The Empire of Gut and Bone (14 page)

R
unning down an alley in a city surrounded by robots, being chased by small clockwork monsters with razor blades on stalks, hurtling along toward a palace filled with cruel elvish aristocrats, Gregory felt that perhaps he needed to make some changes in how he spent his free time.

He thought, as he hopped over some fallen masonry, that maybe he should waste more time in front of the television, more time playing video games, less time embarking on quests to save North America from interdimensional invasion. Why were people always telling you to go out and play? This —
this
is what happened when you went to hang out in the woods.

Brian had fallen behind, and Gregory turned to see how his friend was doing. Brian was still keeping well ahead of the little cluster of metal insects.

“I wish,” Brian puffed, “sneakers were made of something better. Harder.”

His rubber soles were sliced and scored.

Gregory paused to pick up a roof tile in two hands. “Yeah,” he agreed sarcastically. “I don’t know why iron sneaks never took off.” He hurled the tile at the fleet of bugs. It smashed between them. Two spidery units quivered and stopped flailing. The others kept swarming forward.

It took another several blocks before the kids had outrun them.

They did not feel safe until they had made it most of the way back up to the palace.

Behind them, the voices still rang out in the desert air. “Citizens of Norumbega! We are here to serve you….” People hung out of windows, listening.

The kids walked up the muddy avenue.

Gregory said, “So the doctor was probably the one who tried to kill you last night at dinner. Some bedside manner.”

Brian was silent. For one thing, he was still waiting for Gwynyfer to apologize for calling him “dull.” He suspected she wasn’t going to take it back.

Gregory wondered, “Why would he try to kill you?”

“I don’t know,” Brian admitted. He looked pointedly at Gwynyfer.

“Are you waiting for something from me?”

Brian said, “I’m a little tired of people talking about how boring and stupid I am.”

“Then,” Gwynyfer suggested, “why not try being clever and charming? Start now: Say something witty.”

Brian gave her a dirty look and didn’t respond.

Gregory wished Gwynyfer wouldn’t be so snippy with his friend, but he had to admit that Brian had been kind of sulky ever since they’d arrived in the Dry Heart. He thought Brian could at least make an effort, seeing as everyone in this whole Empire was so sharp, so funny — exactly the kind of people who Gregory wanted to hang out with when he grew up, exactly what he’d always dreamed of being: sly, knowing about things, cool in a crisis.

“Could the doctor have been the assassin?” Brian asked.

“I doubt it,” said Gwynyfer. “Your friend, the servant in the dung heap, said that the note he was given was sealed with the official wax mark of the Imperial Council. Whoever wrote that letter must have had one of the eleven signet rings that make the Imperial mark. That means the Regent or the ten councillors. The doctor isn’t a member. He’s not even an aristo.”

“An aristo?” Brian asked.

“An aristocrat. A nobleman. He’s not of the first blood. The Children of the Goddess Danaan.”

“And he wouldn’t have fit into a guard’s uniform,” said Gregory.

“What do you think this is?” Gwynyfer asked, holding up the old walkie-talkie.

“Wow,” said Gregory. “Where’d you get that?”

“It fell out of his bag.”

They stepped to the side of the road, and Gregory switched it on.

Nothing came out of the speakers. Gregory turned it
over. He rattled it. He opened a compartment on the back. “No batteries,” he said. “Is this a standard size?”

“Double A,” said Gwynyfer.

“You have double A batteries here?” Gregory asked. “In the Great Body?”

She looked at him appraisingly. “You expected something more exotic?”

“Sure. It’s a world of magic. So maybe rechargeable triple A’s.”

Brian was looking at the device in Gregory’s hand. “It has a place to talk as well as to listen,” he pointed out. “It’s a two-way radio of some kind.”

“Funny,” Gregory said. “I wonder who he’s communicating with?”

“We could search his room,” Brian suggested. “Before anyone knows he’s gone.”

Gwynyfer looked appalled at the suggestion. “That’s an excruciatingly low idea,” she said.

Gregory handed her the walkie-talkie. “Still, let’s check it out,” he said. “You’re the one who wanted to break out of your whole tea-at-three, kneeling-on-your-face-in-front-of-a-flesh-blob-at-four Court rigamarole.”

She shrugged, looking a little miffed that Gregory would support his friend.

Gregory looked down.

“Oh,” he said.

And stepped on one of the metal bugs, which had finally caught up to them again.

General Malark sat in his command sub, frowning at the telephone.

The fate of his clockwork people, he knew, was in his hands. The rulers of the various fortresses and outposts and castles of the mechanicals — spread throughout the hollows and corky glands of this infinite body — had all reposed their trust in him. He had at his command a vast force of servants-turned-soldier. He loved them each. He was proud of all. They had eked out their living from nothing once they’d fled, embarrassed, one by one, from their masters. They had built a civilization for themselves in these dripping channels and snotty caverns. Their fortresses were carved into the living phlegm. Their guns, their subs were made of brass and bronze and iron that they’d refined from minerals in the flux and lux effluvium. They deserved victory.

He climbed up the gangway and emerged, saluting his soldiers, on the plains on the Dry Heart.

He raised his binoculars and surveyed the citadel of his one-time masters.

He saw great walls with mighty turrets rising above the glistening saline desert. He saw wide, tree-lined avenues and brightly hung marketplaces. He saw, above it all, on a hilltop, rising from the steep roofs and spires and domes, the palace itself, shining like alabaster, its towers sparkling in the light from the veins of lux effluvium.

He was programmed to see this. He was designed to be awed by his masters.

And so he and his fellow soldiers did not see the rubble of shanties. They didn’t see the citizens in old, torn clothing
faded with light and browned with dirt, running in confusion through tangles of faulty electrical wiring and sloppily painted billboards. He couldn’t recognize the palace as a slumped mound of dried flesh rinds and mud walls and stubby towers built of plywood and old two-by-fours, less like a fairy-tale castle than a thicket of tree houses.

And because he could not see that the city could be his whenever he bothered to march into its streets — which lay open to all invasions — he decided grimly that it was going to be a long siege. He thought of all the bombs they’d have to lob, all the catapults they’d need, all the fiery weaponry they’d have to blast this impregnable fortress with.

He did not realize that if he even deployed a tenth of his power on the city, he wouldn’t just conquer it — everyone alive within it would die in rubble and flames before he even noticed he’d won.

Within the palace, everyone was scurrying to and fro, engaged in frenzied preparations. The Court of New Norumbega, in response to the gathering troops on the horizon, had decided to hold a special tea dance. It was important, in this time of trial, to admit no fear. They were not going to let rude mechanicals intrude on their fun. But in all the frenzy of invasion, it was difficult to get shirts ironed and to find stockings without runs.

“We’ve got to report on the mannequins’ message,” said Gregory. “That’s why we were sent down there.”

“The Imperial Council has to send a delegation down to hear their demands,” said Brian.

“I don’t like the odds if the mannequins start firing those cannons,” said Gregory.

“No?” said a voice behind him. It was Gugs. “Would you bet, say, thirty Imperial kroner that we don’t survive a siege? Forty? I know you’re nothing but raw kiddies — but surely your mamas give you pocket money, what?”

Gwynyfer bowed to him, making a sign with her hands. “Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, daughter of the Duke of the Globular Colon, greets Count Galahad Ffines-Whelter of Nettleton and Garje, and expresses her wish that his lands be ever fertile and his …” at which point Brian and Gregory stopped listening because they were very tired of Imperial etiquette.

Gwynyfer passed on the message that they had heard broadcast at the city limits by the mechanicals.

“They said,” she concluded, “that the people of the city should evacuate through the west gate.”

“West gate?” said Gugs. “What are the dazed manns on about? There is no west gate. No gate at all, that I can reckon.”

“I imagine,” said Gwynyfer, “that they can’t see the city as it is. Because they’ve been built for humility and worship.”

Gugs tapped his nose. “’Spect you’re right, old girl. Well, if that doesn’t raise the odds of us surviving the old heave-ho by their catapults and the boom-boom of cannons, I don’t know what does. Good news for us all.” He
said to Gregory, “Sure I can’t interest you in that wager? ”

“My mom cut off my allowance,” Gregory said. “I was mean to the cat.”

“Unless,” said Brian loudly, “we made a bet for something else.”

“Oh yes?”

“If they flatten the palace,” Brian said, “you have to demand that the Council votes to find those old spells to activate the Rules Keepers and kick the Thusser out of Old Norumbega.”

“And if the manns can’t knock the old place down?”

“Then we’ll give you a … a hundred kroner.”

“Hundred kroner? Not exactly equal, old chimp.”

“And a foot massage,” said Gwynyfer.

“That’s the ticket,” said Gugs. “’Specially after a dance, I cramp. It’s all that step-ball-change.”

“You people really don’t have any sense of proportion whatsoever, do you?” Gregory asked Gwynyfer.

“There’s nothing more important than trivia,” said Gwynyfer. “You only touch your change purse twice a day, but your feet you wear forever.”

Brian and Gugs shook on the bet. Gugs went off to get the terms of the wager down in writing.

As the three kids continued up to the chirurgeon’s office, Gregory said, “What do you think the odds are he’ll actually remember to pass on the message about the mannequins’ demands?”

“He’s forgotten it already,” said Gwynyfer, shrugging. “But don’t put odds on it. You know he’ll take the bet.”

They reached the door of the doctor’s office. Gwynyfer said, “You really do wish to break in and slither about his rooms without him? It’s not too skulk-making?”

“He tried to kill me,” Brian pointed out.

Gregory gestured to the chirurgeon’s door. “Go ahead,” he said. “Make me a skulk.”

He had no idea what “skulk” meant, but she and Gregory laughed together. She put her back against the door and swung it open, still clinging to it, her head back, her eyes facing Gregory, her mouth tilted forward and lined up with his.

Brian followed them into the chirurgeon’s quarters. He felt a little like a third wheel.

He said, “If it could only have been someone on the Imperial Council who sent that note to Mr. Gwestin, we need to know everyone who’s on the Council. One of them must be the murderer.”

“It was probably Chigger,” said Gregory. “Chigger Dainsplint. He always seems like he’s up to something.”

“Everyone’s up to something,” said Gwynyfer. “Otherwise, the nights get long and there’s nothing to talk about next day at lunch.”

“Later,” Brian asked, “can you point out all of the members of the Council and tell us about them?”

“At the tea dance,” she said, already starting to shuffle through papers on a desk. “They’ll all be there.”

Gregory looked around the room. “Wow,” he said. “Dr. Brundish clearly did not expect he’d be coming back.”

The room was torn apart in a frenzy of packing and preparation. Drawers were still open. Grubby clothing
was balled up all over the bunk, as if he’d pulled it out of his bureau, tore his way through it to find what he needed, and left the rest.

The leeches, faintly glowing, still made their slow way around their jars, morosely hunting for blood.

Brian rattled through the desk drawers. He scrabbled through quills and bottles of colored ink. “Hey,” he said. “Batteries.”

Gregory fitted them into the radio device. He turned a knob.

Nothing.

He pressed some buttons.

Now the thing started to receive. The three leaned close to it.

“Can you turn it up?” Gwynyfer asked.

Gregory fiddled with the knobs. A huge burst of static. Then voices.

Many voices.

They were all distant. They spoke as if giving orders, but all at once. They were too muted to be understood.

Gregory put it down. He fiddled with some knobs. Static. Then voices again. The same ones. Still distant.

Irritated, he shut it off. “I thought we had a real lead there,” he said. He kept fiddling with it. Gwynyfer patted him on the back.

Brian and Gwynyfer kept on searching the room. They found all kinds of compounds in bottles. They found sprays and pills and salves. They didn’t know anything about any of them. There were lots of books of medicine and sorcery.

“Do you think Dr. Brundish works for the automatons?” Brian asked. “Or if he even is an automaton?”

Gwynyfer shrugged. “It’s possible,” she said. “Do you two never get bored with sleuthing? What say we go up to the belvedere and hit golf balls into the trash heap?”

Brian looked at her steadily. “You’re in the middle of a siege.”

“No,” she said irritably, “we’re at the beginning of one. You aren’t our conscience.”

“Well, maybe you need one,” said Brian, who was tired of being insulted.

“Hey, hey,” said Gregory, holding up his hands.

“I don’t see why,” said Gwynyfer, “I, a descendant of goddesses, need to listen to cheap advice about when I should or shouldn’t putt.”

“Brian just means,” Gregory explained, “that —”

“Hey!” said Brian, lifting something out of Dr. Brundish’s sock drawer. “Look at this!”