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Authors: M. T. Anderson

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BOOK: The Empire of Gut and Bone
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EIGHT

A
n hour later, the boys were dragged to cocktail hour in the Grand Hall of the palace. Brian could not think, he was so worried about Kalgrash and Dantsig, who had been dragged off, bound. And now Gregory and he were surrounded by noblemen and duchesses, all of them eating cheese, drinking white wine, and talking at them.

“Dear children, it is too, too lovely of you to come by.”

“Must have been ghastly, being squeezed through the flux with those chitchatty
appliances.”

“Oh!
One cannot
bear
them prancing around the blood, calling themselves a Resistance.”

“Skidneys! Something must be done.”

“Who’ll do it? Too
dull,
old fish. It’s just too weary-making.”

“I agree, your lordship. One can’t dash off to war in a special hat every time a tin clothespress starts barking speeches about the rights of all to run through fields, hand in hand.”

“Still, it must have been terrible for you boys. Being their prisoners and whatnot.”

“Someday, we’ll bestir ourselves and give them a good, solid brass hiding.”

“That’s what they need: taken across the knee. Walloped till their eyes juice up.”

“Darling,” said a duchess, “I’m not sure a mannequin’s eyes juice.”

“We’ll install ducts. They should ruddy well drop a tear with the rest of us.”

It was almost impossible for Gregory and Brian to understand everything that was being said. One of the Court magicians had cast a spell of translation so they’d understand Norumbegan. Now it sounded like everyone was speaking English with an accent stranded halfway across the Atlantic between Britain and America, like someone who’d spent a year abroad and come back pretentious, or those actors from black-and-white 1930s films about rich New Yorkers dressed in tuxes and velvet who fall in love and end up tripping into bathtubs filled with champagne. With the help of the spell, the boys could tell what was being said, but they could also feel how much Norumbegan still slid past them in the ether, all the alien thoughts flowing across their brains like oil over a walnut.

The Court was gathered to celebrate the boys and the news they brought from the Old Country. Nonspeaking robots with birdlike heads — much simpler automatons than any the boys had seen yet in all the catacombs and organs of the Empire — served little sandwiches on trays.
They wandered stiffly through the crowd, their goggling glass eyes unseeing, offering party napkins and goodies on toothpicks. They wore long tabards of cheap felt in the colors of the Empire.

The Grand Hall was built of huge curls of dried flesh, pink and strong as granite. The ceiling, however, was covered in acoustic tiles, most of which were webbed with brown water damage. A row of sliding glass doors jammed into bare plywood led out onto a veranda that looked down the slumping belly of the palace and over the city of New Norumbega.

The boys had seen enough of the city as they’d rolled through to be depressed by its squalor. The Norumbegans were living in huts — brightly painted, but ramshackle. The streets were narrow and dirty. Broken chairs and chests of drawers leaned against walls. Men in swallowtailed coats and muddy spats ducked through doorways made out of old windows. Girls in torn ball gowns sat on roofs eating apples and hurling the cores over alleys. The whole city smelled like garbage.

It had been hundreds of years since the Norumbegan refugees had arrived, but it seemed like they had never bothered to make themselves a true home.

“You are wondering,” said an old, frowning man in a brocade frock coat, “why this city is so sunken in grime, when we were, in ancient days, such a noble race.” He was rather short, and his face hung sadly, and his voice sounded antique, slow, and gloomy, as if it echoed up from some old dungeon where he was sitting, slumped in despair. “You are wondering how we came to this sorry state.”

“Um, yeah,” said Gregory. “This is nice and all, but the real Norumbega didn’t smell like compost.”

“The real Norumbega. Yes. The Old Norumbega. Ah! Ancient days, now faded.” The old man shook his head, looking around the Court sadly. He explained, “Forgive me: I am a most gloomy wight. We are in this state, living in these decayed corridors, because we have been abandoned by our automatons.”

“So we heard,” Gregory said.

The old man shook his head. He said, “Came our sad and bedraggled horde through the portal, fleeing from the Thusser, and we assayed to build a new City of Gargoyles right in that place, in Three-Gut, and to live there in splendor and merry might. The automatons began to quarry walls and courtyards from the flesh, and had gone some way toward building another city of broad boulevards and fair turrets — when the Great Body swallowed. Alas.” He shook his head. “Alas. ‘Twas a fearsome epoch: the Season of Meals. The whole of what the machines had built was washed away. Many of our number were washed away, too, and we suspect that buried deep in the gut, there are still colonies of our people who have not, for untold ages, struggled up to find us.

“When the flood was passed, we demanded our automatons begin once more. Again they built, and again the Great Body swallowed, and our city was washed away. We now spake sharply to our servants and bade them shape up. They suggested we build in another place. We
would have none of it, and ordered them to follow the plans we had originally set forth.

“They went back to the tissue quarries and carved out more bricks and paving stones. But we could not help noticing that their numbers seemed to have dwindled. Many of them left us. They did not wish to be washed away. And yet, the brunch came again, roaring down the gullet like a spring freshet, and many mannequins were destroyed. Most of the others fled, too frightened of our wrath to speak out against us.

“One led us to this place. We carried everything with us. We demanded he and the remaining automatons build us a palace here. They had barely begun when they were gone. They, too, left us. Fled in the night.” He took a sip of his wine and looked sharply left and right. “Ingrates. Varlets,” he muttered. “We built them. We made them. We taught them.” He noticed the two humans staring at him in wonder and dismay. He held out his hand. “I am the Earl of Munderplast, Munderplast being a verdant land out in the Throttling Pipes. I am the head of the Party of Melancholy.”

Gregory asked, “Is that a good thing?” Brian shook the man’s hand.

“Is anything a good thing?” asked the Earl of Munderplast in dreary tones. “Will anything come to anything? I think not. It is all dying.”

The three of them — two boys flanking the old man — looked out over the glittering tin roofs of the shanty city, on the walls of which were painted advertisements
for Norumbegan products: D
OCTOR
S
TYMSON’S
M
AGICAL
P
ITUITARY
P
ILLS
…H
ALOGEN
R
ECEIVERS BY
G
ALVO-
B
RITE
…A
UTO-
D
RONES BY
B
EDWYR
& C
O.
…M
ADAME
M
ABINANT’S
F
RIPPERY AND
F
ROCKERY
— W
E
F
EATURE
D
RESSES FOR THE
D
ARLINGEST
D
EBS
. Shadows rolled over the city, cast by bubbles in the veins above.

“You can go back to Old Norumbega,” said Brian. “That’s what we’re here to tell the Emperor. All you have to do is stop the Thusser. They’ve cheated.”

“They’re moving in,” Gregory added. “It’s awful. You have to go back. Have a big smack-down. Wham! They’ve messed up the Game. Completely. You’ve got to go back.”

Brian urged, “Then it would be yours again. The old city under the mountain. All the caverns. You wouldn’t have to live here anymore.”

The Earl of Munderplast looked at them both through tired eyes. “Warms the heart, to hear young, energetic bairns such as yourself drivel on about how after night comes morning … believing something can happen … other than the ruin that shall eventually devour us whole … taking you and your little smiling faces with us. Indeed. ‘Twill be sad, to see your bright, shining cheer turn to horror as you’re washed away in brunch or drowned in flux or cut apart by rogue mannequins.” He shook his head. “Alas.”

Brian said, “You can’t just give up. I’m telling you that the Thusser have forfeited the Game! By the Rules, you can just go in and end the whole contest! You can take your old kingdom back!”

Munderplast smiled sadly. Somewhere in the hall, a phone was ringing insistently, ignored by all. “My boy,” said Munderplast, “I can do nothing. The Party of Melancholy is currently in the minority in the Imperial Council. The ruling party there at the moment is the Norumbegan Social Club. A very different band of people. Jolly. Fond of giggling and swell pleasance. Our fine Regent is at their head. Duke Telliol-Bornwythe. He and the Norumbegan Social Club hold all the power. Unless he were to die — Great Liver forbid such a sad turning — and an election be held for a new regent, we of the Melancholy Party shall be sitting in the backseat of this dismal jalopy for some years.”

The phone kept ringing.

“Of course,” said Munderplast, “if the Regent were to die, then it might be possible for a statesman such as myself to suggest to the young Emperor that —”

“Does no one have hands?” shouted the Regent across the crowd. “Will someone get the phone?”

“Sorry, old thing,” said someone wearily. “Can’t reach it from here. Arm isn’t long enough.”

There was a general murmur of agreement. None of them had arms long enough. The phone was fifteen feet away. It kept ringing.

“You have to help us,” Brian pressed the Earl of Munderplast. “Not just with that. Our friends have been locked up.”

“Oh,” said Munderplast. “Those automatons? You call them friends?”

“We brought one of them from Old Norumbega,” said Gregory. “The troll. He’s part of the Game.”

“He’s more than that,” said Brian.

Behind them, the Regent was surging through the crowd, trying to get to the phone.

“I see. You sympathize with the metal help.”

Another man standing nearby — a handsome, youngish nobleman with black hair slicked back and a polka-dot bow tie — said, “Clockwork-lovers, hmm? I wouldn’t get your hopes up, chaps, for a fond reunion, tears in every eye, embraces all round, picnic in the gills, tra la la. They’re being reeducated. The two automatons.”

“What do you mean?” Brian demanded.

“Scrubbed. Fixed. So they’re no longer rebellious.”

Brian felt his fingers grow cold. He and Gregory looked at each other in horror.

“No!” said Brian. “You’ve got to stop people from doing it! You can’t let them!”

“Why ever not, old thing?”

“Because they’re our friends. We won’t — we won’t tell you our message. We won’t tell you anything, if you don’t release them, if you don’t —”

The young man said, “Afraid, chaps, you don’t have much choice. You’re rather over a barrel, being in our midst and surrounded by armed guards and all.”

“See and behold,” droned the Earl of Munderplast to the boys. “Only two and half minutes into our parley, and already sorrow has come to you. Verily, nothing shall turn out —”

“HUSH!”
hissed the Regent from across the room.

The crowd had gathered around the door into the hall. Right outside the door, there was an old wooden phone box with a mouthy phone like the one in General Malark’s headquarters. The Regent was speaking on it theatrically, loud enough so that everyone could hear.

“Ah. Mr. Malark. Yes, we were expecting your call…. I said, ‘Mr. Malark’…. Mister …
Mister
… Because, sir, you are not a general…. Allow me to clarify: I am the Regent of the Empire of the Innards, which extends through the whole of the Great Body, explored and unexplored. I am therefore the only current head of the armed forces. There is but one army in the Empire, and it has no generals named Malark. I was explaining this to your lackey only an hour ago.”

There was a general murmur of appreciation from the crowd, a rumble of approval. The Regent put his finger over his lips and silenced the Court with his hand.

“Yes, sir, he arrived here…. Yes…. Yes, indeed, we have the two little human cublings with us here in the Grand Hall…. They’re a little greasy and they have no conversation, but no, they’re no worse for wear…. Oh? … Oh? But surely you’ve heard all this from the excellent Mr. Dantsig…. No? … Really? You haven’t heard from your submarine? … No? … Now, isn’t that a bit rum? Very odd.”

The crowd, finding this hilarious, started snickering and talking. The Regent, who now looked fit to bust with laughter, squeezed his eyes shut and waved them all back vigorously. He mimed a big, comic
Shhhh!

Brian and Gregory exchanged a frantic look.

“Yes, well, I do have an explanation, Mr. Malark.” He paused for dramatic effect, then said, delighted, “We do have some sense of what might have happened. Because we have imprisoned your envoy, your marines, and your troll, and they’re all going to be reeducated…. Yes … Tutored … Sternly … What do you think of that? … Insofar as you can think … Oh, I’m so sorry…. So very sorry … Perhaps there is a can opener there into whose arms you can cry? …”

At this, the young nobleman in the polka-dot bow tie let loose a loud guffaw. “Classic,” he muttered.

“You’ve got to stop this!” Brian hissed urgently.

“Hush,” said the Earl of Munderplast. “Can’t you see, the Regent is speaking on the telephone. There.”

Brian, loud on purpose, mustering his courage, proclaimed, “We’re not going to tell you our news if you don’t release our friends right now!”

Dark eyes swiveled to glare at him. Mouths were sour. The end of his sentence was still loud, but it was awkward, weak, and uncertain.

He did not speak again as the Regent continued, “And what? And what will you do? … Ah? … Ah? … But you can’t…. You can’t even call me a name…. You aren’t built for it…. Try…. Just try…. Oh, I say, that was actually rather good…. Hmm, yes, that will do…. Yes … Well, I think that perhaps this conversa — What? … What? … Oh, I’d like to see that…. That really would be rich…. Yes, of course I invite you to try…. Please, by all means … Yes….” Then he snarled, “You
little hand-pump, you wouldn’t dare,” and hung up, slamming down the mouthpiece. The call was over.

BOOK: The Empire of Gut and Bone
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