It fell over on its side and dragged itself round in a circle, a high whining sound coming from its wings. Fay Glass darted about shrieking. Fulthor hit it again; watched its redoubled frenzies with his head tilted intelligently on one side; then dropped his weapon, which immediately began fusing the ash around it into glass. 'Oh, the great cups!'he cried. 'The thousand flowers and roses! The thought with the force of a sensation!'He stared imploringly over at Hornwrack then picked up his sword again and ran off into the maze, his eyes wide and his body leaning at an incredible angle to the vertical.
The mutilated insect had fetched up against one of the cindery walls and was trying to climb it. Ash showered down. Fay Glass wept, 'Wait, we are killed here. Vienna, Blackpool, Venice, drown in their own tears. Press our world. Oh. Oh.'Above her head there materialised suddenly the ghost of Benedict Paucemanly, flabby face full of fear. It grimaced apologetically – 'Fenlen! Fenlen!'- and was carried away on some psychic current, waving its arms. Dark clouds had blown up from the west, and now a scatter of hard snow filled the grey air, pattering off the carapace of the insect, which lay motionless in a corner, a flicker of orange animating its remaining eye. The ground was ploughed up all around it. Fay Glass, exhausted, was walking round and round the central area with her hands over her face, moaning.
Hornwrack stared at the churned earth; the wreckage of the insect. He shuddered.
'Look after her,'he told Tomb the Dwarf. 'Try and find Cellur. Tell him about this. He may understand what is happening here.'And with that he set off into the maze in search of the Reborn Man.
8: Galen Hornwrack and the New Invasion
Down ran Alstath Fulthor, last representative of his House, a scarlet figure with a stride like an ostrich's; and down ran Hornwrack the assassin after him, the breath rattling in his lungs. The maze was behind them, the village before. In the maze, fearing the hidden junction, the sudden mad leap and mantid clutch, the bared teeth of an ambush, Hornwrack had drawn the old sword; out there on the plain it dragged down his arm. Westward the land was all as dark as the sky, long black salients reaching back beneath the cold clouds, their flanks scored by steep-sided valleys and dotted with piles of haunted stones. In the east a little of the early brightness remained to pick out the shattered towers of the Agdon Roches, to touch the escarpment and its oakwoods with a lichenous grey. Mist still choked the village beneath, thick and slow; but a new wind had stirred out in the Waste and was beginning to tease its edges out in streamers, like sheep's wool caught on a fence. The light infused these strands with a delicate yellow; and they smelt strongly of lemons.
Alstath Fulthor flung up his arms and was engulfed. Hornwrack followed, with a desperate cry.
The mist enwrapped them, it stuffed their lungs with cotton wool. They passed like two coughing ghosts along the silent village street. The cottages that loomed on either side were tenantless, dusty and cold, their front doors lodged open and creaking in the small winds which seemed to inhabit the inside of the mist. From the empty rooms behind issued dry smells. Birdlime was spattered beneath the eaves, and the gutters were choked with old nests. Sacking lifted in the wind; lifted, dropped, and lifted again.
Alstath Fulthor drew ahead. He became a shadow, and then only a thud of footfalls. Hornwrack ran on, isolated and a little afraid. Death, he saw, had been there before them; perhaps a month, perhaps two months before. A dead man hung half in and half out of a broken window beneath the spattered eaves. Another sat like a bundle of sticks propped up in the angle of a stone wall. They observed one another dryly, as if some old joke had recently passed between them. Their weapons were orange with rust but their bodies, instead of decomposing, seemed to have shrunk, and were as intact as tight old sheaves of straw tied up in ancient sacking; as though the mist in advancing one process of decay had retarded the other. The village was full of corpses, staring out of doorways, caught in contorted attitudes on the grass round the horse trough – looking surprised or complacent or out of breath. Others had drawn their knives and had been about to throw themselves on some enemy. A few children had fallen down during a game in which they followed one another stealthily among the houses, hands held hooked above their heads.
“'They sail inland all night,” 'thought Hornwrack, and for a moment the face of St Elmo Buffin came into his mind, decent, puzzled, wistful. “'Where they are going we do not know -“'
They had been coming here. Wherever they had come from they had ended up here, standing at salient junctions like abandoned machines, their broken antennae and cracked wings dangling in the wind, their compound eyes as dull as stones. Patches of corruption darkened the ground beneath them like tarry shadows, as if vital fluids had bled slowly from abdomen and thorax to fertilize a crop of bluish mushrooms and unearthly moulds before drying-up altogether. With this dessication had come the slow retreat of the intelligence into the husk, the drying up of the violent insectile telepathies received by Hornwrack and the others in the maze, those incidental broadcasts from the mosaic universe which had driven Buffin's sailors to burn their own ships or drown themselves in the fogbound sea.
At night, its mad energy not quite spent, a disembodied head bounced down the gutters of Hornwrack's Low City dreams, accompanied by the laughter of the crackpot poet: plainly it had originated here among these dilapidated hulks, one out of three of which had fallen under the energy blades of the Reborn villagers and, curious viscera exposed in section, now lay surrounded by a litter of amputated limbs. Someone had cut it off and sent it south as a call for help. The rest of them, though they showed a few shallow cuts and scrapes made by less exotic weapons, like violent scribbles on a lacquered screen – had evidently succumbed to the same disease as the lone survivor in the maze. Crusted discharges had swollen their joints. Strings of hardened mucus hung from the curious appendages attached by leather straps to their facial parts. They faced one another in the mechanistic postures of their death, and a faint whisper of telepathy was draped about them like a cobweb. It touched the inside of his skull as he ran dreaming between them, afraid they would come back to life if he lingered.
He ducked beneath a complicated snout. He pushed aside a canted crackling wing. He waved the old sword about until his arm ached. Later he might recall this: now he knew nothing. The wings of the wasteland locust rustled uneasily in his head, gathering for some vast migration. He no longer cared about Alstath Fulthor, running ahead in the mist. He leapt and sang like a grasshopper, and his progress had become a flight.
(Alive or dead, he managed to think, they have altered the Earth; they have changed it manifestly. Something has come into it…
… And thinking this, emerged from the village.) It was like a door opening and closing. When he looked back the mist was streaming away along the foot of the escarpment in the new wind, and the three small figures of Cellur, Tomb and Fay Glass, issuing uncertainly from the maze, had begun to cross the plain.
Hornwrack and Fulthor confronted in a stony cleft among dwarf birch and oak. A chalky light, slanting down between the brittle boughs on to banks of heather and bilberry, revealed the Reborn Man sitting quietly on an unfinished millstone, his features as white and careworn as those of a praying king. A pied bird absorbed his attention: it hopped from stone to stone, tilting its small bright eye to watch him. Chill airs rattled the twigs above his head, stirred his yellow hair. The baan in his hand flickered like a firework in the hand of a child; he had forgotten it. Votive and calm in his scarlet armour, he looked like the invalid knight in the old painting; and the overhanging towers of the Agdon Roches, with their silent gullies and damp sandy courses, rose up behind him through a screen of black branches like the buttresses of an ancient chapel.