A Storm of Wings v-2

by M. John Harrison

  He hid behind a sculpture. He sniggered softly. When the boy looked round: nothing.

  He let his feet scrape, with a horrible purpose.

  He made quiet animal noises.

  He was everywhere and nowhere; it was a cruel charade. The boy knew. He hurried: stopped: listened: stared over his shoulder, his hand feverishly clutching the pommel of his brand-new sword. He said nothing, because that would have been an admission. His eyes were round, glistening in the white like a boiled egg, boiled and shelled like a fresh egg. He touched the silver insect medallion at his throat; he began to run. Tomb only let him hear another chuckle. Their merged shadows fled away beneath them as they crossed a high elegant bridge, parted at a crossroads unused for two hundred years, only to join again and vanish at the moment of joining in a silent flare of purple light vented from some ancient artifact. Tomb grew careless. Swaggering along like the tame midget of some southern prince in cockerel-coloured doublet and yellow stockings, he came abruptly face to face with his victim, who – finding himself confronted by an old mad dwarf with a knife in his gnarled hand and a series of peculiarly childish grimaces chasing themselves across his features – stared appalled.

  'I – 'said Tomb. He looked down at his hand. He wondered how long he had been carrying the knife without knowing it.

  The boy meanwhile trembled despairingly. His eyes were watering. He made a painful effort to draw his sword.

  'Don't!'said Tomb. 'I didn't mean -, And it might have rested there had he not heard the sound of feet coming along the corridor toward them.

  'I'm sorry,'he told the boy, kicking him beneath the left kneecap. The boy lay on the floor motionless, looking up at him like a hurt animal. Tomb hauled the new sword from its scabbard and tried it for balance. He had some idea of using it in the absence of his axe. 'Rubbish,'he said, and threw it clattering across the passage out of harm's way: 'Get something decent as soon as you can afford it.'He knelt on the floor close to the boy, who made no move to stop him, set the point of his knife against his throat and stared into the round hopeless eyes. 'What's this round your neck?'But the boy couldn't speak. 'Don't worry,'said Tomb, 'please.'In this manner both of them awaited the arrival of the footsteps.

  Not long after, a Reborn Man came striding towards them down the corridor. He had on the fantastic blood-red plate armour of an important House, its contorted yellow ideograph flaming on the black cloak that billowed out behind him. The trembling glow of the armour made his image seem mythical, transitory, as if he flickered in and out of Time as we know it; its curious blunt shoulder-spikes and elongated joints gave him the look of some mutated crustacean. His head was bare, his expression beleaguered, and his companions were an ill-assorted lot, comprising a woman of his own race, bitterly thin, shaven-headed, her gait awkward and ungraceful, as if her skeleton worked in a new, untested way (her smile was empty, and she was singing softly, We are off to Vegys now, Fal di Ia di a); a gutter bravo from the Low City, with the walk of a frustrated predator and the spoilt features of a minor aristocrat; and a dark silent figure wrapped like a corpse in an embroidered cloak.

  Tomb started up with a cry. He took a pace forward, blinking and confused.

  'Cromis?'he whispered.

  Pain filled him and he forgot the boy on the floor. He went up close to Galen Hornwrack (for it was him, of course, morose as a wolf, petulant as an adolescent girl at finding himself so unmoved by his ancient bugbear the palace, which after all was only a place) and touched the wrecked metal bird that hung from his belt in lieu of a sword. He looked up into the assassin's face for a moment, then sighed: there was little similarity once you looked closely, and he could find there only an anguished savagery he had never found in the face of the dead poet-hero. He shook his head and turned to Alstath Fulthor.

  'I'm sorry, old friend. I thought for a moment -Fulthor smiled absently down at him.

  'I know,'he said. 'The similarities are superficial. What were you doing on the floor with that boy?'

  He tilted his head to one side as if he were listening to something no-one else could hear, and seemed to forget what he had been saying. There was an awkward pause. Then he went on, 'You should be more patient, Dwarf. I heard there was a maniac or an ape of some kind loose in the corridors. When I saw the little caravan, I -'Fulthor shook his head as though to clear it of some double image – 'I knew it must be you. Are you going to murder this lad, or can he get back to his post?'His tone was curious, friendly but ironical: absent.

  Tomb bared his rotten old teeth. He was a little disconcerted by such a reception after twenty years. 'I'm too old for patience, Reborn,'he said gruffly. 'Are you all right?'When no answer came he turned his attention almost gratefully to the boy (who had risen to his knees: colour was coming back into his face), thinking: the whole city is in a dream which it will not share with me; these corridors are cursed. 'Get up,'he told him. 'What is that thing round your neck?'When the boy wouldn't answer he asked Fulthor, but Fulthor didn't hear.

  Light streamed suddenly down the corridor, the colour of murder. It rushed over them like smoke, to be sucked away into the outer maze and there dissipate: their shadows followed it. The old machine from which it had issued, so long denied its proper function, began to shriek in horror and frustration, flailing its corroded limbs as if waking after millenia to the truth of its position. Echoes fled like bats.

  Out of this abrupt madness crept a party of ten or fifteen men. A squad of the palace guard, they wore the same black and pewter uniforms as the boy, but their faces were distorted by the unsteady glare – salient features drifting into repulsive new relationships – and they came on not with a military gait but with a curious tip-toed tread, their eyes fixed on the dwarf with a feral yet somehow inorganic intensity. Had they shadowed him even as he shadowed the boy, passage to passage, all the way from the outer halls? How had he not felt those eyes like the empty lambent eyes of animals on a dark night? (Or perhaps he had.)

  'Fulthor?'

  But Fulthor was gazing emptily into the air again, his lips moving silently. There was no help there.

  The dwarf shuddered, ambushed by circumstances. The City's web was now complete, and he found himself enmeshed. It wasn't much of a homecoming. Yet it would not be the first time he had fought his way down these corridors. He stood forward a little so as not to prolong the waiting. Nothing much was in his mind.

  They were almost upon him when Fulthor whispered 'Stop.'His voice seemed to come from a long way off, and he looked almost surprised to hear it. 'Stop!'For a moment nothing changed. Tomb snarled; Fulthor touched the hilt of his sword, faced with the motiveless slaughter of his own men. But then the world shook itself and threw off the nightmare. The old machine wailed despairingly, sagged, and was silent (in its frenzy it had melted parts of its own spine and now, bent double like a crone, it twitched and contracted as the hot metal cooled). The evil light faded. The approaching men looked uncertainly at one another and put up their swords.

  It was little enough, and grudgingly done: their captain nodded woodenly, staring straight ahead, while behind him they shuffled into two columns, looking embarrassed and elbowing one another sullenly. Each wore a medallion like the boy's, a curious complex twist of silver the meaning of which retreated from its seeker like a vacant perspective. 'Call off the search,'Fulthor ordered them. He spoke reluctantly, like a main hard put to control some pain or intense desire. 'A mistake has been made. This is the Iron Dwarf, who has returned to help the City in its hour of need.'They regarded him warily for a few seconds, then turned their heads away as one man and marched off. When they had gone'some distance down the corridor the boy leapt abruptly to his feet; flung the Reborn Man a glance of bitter hatred; and was off, flying down the passage after them, his sword abandoned where Tomb had thrown it. Tomb picked it up. 'What do you make of all this?'he asked Fulthor. Fulthor stared blindly after the boy, his thin hands like a layer of white wax over bone.

  'I am lost,'he said, and turned h
is face to the corridor wall. 'They no longer accept my leadership. Soon one of them will disobey and I shall have to kill him.'He made a noise that might have been a laugh or a sob.

  Through all this, Fulthor's companions had hardly moved, but looked on with fear or irony or whatever emotion seemed appropriate. Now the Reborn Woman, sensing his distress, came forward and put one hand uncertainly on his shoulder. 'I – 'she said, and then something in a language Tomb could not follow. 'Mein Herz hat seine Liebe. In my youth I made -'It was clear she could not help him, which distressed her in her turn. She shook him. She looked around for help. 'In my youth I made my small contribution. Blackpool and Venice become as one. Above the night the stars revolve, in circuits of the shuddering bear!'This last a shout. She wept. Oddly enough it was the assassin from the Low City who moved to comfort her. He touched her hand and his bloody, spoilt features writhed briefly: after a second's puzzlement Tomb decided this was an attempt to smile. The woman smiled back, and her face was transfigured – where the dwarf had previously seen only a chilling vacancy there now flared delight, and an intelligence like a lamp uncovered. She let go of the assassin's hand and danced away from him, singing,

  We are off to Vegys now

  Fal di la di a

  We are off to Vegys now

  Faldiladia

  On the shores of the diamond lake

  We shall watch the fishes

  On the summits of the mountains

  Cry 'Erecthalia!'

  Faldiladia

  Fal di la di a

  Di rol

  Hearing this, Alstath Fulthor put his hands over his ears and groaned. 'I cannot forget the people in the beautiful gardens!'he exclaimed. He hit the side of his head with the heel of his fist. 'Arnac san Tehin! How long is it since – saw your sweet mad face at midnight, or trod with you the 'pavements of the Rue Morgue Avenue?'And still groaning he ran away down the corridor toward the outside world, stripping off his armour as he went.

  A thin wind passed down the corridor, smelling of dust and hyacinth; with it came silence, a substance not an absence, to fill the ears with empty rooms and abandoned stairs and the motionless unspeaking figures of the Earth's innocence. In this silence Tomb the Dwarf sought desperately for reassurance. But the woman had retreated into her own memories, shoulders hunched and eyes hooded secretively, a ghost of tenderness playing about the corners of her mouth; nothing she said made sense anyway. And the assassin merely smiled sardonically, shrugging as if to absolve himself of this responsibility at least (the movement appeared to hurt him somewhere in the region of his lower ribs and his expression immediately became sour and self-involved).

  'Is everybody insane, then?'Tomb asked himself irritably, turning in the end – though something made him reluctant – to the man in the shroud-like cloak, who stood a little way off examining the distraught machine as ifit might help him break the universe's last mad code. The machine was crooning to him out of its incomprehensible pain, and he, standing like a mysterious parcelled statue, was whispering back; neither of them would ever understand the other. Tomb went up and stood between them, arms akimbo, staring aggressively into the unrelieved darkness of the man's hood.

  'Leave that, sir,'he said, 'although I'm sure it must be very interesting, and tell me: has the City lost its senses?'

  Silence.

  'Very well, then: if you are a friend of Fulthor's, at least tell me when his illness began. I am the Iron Dwarf (of whom you may have heard), who woke him from his aeon-sleep to help defeat the North (which I did by means of knowledge gained from an old man).'

  He craned his neck, but no face was visible despite that he felt eyes focused on him from somewhere under the hood. At this, his temper went. He pulled out his knife.

  'Say something, you cold pudding, or I'll serve you up in slices! Are you all ignorant or loony in here?'

  But the man only chuckled and said, 'You knew me last time we met, Dwarf, with your beard on fire and your broken head! Have you forgotten so soon? I would have asked you then, only there was no time: how has it been with you since our other fateful parting, there beneath the sad tower eighty years ago? What a change you and I have wrought in the world by our doings then! Do you see any of my children as you go about from desert to desert, from Waste to Waste?

  And he threw back his hood, laughing his dry old enigmatic laugh, and became Cellur, the Lord of the Birds…

  5: Galen Hornwrack and Metkvet Nian

  Cellur the Bird Lord: he has lived for aeons in a five-sided tower full of undersea gloaming. Instruments flickered and ticked about him all that time, while his sensors licked the unquiet air, detecting new forms and seasons. Out of the cold reaches of salt marsh and estuary, out of the long cry of the wind, out of the swell of the sea and the call of the winter tern he comes to us now: out of the War of the Two Queens, with his thousand dying metal birds; out of the long forgotten dream of the Middle Period of the Earth, shaking his head over the pain and beauty, twin demiurgi of Mankind's enduring Afternoon!

  What has he witnessed, that we shall never see? Forgotten, that we could hardly imagine?

  The lines and figures on his marvellous robe writhe and shiver like tortured alien animals. Geometry remembers, though he may not. 'Nothing is left as it was,'they sigh, 'in that final perfect world. The towers that ruled these wastes have fallen now. The world, which they halted for a millenium in its tracks has begun to turn again. We find here no compassion as savage and sterile as theirs; no cruelty as structured or formal; no art. The vast air is stilled, where they lowed beneath five artificial planets, trumpeting verse into the frozen distance. Their libraries lie open like the pages of a book abandoned to the desert wind, their last dry whispers fade; philosophers and clowns alike, fade; that febrile clutching at the stars…'

  Cellur. Ten thousand seasons once were his, years beating like hearts! These geometries could tell us. They are the spoor of Time itself, did we but know. Cellur the Bird Lord! Now he speaks -All are assembled in the throne-room but Alstath Fulthor. (Rumour has him running through the filthy alleys of the Artists'Quarter, up the hill at Alves and through the grounds of the derelict observatory, expressions of madness eroding his proud features; rumour had him leaving Viriconium for the third time in a month – no horse, no armour, only his heaving lungs, and his past in close pursuit. The Low City is entranced.)

  The Queen sits with her calm hands in her lap; at her feet kneels Tomb the Dwarf, picking his teeth with the point of his knife; Fay Glass of the vanished House ofSleth, dressed in a new cloak, whispers nonsense to the Queen's Beast: while Galen Hornwrack stands apart, with a face like death. All wait, except perhaps the madwoman. Round them hover curtains of mercurial light, twists of mirror'd air. Before them five false windows tremble with views of a landscape to be found nowhere in the kingdom.

  In the Time of the Locust it is given to us to see such things. 'My Lady'(began Cellur, bowing to Methvet Nian):

  'I had, as you know, some small part in the war against the North. But that war was almost my death – as I shall tell -and it destroyed both my refuge and my birds, which hurt me grievously. I have been many years coming to terms with this and my life has been a curious one since then. I return to find the kingdom much changed, and I am afraid my very coming heralds further uncertainty. It is eighty years since I sent the iridium vulture to Tegeus-Cromis in his tower at Balmacara among the rowan woods: I wish he were here today to answer a similar summons. Although I believe he thought of himself as a poet, he had a great gift for murder. Events again require such a captain. If I am to explain why, I must return for a moment to the War of the Two Queens -'That I survived the onslaught of Canna Moidart's forces

  was as much a surprise to me as it is to you, who last saw me beleagured and without hope. My birds were long dead, or else scattered. The Geteit Chemosit held the causeway. Their airboat, though grounded during the early part of the exchange, mounted weapons of which I could not conceive. I was trapped in my tower, w
hose armoury I had never had the wit to investigate. A battle began in which the sole true flesh and blood at stake was mine, yet I looked on impotently, terrified. Stone dripped and sputtered in the face of their cannon; the estuary brine boiled and threshed with the power of mine! The watching cliffs echoed and roared with it, dust trickling down their immemorial buttresses like mortar from a rotten wall. All across the water hung a pall of glowing smoke, through which I caught briel glimpses of those dreadful automata coming and going about their vessel, their yellow eyes baleful. A curious armour seemed to protect them against my beams.

  'Day gave way to a long night of blue fogs and drifting corrosive lights. The tower began to show signs of strain. It hooted mournfully into the wrack. Its summit revolved erratically, threatening non-existent enemies. Every five or six minutes its armaments blazed forth like crooked lightning, but every time a little duller. Soon its foundations began to shift. It was doomed. I knew I could not survive a night above ground, even if it should achieve some Pyrrhic victory: two hours after tegeus-Cromis had led you to safety over the estuarine cliffs, the air and water had become contaminated with some energy which poisons the fish even now, so many years on. The tower moaned, its trapped electrical voices pleading with me in strange militaristic languages, whether for advice or relief I could not tell. I could do nothing. I left it, feeling like a traitor, for the cellars beneath, reasoning that I might make my escape through the very tunnels you had used on the previous day…