Dinner at Deviant's Palace (16 page)

… He could think of a lot of smooth rhymes for “break it”….

At least, he thought feverishly, I won’t wind up an old man. He spoke hoarsely into the rain: “I never did
want
to wind up an old man.”

Then, and it scared him even though he could tell it was just delirium, he thought he heard the hemogoblin’s voice from miles away across the rainy hills:
Well then
I’ll
come over and wind him up.

He shuddered, and shook his head to clear it of all these morbid, self-pitying ideas. There you go again focusing only on Rivas, he told himself. You’re just fascinated by the Gregorio Rivas story, aren’t you? Especially the tragic ending.

What about the Urania Barrows story? She may be just a supporting actor in your story, but what about
hers
? Or is yours the only one there is, and when you’re not actually looking at people they disappear or collapse like stage costumes that aren’t currently in use? Now
that
would be an interesting position for you to take, Rivas; maybe even if you somehow get out of this you’ll just end up as Noah Almondine’s main successor in the art of cutting out paper dolls.

He couldn’t hear over the thrashing hiss of the rain, but through the deeply moored timbers of his rack he could
feel
the thudding of approaching footsteps. He closed his eyes so that they might think he was unconscious…. The jaybush might just touch him anyway, but it was worth a try.

“Brother Thomas!” came a sharp whisper.

Rivas’s eyes snapped open. A robed and hooded figure stood in front of him, holding a knife. “Sister Windchime?” he rasped.

“Yes. I don’t want to get my hair wet or they’ll know I’m the one that did this.” Quickly she plowed the knife edge down the gap between Rivas’s right arm and the wood, and as he shook off the slimy loops of wet leather she did the same for his left arm—and then had to hold him up with her free hand, for he’d started to fold helplessly forward. Reaching down, she cut his legs free too, and Rivas reflected dazedly that this was one strong young lady. “Now run,” she said. “No one should ever
deforced
to take the sacrament.”

“Thank you,” Rivas gasped. “I—”

“Go, damn you!”

“Right, right.”

Rivas ran wobblingly toward the seaward hill, his shoes splashing in the new mud, and when he got to the slope he crouched behind one of the scrawny bushes at the foot of the hill until he got his breath back and stopped seeing a rainbow glitter seeping into his vision from the sides.

After a few minutes he scrambled to the next bush, then to a boulder he could lie behind, then to a shallow gully…. Half an hour later he thought he heard shouting in the wind, but it was hard to be sure, for by this time he was well up into the inland end of the valley, and the patter of the rain on stone and leaves, and the trickle and splash of newborn streams, tended to drown out more distant sounds.

He paused, though, and looked back down the valley. The Regroup Tent was a gray mushroom far away, difficult to distinguish from the bulks of the hills because of the mile of veiling rain that hung between it and him.

He grinned. Redeemer, redeem thyself. So long, Sister Sue.

Late in the afternoon he found a building—once some kind of office, apparently—and decided that smoke against this gray-mottled sky would not constitute much of a risk, so he frictioned up a fire of plywood shelves and antique invoices in the open doorway and warmed himself and baked his clothes dry. He tried not to torment himself with thoughts of food or—though he had managed to slake his thirst at a pool of rain water—liquor. Finally, dry and warm and at least not much sicker than he’d been this morning, he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do right now except, with massive reluctance and not even a drink, review his situation.

Well, he told himself, Uri’s gone now, but everything you could do you did do. You not only
have
Barrow’s five thousand fifths, you
earned
them: you took the sacrament twice; you were actually shot, though nobody’ll believe that; twice a hemogoblin attached itself to you; you had to kill four men; and if it weren’t for the unlikely intervention of that girl, Sister Windchime, you’d be a grinning, babbling moron at this very moment. Oh, and that guy knocked you down this morning, and damned hard, too. And you cut hell out of your thumb. And God knows if you still have a job at Spink’s.

He glanced around at the rusty, dusty old filing cabinets and wondered if any of the generations-dead people who’d worked here had been in the habit of caching some liquor somewhere. One heard of such finds occasionally.

Suddenly and shamefacedly he remembered the incomparably greatest suffering he’d sustained during the course of this last, unsuccessful redemption: the loss of Uri herself! For thirteen years he’d planned to go find her as soon as he’d got some real money and could give her the kind of life, she deserved, and for these last three days he’d been out actively risking his life to find her… and now she was gone, snatched from him just at the very moment—what a touch—the very moment when his three-day search, no,
thirteen-year pilgrimage
, was within seconds and inches of being completed!

He was sure to get some good lyrics out of all this.

Then with an unwelcome clarity that memory can rarely manage, he re-heard how Barrows had described him four nights ago: “…Just a kind of shrewd, cunning insect.” And though he’d laughed then, all at once he was astonished at how thoroughly Barrows had understood him. My God, Rivas thought now, you’re going to get some
lyrics
out of this, are you? Sister Windchime may be birdy, but she’s twice the human being you are, boy.

Well, he replied to himself defensively, I’m a professional songwriter—what am I supposed to do, pretend I
don’t
derive my songs from the things that happen to me?

No, clown, what you’re supposed to do now is the same thing you were supposed to do yesterday. Go get Uri.

But they took her into the Holy City.

So?

So no one has ever come out of the Holy City except a few jaybushes and shepherds. Even Norton Jaybush himself hasn’t been seen since entering there ten years ago. Everyone knows that a redemption attempt ends when the quarry goes in there. And no, I
don’t
think such an unheard-of effort is called for by the unheard-of price I screwed Barrows into paying. (Though how on earth could I have
bargained
for Uri’s soul?)

Now memory replayed a statement of his own, one he’d made to Barrows that same night: “Evidently she’s worth five to you, but not ten.” So what do you tell
yourself
, boy? he thought. Evidently she’s worth a cut thumb and a few scares, but not worth putting your life on the table on a long-shot chance?

Against this question he involuntarily held up a sheaf of treasured images: his apartment on First by the North Gate, with rain and night outside and himself inside with warm lamplight and a pipe and a drink and a book; long summer afternoons with the feet up on a sunny balcony rail, and a friend or two, and a cool beer standing right where his hand could reach it; the pleasant certainty of new pretty girls to charm and impress and possibly take to his bed, and the equally pleasant certainty of being comfortably alone in that bed later….

And at length he realized, bleakly, that all this did not balance the scale. Not when Uri’s life was what was being weighed. He had to go to Irvine and get into the Holy City and get Uri out.

God damn her, he thought fervently, for getting us into this.

“…And when he glimpsed a patch of sky above,

Fearing the sight would startle her, he turned—

But saw, behind him, no one…”

—Ovid,
Metamorphoses
,

Book X, lines 55–7

the W. Ashbless translation

F
RACAS MCAN SCOWLED FIERCELY
at a harmless couple of Jaybird girls who were ambling down the other side of the street, and was edgily gratified to see them register alarm and duck into one of the ubiquitous prayer parlors, for the response indicated that his shepherd disguise was convincing—at least to the rank and file. And he only had a couple of blocks still to go before he got to the imminent-departure yard, and it looked like he wouldn’t have any trouble getting there while the morning dew was still wet on the wagon he was after, and before today’s fresh batch of wagons began to be wheeled in. Just so he didn’t run into a genuine shepherd! He supposed they probably had some system of passwords or winks or some damn thing that would instantly expose him as a phony. What a damnable advantage Rivas had in actually having
been
a Jaybird for a few years!

McAn was scared. In all his previous redemptions he’d been careful not to go anywhere near Irvine, and now here he was only a long stone’s throw from the high, inward-slanting white walls of the Holy City itself.

He touched the knife strapped to the inside of his left wrist, but it didn’t give him quite the confidence it usually did. He’d been feeling less than confident ever since the parents of this quarry had reluctantly explained to him that the first redeemer they’d hired to retrieve their son had limped back to Ellay with a bullet in his leg and a story of having been shot at by Jaybird shepherds armed with real working guns and live ammunition.

McAn had asked for five hundred fifths with half payable upon agreement, the most he’d ever asked for a job, and he had explained that he would search only in the areas north of the Seal Beach Desolate. They had objected to that at first, as his clients always did, but he gave them his standard explanation: that the residual radiation—an impressive phrase—was simply so great in those distant regions that no sane person would spend the kind of time there that even the easiest redemption
would
require, and that even if a Jaybird
could
be found and snatched at that point, he or she, and probably the redeemer too, would die like a Venetian fish-eater long before they got back to Ellay.

McAn had always known that the story wasn’t entirely true, but until the day before yesterday he’d never worried about how much of an exaggeration it might be.

He’d been following a caravan of several loosely connected Jaybird bands who’d been moving south from the Flirtin hills; he wandered along with them, imitating a birdy imbecile whenever anyone tried to speak to him, and he waited for them to stop somewhere and stage one of their big communion spirals so that he could see if anyone present particularly fitted the description of his quarry.

Finally, just as he’d been about to give up on them and retreat back north, they did all stop for a communion, in a parking lot at the Anahime Convenshin Centr. It had been about noon of the day before yesterday.

The shepherds had climbed to the tops of the old light poles and the weird two-tone roar had started up as the old man in white showed up and walked into the spiral, going around and around as he got closer to the center. McAn had watched the whole spectacle while sitting comfortably on the roof of a truck, remembering to wince occasionally and glance with chagrin at his hand, which he’d wrapped in the realistically red-spotted rag he always took with him now on redemptions. People in severe pain, he’d learned, were disqualified from taking the sacrament.

During the parking lot ceremony he spotted two possibles, and when the sacrament hammered them down he noted which of the sprawled shapes they were, so that after they recovered he’d be able to approach each of them and spring one of the questions the quarry’s parents had primed him with.

Though his luck, as he now knew, had been about to run out, it had not quite, abandoned him yet. The second of the boys, still somnambulistic from the communion, had not only shown clear recognition of the family dog referred to in the question—“Lucy’s chewing all her fur off and she’s covered with sores, what can we do besides have her killed?”—he’d even given the correct answer: “Put garlic in her food, like we did last summer.”

McAn had been eyeing the nearby fences and walls and doorways, looking for a hidden spot where he could knock the kid out and then carry him away unseen, when the shrill metallic whistling began. Because he’d been peering around he was among the first to see the several dozen Y-shaped bicycles racing across the pavement toward the Jaybird crowd, and he grabbed his quarry’s arm and pulled him along in the opposite direction through the confused crowd. An irregular
pop-pop
began punctuating the screams behind the fleeing pair, but it wasn’t until McAn and his quarry had broken away from the crowd and begun running south along a sheltered sidewalk that he realized the noise must have been gunfire.

The Jaybirds had been at two disadvantages when the attack occurred: most of their number were unconscious or disoriented, and, secure in the knowledge that hooters never dared to attack Jaybird bands, the shepherds had set up the communion in an open, paved spot.

McAn couldn’t get the boy to run for more than a minute at a time, and the fleetest Jaybird fugitives quickly caught up with and passed them, and soon McAn and his quarry were just two bobbing heads in a packed crowd that was being herded south by grim-faced shepherds on horseback. The shepherds held drawn pistols, and kept standing up in the stirrups to look back, and they took every opportunity to drive their herd up steep hillsides and through narrow gaps in the eternal aluminum chain-link fences—clearly they expected the starving hooters to try again. McAn assumed that the wagons, and all the still unconscious communicants, were being taken south too by some other route, but he couldn’t see anything—his horizon was the close heads of the Jaybirds who jogged uncomplainingly along all around him. All he could do was trot along with them and maintain his grip on his quarry’s arm.

They passed the wide street which was Chapman Av. They were in the Seal Beach Desolate now, and showed no sign of slowing down.

McAn still wasn’t too worried. Obviously there would be some opportunity between here and Irvine for him to grab the boy and slip away.