Viriconium (9 page)

His heel touched water, and for an instant he allowed the
baan
to catch his blade. In a shower of sparks, the tip of the nameless sword was severed: now he could not thrust, but must use only its edge. Fear crept and coiled in him. The giant, its cluster of eyes pale and empty, loomed above him, chopping and leaping like an automaton. Abruptly, he saw a dangerous remedy.

Beneath his clothing, his right hand found the hilt of the little
baan
that had killed his sister. Clutching it, he feigned an injury, delaying a counterstroke and fumbling his recovery. He felt little hope for the stratagem. But the giant saw the opening, and as its weapon moved back, then down, Cromis whipped out the energy knife and met with it the killing blow.

There was a terrifying flash as the two
baans
engaged and shorted out. Cromis was hurled bodily into the pool by the concussion of ancient energies, his arm paralysed. Its blade dead and useless, the giant reeled drunkenly about the clearing, hissing balefully.

Cromis dragged himself from the water, arm numb with agony. Gagging and retching on the liquid that had entered his mouth, he renewed his attack and found that in the final flurry of blades, the nameless sword had been cut clearly in two halfway down its length. Cursing bitterly, he lashed out with the stump. But the giant turned and ran awkwardly into the trees, lumbering through the pool in a fountain of spray.

Its murderous confidence had been dispelled, its grace had left it, and it was defeated: but Cromis cast himself on the poached earth and wept with pain and frustration.

Shouting broke out near him. On grey wings, Cellur’s lammergeyer crashed through the foliage, flapping evilly across the clearing, and, screaming, sped after the fleeing shadow. Cromis felt himself lifted.

“Grif,” he muttered. “My blade is broken. It was not a man. I injured it with a trick of Tomb’s. There is ancients’ work here—

“The Moidart has woken something we cannot handle. It almost took me.”

A new fear settled like ice in his bone marrow. He clutched desperately at the fingers of his left hand. “Grif, I could not
kill
it!

“And I have lost the Tenth Ring of Neap.”

Despair carried him down into darkness.

Dawn broke yellow and black like an omen over the Cobaltmere, where isolated wreaths of night mist still hung over the dark, smooth water. From the eyots and reedbeds, fowl cackled: dimly sensing the coming winter, they were gathering in great multicoloured drifts on the surface of the lake, slow migratory urges building to a climax in ten thousand small, dreary skulls.

“And there will be killing weather this year,” murmured tegeus-Cromis, as he huddled over the fire gazing at the noisy flocks, his sword in three pieces beside him, the shreds and tatters of his mail coat rattling together as he moved. They had treated his numerous cuts and bruises, but could do nothing for the state of his thoughts. He shuddered, equating the iron earths of winter with lands in the North and the bale in the eyes of hunting wolves.

He had woken from a brief sleep, his mouth tasting of failure, to find Grif’s men straggling back in despondent twos and threes from a search of the glade where he had met the dark giant; and they reported that the Tenth Ring of Neap was gone without trace, trodden deep into the churned mud, or sunk, perhaps, in the foetid pool. The metal bird, too, had returned to him, having lost its quarry among the water thickets. Now he sat with Theomeris Glyn, who had snored like a drunk through all the chaos.

“You take single setbacks too hard,” said the old man, sucking bits of food from his whiskers. He was holding a strip of meat to the flames with the tip of his knife. “You’ll learn—” He sniggered, nodding his head over the defeats of the aged. “Still, it is strange.

“It was always said south of the Pastel City that if tegeus-Cromis and the nameless sword could not kill it, then it must already be dead. Strange. Have some cooked pig?”

Cromis laughed dully. “You are small comfort. An old man mumbling over meat and homilies. What shall we do without the Queen’s authorisation? What
can
we do?”

Birkin Grif came up to warm his hands over the fire. He sniffed at the cooking meat like a fat bloodhound, squeezed his great bulk carefully into the space between Cromis and the old man.

“Only what we would have done had we kept the thing,” he said. “Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontrovertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.”

“But to command an army—” began Cromis helplessly.

Grif scraped halfheartedly at the filth on his boots. “I have seen you command before, poet. It appeared to me then that you did so from the strengths of your own self, not from those of some bauble.”

“That’s true,” old Glyn said judiciously, spitting out some gristle. “That’s how we did it in the old days. Damned expensive boots, those, Grif. You ought to saddle-soap them to keep the damp out. Not that I ever commandeered anything but the arse of a wench.”

Grif clasped Cromis’s shoulder, shook it gently. “Brooder, it was
not
your fault.”

Cromis shrugged. It made him feel no better. “You buried the guard?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

Grif’s smile vanished. He nodded. “Aye, and found one more piece for the puzzle. I was fascinated by the precise edge of his wound. Examining it more closely, I found—” He paused, prodded the fire with his boot, and watched the ascending sparks. “We buried only a part of that man, Cromis: the rest has gone with the creature you put to flight.

“His brain has been stolen.”

There was a silence. The colourful trees dripped. Theomeris Glyn began to chew noisily. Cromis reached out to toy with the shards of his sword, unpleasant visions of the corpse crawling through his head: the huddled limbs in the mud, the congealing broth at the edge of the wound.

He said: “She has woken something from the Old Science. I am sorry for that man, and I see each of us in him—” He slid the shards of the nameless sword one by one into his scabbard. “We are all dead men, Grif.” He stood up, his muscles aching from the long night. “I’ll make ready my horse. We had best to move on.”

Perched on an overhanging bough with pale turquoise bark, the metal lammergeyer eyed him silently.

“Sure you won’t have some pig?” offered Theomeris Glyn.

They reached the northerly bounds of the marsh without further loss of men. By afternoon on the fourth day the gaudy foliage had thinned sufficiently to reveal a sky overcast but of more acceptable colour. Their speed increased as the going firmed steadily. The bog broke up into irregular patches separated by wide, flat causeways, tending to the colour of rust as they moved north. A cold wind billowed their cloaks, plucked at Cromis’s torn mail, and fine rain dulled the hides of the horses.

Stretching east and west in a great lazy curve, the terminal barrens of the Great Brown Waste barred their way: chains of dun-coloured dunes interconnecting to form a low scarp, the face of which was cut and seamed by massive gully erosion.

“We are lucky to come here in winter,” said Birkin Grif, twisting in his saddle as he led the company in single file up the gently sloping cleft worn by a black and gelid stream. Walls of damp russet loess reared lifelessly on either side. “Although the winds are stronger, they carry more moisture to lay the soil. The waste is not a true desert.”

Cromis nodded dully. In the Low Leedale it had been autumn yet, but that was hard to believe here. He fixed his eyes on the narrow strip of sky beyond the lips of the ravine, wishing for Balmacara, where the year died more happily.

“There is slightly less danger of earth-falls, you understand, and clouds of dust. In summer, one might choke to death, even here on the edge.”

From the uncomfortable sky, Cromis shifted his gaze to the file of men behind him. They were lost in a mist of rain, dim shapes huddled and silent on tired mounts.

At the top of the gully, the entire company halted, and by common, unspoken consent, fanned out along the crest of a dune: each man held solitary and introspective by the bleak panorama before him.

The Waste rolled north—umber and ochre, dead, endless. Intersecting streams with high, vertical banks scored deep, meaningless ideographs in the earth. In the distance, distorted into deceptive, organic forms, metal girders poked accusing fingers at the empty air, as if there the Rust Desert might fix the source of its millennial pain. Grif’s smugglers muttered, and found that a narrowed eye might discern certain slow but definite movements among the baffling curves of the landscape.

But tegeus-Cromis turned his horse to face away from the spoiled land, and stared back at the mauve haze that marked the marshes. He was much preoccupied by giants.

5

“We should not strive too hard to imitate the Afternoon Cultures,” said Grif. “They killed this place with industry and left it for the big monitors. In part, if not in whole, they fell because they exhausted the land. We mine the metal they once used, for instance, because there is no ore left in the earth.

“And in using it all up, they dictated that our achievements should be of a different quality to theirs—”

“There will be no more Name Stars,” murmured Cromis, looking up from the fragments of his sword. Dusk had drawn a brown veil across the wastes, amplifying the peculiar vagueness of the dune landscape. It was cold. As yet, they had seen no lizards: merely the slow, indistinct movements among the dunes that indicated their presence.

“Or any more of
this,
” said Grif, bleakly.

They had made camp amid the ruins of a single vast, roofless building of vanished purpose and complicated ground plan. Although nine tenths of it had sunk long ago beneath the bitter earth, the remains that reared around them rose fifty or sixty feet into the twilight. A feeble wind mumbled in off the waste and mourned over their indistinct summits. Among the dunes meandered a vile, sour watercourse, choked with stones worn and scoured by Time.

Two or three fires burned in the lee of a broken load wall. Grif’s men tended them silently. Infected by the bleakness of the waste, they had picketed the horses close, and the perimeter guards kept well within sight of the main body.

“There will be no more of anything soon,” said Theomeris Glyn. “The Moidart, the Afternoon Cultures—both are Time by another name. You are sentimentalists, lacking a proper sense of perspective. When you get to my age—”

“We will grow bored and boring, and make fools of ourselves with dirty girls in Duirinish. It will be a fine time, that.”

“You may not make it that far, Birkin Grif,” said the old man darkly.

Since Cromis’s fight in the Metal-Salt Marsh, Cellur’s mechanical vulture had spent most of its time in the air, wheeling in great slow circles over the waste. It would report nothing it had seen from that vantage. Now it perched just beyond the circle of firelight and said:

“Post-industrial shock effected by the so-called ‘Afternoon Cultures’ was limited in these latitudes. There is evidence, however, that to the west there exists an entire continent despoiled to the degree of the Great Brown Waste.

“In a global sense, the old man may be right: we are running out of Time.”

Its precise reedy voice lent a further chill to the night. In the silence that followed, the wind aged, the dying sun ran down like clockwork in an orrery. Birkin Grif laughed uncomfortably; a few thin echoes came from his men.

“Bird,
you
will end up as rust, with nothing to your credit but unproven hypotheses. If we are at the end of Time, what have you to show for it? Are you, perhaps, jealous that you cannot experience the misery of flesh, which is this: to know intimately the doom
you
merely parrot, and yet die in hope?”

The bird waddled forward, firelight spraying off its folded wings. “That is not given to me,” it said. “It will not be given to you, if you fail the real task implicit in this war:
fear the
geteit chemosit;
travel at once to
the tower of Cellur, which you will find
—”

Filled with a horrible depression, Cromis dropped the shards of his sword and left the fire. From his saddlebag he took his curious Eastern instrument. He bit his lip and wandered past the picket line and the perimeter guards. With death in his head, he sat on a stone. Before him, huge loops of sand-polished girder dipped in and out of the dunes like metal worms. They are frozen, he thought: caught on a strange journey across an alien planet at the forgotten end of the universe.

Shivering, he composed this:

Rust in our eyes . . . metallic perspectives trammel us in the rare earth north . . . we are nothing but eroded men . . . wind clothing our eyes with white ice . . . we are the swarf-eaters . . . hardened by our addiction, tasting acids . . . Little to dream here, our fantasies are iron and icy echoes of bone. . . . rust in our eyes, we who had once soft faces.

“Rust in our eyes—” he began again, preparing to repeat the chant in the Girvanian Mode, but a great shout from the camp drove it out of his skull. He jumped to his feet.

He saw the metal bird explode into the air, shedding light like a gun-powder rocket, its wings booming. Men were running about the encampment, casting febrile shadows on the ancient walls. He made pitiful grabbing motions at his empty scabbard, hurrying toward the uproar. Over a confusion of voices he heard Grif bellow suddenly: