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'She ca
Hornwrack ignored him. He shook the carcass of the metal bird. He put it to his ear. 'It hums still. It hummed even as I strangled it.'His hands trembled, then stilled. 'I feel my death in all this.'He walked off a few paces and stared up at the palace, a mile distant and misty through the blowing rain. 'Methven's hall!'they heard him say. He seemed to be listening. 'I was once one of you,'he said. 'I was one of the rulers. I chose to become one of the ruled.'Then:
'To hell with all of you,'he said. 'I'll come because you have the weight of that behind you -'pointing to the palace -'and because you have the baan. But I'll tell you nothing.'He regarded Fulthor with a cold smile, drew his ragged sleeve across his red-daubed face. 'You had better watch me, Reborn Man,'he threatened. 'You had better watch me all the time.'
I would rather be a ghost than play such hollow games, thought Alstath Fulthor.
Hornwrack: The horse had run off and he refused to try and catch it on foot.
'Then walk,'the Reborn Man told him.
He writhed his bruised lips and spat. (If he shut his eyes the bird came at him still, tearing long elastic strips of flesh from his chest until the ribs showed through.)
'So,'he said. He shrugged.
Lord Galen Hornwrack, scion of a respected – if relict -House, one-time officer and pilot of the Queen's Flight, now a professional assassin of some repute in the Low City, made his way for the first time in eighty years to the palace at Viriconium. He walked. His wounds throbbed and chafed. Memories of the night gnawed him. But at his belt hung a metal bird he had ruined with his own bare hands, and he felt this to be the symbol of a continuing defiance: though he now had to admit that control of his own destiny had passed from him. Occasionally, small wheels spilled from somewhere deep within the bird to run soundlessly in diminishing circles until the wind whirled them away like chaff across the Proton Circuit. Before he went into the hall, of Methven he looked up at the sky. What had begun at least in light was now dull and unpromising. Even the deadly litharge stain of dawn had faded from the cloud-layer; so that, grey and solid, it capped the earth like an enormous leaden bowl, a single thin crescent of silver showing at its tilted northern extremity. And as he watched even that faded.
4: In the Corridors
Tomb the Dwarf came in through the south-eastern or 'Gabelline'gate of the City, just before dawn, some two weeks after his strange meeting on the edge of the Ra
Tomb heard nothing, though he cocked his head for echoes; but a breath of the past followed him a little way beyond the gate, a cold and depressing air generated in those outer regions, overflowing into the alleyways and peeling demi-monde avenues of the suburbs where geranium leaves were turning ochre and a faint smell like cat's urine issued from the mouldy brick. Viriconium, sump of time and alchemical child; sacrificer of children and comforter of ghosts – who can but shiver and forgive in the damp theatrical airs of dawn?
A red stain grew in the sky above the Haunted Gate. Against it floated the airy towers, suspended as if in water glass, while below were conjured shabby reflections – a glitter of fishscales, olive oil, broken glass, and the west wind shivering the wide shallow puddles in the empty squares. Asleep one minute and aware the next, the Pastel City woke like a whore, to commerce and betrayal, to pleasure and misery – to rare metals and offal, velvet and sackcloth, lust and holiness, litharge, lithia salts and horse cures. The red stain spread until it had filled the sky. Wormeaten floorboards groaned. Gummy eyes gazed forth, half-blind already with boredom and disgust, to watch the dawn drop dead among the sodden chestnut leaves in the Rue Montdampierre! Tomb the Dwarf, recognizing in this suburb the same slut who had emptied the pockets of an impressionable Mingulay tinker's son a hundred years before, was overcome by sentiment. He took deep delighted breaths; spoke almost kindly to his ponies; and gri
Beneath Mi
Into this came the dwarf's caravan like a spirit of chaos -pushing aside tottering stalls, ru
Despite the coming and going about the booth, it had attracted few onlookers. Wan torches set at its corners guttered in the growing light. Its greasy satin curtains were drawn back to reveal the Main herself, billowing over her three-legged stool and coughing like a horse in the raw air. In her vast lap sat a small drunken man with a depraved triangular face, from the top of which stuck straight up a stiff brush of almost crimson hair. His bottle-green jerkin was not only encrusted with old filth, but sticky besides with new foulness; and he seemed to be confessing his part in some brawl or murder the night before. Tears were ru