Walkers (51 page)

He couldn’t shoot, though: the
danger of hitting Samena with an energy-bolt was far too great. But Xaxxa,
flying high above the remnants of the army of corpses, looked to see why
Tebulot had stopped feeding him with fire-power, and he understood what was
happening in an instant. He circled, paused, and then came surfing in across
the battlefield at high speed, feet first, leaning back at an angle of nearly forty-five
degrees.

There was a moment when Kasyx
thought that Xaxxa was attempting the impossible. The corpse gripped Samena
even more tightly, forcing its leprous forehead down against her throat, and
clutching at her back until she began to jerk in spasms of pain. In that
moment, Kasyx was tempted to shout out to Xaxxa to pull clear, to pull away,
not to take the risk. But then Xaxxa streaked unerringly up to Samena and the
corpse, and drop-kicked the corpse’s head smartly off its shoulders, sending it
over a hundred feet away, rolling and jumping across the ashes and the timothy
grass.

The corpse’s neck fountained with
yellow-and-grey liquid, and then it spun around and buckled at the knees and
collapsed on to the ground, releasing its hold on Samena at last. It gave one
last trembling kick and then lay still.

Samena climbed to her feet,
shuddering and pale faced; but she managed to give Kasyx a fleeting smile of
relief. She had been captured by the Devil, and she had understood what total
evil can do. Nothing – not even a rampaging corpse – could ever equal the
terror of that.

Kasyx allowed his power-fences to
die down, and the four of them patrolled around the huddled army of corpses,
occasionally firing at those which were still moving.

Tebulot’s weapon was hot in his
hands, and almost empty of power; he looked around the plain of ashes and he
saw corpses lying everywhere, over three hundred of them, and he knew that the
Night Warriors had won a great victory over the forces of darkness.

The wind blew the ashes over the
bodies, and flapped at their funeral clothes. In a day or two, they would be
buried for a second time, this time for ever. Kasyx said, ‘I suppose we ought
to pray for them. They were only ordinary people like us.’

Tebulot came stepping over the
corpses toward Kasyx, and said, ‘Now we look for the Big Cheese himself, huh?
Yaomauitl?’

Kasyx looked toward the clockwork
city. It had taken on the shape of a huge recumbent body, but it was constantly
changing, constantly reassembling itself, which showed that the boy who was
dreaming about it was restless and frightened.

Highway overpasses disconnected
themselves from one intersection and reconnected themselves to others. Steeples
and clock-towers rose and sank like the bobbin-heads of old-fashioned sewing
machines. Lighted trains whirred in and out of tunnels; clockwork ticked;
whistles blew.

Samena came forward with the plumes
of her hat blowing in the wind. ‘Yaomauitl is there,’ she said, raising her
hand towards the city. ‘The city is made up of all the scariest things that the
boy can think of. Yaomauitl has drawn them all together, and taken them over.
You saw how the city rose up, like a Transformer. The city is Yaomauitl, and
Yaomauitl is the city.’

Tebulot came and stood on Kasyx’s
right side, and Kasyx laid his hand on the machine-carrier’s shoulder to
recharge him.

‘What do we do?’ Tebulot asked. ‘Do
we try to blow up the whole city, or what?’

‘Wouldn’t that inflict damage on the
boy, I mean psychologically – if we blew up all of his most intimate fears?’
Samena asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Kasyx.
‘Besides, I think the question’s academic. We don’t have sufficient power to
destroy the whole place.’

Xaxxa said, ‘Yaomauitl’s got a
heart,
right, like everybody else?’

Kasyx nodded. ‘I think we can assume
that he has, since his offspring had an anatomy similar to a urodela.’

‘A what?’

‘That’s a species of amphibian
creature, like a salamander lizard, or a siren, which is a kind of a lizard
that doesn’t have any legs.’

‘Okay, then,’ said Xaxxa. ‘If the
Devil has a heart, then we can go into the city and find it, right? And hit him
right where he lives.’

Tebulot checked the charge-scale on
his weapon. ‘That makes some kind of sense, I guess. If we don’t have the power
to destroy the whole city, I don’t see that we have any option.’

Samena shrugged. ‘It makes sense to
me. We don’t have very much time left, do we?’

‘Question is, can we
find
the heart?’ asked Kasyx.

Samena armed her index finger with
an arrowhead that was designed to bury itself deep within a building or a body
and then explode, like a whaling-harpoon. ‘I’ll find it,’ she said. ‘That time
the Devil’s offspring held me hostage – I think I developed a nose for
Yaomauitl and his kind.’

They walked away from the plain of
ashes where they had defeated the army of the dead, and into the outskirts of
the clockwork city. Up above their heads, the sky was even more thunderous, and
lightning leaped from cloud to cloud. By the time they had reached the first
buildings, it was beginning to rain, a slow soft drizzle that glistened on the
printed tinplate sidewalks, and beaded the printed tinplate walls.

The Night Warriors walked cautiously
down a dark narrow street, their weapons raised ready. They passed under a
railroad bridge, and a train hurtled over them, its lights shining on the
rooftops.

Samena touched her fingertips to her
forehead, and closed her eyes. ‘This way,’ she said, turning to the left. They
followed her along an even narrower alleyway, between buildings that were
crowded with cogs and springs and ticking ratchets. There was a strong aromatic
smell of oil in the air, as well as a curious odour of tin. Kasyx said,

‘Can you smell that? I used to have
a wind-up racing car that smelled exactly like that. Jesus, I feel like I’m six
years old again.’

So far, they had come across none of
the inhabitants of the clockwork city, but suddenly the alleyway ended, and
they stepped out on to a broad tinplate mall, dimly lit, but busy with
clockwork trams and clockwork buses and clockwork cars, all life-size. The
noise of springs and cogs was tremendous and there was an endless skirling of
painted metal tyres on painted metal pavement. The buses and trams were
crowded, but only with vacantly smiling people who had been painted on to the
tinplate windows. The bus drivers had been painted in profile on the side
windows of the buses, and full-face on the front windows.

‘This is truly weird,’ said Xaxxa,
as they walked past butcher’s shops in which the meat was simply printed on to
the back wall behind the counter, and grocery stores with printed
advertisements for Wheaties and Come Brown Rice and Rinso. The drizzle sparkled
in the streetlights, forming a soft halo around each one. As he walked along
the wet sidewalk, Kasyx began to understand that they were making their way
through some archetypal childhood, lost and gone forever in the real world, but
still humming and clicking and living out its life on the fringes of every
child’s dreams.

This city was the boy-dreamer’s
creation only in so much as each individual part of it represented one of his
nightmares. It was Yaomauitl the Deadly Enemy who had brought his nightmares
together and made a city out of them. Yaomauitl could take on any form that he
desired, and that was what Samena had meant when she said that Yaomauitl
actually
was
the city.

The Night Warriors followed Samena
through street after street, over narrow bridges and mysterious walkways,
through silent town squares and clamorous trolley-depots.

They had been walking through the
rain for almost twenty minutes before she raised her hand and said, ‘Listen!
Now you can hear it!’

They strained their ears, and she
was right. Underneath the whirring and chirring and ringing and clashing of the
city’s traffic, they could detect another kind of mechanical sound: the
deep-throated
kachug,
pause,
kachug,
pause,
kachug,
pause, of a massive verge-escapement clock, with a swinging
pendulum. This clock was the city’s heart; a clock of nightmares, the kind of
clock that chimed in echoing hallways, with a pendulum that swung backwards and
forwards in a dark rushing arc, from wall to wall.

The four of them crossed a narrow
bridge that took them high above the city’s main street. Hundreds of feet below
them, they could see the headlights of clockwork cars and buses, and the
glitter of streetlights. The pale face of a clock on a steeple told them that
it was already nearly half-past four, and that this deep-level nightmare
couldn’t continue for very much longer. As dawn broke, and the boy-dreamer
began to stir, his mind would gradually rise up through the lighter debris of
dozing dreams, and this malevolent clockwork city would be buried in darkness
for all time.

‘There!’ said Samena, pointing ahead
of them. The bridge led them to a curved tunnel, right through the sixty-sixth
floor of a tall iron-grey skyscraper, and on the far side of the skyscraper
there was a balcony, with tinplate railings. They jogged through the tunnel and
came out on the other side, and stepped right up to the balcony’s edge.

In front of them – out of the black
chasm of the city’s structure – a massive iron framework rose up, and inside
this framework a clockwork mechanism steadily and inexorably beat away the
minutes of the night. From the centre of the mechanism a pendulum swung, a pendulum
that was more than a hundred feet long, and which bore on its disc-shaped
weight the death mask of a goat-bearded man, in corroded bronze.

‘Yaomauitl’s heart,’ Samena
declared.

Tebulot wiped the rain away from the
visor of his white helmet. ‘Do you think we have enough power to destroy it?’
he asked Kasyx.

Kasyx gave him a thumbs-up sign.
‘One burst at maximum strength should do it. Aim for the anchor.’ The anchor
was the claw-shaped piece of metal which rocked from side to side with each
swing of the pendulum, releasing the toothed cog-wheel one tooth at a time. If
the anchor was damaged, the cog-wheel would spin freely, and release the
escape-wheel from which a hundred-tonne pallet of pig-iron was suspended, two
hundred feet below them.

Tebulot shouldered his machine,
while Kasyx stood behind him and placed a hand on each of his shoulders, to
infuse him with as much of Ashapola’s power as possible. The charge-scale on
the side of Tebulot’s weapon shone white, indicating full energy and more. It
hummed loudly, eager to be released. Samena and Xaxxa kept watch from opposite
sides of the balcony, in case anyone or anything attempted to stop them.

‘Ready?’ Kasyx asked Tebulot. ‘Then
kill him –
in the dark and holy name of
the Night
Warriors!’

Tebulot fired. There was an
ear-shattering
zzhhh-waaappp!
and a
fifteen-foot bolt of supercharged energy streaked from the muzzle of his
machine. But they had reckoned without the strength and the cunning and the
devilish alertness of Yaomauitl, the Deadly Enemy; for asthe energy-bolt sped
towards the massive clock mechanism, there was a metallic flickering sound, and
a flock of curved metal plates were catapulted through the air like clay
pigeons or frisbees, right across the front of the clock structure. Tebulot’s energy-bolt
hit the first plate in a spectacular shower of sparks, and the plate was
skeeted off sideways. But it had been enough to deflect the energy-bolt by two
or three degrees, and when the bolt hit the next flying plate, in another
explosion of sparks, it was deflected another two degrees, and then another,
and then another; a glittering bursting succession of firework ricochets, which
set up a whistling and a crackling like nothing that any of them had ever heard
before.

As it sparkled against the very last
plate, the energy-bolt flashed harmlessly skyward, disappearing into the
windblown cloud-base. The plates themselves, smoking and scorched, tumbled down
into the depths of the clockwork city, bouncing off beams and scaffolding and
railroad tracks with a deafening clanging and ringing sound.

The Night Warriors were stunned by
what had happened. They stood on the balcony watching the gargantuan
clock-mechanism continue as before,
kachug,
pause,
kachug,
pause, and they
knew that, this time, they had failed.

‘That’s it!’ said Kasyx. ‘We’re
almost out of power! Let’s get out of this dream as quickly as we can!’

But, right then, the skyscraper on
which they were standing began to descend, just as other towers began to rise.
They looked down from the balcony and saw the building sliding smoothly and
quickly into the ground, its lighted windows swallowed up storey by storey,
while a tall thin steeple right next to them began to climb into the sky at the
same relentless speed. All around them, bridges and traffic interchanges swung
around and reconnected themselves, without even a pause in the flow of
clockwork trains and cars. Lightning forked down between the buildings, and lit
up the chaos of assembly and reassembly in stark, startling relief.

As the sixty-sixth floor of their
skyscraper neared the ground, the Night Warriors stepped back into the
protective shelter of the tunnel behind them; but the balcony retracted of its
own accord before the building slid without any hesitation into a sleeve of
close-fitting steel plate. They saw a wall of greasy metal speeding upwards in
front of their eyes, just as if they were standing in an elevator. Then the
building slowed and hissed and shuddered to a stop, and the balcony opened out
again into a series of steps.