Viriconium

THE LAMIA amp; LORD CROMIS

The apologists or historians of the city-Verdigris, Kubin, Saent Saar- tended to describe it at that time in terms of its emblems and emblematic contradictions. An ace in the gutter, a leopard made of flowers, says Verdigris in Some Remarks to My Dog, hoping to suggest a whole comprised of hints, causal lacunae, reversing hierarchies: Where the city is at its emptiest we find ourselves full.

For Saent Saar, comfortable under the patronage of a marchioness, this was more than enough. Less desperate perhaps, and more aware of a kind of slippage in the city’s perception of itself, certainly more conscious of his responsibilities, he has it that we see in her very failures of sense a twinning of contingency and the urge to form. The city is inventing herself, in locutions partial and accidental, like a woman rehearsing the contents of an old letter. She lost it long ago. She may even have forgotten who it came from. If she were to see it now, its careful phrases would surprise her by their lack of resemblance to what she has made of them.

Such a view, as acceptable to the Artists’ Quarter as to Mynned, would have been regarded in the provinces with fear. There they looked to the capital, which they called “Uriconium,” “Vriko,” or sometimes “the Jewel on the Edge of the Western Sea,” for stability. One of its minor princes learned the irony of this at first hand. His name was tegeus-Cromis.

He arrived at Duirinish-then a thriving fish-and-wool town on the coast a hundred miles north of the city-towards the end of December, and after making enquiries at a secondhand bookshop and a taxidermist’s, went in the evening to the Blue Metal Discovery, where he sat down in the long smoky parlour at a table some way from the fire. It turned out that he had come by horse, through the Monar passes, which at that time of the year were beginning to be icy and difficult. One or two of his fellow customers knew this; they shook their heads admiringly. One or two more, who thought they knew why he had come, watched him circumspectly while the wind drove sleet across the bleak cobbles of Replica Square. The rest-rentiers, small landowners from the Low Leedale, coming men in the fur and metal trade-watched him simply because he was a minor prince and they had never seen one before.

It had been a raw afternoon and he looked cold. Otherwise it was hard to know what to make of him. He wore a sword but carried a book (The Hunting of the Jolly Wren). While he walked quickly and energetically, like a young man, when you got close you saw he was grey-haired and preoccupied, and for a moment this was unnerving. In the end they would have put it that though the steel rings on his fingers were bulky, aristocratic, cut into the very complex seals of his House, his boots were a bit cheap and dirty. They wouldn’t have expected a prince’s boots to be like that.

They asked him would he come nearer the fire. There was plenty of room!

But if he struck them as lonely, even diffident, he was also as perfectly unresponsive as only a minor prince can be. They were interested in him, but he was not so interested in them; they soon left him to himself, tall and polite in a heavy bice velvet cloak. Evening wore into night and he smiled faintly at the remains of his meal. He seemed to be waiting for someone.

(He was thinking: Last December I watched the early snow fall in the High City. That morning, when it looked as if the weather would improve, I sat in the Charcuterie Vivien hoping the sun would come out. Someone I had been expecting arrived, or spoke, or smiled. We were to go skating the next day if it froze. Moments like this seemed permanent but they cannot be repaired; I cannot now regenerate them. And that is not to go back very far.)

Just after midnight a boy came down from the upper rooms of the inn and began to go round from group to group in the parlour, laughing and talking animatedly. Little notice was taken of him. As far as the prince could tell he was trying to collect money-a strange, graceless-looking child fourteen or fifteen years old, who could reach out very quickly and catch a moth in one hand, then release it unharmed. Every lamp had ten or a dozen of these creatures, with their dark green and purple wings, circling it frantically: the boy was able to perform his trick again and again. At the fire they affected not to see him, though he caught a moth for each of them. They seemed uncomfortable.

“Well,” said the boy loudly at last. “No one born today will ever be drowned or hanged, that’s something.”

Though he didn’t understand the joke of this, the prince found himself laughing. A moment later the boy came over to speak to him.

“Look, watch the moth.”

“You don’t seem to have had much luck over there,” said tegeus-Cromis when he had examined the insect; he found that he could catch it quite easily, but not without breaking its wings. “Still, they’re a careful lot in the fur and metal trade.”

The boy looked at him oddly, then he laughed too.

“Oh, they all know me,” he said. “They all know me, my lord.”

He sat down.

“I was waiting for someone, but not for you,” tegeus-Cromis told him. “Do I pay you for my moth?”

“You rode over the passes on some old nag,” said the boy. “I heard.”

He put his hand to his mouth. “Did that sound awful? I always say something like that, I don’t know why. Do you ever say something you don’t mean like that? I expect it’s a beautiful horse, isn’t it, probably a thoroughbred, and now you’re hurt. I’m sorry.

“Look, here’s a live one: try again. Fast but not so rough. There! You’re getting the idea.” He shivered. “I was in Vriko once,” he said. “Artists’ Quarter. Phew! That’s no city for a lad like me. Six in the morning a smell so foul came up from the Yser Canal you thought it would rust the lamp-posts. Everything was filthy, but if we wanted a wash we had to go to the baths in Mosaic Lane. Do you know Mosaic Lane, my lord? They had some famous pictures there but you couldn’t see them for dirt; the boy I was with scratched it off and saw a face just like his own. Really. Sometimes the water isn’t like water at all; it smells of perished rubber.”

He stared ahead thoughtfully. His hair, very dark red and cut in a “coup sauvage” once popular in the Tinmarket, made his eyes seem very large and young. Ribbons of various colours were tied to his clothes. His throat was bare, the skin smooth and olive-coloured.

“We lived in a house near Ox Lip Lane.” tegeus-Cromis laughed.

“It’s a long time since the Artists’ Quarter looked like that,” he said. “The Yser Spa fell into its own cistern; that was the end of the murals. There’s a courtyard there now with an apple tree in it, and Ox Lip Lane is all little shops which have tubs of geraniums outside them on the pavement. If you saw it now, I suppose, you’d love it.”

“Would I?” said the boy quietly. “I’d hate it. It would have no soul.”

“Soul!” said tegeus-Cromis, who had often thought the same thing. “I don’t believe you were ever there anyway. How old are you? Thirteen?”

They smiled at one another.

For a few minutes neither of them said anything. Then the prince, looking over the ruins of his dinner for some offer he could make, held out his pewter snuffbox. The boy shook his head slowly, but after some thought pulled apart a piece of bread and ate it. He drank some wine too, tilting back his head and gasping. Someone came up from the group round the fire, put a coin contemptuously on the table in front of him, and said, “Well then?” The boy shrugged. He got up and went into the middle of the parlour, recited rapidly three times, in a high voice devoid of expression or implication,

Johnny Jack all hung with rag dolls

Although he is small his family is great and began to dance in a way which managed to be both clumsy and graceful. There was no music. His big wooden shoes thudded on the bare boards; he frowned with concentration and effort, breathing noisily through his mouth. The ribbons on his arms whirled in the lamplight, leaving coloured spiral afterimages. “The effect was quite touching,” tegeus-Cromis would say to him later: “But your arms are too thin.” There was no applause. When he had finished, the boy simply stood where he was until he had got his breath back, then went round the parlour again, catching moths, collecting money, laughing and chattering affectedly. It had not been an entertainment, the prince saw. Put out that the boy had not come straight back to his table, he opened his book and pretended to read:

“Make him a bed of earth bark, ewe daisy, five-finger blossom.”

He looked puzzledly at the cover of the book, put it down, and closed his eyes. He was tired. He saw quite clearly the great seracs collapsing up among the Monar icefields. He crossed under them, once, twice: again.

There was a red flush under the boy’s cheekbones when he did come back to the table, and he was still panting a little. “I’m older than that,” he said, as if they had never been interrupted. Then: “What have you come here for?” tegeus-Cromis opened his eyes.

“What do they say by the fire?”

“To hunt. I knew that, too.” He leaned forward suddenly and took the prince’s hands between both of his own, which were warm and had a kind but papery touch. “Look, my dear,” he said, “why let it kill you, too?” He glanced round the room. The fire had burned down, the parlour was emptying, someone was collecting the empty pots. A door opened towards the back and a smell of urine came in on a cold draught. He let go of the prince’s hands and made a gesture which encompassed not just the parlour, or the inn, but the cobbled square outside it, and the town beyond that. “It belongs here. It’s their responsibility. No one would want to see you killed.”

At this the prince caught his cloak a bit closer round him. “Some people are coming to help me,” he explained. “They should have been here by now. When the door opened, I thought that was them.”

Later the boy asked him: “Which House are you from?”

“The Sixth.”

“What’s your emblem?” tegeus-Cromis showed him one of the rings he wore.

“The Lamia. Here. See?”

The boy shrugged.

“It doesn’t look like anything.”

In the end only the potboy was in the parlour to see them get up and leave together; the prince’s friends had been delayed.

The boy went in the night.

“You’ll always be able to find me,” he said.

In the morning the prince was woken by an altercation at the back of the inn. He had been given one of the rooms there as soon as he arrived. They were sought after because they were large, but this in itself made them seem cold and empty; and while they were supposed to be quieter than the rooms at the front, which faced Replica Square, they had the disadvantage of looking obliquely onto the stableyard. The stables, unlike the rest of the inn, were built of brick-a warm red kind more often seen in the South-and now stood bright and sharp under the blue winter sky. In the yard he could see, if he pressed one cheek against the glass and twisted his head to look out at an angle, two or three heavily laden ponies and a horse of some quality, short-coupled and powerful, with good “ends” and plenty of bone, about nineteen hands high. They were framed by an arch or passageway which further limited his vision, but which amplified the shouts and exclamations of the people gathered round them.

There had been a frost: it lay thickly on the setts in the corner of the yard the sun had not yet reached. The air was cold and transparent, giving to the scene-or that part of it the prince could see-a distinctness, a vigour, which amounted almost to gaiety. The big horse was plunging, striking out in a temper. It sent a bucket rolling across the cobbles, spilling water in a spiral in the morning light. Figures bobbed panickily under the animal’s hooves, trying to secure it; or lounged laughing and giving advice; or went hurriedly to and fro across the arch waving their arms, vanishing before he was able to identify them.

One of them was dressed in a meal-coloured cloak: did the horse belong to him? tegeus-Cromis knew it did, but now everything had vanished into his breath, which lay on the cold windowpane like the bloom on a grape. He wiped it off, then, growing tired of the uncomfortable position he had to maintain to see anything, tried to open the window. When it resisted he shrugged and went back into the room, barefoot across the chilly oak floor, to the things of his he had arranged on a table by the bed-the pewter snuffbox in need of a polish, his rings scattered like dice, one or two books. The sword, which had been his father’s, was propped in a corner. He dressed quickly, feeling elated for no reason.

In the south, especially in the Mingulay Peninsula where the caravans are full of fortune-tellers and their greasy tarot cards, a woman will often stunt the growth of her first child so that the lucrative career of dwarf is available to it in later life. This she does by confining it to a black oak box they call the “gloottokoma” and by feeding it discriminately, while with the help of the cards she stares paralysed into an uncertain future. The dwarf who now stood on one side of the parlour hearth, warming his deformed spine at a few newish reluctant flames, had made a great success in the arena at Uriconium as a clown and a tumbler. For a time a figure so well known on the Unter-Main-Kai that he had been painted in a red and purple doublet as “Calabacillas, Lord of Misrule” by Audsley King (then at the height of her own brief fashion), he was a founder member of both the Yellow Paper Code and the Cheminor Stilt Walkers, under whose aegis he had killed-in and out of the ring, and more or less fairly-a score of opponents larger than himself.

His name was Morgante, but he was often called Rotgob. His buckled legs gave him a gait which looked feeble, rolling, and uncertain, until you saw him run like an ape across a piece of waste ground at night, up near Allman’s Heath. He had intelligent features and a sweet smile but was prone like many products of the “gloottokoma” to bouts of depression and viciousness, during which he would cry bitterly and kick out at anyone who came near him. He had attained at his full growth-when he was sixteen or seventeen years old and already had the arena crowd in the palm of his fat, undeveloped-looking little hand-a height of about four feet.

He was seen habitually in the company of the prince, and of a very tall man called Dissolution Kahn, who stood on the other side of the hearth saying in a cold voice as tegeus-Cromis entered the parlour:

“And yet you agreed. You were quick enough to agree yesterday.”

“I am a liar as well as a dwarf.”

“Yes,” the Kahn now admitted with a remote sigh. “We all know that.”

When Rotgob saw tegeus-Cromis he ran round the parlour turning somersaults and shouting, “I’m a liar as well as a dwarf! I’m a liar as well as a dwarf!” until he was out of breath. Then he started to tug at the prince’s sword. “Give me that at once!” he said. “Do you want to hurt yourself?” When the prince tried to join in this game, resisting him with a smile, he only burst into peals of fantastic laughter and jumped onto the mantelpiece, where he sat dangling his legs and staring down as if from a great height; later he took out and began to whet his own weapon, a thing halfway between an extremely long stiletto and a rather short rapier, which he kept in a startling ornamental sheath.

The prince insisted they should have breakfast with him.

Dissolution Kahn drew his chair up close and said, “We came as soon as we could.”

He was a large man, and favoured clothes which he thought showed this off to best advantage: orange breeches tucked into great oxblood-coloured boots; enormous camel-hair cloaks; shirts in violet or pink lawn, with slashed and scalloped sleeves. People pointed him out as an example of an excellent horseman, and to carry him and his mail armour-which he hardly ever wore-he always preferred to have massive, ill-tempered horses. His sparse yellow hair curled anarchically round his jowled and bearded features. He had a dangerous reputation in the city, but once you knew him you became aware of his rather watery blue eyes and pendulous underlip.

“We came as soon as we could. Do you know anything for certain?” tegeus-Cromis shook his head.

“The sign is good, and rumour makes the animal one of the Eight. But what do they know in places like this? It seems to have killed twice near Orves, leaving sign; three times at some houses on a hill near the edge of the town-a child and two women there; again the sign was good, very plain-and once, possibly, in the square behind us. They’ve been very nervous since then.”

The Kahn shrugged. “What can you expect?” he said contemptuously.

“You’ll be frightened before we’re finished,” predicted the dwarf. “You’ll piss your pants.” He crumbled some bread and ate it carefully, trying to save his teeth. “What’s wrong with that?” He thought for a minute, then said: “It will be in the marsh. When do we start?”

“Until someone else is killed I can connect nothing with nothing,” the prince was forced to admit. “It would be fatal to move too soon; the books are clear on that if nothing else. Old sign can mean everything or nothing. I’ve had it put about that I am from the Sixth House: they’ll call me as soon as anything happens.”

“They’ll be glad to,” said the Kahn.

He laughed. He got up.

“I’m going to see how they’re doing with the mare,” he said. “She’s a bit slow to settle, that one.”

When he opened the parlour door cold air blew across the breakfast table, smelling bitter and metallic and drawing the spit into their mouths. “The marsh,” said Dissolution Kahn, as if he could see it in front of him. “No stink nastier,” he observed, “and it upsets her.”

“Is that what I’ve been smelling all morning?” said the prince.

He had started to read The Hunting of the Jolly Wren. He looked up but the Kahn had already gone out. The dwarf swung himself quietly onto the mantelpiece, where it was warmer. “If you give me your sword I’ll sharpen it,” he said. “My prince.” tegeus-Cromis spent some of the days that followed with the boy who caught the moths; in the end he knew him no better.

Once they walked up to Orves and sat on the edge of the old fortifications to look out at Leedale with its fields and sheep. On the slopes below, the prince noticed several spiral lanes as steep as staircases, arranged in a complicated pattern on the hill and screened from one another by wind-eroded hedges. Damp snow had fallen. The December light, reflected back and forth between the fields and the heavy bluish sky, faded slowly, prolonging the afternoon into evening so that it seemed earlier in the year than it was. At the last minute, as the air turned grey and cold and the snow seemed to suck up the light rather than give it out, everything seemed to stand out suddenly very black and stark: the trees like fan coral, the three-storey weavers’ houses, the stone walls and hanging quarries of the Leedale hillsides. Next day the snow had turned to rain; after that it was frost again.

Once he said to the boy:

“You know, the old Artists’ Quarter wasn’t so bad. There was always blossom on the ornamental rowan behind the railings in Mecklenburgh Square; and I can remember quite clearly the scent of black-currant gin spilled across the planished top of some corner table in the Plain Moon Cafe! Rack, Ashlyme, Kristodulos, they were all still alive and working in the Quarter. You felt the Yser like a warning behind you, but in the evenings they strung coloured paper lanterns across the gardens in Mynned, and everyone talked. We had all that new art, new philosophy, new thought: in those days everyone seemed to be inventing something!”

“I was never there,” said the boy. “Was I?”

They laughed.

Once the boy said to him, “Let someone else get rid of it. I don’t want you to be hurt,” and he could only reply, “This animal, whatever it is, has fought an ancestor of mine in every generation. It killed my father, and he killed it. It killed my grandfather and he killed it. You see the implication of this. In this way, the books I have spent my life with tell me, some balance is preserved; something which would otherwise be constantly in the world is kept out of it. Much of the rest of what they tell me is opaque, I admit.”

He considered this for a moment, then shrugged.

“If this is the Sixth Beast-I suspect it is-my duty’s clear. I’m the scion of the Sixth House: see, it says on the ring, under the snake. The blood is another kind of book. I can’t escape what’s written there.”

“You don’t care about me, then?”

“Some texts suggest, or seem to, that if I survive the encounter the animal will never come back.”

Once, he thought he understood the expression in the boy’s eyes. But when he woke up he had forgotten, and that night late they called him to see a dead man in a dull house on a quiet cobbled street near the inn. The attack had taken place at the top of the house, in a small room to the walls of which were fastened some charts of the night sky done in a clever hand. An open skylight framed the fading Name Stars and admitted occasional eddies of cold air.

Two or three of the victim’s neighbours-uncertain whether they had been woken by shouting or by some other noise which mimicked it-were in the room when the prince got there, wrinkling their noses at a strong, musty, but not precisely unpleasant smell. Immediately he noticed this, the prince ordered the lamps to be extinguished. He lit a small piece of orange candle he had brought with him and studied its flame intently for about thirty seconds. Whatever he saw there did not satisfy him; he made an impatient gesture. tegeus-Cromis often imagined he had made long ago some fundamentally unrealistic assumption about people, one which had undermined his judgement in that direction: but the behaviour of the Sixth Beast, inasmuch as it was clear to anyone, was clear to him. It couldn’t hide itself from him.

“You can light the lamps again,” he said, and, pinching the candle out abruptly, added to himself, “I would have expected better.”

Everyone was impressed by his cursory examination of the victim.

This man, who was well known around the fire in the parlour of the Blue Metal Discovery, wore a heavy fur robe. Under it he was naked. His greying flesh had the consistency, the prince noted, of coarse blotting paper; ringlets covered what remained of his skull. He had tumbled over among his collection of astrological instruments and now lay among them with an embarrassed expression, as if he had fallen heavily while demonstrating it to someone. One hand still clutched a little brass orrery. The other had fetched up incongruous and waxy-looking against the skirting board some way away from the rest of the body, as though the animal had pulled it off in an afterthought. While he noticed all this, the prince seemed to concentrate on the fingernails of the hand that remained attached. Their shape he examined with great care (in fact he compared it briefly to some illustrations in a compact leather-bound directory).

As soon as he had seen enough he took the orrery away from the dead man and set it in motion. It was a delightful thing. Jewelled planets hurried round the little sun; you could hardly hear the clockwork. He was aware perhaps of the effect this had on the other occupants of the room.

“Nothing was seen?”

They had seen nothing, they said, because they had been asleep. It was the noise that had woken them. “We all thought at first it was him screaming.”

“We all thought that at first.”

He wanted to know next if the gatewardens had been alerted. Someone was sent to find out. Reports were to be confused for some time, but later it became clear that they had seen nothing, either, though a trail had been found quickly enough, aberrant but leading eventually out of Duirinish, of blood. “Ah,” said the prince, apparently thinking of something else: “The blood.” He watched the rotation of the planets through a complete cycle; another began, but was interrupted almost immediately by a commotion on the stairs.

“What a mess in here!” said Morgante the dwarf, bursting in and walking importantly round the corpse, his hands clasped in the hollow of his back, while Dissolution Kahn studied puzzledly the star charts. “This is a very unprofessional job. Who was he?”

“Someone in the fur and metal trade. The Kahn had better get our horses ready.”

They left Duirinish shortly after it got light, following a difficult spoor.

After some miles, lanes and narrow greenways began to slip in all directions down the strike of the country, losing height through little identical dry valleys and nick points in the limestone terraces. The animal had got into them an hour or two before. It was cold; the wind smelled of metal; Dissolution Kahn was often obliged to be firm with his horse.

In two hours they had reached the northeast limit of Leedale. The characteristic bracken and gorse of the valley soon gave out onto poorly drained moorland where dikes had been sunk at right angles to all tracks, to keep the sheep from wandering. The dwarf sang to himself in a droning voice; at every ditch he looked down and said,

“You wouldn’t like to fall in there, would you?”

By mid-morning they had crossed the last of them and entered the marsh.

It began as a few thickets of low trees, strangely shaped but still recognisable as thorn or bullace, through which meandered a river flanked by dense reedbeds a bright unnatural ochre colour. The thickets closed up; the river was soon lost, going to feed iron bogs, then quicksands of suspended magnesium or aluminium alloys, and finally sumps of thick whitish slurry marbled with streaks of mauve or oily cadmium yellow. What paths there were wound between steep-sided pits, along crumbling ridges and promontories of soft discoloured earth. The trees of the interior were of quite unknown kinds, black and burnt-orange, with smooth-barked tapering stems; their tightly woven foliage, rarely more than fifteen feet above the surface of the bog, tinted the light a frail organic pink, which seemed sometimes to be veined like the lobe of a very delicate ear. Moving furtively, as if they had been crippled, or as if they had only just learned how to breath air, frogs and small lizards floundered from sump to sump; they swam with equal difficulty, hurt perhaps by the water, and after some apparently aimless, undirected activity, always struggled to leave it at the same place they had entered. There were insects in the trees, with papery, inutile wings a foot long; they seemed to have too many legs.

At noon the trees thinned out a little.

It was bitterly cold. In the pale, slanting winter light the east wind coated everything in a transparent skin more flexible than ice but nothing like air. For thirty minutes they were able to travel along an old, abandoned road. It was foundering in the soft ground. The shadows of the trees fell distinct but washed-out across its white, tilted surface. “Who would want to make a road in a place like this?” The cold had locked up the moisture in everything-mud, stone, vegetation-so that it looked like bone and they were glad to get under the canopy again.

The horses were intractable. Disoriented by the prawn-coloured “sky,” they would refuse to move, bracing their legs and trembling, then turn rolling white eyes on Dissolution Kahn who, dismounting, swore and sank to his boot-tops in the slime, releasing from it enormous acrid bubbles. By the middle of the short winter afternoon they had lost one of the ponies to quicksand. The other died after drinking from a clear pool, rapid swelling of its limbs followed by gushes of blood from the corroded glands and internal organs. Rotgob was able to save one of the loads. The other, which contained food, was lost.

Over all this presided the smell of corrupt metal. tegeus-Cromis’s mouth was coated with bitter deposits; he felt poisoned, and found it difficult to speak. Though he had always known what to expect, he seemed numb for much of the day, gazing automatically at whatever presented itself to his eyes while he allowed his horse to stumble and slither about beneath him. He had slipped into a reverie in which he saw himself riding over sunny cobbles into a courtyard somewhere in the cisPontine Quarter, entry to which was gained by a narrow brick arch. It was familiar to him, though at the same time he could not remember having been there before. Fish was being sold from a cart at one end of the square; at the other rose the dark bulk of “Our Lady of the Zincsmiths”: children ran excitedly from one to the other in the sunshine, squabbling over a bit of pavement marked out for a hopping game, “blind Michael.” As the prince’s horse clattered under the arch he heard a woman’s voice singing to a mandolin, and the air was full of the smells of cod and saffron.

Suddenly aware of the blood and its unbearable heritage, he jerked awake and said:

“We must get on!”

The dwarf looked at him compassionately. It was evening. They were tired and filthy. They had long ago lost the animal’s spoor.

They reached a place called on some of the prince’s maps Cobaltmere and on others Sour Pent Lay or Pent Lay. “In this case we should read lay as lake, ” he told them. There they lit a fire and camped uncomfortably. “My guts have felt bad since we got in here,” Dissolution Kahn admitted. “It’s lucky there isn’t much to eat.” He and the dwarf were staring out across the lay. On its shallow waters could be seen mats of a kind of tuberous, buoyant vegetation which in the horizontal light of sunset had come alive briefly with mile-long stains of mazarine and cochineal; bits of it were drifting ashore all the time, rubbery and dull-looking. Along the far banks were lines of shadowy knots and hummocks covered with a damp growth, like heaps of spoil on an abandoned quarry terrace. It was easy to see that they fascinated the dwarf, who said several times wonderingly:

“Those were buildings. This marsh was once a city.”

“I know of one map that marks it as such,” the prince told him, “though I have never been shown it. Some authorities agree, but we regard them as speculative. The majority have it as a natural formation, and on the bank there record ‘blocks of stone.’ ”

The dwarf could not accept this.

“It was a city once,” he said with quiet emphasis.

Suddenly he jumped to his feet and pinched the bridge of his nose in imitation of the clairvoyants of Margery Fry Court.

“I see it clearly in its heyday,” he exclaimed. “It was the Uriconium of the North! I call it antiVriko, and reclaim it in the name of Mammy Morgante, Queen of every empire of the earth!” He made a grand gesture with his arms and a fanfaring, farting sound with his mouth. “I encompass it on behalf of all my subjects-even this one.”

“You can take the first watch, then.”

An even, curious light came up from Cobaltmere once the sun had set. It had a veiling effect. The fire seemed orange and remote. Everything else had a soapy look, a colouration which made the prince imagine that if he touched the dwarf or his companion they would have the texture of grey soap. Yet it was bright enough to write by: his pen’s shadow preceded it across the page. “ The wren, ” he quoted, “ may then be hung by its leg in the centre of two hoops crossing each other at right angles. ” If he died it was hoped one of the others would take his notes back to the city to be added to the library of his House; there they would be catalogued.

“I’ll take all the watches,” said Rotgob. “Only some peasant would sleep, here in the Jewel of the Northern Marsh!”

He insisted on this and thereafter they would see him at intervals as they talked, moving slowly round the clearing in and out of their field of vision, humming and murmuring to himself or stopping to listen to the sound of water draining through the reedbeds. “We can only cast about for sign.” “I think we are halfway down the southern shore.” They could decide nothing. Dissolution Kahn fell asleep abruptly, to grunt and belch in his dreams. In the end tegeus-Cromis slept too: only to be woken sometime before dawn by the cold. He moved nearer the embers of the fire and lay there uneasily with his fingers laced beneath his head. The dwarf was still happy at that time. You could hear him yawn, rub his hands together, reassure the horses. Once he said softly but clearly, “It was a city,” and gave a deep sigh.

In the morning they found him curled up with his knees thrust hard into his chest and his arms clasped round them. He had already sunk slightly into the mud. There was an expression of misery and loneliness on his face. He was shivering helplessly: for some reason he had felt compelled to tear off his clothes and throw them about. All they could get him to say was something that sounded like “Filth, filth.” All at once he ran off and tried to jump into the mere; though he only managed to land with his face in it he was dead before they could pull him out.

“Be steady,” said Dissolution Kahn. “There are still two of us.”

Later he picked up the dwarf’s short sword. “People were always offering him money for the sheath of this,” he said. He studied it. “It’s made of a horse’s tosser, I think. They do that down in the South.”

He dug a deep hole in the mud and put the dwarf in it.

“This little chap was one of the best fighters you ever saw. He was so quick.”

He swallowed and stared away across the mere.

“Morgante!” he said. “Morgante!” And: “He must have been poisoned. He must have drunk the water or eaten something, to kill himself like that.”

Dawn had hardly warmed the air. Now brittle flakes of snow came down, reluctantly at first and then with more vigour until Cobaltmere was obscured and the marsh around it began to look like the ornamental gardens of Harden Bosch seen through a net curtain in Montrouge. If you concentrated for a moment on the flakes that made up any part of the curtain they would seem to fall slowly, or even to be suspended: then, with the movement of flies in an empty room in summer, whirl round one another in a sudden intricate spiral before they shot apart as if a string connecting them had been cut. In this way they whirled down on the shore of the lake; they whirled down on the face of the dwarf. The prince, huddled in his cloak, touched the turned earth with his foot. He pushed some of it into the hole.

“It was the animal,” he said. “I recognise the signs.”

“He killed himself,” repeated Dissolution Kahn stubbornly. “How could an animal kill him when he killed himself?”

“I recognise the signs.”

They went on pushing earth into the hole until they could tread it down.

“Well, there are still two of us.”

“I first learned about the Lamia when I was six years old,” said tegeus-Cromis. “There was a musical noise in the night. They explained it to me and then I knew… History’s against us,” he said, “and I should have come alone.”

“We’re here now.”

The prince was easily able to identify fresh sign. They followed it and, not far from the lay, near the northern edge of the marsh, discovered an old tower. Around it the vegetation was returning to normal. Filaments of ordinary ivy crawled over the fawn stone; from cracks near the summit grew a withered bullace, its rattling branches occupied by small stealthy birds; hawthorn and elder lapped up against its base. “Books hint at the existence of a sinking tower, though they place it in the East.” The prince urged his horse forward. Birds flew out of the hawthorn. He drew his sword. “I am afraid to approach too openly.”

The tower, it quickly became clear, had embedded itself so far in the ground that its lower windows were rectangular slits twelve or eighteen inches high. “You won’t get in there,” said Dissolution Kahn. From one of them issued a smell that made him retch. He went a little nearer and sized it up, breathing heavily through his mouth, while snow eddied round his heavy, motionless figure. Eventually he shook his head and repeated,

“You won’t get through there. Neither of us will. It’s too small.”

The prince thought he could crawl through. “I am thinner than you, and perhaps if I take my cloak off that will make things easier.”

“You’re mad if you go in there alone.”

“What choice have I?”

“You know I would go in if I could!”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

The prince threw his cloak over the hindquarters of his horse, then turned and walked as fast as he could to the sunken window. “No one has been here for a hundred years,” he whispered to himself. When he looked back through the plaiting snow he could see Dissolution Kahn gazing after him in a hurt way. He wanted to say something else, but sensing the Lamia so close to him now, and perhaps finding himself glad to take the responsibility for it after all, only managed to shout,

“Go home! I should never have brought you!”

To keep the Kahn from replying, he got down on his hands and knees and put his face into the queer mixture of smells bellying from the slot. He coughed; his eyes watered; against his will he hung back. He heard the Kahn call out from a long way off-but ashamed, and anyway unable to make sense of the words, thrust his head suddenly into the hole. Trying to keep his sword pointed in front of him, he wriggled desperately through. It was dark. When he stood up he hit his head on something; he didn’t think it was the ceiling. Crouching awkwardly he began to stumble about in the dark, swinging out with his sword in all directions. This was how he had always expected to meet the animal. Something cold dripped into his hair and down his cheek. His feet slid on a soft and rotten surface; he fell; the sword flew out of his hand and struck blue sparks from a wall.

He got up slowly and stood there in the dark. “Kill me, then,” he said. “I won’t stop you now.” His own voice sounded dull and artificial to him. After a minute, perhaps two, when nothing had happened, he took out the piece of candle he had been taught to use for diagnosis and lit it. He stared in horror at its flame for a few seconds, then flung it down with a sob. The lair, if it was one at all, was empty.

“I didn’t ask for this,” tegeus-Cromis said. It was something he had often repeated to himself when he was a child. He saw himself reading books, learning these ways to recognise the Beast.

Groping about in the emptiness for his sword, he clasped its blade and cut the palm of his hand. He squirmed backwards through the foundered window and out into the snow, where he took a few uncertain steps, looking for the horses. They were gone. He stared at the blood running down his sword. He ran three times round the tower, crying out. Three of his fingers hung useless. He bound up the wound so he wouldn’t have to see it. Bent forward against the weather, he picked up in the slush two sets of hoofprints leading back towards Sour Pent Lay. If I hurry, he thought, I can still catch up with him. Or he may come back to look for me.

At Cobaltmere he had glimpses through the snow of long vacant mudbanks and reefs. His horse he found lying with its neck stretched out and its head in the water. His cloak was still wrapped round its hindquarters. Its body was swollen; blood oozed from its mouth and anus. The veins in its eyes were yellow.

He was looking down at it puzzledly when he heard a faint cry further along the shore.

There Dissolution Kahn sat on his great horse. She was slow to settle but full of good points-had a shoulder, he often pointed out, like the half side of a house. She arched her neck and shook her big raw head. Her bridle, which was of soft red leather-would he go heavily on her mouth with a pair of hands like his, delicate as a woman’s?-was inlaid with metal filigree; her breath steamed in the cold air. The Kahn had put on his ring mail, which he had had lacquered deep blue for him some weeks before in the Tinmarket; and over that, with care to keep it spotless, a silk surcoat the same acid yellow as the mare’s caparisons. He loved those colours. His hair blew back in the wind like a pennant. High above his head he brandished a sword with silver hilts. To the prince, who had lived for so long in a world of sign, it seemed for a moment that the marsh could not contain them: they were transformed into their own emblem and thus made invincible. But it was an effect of the light, and passed, and he saw that they looked quite small in front of the Beast of the Sixth House.

The Lamia!

It shook its plumage at them irritably. It broke wind. Chitinous scales rattled like dead reeds when it moved. It roared and whistled sardonically, winked a heavy lid over one bulging insectile eye. It did a clumsy sex dance on its hind hooves, and writhed its coils invitingly.

Though it did not want them, it would have them. It was determined to form words.

“Snork.”

It laughed delightedly, lifted a wing, and preened. Lamia the feathered snake: a pleasant musk filled the air. Lamia! With long bent fingers it reached down to pluck the doomed man and his beautiful horse! It said distinctly:

“I am a liar as well as a dwarf.”

It sent a hot stream of urine into the sodden earth. “I piss on you.” It increased its size by a factor of two, staggered, giggled, regained its balance, and fell at the Kahn.

“Run! Run!” warned tegeus-Cromis.

Blood spattered the mare’s caparisons: she stood bravely up to the bit. Dissolution Kahn retched and vomited: he would not run. He clung instead to his saddle, swaying and groaning, while the snow whirled down and the Lamia overshadowed him. He made himself look up. “I’ll have you first,” he said. He swung his big sword desperately and caught the Beast full on. It began to diminish.

“No, you see,” it said.

After that it was plain he didn’t know what to do. He was so tired. The mare still stood quietly up to her bit, careful not to unseat him. He dropped his sword. His mail which he had been so proud of was in shreds; strips of it seemed to be embedded in the flesh of his chest and shoulder. He kept as still as he could, in case he opened some wound, and watched the Sixth Beast shrivel up, shedding wings, scales, everything. Every facet of its eyes went dull. “Please,” it said. “You know.” A smell of burning hair came and went: cinders, dust, vegetable peel. Most of its limbs had withered away, leaving warty stumps which themselves soon disappeared. Iridescent fluids mixed with the water of the marsh. Mouth after mouth clicked feebly and was gone. “Please.” Only when it had repeated all its incarnations would the Kahn look up. His face was pouchy and grey. He slid out of the saddle and stood like someone drunk.

“She’s got ends like a church buttress, that horse,” he said thickly.

He cleared his throat, peering at tegeus-Cromis as if he had never seen him before, then nodded to himself.

“You should have killed it when you had the chance,” he said.

He stumbled backwards. His mouth fell open in surprise. When he looked down and saw the prince’s sword sticking out of his lower belly, he whimpered. A quick violent shudder went through him. Blood plaited on his thighs. He reached down and put his hands on the sword as if he thought he might try to pull it out, then took them carefully away again.

“Why did you do that?”

“I was to be killed killing it. Who am I now?”

Dissolution Kahn sat down gingerly. He coughed and wiped his mouth.

“I never expected this,” he said. ‘Did you see that thing? I got away with it, and now this happens. If you helped me I could still make it out of this marsh. I could tell you what to do if you didn’t know.”

He laughed.

“You and all your ancestors were well fooled. It was easy to kill. Easy. Will you help me out of here?”

“What will I do now?” whispered the prince, who hadn’t heard him.

Dissolution Kahn twisted round until he faced the body of the boy from the inn. He saw how thin and white it looked, how apart from being twisted at an odd angle it was unmarked by its own transfiguration, and how at this moment it looked to him like any other body. Then he leant forward, steadied the pommel of the prince’s sword against its ribs, and pushed himself onto it. He grunted. tegeus-Cromis sat by the lake until late in the afternoon, when the peculiar light began to come up from the water, his pewter snuffbox on his knee. The snow had stopped; not much had settled. Little Johnny Jack, he noted in the margin of one of his books: Though he is small his family is great. After that he could think of nothing to do. He reviewed everything he had ever done; that was nothing too. Eventually he pulled his sword out of Dissolution Kahn’s belly and threw it into the mere. This did not seem to satisfy him, so he took off his rings and threw them in after it. He swung himself up onto the mare; in her saddlebags he had found a big thick cloak in which to wrap himself. Because he had avoided it all afternoon, he made himself look down at the dead boy.

“When I think of you catching moths I want to cry,” he said. “You should have killed me at the inn.”

The prince rode south all night, and when he came out from under the trees he would not look up in case the Name Stars should reflect some immense and unnatural change below.