diners in a cloud of tobacco smoke and dust, on a network of cables. At each end of it were two great, fat, steel hawsers. They ran from the ends of the girder to great winching machines, mounted on the walls of the hall.
This girder, which was as big as any cathedral bell, was the clapper.
The girder was wound slowly across the great space towards the walls. All the time the diners were eating it was being dragged through the air, metre by metre, as if part of the building itself were moving above them. At last it nestled close to the walls. The rest was simple. The winching mechanism was released, and the great beam swung through the air like a landslide in space.
You could hear the air get out of the way as the girder began its journey. It was so big it looked slow, the way a plane looks slow when it passes overhead. But it was going like a train. The air was hissing in fright and that dead weight was swinging down from heaven like the falling moon. You might have seen it all a hundred times, but when you saw it move you were certain the roof was coming down! You were dead already. You were going to get crushed like a damp pea. Not only that, but look! The beam was heading straight for the lift shaft…
Conor's men cringed, they lifted their hands over their heads and backed off with nowhere to go. At any second the beam would strike and a blizzard of glass shrapnel would rain down around them.
The beam struck, and it bounced off that glass with a crack like the back of the world was being snapped: The glass tube twitched. Colours ran all over it, like oil leaking suddenly, flushes of colours in a hundred palettes. And the lift shaft sang.
The hundred-ton girder was the clapper; the lift shaft was a tubular bell. And the whole building was the bell tower.
The sound was like the earth howling. Everyone had their fingers in their ears – they'd been told to. Even the bodyguard stood there with their fingers in, eyes rolling around to spot if anyone was going to try anything while their hands were busy. The lift shaft boomed and howled; every millimetre of air was packed with noise until it overflowed. The halfman bodyguard curled up into a ball and howled like he'd seen death coming to get him, but no one could hear a thing. On the table, the wine trembled in the glasses, the cutlery rattled. High overhead, sheets of dust began to descend. As it caught the light it looked like angels from heaven coming down in a blaze of glory, although it was only dirt.
But the strangest thing of all when the bell rang was the behaviour of the dead. They began to move. Their arms lifted, their heads shaking as if to say, no, no. They began to twist and writhe on their ropes and crosses. There was a sprinkling of bones as some of the older ones fell to pieces. As the sound began to die down, this strange phenomenon carried on, and every head in the hall turned to watch it. The wine stilled in the glasses into tittle rings. The dust arrived among the wedding guests and people flung their napkins over their food to protect it, but the dead still moved. For minutes after, when the noise was just a hum, they continued their macabre dance among the cables, turning and peering this way and that, victims of sub-sonic noises and the forces running up and down the lift shaft.
Their movements became slower and weaker until at last they hung quiet and still and the wedding guests turned away to resume their meals or talk with their neighbours about what they had just seen. But soon they turned back for another look. Something was happening that no one had ever seen before.
One of the dead refused to stay still.
It was the man with one eye. The body was still twisting his head this way and that, with its terrible smears of blood and its one dull eye. His arms seemed to have come loose from the bonds behind his back, and now he was lifting them into the air. He turned his head. Remarkable! Then suddenly he bent at the waist and reached up to seize the beam where his foot was nailed.
People jumped up and screamed. This was impossible! In a second all eyes were on the dead man. It was like a dream that wouldn't stop. When he tore out the nail with a single tug of his hands it was clear that he was coming back to life.
The screams died away one by one and a thick stillness descended on the hall. The dead man was reaching out to grasp the cables by his feet. Then, slowly, slowly, hanging by his hands, he dropped his feet until he was the right way up. There he hung for a while, staring down at the diners like a great black bird.
Outside, in the hall, people began to murmur, voices to be raised. But Val stood up and flung back his arm.
'Quiet! It seems we have a visitor…' And the hall fell silent again.
Had leaned across to his brothers and hissed, 'It must be a machine after all!' But already the blood had begun to flow again from the man's back. His face, which had been black as a clot of blood, began to turn red.
The dead man swayed slightly, hanging by his hands. He was looking down at the cabling below him, as if he was working out how to get down. The silence in the hall had grown so deep it was like the bottom of the ocean in there. The man's face was in the shadow of that wide hat, but even so you could see his one eye glittering – just like the eye of a machine, in fact.
Conor had gone white. He was pretending it was anger, although it was really fear. 'This is your creature,' he said to Val in a flat voice. Then he turned to Signy and said, 'So was it a trick all the time? Even you?'
'It wasn't! It's not… I'm not…' began Signy.
Val said, 'It's nothing to do with me, man. Don't you see? It's the gods – the old gods coming back among us. You're seeing nothing less than Odin himself.'
The dead man began to lower himself down the lift shaft. He didn't climb, he used his hands, like a huge, dark bat with his long cloak hanging around him. It was a dangerous situation. The bodyguards of both sides were twitching. Someone was going to fire and then the most powerful people of the two nations would be wiped out.
Conor licked his lips and said, 'I don't know if I believe in these gods.'
But Val laughed and said, 'Who else? Who else could do this but the masters of life and death? Ask your halfman. Look!'
At his place behind Conor's chair the halfman had sunk to one knee and bowed his head to the uninvited guest. Around the hall, a hubbub of noise rose as people argued over Val's words.
Ben was already convinced. 'He's right – look! He has one eye just like in the stories.'
Siggy was about to reply, 'Balls,' but as he opened his mouth the man slipped and fell thirty feet or more, tumbling and crashing among the cables and bodies beneath him. He landed with a great thud on the mound of bones and broken pieces of machinery at the bottom. They could hear the breath gasp out of him. Once again, he should have been dead, but instead he got slowly to his feet. To one side of him was a gap in the lift shaft where the doorway used to be. Out of this he stepped in among the company in the hall, and as he emerged, every voice in the place fell still.
Now the hall was frozen. Men who wanted to rush forward and seize the intruder found their muscles stilled. Those who wished to run from the hall for fear of the dead man found themselves rooted to their seats. There was only the soft sound of his feet on the floor. He paused for a moment and looked around the hall as if he recognised every single face there. Then, he reached to his belt and took a knife, which he held up in the air above his head. It was an old, crude, ugly thing, with a stubby, crinkled blade. Those close enough could see that it wasn't even made of metal. It was stone, chipped stone – something a caveman might have used fifty thousand years before.
The dead man turned to the lift shaft and with a sudden stab, he plunged the blade into the lift shaft. A sound like a tuning fork rang out, and the knife hung in the polished glass as if in air. The dead man turned and smiled, proud and grim, down at the captive audience, who stared transfixed at this second miracle of the day. Nothing could cut that stuff. A hundred-ton girder swung through space couldn't even dent it. But here it was, pierced by a chipped stone knife.
Only the halfman seemed to have the power of movement. He took a few steps forward from his place behind Conor's chair, fell face first to the ground, and they heard for the first time his voice, half dog, half man.
'Lord,' said the halfman.
The dead man bent and laid a hand briefly on the dogman's shoulder, then pushed his way in between the bodyguards until he came to stand behind Signy's chair. She sat twisted round staring up at him. Val, too, twisted round in his chair, panting, to look at this guest, who had taken every scrap of power from him just by being there. Only Conor couldn't look at him, but turned to glare at the bodyguards as if it was their fault that the dead man was within striking distance of him.
The dead man leaned forward. Conor cringed, like he was waiting for a cuff round the ear. But it never came. Instead, the man lifted Val's cup from the table and held it high in the air. He raised his cup to all sides of the hall,
