The Empire of Gut and Bone Page 12

  Brian could not believe that the fate of his parents, of Gregory’s, of everyone he knew lay in the manicured hands of these elfin idiots, these ditsy pranksters giggling in their ruins beyond the end of time.

  He curled up in his bed. In an hour or so, he’d have to get up and put some kind of magic unguent on his leg. The pain sprang through him.

  He crushed his head down into his pillow. Outside, he heard the cheers as some vapid game was won.

  He tried to sleep.

  The night was warm. The veins had gone dark an hour before, but heat still rose off the granules of the desert.

  Gregory and Gwynyfer strolled on a balcony that ran most of the way around the palace. They looked out over the huts and alleys of the city. Smoke rose from bonfires. Far, far out in the dark plains of the Dry Heart, the lights of small villages shone, and perhaps a caravan traveling into the capital with goods from some distant ventricle or aorta.

  “There is a cluster of hearts,” said Gwynyfer. “Like a bouquet.”

  Gregory asked, “Where’s the blood?”

  “There’s some growth — it’s weedy; the Wildwood, we call it — that blocks up the valves. That’s one of the reasons some people think that the Great Body is dead.” She leaned on the railing. She looked up at the ceiling of muscle far up in the darkness. She said, “Maybe it’s been dead since before I was born. The last time there was a pulse in the veins of flux was years and years ago. But who knows? We just call these organs hearts because they seem like hearts to us. Maybe they aren’t at all. Maybe the Wildwood is actually part of them. I don’t know.”

  Gregory stood by her side and looked up with her at the unmoving heart. The soft night air blew past them. He couldn’t help notice how close her arm was. It was an incredible arm. It had a dimple at the elbow. Gregory found himself wishing that he could take Gwynyfer to school with him, show the others how they laughed together.

  “It’s sweet,” she said, “that you and your friend want to find out who really killed the Regent. It’s not very Norumbegan to care.”

  “You know, we do what we can to help.”

  She smiled. “How ducky for us.”

  He wagged his finger. “You don’t believe we can figure it out, do you?”

  “It would be fun if you did.”

  “Fun?”

  “Nifty.”

  “Well, Brian’s pretty smart. And I happen to be pretty charming.”

  “Are you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s see proof.”

  “I can burp ‘Do Your Ears Hang Low.’ ”

  She rolled her eyes and murmured, “You and the Minister of the Interior.”

  Gregory pointed out, “You must care about the murder. You’re helping us solve it.”

  Gwynyfer shrugged. “It’s a lark. You can’t know how dull the Court often is. Curtsying. Walking in processions. Waiting on the Stub. Who sweats, by the by. It’s a bit thrilling to have two humans here who actually care about a thing. And the murder, of course — the delicious, chill-making murder.”

  She smiled at Gregory, and he could see pleasure in her smile.

  “You’re not like other girls,” he said. He figured women always liked flattery, and in this case, what he said was true, anyway. Other girls didn’t have pointed ears. “I wish I could introduce you to people at school. They’d be amazed.”

  “That would be lovely. Would they ask me what songs I can burp?”

  Gregory countered with polite sarcasm: “Oh, sorry, madame. Please, tell me, what’s the Globular Colon like?”

  She laughed. “Actually, it’s lovely in the spring, when it’s green.”

  “Do you have a castle there? On your estate?”

  She looked at him quite carefully. From inside, there came a crash as the radial tire knocked down a drone.

  Gwynyfer said, “My parents describe it to people as a castle, but it’s a shack of four rooms. That’s how most of the Court lives when they’re away from the palace.” She gave him a look of defiant shyness and said, “Everyone boasts about their estates and hopes no one else ever visits. We all have shameful secrets to hide.” She crossed her arms. “But who wants to take the time to build something? Who will do it for us? Too, too weary-making.

  “That,” she said, “is why it’s so outrageous that the mannequins have left us, all but a very few. We need them.”

  “You deserve a castle,” said Gregory. “Someone should build one for you. You look like a princess.”

  She turned and smiled at him.

  They were very close to each other.

  Gregory was suddenly aware that their arms were touching. He really wanted to kiss her.

  But he didn’t dare.

  So they stood there, side by side, almost kissing, feeling warmth trickle from arm to arm, drunk on the balmy night, the hot, bracing scent of burning plastic, and the sweet, enfolding darkness of the Dry Heart.

  And down below them, at the base of the palace’s keep, a servant’s door opened and Lord Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint slipped out, wearing a cloak with a hood. He scurried down the steps and skirted the edge of the square.

  Through the night city he walked, while boys ran past with torches and striped beasts rifled through garbage heaps. Through windows, old boom boxes played the fragmented dance tunes of Norumbega, blaring through tinny speakers to courtyards filled with shrieking families.

  Toward the edge of the city, things were quieter. The silence of the granular desert hung heavy in the air. The night was cooler. Occasionally, someone stirred in a shack. Dainsplint picked his way along narrow passages between houses. He stepped over sleeping men.

  Finally, he reached a turquoise hut. He looked one way and then the other. He opened the door and slipped in.

  He closed the door behind him.

  “I fear,” he said to the person he found there, “that I’ve made rather a mistake.”

  The person he met blew out the single candle.

  Then everything was dark.

  SEVENTEEN

  In the streets of the Thusser suburb at the foot of Norumbega Mountain, time ran quickly, and houses billowed and wobbled as they became less like human dwellings and more like the pulpy nests of Thusser settlers with dark-ringed eyes who arrived every day with their suitcases filled with devices that resembled broken glass.

  Beneath that suburb, in the City of Gargoyles, the old stone houses and domes and obelisks and arches sprouted luxury pods, more like plant bladders than anything built by human hands. These were the condominiums of the Thusser Horde.

  Through the dim streets, lit by the bellies of the fungus-like condos, the Thusser shuffled, whispering and passing blackly in crowds through the avenues.

  In a vault beneath that city, beneath the cathedral that overlooked those flinty streets, in the midst of the Thusser settlement, a human woman and an old Norumbegan man sat trapped and weakened.

  Prudence was slumped near the blank portal. Around her were scattered plastic bags once filled with lunch meats. She and Wee Sniggleping had been sitting in this chamber for weeks. They could no longer leave to fetch food. The Thusser were too thick on the streets up above them. Days passed with nothing to do but read the old issues of People and Teen Vogue they’d bought back when they’d been slipping out regularly to the Halt’N’Buy.

  They were out of food. Prudence had been suffering from a headache for several days. They were out of water. They’d had to use the mausoleum of former emperors for a toilet. The stench crept in over the stone sill.

  For the past day, neither Prudence nor Sniggleping had moved much.

  For two weeks, they had not seen any light but the light of the lantern. Its magical charge grew weak. Staring directly at its twist of burning wire, Prudence could almost imagine that it was not light that came from it, but just another kind of shadow. Spots clotted the room. When she held her breath, they pulsed.

  It had been some hours since she and Sniggleping had spoken. He was d
oing better than her, still sitting upright, watching her with concern.

  She rolled her head toward him and said, “They’re not coming, are they? They’ve gotten lost or killed.”

  “Or time,” said Sniggleping, “is moving so slowly on the other side of the portal that only a few seconds have passed for them since they went through.” He shook his head. “We don’t know.”

  “We have to go through. We can’t stay here.”

  “Remember,” said Sniggleping, “that we don’t know that we can get back without someone here to receive us. To open the gate from this end.”

  “We can’t stay here,” Prudence repeated. “The Thusser are going to find us.” She put her hands on her head. Her hair was a scraggly mess. “I can hear them,” she said. “They’re up in the cathedral. They must be using it for something.”

  “You may hear them,” said Sniggleping. “Or that may be your panic clanking. It may be your fear murmuring, my darling.”

  They fell silent, then, for a long time. They stared into the darkness of the chamber, at the plastic bags of trash, all that remained of their supply runs earlier in the month.

  After an hour, Prudence became convinced she saw faces watching her from the darkness. They were glowering and pale. She wondered offhand, half dreaming, if they would leave if she sang. They did not move, however. The lamp grew dimmer. Prudence stared at the faces and they stared frankly back.

  For a while, Prudence closed her eyes. When she opened them, the shadows were deeper, and the faces were more present than ever.

  Sniggleping saw them, too, but he did not want to speak. He thought that by acknowledging them, he’d invite them to become solid sooner.

  The faces watched the two who sat in the circle of light. They ringed them.

  Gradually, Prudence saw bodies also. They wore black wool overcoats. Their hands were very white. The faces still glared at her.

  Sniggleping remained silent. He did not want the final catastrophe to begin. He wanted a few last minutes before the awful things happened.

  But Prudence did speak. “They’ve arrived,” she said, and she meant the Thusser. Sniggleping dared to look at her. To nod.

  “Yes,” one of them agreed. “We are here.”

  Sniggleping waved his hand vaguely in the air. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said.

  “You were thinking of something else.”

  The figures walked forward, and they were solid, gathered around Prudence and Snig, thin and dangerous as knives.

  One of the Thusser said, “You sent agents through the portal.”

  “Did we?” said Sniggleping.

  “You did. We have ears in the Court of New Norumbega. We have kept ourselves informed.”

  Prudence concluded triumphantly, “So the boys’ve reached the Court. They’re not dead.”

  “Yet,” agreed a Thusser.

  “You are, of course, under arrest,” said another. “You destroyed our operative in this world, the vehicle Deatley. You have attempted to invoke the Rules.”

  “It’s only fair,” said Prudence. “You’re breaking the Rules.”

  “Fair,” said the Thusser, “is what the powerful do, and the story they tell about it afterward.”

  With that, the Thusser closed in on the two who sagged by lamplight.

  Prudence coughed and gagged, feeling the wet hands clamped over her mouth, fastened on her wrist, dragging at her legs. She kicked and bucked. She screamed Sniggleping’s name. He called for her. The Thusser lifted her and carried her toward the archway into the crypt. She twisted and managed to hang free long enough to bump up steps. She was half heaved, her hand sputtering along in the dust, scraping grit.

  Then the cluster of Thusser was gone.

  Only one was left. A single Thusser man with a mouth full of teeth and a glare in his eye.

  He began, slowly, to run his hands over the lintel of the portal. He began to read what was written there. He began to activate the gateway to the other world.

  EIGHTEEN

  At breakfast, the boys kept their eye out for Lambert Gwestin, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Maybe he doesn’t work breakfast,” said Gregory. He watched without pleasure as the servants brought another platter of steamed eels on the table. He complained, “How is it you people have figured out magic, but you still haven’t figured out the cheese Danish?”

  “We’re the Court,” said Gwynyfer. “We get delicacies at every meal.”

  Brian and Gregory found the delicacies hard to take. Though few of the Court actually made it to breakfast in the dining hall of the palace, the servants brought out course after course of meats in heavy sauces: hard little birds, eels wound into knots, the heads of some horned animal decorated with marzipan lace. The gravy on the heads was thin and watery with lumps of flour. The grease on the birds was starting to turn white.

  Gwynyfer took a silver spatula and eagerly heaped a five-winged roast onto her plate. After she’d taken a few bites, she told the boys, “Last night some refugees arrived from down in the digestive tract. They escaped from the Mannequin Resistance. Later, they’re going to have an Imperial audience with the Stub. You really should see it. It will be a lark.”

  Brian considered, “Maybe it would be a good time to bring up the Thusser again, and the idea of going back to Old Norumbega.”

  Gwynyfer looked a little impatient. “That would be quite dull. You’ve talked about that before. You should make up something different.”

  “But,” Brian said, “Earth needs you to enforce the Rules of the Game.”

  “And we need you to entertain us,” said Gwynyfer. “Things aren’t easy in the Innards. We don’t want to think about the awful things and the boring things.” She put her hand on Brian’s wrist. She told him, “It would be so much better for you and for us if you worked out a trick with fiery batons.”

  Brian stared dejectedly at her hand. Gregory glared jealously at it.

  “Let’s go,” Brian said to Gregory. “We have to find Mr. Gwestin.”

  Gregory didn’t want to leave Gwynyfer. He said to her, “Do you want to come along?”

  She shrugged and nodded.

  They asked the head butler where Mr. Gwestin was. He informed them Mr. Gwestin had been transferred and no longer worked in the dining hall. No, he did not know where Mr. Gwestin had been sent. The Seneschal might know. It was the Seneschal’s business to oversee the running of the palace.

  “It’s very suspicious that he’s been reassigned,” said Brian as they wandered off to find the Seneschal. “Yesterday it seemed like Lord Dainsplint didn’t want us to talk to Mr. Gwestin.”

  “Lord Dainsplint doesn’t want you to investigate the murder at all,” said Gwynyfer. “He wants to win the election for the new regent. If it turns out that the assassin is from his party — the Norumbegan Social Club — and you prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, he’ll never win. He must suspect that members of his party are involved.”

  “Suspect,” said Gregory, “or know?”

  Gwynyfer agreed, “Or know.”

  “It could even be him,” said Brian. “Except he was playing cards with Gugs. That’s his alibi.” Brian looked thoughtful.

  Gwynyfer said, “The Earl of Munderplast is worried about the same thing, I’m sure. If it was someone in the Party of Melancholy who murdered the Regent, no one will trust them anymore. All the baronets and dukes from, I don’t know, the pancreas and the eight kidneys will drop the party like a hot ingot. The earl will lose the election.”

  Brian mused, “I wonder where he really was that night.”

  Gwynyfer said, “For a long time, there have been rumors that the earl was part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Regent. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. No one’s ever proved it. It’s very spine-tingly.”

  “And a nice spine it is,” said Gregory, gesturing at the slow curve of her shoulders and her back.

  She smiled. “This? It’s just something I threw together.”

&n
bsp; They found the Seneschal marching in the opposite direction. He had on a large, lumpy hat and carried a huge account book under his arm. Men in robes scurried alongside of him, offering inkstones and quills.

  Gwynyfer stood directly in his path. She curtsied. “The daughter of the Duke of the Globular Colon greets the Lord High Seneschal of New Norumbega.”

  Irritated, he stopped in his tracks and inclined his head. He made some ritual sign of welcome with his hand. In a voice scratchy and exasperated he said, “The Lord High Seneschal greets the daughter of the Duke of the Globular Colon and wishes her a thousand years of youth. Is there something that the Lord High Seneschal can do for Miss Gwarnmore, in the hopes that she will move out of his way so that he can pursue his business without being hampered by debutantes and monkey-born brats?”

  Gwynyfer said, “It is the wish of Miss Gwarnmore that she be informed as to the reappointment of one servant named Lambert Gwestin.”

  The Seneschal nodded, perched his great book on one hand, and drew it open. He scanned a list. He said to a scribe, “Turn.” The scribe turned the page. “Turn.” Another page flipped. “Two fifty-seven,” he said, and another scribe leafed through to that page.

  The Seneschal ran his finger down the page and looked up. “Mr. Gwestin was reassigned at Lord Dainsplint’s command to shoveling duty in the generator room.”

  “One thanks the Seneschal for his timely and accurate information.”

  “The Seneschal wishes Miss Gwarnmore a thousand glittering pleasures and requests she go play roll-a-hoop outside rather than blockading the august progress of the Imperial bureaucracy.”

  Gwynyfer got a mean look on her face. “Miss Gwarnmore hopes that the Seneschal remains as well as can be expected, at his advanced age.”

  Frowning, the Seneschal slammed his book shut. “The Seneschal expresses the hope that Miss Gwarnmore will in the next years make fewer of the stupid mistakes commonly associated with people of her extreme youth.” He bowed to the three kids and swept past them, his scribes jogging to keep up.