littlenight.”
“I’m glad I won’t have to help.”
“He has his own kind of courage, you know. I don’t think I could endure the life of a cripple, but I have yet to hear him utter a single word of complaint.”
“Why do you keep talking about sickness when you know I don’t like it?” Fera stood up and smoothed the wispy plumage of her clothing. “We have time to walk by the White Fountains, haven’t we?”
“Only for a few minutes.” Toller linked arms with his wife and they crossed the Plaza of the Navigators and walked along the busy avenue which led to the municipal gardens. The fountains sculpted in snowy Padalian marble were seeding the air with a refreshing coolness. Groups of people, some of them accompanied by children, were strolling amid the islands of bright foliage and their occasional laughter added to the idyllic tranquillity of the scene.
“I suppose this could be regarded as the epitome of civilised life,” Toller said. “The only thing wrong with it — and this is strictly my own point of view — is that it is much too.…” He stopped speaking as the braying note of a heavy horn sounded from a nearby rooftop and was quickly echoed by others in more distant parts of the city.
“Ptertha!” Toller swung his gaze upwards to the sky.
Fera moved closer to him. “It’s a mistake, isn’t it, Toller? They don’t come into the city.”
“We’d better get out of the open just the same,” Toller said, urging her towards the buildings on the north side of the gardens. People all about him were scanning the heavens, but — such was the power of conviction and habit — only a few were hurrying to take cover. The ptertha were an implacable natural enemy, but a balance had been struck long ago and the very existence of civilisation was predicated on the ptertha’s behaviour patterns remaining constant and foreseeable. It was quite unthinkable that the blindly malevolent globes could make a sudden radical change in their habits — in that respect Toller was at one with the people around him — but the news from the provinces had implanted the seeds of unease deep in his consciousness. If the ptertha could change in one way — why not in another?
A woman screamed some distance to Toller’s left, and the single inarticulate pulse of sound framed the real world’s answer to his abstract musings. He looked in the direction of the scream and saw a single ptertha descend from the sun’s cone of brilliance. The blue-and-purple globe sank into a crowded area at the centre of the gardens, and now men were screaming too, counterpointing the continuing blare of the alarm horns. Fera’s body went rigid with shock as she glimpsed the ptertha in the last second of its existence.
“Come on!” Toller gripped her hand and sprinted towards the peristyled guildhalls to the north. In his pounding progress across the open ground he had scant time in which to look out for other ptertha, but it was no longer necessary to search for the globes. They could be readily seen now, drifting among the rooftops and domes and chimneys in placid sunlight.
There could only have been a few citizens of the Kolcorronian empire who had never had a nightmare about being caught on exposed ground amid a swarm of ptertha, and in the next hour Toller not only experienced the nightmare to the full but went beyond it into new realms of dread. Displaying their terrifying new boldness, the ptertha were descending to street level all over the city — silent and shimmering — invading gardens and precincts, bounding slowly across public squares, lurking in archways and colonnades. They were being annihilated by the panic-stricken populace, and it was here that the terms of the ancient nightmare became inadequate for the actuality — because Toller knew, with a bleak and wordless certainty, that the invaders represented the new breed of ptertha.
They were the plague-carriers.
In the long-running debate about the nature of the ptertha, those who spoke in support of the idea that the globes possessed some qualities of mind had always pointed to the fact that they judiciously avoided cities and large towns. Even in sizable swarms the ptertha would have been swiftly destroyed on venturing into an urban environment, especially in conditions of good visibility. The argument had been that they were less concerned with self-preservation than with avoiding wasting their numbers in futile attacks — clear evidence of mentation — and the theory had had some validity when the ptertha’s killing range was limited to a few paces.
But, as Toller had intuited at once, the livid globes drifting down in Ro-Atabri were plague-carriers.
For every one of them destroyed, many citizens would be lost to the new kind of poisonous dust which killed at great range, and the horror did not stop there — because the grim new rules of conflict decreed that each direct victim of a ptertha encounter would, in the brief time remaining to them, contaminate and carry off to the grave perhaps dozens of others.
An hour elapsed before the wind conditions changed and brought the first attack on Ro-Atabri to an end, but — in a city where every man, woman and child was suddenly a potential mortal enemy and had to be treated as such — Toller’s nightmare was able to continue for much, much longer.… A rare band of rain had swept over the region during the night and now, in the first quiet minutes after sunrise, Toller Maraquine found himself looking down from Greenmount on an unfamiliar world. Patches and streamers of ground-hugging mist garlanded the vistas below, in places obscuring Ro-Atabri more effectively than the blanket of ptertha screens which had been thrown over the city since the first attack, almost two years earlier. The triangular outline of Mount Opelmer rose out of an aureate haze to the east, its upper slopes tinted by the reddish sun which had just climbed into view.
Toller had awakened early and, driven by the restlessness which recently had been troubling him more and more, had decided to get up and walk alone in the grounds of the Peel.
He began by pacing along the inner defensive screen and checking that the nets were securely in place. Until the onslaught of the plague only rural habitations had needed ptertha barriers, and in those days simple nets and trellises had been adequate — but all at once, in town and country alike, it had become necessary to erect more elaborate screens which created a thirty-yard buffer zone around protected areas. A single layer of netting still sufficed for the roofs of most enclosures, because the ptertha toxins were borne away horizontally in the wind, but it was vital that the perimeters should be double screens, widely separated and supported by strong scaffolding.
Lord Glo had gratified Toller by giving him, in addition to his normal duties, the responsible and sometimes dangerous task of overseeing the construction of the screens for the Peel and some other philosophy buildings. The feeling that he was at last doing something important and useful had made him less unruly, and the risks of working in the open had provided satisfactions of a different kind. Borreat Hargeth’s only significant contribution to the anti-ptertha armoury had been the development of an odd-looking L-shaped throwing stick which flew faster and farther than the standard Kolcorronian cruciform, and in which in the hands of a good man could destroy globes at more than forty yards. While supervising screen construction Toller had perfected his skill with the new weapon, and prided himself on having lost no workers directly to the ptertha.
That phase of his life had drawn to its ordained close, however, and now — in spite of all his efforts — he was burdened with a sense of having been caught like a fish in the very nets he had helped to construct. Considering that more than two thirds of the empire’s population had been swept away by the virulent new form of pterthacosis, he should have been counting himself fortunate to be alive and healthy, with food, shelter and a lusty woman to share his bed — but none of those considerations could offset the gnawing conviction that his life was going to waste. He instinctively rejected the Church’s teaching that he had an endless succession of incarnations ahead of him, alternating between Land and Overland; he had been granted only one life, one precious span of existence, and the prospect of squandering what remained of it was intolerable.
Despite the buoyant freshness of the morning air, Toller felt his chest begin to heave and his lungs to labour as though with suffocation. Close to sudden irrational panic, desperate for a physical outlet for his emotions, he reacted as he had not done since his time of exile on the Loongl peninsula. He opened a gate in the Peel’s inner screen, crossed the buffer zone and went through the outer screen to stand on the unprotected slope of Greenmount. A strip of pasture — deeded to the philosophy order long ago — stretched before him for several furlongs, its lower end slanting down into trees and mist. The air was almost completely still, so there was little chance of encountering a stray globe, but the symbolic act of defiance had an easing effect on the psychological pressure which had been building within him.
He unhooked a ptertha stick from his belt and was preparing to walk farther down the hill when his attention was caught by a movement at the bottom edge of the pasture. A lone rider was emerging from the swath of woodland which separated the philosophers’ demesne from the adjacent city district of Silarbri. Toller brought out his telescope, treasured possession, and with its aid determined that the rider was in the King’s service and that he bore on his chest the blue-and-white plume-and-sword symbol of a courier.
His interest aroused, Toller sat down on a natural bench of rock to observe the newcomer’s progress. He was reminded of a previous time when the arrival of a royal messenger had heralded his escape from the miseries of the Loongl research station, but on this occasion the circumstances were vastly different. Lord Glo had been virtually ignored by the Great Palace since the debacle in the Rainbow Hall. In the old days the delivery of a message by hand could have implied that it was privy, not to be entrusted to a sunwriter, but now it was difficult to imagine King Prad wanting to communicate with the Lord Philosopher about anything at all.
The rider was approaching slowly and nonchalantly. By taking a slightly more circuitous route he could have made the entire journey to Glo’s residence under the smothering nets of the city’s ptertha screens, but it looked as though he was enjoying the short stretch of open sky in spite of the slight risk of having a ptertha descend on him. Toller wondered if the messenger had a spirit similar to his own, one which chafed under the stringent anti-ptertha precautions which enabled what was left of the population to continue with their beleaguered existences.
The great census of 2622, taken only four years earlier, had established that the empire’s population consisted of almost two million with full Kolcorronian citizenship and some four million with tributary status. By the end of the first two plague years the total remaining was estimated at rather less than two million. A minute proportion of those who survived did so because, inexplicably, they had some degree of immunity to the secondary infection, but the vast majority went in continual fear for their lives, emulating the lowliest vermin in their burrows. Unscreened dwellings had been fitted with airtight seals which were clamped over doors, windows and chimney openings during ptertha alerts, and outside the cities and townships the ordinary people had deserted their farms and taken to living in woodlands and forests, the natural fortresses which the globes were unable to penetrate.
As a result agricultural output had fallen to a level which was insufficient even for the greatly reduced needs of a depleted population, but Toller — with the unconscious egocentricity of the young — had little thought to spare for the statistics which told of calamities on a national scale. To him they amounted to little more than a shadow play, a vaguely shifting background to the central drama of his own affairs, and it was in the hope of learning something to his personal advantage that he stood up to greet the arriving king’s messenger.
“Good foreday,” he said, smiling. “What brings you to Greenmount Peel?”
The courier was a gaunt man with a world-weary look to him, but he nodded pleasantly enough as he reined his bluehorn to a halt. “The message I bear is for Lord Glo’s eyes only.”
“Lord Glo is still asleep. I am Toller Maraquine, Lord Glo’s personal attendant and a hereditary member of the philosophy order. I have no wish to pry, but my lord is not a well man and he would be displeased were I to awaken him at this hour except for a matter of considerable urgency. Let me have the gist of your message so that I may decide what should be done.”
“The message tube is sealed.” The courier produced a mock-rueful smile. “And I’m not supposed to be aware of its contents.”
Toller shrugged, playing a familiar game. “That’s a pity — I was hoping that you and I could have made our lives a little easier.”
“Fine grazing land,” the courier said, turning in the saddle to appraise the pasture he had just ridden through. “I imagine his lordship’s household has not been greatly affected by the food shortages.…”
“You must be hungry after riding all the way out here,” Toller said. “I would be happy to set you down to a hero’s breakfast, but perhaps there is no time. Perhaps I have to go immediately and rouse Lord Glo.”
“Perhaps it would be more considerate to allow his lordship to enjoy his rest.” The courier swung himself down to stand beside Toller. “The King is summoning him to a special meeting in the Great Palace, but the appointment is four days hence. It scarcely seems to be a matter of great urgency.”
“Perhaps,” Toller said, frowning as he tried to evaluate the surprising new information. “Perhaps not.”
Chapter 7
“I’m not at all sure that I’m doing the right thing,” Lord Glo said as Toller Maraquine finished strapping him into his walking frame. “I think it would be much more prudent — not to mention being more fair to you — if I were to take one of the servants to the Great Palace with me and… hmm… leave you here. There is enough work to be done around the place, work which would keep you out of trouble.”
