The Chamber in the Sky (19 page)

T
wo thombulants carried riders through the dark up the mucoid cliffs. A wandering, narrow road had been carved into the crystalline flow.

Brian and Lord Dainsplint rode one of the thombs; Gwynyfer and Gregory rode the other. Far below them gleamed the lights of Pflundt.

They had stolen the thombulants from a stable near the edge of town. There was no other way to get up to the Kaputsville plateau. Though they were bulky and stupid, the thombulants walked quickly, their flanks swaying from side to side.

They'd been climbing for hours, laboring along the switchbacks. Gwynyfer was asleep, curled uncomfortably sideways on Gregory's chest. He was tired also, but he was too happy to sleep. He was holding on to her, and she was allowing him to. It didn't matter that he was human and she was elfin. She relied on him to stay awake while she slept nestled against him.

Brian, needless to say, didn't feel exactly the same
way about Lord Dainsplint, who sat in front of him, making rude comments about the few little villages they passed — grim places with tall chimneys, fixed to the sides of the cliffs.

When the night was almost over, in the darkness before dawn, the cliff shook. At first, Brian thought it was just the thomb, but the quaking kept up, got heavier, and he saw rocks pelting down the slope below them.

“Great Body's shifting,” said Lord Dainsplint. He looked up. “The stomach's jolting or whatnot.”

There was a hideous slam, and everything jounced. Guinevere wakened and yelped with surprise. The thombulants froze on the path.

Then the motion was over as quickly as it had started. Rocks and stones trickled down the ledges.

Dainsplint grinned. “See? There's life in the old corpse yet.”

“Let's go,” said Gregory. “We've got to keep going.”

Brian said grimly, “They're probably missing us at the prison by now.”

Dainsplint explained, “Listen, old pudge, hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but there's a difference between
missing
you and simply noticing you're gone. Not sure if anyone actually ever
misses
young Brian Thatz. ‘Oh, I say, Waxmuth, where's that droopy human number who's always complaining about fairness and Vermont? I really do like to start my day with an earful of simian whinge about freedom and pine trees.'”

Brian kept his mouth shut. One way or another, he wouldn't have to take this much longer.

They kept riding. Murky hours passed. Gwynyfer fell asleep again. Brian wanted to fall asleep, but he felt as if Dainsplint was keeping an eye on him.

They were high up on the cliff of phlegm. Iridescent gleams caught on the huge formations above them.

The veins of lux effluvium grew bright. The air grew warmer.

As dawn spread throughout the stomach, they came within sight of a plateau of heads.

At first, the huge shapes were dark and domed in the sunrise. But then the veins in the sky shone brighter. The blue glow caught on carven features: a massive eye, the bridge of a nose. Brian and Gregory squinted to make out what they were seeing.

It was the town where mechanical brains were made with souls wound on sprockets, and the engineers who had built those brains had carved their shops to advertise their wares. So each shop was itself a giant head: domed scalps and eyes peering out across the void, far across the darkling plains of chyme; full faces some, with noble noses and gentle lips, while others peeked out above the plateau, mischievous and half sunken. There were giant babies with wisps of hair barely sketched on their skulls, gazing into a future that might never come. There was a young woman of beauty; there was a young man who laughed; there was an old woman whose lines spelled out the understanding of pain.

The heads stood immobile on a cliff far, far above the marshes of Three-Gut, motionless in the morning winds.

“We're there,” Gregory whispered to Gwynyfer. She
wriggled in his arms and sat up, stretching. He felt her shoulders with his hand.

It was not long before they came across the site of a battle. Clearly the mannequins had fought hard to defend the little town against the Thusser invaders. On a rough rise, there were blast marks and an overturned jeep. A set of mannequins lay, blown apart, on the heath, their gears and clockworks blackened. There were several Thusser graves — pointed mounds of earth with gray, filmy banners rippling out of them in the wind like the tags on chocolate kisses.

The kids and the elfin nobleman slid off their thombulants to search the mannequins for intact heads. The Thusser had smashed all the survivors, however. Lord Dainsplint found a rifle that looked like it was in working order. He slung its strap over his shoulder. Brian and Gregory inspected the Thusser graves.

“Don't touch the banners, kids,” said Lord Dainsplint. “They're charged with memories. You'll be flooded.”

They boys backed away and mounted their beasts. They galloped up toward the town of heads.

The lux effluvium now shone like it was full day. Gregory said, “Hey — when we were in Three-Gut a few weeks ago, it was never day. It was always kind of dark.”

Brian said, “The lux effluvium must be circulating. Because the Great Body is coming back to life. And it's heating up, too. Everything's changing.”

“I think it's just corking the Great Body's stirring,” said Lord Dainsplint. “And I say, about time, too.”

Brian asked, “Aren't you worried that it might, I don't know — move? Or get up? Or cough or swallow or something? And that everything will be wiped out?”

“See, you
are
a gloomy little mite. Whenever there's energy and chaos and change in a system, it's time for someone clever to profit by it. Someone with a biting wit and a sleek, fashionable head of hair. Yes, old boot, I mean myself.”

Gregory grinned. He liked Lord Dainsplint, in spite of himself. He wanted to be that way some day himself: the smart, savvy one who figured things out before anyone else. And maybe Gwynyfer — maybe they were married by then? — they could have an apartment in New York where all their furniture was hard and rectangular, or maybe white and spherical, and they'd —

The first shot hit a thombulant. The creature reared up, throwing Gregory and Gwynyfer to the ground. The beast blew out a painful blast of steam.

Cowering on the ground, Gregory looked around for the gunman.

Bolts of light were sailing past.

A sniper. A guard up by the town firing down on them.

Lord Dainsplint had slid off his mount and hid behind it. Brian, meanwhile, couldn't get off, because the animal was panicked, and reared up on its hindmost legs as bolts blasted the rocks around them.

Gregory saw a ditch about ten feet ahead of them. “Come on!” he hissed to Gwynyfer. “Crawl!”

But she shrieked — for she had already been hit.

The drills around the Dry Heart whirred and rasped, tearing away at its wall. The flux was murky with torn meat, ribbons of muscle cored out of the flesh.

New Norumbega had been rocked by several quakes. People just sat on the heaps that remained. They did not try to save themselves. There was no way to stop what was happening. If the Thusser broke through, everyone would die. The Norumbegans of flesh needed to breathe — and almost all of the mannequins, if soaked for long, would begin to misfire, to malfunction, to short, to seize up, and therefore to die.

The scene in the city was one of absolute chaos. No one bothered to protect anything. Fathers wailed. Mothers gouged at one another for pushing too hard or shoving. Babies screamed. Crazed teens laughed.

Kalgrash sat on top of the wall. His legs stuck out straight. It was the end. General Malark was off trying to guide the navy in one last attack on the Thusser drills.

It wouldn't work. No one thought it would. There were too few ships left.

Kalgrash lay his battle-ax beside him. There was no smiting left to be done. No house under the bridge. No warm afternoons. No cozy winter nights by the fire. No more skating. No more anything.

Kalgrash realized he had only lived a year — and now it was over.

It was so unfair he felt like crying.

Someone was running toward him. A kid. A real Norumbegan dressed as an Imperial page.

“Mr. Kalgrash! Mr. Kalgrash, sir!”

“Yup?”

“The computer! That your guys found! It's started sending messages!”

Kalgrash struggled to his feet. “Huh?”

“It's sending messages!”

Kalgrash grabbed his ax. You never knew when you might need to smite, after all.

“You're kidding,” he said.

“No,” said the boy. “And it's asking for you by name.”

T
he thombulants stampeded back and forth in terror. The sniper still fired down at the group.

Brian couldn't jump off his steed. It was moving too quickly, too violently. He'd get crushed. Tars Tarkas flapped and swirled around his head, growling at the distant gunman.

Gwynyfer was screaming in pain. Her foot was mostly gone. In a ditch, Gregory was pulling off his shirt and wrapping it tightly around her missing toes. It was already red with her blood.

Up in the town, the sniper hid behind a wall. He snarled into a walkie-talkie that he might need reinforcements. He lowered his gun and aimed it at the top of the blond boy's head.

The thombulants galloped in opposite directions.

And as they parted, they revealed Lord Dainsplint standing behind them with the rifle he'd found, pointing it up the hill. He shouted the Cantrip of Activation and it fired.

The sniper flopped backward, dead.

It was a ragged band that finally wandered into Kaputsville. Gregory had no shirt. Lord Dainsplint had the scummy start of a beard. Brian's glasses were cracked, and his feet were bare and sliced up. He hadn't bathed for days and his hair stuck up crazily. Tars Tarkas was crusted with dirt and cranky. Gwynyfer staggered on a bloody, bandaged foot, using a slightly twisted metal signpost as a staff to hold her up. She winced every time she stepped.

No one made any jokes or sly remarks. They walked past the dead guard and into the center of the little town. They were among the giant faces.

The ear-holes radiated black soot, as did the eyes. It was like the heads had thought something so terrible it had blown their brains. There were doorways into the head stores, sometimes on the cheeks, sometimes on the back of the skull, and a few times, replacing the faces. The doors were blasted off. Clearly, there had been explosions inside the skulls.

Chunks of their stone faces spilled across the plateau. The heads were huge and wounded.

Brian and Lord Dainsplint walked into the first face they came to. The empty cranium echoed with their footsteps.

Inside, there was nothing but black walls and a few pieces of furniture, almost burnt beyond recognition.

Dainsplint said, “You think the blinking Ump is here? I'm not sure that anything's left in this town.”

He walked back out into the light of the lux effluvium.

They went into several of the head-shaped houses. There was nothing but incendiary ruin.

“The Thusser blew everything up,” Gregory said. “They destroyed everything.”

“I think not,” said Lord Dainsplint, squatting on the ground. When he stood up, he held a device in his hand. He said, “I think the mannequins destroyed it. This is a mannequin grenade, unexploded.”

“Huh?” said Brian. “Why would the mannequins destroy their own town?”

“Because this is where the manns make and restore their own souls. They didn't want the Thusser Horde to find out how it was done. So they probably held the Thusser off down there for as long as they could — and then they blasted apart their own workshops. Protect the secrets of their trade and whatnot.” He frowned and looked around Kaputsville.

Gwynyfer, who was having trouble breathing from the pain of her wound, sat down and leaned her head against the nape of a neck.

Brian said, “That was why the town was only guarded by one Thusser. There's nothing here to guard anymore. It's empty.”

“What do we do?” Gregory asked.

No one could answer. They knew that hundreds of miles away, along the great network of veins and arteries, battles were being fought, and even as they stood, looking at the vast, dismal sea of slime thousands of feet below them, people were dying.

They searched the other houses.

There was a lot of twisted metal. There was dirty glass. There were small remains of mannequins who'd been blasted to bits.

Gregory stopped searching to check Gwynyfer's bandages and make sure his shirt was still tied tight on her foot. She was in a lot of pain, and kept grunting.

As he knelt by her and yanked on the sleeves of the shirt, he happened to look up at the dull hills above the town. Something was moving. It looked like a church steeple.

He said, “One sec,” to Gwynyfer, then ran over to call Brian and Lord Dainsplint. He found them in an old man's head, inspecting some footprints in the ash. “Something's coming,” he said to them.

They went outside.

Coming down from the hills were three mechanical giants. They were blackened with soot. They were heavy and their limbs were thick and their arms would have reached almost to the ground, if they had not been carrying something.

In their arms was a chapel of some kind: a tiny, stone Gothic booth with stained-glass windows only a foot wide, and little buttresses and finials and spires. It had a door in its side. They carried it by its buttresses.

They advanced slowly.

“Whoa,” said Gregory.

And Brian said, “So here it is.”

The three blackened automatons marched the Umpire Capsule through the village of shattered faces.

The giants each faced a different direction. The capsule was raised between them. They stood on the edge of the cliff, looking out across the marshes.

Lord Dainsplint and the three kids faced the giants. Tars was sniffing the capsule.

Behind the giants, somewhere far out in that sea of goop, lay the black portal where, three weeks before, the boys and their troll had entered this world. Brian squinted out at the horizon, but he could not see those faint ruins, that staircase in the air. Since then, they had been gassed, scissored by droids, shot at, pinched, hypnotized, tortured, and, perhaps worst of all, insulted continually by the very people they were trying to help. They had flowed through veins of flux and traveled the wastes of the Dry Heart. They had crawled through the Volutes like yesterday's dinner.

And now, standing before them was the capsule they had sought so long. Its slim stone arches and stained glass glittered in the light of the belly.

Down the slope, several jeeps were making their way up the rough road from Pflundt toward the town of heads. It looked like they were crammed full of Thusser soldiers with guns.

The giants spoke, one word at a time.

“The.” — “Thusser.” — “Came.” — “We.” — “Hid.”

Then:

“We.” — “Believe.” — “It.” — “Is.” — “Time.” — “For.” — “Interruption.”

Brian stepped forward. “Yes. Yes, it is.” He didn't know what to do next. He raised his hands like a wizard.
The wind blew through his mossy hair. “Interrupt!” he commanded.

The three giants turned toward him.

“We.” — “Cannot.”

Gwynyfer, dangling from her signpost crutch, said, “Well, that's a bit of a clunk.”

The giants explained, “You.” — “Must.” — “Enter.” — “And.” — “Activate.” — “The.” — “Time.” — “Out.”

Gregory and Brian rushed over.

“Dibs on the controls!” said Gregory. “I call hitting the button!”

“If there is a button,” said Brian. “And not just something you touch and then say the Cantrip of Activation.”

Gregory rolled his eyes. “Okay! Now that we're about to finish, could you for once stop pretending that God gave you golden pants just because you know the stupid Cantrip of Activation?”

“I'm just saying that —”

Gregory reached up to the old, iron ring that opened the door to the little gothic capsule. He swung the door open.

He and Brian might have kept squabbling if Lord Dainsplint hadn't interrupted them.

“Hey, old bucks. Dashed sorry to interrupt the interruption, but it ain't going to happen.”

The boys stopped and looked at him. He smiled. He said, “If you interrupt the Game — if you call back the Rules Keepers — if they come and blow the bally whistle and sock the Thusser out of Old Norumbega, then all of us — all the citizens of the Empire of the Innards — will head back to our old haunts back on Earth.”

“Yeah,” said Gregory. “That's the idea. Duh.”

“That's
your
idea,” said Lord Dainsplint. “But you forget, there are certain noble and gracious people — and I count myself one of them — who own most of the Dry Heart, who own plantations in the spleen, who own mansions in corky old organs that don't even have names. And if everyone flees the Great Body, we, sorry to say, will be spang out of luck. And I, my dear children — I do not like to be out of luck. Luck's a filthy lady, lads, and never let anyone tell you different. Whenever you want to feel lucky, and plucky, and brave, pick up, for example, a grenade.”

He held up, in his hand, the unexploded mannequin grenade. He tossed it lightly up into the air and caught it again.

“I helped you come here not so that we could all grasp hands and sing ‘Hooray' and snatch victory hot off the griddle. I came here to destroy that bloody capsule once and for all.”

“But the Thusser!” Brian protested. “If you destroy the capsule, the Thusser will take over the Great Body and you won't have anything! Not a city, not an empire, not anything!”

“On the contrary, young Thatz. As I said: Whenever there's energy and chaos and change in a system, it's time for someone clever to profit by it. Someone with a biting wit and a sleek, fashionable head of hair. So …” He held the grenade above his head. “As much as we've all become close in the last weeks, and as much as it would be right and good and dandy to do the square thing by my little chimp chums, I'm afraid that what I'm going to do instead — is blow you all to hell.”