Chapter Ten

Canna Moidart's long thrust into the South reached Mingulay and guttered. The town fell, but in the bleak streets behind the sea-front, the chemosit sensed there was nowhere further to go: they slaughtered the civilians, and then, quite without purpose or emotion, turned on their masters, who died in a smell of blood and fish…

While, in the back alleys of Soubridge and the Pastel City, death wore precise, mechanical limbs… A greater war had begun… Or perhaps it had never finished, and the automata were completing a task they had started over a thousand years before… The Northmen desperately needed enemies…

'A forbidding prospect.'

tegeus-Cromis and Tomb the dwarf stood at the summit of a rainswept ridge in the South of that narrow neck of land which separates the Monadliath Mountains from the sea.

The country around them was alkaline and barren, an elevated limestone region seamed and lined with deep gullies by the almost constant rain: in areas, rock strata that had resisted the erosion of millennia made tall, smooth, distorted columns which stood out above time surmounding land.

'An old road runs through it, according to the Birdmaster. What we seek is at the end of it – perhaps. You are sure you will recognise it?'

Above the grotesque spires and limb-shapes of the terrain, grey clouds were flung out across a drab sky, and the wind was bitter. Tomb tapped enormous steel fingers impatiently against the left leg of his exoskeleton.

'How many times must you be told? Cellur taught me.'

They had been five days travelling. On the first night, the successful skirting of Lendalfoot and its uneasy garrison of Northmen, the fording of the major estuary of the Girvan Bay at low tide: but the next afternoon, crofters living in the south-western shadow of Monadliath had warned them of chemosit advance parties operating in the area, and their movements had been cautious thereafter.

Now, the vanguard of the South Forest barred their path.

The land sloped away from them for five miles, growing steadily less tortured as the limestone faded out. Low scrub and gorse made their appearance, gave way to groves of birch: then the black line of the trees – dark, solid, stretching like a wooden wall from the thousand-foot line of the mountains to the chalk pits by the sea.

'Well,'said Cromis, 'we have no choice.'

He left the dwarf staring ahead and made his way down the greasy Northern slope of the ridge to where Birkin Grif and Methvet Nian huddled with the horses under a meagre overhang, rain plastering their cloaks to their bodies and their hair to their heads.

'The way is clear to the forest. Hard to tell if anything moves out there. We gain nothing by waiting here. Grif, you and I had better begin thinking of our way through the trees.'

Within half a day they were lost among the green cathedrals.

There was no undergrowth, only trunks and twisted limbs; their horses stumbled over interlaced roots, the going was slow. There was no movement or sound among the lower branches, only the slow drip of moisture percolating from the groined gmey spaces above. Pines gave way to denser plots of oak and ash, and there was no path: only the aimless roads their minds made through the trees.

Mid afternoon.

In a clearing of gigantic, wan hemlock and etiolated nettle, Tomb the dwarf left them.

'It is a bitch that I have to do your work, too,'he muttered. 'Stay here.'And he strode off, chopping a straight route with his big axe, uprooting saplings out of spite.

Shaggy mosses grew on the Southern faces of the trees that ringed the glade; wet fungoid growths like huge plates erupted on their cloven massive trunks, bursting putrescently when touched. The light was lichen-grey, oppressive.

'We have come too far to the west,'said Birkin Grif, glancing round uncomfortably. 'The land begins to slope.'After a pause, he added in his own defense: 'The Birdmaker was less than explicit.'

'The fault is also mine,'Cromis admitted.

Methven Nian shivered. 'I hate this place.'

Nothing more was said: voices were heavy and dead, conversation fell like turf on a grave, or the thud of hooves on endless leaf-mould.

At dusk, the dwarf returned, a little less sullen. He bowed to the Queen.

'Tomb, my lady,'he explained: 'An itinerant dwarf of menacing demeanour. Mechanic and pathfinder -'Here, he glanced witheringly at Cromis and Grif, who had both become interested in a thicket of nightshade '- at your service.'

He sniggered.

He led them to a poorly-defined path overshadowed by great rough blackthorn, the light failing around them. As the sun died without a sound somewhere off behind the trees and the clouds, they came to a broad, wasted space running to North and South in the mounting gloom.

Fireweed and thistle grew thickiy there, but it could not disguise the huge, canted stone slabs, twenty yards on a side and settling into the floor of the forest, that had once made up a highway of gargantuan proportion. Nor could the damp moss completely obscure the tall megalith; deeply inscribed with a dead language, that lined the way to the city in the forest:

Thing Fifty, a capitol of the South in days beyond the memory of Cellur's marvellous tower.

They camped on the road, in the lee of an overgrown slab; and their fire, calling across Time, perhaps, as well as space, brought out the sloths…

'Something is out there,'said Birkin Grif.

He got to his feet, stood with the flames flickering on his back, looking into the terrible silences of the forest. He drew his broadsword.

Flames and stillness.

'There,'he hissed. He ran forward into the shadows, whirling the long blade round his head.

'Stop!'cried Methvet Nian. 'My lord – leave them be!'

They came shambling slowly into the light, three of them. Grif gave ground before them, his weapon reflecting the flames, his breath coming slow and heavy.

They blinked. They reared on to their great stubby hind legs, raising their forepaws, each one armed with steely cutting claws. Patterns of orange firelight shifted across their thick white pelts.

Fifteen feet high, they stared mutely down at Grif, their tranquil brown eyes fixed myopically on him. They swayed their blunt, shaggy heads from side to side. Grif retreated.

Slim and quick as a sword, her hair a challenge to the fire, Methvet Nian, Queen and Empress, placed herself between him and the megatheria.

'Hello, my old ones,'she whispered. 'Your kindred sends you greetings from the palace.'

They did not understand. But they nodded their heads wisely, and gazed into her eyes. One by one, they dropped to their haunches, and ambled to the fire which they examined thoroughly.

'They are the Queen's Beasts, my lord,'said Methvet Nian to Birkin Grif. 'And once they may have been more than that. No harm will come to us from them.'

In two days, they came to Thing Fifty. It was a humbled city, ten square miles of broken towers, sinking into the soft earth.

Squares and plazas, submerged beneath. fathoms of filthy water, had become stagnant, stinking lakes, their surfaces thickly coated with dead brown leaves. Black ivy clutched the enduring metals of the Afternoon Cultures, laid its own meandering inscriptions over bas-reliefs that echoed the geometries of the Pastel City and the diagrams that shifted across the robe of Cellur.

And everywhere, the trees, the fireweed, the pale hemlock:

Thing Fifty had met a vegetable death with thick, fibrous, thousand-year roots.

Between the collapsed towers moved the megatheria, denizens of the dead metropolis. They lived in sunken rooms, moved ponderously through the choked streets by night and day, as if for millennia they had been trying to discover the purpose of their inheritance.