The Empire of Gut and Bone (11 page)

T
hat evening, Brian lay in bed, miserable and scared.

As he had hobbled back to his room, supported on one side by Gregory and on the other by Gwynyfer, they had wandered through a vague kind of game in the Grand Hall: The members of the Norumbegan Social Club, dressed in black tie, were squealing with pleasure and rolling an old truck tire across the room, trying to not hit two ranks of robotic drones, which had been instructed to trudge slowly back and forth in opposite directions, holding out their arms like Egyptians.

The tire came soaring toward the three kids, and Gregory had chuckled, whooped, and jumped out of the way. But Brian, of course, couldn’t jump. It had hit him and he’d fallen down.

He was not hurt. His glasses had fallen off. He could tell the men of the Social Club were laughing secretly.

“All clear, old thing?” said Lord Dainsplint. “Terribly sorry.”

“No problem,” said Gregory. “Good shot.”

Gwynyfer helped Brian to his feet. Brian carefully replaced his glasses on his nose. He was ashamed. He winced as he stood.

They began to roll the tire between the drones again.

A farmer in a tunic was standing at the end of the room, pleading, “Can I have my tire back now, your lordships? Yes, very funny. Very funny, my lord. Now can I have my tire back? Please?”

“I don’t have it, old thing,” said Lord Dainsplint, rolling it to the next man. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer has it.”

The Chancellor of the Exchequer rolled it to the next man. “I don’t have it, either, my good sir,” he said. “I believe it’s in the possession of His Excellency the Lord High Castellan.”

“My cart,” said the man, “can’t go with only the one wheel.”

Brian felt a rush of hatred for them all — the whole Court of New Norumbega — all of them playing their stupid games that decided the fates of families and nations.

“You okay?” Gregory asked.

Brian nodded. “Just — let’s go back to our room. You can leave me there. I don’t want to walk around any more tonight.”

“If that’s okay,” said Gregory. “I mean, me just leaving you.”

And Brian had been even more upset to notice how eager Gregory was to get rid of him. He could tell that
Gregory was embarrassed for Brian, that Gregory wanted to get Brian out of the way so that he, too, could try to be as witty and as playful as these men in their tuxedos, with servants at their command.

And so Brian lay in bed in their room, exhausted almost to the point of tears, thinking of Kalgrash — kind, friendly Kalgrash — lying there inert, shut off, in the prison down the hill, his claws half unfurled. Brian thought of all the times people had insulted him that day, called him stupid or ape, and it just made him tired. He didn’t want to have to make deals with these people and beg for information. He thought of his parents, round and cracking jokes, sitting down at dinner (spaghetti), how horrified they would be to hear what was said about him, how they’d put an arm around him and tell him he was wonderful, not to give up. They’d tell him how much they loved him.

It meant nothing, Brian felt with a hollow ache. What did it matter what his parents thought of him or said? They were in another world, and he was stranded here. He couldn’t see them. He couldn’t protect them. They wouldn’t know what hit them when the Thusser appeared. Who knew how much time had passed back in Boston? Months, maybe. They could already be part of a Thusser settlement. They might be protruding out of their walls, eyes empty, while Thusser men planned further horrors at their table, or some young Thusser couple, back from the kill, kissed on their bed in front of them.

Brian could not believe that the fate of his parents, of Gregory’s, of everyone he knew lay in the manicured
hands of these elfin idiots, these ditsy pranksters giggling in their ruins beyond the end of time.

He curled up in his bed. In an hour or so, he’d have to get up and put some kind of magic unguent on his leg. The pain sprang through him.

He crushed his head down into his pillow. Outside, he heard the cheers as some vapid game was won.

He tried to sleep.

The night was warm. The veins had gone dark an hour before, but heat still rose off the granules of the desert.

Gregory and Gwynyfer strolled on a balcony that ran most of the way around the palace. They looked out over the huts and alleys of the city. Smoke rose from bonfires. Far, far out in the dark plains of the Dry Heart, the lights of small villages shone, and perhaps a caravan traveling into the capital with goods from some distant ventricle or aorta.

“There is a cluster of hearts,” said Gwynyfer. “Like a bouquet.”

Gregory asked, “Where’s the blood?”

“There’s some growth — it’s weedy; the Wildwood, we call it — that blocks up the valves. That’s one of the reasons some people think that the Great Body is dead.” She leaned on the railing. She looked up at the ceiling of muscle far up in the darkness. She said, “Maybe it’s been dead since before I was born. The last time there was a pulse in the veins of flux was years and years ago. But who knows?
We just call these organs hearts because they seem like hearts to us. Maybe they aren’t at all. Maybe the Wildwood is actually part of them. I don’t know.”

Gregory stood by her side and looked up with her at the unmoving heart. The soft night air blew past them. He couldn’t help notice how close her arm was. It was an incredible arm. It had a dimple at the elbow. Gregory found himself wishing that he could take Gwynyfer to school with him, show the others how they laughed together.

“It’s sweet,” she said, “that you and your friend want to find out who really killed the Regent. It’s not very Norumbegan to care.”

“You know, we do what we can to help.”

She smiled. “How ducky for us.”

He wagged his finger. “You don’t believe we can figure it out, do you?”

“It would be fun if you did.”

“Fun?”

“Nifty.”

“Well, Brian’s pretty smart. And I happen to be pretty charming.”

“Are you?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s see proof.”

“I can burp ‘Do Your Ears Hang Low.’ ”

She rolled her eyes and murmured, “You and the Minister of the Interior.”

Gregory pointed out, “You must care about the murder. You’re helping us solve it.”

Gwynyfer shrugged. “It’s a lark. You can’t know how dull the Court often is. Curtsying. Walking in processions. Waiting on the Stub. Who sweats, by the by. It’s a bit thrilling to have two humans here who actually
care
about a thing. And the murder, of course — the delicious, chill-making murder.”

She smiled at Gregory, and he could see pleasure in her smile.

“You’re not like other girls,” he said. He figured women always liked flattery, and in this case, what he said was true, anyway. Other girls didn’t have pointed ears. “I wish I could introduce you to people at school. They’d be amazed.”

“That would be lovely. Would they ask me what songs I can burp?”

Gregory countered with polite sarcasm: “Oh, sorry, madame. Please, tell me, what’s the Globular Colon like?”

She laughed. “Actually, it’s lovely in the spring, when it’s green.”

“Do you have a castle there? On your estate?”

She looked at him quite carefully. From inside, there came a crash as the radial tire knocked down a drone.

Gwynyfer said, “My parents describe it to people as a castle, but it’s a shack of four rooms. That’s how most of the Court lives when they’re away from the palace.” She gave him a look of defiant shyness and said, “Everyone boasts about their estates and hopes no one else ever visits. We all have shameful secrets to hide.” She crossed her arms. “But who wants to take the time to
build
something? Who will
do
it for us? Too, too weary-making.

“That,” she said, “is why it’s so outrageous that the mannequins have left us, all but a very few. We need them.”

“You deserve a castle,” said Gregory. “Someone should build one for you. You look like a princess.”

She turned and smiled at him.

They were very close to each other.

Gregory was suddenly aware that their arms were touching. He really wanted to kiss her.

But he didn’t dare.

So they stood there, side by side, almost kissing, feeling warmth trickle from arm to arm, drunk on the balmy night, the hot, bracing scent of burning plastic, and the sweet, enfolding darkness of the Dry Heart.

And down below them, at the base of the palace’s keep, a servant’s door opened and Lord Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint slipped out, wearing a cloak with a hood. He scurried down the steps and skirted the edge of the square.

Through the night city he walked, while boys ran past with torches and striped beasts rifled through garbage heaps. Through windows, old boom boxes played the fragmented dance tunes of Norumbega, blaring through tinny speakers to courtyards filled with shrieking families.

Toward the edge of the city, things were quieter. The silence of the granular desert hung heavy in the air.
The night was cooler. Occasionally, someone stirred in a shack. Dainsplint picked his way along narrow passages between houses. He stepped over sleeping men.

Finally, he reached a turquoise hut. He looked one way and then the other. He opened the door and slipped in.

He closed the door behind him.

“I fear,” he said to the person he found there, “that I’ve made rather a mistake.”

The person he met blew out the single candle.

Then everything was dark.

I
n the streets of the Thusser suburb at the foot of Norumbega Mountain, time ran quickly, and houses billowed and wobbled as they became less like human dwellings and more like the pulpy nests of Thusser settlers with dark-ringed eyes who arrived every day with their suitcases filled with devices that resembled broken glass.

Beneath that suburb, in the City of Gargoyles, the old stone houses and domes and obelisks and arches sprouted luxury pods, more like plant bladders than anything built by human hands. These were the condominiums of the Thusser Horde.

Through the dim streets, lit by the bellies of the fungus-like condos, the Thusser shuffled, whispering and passing blackly in crowds through the avenues.

In a vault beneath that city, beneath the cathedral that overlooked those flinty streets, in the midst of the Thusser settlement, a human woman and an old Norumbegan man sat trapped and weakened.

Prudence was slumped near the blank portal. Around her were scattered plastic bags once filled with lunch meats. She and Wee Sniggleping had been sitting in this chamber for weeks. They could no longer leave to fetch food. The Thusser were too thick on the streets up above them. Days passed with nothing to do but read the old issues of
People
and
Teen Vogue
they’d bought back when they’d been slipping out regularly to the Halt’N’Buy.

They were out of food. Prudence had been suffering from a headache for several days. They were out of water. They’d had to use the mausoleum of former emperors for a toilet. The stench crept in over the stone sill.

For the past day, neither Prudence nor Sniggleping had moved much.

For two weeks, they had not seen any light but the light of the lantern. Its magical charge grew weak. Staring directly at its twist of burning wire, Prudence could almost imagine that it was not light that came from it, but just another kind of shadow. Spots clotted the room. When she held her breath, they pulsed.

It had been some hours since she and Sniggleping had spoken. He was doing better than her, still sitting upright, watching her with concern.

She rolled her head toward him and said, “They’re not coming, are they? They’ve gotten lost or killed.”

“Or time,” said Sniggleping, “is moving so slowly on the other side of the portal that only a few seconds have passed for them since they went through.” He shook his head. “We don’t know.”

“We have to go through. We can’t stay here.”

“Remember,” said Sniggleping, “that we don’t know that we can get back without someone here to receive us. To open the gate from this end.”

“We can’t stay here,” Prudence repeated. “The Thusser are going to find us.” She put her hands on her head. Her hair was a scraggly mess. “I can hear them,” she said. “They’re up in the cathedral. They must be using it for something.”

“You may hear them,” said Sniggleping. “Or that may be your panic clanking. It may be your fear murmuring, my darling.”

They fell silent, then, for a long time. They stared into the darkness of the chamber, at the plastic bags of trash, all that remained of their supply runs earlier in the month.

After an hour, Prudence became convinced she saw faces watching her from the darkness. They were glowering and pale. She wondered offhand, half dreaming, if they would leave if she sang. They did not move, however. The lamp grew dimmer. Prudence stared at the faces and they stared frankly back.

For a while, Prudence closed her eyes. When she opened them, the shadows were deeper, and the faces were more present than ever.

Sniggleping saw them, too, but he did not want to speak. He thought that by acknowledging them, he’d invite them to become solid sooner.

The faces watched the two who sat in the circle of light. They ringed them.

Gradually, Prudence saw bodies also. They wore black wool overcoats. Their hands were very white. The faces still glared at her.

Sniggleping remained silent. He did not want the final catastrophe to begin. He wanted a few last minutes before the awful things happened.

But Prudence did speak. “They’ve arrived,” she said, and she meant the Thusser. Sniggleping dared to look at her. To nod.

“Yes,” one of them agreed. “We are here.”

Sniggleping waved his hand vaguely in the air. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said.

“You were thinking of something else.”

The figures walked forward, and they were solid, gathered around Prudence and Snig, thin and dangerous as knives.

One of the Thusser said, “You sent agents through the portal.”

“Did we?” said Sniggleping.

“You did. We have ears in the Court of New Norumbega. We have kept ourselves informed.”

Prudence concluded triumphantly, “So the boys’ve reached the Court. They’re not dead.”

“Yet,” agreed a Thusser.

“You are, of course, under arrest,” said another. “You destroyed our operative in this world, the vehicle Deatley. You have attempted to invoke the Rules.”

“It’s only fair,” said Prudence. “You’re breaking the Rules.”

“Fair,” said the Thusser, “is what the powerful do, and the story they tell about it afterward.”

With that, the Thusser closed in on the two who sagged by lamplight.

Prudence coughed and gagged, feeling the wet hands clamped over her mouth, fastened on her wrist, dragging at her legs. She kicked and bucked. She screamed Sniggleping’s name. He called for her. The Thusser lifted her and carried her toward the archway into the crypt. She twisted and managed to hang free long enough to bump up steps. She was half heaved, her hand sputtering along in the dust, scraping grit.

Then the cluster of Thusser was gone.

Only one was left. A single Thusser man with a mouth full of teeth and a glare in his eye.

He began, slowly, to run his hands over the lintel of the portal. He began to read what was written there. He began to activate the gateway to the other world.