The Chamber in the Sky Read online

  The lieutenant walked into the cell. “No interruption. Sing.” The girl picked up her waltz. Kunhild bade them, “Dance. Make merry.”

  Brian sagged against the wall, his mouth open, sweating.

  Then the girl Ianogunde swayed forward in rhythm, took Brian’s hands, and began to spin him. “He’s repulsive!” she said, in time to the music. “He’s sticky! He’s wet! My pet person!” She laughed with her deep, cherry lips.

  She held Brian’s hand and spun him out as if they were doing a routine. When her arm was fully extended and Brian tottered at the greatest distance, Aelfward threw his knife, and this time it sliced Brian’s heel.

  The whole crowd, Lieutenant Kunhild included, burst into cheers. Brian fell to one knee. Ianogunde rushed to him and lifted him up. She kept him waltzing, pressing his soaking head to her shoulder as if they were in love. She rolled her eyes in mock ecstasy.

  Everyone whooped and clapped.

  Gregory and Gwynyfer did not. Gwynyfer stood without moving near the door, her face tipped up. Gregory just looked desperate.

  The dance went on. Brian had trouble walking now. He was limping. His right foot left a smudge of blood at each step.

  “We regret the blood,” said the lieutenant. “No more blood.” She turned to Gregory. “The babe Ortwine. I like a young man to enjoy my regiment. A young man needs to collect those memories of camaraderie and shenanigans in foreign parts to treasure in later years, when the bones are soft and things are quiet in the nest. But you, little Ortwine, you don’t seem to have the requisite spirit of kick-up-your-heels. You look positively ill at ease. Green around the gills. What ails you, Ortwine? I wonder whether you know our human animal here. I wonder whether you met when you were on Earth. You’re not old friends, are you?”

  Gregory looked at Brian, forced to canter in circles with Ianogunde screeching, “You’re foul! Foul!” in the boy’s ear. He looked at the smirk on Lieutenant Kunhild’s face.

  And then he spluttered, “No! No, I don’t know him!”

  There was no reason, Gregory thought quickly to himself, to get locked up, too. They couldn’t help Brian escape if they were also —

  “So play along,” the lieutenant ordered. “Unless you know him.”

  She pointed. Brian sagged in Ianogunde’s arms.

  Everyone was watching Gregory. He went into the middle of the circle.

  One two three, one two three, one two three went the music. Two kids were singing now in ugly harmony. One two three. One two three. One two three.

  And Gregory began to kick his friend’s wounded foot in time. Kick two three. Kick two three. Kick two three.

  Brian said, “Please … Please …”

  And the lieutenant smiled as Gregory kicked his friend’s wounds, and the dance went on and on and on.

  When Lord Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint stopped to think about how the old game of life was treating him, he felt heavyish in his gut. Things were not going swimmingly for his lordship.

  Lord Dainsplint came from one of the most ancient and noble Norumbegan families — a family that had often worn the purple and ermine of high, even royal, office. He owned much of the city of New Norumbega and many other organs beside. He had grown up surrounded by luxuries, drinking pearls dissolved in wine, eating peacock with the tail fanned. Two weeks earlier, he had almost been elected as Regent and Prime Minister of the Empire of the Innards, and perhaps would have now been the most powerful man in the Great Body if people hadn’t taken unkindly to his murder of his chum Gugs — which he thought was rather blinking dank of them, considering that no one ever could really stomach Gugs when the chap was alive (often rattled on a bit; brayed, even; a terribly slow card player).

  Two weeks before, Lord Dainsplint had considered himself almost at the top of the Norumbegan hill of beans: views from the palace windows, long afternoons spent playing polo on droneback, plenty of champagne and orange juice for breakfast.

  So now it was somewhat difficult to face up to the fact that he was sitting in a grubby undershirt, prisoner in a fortress carved entirely from snot.

  Encrusting one wall of Three-Gut’s vast stomach was a huge flow of phlegm, dried over centuries into great swaths and columns and ripples. The mannequins had chiseled their way into this shimmering cliff and had created a towering fortress with battlements and turrets of mucus hard as stone.

  Exactly how Lord Dainsplint had ended up imprisoned in Pflundt was a complicated tale, and one he didn’t really want to think about too hard. He had been exiled from New Norumbega, of course, after shooting Gugs (people can be so dashed particular), and he’d wandered the Dry Heart at first, uncertain where to go. Eventually, he’d paid for passage on a sub headed to the Splenetic Wastes, where he owned a hunting estate. He had the thought that if he got bored of shooting beasties in the crannies and crevices of the wild, he could always pop over to the monastery next door — St. Diancecht’s — where he knew a monk who was an expert in herbal poisons. If he ever wanted to go back into politics, it seemed necessary to have a few undetectable and fast-acting toxins in his kit bag.

  He hadn’t gotten far. In midstream, the passenger submarine he was on had been surrounded by Thusser vessels and threatened with destruction. The Thusser boarded and steered the thing to Pflundt.

  And now here sat Lord Dainsplint, favored son of a glorious family, in a prison yard, eating plain rice off a scrap of brown paper bag.

  The only good news was that he had been chosen to act as social manager for the Norumbegan prison population. He arranged the distribution of food and the sleeping arrangements and the amateur theatricals. He made sure that the noble families in prison got a separate table and didn’t have to eat with the peasantry. He had met some splendid people in the last week — some very solid eggs — and it was always a bit of a shame when they were dragged off to some location where their wills were broken through torture, their minds were laid bare, and they were melded into the walls, alive but corpse-like, psychically fed upon by Thusser, young and old.

  Dainsplint looked up from his meal of rice and saw that the gates to the prison yard were opening. Several guards came in, and between them, a new set of prisoners.

  Dainsplint stood. It was time for him to do his duty. He handed his rice to a grubby child who stood near him — “Finish it off, Rufus. You look a sight too spindly.” — and marched over to greet the new prisoners.

  “Hell-o, all. The Honorable Rafe ‘Chigger’ Dainsplint greets you and all that rot. Welcome to General Herla’s Holding Tank. Delightful you could come. We hope you’ll enjoy your time here, et cetera. I’ll be showing you to your cots and the mess hall and whatnot. And you are …?”

  A man with a white walrus mustache bowed. “The Honorable Osbert Darvish, Baronet of Twilly Steadham, greets the Honorable Lord Dainsplint, and expresses his delight to be imprisoned and tortured with such a worthy peer, who surely will extend protection for his lowly servant.”

  “Yes … I wouldn’t get too giddy about my protection, old tripe. A day or two and you’ll be feathering some Thusser mum’s nest.” To himself, Dainsplint thought: A mere baronet! Puffing around as if he expected the red carpet and servants in livery! Poor old duffer looks like he’ll break easily. “And you are?” he asked the next couple, who presented tear-stained faces.

  He was dealing with a family of eight — the horrific Drastlumpkins, most of them wailing for toys — when suddenly he spied a familiar face.

  A grubby human boy with broken glasses.

  His accuser. The boy who’d unmasked him as a murderer.

  Brian Thatz.

  Lord Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint smiled. “Well met, Brian, old flick. It’s so delightful to see you. Let me throw an arm around those husky shoulders.” Dainsplint squeezed Brian as hard as he could. The bones popped a bit.

  Dainsplint’s grin was wolflike. “Well, my son, aren’t we going to have times?”

  Gwynyfer and Gregory’s Young Horde troop were housed in an
old machine shop in the lower reaches of Pflundt. Someone had laid out cheap air mattresses for them, and a Norumbegan lady had been webbed to the wall, her eyes and mouth gaping wide, lost in dreams, so that they’d be able to feed on her energy. She wore an oversize sweater and leggings. She still had on large earrings, which swayed when, occasionally, her head bobbed.

  She made Gregory and Gwynyfer nervous.

  Gregory said they had to get out on the streets and start checking out the city. “Two things we need to find,” he whispered to Gwynyfer. “Where Brian is and where the capsule is.”

  “Oh, lordy, the capsule. The capsule! You people and the capsule!”

  “Look, Gwynyfer, it’s the only one-step way to beat the Thusser. The Norumbegans can’t stop them. The mannequins can’t stop them, obviously. So we have to get the Rules Keepers to stop them.”

  Gwynyfer gritted her teeth and nodded. They left the machine shop and walked through the streets.

  The last time Gregory had been to Pflundt, it had been full of mannequin life. There had been vendors and hawkers in alleys, mechanical families dressed in proper suits promenading on the avenues. If the mannequins were given their independence, this would become the capital of their nation.

  Now the gray, cobbled streets were nearly empty. There were signs of the violent assault that had taken the city. Huge chunks of wall were blasted to pieces, and neighborhoods were empty shells. The mannequins who remained now served the Thusser, carrying armaments through the streets or even carrying Thusser dignitaries on platforms. For the first time in more than two centuries, the mannequins had to cook again. In public squares, they made cauldrons of stew for their Thusser overlords. In kitchens, mechanical men sliced up alien vegetables. Butchers hacked at the haunches of many-legged beasts.

  There were not enough Thusser to fill the city. Most of the shops and houses were closed up.

  “You know what’s happening, don’t you, while we stroll around?” said Gwynyfer.

  “What?”

  “The other chaps are poking holes in our inflatable mattresses.”

  “Look,” said Gregory. “That must be the prison down there.”

  They stood on a bridge partway up the cliff. Down the slope, through a tangle of rooftops and chimneys, was a gray, paved yard that had been outfitted with razor wire on its walls and giant Thusser runes of warning or condemnation. Norumbegans were sitting on the cobblestones in the courtyard, trapped and dejected.

  “I’ll bet Brian is in there,” said Gregory.

  “Perhaps,” said Gwynyfer, shrugging. “If he hasn’t already been brain-sucked.”

  Gregory surveyed the place, leaning over the railing. He mused, “There has to be some way in there.”

  “Oh? We could give ourselves up. We’d be in there in seconds.”

  “Don’t be a bore,” said Gregory, trying to speak a language she understood. “It will involve disguises.” He wagged his eyebrows.

  “I do love disguises. Too bad these ones are going to quit soon, and leave us with the Thusser crawling all over us like ants swarming on a turkey carcass.”

  “We can’t replace the batteries?”

  “On garbagy little items like these? No. They’re throwaway.”

  After they’d looked around the city, they stopped at a café where they ate awful little Thusser cakes and drank tea grown in the moist hillocks of Axial Organ #6 (“Slumber-Bear Daydreams” — decaffeinated). Gregory urged Gwynyfer to talk to some of the other Young Horde scouts who were slouching at nearby tables, reading magazines. He was too worried that his accent and his ignorance would give him away.

  She inserted herself into a group, pulling up a chair and sitting on it backward. Gregory watched the way she touched her hair or boys’ arms and the way she laughed. He wanted her to laugh that way with him.

  Finally, he watched as two boys, eager to show off, stood up and displayed their scars for her.

  When they left the café, Gwynyfer had a lot of news.

  “Something big is happening tomorrow. They don’t know what … the Norumbegan prisoners are being kept in that walled yard we saw, but only until they’re needed in a Thusser dwelling or encampment. That’s as we expected …. None of the fellows there have seen three mechanical giants carrying a capsule of any kind. Stupid move on my part — they were a mite startled by the question. Did seem too awfully specific …. As for the mannequins: The ones who’ve been taken prisoner are allowed to run down — no one winds them up — and they’re stowed in a factory down at the foot of the cliff until they’re needed. They’re not being used for psychic fertilizer because the structure of their thought is too alien. That factory’s the best guess as to where three mechanical giants might be stowed. All clear?”

  “Let’s go to the factory,” said Gregory, and when she rolled her eyes, he grabbed her wrist and started running. He knew that speed and recklessness would please her.

  They pelted down through the gray, empty streets. They galloped down winding staircases that crisscrossed the cliff, and arrived at the factory breathing heavily and laughing.

  It was made of dull brick. Some of the high windows were broken from nearby explosions. There were two Thusser guards standing by the front doors with long rifles and bayonets.

  Gregory said, “Should we claim our troop wants a personal tour?”

  “No. That’s nuts.”

  Gregory nodded. “Then we’re just going to have to find a way to break in,” he concluded.

  They went back to their barracks for dinner and a poor night’s sleep on their punctured and deflated beds.

  Brian did not have a good night’s sleep. Lord Dainsplint had arranged for Brian to share a cell with him. This was just so his lordship could torment him.

  Brian came back from dinner to discover Lord Dainsplint standing next to their bunk bed.

  “D’you know,” said Lord Dainsplint, “it is a tragedy that the terrors and mishaps of childhood so often plague us in later years. I, for example, was once locked in a haunted butler’s pantry overnight. The expressions and expostulations of the dead quite unsettled me. To this day, I find that being in an enclosed space — such as a small cell — often prompts in me a horrible spate of bed-wetting.”

  Brian looked at his lordship. He said, “That’s my bed you’re wetting.”

  Dainsplint looked down. “So it is, old fish. So it is.” He walked off to look out into the prison yard through the bars of the door.

  So Brian had not slept in a bed. He’d slept on the cold, hard floor. And every time he finally got to sleep, Dainsplint had started singing a menacing old folk song about wringing the neck of a fat little goose.

  Brian was exhausted. His nerves had been attacked magically. His foot was festering with an untended wound. He had a fever. He had hardly eaten for days. His best friend had betrayed him, somehow — Brian couldn’t tell exactly what was going on there. He kept hoping that the door would burst open and Gregory would be there, dressed as a …

  But even Brian couldn’t work out a scheme to escape.

  All night, he lay kinked up in the corner of the cell, and he felt the goopy Great Body all around him. He felt the cold, hollow passages and squelching systems unfurling in all directions through all of time and space — and he himself was nothing but a little wad of organs and quivering muscles in the midst of those vaster innards. There was no wall behind which something was dry and safe. There was nothing but ruin and corrupted body: his own weary and scratched flesh, his empty stomach, and then the stomach around him, the Volutes wound around it like clouds around a globe — and the unimaginable distances that had to be traveled before the dead, dry heart could be found again.

  There was one scrap of good news. As Brian ate the flatbread that was shoved through a slot in the morning, he heard a clatter at the window. A dragony face looked in.

  “Eew!” cried Lord Dainsplint. “An heraldic bacterium! Filthy!”

  Brian ran over to Tars Tarkas and petted his nose t
hrough the bars on the window. He said, “That’s funny, coming from someone who wets other people’s beds.” Brian tore off a small piece of bread and fed the bacterium. “He followed me all the way from the Volutes. He’s a good boy. Occasionally, I saw him, but he could never get to me. Once, these soldiers all fired at him.”

  “Pity they don’t train true marksmen anymore.”

  Brian crooned, “How are you doing, boy? Huh? How are you doing?”

  The animal made a weird, cute noise and licked the boy’s hand. He tried to force his way into the cell. His shoulders didn’t fit. He made frustrated little whimpers and scratched at the bars with the first couple of sets of claws.

  Tars couldn’t get in, and Brian couldn’t get out. They stared at each other through the window. Tars’s eyes were deep and green, and seemed to know everything Brian thought and felt. The creature leaned down and licked Brian’s knuckle again — then turned with a flick of the tail and flew off toward the crags of dry sputum.

  Early that morning, on an empty street of row houses, Thusser in top hats knelt, polishing long Alpine horns.

  Gregory and Gwynyfer were eating breakfast when the horns sounded.

  All over the city, on balconies and towers and bridges, Thusser wearing bright red sashes blasted out one long, urgent note. One horn took it up, then another, then another, then another. The sound rebounded across the frozen cataract of snot and echoed in the swamps.

  Immediately, there was activity. Thusser soldiers turned out of houses where they’d been sleeping. They rushed into formation in the city squares.

  Word passed from mouth to mouth: General Herla, commander of the Thusser forces in the Great Body, had finally ordered the submarine assault on New Norumbega. It was time at last. The waiting was over. Regiments were on the march to the valves. In two hours, the subs were going to set off into their various circulatory systems, all of them converging on the Dry Heart.