M. John Harrison - Viriconium 2 - A Storm Of Wings

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A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison

•Chapter One

•Chapter Two

•Chapter Three

•Chapter Four

•Chapter Five

•Chapter Six

•Chapter Seven

•Chapter Eight

•Chapter Nine

•Chapter Ten

•Chapter Eleven

1: The Moon Looking Down

In the dark tidal reaches of one of those unnamed rivers which spring from the mountains behind Cladich,

on a small domed island in the shallows before the sea, fallen masonry of a great age glows faintly under

the eye of an uncomfortable Moon. A tower once stood here in the shadow of the estuarine cliffs, made

too long ago for anyone to remember, in a way no-one left can understand, from a single obsidian

monolith fully two hundred feet in length. For ten thousand years wind and water scoured its southern

face, finding no weakness; and at night a yellow light might be discerned in its topmost window, coming

and going as if someone there passed before a flame. Who brought it to this rainy country, where in

winter the gales drive the white water up the Minch and fishermen from Lendalfoot shun the inshore

ground, and for what purpose, is unclear. Now it lies in five pieces. The edges of the stone are neither

shattered nor worn, but melted like candlewax. The causeway that once gave access here - from a beach

on the west bank where lumps of volcanic glass are scattered on the sand - is drowned now, and all that

comes up it from the water is a strange lax vegetation, a sprawl of giant sea-hemlock which for some

reason has forsaken the mild and beneficial brine of the estuary to colonise the beach, spread its pale and

pulpy stems over the shattered tower, and clutch at a stand of dead, white pines.

In this time, in the Time of the Locust, when we have nothing to ourselves but the hollowness within us, in

the Time of Bone, when we have nothing to do but wait, nothing human moves here. Nothing human has

moved here for eighty years. Fire, were it brought here, would be pale and dim, hard to kindle. Passion

would fade here on a whisper. Something in the tower's fall has poisoned the air here, and drained the

landscape of its power. White and sickly and infinitely slow, the hemlock creeps out of the water to run

sad rubbery fingers over the rubbish in the fallen rooms. The collapse of the tower seems complete, the

defeat of artifice accomplished.

Yet in the Time of the Locust are we not counselled to patience? Eighty years have passed since

tegeus-Cromis broke the yoke of Canna Moidart, since the Chemosit fell and the Reborn Men came

among us; and in the deeps of this autumn night, under the aegis of an old and bitter geology, we witness

here in events astronomical and enigmatic an intersection crucial to both the Earth and the precarious

foothold on it of the adolescent Evening Cultures. 'Wait! Things are. Things happen. Only wait!'The

estuarine cliffs impend, black, expectant; the air is full of frost and anticipation...

It is the hour of our old enemy, the Moon. Her fugitive reflections shiver on the water amid the cold

unmeaning patterns of the wind. Above, her tense circle aches across the sky (imprisoned there within it,

staring down, the pocked face of our mysterious crone, our companion of a million-million years).

Somewhere between midnight and dawn, in that hour when sick men topple from the high ledges of

themselves and fall into the darkness; suddenly and with no warning; something can be seen to detach

itself from the edge of that charmed circle and, through the terrible spaces surrounding, speed towards

the Earth. It is only a tiny puff of vapour, a cloud of pollen blown across a single ray of light in some

darkened, empty room - gone in the time it takes to blink, to rub the eyes and rearrange the waiting brain:

but nothing like this has been seen for ten thousand years; and though all might seem unchanged, and the

Moon hang never so white and hard over the rim of the cliffs, like a powdered face yearning from a

vacant doorway, and the memory decide the eye has played it false - nothing will ever be the same

again.

Not many hours later, as the thin, uncertain light of day spreads like smoke between the soft fat stems,

limning the fallen column of the tower, a figure emerges from the hemlock thickets - puzzled and reluctant

as if harried from a deep sleep - to scan the southern sky where the Moon is still a bone-white image, the

cankered face which lingers in a dream. The old man shivers a little, and settles his cloak about his

shoulders; they confront for a time, man and planet. But then in an instant, sunrise proper has splattered

everything below with blood - the sea, the shore, the hemlock and the old man's cloak all smeared and

dappled with it - and he turns urgently away to drag from cover a small crude wooden boat. Its keel

grates on the shingle, oars fall whitely on the water. The day brightens, but as he rows, the old man

winces from the ominous sky. Beaching his boat on the western shore, muttering and panting with the

effort, he pauses at the water's edge for a final glimpse of the tower, locked in its long struggle with

decay; then shrugs and hurries up a flight of steps cut long ago into the cliff. While behind him, a single

fish eagle with wings of a curious colour beats up out of the bright south and swoops over the island like

a valediction.

In the Time of the Locust it is given to us to see such things.

The Reborn Men do not think as we do. They live in waking dreams, pursued by a past they do not

understand, harried by a birthright which has no meaning to them: taunted by amnesia of the soul.

Alstath Fulthor, the first of them to be drawn by Tomb the Iron Dwarf from millenial interment in the

Lesser Rust Desert, remembered nothing of his previous life: instead, his steps were dogged by a

suspicion he could not make plain even to himself. His body, his blood, his very germ cells knew (or so it

seemed to him), but could find no everyday language in which to tell him what his life had been like during

the frigid lunacy of the Afternoon. Dark hints reached him. But the quivering fibrils of his nervous system

were adjusted to receive messages dispersed a thousand or more years before, intimations faded on the

winds of time.

In the months following his revival he dreamt constantly: Sometimes of a large silver insect, clicking and

metallic, the life-cycle of which he was able to observe in all its main aspects; at others of a woman (who

sat alone in a room so tall that its ceiling was a web of shadow, spinning a golden thread which, of its

own accord, rose and flickered from her hands until it filled all that mysterious, immense, whispering

space above her). In the ruck and ruin of Soubridge, with its warehouses full of rotting fish and

massacred children, during the long icy march through the Monar Mountains in winter, and at the

storming of the North-East Gate, these images came repeatedly between him and the battle: the insect

with its expressionless faceted eyes, the woman with her jewelled spinaret. (Often he inflicted dreadful

cuts on its carapace; or smeared her sleeve with blood; and once, as he fought his way through the

streets of Viriconium to shake the hand of Tomb the Dwarf over a heap of Northmen's corpses, the

flames along the Proton Circuit merged for a moment with the woman's strange writhing skein, so that his

past and his present crackled in a lightning arc through his mind and he fell on his face blinded, and was

taken for dead, no longer able to tell which was real - the airy whisper of the city fires or the roaring of

that golden cloud . . . ) Steadily though, as if he were leaving the haven of some second childhood, even

these reference points seemed to be withdrawn from him, to be replaced by a rushing chaos, the sense of

an act of memory continually performed without relief, a hidden river in the night, from which might

sometimes surface unbidden some fragment of an event drifting like a dead branch amid the unidentifiable

rubbish of the tides...

A face stalked him between the twilit stacks of the ancestral library, bobbing like a balloon. It came very

close to his, twitching and dissolving under the impact of some deeply felt emotion, then retreated with a

hiss of indrawn breath;

'What are you doing?'someone asked him. They were outside the walls but he didn't know where..

He stumbled through the arteries of his home, his brain buzzing and vibrating with a new vigour,

discovering chambers and oubliettes he had never seen before. At every turn hands beckoned him in...

Here, organic towers, tall shapeless masses of tissue cultured from the plasm of ancient mammals,

trumpeted and moaned across the abandoned wastes of another continent, their huge cynical voices

modulating on the wind, now immensely distant, now close at hand. Natural philosophy, they maintained

(holding him to be in heresy), is a betrayal of invention. It is an edifice of clay. It was always night

there...

A city spread itself before him in the wet, equivocal afternoon light like interrupted excavations in a

sunken garden. It could be reached by a ladder of bone. 'I will go down into that place!'

With these poor and misleading relics of a dead culture he tried to create a past for himself and so

achieve, like any other human being, some experiential perspective from which to judge his own actions;

crouching, as it were, on the banks of his own internal stream and scooping from the water those things

which floated closest. They rarely helped him in dealing with the new reality of the Evening Cultures. And

at least one of the catches he made in this manner came to haunt him, a dead thing risen from the

bottom-mud of one incarnation to infect his perception of the other. It was not a normal memory,

rendered as an image - a sound, a scent, a vision of a face or place: rather it came as an act he felt

compelled to perform - or one which his body might perform quite of its own accord, as if his muscles

remembered what he did not - and in performing, recall.

Eighty years, then, had passed since tegeus-Cromis broke the yoke of Canna Moidart, since the

Chemosit fell and dragged the North down with them; and Aistath Fulthor, first among the Reborn Men,

heir to a technology whose power he could not really appreciate, a lord respected among the councils of

the Pastel City, was running through the foothills of the Monar as if his life depended upon it, without any

knowledge of why he ran or what compelled him to do it.

He was a tall man, as are all the Reborn, and a thin one, clad in tunic and trousers of black satin, the

contorted yellow crest or ideograph of his House writhing over his breast. On his feet were the curious

flimsy shoes his race wears in preference to boots, and at his waist hung a short force knife or baan, dug

up along with its ancient ceramic scabbard from some desert. His long coarse yellow hair was tangled

and damp, and sweat filmed his prominent birdlike features. He came into Dyke Head Moss over the

steep and dangerous ground at the head of Rossett Gill, the low rounded hills about him browned with

autumn; shot the screes at Surgeon's Gate with arms windmilling to keep his balance and grey dust

exploding round him as he went; and gained the valley path in a few long, energetic strides. That the pace

he set would have crippled an ordinary man he was unaware. His queer green eyes were blank and

unfocused, but with a psychic rather than a physical weariness. In the more foolish and fashionable salons

of Viriconium he was held to be the 'most human'of the Reborn; but this was a silly expression (not to say

a meaningless one), and if there was anything more or less human in his face now it was only despair.

Thirty-six hours before, black and incontrovertible, the madness had driven him from his comfortable

house on the edge of Minnet Saba, dragged him through the silent predawn streets of the city, along

Proton Circuit to the NorthEast Gate, and so up into the icy gullies of the Monar, where it showed him

the evil landscapes of quite another country (in his ears was a prolonged metallic moan rising on afdhn

wind, while against the horizon moved tall and cumbersome shapes) and drove him on with 'Run!

Run!'whispered in every chamber of the heart, shrieked in the skull's deep recess and echoed in each

atom of his pounding blood. The known world fled away from him. The running hours became simply the

spaces between dreams. The great fault between 'now'and 'then'opened itself on him like a chasm and he

ran along its rim - poised, taut, forever...

A hundred and forty miles he had come, or more, in a long loop through the hills, old landscapes

fomenting in his brain: but the fit was leaving him as he descended Dyke Head Moss, and his senses were

returned to him one by one. A stream glittered beside him. Sheep were bleating distantly as the

shepherds drove them down from the upland turf to winter pasture in the valley. The air was harsh with

the scent of peat and ling-heather, and below him the path fell away in a series of curves and re-entrants

and gentle descents to the distant city. Weariness was replacing the mixture of elation and dread which

had filled him while he ran. From a state of black exultation he tumbled into one of puzzlement. He had

run like this a thousand years before: but from what? Where had he run to? What fears had pullulated in

his brain? What curious joy?

Under the brow of Hollin Low Moor he slowed to a walk. His feet and ankles hurt. He sat on a rock by

the path to massage them, and his attention was captured by the City, waiting there in its mantle of

stillness and distance. Light flared through the haze: heliographing from the riverine curves of the Proton

Circuit; phosphorescing from the pleasure-canal at Lowth where, under a setting sun, banks of anemones

glowed like triumphal stained glass; signalling from the tiered vivid heights of Minnet-Saba, from the

inconceivable pastel towers and plazas of the Atteline Quarter. All was immaculate - illuminated,

transfigured, miniature. It attracted him not as a refuge (although he saw himself as a refugee), nor by its

double familiarity, but by its long strangeness and obstinacy in the face of Time, celebrated here in the

generation (or so it seemed) rather than the reflection of light. Viriconium, the Pastel City; a little cryptic,

a little proud, a little mad. Its histories, as forgotten as his own, made of the air a sort of amber, an

entrapment; the geometry of its avenues was a wry message from one survivor to another: and its

present, like his own, was but an implication of its past - a dream, a prediction, a brief possibility to be

endured.

Thus he fell into a reverie of dispossession, a thin man sitting on a rock in the red wash of sunset, heraldic

yellow blazing across his chest, while in his face puzzlement contended with weariness and a certain awe.

The light began to fail about him. The valley sounds intensified then died away. A cool wind sprang down

from Rossett Gill to rustle like a small animal in the bracken. When he looked up again the City was lost,

the evening grey and chilly, and an old man in a long cloak was walking up the path towards him.

He got to his feet and stretched his stiff limbs, Covertly he studied the newcomer's apparel for the Sign of

the Locust. When he could not find it he let his hand drop from the hilt of his baan.

'Hello, old man,'he said.

The old man stopped. He was barefooted and dusty, bent as if from a long journey undertaken in haste

and poverty, and his face was hidden in the depths of his hood. Fulthor would have taken him for a

tenant farmer, or one of the small shopkeepers of the south, called away from Soubridge or Lendalfoot

to bring a dowry to the wedding of a favourite daughter (copper in the shape of a dolphin, long-hoarded;

a small piece of steel equal to the profits of one fig tree), tears and unbleached cloth to the funeral of a

younger son. But his cloak was of good fabric, and woven with odd mathematical designs which seemed

to ebb and flow in the receding light. And, 'You cannot always be running, Alstath Fulthor,'he whispered,

his eyes glittering brightly from the darkness of the hood. 'Why do you waste your time - and the time of

your adopted city not less! - away in the brown hills like this?'

Fulthor was intrigued, and a little taken aback. It was a strange place for such a meeting. He shrugged

and smiled,

'Why do you waste yours in asking, old man?'he answered.

The old man shivered, and with a quick unconscious movement of the head glanced up at the southern

sky before he spoke again. The high, naked shriek of a fish eagle echoed over the fells; but there was no

moon yet in the sky.

In a palace like a shell - in Methven's Hall where the Proton Circuit draws itself up into a spiral on a

hundred pillars of thin black stone - Methvet Nian, Queen Jane, Queen in Viriconium, who in her youth

had taken to the windy birch-stands and glacial lakes of the Rannoch Moor, hunted away by the

Chemosit and wild as any moss-trooper's daughter (with the last of the Methven limping and scarred to

guard her, a poet and a dead metal bird to guide her, and a giant dwarf to expedite her passage), sat

before five false windows in a tall room floored with cinnabar crystal. She was surrounded by precious,

complex objects of forgotten use - machines or sculptures excavated from ruined cities in the Rust Desert

beyond Duirinish; curtains of pale, fluctuating light drifted irregularly about the chamber like showers of

rain; and through the dreamlike shadows thus created shambled the Queen's Beast-one of the great white

sloths of the southern forests, who are said to be the fallen remnants of a star-faring race invited or lured

to Earth during the madness of the Afternoon.

Eighty years had passed since Usheen, the first of her beasts, died on Canna Moidart's knife, and in

dying sealed the final defeat of the North. Tegeus-Cromis, lay two decades still and dead beneath the

fields of sol d'or at Lowth. Methvet Nian was no longer young, even by the standards of the Evening.

Still, in her purple eyes there might yet be discerned something of the girl who in the space of one year

lost and gained the Last Kingdom of the world: and in the dreaming light where those five false windows

showed landscapes to be found nowhere in Viriconium, her age weighed only lightly on her - like the

hand of some imaginary child. Inside, the windows flickered. Outside it was autumn; and under a cold

moon processions of men with insect faces went silently through the streets.

A curious thing happened to her.

Often in that flickering room the past had come to touch her with quiet persistence, tugging at her sleeve

in the effort to capture her attention: white hares in the twilight at Shining Clough Moss or Torside Naze;

the long brown sweep of the Rannoch peat moors like a brush stroke in some enormous written

language; desert dust piling itself noiselessly in the bleak plazas of ruined Drunmore. But these were no

more or less than the sad fingerprints of memory on her brain (she remembered the verses tegeus-Cromis

made, the ancient cry of the fish eagles, and his voice out of night and morning): tonight it was something

more. The windows flickered; the windows shimmered: the windows said

'Methvet Nian.'

All five went blank and dark.

'Methvet Nian!'

Smoke and snow filled them, a pearly-grey light like dawn over the tottering seracs of some marine

glacier in the north beyond the North. It shivered and was wrenched away -'Methvet Nian!'

Fused sand, and a sky filled with mica, the rolling dunes and dry saline wadis of the sempiternal erg. In

the fierce air hung a perfect mirage of the City, pastel towers tall and mathematical, cut with strange

designs. The wind stooped likeahawk- 'Methvet Nian!'

She approached the windows fatalistically, and with a sense of being drawn or invoked (seeing herself

perhaps walk complaisantly through them and out into some other time). Now they poured out on her a

green and submarine radiance, as if the palace she stood in truly were a shell, or a ship full of drowned

sailors spinning forever beneath the ancient clammy sea. All other lights in the throne room were dimmed;

the sloth whimpered, rearing puzzledly up on its hind legs, great ambered claws extending and retracting

nervously.

'Hush,'she said: 'Who wishes to speak to me?'and was still.

'Methvet Nian.'

The deep-sea gloom surged, foamed, blew away, like spindrift off a wave in the invisible wind, only to be

replaced by the image of a cavernous, ruined room which seemed to be full of dusty stuffed birds.

Moonlight filtered through rents in the walls. An old man stood before her, pentadic, five-imaged. His

long domed skull was yellow and fleshless, his eyes green and his lips thin. His skin was so fine and tight

as to be translucent, the bones shining through it like jade. His age, she thought, has outstripped mere

physical symptoms, and exalted him. His robe was embroidered with subtle gold designs having this

property, that in every draught of air they seemed to shift and flow, responsive to each movement of the

cloth but independent of it.

She trembled. She put out a hand to touch cold glass.

The cry of gulls rang in her ears, and the sound of a cold grey sea lapping on black sand far away and

long ago.

'Do the dead live in that country, then?'she whispered, twisting her fingers in the white fur of the sloth.

'Beyond the windows?'

'Methvet Nian.'

East and South of Monar runs a strip of heathland whose name, when it still had one, was a handful of

primitive syllables scattered like a question into the damp wind. It is a deserted and superseded country,

that one, full of the monuments and inarticulate ghosts of a race older than Viriconium, younger than the

Afternoon Cultures, and possibly more naive than either: a short-lived nation of tribal herdsmen who

buried their dead once-yearly in tiered barrows and knew nothing more of their heritage than that it

should be avoided. Of the future they knew nothing at all. Worked metal was the death-knell of them,

tolling from the crude and ceaseless smithies of the North. Their works, ridge-path and necropolis alike,

have now taken on the air of natural features and, overgrown with gorse and young beech, become one

with the sombre expanse of long mounds and shallow valleys sloping away to merge imperceptibly with

the Rannoch beyond.

This place avoided the poisoned hands of the Afternoon only to age and grow enfeebled instead.

Curlews make free of its sad desuetude; hares play in the deep cloughs and sheltered hollows of a land

which has quietly exhausted itself; it ignores the traveller, and gently seeks the night. Here on many an

evening in the latter part of the year darkness visits the earth while the pale wreck of the sunset still

commands the sky. The air is suffused with brightness yet somehow lacks the power to illuminate. In a

moment each declivity has brimmed up with shadow and become the abode of mumbling wind and the

shy thin ghosts who never cireamed of the Afternoon or knew its iron, at first or second hand. On just

such an evening one autumn, eighty years after the Fall of the North, grey smoke might have been seen

issuing from the chimney of a small red caravan parked on an old ridgeway deep in the heart of the heath;

and from a considerable hole newly-dug in the ground nearby, the chink of metal on metal -It was a

four-wheeled caravan of the type traditionally used by the Mingulay tinker to move his enormous family

and meagre equipment along the warm summer roads of the south. Indeed, the south vibrated in it, every

panel and peg, lively atrocious designs in electric blue rioting over its sides, its thick spokes picked out in

canary yellow, the curved roof a racy purple to throw back the last of the light in a challenge to the

sombre crawling umbers of the heath. The hilarious, slovenly children, it seemed, were not long departed,

run off snot-nosed to go blackberrying among the brambles. Smoke rose, and a smell of food. Two

dusty ponies tethered to the backboard with a bit of frayed rope cropped the short ridgeway turf in noisy

self-absorbtion, lop ears cocked to catch the voice of their master who, though rendered invisible by the

embankment of fresh sandy soil surrounding his pit, could be heard from time to time punctuating with vile

threats and oaths the low monotonous humming of some Rivermouth dirge. But no children returned from

the bracken (we hear their voices fade and recede across the long darkness of the heath); and this

impatient excavation continued unwearyingly until the light had almost left the sky. Long shadows

engulfed the caravan; its chimney ceased to smoke; the ponies shuffled at the end of their tether. Fresh

showers of earth added height to the ramparts. Then a peculiar thing happened.

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

2: Galen Hornwrack and the Sign of the Locust

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!

Presently he shook himself, laughed harshly, and, certain that the Californium contained no obvious trap

or enemy, abandoned the shadows like a viper. One hand hung visible by his side while the other,

beneath his threadbare grey cloak, rested on the hilt of his good plain knife. In that manner he made his

way through the notorious chromium portals behind which Rotgob Mungo, a Captain of the North, had in

the last days of Canna Moidart's rule laid his vain and valiant plans to break the siege of the

Artists'Quarter, only to bleed out his life - albeit more honourably than many of his kin - under the strange

axe of Alstath Fulthor.

Californium! The very word is like a bell, tolling all the years of the City - tolling for the mad poets of the

Afternoon with all their self-inflicted wounds and desperate drugged sojourns at its rose-coloured glass

tables; tolling for their skinless jewelled women who, lolling beneath the incomprehensible frescoes, took

tea from porcelain as lucid as a baby's ear; tolling forJiro-San and Adolf Ableson, for Clane and Grishkin

and the crimes which sickened their minds in the rare service of Art - their formless, quavering light

extinguished now, their names forgotten, their feverish stanzas no more than a faint flush on the face of the

world, a fading resonance in the ears of Time!

Californium! - a knell for the new nobles of Borring's court, the unkempt rural harpists who only five

centuries ago filled the place with sawdust and thin beer and vomit, beating out their sagas and great lying

epics like swords on a Rivermouth anvil while Viriconium, the only city they had ever seen, refurbished

itself around them, (remembering, perhaps, its long declining dream) and, at the head of Low Leedale,

the cold stronghold of Duirinish levered its way upward stone by stone to bar the way to the wolves of

the North. They were here!

Here too came the young tegeus-Cromis, a lord in Methven's halls before the death of his proud sister,

morose and ascetic in a bice velvet cloak, eager to stitch the night through with the eerie self-involved

notes of a curious Eastern gourd . . . Californium! Philosophers and tinkers; poetry, art and revolution;

princes like vagrants and migrant polemicists with voices soft as a snake's; the absolute beat and quiver

of Time, the voice of the City; millennia of verse echo from its chromium walls, drift in little dishonest

flakes of sound from that peculiarly frescoed ceiling!

Tonight it was like a grave.

Tonight (with the night in the grip of the Locust, at the mercy of a poetry as icy and formal as an instinct)

it was filled with the singular moonlight, bright yet leaden, arctic and elusive, that seeped in from the

street. It was cold. And from its windows the City was a broad ingenuous diorama, blue-grey,

lemon-yellow, textured like crude paper. Each table cast a precise dull shadow on the floor, as did each

table's occupant, caught in frozen contemplation of some crime or moral feebleness; Lord Mooncarrot,

he with the receding brow and rotting Southern estates (gardens filled with perspiring leaden statuary and

wild white cats), pondering the blackmail of his wife; Ansel Verdigris the derelict poet, head like an

antipodean cockatoo's, fingering his knife and two small coins; Chorica nam Vell Ban, half-daughter of

the renegade Norvin Trinor, forgiven but shunned by the society she craved: the persistent moon

illuminated them all, and shadows ate their puzzled faces, a handful of rogues and poseurs and failures

watching midnight away in the security of their own sour fellowship.

Lord Galen Hornwrack found an empty table and settled himself among them to drink cheap wine and

stare impassively into the lunar street, waiting for whatever the long empty night might bring.

(It was to bring him three things: the Sign of the Locust; a personal encounter wan and oblique enough for

the bleak white midnight outside; and a betrayal.)

The Sign of the Locust is unlike any other religion invented in Viriconium. Its outward forms and

observances - its liturgies and rituals, its theurgic or metaphysical speculations, its daily processionals -

seem less an attempt by men to express an essentially human invention than the effort of some raw and

independent Idea - a theopneustia, existing without recourse to brain or blood: a Muse or demiurge - to

express itself It wears its congregation like a disguise: we did not so much create the Sign of the Locust

as invite it into ourselves, and now it dons us nightly like a cloak and domino to go abroad in the world.

Who knows exactly where it began, or how? For as much as a century (or as little as a decade: estimates

vary) before it made its appearance on the streets, a small group or cabal somewhere in the City had

propogated its fundamental tenet - that the appearance of 'reality'is quite false, a counterfeit or artefact of

the human senses. How hesitantly they must have crept from alley to alley to confirm one another in their

grotesque beliefs! How shy to confide them! And yet: the War had left our spirits as ruinous as the

Cispontine Quarter. We were tired. We were hungry. The coming of the Reborn Men was disheartening,

unlooked for, punitive. It left us with a sense of having been replaced. How eagerly in the end we

clutched at this pitiless, elegant systemization of one simple nihilistic premise!

'The world is not as we perceive it,'maintained the early converts, 'but infinitely more surprising. We must

cultivate a diverse view.'This mild (even naive) truism, however, was to give way rapidly - via a series of

secret and bloody heretical splits - to a more radical assertion. A wave of murders, mystifying to the

population at large, swept the City. It was during this confused period that the Sign itself first came to

light, that simple yet tortuous adaptation of the fortune teller's MANTIS symbol which, cut in steel or

silver, swings at the neck of each adherent. Ostlers and merchant princess, soldiers and shopkeepers,

astrologers and vagabonds, were discovered sprawled stiffly in the gutters and plazas, strangled in an

unknown fashion and their bodies tattooed with symbolical patterns, as the entire council of the Sign,

elected by secret ballot from the members of the original cabal, tore itself apart in a grotesque

metaphysical dispute. A dreadful sense of immanence beset the City. 'Life is a blasphemy,'announced the

Sign. 'Procreation is a blasphemy, for it replicates and fosters the human view of the universe.'

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AStormofWingsbyM.JohnHarrisonAStormofWings©1980byM.JohnHarrison·ChapterOne·ChapterTwo·ChapterThree·ChapterFour·ChapterFive·ChapterSix·ChapterSeven·ChapterEight·ChapterNine·ChapterTen·ChapterEleven1:TheMoonLookingDownInthedarktidalreachesofoneofthoseunnamedriverswhichspringfromthemountainsbehindCladi...

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