The Empire of Gut and Bone (7 page)

With a gentle smile, the Regent turned to the Norumbegan Court.

“I am pleased to announce,” he said, “that the Mannequin Resistance has just declared war. They say they’re coming to besiege New Norumbega.”

The room went wild with confusion, anger, and delight.

N
ew Norumbega’s Imperial Prison was not impressive: a messy ring of huts strung together around a circular courtyard that was paved with flagstones of ancient jerky ripped from the wall of the Dry Heart, striped with fats.

Dantsig and Kalgrash, handcuffed, were marched through the yard. They stumbled past pits where prisoners called up through wooden gratings for food, drink, and mercy. Guards goaded the two automatons on.

“All right, all right, all right,” said Kalgrash irritably. “Stop shoving! I bite.” He clacked his pointed teeth.

In lean-tos, soldiers played cards or snoozed.

“What’s the big —” Kalgrash started, then stopped himself, nearly slamming into Dantsig.

Dantsig, mouth dropped open, was staring to the side.

One wall was lined with rough wooden shelves that had been sloppily painted blue. Kalgrash saw, lined up on those shelves, stretching for forty feet or more, rows and
rows of mannequin heads, caught in expressions of fear and surprise. Necks that had been disconnected from bodies that still floated out there in the mire, in Three-Gut. Eyes that were blank. Brains that were shut down. The prisoners taken at the siege of Delge.

Then he grew truly terrified. The Norumbegans really did see him and his kind merely as machines. Not like Wee Sniggleping, who adored each of his creations and took pride in its successes and eccentricities.

A guard shoved Kalgrash in the back, and the troll stumbled forward.

They were led into a dark shed, pushed into the center of the room, and a plywood door was dragged across the uneven floor to shut them in. Kalgrash heard it latch.

A guard looked through slats of wood and said, “Promise you won’t escape.”

Dantsig looked shifty. He nodded.

“Say it. I command you to say it.”

Dantsig flinched as if there was some inner battle. And then he growled, “Yeah, I promise.”

“There’s a good automaton. And you?”

Kalgrash looked at the guard like the man was crazy. “What do you want?”

“Promise you won’t escape. Your word.”

“I promise,” said Kalgrash, crossing his fingers behind his back.

The guard walked away.

Kalgrash and Dantsig sat in the dust.

Dantsig looked defeated. His face was pale. His arms were limp.

“You saw them?” Kalgrash said.

Dantsig nodded grimly.

“There were so many,” said Kalgrash.

The two mannequins didn’t speak for a long while.

Their cell was made of uneven bits of wood and metal. Though it was gloomy, it wasn’t entirely dark, since light fell in through cracks between the panels of fiberboard. Somewhere nearby, there was a hive of wasps. They came in and out on errands.

After a time, Dantsig stood and paced around the cell, his eyes narrowed.

“Damn them,” he said. “We’ll never get out of here.”

Kalgrash thought this was odd. “We just need to wait until there aren’t any guards around,” he said, “and we can untie the twine that holds the door on.”

“Are you tweaking my beard?” Dantsig said to him. “This place is tied up tight as a Christmas roast.” He kicked at the wall. The whole hut shimmied. “These walls must be six feet thick. The door is banded with iron. The Norumbegan breathers are masters of construction.”

Kalgrash stood and looked at Dantsig carefully. “Is that really what you see?” he said. “’Cause I see something a whole lot different.”

“What do you see?”

“This place is built like a doghouse. For an old dog. Who doesn’t lean too much on walls.”

“Are you out of your tin can? The Norumbegans don’t do anything half gut. It’s all full-on with them. They build their cities to last a million years. This prison will keep us
locked up until the blood runs out of the
Body’s veins and the gorge rises and the Innards split with rot.”

“Dantsig,” said Kalgrash, “part of the wall is made out of old orange crates.”

The troll walked over to the door. The bottom part of it was plywood, and the top was some slats of rough wood. Kalgrash surveyed the room beyond them. A couple of guards sat at a table, talking quietly in the language of the Norumbegans.

When he turned back to Dantsig, the man was staring at him moodily. Dantsig asked, “Are you serious?”

Kalgrash nodded. “Here,” he said, “read the writing on the wall.”

“What do you mean?”

Kalgrash pointed. “There’s writing. There’s the picture of an orange, and some writing. Read it.”

Dantsig walked over and glared at the wall. “Stone,” he said.

“Balsa wood,” said Kalgrash. “Read it. See the words?”

Dantsig concentrated. He muttered, “They make us worship them. That’s how we’re built. For worship. They can do no wrong. We think every single one of them is beautiful. More beautiful than we can ever be. That’s what they’ve done to us. They could have horns and yellow claws and we’d think they were the belles of the ball.” He was getting angrier as he glared at the wall. “We just take a little look at them and we’re chockablock with ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ ‘Very good, sir’ … and bowing and scraping and ‘By your leave.’ Fresh Poictesme Navel Oranges.” He
stopped short. Then he crowed, “Fresh Poictesme Navel Oranges!” He looked toward the guards in the outer chamber and dropped his voice in hushed excitement. “I can read it. I can see something’s there. Or if there was something there, it would say, in Norumbegan, ‘Fresh Poictesme Navel Oranges,’ and there would be a picture of an orange right next to it!” He grinned wolfishly. “Is that what you see?”

“I see a battered old box that’s been tacked onto the wall with brads. You know, those little nails? And it says something in runes, and then there’s pictures of oranges, and I know I don’t need to eat, but I’d really like one right now. Oranges are great. The way they split into sections is like they’re built to be eaten.” Kalgrash got a sad, citrusy look on his spiky face.

Dantsig was squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again, staring hard at the wall. “I’ve lost it. I can’t see it anymore. But you’re right, I bet. I can tell. You’re right.” He looked around him carefully. “Let’s sit in the middle of the floor,” he said.

They sat back-to-back in the middle of the floor.

“So,” whispered Dantsig, “tell me what you see. Can we break out?”

“Sure. There are guards.”

“We wait for our moment.”

“Got it.”

“Then we move.”

“Sure.”

“Forget our promises.”

“Mine’s forgotten.”

“You’ll have to be my eyes. Tell me what things are made of.”

“They’re mostly made of junky stuff.”

“Let’s keep quiet now. Don’t want to attract attention.”

“Gotcha.”

“We’re going to do this.”

“That’s the spirit.”

So they sat, facing opposite directions, their arms on their knees.

Through the afternoon, people came to examine them. Guards came, and a wizard, and a servant from the palace tasked with looking them over and providing a report for the Imperial Council. No one talked to them. Guards lifted up their arms and opened up panels in their backs and took notes, then swung the panels closed and left them alone.

At some point, the generators that lit the lux effluvium so bright shut off to bring night to the Dry Heart. The cracks in the walls faded. The shed got dark.

Finally, Dantsig got up and walked to the door. He looked out through the wooden slats. “The guards have left the table. Is that what you see?”

“That’s what I see, Captain.”

“So you think you can get this door open?”

“The only thing holding us in here is you thinking we have to stay,” Kalgrash said.

“You lucky little dingus,” said Dantsig. “You’re not built like the rest of us. Do you see how they do this to us?”

“Sure, sure, sure.” Kalgrash fiddled with the door. He
lifted it carefully out of its rut in the dirt. He fiddled with its catch. Then he reached over to the twine hinges and began to untie the knots.

When a few of the twine hinges were untied, he lifted the door from its setting. He and Dantsig scuttled out, glancing around watchfully for guards.

Kalgrash and Dantsig crouched behind the table.

“How are we going to deal with them?” Kalgrash asked, nodding out at figures in the courtyard.

Dantsig made a face and thought long and hard. He looked around.

Then he smiled.

He pointed at something on a chair.

“That’s how,” he said. “Right there.”

G
regory had met a girl. She wore a gown of silk, but her shoulders were bare. Her skin was smooth as lotion. Her hair shone. The two were talking. They had been introduced by the Earl of Munderplast. (“Ah! Your eye, my boy, is upon that fine young creature…. Follow me thither…. Gregory Stoffle, may I present you to a true angel of delight, a very paragon of sweetness, and (as the young people say) a ‘solid sender’ yclept Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of the Globular Colon…. It warms an old heart to see you two smile at one another as if you were unaware that the flesh you so much admire will soon be dust and dry straps of muscle on a frame of rotting bone…. There we are. Enjoy!”)

“Wow,” said Gregory. “That was quite an intro.”

Gwynyfer laughed. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to.

They watched each other carefully, ready for flirtation.

“So,” said Gregory. “I’m from Earth.”

“I know. We all know.”

“And you’re from the Globular Colon.” She nodded at that and Gregory nodded slowly with her. “That’s awesome,” he said. “Super neighborhood.”

“Really.” Her tone was ironic. “You like it?”

“Great schools. Really good hockey team.”

She touched him on the nose. “You’ve never been.”

“No. But I may pass that way.” He winked. “Get it?”

She laughed again.

He told her, “We’re trying to free our friend Kalgrash. He’s an automaton.”

“I thought you were here to warn us about the Thusser.”

“That, too. We’re very exciting. We’ve got a finger in every pie.”

Gregory was starting to feel secure again. After days of nothing but weirdness, he felt like he was on firm ground. He knew how to deal with girls.

Except that Brian interrupted. “Gregory, we’ve got to go. We have to try to meet with the Emperor and the Regent. We’ve got to talk to someone, quick.”

“The Emperor?” said Gwynyfer. “The Stub?”

Brian looked confused. Gregory made the introductions: “Brian Thatz, let me present you to Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of the Globular Colon.”

“It’s good to meet you,” said Brian without humor, “but we’ve got to go.”

“We were just talking,” said Gregory.

“Well, any minute, they’re going to take us in to meet the Emperor.”

Gwynyfer Gwarnmore smiled a secret smile.

“What’s going on there?” prodded Gregory cutely, as if coaxing a baby to give up its sippy cup. “What’s the widdle smile about?”

“I just don’t think you’re really going to get much help from the Emperor.”

“He’s a kid, right?” said Gregory.

She shrugged. Gregory couldn’t help but notice that her shoulders were superb. “I guess,” she said.

Brian hesitated. Gregory told him, “I’ll be with you in a couple.”

Brian nodded and walked away.

Gregory jabbed his thumb back at his friend. “Always on the job. It tires me out. Sometimes I want to just lie back, eat the buffet.”

Gwynyfer smiled at him, and he felt the glow, as if the acoustic-tiled ceiling had just lifted and let butter in.

He felt his brain drenched in things she was not saying.

Brian, meanwhile, was listening to the young nobleman with the polka-dot bow tie and the slicked-back hair, who old Munderplast had introduced as Lord Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint, a prominent member of the Norumbegan Social Club.

“Outrageous,” Lord Dainsplint was murmuring to
another young buck of the Norumbegan Social Club, this one a vaguely bucktoothed type with floppy blond hair. Dainsplint said beneath his breath, “The Regent’s a fool. An absolute fool. Why did he let the bally mannequins declare war? Why right now?”

“You mean,” said the floppy-haired gent, “with the Fest coming up.”

“Exactly, Gugs. The Fest. Next week. And it will be one sorely drippy Fest if the city is surrounded by manns with cannon.”

By
manns,
he apparently meant
mannequins.
Brian thought that even his abbreviations sounded snobby.

“It is not our way to invite trouble,” said Lord “Chigger” Dainsplint. “Lolling, that’s our way. Letting the bloody manns do whatever their little tin hearts desire, so long as it’s far away and dull.”

“What if the manns actually find a way around their prohibitions? And manage to attack us?”

“I
know,
Gugs. It’s not impossible. And do you know, the thing which bothers me in that case — the little detail I find troubling — is the utter lack of walls. It’s my understanding, Gugs, that an important part of resisting any besieging force that has catapults and mortars and howitzers and so forth is a bloody wall. And maybe a moat. What was the Regent
thinking?
Really. This is the end. He’s crackers.”

Suddenly, the floppy-haired man called Gugs caught sight of Brian listening. He said to Lord Dainsplint, “Ah, Chigger, old pal, it appears small apes have large ears.”

Chigger Dainsplint turned. “Well, hello, little chimp! Still worried about those Thusser?”

Brian glared at the man. He didn’t want to be rude to his elders, especially not his elders by several hundred years, but his elders were being rude to him. “You should be worried, too,” Brian reprimanded. “Once they settle Old Norumbega, they might come through the portal to settle New Norumbega and the Innards.”

“Not particularly likely,” said Chigger. “I’ve never met a Thusser who’d asked specially to live in a spleen.”

“The little thing is slightly peevish,” said Gugs. “Is it right in the head, do you think?”

“It does seem to say the same things over and over,” said Chigger. “Like a seal clapping in an empty big top.”

Brian had never heard an adult be so mean to him. He was shocked.

“The Thusser,” said Gugs, “are hardly anything now but an old wives’ tale.”

Chigger Dainsplint said, “Quite right, old fish. Nothing doing.”

Suddenly, it was time to try to pitch the reconquest of Old Norumbega to the Emperor. Trumpets were blowing. Heralds were rolling back some fire-retardant folding doors on tracks, revealing an inner throne room.

A herald announced, “Now come forward the members of the Imperial Council, His Excellency the Regent, and the two human diplomats! With fear and adoration, bow before His Imperial Majesty, His Sublime Highness, the Emperor of Old Norumbega, New Norumbega, and the Whole
Dominion of the Innards, Elector of the
Bladders, Prince of the Gastric Wastes, Sovereign of Ducts Superior and Inferior, Lord of All!”

Brian looked hastily toward Gregory, who was taking too long shaking Gwynyfer Gwarnmore’s hand.

“This way, old bean,” said Chigger Dainsplint to Brian, beckoning with a jerk of the head.

The rest of the crowd fell silent. They slid to the ground, touching their heads to the porous, pink floor.

Eleven remained standing, walking forward, stepping over the prone bodies: Eight members of the Imperial Council (including Lord Dainsplint, his pal Gugs, and the gloomy, medieval Earl of Munderplast), the Regent, Brian, and Gregory. They all worked their way across the Grand Hall to the throne room.

Passing through the great archway, between the fire-retardant panels into a new, lower, darker chamber, a room of cheap old wallboard scribbled with royal designs in flaking paint, a room of unmatched chairs and a brown hassock, the boys saw for the first time the young Emperor of Norumbega and, on either side of him, his father and mother.

Brian and Gregory both immediately recognized the parents: They were the bright young things who had, the year before, ridden ghostly palfreys through the Haunted Hunting Grounds. They had bickered with Brian and Gregory on the Imperial barge while the boys tried to grab their crown. They had ridden down the slope near the palace on lunch trays. They had once been the rulers of this eldritch tribe: a blond man, witty and
urbane, and the love of his life, a playful woman with a knowing look.

Now they were middle-aged. In human years, they would have been fifty or sixty at least. They sat on either side of the throne, both gray, wearing simple circlets of gold on their heads. The man, who was introduced as Ex-Emperor Randall Elismoore Fendritch, wore an old crew-necked tennis sweater with pulls in it and dirty white flannel trousers. He was sunk deep in his chair, his head upright, but his back slumped, his legs sprawled out in front of him, his shoes scuffed. His wife, Ex-Empress Elspeth Fendritch, wore a flapper dress from the 1920s. The lace near the underarms was stained yellow with old sweat.

They had abdicated for their son, who presumably sat between them, on the throne. Gregory stared. Brian looked quizzical.

It was not a person enthroned between the Imperial couple. It was a Stub. A vaguely conical lump of white flesh, perhaps almost a foot tall. On one side, facing forward, was a single, wide eye. To mark the other side, there was a patch of acne.

The Regent bowed before the Stub, and, having announced the Stub’s parents, announced the Stub itself: “Gregory Stoffle and Brian Thatz, I present you to His Imperial Majesty, the Stub. Long may he prosper.”

The councillors looked at the boys expectantly.

Ex-Emperor Fendritch looked at them expectantly.

Ex-Empress Elspeth looked at them expectantly.

Brian and Gregory repeated raggedly, “Long may he prosper …?”

“Excellent,” said the Regent. “Close the panels. We’ll converse.”

For the next hour, the boys told their story yet again.

The Ex-Empress and her husband recognized the boys immediately. “Hullo,” said Elspeth, drinking some whitish water from a tumbler, “I believe it’s those little human wags who sneaked your crown.”

“Whisk me if you aren’t right. So it is, Elsp. The same little blighters. I remember them wet.”

The Ex-Empress asked, “You win your Game?”

“We did,” said Brian. “We won it for you.”

“Grand,” said Elspeth without any enthusiasm whatsoever. “You make off with the ancient, sacred crown of the realm, never to be seen again, you send the Thusser into a diplomatic panic, and then there’s a war, but yes, swell, congratters on the Game, I s’pose.”

“Ah, time travel,” said the Ex-Emperor wistfully. “Remember, dearest, the time travel? There is no company, chaps, like oneself in a few hours. Especially if one bets on the horses.”

“So you were the future,” said Elspeth, a little sharply. “You were the future, and now here you are. The future stands in front of us.”

Brian nodded. “I guess.”

The Ex-Emperor was taken up with a plate set on a
TV tray in front of him. “I need someone to cut my meat into smaller pieces,” he said. “This is awful. Very tough. It’s like trying to eat mah-jongg.”

“His Ex-and Her Ex-Imperial Majesties are members of the Council,” explained the Regent. “I am the head of that Council. We shall all be most interested in your story.”

“Grippers,” said Elspeth.

“Go ahead,” said the Regent.

Brian and Gregory started to talk.

“Address the Stub,” said the Regent. “He is the Emperor of us all.”

Acutely uncomfortable, the two boys spoke to the Stub, which occasionally looked at them, but only as its maniac eye swept over the room, lingering one place, darting to another, the eye of a man trapped behind a wall.

Halting, hesitating, interrupting each other, the boys told the story of how they’d played the Game. The boys spoke on in that throne room in that ramshackle city buried somewhere in the guts of a pulpy world. The murals on the walls, Brian and Gregory could now see, were floral designs, perhaps drawn by the Emperor and Empress themselves some years before: wreaths, swags of flowers, ferns in vases, sketches of old Emperors wearing the crown Gregory had stolen, all painted with poster paints or drawn in thick pastels. They were darkened by the smudges where torches hung. The room smelled like burning oil.

As the boys told their story, the audience did not seem to be very interested in what they had to say. The six
members of the Norumbegan Social Club kept exchanging looks — and neither Brian nor Gregory could tell what those looks meant.

The Ex-Empress and her husband were particularly entertained, at first. They liked very much the parts about themselves, and often asked questions.

“Were we very lovely to see, boys?”

“Did you think us the charmingest thing ever to ride before you in panoply? You may be honest. Deathly honest.”

But then the story evidently went on too long. The Ex-Emperor and his consort grew bored and started to stare. The members of the Norumbegan Social Club were blowing smoke rings. One was arranging papers from his briefcase. The Earl of Munderplast was bent double in his chair, as if with gas pains, his arms crossed.

Only the Regent listened, and he listened closely. His eyes swiveled from Gregory to Brian, watching both faces. There was nothing of the practical joker about him now. He seemed deadly serious.

Eventually, on the other side of the fire-retardant panels, music started up. It sounded like jazz tunes, but taken apart and stuck back together again wrong. When it became clear that Chigger and Gugs were tapping time to the music, wishing they were elsewhere, Brian stopped mid-sentence. He said, “You know, we’re trying to help you, too. We’ve come a long way.”

Gregory agreed, “We came through that stupid portal for you.”

“You could at least listen,” said Brian. “What we’re telling you is important. It’s about your own kingdom.”

“It’s just,” said Chigger, “you’ve spoken for so very
long.”

“Hear, hear,” said Gugs, raising his pipe.

“Because we need
your
help and you need
our
help,” Brian protested.

Chigger fixed him with a gaze. “We,” he said deliberately, “don’t need any help. From anyone. We are a sublime species.”

Brian gaped. He didn’t know what to say. He was tired and hungry. Fleetingly, he thought of his home, how much he wanted to be there — and then remembered that Boston itself and his parents and their apartment were all threatened by the spread of the Thusser settlement — and that if he and Gregory didn’t get this elfin court to intervene, if he didn’t convince these snobby, drawling men in their bow ties and vests to observe the Game again, the Thusser would gradually blot out everything in North America — so he didn’t know whether there would even be a home when he got back to Earth. He wondered what else he could say. These courtiers were so sure of themselves, so quick with their words, and everything about the way they spoke and thought was strange to him. He tried to come up with more arguments.