The Chamber in the Sky (7 page)

T
wo hundred miles away, mannequins were stacking muscle to build a wall. They had manufactured cranes out of wood. They were gouging out the fabric of the Dry Heart to raise up some kind of fort that might withstand attack.

Kalgrash the troll was surprised.

He walked past the quarries, carrying a shovel. He had put aside his battle-ax for a few days until it was needed for smiting.

He found General Malark in a hut, talking with the military engineers.

“Reporting for duty,” said Kalgrash.

“Good man,” said Malark. He made a couple of final marks in grease pencil on the plans, then rose.

He and Kalgrash went walking along the wall. “Tell me what you see,” said Malark.

“What I'm
surprised
to see,” the troll said, “is that you're building a wall for the Court at all. I thought you told the Empress yesterday that you weren't going to lift
a finger till they agreed to call you the Mannequin Army. And here you are, sir — building a wall.”

Malark stopped short, and looked out over the construction. On the other side of the wall rose the ruins of the palace and the Imperial Plaza. Giant chunks of heart jerky were being lowered into place, blocking the view.

“True,” he agreed. “I am building a wall.” He nodded his head toward it. The wall was not yet very tall. It was pink and striped. “But the Court will have to decide which side of it they want to be on. Tomorrow, it's going to take a sharp turn —
there
. They'll notice that it isn't a wall around the palace. It runs next to the palace. But unless they change their tune, it's going to enclose what used to be called the Easybones Quarter.” He smacked his shins together sharply and kept walking. “Our duty is to protect the Norumbegan people. Not the Empress Herself. (May the sun always shine on her radiant face.) So yes, Mr. Kalgrash, we're building a wall. We're raising up a fort to repel the Thusser menace. And we will protect anyone who requests our aid and asylum. But unless the Court sends a petition to General Malark of the Mannequin Army, they will discover themselves to be sitting
outside
that wall when the Horde arrives.” He swiveled his head and said, “Incidentally, you're being followed by two young gentlemen. You've noticed?”

Kalgrash nodded. “They seem really friendly. I mean, they haven't talked to me yet, but they showed up this morning and they've been walking around with me everywhere. They're kind of bashful. They keep on hiding behind stuff. But they must have heard about my exploits.”

“Smiting, Mr. Kalgrash?”

“Exactly. All the smiting.”

“Good. But you might want to —”

At that moment, there was a rumble, and everything rippled. The ground shook. People shrieked in surprise.

Malark ducked down, grabbed the troll's arm.

Both of them squatted behind rubble.

“Earthquake,” said Malark.

They looked up.

The shaking had dislodged one of the huge blocks from the wall. It was toppling over. Mannequins were running from the collapse.

The block hit the ground with a dull thud.

“What was that?” asked Kalgrash.

“Don't know,” muttered Malark. “Let's get back to HQ and find out.”

An hour later, they knew. Everyone in New Norumbega knew. Word had come through the radio. All over the city, people were panicked. They didn't know what to do.

For the first time in a century, one of the other hearts had beat.

The Great Body was alive.

Blades swung all around Brian — he ducked — the instruments of dismemberment and torture dangled from their harness straps, slapping together as the Thusser guard pulled him and Gregory out into the open.

Brian scampered back against the desk.

The baby-faced guard inspected them both with his black eyes, and inspected Gwynyfer, who he saw crouching still.

He looked back at the boys. His tongue paddled at his lips.

“I am nobly born,” said Gwynyfer. “You will want to ransom me.”

The Thusser looked at them all again, this time with a terrible, wounded sadness, because he would have to kill ones so young.

He gazed down at his array of cutting and sawing and gouging instruments. He touched a few, as if to remind himself to use them later — where the joints were particularly soft, perhaps, or the bone particularly sturdy.

He yanked Gwynyfer out from under the desk. Wincing, she rose to her feet. She chanted out, “The Honorable Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, daughter of the Duke of the Globular Colon, who is himself of the Imperial Council of New Norumbega, submits to — your grip is rather clampish — listen, I am only submitting to you
insofar as you are a representative of the Magister of the Thusser Horde
. Is that understood? I don't submit to you as a private person. Please state your rank and greet me with joy in your good fortune at so fine a capture.”

The Thusser dragged Brian and Gwynyfer beside him and kicked Gregory along in front — the blond boy weaving and toppling, hardly able to catch breath.

Gwynyfer, jerked along by her arm, was still trying to brightly convince the torturer that she was worth saving. “Oh yes, my friend, you'll have a fine tale of honor and
chivalry to tell your fellows, as you sit around in your barracks, eating rationed chocolate, playing sentimental tunes on the old upright piano, drinking toasts to the finest —
must
you
drag
so? What is your rank? Do you have a coat of arms? Who is your commanding officer? Take us to him at once! Announce me!”

The Thusser kicked Gregory again, shoved Brian, grabbed Gregory briefly by the collar to get the kid sliding along in the right direction, and pushed them all into a workroom.

Brian seized at one of the Thusser's harness straps — hung for a second — and then, shoved again, he collapsed into the room, snapping the strap.

The chamber's walls were rounded — the inside of a metal drum. There were tables and vats and unlit furnaces.

Brian, Gregory, and Gwynyfer were sprawled on the floor.

The man dragged a huge cauldron and pushed it against the door. It must have weighed several hundred pounds. He'd blocked the way out. He went over to a table and took a machine out of a grubby plastic case. He started to set it up.

Gwynyfer, with a hint of desperation in her voice, asked, “Oh, are you a hobbyist?”

The guard plugged the machine in.

Gwynyfer continued hopefully, “I think it's a fine thing for a person to have a hobby. I may tell you that so famous a man as the Marquis of Holocrine Downsley chisels things into the likeness of bears.”

It was at that moment that Brian looked up and saw several Norumbegans dangling from the ceiling.

They were no longer humanoid in their shape. They had begun to spread out into the curved wall, their bodies casting out roots and fronds. The arms of one wound like a growth, no longer straightened by bone.

Brian suspected they'd been captured in a submarine somewhere and dropped off here while the Thusser were performing a sweep of the vein. Now they were part of the place. He'd seen this happen to humans back on Earth: He'd seen how the Thusser Horde anchored themselves using the decomposing thoughts of others to plant their own lush dreams.

Brian looked in horror at those brittle, half-human faces. The mouths were open. The ears were webbed to the metal around them. The bodies slumped into the iron as if they were drowning in bathwater.

And this, he knew, was what the Thusser guard had in store for him and for Gregory and finally for Gwynyfer. They were about to be hypnotized and colonized.

The machine was some kind of projector. It shot out beams and blips of light.

The Thusser strolled over and shut off the overhead lamps in the room. He leaned against the smelting cauldron that blocked the door. The room was dark except for the light that escaped the machine.

It sent out a bead of light. Then nothing. Then another bead of light, in a different direction.

Then a spray of little lights. They darted around like guppies before they faded.

The kids watched the lights warily. They tried to figure out what was going on. They tried to work out a rhythm.

“Don't look at it,” Gregory said, looking right at it. “It's … This is like what I saw … when they captured me before … in the dungeon … when I had the … colors.” He kept staring. He did not shut his eyes.

Gwynyfer turned away, her mouth locked shut in fear. She looked up, following a large, flashing orb, and saw the bodies of her fellow Norumbegans fading into the wall. Brian heard her sob under her breath.

Brian was trying to keep thinking. He just wanted to watch lights, not think. He just wanted to count them. He wondered if patterns were repeated, or if all the lights were new.

He saw that Gregory had lain back on the floor, and was completely lost. The blond boy no longer even seemed to notice the Thusser in the corner. He stared at the ceiling and held one arm straight up with the fingers twitching, as if he could play with the bobbling sparks ten feet above him.

Brian knew exactly what was happening. And so he shut his eyes.

He clamped his arm over them. He rocked forward.

Then he heard the Thusser walking over.

He did not open his eyes. Carefully, he hid one of his hands behind his back.

The Thusser put gentle fingers on Brian's arm, and began to pull it away from the boy's face.

For a moment, Brian opened his eyes. The hideous, childlike face with its pudgy tongue stared down at him.

He shut his eyes and then there were fingers on his face.

He pulled his one hand from behind him. In it, he had the strap he'd grabbed and snapped off as he was thrown into the room — and the little dagger that hung on it.

The Thusser pinched Brian's eyelids and tried to drag them open.

The boy stabbed upward.

He hit the torturer's stomach. The guard bellowed — let out a wheeze — and stumbled back. Brian opened his eyes.

The lights were still whirling all over the room. They scraped across the gasping Thusser's wide face.

The Thusser grabbed a curved sword and whipped it out of its strap. His eyes wide in pain, he swung it, lurching toward Brian.

There was a crash, and the room went dark. Gwynyfer had knocked the projector off the table. Brian scuttled into something metal and staggered. He ducked.

The Thusser would be able to see in the dark as soon as his eyes adjusted. Gwynyfer would, too, to some extent. But Brian and Gregory were blind.

Brian heard the Thusser running for him. He darted to the side — trying to make his way to the door, where the light switch was.

The Thusser followed him.

Brian found the wall. He began feeling along, scraping his hands over the rust. There was a crash and Gwynyfer exclaimed, “Take that!”

She must have thrown the projector at the Thusser. Brian could hear the man kicking aside the refuse.

Brian turned on the light.

Gwynyfer was standing on a table, about to throw a length of metal pipe like a javelin. Gregory was on the floor, wincing at the brightness. The Thusser, bleeding heavily, was right by Brian.

He swung his scimitar.

Brian fell back. That was lucky: If he'd stayed on his feet, he would have been sliced in two.

The torturer swung again.

And this time, he might have killed Brian if, three hundred miles away, a heart hadn't beaten, and a pulse hadn't hit.

T
he heart that had beat was called #4 (McRiddle's Plum). It was a muscle as large as Iceland. It twitched and collapsed and expanded again, blasting out a tsunami of gore into the arteries, sucking up a rich tide of flux through the veins. The wave of blood coursed through the Great Body, tearing up forests of weeds, hurling dim monstrosities through valves and corridors, slamming submarine boats — and sending the abandoned extraction facility spinning like a jack tossed hard in a game.

Everything was thrown into the air. The Thusser and Brian were hurled onto the floor — then onto the curved wall, where they stuck while the whole base swirled down the artery. Gregory and Gwynyfer were plastered right near them. The metal walls vibrated with the rush of flux.

Gregory had fallen to the wall right next to the half-absorbed Norumbegans. They gaped at him. As the
factory tumbled, Gregory found himself rolling toward their vanishing bodies. He scraped with his hands to try to keep himself away.

The Thusser was breathing heavily, losing a lot of blood through the wound to his stomach. Brian thought there was a chance of escaping if they could only make a run for it.

He watched as the heavy cauldron that blocked the door on the other side of the room slowly slid across the floor. If it moved another foot, they'd have a way out. “Come on!” he shouted to his friends.

With a clang, the Thusser struck out at him again. Brian rolled to the side.

The base continued to shift. Machines and tools hopped off the wall, clattering and cascading across the floor. Brian landed and rolled.

The Thusser ran toward him, bounding from floor to wall to floor again.

The Thusser's tongue slapped around his lips and he howled.

The room tilted.

The cauldron plunged toward Brian. He grabbed it as it went past. He rode it as it screeched toward the Thusser. The torturer looked up in panic.

The cauldron slammed into the man. Brian fell off backward.

The baby-faced Thusser was pinned beneath it, his head jerking. He clawed at the kids, but he could not move.

The metal skeleton of the factory moaned in stress.

Brian, Gregory, and Gwynyfer didn't wait to see
whether the Thusser could free himself. They ran to the door, swung it open, and fled the room as fast as they could.

But it wasn't easy to run. Not only were chairs and equipment and stacks of paper slithering up and down halls, but the floor kept shifting. To go straight, they had to climb uphill.

The kids ran for the corridor that led to the docking bay.

Suddenly, they tumbled. They fell through the air. They felt the blows of walls all over their bodies.

They were on the ceiling. Brian gasped in pain. He heard Gregory barking swears beside him as they pulled themselves up and crawled toward their dinghy.

There was a huge collision. Everything shook. The lights went out.

The factory had plunged down against the artery wall. A metal arm had smashed off.

In the complete blackness, they could hear millions of gallons of blood rushing into distant rooms.

Brian and Gregory couldn't see. They were terrified. Around them, the whole huge building pitched and screamed. They didn't know which way to crawl.

“Come along,” said Gwynyfer. “This way. Hold on to my heels.” She shuffled forward. “Come on! The flux is coming!”

Gwynyfer, who could see faintly in pitch blackness, led them across the ceiling of the docking bay. She shut the bay's airtight door behind them and wheeled its locks closed.

The rushing of waters got louder. There was a hideous iron shriek, and another arm of the factory pulled off. The room jumped. Brian screamed.

The door was creaking. The force of watery blood grew behind it.

Gwynyfer pulled open the hatches to the dinghy. She turned on the light.

The airtight door into the docking bay burst. Flux spouted in.

Gregory and Brian tumbled into the dinghy behind her. They slammed the hatch shut. Brian pulled the lever to lock it.

The whole factory was shifting again — bumping along the arterial wall.

Gregory started the dinghy's engine.

“Release the magnet!” he said. “Cut us free!”

Brian flipped another lever.

The little sub jolted and then was adrift.

Gregory hit the throttle, laid on the gas, and they buzzed away from the spinning factory. Behind them, they could see its greening surface turn and head into the profounder darkness of the lower organs.

Gwynyfer said, “Why, thank you, Bri-Bri, for grabbing that dagger and saving our necks. And thank you, Gregory dear, for lying soundly asleep while it all happened.”

Gregory actually looked kind of angry at her sarcasm.

She sighed, “Exhausting.” She threw her head back against the hull. “I've only met two Thusser,” she said, “Dr. Brundish and this awful bounder with the cutlery. I
have to say, I can't recommend them as a people. They seem really rather
moody
. Full of opinions, but with no conversation.”

“Where are we going?” asked Brian. He turned on the rattling fan to circulate air.

“I don't know,” Gregory answered, and steered them there.

Kalgrash was sick of being followed. He walked along through the Quicknickel Market, casting quick glances behind him. Two men dressed as servants were making their way through the crowd. Both of them wore the livery of the Imperial Court, both had sturdy backpacks, and both were carrying platters. There was nothing on the platters. Kalgrash didn't know what was in the backpacks, but he had a strong suspicion it was not soft bread, fine cheese, and all the makings of a delicious picnic.

Lamps lit the marketplace. Stalls were set up for the night, selling vegetables and flesh. The alleys smelled of rot.

Kalgrash wasn't worried while he was in the market itself. But he could see the assassins getting tense. You could always tell when breathers were about to make their move. Their eyes shifted differently, and their muscles twitched. He could tell that the second he was away from others, they were going to jump. He just didn't know what else they planned to do.

He stopped and looked at a stall that sold kitchenware. He inspected several metal bowls. He stared into their depths. He caught a reflection over his armored shoulder. There was one of the assassins. Kalgrash inspected the man. At first, the guy looked like he was just another servant: He wore the hat, he was carrying the tray, and so on.

Kalgrash looked more carefully at the tray. Then he saw two wires leading from the tray to the backpack.

Suddenly, he knew what was going on. Those weren't trays. They were electromagnets. The backpacks were batteries. The assassins were going to wait until he was alone and then create a magnetic field around him. A light jolt would knock him out. A heavy jolt would erase his memory, his personality. And turned up all the way, a magnet could kill him outright.

Kalgrash stopped inspecting the man in the metal bowl. The girl selling the kitchenware looked at him hopefully. “See one you're interested in?”

Kalgrash tried it on his head. “No. None of them fit. Sorry.”

He put the bowl down and stalked away. He was sure the assassins followed.

He turned down Dainsplint Avenue. A building had collapsed into the street earlier in the day, during the heartbeat. Scavengers were looking through the wreckage. Kalgrash kept going.

It was time to confront the assassins.

He found an alley too narrow for both of them to walk side by side. That was important. He had to make sure
that they didn't manage to get on either side of him and create a magnetic field between them.

He stepped sideways, suddenly, into the alley, and ran down it.

The assassins saw him dart off the avenue and they moved in for the kill.

The alley was narrow and dark, so narrow the assassins' elbows almost brushed the uneven walls. Their Norumbegan eyes quickly adjusted to the dark. They swiveled their platters so the flat faced forward. Each held his thumb over a switch.

Kalgrash crouched waiting in a doorway, unseen. As the first assassin crept by, the troll reached out gently, quietly, and grabbed the wires that led from the platter to the battery pack. He sliced them neatly with his ax.

That was one electromagnet down — but he'd been seen. The first assassin shouted, and the second assassin rushed to the doorway and faced the mechanical troll.

Kalgrash panicked at the sight of the second assassin's flat, gray tray — soon alive with deadly charge.

He heard a click. A woozy force hit him. It grabbed his ax sideways and slammed it for him into the assassin, clanking hard against the magnet. The man went reeling back against the wall.

The other assassin was still fumbling with his useless platter. Kalgrash grabbed him and used him as a club to beat his friend.

His hands tingled. He'd gotten them too close to the magnetic field. He couldn't work his fingers.

So he beat with his metallic fists in clumsy karate chops.

The two Norumbegans were down on the ground. Kalgrash stuck his foot through the loops of wires and yanked. The charge was cut off.

He reached down and grabbed his battle-ax.

“Tell whoever sent you,” he said, “that when I smite, it hurts.”

He went back out to the avenue.