always had been, the repository of more fears than hopes.

So they quietened as he passed. It was like an embarrassment in them. A few smiled up at him. Some spat. Others fingered thoughtfully the metal pendant at their necks and wished, perhaps, for the night.

If Hornwrack was disposed to a certain cynical amusement at this reception of the Queen's favourite advisor, it was dispelled when their destination became plain. Fulthor led his little group first to Minnet-Saba by a northward traverse – the precipitous Rivelin Way being at this hour impassable for the stalls of a makeshift but flourishing fish market; then on to the Camine again; and by this indirect and ill-chosen route (like a main remembering quite another city) brought them finally to the Proton Circuit: a road which has only one ending, there in the great filigree metal shell of Methven's hall. Dwarfed by the vast curve of that airy way, spiralling above the lesser thoroughfares on its hundred fragile stone pillars, they inched their way towards the palace under a sky like red lead, four small figures imprisoned in a monstrously beautiful geometry. Above them orbited a solitary fish eagle, raucous and lost here on the edge of the mountains, making long white arcs against the clouds.

Hunched up on his horse in the wind and the rain, Hornwrack perceived simultaneously his destination and his mistake. He nodded bitterly to himself. He looked up at the fish eagle to remind himself of old freedoms cruelly taken away. Then he reached deliberately over to his left where the old man rode by his side; hooked one arm round the ancient neck; and brought his second-best knife smoothly from its place of concealment beneath his wet woollen cloak. His own horse halted in confusion, but the old man's continued to move in a nervous circle. This had the effect of dislodging him from its saddle, so that his weight was completely supported by Hornwrack's stranglehold – while Hornwrack's flawed blade, flickering in the ashy light, pricked his yellow skin; and Hornwrack's flawed laugh died in his face like a poisoned dog.

'I'll go no further on this bloody road,'cried Hornwrack, 'until you tell me why, Aistath Fulthor! What have I ever had here but disappointments?'

Above him, closer now, it seemed, the fish eagle screamed. Its cries caused a kind of elation to spill through him, briefly anaesthetising the ache of his wounds and strengthening him if need be for another murder.

'I've not ridden this road for eighty years. I know you, Fulthor. Give me a reason why I should come with you now!'

But a chill went through him as he spoke; and though his words were for the Reborn Man, he found himself staring into the parchment face of his impassive hostage. The old man had spoken not once since his cryptic greeting of the dawn in Hornwrack's rooms – not once in all that long ride across the City: but now he opened his mouth and gave vent to a sudden mewing wail, a cry with no speech in it at all, which rose inhumanly into the sky and fled away'like an ancient bird. This done, he became still again, his lips dry and bluish, his rheumy eyes fixed vacantly on the empty air. The queer geometrical embroidery on his robe seemed to settle itself slowly, as if a moment before it had been in violent and independent motion.

Hornwrack clung tightly to him and shuddered, as the victim clings to his assassin. His wounds hurt him suddenly. He felt sick and he felt very old.

Alstath Fulthor, caught between one tepid nightmare and the next:

For two days a scene from his previous life had hung at the outside edge of perception, giving him the impression that he was accompanied everywhere by one or two partly visible companions. They were tall and whitish – candle-like figures resembling the drawings of the insane – and whenever he turned his head they vanished immediately. At unexpected moments the scene would submerge him completely, and he would become aware that they were walking in some sort of sunken ornamental garden planted with flowers whose names he could not remember and filled with a smell of horsehair and mint which varied in intensity with the wind from beyond the walls. Across it floated the voices of his companions, engaged in some half-serious philosophical or religious dispute. His relationship to them, whilst not precisely sexual, could be described in only the most complex and emotional of terms; and his constant attempts to see them more clearly had given his head a slight sideways tilt, and lent to his expression an even more withdrawn quality than was usual.

It was symptomatic, perhaps, of a sudden self-doubt. The old man in the embroidered robe – guarded as to his immediate origins, secretive of purpose though evidently benign – had issued from the recent history of Viriconium with all the force of a living myth. And on that high path under the brow of Hollin Low Moor, less than a week before (night coming on, the sweat drying on him, and the distant shriek of a fish eagle making alien the bleating of the autumn flocks), Alstath Fulthor had relinquished to him what he secretly saw as the stewardship of the empire. He did not quite understand how this had come about. Only that he had fought so long against the quicksand of his Afternoon memories (because after the passing of tegeus-Cromis and the vanishing of Tomb the Iron Dwarf who else was left to advise the Queen?) and now the fight was failing and he was tired to death. Only that the old man's charisma was immense, his frail old figure looming somehow over every foreseeable future, a warning or a threat.

So, even before the appearance at his house in the early hours, of the woman Fay Glass, incoherent and alone, he had begun to act in a stupor, consumed by the feeling that there was nothing to choose between the fevers of his skull and those of the world outside it. When he closed his eyes strange waxen figures moved through a garden; when he opened them again he found that he had allowed the girl (like some demented diviner) to lead him half-way across the city in search of a cheap assassin. Somewhere along the way he had collected the old man, who now watched him sardonically and offered him no assistance… 'I can connect nothing with nothing…'The tenement in the Rue Sepile filled him with disgust for the people among whom he must now make his life. Its stairways wound like a tedious. argument, luring part of his brain along with them until he found himself thinking, apropos of nothing, If the dead have a city it is like this one, and it smells of rats and withered geraniums … 'But look how the leaves fall…'While his boy bled him patiently the assassin groaned and whispered from the disordered bed. Fulthor eyed the process with distaste, noting how the boy's face, delicate and womanish in the unsteady light, filled with a strange detached sympathy. Later, watching the assassin dress, he felt only impatience at the Low City swagger of him, and missed the hidden knife…

Now Hornwrack closed on his victim like a rat-trap.

There was a sudden hiss of indrawn breath. A flurry of hooves. The knife flickered out from somewhere, a blemished steel tongue in the grey light. The old man gasped once and was silent. They remained locked together for a long moment, like lovers. Above them, somewhere up in the dark morning, a huge bird shrieked. The madwoman began to ride round them in circles, whimpering and waving her arms. Hornwrack laughed madly. 'I'll go no further, Fulthor! I've been this way before. It's a road to nothing!'Suddenly he stared into the face of his hostage as if he saw his own death there. 'What?'Fear stretched his thin brutalised features.

The old man opened his throat, retched; squawked inhumanly; then seemed to smile.

'Oh! Oh! Oh!'cried Fay Glass, staring upward.

Alstath Fulthor, his brain an empty beach across which were scattered the bones of understanding, felt, rather than saw, something detach itself from the racing clouds above.

It fell slowly at first, toppling languidly off one great wing, giving vent to a high wailing cry (thus do the fish eagles of the Southern Marches plummet almost lazily a thousand yards into the cold salt water of their native sea-lochs: but this one was fully five feet from wingtip to wingtip, and of an odd grey colour); plunged quicker and quicker until Fulthor was sure it must bury itself in the paving of the Circuit; then in the final instant shot horizontally across his field of vision in a rush of displaced air, to smash into the assassin's ribcage with a noise like an axe going into an oak door. Shouting in rage and fright, Hornwrack fell backwards off his horse. He lost his hold on the old man, hit the wet road, and was bowled over in a mist of blood and feathers.

Relieved – if astonished – at this turn of events, Fulthor drew his powered blade and cursed his horse in close; found that he could get a clear stroke at neither assassin nor bird, and swept the old man up to safety instead. This gave him the illusion, at least, of participation.

In the immediate aftermath of its strike the hawk had the advantage of momentum: with its talons fastened in his face Hornwrack went rolling and bellowing about the roadway, knife-arm flailing while he tried with the other to protect his eyes and throat. There was little to choose between them for ferocity. The bird shrieked and croaked; the man groaned and wept; rain fell on them both. Alstath Fulthor stared appalled. Eventually, blood streaming from his face and forearms, the man wriggled into a kneeling position. He grasped the bird by its neck and pulled it off him. Time after time he drove the knife into its body, but it was like stabbing a brick wall. The huge wings buffeted him. Their faces were inches apart, and both of them were screaming now as if they had finally recognised one another from some other country and were continuing a quarrel begun there long ago… Suddenly the man threw his knife away, transferred both hands to the bird's neck, and twisted it once.

They raised their bloody heads and shrieked together. The man choked. The bird was still.

Fulthor rode over, dismounted, and watched Hornwrack get unsteadily to his feet. His cloak was ripped, his shoulders a mantle of blood. He looked round him like an idiot, empty-eyed. 'Yours, I suppose,'he said to Fulthor, his voice thick and dull. He hardly seemed to notice the powered blade flickering and spitting at his throat. He held out the dead bird. 'Some bloody thing dug up out of the ground.'

The Reborn Man stared at it in silence. It was a perfect image of a bird made all in metal: a fantasy with armoured wings, every feather beaten from wafer-thin iridium, the fierce raptorial beak and talons forged from steel and graven with strange delicate designs. It hung from Hornwrack's hand, though, like anything newly dead – loose of limb, open-mouthed and vulnerable (as if in the moment of death it had been surprised by some truth which made nothing of beaks and claws), one great wing hanging in a slack double curve. He shook his head stupidly and turned away.

The old man seemed little the worse for his adventure, though the strain seemed to have accentuated something not quite human in the set of his features, the way his almost-saffron skin clung to cheekbone and jaw, taut as an oiled silk lampshade. 'You had better tell him why we need him, Alstath Fulthor,'he whispered hoarsely. He massaged his scraggy neck and chuckled. 'I believe he will not come except of his own accord. And I would rather he destroyed no more of my property. '

Fulthor failed to hide his surprise. 'You made the bird?'he said.

'Long ago. There may be a few more left – 'He looked up into the grey sky – 'but they have grown shy since the War. They are less dependable, and no longer speak.'He nodded to himself, remembering something. Then: 'Tell him why we need him.'

Fulthor could think of nothing to say. He looked from the old man to the ruined bird and back 'again; then at Hornwrack (who, far from showing any further signs of fight, had begun to shiver volcanically).

'The girl,'he began. 'She was sent here with a message, we think, vital to the City, to the Empire. To all of us in these peculiar times. But look at her! The rest of her party must have wandered off somewhere between here and the Great Brown Waste: they are far along the road to the Past in her village, and it is hard for them to concentrate for long on what they judge to be nine tenths dream.'(Waxen figures were at that moment processing through his own skull, carrying something wrapped in a fantastically decorated sheet, all of them leaning at thirty degrees to the vertical; they were singing. Nine-tenths dream! He had placed her by the weave of her cloak. He could find the place but would he ever leave it again?) 'You must know what they are like out there. '

The assassin seemed preoccupied. With the hem of his cloak he was dabbing at his lips, his cheeks; the lobe had been torn off his left ear. He fought off a fresh bout of shivering (looked for a second hunted and afraid, like a man who suspects in himself a fatal disease). 'She said nothing to me. Nothing but gibberish.'He touched white bone where his jawline had been laid open, winced. 'Look at me! I am already bleeding for her. Three times now she has brought me to this, though that bastard Verdigris had his dirty hands in the matter.'He sneered. “'The face of the ewe-Iamb bone white in the mallows”! Gibberish!'

Fulthor could follow little of this. He thought privately that the man was mad.

'It is not what she has said,'he explained carefully, 'but what she brought with her, that is of significance. Had she anything with her? I thought as much! You are the only one who saw it. We must know. You owe us this, if only because you were the cause of its loss!'

This seemed to enrage the assassin.

'Then ask her, Reborn!'he shouted. He spat blood into the road at Fulthor's feet. 'It is I who am owed. I killed five of the Sign last night on her behalf and my palm is empty. One of them at least would have fetched twenty pounds of steel in the open market. Martin Fierro under my knife! That was a black madness. Here!'He stuck out his cupped right hand. 'Black bloody madness! I am sick of doing the work of the High City and reaping only their sanctimonious stares!'He turned away disgustedly and made to pick up his knife. When Fulthor's weapon pricked the small of his back, he froze. He looked back over his shoulder, a sneer spreading across his lacerated face. 'Are you frightened of a steel knife now, up there in the High City? You could chop me like an onion with that thing if I had fifty knives like this!'He bent down quickly and snatched it up. 'Look, blunted at the tip.'It had vanished under his cloak before Fulthor could protest. He had sensed now to what extent he was needed; to what extent safe.

'She cannot tell us, Hornwrack,'said Fulthor tiredly. 'You can. That is why she brough us to you. It was her only means of communication. At least come to the palace to discuss it. I agree that you may have been treated unfairly.'

Hornwrack ignored him. He shook the carcass of the metal bird. He put it to his ear. 'It hums still. It hummed even as I strangled it.'His hands trembled, then stilled. 'I feel my death in all this.'He walked off a few paces and stared up at the palace, a mile distant and misty through the blowing rain. 'Methven's hall!'they heard him say. He seemed to be listening. 'I was once one of you,'he said. 'I was one of the rulers. I chose to become one of the ruled.'Then:

'To hell with all of you,'he said. 'I'll come because you have the weight of that behind you -'pointing to the palace -'and because you have the baan. But I'll tell you nothing.'He regarded Fulthor with a cold smile, drew his ragged sleeve across his red-daubed face. 'You had better watch me, Reborn Man,'he threatened. 'You had better watch me all the time.'

I would rather be a ghost than play such hollow games, thought Alstath Fulthor.

Hornwrack: The horse had run off and he refused to try and catch it on foot.

'Then walk,'the Reborn Man told him.

He writhed his bruised lips and spat. (If he shut his eyes the bird came at him still, tearing long elastic strips of flesh from his chest until the ribs showed through.)

'So,'he said. He shrugged.

Lord Galen Hornwrack, scion of a respected – if relict -House, one-time officer and pilot of the Queen's Flight, now a professional assassin of some repute in the Low City, made his way for the first time in eighty years to the palace at Viriconium. He walked. His wounds throbbed and chafed. Memories of the night gnawed him. But at his belt hung a metal bird he had ruined with his own bare hands, and he felt this to be the symbol of a continuing defiance: though he now had to admit that control of his own destiny had passed from him. Occasionally, small wheels spilled from somewhere deep within the bird to run soundlessly in diminishing circles until the wind whirled them away like chaff across the Proton Circuit. Before he went into the hall, of Methven he looked up at the sky. What had begun at least in light was now dull and unpromising. Even the deadly litharge stain of dawn had faded from the cloud-layer; so that, grey and solid, it capped the earth like an enormous leaden bowl, a single thin crescent of silver showing at its tilted northern extremity. And as he watched even that faded.