The Quest of the DNA Cowboys (10 page)

The three of them climbed to their feet and looked around. They were in a narrow stone-flagged alley, on each side of which were high, windowless granite walls. The place had a hard, forbidding atmosphere.

‘So where are we?’

‘Somewhere, and that’s a comfort in itself.’

‘Think we ought to take a look round? It’s a gloomy kind of place.’

Grey seemed to be the key note of everything they could see. The sky was the colour of slate, the granite buildings and flags echoed the same theme, and dark, dirty water trickled down a gutter in the middle of the alley. Reave shivered.

‘It’s none too warm.’

Billy nodded.

‘This place gives me the creeps.’

The Rainman shrugged.

‘We ain’t going to improve matters by standing round complaining.’

He flipped a coin to see which way they should go. It came up tails, and they started down the alley. They’d only gone a few paces when men appeared at both ends of the alley. Calling them men was rather stretching the point. They had coarse, ape-like features and their arms hung nearly to their knees. They wore black tunics and leggings, and leather helmets with an iron strip that hung down to protect the nose. On the front of the tunics was a design that consisted of an eye surrounded by stylized flames. In their hands they held dull iron tubes that Billy assumed were guns of some kind.

‘Halt!’

Billy started to run, but there was a deafening bang and a hail of nuts, bolts, nails and assorted lumps of metal whistled over his head. Billy stopped, and stood very still. A group of the men surrounded him. They were shorter than either Billy, Reave or the Rainman, but they had massive chests, shoulders and arms. A hand covered in warts and thick bristles was thrust under Billy’s nose.

‘Papers!’

‘Papers?’

‘Papers, snaga, papers!’

‘I don’t have any papers.’

‘No papers? No papers? Everyone has papers, filth.’

‘I don’t have any papers. I just fell out of the nothings.’

One of the creatures punched Billy hard in the mouth, and Billy was knocked to the paving stones. The creature who had hit him roared down at him, showing sharp yellow teeth.

‘The nothings are forbidden, worm. You are a prisoner of the Shirik.’

Billy was hauled roughly to his feet, his arms were dragged behind him, and a pair of manacles snapped round his wrists. Reave and the Rainman received similar treatment, and surrounded by the creatures who called themselves the Shirik, they were marched down the alley.

They turned into a wider street that was paved with the same granite as the alley and surrounded by the same high, menacing buildings. It was Billy’s first chance really to look at the sinister new city. As far as he could see it was built from the same sombre grey stone, topped by steeply sloping roofs of darker grey slate. The total lack of colour touched Billy with an edge of fear. Another feature that seemed to be absent from the high dour buildings was windows. Billy could see no openings near the ground, and it was only high up under the roofs that he could make out some narrow slits. The most frightening thing about the city was that it was completely silent. Apart from the strange apemen that surrounded him, there was nobody in the streets, no birds fluttered round the roof tops, and the city looked totally deserted.

After walking for some three hundred yards, the party came to a doorway with writing over it in some strange script. Billy, Reave and the Rainman were bundled inside, pushed down a corridor and into a stone-floored room where another of the apemen sat behind a high wooden desk. He looked up as the room filled with people, and barked at Billy’s captors.

‘What’s this? What’s this?’

‘Prisoners, Uruk sir. Wandering without papers.’

‘No papers? No papers?’

He climbed down from his stool and came out from behind the desk. He jabbed at Billy with a thick stubby finger.

‘Where’s your papers, filth?’

‘I don’t have no papers. I only just arrived in the city.’

The finger jabbed again.

‘Arrived? Arrived? How you arrive? You couldn’t pass Black Gate without papers.’

‘We came out of the nothings, a disrupter got us and we finished up here. We don’t even know where we are.’

The Uruk’s small red eyes narrowed and he peered intensely at Billy. He paced up and down. One of the group that had brought in Reave shuffled his feet and coughed.

‘The Eight. P’raps we should report this to the Eight.’

The Uruk sprang across the room and punched the one who had spoken.

‘Eight? Eight? I’m the Uruk for this section. I say what gets reported to the Eight.’

The Shirik wiped blood from his mouth and spat.

‘You won’t be Uruk for long if one of the Eight found out you’d not been telling things they wanted to know, you’d have the skin taken off you, and the flesh, too.’

The Uruk flashed round and kicked the Shirik hard in the groin. With a scream, the Shirik dropped to his knees. The Uruk swung his ironshod boot at the Shirik’s head and the Shirik rolled over and lay still. The Uruk faced the other Shiriks.

‘See that? See that? That’s what’ll happen to any others of you filth who talk fancy.’

He turned back to Billy, Reave and the Rainman.

‘No papers, come from the nothings. What tale you scum trying to give me? The Eight going to hear about you. They’ll deal with your tales.’

He swung round on the Shiriks.

‘Six of you process them, and the rest back on patrol. Jump, I said!’

Billy, Reave and the Rainman were released from their manacles and hastily stripped. Their clothes and possessions were stacked on the Uruk’s desk. He prodded the heap.

‘We keep this for the Eight. Take them down.’

The three of them had their manacles replaced, this time with their arms in front of them instead of behind their backs, and were marched naked into another corridor. The guards in front of them stopped at an arched doorway, and one of them unlocked a huge door of dark wood studded with iron nails.

They descended a winding stone staircase with guards in front of them and behind. Narrow corridors radiated out from the foot of the stairs, and the three were pushed and kicked down one of them. The leading guard unlocked another door, this time a steel one with a small peephole in it, and they were all thrown into the same narrow cell.

The cell was about six feet wide and ten feet long. Its walls were made of the same granite, and in places it ran with slimy dampness. There were no windows in the cell, and the only light came from a yellow globe high up in the door. The floor was covered with damp straw, and an open drain ran along the far wall. Reave flopped to the ground.

‘We really did it this time.’

Billy and the Rainman sat down as well. Billy tugged in frustration at his manacles, and winced as the metal bit into his wrists.

‘If we only knew where the hell we were.’

He glanced at the Rainman.

‘You got any idea what this place is?’

The Rainman shook his head.

‘I never seen anything like this. It’s not the usual stasis town. This looks like something different, something I ain’t even heard about before. We’re in trouble, boys.’

Reave slumped against the wall.

‘You can say that again.’

A rat scuttled down the drain, and wriggled through the little opening where the drain continued into the next cell.

‘We’ve really got to get out of here.’

‘Yeah, but how?’

‘Fuck knows.’

They lapsed into thought, and Billy’s attention kept going to the hole through which the rat had gone. He stooped over, and knelt down beside the foul smelling gutter.

‘Hello, hello in there.’

There was a grunt from the other side of the hole, and then a blunt hairy hand was thrust through the space. It grabbed one of Billy’s hands and tried to drag it into the next cell. Billy tugged it free, and looked round at the others.

‘Don’t look as though we’re going to get any help from that direction.’

A glum silence fell over Billy, Reave and the Rainman. They slumped on the damp straw. The chill began to get to them. Reave watched his legs slowly turn blue, and very soon, all three’s teeth had begun to chatter uncontrollably.

‘Dear god, how long do we stay stuck in here?’

Billy jumped to his feet and hammered on the door with his fists.

‘Hey out there. What the fuck’s happening?’

His fist made little more than a dull thud on the thick wood of the door, and no sound came from the outside. Frustratedly he beat on the door and then sank to the floor.

‘We’ve fucked up good.’

The other two shuddered and nodded.

The gloomy silence descended again. Only the occasional rustle of the straw punctuated their paranoia. Reave remembered Miss Ettie’s. It was worlds away.

The lights of memory dimmed as the blackness of cold and despair closed around Reave. They wouldn’t be wandering heroes. They’d blown it and wound up in a filthy cell. They’d lost the bet for fortune, adventure and experience.

Just as Reave had decided that he was a loser, a familiar voice echoed from outside the cell.

‘… And you, shiteater, under para 4, section 1, a registered minstrel gets himself into all and any public administration buildings. Here’s my fucking card, so open the door, Got it?’

Billy’s and Reave’s heads both snapped up.

‘The Minstrel Boy, here?’

They jumped up and stood by the door. More voices came from outside.

‘Not possible. No one goes into cell till Ghâshnákh come to interrogate.’

‘And it says in the Code that I go anywhere.’

‘Not possible.’

‘Shirik Precinct Houses come under the public administration order of the Ghâshnákh. Right?’

‘Yes?’

‘So Shirik Precinct Houses are public administration buildings? Right?’

‘Yes?’

‘So minstrels, and namely me, gets to go where I like in public administration buildings. That means Shirik buildings, so open up.’

‘It’s against regulations.’

‘If you don’t, it’s against the Code, and I’ll report it.’

‘Code?’

‘Code.’

‘But regulations …’

‘Look at it this way, scumbag. If you break the Code it’s a hanging deal, and that’s it. The regulations, the worst thing that can happen to you is a flogging. Know what I mean? Make it easy on yourself.’

‘But …’

‘Ever thought about it, piggio? Hanging, I mean, how it must feel and all, swinging away and choking, your hands tied behind your back, and just nothing you can do about it.’

There was a reluctant scraping of keys in the door, and it swung inwards. It was a very different Minstrel Boy who stepped into the cell.

The thin white face was hidden behind huge black multi-faceted glasses that made him look like he had the eyes of some grotesque insect. The halo of hair was still there, but it had been dyed white. He wore a dark green lizard-skin frock coat over a black ruffled shirt, velvet trousers and high black boots with silver fastenings. The silver guitar hung from a heavy strap inlaid with coloured stones.

Billy and Reave bombarded him with questions.

‘Where are we, man?’

‘How the hell did you get here?’

‘How do we get out of here?’

The Minstrel Boy held up his hands.

‘Hold it! Hold it! Dumbo behind me might suddenly decide that there’s nothing in the regulations says I get to talk to you. So listen. If you can just hold on a while longer I’ll try and get you out of here. Okay?’

‘How soon?’

‘I don’t know. It ain’t easy. You won’t be going anywhere.’

‘Where are we?’

‘Dur Shanzag.’

‘Dur Shanzag?’

‘I can’t talk now. Don’t worry, I’ll swing it. I don’t know how you could get into any more shit if you worked at it.’

‘Okay, okay. We know, just try and get us out.’

‘I told you, don’t worry.’

He stepped back out of the cell and the door was slammed shut. Briefly it opened again.

‘What’s the other guy called?’

‘The Rainman.’

‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do for him.’

The Minstrel Boy ducked out, and again the door was slammed. Billy and Reave looked at each other.

‘What the hell. Did that happen?’

‘Seemed to.’

‘But his clothes and everything?’

‘Who knows?’

The Rainman stood up.

‘Who was your friend?’

‘The Minstrel Boy, a guy we met on the road back in Graveyard.’

‘Some useful friend to have in a strange city.’

‘I sure hope so.’

‘And me, boy, I can tell you. Say you met him in Graveyard?’

‘Sure, we travelled with him from there to Dogbreath. You know Graveyard?’

‘Graveyard, sure I know Graveyard. Jived up many a thunderstorm for them guys to slide their old rigs through.’

He looked at them intently.

‘What did he look like, back in Graveyard?’

‘Much the same, only with dirty blue jeans instead of those fancy clothes, and his hair was dark. Why?’

The Rainman shook his head.

‘It’s nothing. One of those things stuck in the back of your mind that you can’t quite bring out. Maybe it’ll come to me later.’

They waited, straining their ears for any possible footfall, but nothing happened. It had long ago become impossible to gauge the passage of time. Billy and Reave had lost that skill altogether when they first stepped into the nothings. The sudden appearance of the Minstrel Boy receded and became confused. They began to think it was an absurd way of snapping their minds. To add to their problems, they had begun to get ravenously hungry, and thirsty too. Nobody was ready to drink the foul trickle that ran along the guttering. At one point there was a commotion of voices a long way away, and they held their breath to see if it came nearer. Then the sounds died, and hope of immediate release faded.

It was just when any faith in the Minstrel Boy’s return had all but disappeared that the door creaked open, and he walked in.

‘I’ve done it, you’re free.’

‘Free?’

‘Well, almost free. I’ve got a release order, and you don’t have to be interrogated by the Ghâshnákh. You could say that you were substantively free.’