M. Harrison: A Storm of Wings

The sound of digging ceased…

A great white light came up out of the pit and flared soundlessly into the sky like a signal to the stars..

(Simultaneously an enormous voice could be heard to shout, OOGABOURINDRA! BORGA! OOGABOURINDRA-BA!) -

And a small figure dressed in the leather leggings of a metal prospector was hurled out of the hole cartwheeling like a horse-chestnut leaf in a March wind, to fall heavily in a heap of harness near the tethered ponies, (who bared their old yellow teeth in brief contempt and immediately resumed their greedy pulling at the turf), its beard smouldering furiously, its long white hair alight, and all its accoutrements charred. For a moment it sat on the ground as if stunned; beat feebly at itself, muttering the foulest of marsh-oaths from Cladich; then sank back, insensible, silent, smoking. All around, the light that had come up from the earth was fading from white and the invisible colours through a strange series of violets and pinks to darkness and vanishment. A small breeze searched the rowan and thorn for it; shrugged; and departed.

Tomb the Iron Dwarf, acting at the lean end of his life on an impulse he didn't fully understand, had left the Great Brown Waste, his longtime prospecting ground, and in his one-hundred-and-fiftieth year travelled through Methedrin in the spring; where amid the tumbling meltwater and shortlived flower meadows he recalled other times and other journeys. Surprised by his own sentimentality and suddenly aware he was seeking something special, he'd dawdled south down the Rannoch, warming his old bones. 'One last discovery,'he had promised himself, one last communion with ancient metal, and then an end to arthritic nights; but this seemed a strange place to make it. What he might find in a land that hadn't known industry for millenia, what he might return with for the last time to the Pastel City, he couldn't imagine. He had not seen the City for twenty years, or his friend Fulthor. He had never seen the Sign of the Locust.

When he woke up, it was dark, and he was inside his caravan. A tall old man in a hooded cloak bent over him like a question mark in the orange lamplight. Strange designs worked into the weave of the garment seemed to shift and writhe as he moved.

Tomb winced away, his thick gnarled hands yearning for the axe he had not used in a decade (it lay beneath his bed; his armour was there too, packed in a trunk; so his life had gone since the Fall of the North). 'Why have yoti come here, old ghost?'he said. 'I'll cut off your arms!'he whispered as he lost consciousness again, feeling an old cruelty sweep over him like a familiar pain; and then, waking suddenly with his wide astonished eyes staring into that aged face, skin like parchment stretched over a clear lemon-yellow flame, he remembered! Ten thousand grey wings beat down the salty wind like a storm in his head!

'We thought you were dead,'he said. 'We thought you were dead!'And slept

Autumn. Midnight. The eternal City. The moon hangs over her like an attentive white-faced lover, its light reaching into dusty corners and empty lots. Like all lovers it remarks equally the blemish and the beauty spot – limning the iridium fretwork and baroque spires of the fabled Atteline Plaza even as it silvers the fishy eye of the old woman cutting fireweed and elder twigs among the ruins of the Cispontine Quarter, whose towers suffered most during the War of the Two Queens. The City is a product of her own dreams, a million years of them: now she turns in her sleep, so quietly you can hear the far-off rumour of the newest: white bones, the Song of the Locust, dry mandibles rubbing together in desert nights… or is it only a wind out of Monar, and autumn leaves filling the air, to scrape and patter in the side streets?

In the Artists'Quarter it is that hour of the night when all and nothing seems possible. The bistros are quiet. The entertainments and smoking-parlours are all closed. Even Fat Main Etteilla the fortune teller has shipped her wicked pack of cards, put up for a few hours the shutters of her grubby satin booth and waddled off with her aching ankles and her hacking cough, which is bad tonight. Canker, the Dark Man of the cards, has her by the lungs; she leans against a wall to spit in a puddle of moonlight, whispering the word that will hold him back; it falls hollowly into the vibrant, vacant street. The canker, she confides to her shadow, will take her in its own good time; at present she is less concerned about herself than her last customer of the evening. She has a wan belief in her own efficacy, and tells the silent Quarter, 'I did my best, I did my best -,

She did her best -'There is nothing good in the cards spread thus.

'Bogrib, NOTHINGNESS, crosses you, and here is NUMBER FOUR, called by some “the Name Stars”: beware a fire.

'A woman shadows you, POVERTY lies behind you, the Lessing; and before you a discussion, or it may be water.

'Nothing is clear tonight – who is that, running in the alley? I heard steps for a moment in the alley – but see the MANTIS here, praying at the Moon beneath three arches. The first is for something new; the second for injustice; under the third arch all will be made different. Something taken away long ago is now returned.

'These are your thoughts on the matter, to turn this card I must have something more. Thank you. FIVE TOWERS! Do nothing, I beseech you, that you might regret. Fear death from the air, and avoid the North -'Wait! We have hardly begun! Three more cards remain to be turned!'

– But he went all the same, rapidly down the street and into the Alley of Bakers: a dark self-sufficient figure whose face she never clearly saw, going with a light and dangerous tre ad.

Once in the alley and out of Main Etteilla's earshot (for fear perhaps she might pursue him, predicting, haranguing, or merely coughing up her lungs) he allowed himself to laugh a little, baring his teeth wryly to the grim City, the walls which contained him, the towers which had failed him, the night which covered him; and he quickened his pace, making for the Bistro Californium, that home of all errors and all who err. The air had stilled itself; it was sharp and cold, and his breath hung about him in a cloud. He did not enter the Californium at once but hung like a bird of prey on the edge of the lamplight to see who might await him inside. In this bright, static quadrant of the night's existence the City seemed shattered and fragmentary, tumbled into hard meaningless patterns of light and shade, blue and grey and faded gamboge, grainy of texture and difficult of interpretation. Stray beams of smoky lemon-yellow barred his harsh worn features, his tired hooded eyes. When a dog barked down in the Cispontine Quarter – desultory, monotonous, distant – he seemed to stiffen for a moment; pass his hand over his face; and look puzzledly about him, for all the world like a man who wakes from a nightmare to an empty, buzzing dream, and wonders briefly how his life has led him here …

Fear death from the air!

His name was Galen Hornwrack. He was a lord without a domain, an eagle without wings; and he did not fear the air, he loved it. The Way of the Two Queens had ended his boyhood without hope: and he had spent the slow years since hidden away in the mazy alleys of the Artists'Quarter, the better to regret an act of fate which (so it appeared to him) had robbed his existence of any promise or purpose before it was fairly begun. Out of spite against himself or against the world, he never knew which, he had not taken up a profession, learning to use the steel knife instead to cut a living from the streets, shunning his peers and watching himself turn from a young man full of dreams into an older one stuffed with emptiness and fear. Fear death from the air! He feared it at every corner – it yawned at him from every alley's mouth – but never from there, where he would willingly have burned or bled or hung like a corpse from the million-year gallows of his own pain!