The Chamber in the Sky (3 page)

“Yours was probably slathered up with attractor, too.”

Gwynyfer asked, “What is sir talking about?”

“Where'd you stay last night?”

“We camped,” said Brian. “Right on one of the strands.”

“Night before?”

“An inn,” said Gregory.

“You watch your beasts all night?”

“Of course not,” said Gwynyfer. “The stableboy did.”

“The stableboy didn't,” said Darlmore.

“The stableboy should have.”

Brian pressed him, “What do you mean? What's an attractor?”

The hermit said, “I mean: Someone tried to kill you.”

T
he hermit made them a kind of lifeless pancake — one huge, flat, pasty flapjack in a frying pan as big as a wagon wheel. Apparently, he ate simply.

“Later, we'll fish for dinner,” he said. He jerked a few chains to adjust the height of the frying pan over the fire in the center of the room.

He looked at the kids. “So who'd want to kill you?” He squinted at each one of them in turn, then asked Gwynyfer, “Anyone with a gripe against your father? I knew him, by the way. Is there anyone who'd inherit your title? If you died?”

Gregory said, “Whoa, whoa! So tell us what you're thinking.”

Darlmore explained, “Someone sabotaged your caravan. Someone painted your thombs with an attractor — the juice they use out here to draw the mites when they're hunting them. In the Wildwood, people hunt the mites for food. Mites love the smell of the attractor juice. They
scuttle down out of their nests and try to grab whatever's painted with it. Then, normally, the hunt closes in.” He yanked a chain and the black pan slammed upward. The pancake whirled up floppily toward the chimney-hole, flipped, and slapped back down. Darlmore turned to the kids again. “But in your case, someone was trying to get the mites to come kill you.”

Brian thought carefully, then wondered aloud, “So you think they were only trying to get Gwynyfer?”

“And probably your pal Greg here. Place bets they buttered up his thomb, too.”

Gwynyfer patted Brian's hand and said sweetly, “It must be nice for once not to be the one people are trying to kill.”

They ate the pancake. It was tough and dry.

“Sorry,” said the hermit. “The lunch.” He looked at Gwynyfer. “You want a napkin to spit it into?”

Gwynyfer replied haughtily, “The Honorable Miss Gwynyfer Gwarnmore has already used the tablecloth.”

Brian said, “Sir, you're the only one at Court who used to worry about the Game, when you all were playing against the Thusser to see who'd rule Old Norumbega, back on our world.”

Thomas Darlmore nodded.

Brian explained, “We're here because the Thusser have broken the rules. They're not playing the Game right anymore. They've invaded our world. They're settling all of New England. We can stop them, if someone here would just, you know, summon the Rules Keepers. The ones
who were supposed to make sure neither side cheated — the Norumbegans or the Thusser Horde. And Earth depends on it.”

“Well, New England,” Gregory corrected.

Darlmore walked over to the counter and got a pitcher of water. He refilled the kids' glasses. “One of the reasons I left the Court: I couldn't stand that they forgot the Game. We were better off in Old Norumbega. All this” — he put down the pitcher and gestured generally — “all the Great Body … it's a mistake to be here. It's too unstable. Might be dead. Might be dying. Might be alive and ready to convulse or stand up or sit down. We don't know.” He turned away and began scraping the giant frying pan with a wooden spatula. “I used to believe we were going to win Old Norumbega back. I kept track of the Game … long time ago … long, long time … but the Court are all happy up there living in filth and smoking cheap cigarettes. I don't know, now.” The spatula rasped on the black iron pan. “I don't know.”

Irritably, Gwynyfer snapped, “They always speak very well of you, sir.”

The hermit stopped scraping and stared at her. “Do they, Gwyn?” he said, and it was not a question. “Do they really?” He clearly knew the answer.

She flinched — then stared angrily right back at him.

Brian begged him, “But, Mr. Darlmore, you'll help us summon the Rules Keepers? The people at Court said that you're the only person who remembers how.”

For a minute, the hermit didn't answer. He thwacked
the spatula against a coffee can to knock off burnt crisps. Then he said, “Sure.”

Brian relaxed. He and Gregory grinned at each other.

Darlmore tossed the spatula into a tub of soap water. “The way to summon the Rules Keepers — it's a machine called the Umpire. Like a referee for the Game. It's a capsule. A little chamber. You go in it, there's a control set up by the Thusser and our Imperial Synod of Wizards. You activate it. It'll check the conduct of the Game and call the Rules Keepers.” He went and leaned against a wide arch. “The capsule got washed away soon after the Court got here to the Great Body. Pretty soon after we first tried to settle here. You heard about the flooding? This mess came rushing down through the stomachs. Tragic. I'll tell you, almost everything was washed away. Whole carts of stuff. Mounds of furniture and so forth. People. Mannequins. The Umpire Capsule was lost, too.”

“It's
gone
?” Brian exclaimed in despair.

Darlmore winced. “Not
gone
,” he said. “I ran into it some years back. I was on an expedition. Wanted to see if there was a way out.”

“A way out of what?” Gregory asked.

“The Great Body. I wanted to know whether there's an outside.” He walked over, unrolled the tablecloth in front of Gwynyfer, removed the chunk of pancake she'd chewed, and then tossed it into the flame-pit in the center of the kitchen. “Theological question,” he said.

Gregory said, “So was there?”

“A way out?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't think there is,” said the hermit. “I went right past the Globular Colon. Thought I might discover something. A passage to the exterior. See if there's skin. Limbs. A head. And others. Other Great Bodies floating through space. Or walking through an endless canyon.” He shrugged. “Maybe there is a way out, but I didn't find it. Past the Globular Colon, there was just more gut. It's not like a human body or a Norumbegan body. The intestines split up and divide and go in different directions. They may not even be intestines. May not be for food. They get strange and corky.”

“So where's the capsule, then?” Brian asked.

“I ran into it down in the guts. Joyful reunion, et cetera. It promised to write me sometimes. Pen pals.”

“To
write
you?” said Gregory, astonished.

Gwynyfer said, “You didn't think it was important enough to bring it
back
with you? You didn't think of that?”

The hermit said harshly, “Quite. I didn't want the Court to get ahold of the thing.”

“It belongs to the Emperor.”

“Dear, you just told me the last Emperor exploded. It's safer for the Umpire down in the guts, moving around.”

“How does it move around?” said Brian.

“On three mechanical giants. They carry it on their backs and they protect it. They keep it moving.”

“It's
lost
!” Gwynyfer accused. “You
lost
it, sir!”

Darlmore strode under the arch and into a living room filled with big couches and chairs covered in batik cloths.
He slammed around at an old, broken desk and came back with a stack of postcards. “Not lost. The capsule sends me one of these occasionally.” He tossed them down on the table.

Brian and Gregory leaned in to look at the stack of postcards. The photos showed odd buildings and weird, organic crevasses. There were cities of spikes. There were hotels on the shores of lakes of blue. There were plains filled with metal water tanks or oil tanks in rows. There were jungles of weird growth.

Darlmore flipped a few over to check the backs. He picked out one card. “Okay. See here.”

On the front, the postcard had a picture of a tall, tall, thin stack of houses, steeples, and turrets in a rolling, green landscape. It said,

“Wherever the heck the Jejunum is,” said Gregory.

Gwynyfer explained, “There are four of them. They're way down in the Innards, at the entrance to the Volutes. They grow a lot of wheat there.” She pushed back her hair with one hand. “You have to travel through one of them to get to the Globular Colon. It's pretty.”

Darlmore had flipped the postcard over. On the back was a message scrawled in brown ink in large, clumsy Norumbegan runes. It said:

The postcard was from the Ellyllyn Inn, Turnstile.

Darlmore went into the other living room and came back with an elaborate, hand-painted map. Organs and ducts stretched in every direction. “The town of Turnstile's here,” he said, tracing the coil of an intestine and tapping. “The intestines of the Great Body aren't like human or Norumbegan entrails. They branch more and they lead to one another and there are many separate tracts. It's lucky the capsule has stopped at Turnstile. Much easier to find it there.”

While Gwynyfer was carefully inspecting the map, Darlmore inspected the two boys. “The Game: I'm assuming you were the human pawns?”

Gregory said, “Yeah.”

Darlmore jerked his head and pointed, summoning them all to follow him.

He led them up a rickety staircase. There was a cramped little office full of stacks of paper and old books and a swivel chair. A window stolen from some other building was plastered into the wall, looking out at the Wildwood. Darlmore dug around in the piles. He set aside dull-looking philosophy books to reveal an old computer printer. The plastic was yellowed with time. A continuous spill of paper looped out of it, hanging down to the
floor. Darlmore lifted up the last few sheets and tore them off at the perforations. He scanned them quickly. “Haven't looked at these messages for ages. Sent by … Wee Snig.”

“We know him!” said Brian, excited. “He helped run the Game!”

“You have a friend,” said Gwynyfer, “who goes by the first name of
Wee
? What a surprising set of acquaintances you keep.”

The hermit tore off strips of snaff. “These updates were sent automatically both to this terminal and to the communications room at the palace in New Norumbega.”

Brian and Gregory looked at each other. Brian said, “We never heard anything about a communications room at the palace.”

Darlmore said, “No surprise. They probably don't remember it's there.”

Brian nodded.

Darlmore looked up and down the sheets, scanning them. “I really should have kept up with this…. Look, here….. A little more than a year and a half ago, our time. Your time … how do you arrange your years?”

Brian looked where the hermit's thumb bit the paper. “That's last October! That's when we played our round of the Game!”

“I figured. The printer kept spitting things out.”

Brian read Wee Snig's description of the Game they'd played the previous fall. It just said:

It was a lot less eventful than the real thing had been.

“What does it mean?” Brian asked.

Darlmore cleared his throat. “Two human cubs aged around thirteen or fourteen engaged as players … Norumbegan player won.”

Brian and Gregory exchanged a glance. It was Brian who'd won, and Gregory was occasionally touchy about it.

“That's
it
?” said Brian. “That's all anyone ever learned about everything we did? All we went through?”

“No,” said Darlmore. “No one at the palace even bothered to read this report. So they learned even less.” He laid the papers back on the printer.

“What's the rest of that?” Brian asked.

“Let's go fishing,” the hermit said.