M. Harrison - A Storm of Wings

We hear that Lord Mooncarrot is seen about with Chorica nam VeIl Ban, that cold fish. He has received her mother at his house in Minnet-Saba: rumour is rife. We hear that the feverish Madame 'L'has ceased her visits to the Boulevard Aussman, is cured of all but her bad taste, and this week reopens her salon. We hear that Paulinus Rack, the fat poetaster and undertaker's agent has come by a packet of manuscript in not-unquestionable circumstances, and plans soon to edit a volume of the cockatoo's work. He can be seen any day, with his fat hands and jade cane, drinking lemon gin at the Bistro Californium. (He has theory of the Locust Winter and its madness. Who does not? Invite him to dinner and he will spill it on his waistcoat with the custard.) As for the rest of the Low City: the younger poets favour a Bistro gnosticism – the World, they say, has already ended, and we are living out hours for which no chronology allows. They cut atrocious figures as they swagger about the Artists'Quarter practising their polemic. And these days so many poseurs are wearing the meal-coloured cloak that the bravos have taken in defence to yellow velvet.

In short, the Eternal City stands as it once did, infuriating, beautiful, vulgar by turns. Only the Reborn are missing. You do not see them now in the Atteline Quarter, or on the Proton Circuit hurrying from the palace on an errand of Alstath Fuithor's. (He has never returned. The Low City always knew something like this would happen. It taps the side of its nose: sniffs.) After the persecutions they endured at the hands of the Sign, the majority of them will never come here again. They will live now in the deserts for many generations, their germ-plasm becoming as alien as that of the big lizards of the Great Brown Waste, refining their theory of Time, redefining their heritage, growing mad and strange.

In the evenings Queen Jane, Methvet Nian of Viriconium, sits in the side chamber or salle she uses as a library and drawing room, sometimes meditating this loss, which is one of many in her life. 'A world trying to remember itself:'surrounded by her sheets of music and delicate little corals, she has the wry but supple calm ofan ageing danseuse; keeps in a rosewood chest with copper reinforcing bands a gourd-shaped musical instrument from the deep East; hears the past in every passing footstep, and wonders often what became of the sword and the mail and the assassin she gave them to.

'I had hoped for so much from the Reborn,'she confides to her new advisor, the old man who is so very rarely seen in public. 'We might have rebuilt our culture. Yet they were perhaps too concerned with their own salvation to teach us… And we always too uncomplicated for their delicate nerves…'

She closes her eyes.

'They enriched us even so. Can you still see them, Cellur, when Tomb woke them first? What a pageant they made, there in the brain chamber at Knarr, with all their strange weapons!'

He can see nothing. He was not there. But he has forgotten even that (or perhaps he realizes that she has) and with a small diffident movement of his hands says, 'I am sure I do, my lady;'then, remembering something else, smiles suddenly. 'Did I not live then in a tower by the sea?'

Ten thousand grey wings beat down the salty wind, like a storm in his head!