Dinner at Deviant's Palace (26 page)

“You stay here,” Rivas said, afraid he might hit the man, or start crying again. “I’m leaving.”

“Well, say, Greg, I wasn’t going to bring it up right now,” Frenchfry said, beginning to sound worried himself, “but I can’t break the last, uh, hundred-fifth note they paid me here, and I was wondering—”

“That was it,” said Rivas, “for that drink.” He pointed at the fresh glass. “All the money I had.” He was having trouble taking a deep breath. “But hey, help yourself, man.
Mi tequila es su tequila
.”

He blundered out of the place, aware of the stares of other drinkers. The waitress had obviously told them who he claimed to be. Some seemed to believe it and some didn’t, but none of them seemed very impressed.

In the darkness outside he walked quickly, as though trying to outpace the memory.
You and me, Greg
—
we’re two of a kind.
My God, he thought. And everybody there thought we were! So who cares? So
I
care—you are what people think you are, which is why it’s so important to get them thinking you’re someone who…
counts
. Gaah.

By the time he came to the canal, the night breeze seemed to have blown away the worst edges of the tequila and the memory, and he stood on the bank and watched the reflected moon waver on the black water and then separate into glowing white streaks as some swimming thing approached, rippling the water. A rat? No, too many ripples. A dog, conceivably, or some kid.

The low waves subsided as the swimmer stopped in the darkness below Rivas and to his left.

“Greg,” came a whisper from the darkness.

“Who’s—” he began, but he realized he didn’t have to ask. He tried to tell it to go away, but at the moment he didn’t have the strength.

“I can restore you,” said the whisper. There was a slurrying sound as the thing flapped gently in the black water.

“What do you mean?” Rivas asked angrily, though keeping his voice down. “You couldn’t lift up a medium-size stone.”

“True. But I’m part of you. Maybe the most important part, the part that makes—used to make—you
you
. You know when I… was born?”

“No.”

“That day at the Cerritos Stadium, when you gashed your thumb to avoid merging with Jaybush. That works, of course, intense pain does block you from the sacrament, but it splinters a piece of you away—something like a ghost. That’s me. And you’ve noticed qualities missing from yourself since then, haven’t you? Weaknesses where there used to be strengths, hesitations and uncertainties where you used to have assurance?”

“… Yes,” Rivas whispered.

“Merge with me and let me make you whole. You don’t mind merging with
me
—I’m nothing but yourself.”

“But… would I be…”

“Remember when you threw rocks at me that first day, how I tore apart but grew back together, so you couldn’t see I’d ever been cut?” It chuckled out there. “Merge with me and I’ll grow back your two fingers for you.”

Rivas gasped as if he’d been hit, and before he’d even thought about it he’d taken two steps forward, so that he was standing on the tilted dirt slope of the canal bank. There was more swirling in the water, and then the thing swam out of the shadows of the trees into the moonlight, and Rivas could see that it was a lot solider now than it had been when he’d seen it last.

“How did you
get
here?” he asked, thinking of all the populated urban miles around them.

“Followed your boat up,” the thing said, its voice taking on a gobbling sound because of its eagerness. “I caught the new-born ghost that was cast when you used the pain parry against that dose of Blood, so you don’t have to worry about where that piece of you went. I ate it. It’s in me. And then all day I’ve been eeling around through the canals, trying to find you. Almost got to you before that damn whore did. You don’t need her, do you?”

“Need her. Well, I don’t know, I—”

“You—we—don’t
need
anybody. Thinking you did is what split us in the first place, isn’t it? And it has nearly destroyed you.”

The thing had swum in closer, and Rivas didn’t have to whisper loudly at all for it to hear him. “I’m not sure that’s…”

“I was angry, earlier today,” the thing said, giggling reproachfully, “when I realized you were in that boat full of women. I was hoping you wouldn’t be stupid enough to… have congress with any of those
vacas
in the state you’re in.”

Rivas started to tilt, then took a step back, up the bank, to right himself. “Why… shouldn’t I?”

“It would diminish you. It always does, but in your present broken, unstrong condition it could make you forget.”

The thing had fishtailed closer as he backed off, and now he could see its fingers above the water, gripping the muddy stones and glistening like fat sea creatures in the moonlight.

“Forget what?”

“Who you
are
, man. If we forget we’re Rivas, what’s left of us?”

Rivas took two more steps back. “Whatever
is
me. That’s what’s left.”

The thing was trembling so violently that a lot of close rings were radiating away from it. The canal water smelled like crushed green leaves. “Come to me,” the thing in the water choked.

He was suddenly sure that to go to it would mean leaving behind things that had been too costly to acquire. The sadness in the glass eyes of the broken trash man, back in Irvine. The remembered ache in his arm from holding the dying boy up to the corner of the Blood basket where there was air. His shame at having struck a buyer’s-market bargain for saving Uri’s life. The grudged respect of Frake McAn.

He stepped all the way back up to the path. “No, thank you,” he said politely.

“Your fingers, I can replace your—”

“Get away from me,” said Rivas tensely, suddenly aware that he was scared. “Go catch a fish if you need some blood to drink.”

“You need me more than I need you, Rivas. I can—”

“Then you don’t need me at all.”

He turned on his heel and started walking toward Lisa’s house, which all at once seemed very far away; and a moment later he was running, for he’d heard splashing behind him and the slap of wet rubbery feet against the packed dirt of the path. The pursuing footfalls stopped after a few seconds and Rivas let himself slow down a little, thinking that the hemogoblin had stopped—he didn’t realize it had simply taken off and begun flying until it slammed into his shoulders and sent him tumbling down the slope to splash into the canal.

And then it was on him like a dog that has beaten its companions by only a few seconds to a big piece of meat. As the two of them rolled in the chilly salt water Rivas punched at it with his left fist, feeling jellyfish tissue split apart and spill, but always quickly re-knit, and its entirely solid teeth were greedily tearing at his arms and chest. They were both sobbing with fear and rage, and any time either of them got halfway to his feet the other knocked him down.

Finally Rivas got his knees around its waist and his hands on the corners of its jaw, and he pulled its face away from him, trying to use only the thumb and heel of his bad right hand.

It blew out a mouthful of water and blood and then, its big milky eyes boring into him in the moonlight, it whispered, “
Please
, Greg.”

Gripping it strongly with his legs, he began twisting its head around.

The creature began emitting a sort of whispered scream, but the noise was chopped off abruptly when he’d given the head one full turn. The thing’s hands were scrabbling at his chest and arms and sometimes even his face, but it didn’t seem to have developed fingernails yet, and the fingers just broke against him in a slimy nastiness that was worse than scratches would have been.

Rivas had been letting his head submerge in the canal water whenever he had a fresh breath and the move would allow him to get a new grip on the creature’s slippery head, but at the third full turn the thing’s neck began to split and spurt some kind of fluid into the water, and after that he tried to keep his head up out of it. The hemogoblin was heaving about under him so strongly that he was afraid he’d be flung off, and he couldn’t believe that the noise of their splashing wasn’t being heard, but at last at the eighth or ninth full turn the creature’s head, which like a clock-winding key had been getting more difficult to twist, snapped off, and the abruptly released force of his straining arms flipped Rivas right over in the fouled water.

The body of the hemogoblin went limp and, releasing a lot of bad-smelling bubbles, sank beneath him. He struggled to his feet and flung the still quivering head as far down the canal, in the direction away from Lisa’s house, as he could. After three seconds he heard it splash in the darkness. Then, leaving the body there, he swam up the canal, away from the two pieces of the creature, rinsing his mouth and hair in the canal water, which was relatively clean compared to what he had been splashing around in.

Before long he began imagining that something was wriggling silently through the water in his wake, and he clambered out onto the canal bank and walked the rest of the way to Lisa’s place. She wasn’t home, so he went in and took another bath—which exhausted her water supply—and crawled into the bed she’d made up for him.

And out in the sluggish, lightless canal, thin filaments were fingering out from two pieces of organic stuff in the water—a small round lump to the west and a big four-limbed lump to the east. The filaments from one traveled toward those of the other, and in the small hours of the night they touched, and merged… and slowly began to pull the two pieces together.

When Rivas awoke next morning at about seven, he was hungover and stiff, but he felt more solidly put together than he had for the past several days. Lisa was nowhere to be seen, so he broke some more eggs into a pan and dumped in the fillings from some tacos he found in her brick evaporation box, stirred the mess up over her re-stoked fire until it was nearly cooked, then folded in the taco shells, piled it all onto a plate, shook
salsa furiosa
over it all and then set to. After washing the meal down with a cool beer, he felt at least a lot less unqualified for the sortie he’d planned for this morning.

After washing the dishes and locking the door behind him he left Lisa’s house and walked north to Century and then turned left, toward the deep canals and the waterfront, the pouch with the bottle in it swinging at his side. The narrow sunlit streets were alive with cats, the rooftops with monkeys and the sky with parrots, though the human species was represented only by a few shamblers and some steamy smells of coffee and bacon wisping up from tiny street-level windows.

Nearly all of the items that were offered for sale in Venice’s shops or served in her restaurants were, if not made or grown locally, wagoned in from Santa Monica to the north or Ellay to the east; the mile of docks and piers rotting over the sea was the site of none but the most furtive sorts of trade, and the citizens who preferred shorefront property did so because they were in the Blood or birdy girl trade, or preyed on those who were, or liked having a whole ocean to dispose of inconveniences in, or simply were more comfortable swimming from place to place, along the waterfront or up and down the canal network, than trying to walk on limbs that had begun to devolve back toward a simpler way of life.

The waterfront area had been built up more than a century ago, during the days of the First Ace, and all the docks and sea walls and canals had been so determinedly built to last that the architects had not hesitated to add touches simply for the sake of decoration—fancy towers, fairy bridges too high and light for any actual traffic, even a seaside amusement park for children. But construction had stopped during the years of the Second Ace, and even maintenance was discontinued when the Third Ace came to power, and now the constructions were cracked, canted and undercut by the sea, and the towers and lacy bridges and the sun-bleached frameworks of the amusement park rides waved and creaked in the wind like the abandoned toys of a long-departed child.

Palms and hibiscus and vines grew in hybrid profusion here, and folklore had it that it was easier to get from place to place through the clustered treetops than by trying to negotiate the unmapped maze of alleys and canals and wobbly bridges, and that the snakes and bugs and monkeys one would encounter in the jungly heights would be less dangerous than the denizens below.

If he’d had two good hands Rivas might seriously have considered taking the green highroad on his trip to the waterfront. What he wanted to do this morning was get near enough to Deviant’s Palace to see if that was, as he feared, the destination of the barges full of Jaybird girls, once the Blood baskets had been sold off. There was, of course, the possibility that the barge he’d stowed away on had been the last for a week or so, and that he’d have to try to get into Deviant’s Palace without confirmation of his hunch; but he had heard nothing in the Holy City or from the boy who had spoken Sevatividam’s thoughts to indicate that the shipments of girls from Irvine were due to be cut any time soon.

As the sun slowly rose above the buildings at his back, the streets ahead of him became narrower, for lines of little houses and shops had been built down the middle of the old wide streets, and in some cases even the resulting ways had been split by rows of food and drink and fortune-telling and peepshow tents, so that no wagon nor even a very fat person could maneuver through. Some of the food tents and liquor vendors were doing business, but most of Venice had only gone to bed a couple of hours ago.

Closer to the sea the ways became uneven as alleys zigzagged sharply to circumnavigate collapsed buildings, or rose and fell where makeshift bridges had been flung up over gaps in the undercut pavement, and it became hard to keep moving west—it was as though the city itself were trying to prevent him from getting to the waterfront. At last, though, nearer to noon than dawn, Rivas edged his way cautiously out along a tilted, swaying fire escape and, crouching to look under the remains of some ancient gable that had broken free of its original mooring and was now jammed precariously between two roof edges, he saw the surging, wrinkled darkness of the sea. He shuffled along his perch, trying to keep the sea in sight, and climbed through an arched doorway that was in the slow process of becoming a window as the masonry settled away below it.