through the blood and rubble and the litter of corpses with their delicate bloodstained feet. The machines, some taking to the air, others lumbering along the ground, began to fight each other.
As the machines fought, the air filled with the sullen cough of projectile weapons, the shubilant hiss of energy beams, the hollow, booming thud of contact explosions, the thud of collisions and the high-pitched intolerable scream of despairing steel.
A light wind got up, sending the ilpses drifting away. The battle between the machines continued. Many of them sought refuge underground. The others followed, and the continuation of a very ancient war proceeded underfoot. The ground shook with muffled explosions.
The flow of blood diminished to a trickle. The last few stag fawns jumped out of the odex. The last thing to come forth was a female human dressed in silk. She slithered out of the odex and landed on her backside in the mud and muck.
'Day!' screamed Togura, with the very last of his voice.
Heedless of the danger, he raced down the roof and leapt into the courtyard. He landed, fell, and went sprawling into the soft, reeking squilg of blood and mud and water and bird droppings. As he hauled himself out of the ooze, the human female regarded him with distaste. She was, he saw, most definitely not Day Suet; she was taller, older and wore diamonds. Despite her muck-stained backside, she carried herself with all the hauteur of an empress.
'Help me,' said Togura, shambling through the mud toward her.
She took a tiny oddment from about her person and pointed it at him. The air sizzled. His limbs discoordinated and dropped him down in the filth. Slowly, cautiously, he raised his head, blinked, and peered at the woman. She asked him a question in a very foreign language.
'I don't understand,' said Togura, in a voice made of dry straw, sand, wood shavings and iron filings.
The woman looked around, taking stock of the situation. She wrinkled her nose with distaste at the shambles around her. She had nothing but contempt for everything she saw. Picking up her skirts, she began to pick her way toward the nearest exit.
'Wait!' screeched Togura, wallowing through the filth on knees and elbows. 'You have to help us. Don't go!'
The woman turned, sneered, aimed her weapon again and fired, this time giving him a blast which knocked him unconscious for a day and a night. Then she turned on her heel and left, and was never seen again in Keep.
Chapter 9
The servitor lanced one last blister. Clear fluid eased out, forming a painless tear which the servitor wiped away with a fleece-white dabbing cloth. Togura flexed his hand, which felt stiff and sore.
'Another time, bandage your hands before you fight,' said the servitor, a rough-bearded man with a strange accent. 'Until such time as your hands are battle-hardened.'
'Where did you learn that?' said Togura.
'In another place, another time.'
'Tell me about it.'
'Not today. No – don't get up. Rest. I'll be back soon with something good.'
'What?'
'Wait and see.'
The servitor departed. Togura lay back in bed, staring at the cobwebs sprawled across the timbers overhead, and listened to the fury of the autumn storm which raged without. The wilderness weather was scattering the ilpses far and wide across the land, or blowing them out to sea; it was killing or dispersing the mobs of birds; it was grounding most of those quarrelsome machines which had not yet run out of fuel. The war weather was dealing with the pests and enemies unleashed by the odex, bringing a kind of peace back to the city state of Keep.
The servitor returned, bringing a two-handled drinking jug filled with something hot and sweltering.
'Drink,' he said.
Togura did so. Warmth paunched in his belly and invaded his veins. His senses slurred. The colours of the darkened timbers overhead began to drift.
'Drink,' said the servitor, encouraging him.
Togura drank his fill. Though he was lying in bed, he felt that he was floating. He tried to ask a question. On the third attempt, he managed to curl his tongue round the word.
'What is it?'
'Quaffle,' said the servitor.
'And what's that?'
'A mixture of all good things. Alcohol, opium, hemlock, dark nightshade, the red-capped mushroom and the blue, a foreign herb called ginseng and a little oil of hashish. And honey, of course.'
'I could learn to like it.'
'You could learn too well,' said the servitor, with a laugh. 'But it's good for the sickness. Sleep now.'
And, at his command, Togura drifted off into silk-blosomed drug dreams which suckled him with nectar and fed him on honey-basted melody cats.
He woke later, in darkness. The rain and the wind were still at work beyond the walls. He was alone, without the company of so much as a candle. Lying there in the darkness, he remembered Day Suet, in spring, cradling a tiny bird in her little hands, and laughing when it stained her fingers with a tiny bit of lime. Hot tears blistered his eyes.
He wept.
Later, in the darkness, he found the two-handled drinking jug. What was left in the bottom was cold to the touch. It sidled down his throat, cold as a snake, then transmuted itself to living fire. Sweating from the heat of the fire, and reeling from weariness, he allowed his bones to compose themselves once more for sleep.
When he woke, it was morning.
The servitor brought him mutton chops, swedes, rutabaga and water cress. He ate, ravenously. For lunch, there was leek soup, venison and the brains of a pig, with a side-helping of fried snails and pickled slugs. He devoured everything. In the evening, there was a slab of bread loaded down with beefsteak and a gill of milk, with blackbird pie to follow. He polished off the lot.
'Why am I so hungry?' said Togura.
'Good health makes you so,' said the servitor.
For days, as Togura recovered from the effects of the unknown weapon which the strange woman from the odex had used to knock him unconscious, the cold rains of autumn lashed the town, washing away dead fish, drowned rats and the smells of blood and cheese. While Togura ate and slept, while the days shortened and the rains pounded down, the townspeople counted the cost of their orgiastic disaster with the odex, and argued whether it was a blessing or a disaster.
'Of course it was a disaster, no question about it!' said Shock the Cobbleman, who had broken both legs on the Night.
But not everyone was quick to agree.
On the debit side, at least thirty-four people had been killed, fifty houses flooded, seventeen other properties damaged or demolished, and incredible devastation wrought underground by war machines fighting to death in the mines. Through autumn and winter, the miners would be able to retrieve little gemstock; they would be too busy repairing and shoring up mineshafts.
On the credit side, three of the fighting machines, burrowing deep into the rock, had finally burst out into the daylight at the very bottom of Dead Man's Drop. Water was now cascading out of their escape tunnels. The problem of flooding in the mines, which had worsened as the miners delved deeper over the years, was now easing. This unexpected solution to the drainage problem meant that the total amount of gemstock available in the long term had greatly increased.
Bankers at banquet, gleaming with perspiration, toasted Togura Poulaan – also known as Barak the Battleman – with goblets of diluted ambrosia or strong mulled wine. The Gonderbrine mine, the largest in Keep, which had
