Chapter Eleven

Brown, featureless desert slipped beneath the keel of the drifting airboat: the Lesser Waste, in all respects similar to the great dead region North of Duirinish, the spoliated remnants of an industrial hinterland once administrated from Thing Fifty.

tegeus-Cromis, Birkin Grif and Tomb the dwarf, locked in the cargo hold with the dead megatheria, paced restlessly the throbbing crystal deck. With a power blade at the neck of Methvet Nian, Norvin Trinor had forced the dwarf to give up his armour, although he had allowed him to keep his axe. He looked like an ancient, twisted child.

'A chance may come when I breach the defences of the organic.brain,'he said. He fondled the axe. He shrugged. 'Indeed, I may slip, and kill us all.'

The boat lurched in an updraught: white carcasses slid about the hold. Cromis stared from the single porthole down at the desert. Unknown to him, his fingers plucked at 'the hilt of the nameless sword.

'Whatever is done, it must not involve a fight. You understand that, Grif? I want no fighting unless we can be sure the Queen will remain unharmed.'

Grif nodded sulkily.

'In other words, do nothing,'he said.

As he spoke, the bulkhead door opened. Norvin Trinor stepped through, two of his wolves flanking him. He pulled at his drooping moustache.

'A commendable plan,'he said. 'Most wise.'He looked at Grif for some moments, then turned to Tomb. 'Dwarf, we have arrived. Look down there and tell me if this place was mentioned in your information.'

Tomb moved to the porthole.

'It is a desert. Deserts were indeed mentioned to me.'He showed his rotting teeth. 'Trinor, you are displaying a traditional foolishness. I can tell nothing for sure until we land.'

The traitor nodded curtly, and left. A few moments later, the airboat began to descend, bucking a little as it entered a low d level of wind.

Trinor's pilot settled the ship on a bare shield of black rock like an island in the rolling limbo of the dunes. The engines ceased to pulse, and a soft, intermittent hissing sound commenced beyond the hull. Time is erosion: an icy wind blew streams of dust across the surface of the rock. It had been blowing for a millennium.

They stood in the lee of the vehicle, eddies of wind wrapping their cloaks about them. Dust in their eyes and mouths. Cromis looked at the thin, hunched shoulders of the Queen. We are nothing but eroded men, he thought, Wind clothing our eyes with white ice. Benedict Paucemanly flew to the Earth. It is we who live on the barren Moon…

'Well?'said Trinor.

A hundred yards away reared the curving flank of a dune. From it poked the ends of broken and melted load girders, like a grove of buckled steel trees. They were bright, polished and eroded. Cromis, eyeing the desolation silently, became aware that beneath the muted cry of the archaic wind was a low humming: the rock beneath his feet was vibrating faintly.

Tomb the dwarf walked about. He bent down and put his ear to the rock. He got up again and dusted his leather leggings.

'This is the place,'he said. 'Begin digging at the base of the dune.'He grinned cockily at Cromis. 'The wolves become moles,'he said loudly. 'This would have taken us weeks without them. Perhaps we should thank Lord Traitor.'He strutted off to examine the girder-forest, his long white hair knotting in the wind.

With surly gruts, the Northmen were set to work; and by noon of the following day, their labours had exposed a rectangular doorway in the flank of the dune: a long low slit sealed with a slab of the same resistant obsidian stuff as had been used to construct the Birdmaker's tower.

The maker of the door had cut deep ideographs in it. Time and the desert had been unable to equal him in this respect:

the slab was as smooth and the ciphers as precise as if they had been made the day before. It seemed a pity that no one could read them.

Trinor was jubilant.

'We have a door,'he said, pulling at his moustache. 'Now let us see if our dwarf can provide a key.'He slapped Tomb jovially on the shoulder.

'You forget yourself,'murmured the dwarf.

He stood before the door, his lips moving silently. Perhaps he was recalling his apprenticeship on the fifth floor. He knelt. He passed his hands over a row of ideographs. A red glow sprang up and followed them. He murmured something:

repeated it.

'NEEDS YOU,'intoned the door abruptly, in a precise, hollow voice: 'NEEDS YOU. BAA, BAA. BAA. OUROBUNDOS-'

The gathered Northmen dropped their spades. Many of them made religious signs with their fingers. Eyes round, they clutched their weapons, breathing though their open mouths.

'DOG MOON, DOG YEARS,'moaned the door: 'BAA, BAA, BAA.'

And to each ritualistic syllable, Tomb made a suitable reply. Their dialogue lasted for some minutes before silence descended and he began again the process of moving his hands across the ancient script.

'GOLEBOG!'screamed the door.

A brief, intense flare of white light obscured the dwarf. He staggered out of it, beatig at his clothes. He chuckled. His hair reeked, his leggings smouldered. He blew on his fingers.

'The door mechanism has become insane over the years,'he said. 'It -'Here, he said a word that no one knew '- me, but I misled it. Look.'

Slowly, and with no sound, the obsidian slab had hinged downwards until it rested like the lower lip of a shack mechanical mouth on the dust, compacting it; and behind it stretched a sloping corridor lit by a pale, shifting pastel glow.

'Your door is open,'he told Trinor. 'The defences are down.'

Trinor rubbed the scar on his cheek.

'One hopes that they are,'he said. 'tegeus-Cromis enters first. If there should be a misunderstanding between him and the door, the Queen will follow.'

There were no accidents.

As Cromis entered the bunker, the door whispered malevolently to him, but it left him alone. The light shifted frequency several times as he stood there staring at the vanishing-point of the gently-sloping passage. Vague, unidentifiable musical sounds were all around him. Growing from the walls were clumps of crystal that reminded him of the Metal Salt Marsh; they pulsed regularly.

He felt no fear.

'Remain where you are, Lord Cromis.'Trinor's voice seemed muffled, distant, as though affected by passage through the open door. 'I shall expect to find you when I come through -'

He entered with sword drawn. He grinned.

'Just in case you had planned… Well, of course, I'm sure you hadn't.'He raised his voice. 'Bring the Queen through first.'

When they had assembled, the Northmen sullen and silent, keeping their eyes fixed on the floor and mis-hearing their orders, he made Tomb take the lead. 'Any… defences… you should disarm. Remember where the knife is held, dwarf, and who holds it.'

That corridor stretched for two miles into the earth. Shortly after they had begun to walk, they found that the incline had levelled off. The nature of the walls changed: ±e clumps of crystal were replaced by yard-square windows, armanged at four foot intervals. Nothing could be clearly discerned through them, but they were filled with a milky light in which were suspended vague but menacing organic shapes.

There were no turnings. Their footfalls echoed.

There were no junctions or side-passages. They did not speak.

They came eventually to a great circular chamber, in the centre of which columns of light and great rods of shadow wove patterns umpossible to understand, like spectral dancers at the end of Time. Its roof and walls, all of green diamond, made a perfect half-globe. Twelve corridors, including their own, led off it from twelve vaulting arches. Otherwise, it was totally featureless.

Those columns and cylinders of light and darkness flickered, intertwined, exchanged their substance, reversed their directions of motion. Motes of brighter light appeared suddenly among them, hovered like insects, and vanished. A single musical chord filled the place, a high cathedral resonance.