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  They found it difficult to believe him a Methven (memories had indeed grown dim, for their chief objection to his claim was that he came with no ceremony or circumstance) and for some time refused him entrance: a circumspection he could only applaud.

  He remembered certain pass words known only to the guards of the city.

  He made his way along corridors of pale, fluctuating light, passing strange, precious objects that might have been animated sculptures or machines, excavated from ruined cities in the Rust Desert beyond Duirinish.

  Queen Jane awaited him in a tall room floored with cinnabar-veined crystal and having five false windows that showed landscapes to be found nowhere in the kingdom.

  Shambling slowly among the curtains of light and finely wrought furniture was one of the giant albino megatheria of the Southern forests: great sloth-like beasts, fifteen feet high when they stood upright (which was rarely) and armed with terrible cutting claws, though they were vegetarian and amiable. The Queen’s beast wore an iridium collar, and its claws were sheathed in clear thick resin. Seeing Cromis, it ambled up to him in a sleepy manner, and gazed myopically at him. Patterns of light moved across its shining pelt.

  “Leave him, Usheen,” said a small, musical voice.

  Cromis turned his eyes from the megatherium to the dais at the south end of the room.

  Queen Jane of Viriconium, Methvet Nian, whom he had last seen as a child at Methven’s court, was seventeen years of age. She sat on a simple throne and regarded him steadily with violet eyes. She was tall and supple, clad in a gown of russet velvet, and her skin was neither painted nor jewelled. The identical Ten Rings of Neap glittered from her long fingers. Her hair, which recalled the colour of the autumn rowans of Balmacara, hung in soft waves to her waist, coiled about her breasts.

  “Queen Jane,” said Cromis and bowed.

  She buried her fingers in the thick fur of the megatherium, and whispered to it. The false windows flickered with strange scenes. She looked up.

  “Is it really you, Lord Cromis?” she said, a strange expression crossing her pale triangular features.

  “Have I changed so much, madam?”

  “Not much, Lord Cromis: you were a stiff and sombre man, even when you sang, and you are that still. But I was very young when we last met—”

  Suddenly, she laughed, rose from the throne, and came gracefully down to take his hands. Cromis saw that her eyes were moist.

  “—And I think I preferred Tomb the Dwarf in those days,” she went on, “for he brought me the most wonderful things from his favourite ruins. Or Grif, perhaps, who told questionable tales and laughed a good deal—”

  She drew him through the shifting light sculptures to the dais, and made him sit down. The megatherium came to gaze wisely at him from brown, tranquil eyes. Methvet Nian sat on her simple throne, and the laughter left her.

  “Oh, Cromis, why have none of you come before? These ten years, I have had need of your support. How many live? I have seen none of you since my father’s death.”

  “Grif lives, madam, for sure. Hours ago, he rode north at my request. He believes that Tomb and Trinor live also. Of the others I have heard nothing. We have come late to this, but you must not think too ill of us. I have come to discover just how late we are. What have been your moves to date?”

  She shook her head musingly, so that her bright hair caught the light and moved like a fire.

  “Two only, Cromis: I have held the city, though it has suffered; and I have dispatched Lord Waterbeck—who, though well-schooled, has not the strategies of one such as Norvin Trinor—with four regiments. We hope to engage my cousin before she reaches the Rust Desert.”

  “How long has Waterbeck been gone?”

  “A week only. The launch fliers tell me he must reach her within another week and a half, for she travels surprisingly fast. Few of them have returned of late: they report launches destroyed in flight by energy weapons, and their numbers are depleted.

  “Our lines of communication grow thin, Cromis. It will be a Dark Age, should our last machines go down.”

  Again, she took his hand, silently drawing strength from him, and he knew that her young frame was frail for such weight of responsibility. He blamed himself, because that was his way.

  “Cromis, can you do anything?”

  “I start immediately,” he said, trying to smile and finding the requisite muscles stiff from disuse. He gently disengaged her hands, for their cool touch had disturbed him.

  “First I must locate Trinor, who may be somewhere in the city; although if that is so, I cannot say why he has not come to you before now. Then it will take me only a short time to come up with Grif, since I can take paths impassible to more than one rider.

  “What I must have from you, my lady, is an authorisation. Trinor or Grif must command that army when it meets the Moidart, or failing one of them, myself—this Waterbeck is a peacetime general, I would guess, and has not the experience of a Methven.

  “You must not fear too greatly. Can it be done, we will do it, and fall bringing a victory about. Keep order here and faith with what Methven remain, even though we have not used you well.”

  She smiled, and the smile passed barriers he had not thought existed in his morose soul. She took off one of the steel Rings of Neap and slid it onto his left index finger, which was hardly of greater diameter than her own, saying:

  “This will be your authorisation. It is traditional. Will you take a launch? They are swifter—”

  He rose to leave, and found himself reluctant.

  “No launch, my lady. Those, you must keep jealously, in case we fail. And I prefer to ride.”

  At the door of the room with five windows, he looked back through the drifting shapes and curtains of light, and it seemed to him that he saw a lost, beautiful child. She brought to mind his dead sister Galen, and he was not surprised: what shook him was that those memories somehow lacked the force they had had that morning. Cromis was a man who, like most recluses, thought he understood himself, and did not.

  The great white sloth watched him out with almost human eyes, rearing up to its full height, its ambered claws glinting.

  He stayed in the city for that night and another day. It was quiet, the streets empty and stunned. He had snippets of rumour that the Moidart’s remaining supporters skulked the narrower alleys after dark and skirmished with groups of the city guard. He did not discount them, and kept a hand on the nameless sword. He expected to find Trinor somewhere in the old Artists’ Quarter.

  He enquired at several taverns there, but had no information. He grew progressively more impatient, and would have given up had not a derelict poet he met in the Bistro Californium advised him to take his queries to an address on Bread Street in the poorer part of the quarter. It was said that blind Kristodulous had once rented a garret studio there.

  He came to Bread Street at twilight. It was far removed from the palace and the Pastel Towers, a mean alley of aging, ugly houses, down which the wind funneled bitterly. Over the crazed rooftops, the sky bled. He shivered and thought of the Moidart, and the note of the wind became more urgent. He drew his cloak about him and rapped with the hilt of his sword on a weathered door.

  He did not recognise the woman who opened it: perhaps the light was at fault.

  She was tall, statuesque, and graceful; her narrow face had an air of calm and the self-knowledge that may or may not come with suffering. But her blue robe was faded, patched here and there with material of quite another colour, and her eyes were ringed with tired, lined flesh. He bowed out of courtesy.

  “I seek Norvin Trinor,” he said, “or news of him.”

  She peered into his face as if her eyes were weak, and said nothing. She stepped aside and motioned him to enter. He thought that a quiet, sad smile played about her firm mouth.

  Inside, the house was dusty and dim, the furniture of rough, scrubbed deal. She offered him cheap, artificially coloured wine. They sat on opposite sides of a table and
a silence. He looked from her discoloured fingernails to the cobwebs in the windows, and said:

  “I do not know you, madam. If you would be—”

  Her weary eyes met his and still he did not know her. She got slowly to her feet and lit a squat hanging lamp.

  “I am sorry, tegeus-Cromis. I should not have embarrassed you in this fashion. Norvin is not here. I—”

  In the lamplight stood Carron Ban, the wife of Norvin Trinor, whom he had married after the fight against Carlemaker’s brigands, twelve years before. Time had gone against her, and she had aged beyond her years.

  Cromis upset his chair as he got to his feet, sent it clattering across the floor. It was not the change in her that horrified him, but the poverty that had caused it.

  “Carron! Carron! I did not know. What has happened here?”

  She smiled, bitter as the wind.

  “Norvin Trinor has been gone for nearly a year,” she said. “You must not worry on my behalf. Sit down and drink the wine.”

  She moved away, avoiding his gaze, and stood looking into the darkness of Bread Street. Under the faded robe, her shoulders shook. Cromis came to her and put his hand on her arm.

  “You should tell me,” he said gently. “Come and tell me.”

  But she shrugged off the hand.

  “Nothing to tell, my lord. He left no word. He seemed to have grown weary of the city, of me—”

  “But Trinor would not merely have abandoned you! It is cruel of you to suggest such—”

  She turned to face him and there was anger in her eyes.

  “It was cruel of him to do it, Lord Cromis. I have heard nothing from him for a year. And now—now I wish to hear nothing of him. That is all finished, like many things that have not outlasted King Methven.”

  She walked to the door.

  “If you would leave me, I would be pleased. Understand that I have nothing against you, Cromis; I should not have done this to you; but you bring memories I would rather not acknowledge.”

  “Lady, I—”

  “Please go.”

  There was a terrible patience in her voice, in the set of her shoulders. She was brought down, and saw only that she would remain so. Cromis could not deny her. Her condition was painful to them both. That a Methven should cause such misery was hard to credit—that it should be Norvin Trinor was unbelievable. He halted at the door.

  “If there is help you require—I have money—And the Queen—”

  She shook her head brusquely.

  “I shall travel to my family in the South. I want nothing from this city or its empire.” Her eyes softened. “I am sorry, tegeus-Cromis. You have meant nothing but good. I suggest you look for him in the North. That is the way he went.

  “But I would have you remember this: he is not the friend you know. Something changed him after the death of Methven. He is not the man you knew.”

  “Should I find him—”

  “I would have you carry no message. Goodbye.”

  She closed the door, and he was alone on that mean street with the wind. The night had closed in.

  3

  That night, haunted by three women and a grim future, Cromis of the nameless sword, who thought himself a better poet than fighter, left the Pastel City by one of its northern gates, his horse’s hooves quiet on the ancient paving. No one hindered him.

  Though he went prepared, he wore no armour save a mail shirt, lacquered black as his short cloak and leather breeches. It was the way of many of the Methven, who had found armour an encumbrance and no protection against energy blades. He had no helmet, and his black hair streamed in the wind. The baan was at his belt and his curious Eastern instrument across his back.

  In a day, he came to the bleak hills of Monar that lay between Viriconium and Duirinish, where the wind lamented considerably some gigantic sorrow it was unable to put into words. He trembled the high paths that wound over slopes of shale and between cold still lochans in empty corries. No birds lived there. Once he saw a crystal launch drift overhead, a dark smoke seeping from its hull. He thought a good deal of the strange actions of Norvin Trinor, but achieved no conclusions.

  He went in this fashion for three days, and one thing happened to him while he traversed the summit of the Cruachan Ridge.

  He had reached the third cairn on the ridge when a mist descended. Aware of the insecurity of the path in various places ahead, and noting that his beast was already prone to stumble on the loose, lichen-stained rock, he halted. The wind had dropped, and the silence made a peculiar ringing noise in his ears. It was comfortless and alien up there, impassable when the snow came, as were the lower valleys. He understood the Moidart’s haste.

  He found the cairn to be the tumbled ruins of an old four-faced tower constructed of a grey rock quite different from that beneath his feet. Three walls remained, and part of a ceiling. It had no windows. He could not guess its intended purpose, or why it was not built of native stone. It stood enigmatically among its own rubble, an eroded stub, and he wondered at the effort needed to transport its stones to such a height.

  Inside, there were signs that other travellers of the Cruachan had been overtaken by the mist: several long-dead fires, the bare bones of small animals.

  He tethered his horse, which had begun to shiver, fed it, and threw a light blanket over its hindquarters against the chill. He kindled a small fire and prepared a meal, then sat down to wait out the mist, taking up the Eastern gourd and composing to its eery metallic tones a chanted lament. The mist coiled around him, sent cold, probing fingers into his meagre shelter. His words fell into the silence like stones into the absolute abyss:

  “Strong visions: I have strong visions of this place in the empty times. . . . Far below there are wavering pines. . . . I left the rowan elphin woods to fulminate on ancient headlands, dipping slowly into the glasen seas of evening. . . . On the devastated peaks of hills we ease the barrenness into our thin bones like a foot into a tight shoe. . . . The narrative of this place: other than the smashed arris of the ridge there are only sad winds and silences. . . . I lay on the cairn one more rock. . . . I am possessed by Time. . . .”

  He put the instrument away from him, disturbed by the echoes of his own voice. His horse shifted its feet uneasily. The mist wove subtle shapes, caught by a sudden faint breath of wind.

  “tegeus-Cromis, tegeus-Cromis,” said a reedy voice close at hand.

  He leapt to his feet, the baan spitting and flickering in his left hand, the nameless sword greasing out of its dull sheath, his stance canny and murderous.

  “There is a message for you.”

  He could see nothing. There was nothing but the mist. The horse skittered and plunged, snorting. The forceblade fizzed in the damp atmosphere.

  “Come out!” he shouted, and the Cruachan echoed, out! out! out!

  “There is a message,” repeated the voice.

  He put his back against a worn wall and moved his head in a careful semicircle, on the hunt. His breath came harsh. The fire blazed up red in the grey, unquiet vapours.

  Perched on the rubble before him, its wicked head and bent neck underlit by the flames, was a bearded vulture—one of the huge, predatory lammergeyers of the lower slopes. In that gloom, it resembled a hunch-backed and spiteful old man. It spread and cupped a broad wing, fanning the fire, to preen its underfeathers. There was a strange sheen to its plumage; it caught the light in a way feathers do not.

  It turned a small crimson eye on him. “The message is as follows,” it said. Unlimbering both wings, it flapped noisily across the ruined room in its own wind, to perch on the wall by his head. His horse sidestepped nervously, tried to pull free from its tether, eyes white and rolling at the dark, powerful wings.

  Cromis stood back warily, raised his sword. The lammergeyers were strong, and said by the herders of Monar to prefer children to lambs.

  “If you will allow me:

  “tegeus-Cromis of Viriconium, which I take to be yourself, since you tally broadly
with the description given, should go at once to the tower of Cellur.” Here, it flexed its cruel claws on the cold grey stone, cocked its head, ruffled its feathers. “Which he will find on the Girvan Bay in the South, a little east of Lendalfoot. Further—”

  Cromis felt unreal: the mist curled, the lammergeyer spoke, and he was fascinated. On Cruachan Ridge he might have been out of Time, lost, but was much concerned with the essential nature of things, and he kept his sword raised. He would have queried the bird, but it went on:

  “—Further, he is advised to let nothing hinder that journey, however pressingit may seem: for things hang in a fine balance, and more is at stake than the fate of a minor empire.

  “This comes from Cellur of Girvan. That is the message.”

  Who Cellur of Girvan might be, or what intelligence he might have that overshadowed the fall of Viriconium (or, indeed, how he had taught a vulture to recognise a man he never could have met), Cromis did not know. He waited his time, and touched the neck of his horse to calm it.

  “Should you feel you must follow another course, I am instructed to emphasise the urgency of the matter, and to stay with you until such time as you decide to make the journey to Lendalfoot and Girvan. At intervals, I shall repeat the message, in case it should become obscured by circumstance.

  “Meanwhile, there may be questions you wish to ask. I have been provided with an excellent vocabulary.”

  With a taloned foot, it scratched the feathers behind its head, and seemed to pay no more attention to him. He sheathed his sword, seeing no threat. His beast had quietened, so he walked back to the fire. The lammergeyer followed. He looked into its glittering eyes.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  “I am a Messenger of Cellur.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I have not been instructed in the description of him.”

  “What is his purpose?”

  “I have not been instructed in the description of that.”

  “What is the exact nature of the threat perceived by him?”