Viriconium

2

Autumn. Midnight. The eternal city. The moon hangs over her like an attentive white-faced lover, its light reaching into dusty corners and empty lots. Like all lovers it remarks equally the blemish and the beauty spot- limning the iridium fretwork and baroque spires of the fabled Atteline Plaza even as it silvers the fishy eye of the old woman cutting fireweed and elder twigs among the ruins of the Cispontine Quarter, whose towers suffered most during the War of the Two Queens. The city is a product of her own dreams, a million years of them. Now she turns in her sleep, so quietly you can hear the far-off rumour of the newest: white bones, the Song of the Locust, dry mandibles rubbing together in desert nights… or is it only a wind out of Monar, and autumn leaves filling the air, to scrape and patter in the side streets?

In the Artists’ Quarter it is that hour of the night when all and nothing seem possible. The bistros are quiet. The entertainments and smoking parlours are all closed. Even Fat Mam Etteilla the fortune-teller has shipped her wicked pack of cards, put up for a few hours the shutters of her grubby satin booth, and waddled off with her aching ankles and her hacking cough, which is bad tonight. Canker, the Dark Man of the cards, has her by the lungs; she leans against a wall to spit in a puddle of moonlight, whispering the word that will hold him back; it falls hollowly into the vibrant, vacant street. The canker, she confides to her shadow, will take her in its own good time; at present she is less concerned about herself than her last customer of the evening. She has a wan belief in her own efficacy, and tells the silent Quarter, “I did my best, I did my best-”

She did her best “There is nothing good in the cards spread thus.

“Bogrib, NOTHINGNESS, crosses you, and here is NUMBER FOUR, called by some ‘the Name Stars’: beware a fire.

“A woman shadows you, POVERTY lies behind you, the Lessing; and before you a discussion, or it may be water.

“Nothing is clear tonight-who is that, running in the alley? I heard steps for a moment in the alley-but see the MANTIS here, praying at the moon beneath three arches. The first is for something new; the second for injustice; under the third arch all will be made different. Something taken away long ago is now returned.

“These are your thoughts on the matter, to turn this card I must have something more. Thank you. FIVE TOWERS! Do nothing, I beseech you, that you might regret. Fear death from the air, and avoid the North “Wait! We have hardly begun! Three more cards remain to be turned!”

– but he went all the same, rapidly down the street and into the Alley of Bakers: a dark self-sufficient figure whose face she never clearly saw, going with a light and dangerous tread.

Once in the alley and out of Mam Etteilla’s earshot (for fear perhaps she might pursue him, predicting, haranguing, or merely coughing up her lungs), he allowed himself to laugh a little, baring his teeth wryly to the grim city, the walls which contained him, the towers which had failed him, the night which covered him; and he quickened his pace, making for the Bistro Californium, that home of all errors and all who err. The air had stilled itself; it was sharp and cold, and his breath hung about him in a cloud. He did not enter the Californium at once but hung like a bird of prey on the edge of the lamplight to see who might await him inside. In this bright, static quadrant of the night’s existence the city seemed shattered and fragmentary, tumbled into hard meaningless patterns of light and shade, blue and grey and faded gamboge, grainy of texture and difficult of interpretation. Stray beams of smoky lemon-yellow barred his harsh worn features, his tired hooded eyes. When a dog barked down in the Cispontine Quarter-desultory, monotonous, distant-he seemed to stiffen for a moment; pass his hand over his face; and look puzzledly about him, for all the world like a man who wakes from a nightmare to an empty, buzzing dream, and wonders briefly how his life has led him here…

Fear death from the air!

His name was Galen Hornwrack. He was a lord without a domain, an eagle without wings, and he did not fear the air, he loved it. The War of the Two Queens had ended his boyhood without hope, and he had spent the slow years since hidden away in the mazy alleys of the Artists’ Quarter, the better to regret an act of fate which (so it appeared to him) had robbed his existence of any promise or purpose before it was fairly begun. Out of spite against himself or against the world, he never knew which, he had not taken up a profession, learning to use the steel knife instead to cut a living from the streets, shunning his peers and watching himself turn from a young man full of dreams into an older one stuffed with emptiness and fear. Fear death from the air! He feared it at every corner-it yawned at him from every alley’s mouth-but never from there, where he would willingly have burned or bled or hung like a corpse from the million-year gallows of his own pain!

Presently he shook himself, laughed harshly, and, certain that the Californium contained no obvious trap or enemy, abandoned the shadows like a viper. One hand hung visible by his side while the other, beneath his threadbare grey cloak, rested on the hilt of his good plain knife. In that manner he made his way through the notorious chromium portals behind which Rotgob Mungo, a captain of the North, had in the last days of Canna Moidart’s rule laid his vain and valiant plans to break the siege of the Artists’ Quarter, only to bleed out his life-albeit more honourably than many of his kin-under the strange axe of Alstath Fulthor.

Californium! The very word is like a bell, tolling all the years of the city-tolling for the mad poets of the Afternoon with all their self-inflicted wounds and desperate drugged sojourns at its rose-coloured glass tables; tolling for their skinless jewelled women who, lolling beneath the incomprehensible frescoes, took tea from porcelain as lucid as a baby’s ear; tolling for Jiro-San and Adolf Ableson, for Clane and Grishkin and the crimes which sickened their minds in the rare service of Art-their formless, quavering light extinguished now, their names forgotten, their feverish stanzas no more than a faint flush on the face of the world, a fading resonance in the ears of Time!

Californium!-a knell for the new nobles of Borring’s court, the unkempt rural harpists who only five centuries ago filled the place with sawdust and thin beer and vomit, beating out their sagas and great lying epics like swords on a Rivermouth anvil while Viriconium, the only city they had ever seen, refurbished itself around them (remembering, perhaps, its long declining dream) and, at the head of Low Leedale, the cold stronghold of Duirinish levered its way upward stone by stone to bar the way to the wolves of the North. They were here!

Here too came the young tegeus-Cromis, a lord in Methven’s halls before the death of his proud sister, morose and ascetic in a bice velvet cloak, eager to stitch the night through with the eerie self-involved notes of a curious Eastern gourd… Californium! Philosophers and tinkers; poetry, art, and revolution; princes like vagrants and migrant polemicists with voices soft as a snake’s; the absolute beat and quiver of Time, the voice of the city; millennia of verse echo from its chromium walls, drift in little dishonest flakes of sound from that peculiarly frescoed ceiling!

Tonight it was like a grave.

Tonight (with the night in the grip of the Locust, at the mercy of a poetry as icy and formal as an instinct) it was filled with the singular moonlight, bright yet leaden, arctic and elusive, that seeped in from the street. It was cold. And from its windows the city was a broad ingenuous diorama, blue-grey, lemon-yellow, textured like crude paper. Each table cast a precise dull shadow on the floor, as did each table’s occupant, caught in frozen contemplation of some crime or moral feebleness-Lord Mooncarrot, he with the receding brow and rotting Southern estates (gardens filled with perspiring leaden statuary and wild white cats), pondering the blackmail of his wife; Ansel Verdigris the derelict poet, head like an antipodean cockatoo’s, fingering his knife and two small coins; Chorica nam Vell Ban, half-daughter of the renegade Norvin Trinor, forgiven but shunned by the society she craved-the persistent moon illuminated them all, and shadows ate their puzzled faces, a handful of rogues and poseurs and failures watching midnight away in the security of their own sour fellowship.

Lord Galen Hornwrack found an empty table and settled himself among them to drink cheap wine and stare impassively into the lunar street, waiting for whatever the long empty night might bring.

It was to bring him three things: the Sign of the Locust; a personal encounter wan and oblique enough for the bleak white midnight outside; and a betrayal.

The Sign of the Locust is unlike any other religion invented in Viriconium. Its outward forms and observances-its liturgies and rituals, its theurgic or metaphysical speculations, its daily processionals-seem less an attempt by men to express an essentially human invention than the effort of some raw and independent Idea-a theophneustia, existing without recourse to brain or blood: a Muse or demiurge-to express itself. It wears its congregation like a disguise: we did not so much create the Sign of the Locust as invite it into ourselves, and now it dons us nightly like a cloak and domino to go abroad in the world.

Who knows exactly where it began, or how? For as much as a century (or as little as a decade: estimates vary) before it made its appearance on the streets, a small group or cabal somewhere in the city had propagated its fundamental tenet-that the appearance of “reality” is quite false, a counterfeit or artefact of the human senses. How hesitantly they must have crept from alley to alley to confirm one another in their grotesque beliefs! How shy to confide them! And yet: the war had left our spirits as ruinous as the Cispontine Quarter. We were tired. We were hungry. The coming of the Reborn Men was disheartening, unlooked-for, punitive. It left us with a sense of having been replaced. How eagerly in the end we clutched at this pitiless, elegant systemization of one simple nihilistic premise!

“The world is not as we perceive it,” maintained the early converts, “but infinitely more surprising. We must cultivate a diverse view.” This mild (even naive) truism, however, was to give way rapidly-via a series of secret and bloody heretical splits-to a more radical assertion. A wave of murders, mystifying to the population at large, swept the city. It was during this confused period that the Sign itself first came to light, that simple yet tortuous adaptation of the fortune-teller’s MANTIS symbol which, cut in steel or silver, swings at the neck of each adherent. Ostlers and merchant princesses, soldiers and shopkeepers, astrologers and vagabonds, were discovered sprawled stiffly in the gutters and plazas, strangled in an unknown fashion and their bodies tattooed with symbolical patterns, as the entire council of the Sign, elected by secret ballot from the members of the original cabal, tore itself apart in a grotesque metaphysical dispute. A dreadful sense of immanence beset the city. “Life is a blasphemy,” announced the Sign. “Procreation is a blasphemy, for it replicates and fosters the human view of the universe.”

Thus the Sign established itself, coming like a coded message from nowhere. Now its apologists range from wheelwright to Court ascetic; it is scrawled on every alley wall to fluoresce in the thin bluish moonlight; it rustles like a dry wind-or so it’s said-even in the corridors of Methven’s hall. Its complicated subsects, with their headless and apparently aimless structures, issue many bulletins. We counterfeit the “real,” they claim, by our very forward passage through time, and thus occlude the actual and essential. One old man feeding a dog might by the power of his spirit maintain the existence of an entire street-the dog, the shamble of houses with their big-armed women and staring children, the cobbles wet with an afternoon’s rain, the sunset seen through the top of a ruined tower-and what mysteries lie behind this imperfect shadow play? What truths? They process the streets impulsively, trying to defeat the real, and hoping to come upon a Reborn Man.

Such a procession now made its way toward the Bistro Californium, given up like a breath of malice by the night. It was quick and many-legged in the gloom. It was silent and unnerving. The faces which composed it were nacreous, curiously inexpressive as they yearned on long rubbery necks after their victim. Surprised among the Cispontine ruins not an hour before, this poor creature fled in fits and starts before them, falling in and out of doorways and sobbing in the white moonlight. A single set of running footsteps echoed in the dark. All else was a parched whisper, as if some enormous insect hovered thoughtfully above the chase on strong, chitinous wings.

Since their condition allows them no deeper relief, the merely selfish are raddled with superstition; salt, mirror, “touch wood” are ritual bribes, employed to ensure the approval of an already indulgent continuum. The true solipsist, however, has no need of such toys. His presiding superstition is himself. Galen Hornwrack, then, cared as much for the Sign of the Locust as he did for anything not directly connected with himself or his great loss: that is to say, not in the least. So the first clue to their coming confrontation went unrecognised by him-how could it be otherwise?

Glued to its own feeble destiny in the leaden blue moonlight, the clique at the Bistro Californium regarded its navel with surprised disgust. Verdigris the poet was trying to raise money against the security of a ballad he said he was writing. He bobbed and hopped fruitlessly from shadow to harsh shadow, attempting first to cheat the fat Anax Hermax, epileptic second son of an old Mingulay fish family, then a sleepy prostitute from Minnet-Saba, who only smiled maternally at him, and finally Mooncarrot, who knew him of old. Mooncarrot laughed palely, his eyes focused elsewhere, and flapped his gloves. “Oh dear, oh no, old friend,” he whispered murderously. “Oh dear, oh no!” The words fell from his soft mouth one by one like pieces of pork. Verdigris was frantic. He plucked at Mooncarrot’s sleeve. “But listen!” he said. He had nowhere to sleep; he had-it has to be admitted-debts too large to run away from; worse, he actually did feel verses crawling about somewhere in the back of his skull like maggots in a corpse, and he needed refuge from them in some woman or bottle. He nodded his head rapidly, shook that dyed fantastic crest of hair. “But listen!” he begged; and, standing on one leg in a pool of weird moonlight, he put his hands behind his back, stretched his neck and recited,

My dear when the grass rolls in tubular billows

And the face of the ewe lamb bone white in the meadows

Sickens and slithers down into the mallows

Murder will soothe us and settle our fate;

Hallowed and pillowed in the palm of tomorrow

We tremble and trouble the hearts of the hollow:

The teeth of the tigers that stalk in the shallows

Encrimson the foam at the fisherman’s feet!

No one paid him any attention. Hornwrack sat slumped at the edge of the room where he could keep an eye on both door and window (he expected nobody-it was a precaution-it was a habit), his long white hand curled round the handle of a black jug, a smile neglected on his thin lips. Though he loathed and mistrusted Verdigris he was faintly amused by this characteristic display. The poet now choked on his horrid extemporary, mid-line. He was becoming exhausted, staring about like a bullock in an abattoir, moving here and there in little indecisive runs beneath the strange Californium frescoes. Only Hornwrack and Chorica nam Vell Ban were left to importune; he hesitated then turned to the woman, with her pinched face and remote eyes. She will give him nothing, thought Hornwrack. Then we shall see how badly off he really is.

“I dined with the hertis-Padnas,” she explained confidentially, not looking at Verdigris as he bobbed uxoriously about in front of her. “They were too kind.” She seemed to see him for the first time, and her imbecile smile opened like a flower.

“Muck and filth!” screamed Verdigris. “I didn’t ask for a social calendar!”

Shivering, he forced himself to face Hornwrack.

A grey shadow materialised behind him at the door and wavered there like some old worn lethal dream.

Hornwrack flung his chair back against the wall and fumbled for his plain steel knife. (Moonlight trickled down its blade and dripped from his wrist.) Verdigris, who had not seen the shadow in the doorway, gaped at him in grotesque surprise. “No, Hornwrack,” he said. His tongue, like a little purple lizard, came out and scuttled round his lips. “Please. I only wanted-”

“Get out of my way,” Hornwrack told him. “Go on.”

Scarlet crest shaking with relief, he gave a great desperate shout of laughter and sprang away in time to give Hornwrack one good look at the figure which now tottered through the door.

A thin skin only, taut as a drumhead, separates us from the future: events leak through it reluctantly, with a faint buzzing sound, if they make any noise at all-like the wind in an empty house before rain. Much later, when an irreversible process of change had hold of them both, he was to learn her name-Fay Glass, of the House of Sleth, famous a thousand and more years ago for its unimaginably oblique acts of cruelty and compassion. But for now she was a mere faint echo of the yet-to-occur, a Reborn Woman with eyes of a fearful honesty, haphazardly cropped hair an astonishing lemon colour, and a carriage awkward to the point of ugliness and absurdity (as if she had forgotten, or somehow never learned, how a human being stands). Her knees and elbows made odd and painful angles beneath the thick velvet cloak she wore; her thin fingers clutched some object wrapped in waterproof cloth and tied up with a bit of coloured leather. Muddy and travel-stained, there she stood, in an attitude of confusion and fear, blinking at Hornwrack’s knife proffered like a sliver of midnight and true murder in the eccentric Californium shadows; at Verdigris’s disgusting red crest; at Mooncarrot and his kid gloves, smiling and whispering delightedly, “Hello, my dear. Hello, my little damp parsnip-”

“I,” she said. She fell down like a heap of sticks.

Verdigris was on her at once, slashing open the bundle even as her fingers relaxed.

“What’s this?” he muttered to himself. “No money! No money!” With a sob he threw it high into the air. It turned over once or twice, landed with a thud, and rolled into a corner.

Hornwrack went up and kicked him off. “Go home and rot, Verdigris.” He gazed down thoughtfully.

Perhaps a decade after the successful conclusion of the War of the Two Queens it had become apparent that a large proportion of the Reborn could not manage the continual effort necessary to separate their dreams, their memories, and the irrevocable present in which they now discovered themselves. Some illness or dislocation had visited them during the long burial. No more, it was decided, should be resurrected until the others had found a cure for this disability. In the interim the worst afflicted would leave the city to form communes and self-help groups dotted across the uplands and along the littorals of the depopulated North. It was a callous and unsatisfactory solution, except to those who felt most threatened by the Reborn; ramshackle and interim as it was, however, it endured-and here we find them seventy years on, in deserted estuaries full of upturned fishing boats and hungry gulls, under fretted fantastic gritstone edges and all along the verges of the Great Brown Waste-curious, flourishing, hermetic little colonies, some dedicated to music or mathematics, others to weaving and the related arts, others still to the carving of enormous mazes out of the sodden clinker and blowing sands of the waste. All practise, besides, some form of the ecstatic dancing first witnessed by Tomb the Dwarf in the Great Brain Chamber at Knarr in the Lesser Rust Desert.

The search for a cure is forgotten, the attempt to come to terms with Evening abandoned. They prefer now to drift, to surrender themselves to the currents of that peculiar shifting interface between past, present, and wholly imaginary: acting out partial memories of the Afternoon and weaving into them whatever fragments of the Evening they are able to perceive. Privately they call this twilight country of perception “the margins,” and some believe that by committing themselves wholly to it they will in the end achieve not only a complete liberation from linear Time but also some vast indescribable affinity with the very fabric of the “real.” They are mad, to all intents and purposes: but perfectly hospitable.

From one of these communities Fay Glass had come, down all the long miles to the South. The weird filaments of silver threading the grey velvet of her cloak; her inability to articulate; her palpable confusion and petit mal: all spoke eloquently of her origins. But there was nothing to explain what had brought her here, or why she had failed to contact the Reborn of the city (who without exception-full of guilt perhaps over their abandonment of their cousins-would have feted and cared for her as they did every visitor from the North); nothing to account for her present pitiable condition. Hornwrack touched her gently with the toe of his boot. “Lady?” he said absently. He did not precisely “care”-he was, after all, incapable of that-but the night had surprised him, presenting him with a face he had never seen (or wanted to see) before: his curiosity had been piqued for the first time in many years.

The city caught its breath; the blue hollow lunar glow, streetlight of some necrotic, alternate Viriconium, flickered; and when at last something prompted him to look up again, the servants of the Sign were before him, filing in dumb processional through the chromium Californium door.

Chorica nam Vell Ban left her table hurriedly and went to sit beside Lord Mooncarrot, whom she loathed. Her shoulders were as thin as a coat hanger and from the folds of her purple dress there fluttered like exotic moths old invitation cards with deckled edges and embossed silver script. Mooncarrot for his part dropped both his rancid smile and his yellow gloves- plop! -and now found himself too rigid to pick them up again. Under the table these two fumbled for one another’s shaking hands, to clasp them in a tetanus of anxiety and self-interest while their lips curled with mutual distaste and their curdled whispers trickled across the room.

“Hornwrack, take care!”

(Much later he was to realise that even this simple counsel was enmeshed in incidental entendres. Not that it matters: at the time it was already too late to follow.)

“Take care, Hornwrack!” advised a voice of wet rags and bile, a voice which had plumbed the gutters of its youth for inspiration and never clambered out again. It was Verdigris, sidling up behind him to hop and shuffle like a demented flamingo at the edge of vision. What abrupt desperate betrayal was he nerving himself up for? What unforgivable retreat? “Oh, go away,” said Hornwrack. He felt like a man at the edge of some crumbling sea cliff, his back to the drop and the unknown waves with the foam in their teeth. “What do you want here?” he asked the servants of the Sign.

By day they were drapers, dull and dishonest; by day they were bakers. Now, avid-eyed, as hollow and expectant as a vacuum, they stood in a line regarding the woman at his feet with a kind of damp, empty longing, their faces lumpen and ill-formed in the hideous light-moulded, it seemed, from some impure or desecrated white wax-weaving about on long thin necks, grunting and squinting in a manner half-apologetic, half-aggressive. Their spokesman, their priest or tormentor, was a beggar with the ravaged yellow mask of a saint. A surviving member of the original cabal, he wielded extensive financial power though he lived on the charity of certain important Houses of the city. A rich bohemian in his youth, he had refuted the ultimate reality even of the self (staggering, after nights of witty and irreproachable polemic, down the ashen streets at dawn, afraid to destroy himself lest by that he should somehow acknowledge that he had lived). He no longer interpreted but rather embodied the Sign, and when he stood forward and began to work his reluctant jaws back and forth, it spoke out of him.

“You do not exist,” it said, in a voice like a starving imbecile, articulating slowly and carefully, as if speech were a new invention, a new unlooked-for interruption of the endless reedy Song. “You are dreaming each other.” It pointed to the woman. “She is dreaming you all. Give her up.” It swallowed dryly, clicking its lips, and became still.

Before Hornwrack could reply, Verdigris-who, filled by circumstance with a bilious and lethal despair, had indeed been nerving himself up, although not for a betrayal-stepped unexpectedly out of the shadows. He had had a bad afternoon at the cards with Fat Mam Etteilla; verse was scraping away at the wards of his skull like a picklock in a rusty keyhole; he was a rag of a man, in horror of himself and everything else that lived. To the spokesman of the Sign he offered a ridiculous little bow. “Pigs are dreaming you, you tit-suckers!” he sneered, and, squawking like a drunken juggler, winked up at Hornwrack.

Hornwrack was astonished.

“Verdigris, are you mad?”

“You’re done for, at least!” was all the poet said. “It’s black murder now.” A perverted grin crossed his face. “Unless-”

Suddenly he extended a dirty avaricious claw, palm upwards, calloused and ink-stained from the pen. “If you want her you’ll have to pay for her, Hornwrack!” he hissed. “You can’t fight them on your own.” He glanced sideways at the Sign, shuddered. “Those eyes!” he whispered. “Quick,” he said, “before my guts turn to prune juice. Enough for a bed, enough for a bottle, and I’m your man! Eh?” As he watched Hornwrack’s incomprehension dissolve into disgust, he shivered and sobbed. “You can’t fight them on your own!”

Hornwrack looked at him. He looked down at Fay Glass, insensible yet invested-a mysterious engine of fate. He looked at the spokesman of the Sign. He shrugged.

“Peddle your knife somewhere else,” he told the poet. “These people have never had cause to quarrel with me. They should remember that. They have made a simple mistake in the identity of this unfortunate woman (who is a cousin of mine, I now see, from Soubridge), and they are leaving.”

He stood there feeling surprised. He had meant to say something else.

“You do not exist,” whispered the Sign.

Ansel Verdigris chuckled.

Shadows flickered on the wall. Knives were out in the eerie light.

“Oh, very well,” sighed Galen Hornwrack. “Very well.”

Possessed by the sudden instinctive cannibalism of the baboon (our unshakable mahout, seated in the skull these million centuries), the combatants throw themselves at one another: the flesh parting like lips, wounds opening like avid mouths, precious fluids of the heart spent in one quick salivation; the bloody flux…

Hornwrack watches at the celebration of his own genius, helpless and a little awed. He has done nothing during his self-imposed exile from humanity if not learn his trade. A cold, manufactured rage, counterfeit of an emotion without which he cannot do his work, laps him round. The good steel knife, conjured from its sheath like a memory, settles comfortably in his hand. He can no longer influence himself, and treads the measures of his trade-the cut, the leap, the feint. Like a juggler in the Atteline Plaza he tumbles to avoid the despairing counterstroke (the blade whickering in beneath his cheekbone, the displaced air brushing feather-like his hollowed cheek). Blood fountains in the mad Californium light, the colour of old plums. That is no new colour. (All the while the girl lay between his shuffling feet like a stone, her eyes full of pain and disbelief.) The knife goes home, and goes home again in the queasy gloom. His blood is now inextricably mixed with that of the Sign, daubed on his bare forearms, greasy underfoot, a fraternity of murder and pain… .

Somewhere behind him Verdigris was struggling, his face luminous with terror, his mouth a gargoyle’s spouting a filth of verses, some drain-pipe lyric of relaxing sphincters and glazed eyes. “Remember this, Hornwrack!” he shouted. “Remember this!”

Hornwrack never heard him. Three, perhaps four, fall before him, and then the mouthpiece of the Sign squeezes into view from the bloody melee like a face surfacing from the bottom of a dream-long, yellow, smeared with blood, triangular and expressionless as a wasp’s-the breath huffing in and out like dry inhalations of some machine, the breath of the insect whispering the deadly symbolic secrets of the cabal, the arid rustling visions of bone and desert-until Hornwrack’s knife thumps him squarely in the hollow between collarbone and trapezius with a sound like a chisel in a block of wood, to end eighty years of fear and doubt. At the point of his death, electricity flares between them, as if the whole cabal gave up its heart in the one despairing, vomited word,

“No,” which was simultaneously his warning and his triumph.

Hornwrack supported the corpse by its throat, struggling to pull out his knife. The yellow face grinned at him, laved by its own punctured carotid. He let it slip away, back down into his nightmares.

For a moment he felt quite old and hopeless. All around him shadows were slipping from the place in defeat-silently, like sapient grey baboons quitting some foggy midnight rock in a warmer latitude, fur blood-streaked, the game up. In the middle of the room Verdigris had fallen to his knees and, clutching one gory thigh to stem the bleeding, was slashing feebly at retreating hamstrings. As Hornwrack watched he fell on his face and dragged himself off into a corner. Hornwrack ran out into the street, shouting. Brought up short by the dazzle of moonlight, he could hear only the rapid patter of feet. He stood there for a long time, shaking his head puzzledly, growing cold as the clock moved from midnight to one, the knife forgotten in his hand; then he went back inside.

Verdigris had gone, through the rear entrance and out into the thousand gutters of the Quarter, the girl’s bundle with him; even now he would be trying to sell it in some derelict shambles at the dark end of an alley. Mooncarrot and Chorica nam Vell Ban were gone, to spend the rest of the night together in grey, narcissistic embrace, each seeing in the other’s unresponsive face a mirror-and to part with revulsion as the spasm of fear which had briefly united them faded in the spreading light of dawn. The Sign had gone, and its dead with it. The queer Californium frescoes looked down on an empty and echoing space, and, standing awkwardly at the hub of it, staring about her in characteristic frozen panic, the Reborn Woman Fay Glass, a harbinger, a messenger in a velvet cloak. Her cropped yellow hair was spiky with congealing blood and she was trying desperately to speak.

“I,” she said. “In my youth,” she whispered. Her eyes were blue as acid.

“Look,” he told her, “you had better leave before they come back.” A place in his left side ached unbearably. He felt dull and fatigued. “I’m sorry about the bundle,” he said. “If I see Verdigris… but I expect your people can help you.” He put his hand through the rip in his soft leather shirt. It came out warm and sticky. He bit his knuckles. “I’m hurt,” he explained, “and I can’t help you anymore.”

“In my youth I-”

She was plainly mad (and attracted madness too, focusing all the long lunacies of the city like a glass catching the rays of some ironic invisible sun). He wanted no dependents. He put out a hand to touch her shoulder.

Immediately he experienced a shocking moment of blankness, a lapse like the premature tumble into sleep of an overtired brain. It was accompanied by something which resembled an intense flash of light. He heard himself say, quite inexplicably: “There are no longer any walls.” Shadows rushed out of the Californium corners and swallowed him: the Afternoon was vibrating in him like a malign chord. Somewhere out there in the millennial dark night, tall ancient towers howled on a rising wind. He approached them over many days, fearfully, across tracts of moorland and dissected peat, scoured ridges and deep sumps. The water was corrupted and undrinkable, the paths difficult to find. Finally the hidden city composed itself before him like a dream, but by then it was too late… Simultaneously (in a vision overlaid like delicately coloured glass) he was in some other place. A settlement huddled on the verge of the Great Brown Waste. Behind it steep slopes covered with sickly dwarf oak swept up to an extensive gritstone escarpment running north and south, its black bays and buttresses looming up against the fading light. A few flakes of snow hung in the bitter air, and, silhouetted against the pale green sky, enormous insectile shapes marched in slow processions across the clifftop.

“No,” cried Galen Hornwrack. He shook himself like a dying rat and pushed the woman away. “What?” he said, staring at her. He was trembling all over. Then, with his hand clapped to his left side and his face haggard, he staggered out of the Californium, feeling the dry, febrile touch of wings or madness on his skin.

Behind him the Reborn Woman moved her lips desperately, a child making faces into a mirror.

“In my youth,” she said to his retreating back, “I made my small contribution. Venice becomes like Blackpool, leaving nothing for anybody. Rebellion is good and necessary. I-” The Californium became silent about her. There was nothing left but the doorway, a trapezium of blue and grey and faded gamboge-the reflection of the city in a deep well of moonlight on an autumn night. Nothing was left but the wind out of Monar, a little blood, the falling leaves. She began to weep with frustration.

“I-”

Viriconium. Hornwrack. Three worlds colliding in his head. As he ran aimlessly up and down the alleyways at the periphery of the Quarter, dark, viscid peat groughs yawned like traps beneath his feet. The wind hissed in his ears. Looming against an electric sky, that terrible haunted crag with its slow purposeful visitation! In the shattered moonlight of the city he stumbled into doors and walls, his limbs jerking erratically as if the vision accidentally vouchsafed him had been accompanied by some injection of poison into his nervous system. His clothes were torn and he was caked with blood; he couldn’t remember where he lived; he couldn’t imagine where he’d been. It was this fatal disorientation which camouflaged the sound of footsteps following him, and by the time he had remembered who he was-by the time those other landscapes had faded sufficiently for him to appreciate his situation-it was too late.

Out of the shadows that curtained the alley wall another shadow hurled itself; across a band of moonlight a white perverted face was launched at his own; he was carried to the floor by a tremendous blow in his damaged side, as if someone had run full-tilt into him in the bruised yellow gloom. Thin, hispid arms embraced him, and close to his ear a voice that smelt of wet rags and bile-a voice pulped by self-indulgence and curdled with vice-hissed, “Pay up, Hornwrack, or you’ll rot in the gutter! I swear it!”

The hands which now scuttled over him were lean and fearful, full of horrible vitality. They discovered his purse and emptied it. They stumbled on his knife, retreated in confusion, then snatched it up and drove it repeatedly against the flagstones until it shattered. Overcome by this ambitious tactic they abandoned him suddenly, like frightened rats. Something heavy and foul was flung down on the pavement near his head. A single exotic shriek of laughter split the night: running footsteps, the signature of the Low City, faded into echoes, stranding him sick and helpless on this barren, reeling promontory of his empty life.

Now he realised that he had been stabbed a second time, close to the original wound. He grinned painfully at the ironical shards of his own blade, winking up at him from the cracked flags, each one containing a tiny, perfect reflection of the mad retreating figure of the balladeer, coxcomb flapping in the homicidal night. “I’ll have your lights, you bloody cockatoo, you rag,” he whispered, “you bloody poet!” But now he wanted only his familiar quarters in the Rue Sepile, the dry rustle of mice among the dead geraniums, and the murmured confidences of the whores on the upper stair. After a while this hallucination of security became so magnetic that he hauled himself to his feet and began the journey, clinging to the alley wall for comfort. Almost immediately he was enveloped in a foul reek. He had stumbled over Verdigris’s abandoned rubbish: the Reborn Woman’s bundle, still wrapped in its waterproof cloth. For the life of him he couldn’t think why it should stink so of rotting cabbage.

When he unwrapped it to find out he discovered the hacked-off head of an insect, rotting and seeping and fully eighteen inches from eye to globulareye.

He dropped it with a groan and fled, through the warrens behind Delphin Square, past the grubby silent booth of Fat Mam Etteilla and the crumbling cornices of the Camine Auriale, his feet echoing down the empty colonnades, his wounds aching in the cold. Things pass behind me when my head is turned, he thought, and he knew then that the future was stalking him, that a consummation lay in ambush. He stared wildly up at the Name Stars in case they should reflect the huge unnatural change below. From Delphin all the way to the Plaza of Unrealised Time he went, straight as an arrow across the Artists’ Quarter to the narrow opening of the Rue Sepile, to those worm-eaten rooms on the lower landing with the ceilings that creaked all night. ..

… Where the dawn found him out at last and his eighty-year exile ended (although he was not to know that at the time).

All night he had lain in a painful daze broken by short violent dreams and fevers in which he received hints and rumours of the world’s end. Fire shot from the ruined observatory at Alves, and a great bell tolled where none had hung for millennia. A woman with an insect’s head stuffed his wounds with sand; later, she led him through unfamiliar colonnades scoured by a hot dry wind-the streets crackled underfoot, carpeted with dying yellow locusts! Mam Etteilla, sweating in the prophetic booth- “Fear death from the air!”-opened her hands palm upwards and placed them on the table. He was abandoned by his companions in the deep wastes and crawled about groaning while the earth flew apart like an old bronze flywheel under the wan eye of a moon which resolved itself finally into the face of his boy, impassive in the queasy light of a single candle.

“What, then?” he whispered, trying to push the lad away.

It was the last hour of the night, when the light creeps up between the shutters and spreads across the damp plaster like a stain, musty and cold. Outside, the Rue Sepile lay exhausted, prostrate, smelling of stale wine. He coughed and sat up, the sheets beneath him stiff with his own coagulating blood. Pulling himself, hand over hand, out of the hole of sleep, he found his mouth dry and rancid, his injured side a hollow pod of pain.

“There are people to see you,” said the boy. And, indeed, behind his expressionless face other faces swam, there in the corner beyond the candle-light. Hornwrack shuddered, clawing at the bloody linen.

“Do nothing,” he croaked.

The boy smiled and touched his arm, with “Better get up, my lord,” the gesture ambivalent, the smile holding compassion perhaps, perhaps contempt, affection, or embarrassment. They knew nothing about one another despite a hundred mornings like this, years of stiff and bloody sheets, delirium, hot water, and the stitching needle. How many wounds had the boy bound, with pinched face and capable undemonstrative fingers? How many days had he spent alone with the dry smell of the geraniums, the Rue Sepile buzzing beyond the shutters, waiting to hear of a death?

“Better get up.”

“Will you remember me?”

He shivered, and his hand found the boy’s thin shoulder. “Will you remember me?” he repeated, and when no answer was forthcoming swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

“I’m coming,” he said with a shrug; so they waited for him in the shadows of his room, silent and attentive as the boy bathed and dressed his wounds, as the candle faded and grey light crept in under the door. Fay Glass the madwoman with her message from the North; Alstath Fulthor, lord of the Reborn and a great power in Viriconium since the War of the Two Queens; and between them the old bent man in the hooded robe, who peered out through a chink in the mouldy shutter and said dryly, “I can connect nothing with nothing today. But look how the leaves fall!”