The Suburb Beyond the Stars (13 page)

T
he stairs curled around themselves forever. Centuries before, they’d connected a turret, a mountain outpost, with the maze of caverns beneath. Norumbegan soldiers had rushed up and down these steps during the Wars of Thusserian Aggression. Their halberds had clanged on the stone.

Down these stairs, in this late, unmythical age, a boy in glasses and a troll dressed for a joust descended into silence. As they passed farther and farther into the mountain, the chill grew. The summer’s warmth never penetrated here.

At the bottom of the stairs, Brian hesitated. They were coming out into Snarth’s Cavern, where, the previous fall, a blind ogre had stomped and raged and nearly flattened Brian and Gregory both.

Kalgrash poked around the cavern first, knees akimbo, ax ready for smiting.

He found that Snarth the blind ogre was long deactivated. He sat in a pile, head sagging between his warty
knees. His mechanism had run down. He had not been wound for months.

This calmed Brian down a lot. They crossed the cavern, Brian shining his lantern to pick out stalactites and stalagmites, the mucilaginous flow of rock around which Snarth had nosed his way in former days.

“You know,” said Kalgrash apologetically, “you’re going to have to switch off the lantern.”

“Why?” Brian asked.

“Because once we get into the cavern with the City of Gargoyles, the light will alert things that we’re there. Whatever is waiting for us. And then it’s nothing but claws, tentacles, tentacles, claws, teeth, spines, acid spouts, whiskers, cleavers, katanas, shillelaghs …”

“Okay,” said Brian, “but how am I going to see?”

“… fireous breath, razor-sharp dorsal plates, cat-o’-nine-tails — you get my drift.” Kalgrash sputtered with his lips.

“I won’t be able to see.”

“But I’ll be able to see better in total darkness than with your lamp. I’m a troll. Or at least, a good fake of one. And we won’t get munged by anything with scales that happens to slither by.”

“You’ll have to guide me.”

“Even better,” said Kalgrash. “You sit on my shoulders. Holding up the blunderbuss. Then:
Clank. Clank. Clank.
We progress into the City of Gargoyles. We’ll be like a tank. Medieval tank.”

Brian extinguished the lantern with a Cantrip of Deactivation. Kalgrash lowered himself to one knee, and
Brian clambered on his shoulders. The arrangement required the dismantling of some of Kalgrash’s armor. There were too many spikes on it.

So it was that they came to the vast arch that looked out over the City of Gargoyles.

Kalgrash could not see with complete precision in the total darkness, but he could certainly make out the city streets and the dark bay. At the head of the grandest avenue of the city rose the spires of the cathedral and, next to it, the Palace of the Norumbegans. It was in that palace that the prison cells lay. They had been abandoned by Norumbega ages ago, and now, Brian guessed, were being put to use by their adversaries.

“We have to make it the whole length of the city,” Kalgrash said.

Brian stared into the gloom. “Do you see anything unusual? That shouldn’t be there?”

“I can’t make them out exactly. I see the sacs on the city streets. They look gray and very big. I bet they’re Thusser luxury homes.” He scanned the horizon. Brian could feel the troll’s head swivel. “And there’s … there’s someone moving … up above the grand boulevard … someone … I can’t really see from this distance. It’s a little man.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Floating. Or hovering. I guess he shouldn’t be doing that. Gravity’s not just a good idea — it’s the law.”

“Do you think you can get us to the castle without going past him on the boulevard?”

“Side streets, hmm? We’ll give it a shot.”

Brian could not judge their progress. It seemed to take forever. They did not speak as the troll advanced, rocking, beneath him. Brian felt each jolt through his legs. He held the blunderbuss in readiness, but could see nothing to aim at.

He could hear, by the faint jingle and clank of the troll’s armor, that they passed through wide spaces and narrow. He felt them trudge up steps and down through sunken channels.

The darkness was claustrophobic or frightening, even though there was nothing pressing down on him, nothing closing him in. There was just the vastness of blank space and chill around him. He couldn’t tell if there was nothing above his head for five hundred feet, or if a stone beam or lintel was about to bash him senseless.

He found himself ducking instinctively to try to avoid hazards that weren’t even there.

He wished Gregory were there to make a joke about his blindness.

Suddenly, Kalgrash jerked sideways. He slammed backward into a stone wall. Brian fumbled to keep hold of the blunderbuss.

“What is it?” the boy croaked.

Kalgrash moved swiftly backward. Then to the side.

Brian couldn’t tell what was going on.

“Can’t even close its mouth,” said Kalgrash.

Brian heard something approach. Claws on stone.

Kalgrash said, “Ready!” He reached up, grabbed the tip of the blunderbuss, and aimed it into the darkness.

A jolt — Kalgrash had been hit. He rocked backward, stumbled to keep his balance with the boy on top of him.

He cried,
“Fire!”

And Brian cast the Cantrip of Activation.

Flare bloomed.

In the brief shock of fire, Brian saw something lizardlike and vicious, maw so wide and so deeply fanged it drooped open. It burned.

Kalgrash began running.

Brian asked, “Are there more of them?” At each step, he juddered up and down, slapping against the troll’s spaulders.

“No,” said the troll. “Worse. The light of the blast.”

“Who saw?”

“That floating guy. He saw.”

“How do you know?”

“I can see him over the roofs.”

“Flying?”

“No. I think it’s little cords. It’s Gelt the Winnower. He’s headed this way.”

S
uspended above the boulevards, suspended, too, between life and death, Gelt the Winnower, once a man (or something like one), now a monster, patrolled the dark spaces beneath the mountain for his Thusser masters. The cords erupting from his hands, his legs, his chest, his eyes, all gently lofted him through the cold subterranean air. They caressed the smoothness of marble, the rough heft of granite. He felt the cold stone all around him, and pulled himself along in utter gloom.

Dimly, he could recall life lived upon his own feet — another world — much more noise, more glow, delightful color (for others, never for him). People leaned together at cafés and in homes, and he remembered attachments to people who called him by another name. He did not regret that he had chosen a strange and wayward route to power. He wanted only to destroy more effectively, and here he hung, feared by all.

His thoughts — husky in his brittle, dried head — were limited to the routes he’d followed in the last twelve
hours, surveying the dead city to ensure that none of its former citizens, alerted, had returned. He had wound himself a cocoon, a spiral web, of his own silver cords, perched atop the peak of a conical turret on a defunct banker’s house; he’d hung there for fifteen minutes, filaments twitching around him, searching for movement.

And then — there was light.

A burst: a gun.

Without sound, rapid as a cat, Gelt unwound himself. He drew himself silently along rooftops, up shingled planes, down gutters, through alleys, chin forward, eyes bristling with strands. In his dead heart was the joy of the hunt and the desire, after the chase, for embrace — to clutch his enemy tight, tighter, until the cords cut and the flesh failed and he was left alone again in silence.

He rushed to meet his adversary.

Kalgrash bounded through the deserted alleyways. They had no light to give them away, true, but Brian could tell what a clatter the armor made. He was sure it echoed loudly above the silent city. Gelt would be upon them in moments.

Now the darkness filled Brian with panic. It was as if the ink in the air were a substance, something he breathed into his lungs with the chill, and he was sunk deep in some sea. He did not know from which way the cord would come, plucking at him, garroting him as Kalgrash thumped on, unawares.

He just wanted it to happen, to be over with, because he could not stand knowing that the danger was all around him and invisible, the fibers waiting to strike.

Brian’s arm knocked against the wall of a house. It stung. He swayed on the troll’s back. He gathered himself and hissed, “Inside!”

Kalgrash nodded, made an abrupt turn.

The space was close. Brian could tell from the echoes. Down a flight of stairs.

Deep in his nostrils, the scent of dust.

“Get down!
Get down!
” Kalgrash demanded. He lowered himself to one knee. Brian scrambled off.

Kalgrash pushed Brian down more steps. The troll half held him, half shoved him. Brian shuffled on the stone, barking his shins, slamming his hands into granite walls.

They were in some deep, small place. A cellar, maybe.

“Sit,” Kalgrash demanded.

The two of them crouched on a dirt floor, their backs against frigid stone.

They tried to calm their breathing. Their mouths were open. They tried for silence.

For a minute, the air was as empty of sound as it was of image. Brian had only the sensation of rock in his back to mire him in the world of objects. Otherwise, there was nothing to suggest a world was there at all.

And then, a sound came. A stealthy ticking.

Gelt was above the house. His tendrils looped and curled down through its windows, under its lintels and across its floors. They crept along, feeling for humankind.

Brian could barely breathe with panic.

He heard the cords making their way through rooms.

Kalgrash whispered, “This isn’t going to work. Hiding here.”

Brian didn’t want to respond. He didn’t want to say anything, and to have that hushed word be the thing that got them caught.

Kalgrash said, “I’ll lead the Winnower away and come back.”

Brian had already lost Gregory. He couldn’t lose Kalgrash. Chest pounding, he tried not to breathe. He could hear the tendrils licking the house, tapping through each room.

“I’m going,” said Kalgrash.

“You can’t do that,” Brian insisted.

Then Kalgrash lunged. He stood. “Stay where you are. Exactly,” the troll demanded, and leaped up the steps.

Brian sat absolutely still and waited for the troll to come back, or the Winnower to find him.

Kalgrash saw the cords draped through the windows and doors, looping through rooms.

He ran past them, heading for the exit.

Feeling the percussion of armor on stone, Gelt’s cords twitched and sought the troll harder. His servant fronds hopped and scurried through the house. Kalgrash leaped over them.

He jumped through a window and started bolting down the alley.

He saw, above him, the hideous, mangled form of Gelt. The slack, white body hung in the air, supported by the silver cords that now whipped out of windows and reached for the troll.

Kalgrash wanted to make it a few blocks away before he was caught. He wanted to give Brian as much space as possible.

A cord brushed his shoulder. He leaped into a house.

The tendrils poured in after him.

Kalgrash was already lumbering down a corridor, breathing heavily, looking for another — preferably confusing — way out.

The tendrils turned all corners at once.

Kalgrash put a heavy foot on the stone sill of a window and prepared to heave himself out.

A cord tapped, confirmed — then grabbed.

It was around his neck. He was astonished that something so gentle, so pliable, could suddenly snap taut and kill.

There were plates on his helm that protected his neck — but he could feel them creaking on their staples. He was trapped, half in, half out the window.

With a jerk, the cord pulled him up off his feet.

And others were there now to join in the fun. They crawled all over him. He struggled, stranded in a window.

Brian sat motionless in the basement. He did not hear the Winnower any longer. Still, he wasn’t going to move.

The darkness was total. Brian didn’t want to think how far he was beneath the earth. There was a mountain on top of him. Enough dirt and rock to fill his mouth and nose and pack his throat solid fifty thousand times over.

He had lost Gregory. He couldn’t imagine it. It felt impossible, that Gregory wasn’t here, wisecracking. Brian tried to imagine what Gregory would say if he were there. He himself couldn’t think of anything funny.

Brian couldn’t believe how badly this whole mission had gone. They never would have even known where Prudence was if they hadn’t run into Kalgrash. And now Kalgrash was gone, too. And families were still being absorbed into their houses. And the Thusser settlement was spreading.

And here he was, trapped in a cellar of a ruined house deep beneath a mountain, with a nightmare plucking at the air around him to try to find him —

Where was Kalgrash? Why wasn’t he back yet?

And then, out of the darkness, Brian heard a voice. It was someone in the house above him. Someone was hissing, “Brian. Brian.”

It sounded like Kalgrash. But Brian couldn’t hear for sure.

“Come on,” whispered Kalgrash, above him. Kalgrash, who had said to stay put regardless.

“Come on, Brian.”

Uncertain, blind, Brian began slowly to climb the steps on his hands and knees.

Toward the voice.

K
algrash, suspended, screamed,
“I SHALL SMITE!”
— which he thought was really very impressive, very epic poem, very chain-mail-and-broadsword — and swung his ax as hard as he could.

Several cords snapped, and Kalgrash toppled backward through the window. Several more cords snapped with the sudden shift of his weight.

Wham!
He hit the soil in a long-dead courtyard. His breath was taken away. For a minute, he couldn’t move. The tendrils were already slithering through the window to fetch him again.

He imagined how many bodies had hung from these willowlike fronds. How many bodies had dangled beneath the Winnower. Gelt was a human gallows.

Kalgrash, panicky, dragged himself across cobblestones.

Gelt’s cords were retracting so he could reach the troll more directly, without having to detour through the mansion.

A great opportunity, thought Kalgrash, to live and smite another day.

He charged across the courtyard, skirting the lip of a dry old impluvium frilled with lichen.

His ax! Nicked!

It was almost out of his hand when he seized it harder. The cords were all around him.

He turned his head fearfully and saw, through his visor, Gelt suspended just a few feet above the dead mounds of the garden, grinning.

The troll bounded into a colonnade. The tendrils followed.

Kalgrash ran slalom. He weaved back and forth between the columns. Gelt’s hideous cords followed, rearing back, jetting forward, seizing upon a shin or an elbow.

Kalgrash tripped — but didn’t fall. Cords whipped round him.

He was still on his feet, but raveled in seething silver loops. They were all over him.

His armor pinged. Cables were tightening. Plates were weakening.

His helmet wriggled.

They were pulling off his protective shell.

No, worse.

He spluttered — gagged. The tendrils had crawled into the breathing grill. They were prying at his lips.

They were going to slither inside him and pull him apart like thumbs in an orange.

He yanked his arm. He still had his ax, but he couldn’t swing it at himself.

The cables jabbed at his eyes.

In another second or two, he’d be blinded. The wire would pierce the soft quick of the eye and start stirring.

And so Kalgrash swung his ax as hard as he could. Not at the cables — he knew he’d never be able to sever so many of them.

But at the ruins of a half-decayed pillar.

His ax hit with a clang.

The pillar collapsed.

And with it, down came a lot of the roof.