The Chamber in the Sky (17 page)

There was a ghost of a dark coat fudging the air around her jacket sleeves. And, she imagined, her eyes probably showed through the costume as it faded.

Her disguise was gone. She was a Norumbegan surrounded by Thusser soldiers in the center of a fortress ruled by the Horde.

“Perhaps,” she said with a sigh, “I do fancy a brisk walk up the cliffs.”

It was clear to Gregory that the capsule and its bearers were nowhere in the ranks of the deactivated mannequins. A thousand things could have happened to it. It might never have reached Pflundt. It might still be toiling across the goopy wastes. It might have come to Pflundt and left. And worst, it might have been discovered already by the Thusser and destroyed.

Gregory started to thread his way back to the window he'd come into. He hoped he could make it back up the pipe and out.

The front doors to the building, several rooms away, slammed open.

Gregory froze. He backed away into the shadows, intertwining himself with mannequin businessmen. Someone could be looking for him. If Gwynyfer was caught, they might have suspected there was someone sneaking around in the building.

A single pair of footsteps was coming up a flight of stairs.

Gregory ducked and made his way toward the wall.

The door to the room Gregory was in burst open.

Gregory kept close to the floor. He froze.

He stayed that way, caught in the room of immobile bodies which all stood like the exhibits of bears and badgers and moose at a natural history museum.

For a long time, he stood still. He admired how smart he was.

Then his muscles began to hurt. His back twinged. He was in a weird position.

He didn't hear any other sound in the room. No more footsteps.

Gradually, so slowly it felt like not moving at all, he lifted up his head.

There was a tide of faces around him. Some had their mouths open. Some had their eyes closed.

Over near the door he'd heard bang open was a young man facing his way and a young woman facing the other way.

Gregory froze again and tried to see if the young man moved. He couldn't remember if the guy had been there when he came in. A mustache. A bowler hat. He would remember a bowler hat.

The light fell through the broad windows and floated like old, brown times through the air.

Gregory stared at the man's face. The man stared back at him.

But it was the woman who raised her arm — the arm of a Thusser soldier — and released a stream of thick yellow gas right toward him from the nozzle of a gun.

Gregory caught her eye in the reflection of the window. She'd been watching. He'd moved too soon.

The gas roiled across the hall, passing over the heads of the frozen mannequins.

The soldier waded through the crowd toward him. She wore a mask over her nose and mouth.

Gregory bolted toward the pipe he'd climbed down.
He grabbed hold of it and started pulling himself up. He kept slipping. She was getting closer. The cloud was almost around him.

It hit. His eyes burned. He had to close them. He couldn't hold on to the pipe. He fell backward, choking.

He hit the floor and rolled, gagging, fighting for breath.

T
hey sat in a row in the prison yard: Gregory Stoffle, Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, Brian Thatz, and Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint. Their hands were by their sides. They stared at the cobblestones.

Overhead, the lux effluvium burned a bright, hot white.

All four of them were dressed in shapeless gray clothes. They sweated from the heat beating down on them.

Tars Tarkas lay beside the four of them with all six of his short little legs sticking out to the sides and his tail trailing through the dust. His tongue stuck out of his beak and he panted. The afternoon seemed endless.

Gwynyfer said, “I call this a pretty kettle of fish.”

Dainsplint daubed at his wet forehead with the hem of his smock. He said, “I do so love to see friends reunited. Stirs the old heart, hm?”

Gregory and Brian looked at each other. The last time they'd seen each other Gregory had been kicking Brian's
bleeding ankles while Brian limped in circles with a cackling Thusser beauty queen.

Whenever Brian looked at Gregory's face, he could not help remembering the jolts of pain at every third step:
kick
two three,
kick
two three. When Gregory looked at Brian, he felt ashamed, and then he felt angry, because he had only been trying to help, and Brian obviously didn't understand. Brian closed his eyes and dropped his head.

Across the stone yard, children chased moths.

A huge fleet of submarines chugged through the veins. The walls vibrated as they passed by, their propellers spinning. Swimming things sank or scurried.

A balloon with many eyes and a single flipper watched them burble past. When the coast was clear, it began to swim quickly and purposefully away.

Kalgrash the troll and the Earl of Munderplast — the gloomy, old Prime Minister of the Empire of the Innards — sat perched on a broken slab of concrete, taking tea.

“Shan't end well,” grumbled Munderplast in a voice that sounded like a sad, bored prisoner speaking from a dungeon several rooms away. He looked out over the mess of the city and said in his weird, medieval mutter, “Your walls … your walls, with strength and mickle might
up-builded … We of the Court cannot help but notice that they do not enclose our palace.”

Kalgrash corrected him. “The remains of your palace.”

“No reason to be unkind. We are all of us remains, dear troll. Vehicles of decay.”

“We said we'd protect the Norumbegan people. And we will. But we couldn't protect the whole city. So we chose part. Not the palace. Anyone who wants to can flee behind the walls.”

“Aye. And your other ventures? What of your computers, dredged out of the wreckage? Any messages, any missives sent from yon other sphere?”

“No. Not a peep. We have them set up and they're on, but there's nothing happening. There's no one to talk to us.”

“Oh, dear troll.
I
will talk to you.” The old man patted the troll's claw. For a moment, they sat companionably, looking out at the ruins. Munderplast asked politely, “Does our beloved Empress — may the gods smile always upon her — does our beloved Empress still persist in trying to kill or to magnetize you?”

“Yup, yup, yup,” said the troll, eating shortbread. “Last night she tried to have a pallet of bricks dropped on me. But accidentally, the rope didn't break. Day before that, it was a metal-eating virus in my cot.”

“You escaped, I wot?”

“I came back late. By the time I got there, it had eaten the bed.”

The Earl of Munderplast shook his head. “One fears for the politician who can't carry out a simple assassination.
Utter incompetence … Still, I suppose, better for you this way: living … in as much as living is occasionally superior to deathly oblivion.” The earl sipped his tea. “Occasionally,” he repeated. “Very occasionally.”

A boy came leaping and jumping over the gravel pits toward them. “Sirs!” he yelled. “Sirs! The Thusser are on the move! General Malark sent me! The Thusser are on the move!”

The kid reached their side. He wore the jacket of an Imperial herald. He was out of breath from scampering over the ruins of the palace.

Munderplast asked, “What news, child?”

“There's a mechanical spy down the flux veins. It saw the Thusser fleet. Stolen subs — a whole heap of them on their way up here. General Malark says twelve hours away.”

Munderplast stood. He tossed his old china teacup and saucer off to the side. They cracked on the rocks.

“Alas and alack and ‘To arms,'” said the earl. “Things are about to get worse.”

Gregory and Brian stood in line for brown rice. It was the first time they'd been alone since Gregory was shoved through the doors of the prison.

Brian said, “Sometimes there's a little pork fat, too. Or something like pork.”

Gregory nodded. They stood for a while longer. The line wasn't moving very fast.

The rice was cooked in a big metal half-barrel over a pile of embers. The air smelled like burning oil and hot steel.

Gregory said, “I'm sorry. You get it … I mean … that I had to? … Kick you?”

Brian just stared at him. He didn't know what to say. Of course he got that.

Gregory continued, “If I didn't kick you while you danced, Gwynyfer and I would have been captured. They already suspected us. Because of our accents and because the disguises shielded our thoughts.”

Brian nodded.

Gregory said, “And also, if Gwynyfer hadn't started dancing with you, that kid Aelfward would have kept you hanging up in those chains.” He shook his head. “That was terrible. That was awful. I hated seeing you like that.”

Brian nodded again. “I know you did.”

“So there's nothing else I could have done. You know?”

“I know.”

Gregory stuck out his hand. “So … shake? Friends?”

“Friends,” said Brian. He shook Gregory's hand.

But he didn't know whether they would ever truly be friends again.

Just as trumpets had sounded above the walls of Pflundt down in Three-Gut, now sirens wailed on the walls of New Norumbega. Citizens crawled out of their
huts dragging plastic bags filled with possessions, rushing for the neighborhoods the mannequins had fortified.

Kalgrash and the general sat in the clanksiege, perched on top of the crude new walls. The troll had to be at General Malark's side to tell him what was real and what were simply the illusions of Norumbegan glamour.

“What a mess,” muttered the general, watching the crowds of elfin Norumbegans inside and outside the walls. There were brawls down below, and people were running around without point, ignoring the orders of mannequin soldiers. Some people were trying to drag their most expensive pieces of furniture along with them to safety — things their parents had brought hundreds of years before from Earth. Others were looting empty shops and smashing windows, kicking down the doors of apartment buildings to see what was left to steal.

Soon the Thusser would be mooring their submarines at valves surrounding the capital. They'd be crawling out of the ground. They'd be forming ranks in the desert, just as the mannequins themselves had done three weeks before.

Kalgrash and General Malark watched the Empress and her Court borne along on chairs carried by serving-men. She and her servants made their way heavily down hillocks of trash. The Empress cooled herself with a fan.

The troll and the general watched as, in the distance, out in the bright plains, mannequin marines headed off to their vessels to do battle with the oncoming Thusser fleet.

“Good men,” said the general. “Good women. But they can't win.”

“What do you mean?” Kalgrash asked, horrified.

“According to the mechanized spies floating in the blood, our subs are outnumbered. Wildly. Only hope is that the Thusser haven't had time to bring enough weapons through from Earth.”

A jolt ran through the landscape. For one startling moment, the clanksiege teetered. The general swore and banged at the controls. The machine regained its footing. Down on the ground, piles of garbage slid and shifted.

“Another heartbeat,” said the general. He shook his head. Down below, in a tent, geologists and mathematicians were hard at work, trying to figure out when each pulse was coming and which way it would push the flux or the lux effluvium.

Now another skirmish had broken out near the new gates. Lord Attleborough-Stoughton, the railroad baron, and Lord Gwarnmore, Duke of the Globular Colon, had started a movement called Equal Walls, Equal Citizens. They objected to the fact that some people's houses and businesses were protected, while others weren't. They were mainly interested in this because the walls would do nothing to protect their own property: the railroads and various neighborhoods at the edge of the city. So they shot off guns and threatened to shoot anyone fleeing into the safety of the walls. They wanted to force the mannequins to protect the whole city, rather than just one part.

“They're crazy,” said Kalgrash. “Nuts, nuts, nuts.”

The general nodded. “We have to decide when to take them both down. Gwarnmore and Attleborough-Stoughton. May they live long and may their fields be fertile.”

“The Thusser will be here in just a few hours. We can't have people outside the walls.”

“It's a mess,” the general repeated. “Living, breathing creatures — they're always a mess. Never trust them, troll. We have to love them. We have to serve them. But don't trust them.”

The ground jolted again. Another heart; another heartbeat.

Below, three men in bowlers were in a fistfight over a box of stolen ice cream.