The Chamber in the Sky Page 15

  A sergeant came by to tell the Young Horde scouts that they weren’t going anywhere. They were going to help staff the fortress while the army fought this last, great battle.

  No one thought it would take long.

  “What I’ve heard is that New Norumbega has no walls,” said Aelfward. “The army’ll be back in a day and a half.”

  The kids were tremendously excited. They left their breakfasts half eaten and ran for the overpasses where they could watch the soldiers marching toward their subs. The Thusser did not cheer, but they made a strange rasping noise in their throats. The soldiers turned and smiled.

  Giant elevators deep within the fortress dropped the soldiers down through the thick layers of the stomach. They crawled into subs of all descriptions: from a few military subs left from the Mannequin Resistance to merchant ships that had been outfitted with guns and torpedoes.

  One by one, the subs arrived, docked, were filled, and set themselves loose.

  The engine screws started to turn. The flux was filled with muck kicked up from all the commotion.

  The Thusser subaquatic force set out for the Dry Heart.

  Meanwhile, Gregory and Gwynyfer ran down toward the factory where the disabled mannequins were stored.

  “This is exactly the right time to break in,” said Gregory. “No one’s paying attention.”

  “Topping,” said Gwynyfer, playing leapfrog with a bollard.

  They slowed down and fell silent when they reached the factory’s grim, soot-streaked walls.

  There was only one guard out front.

  “Okay,” said Gregory. “It will be amazing if the Umpire is in there. We’ll just wind the three guys up, go inside the capsule, and start figuring out the controls.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah. Just think: Single-handedly, we’ll be saving New Norumbega. Can you imagine how angry the Thusser will be when they do all this trumpet BLAH, BLAH! and all their subs leave, and then they hear that the Rules Keepers are kicking their butts on Earth? Give me five, lady! Give me five!”

  “Noise.”

  “You’re right.” Gregory led them back along an alley. “Okay. You go and talk to the guard. Distract him. I’m going to climb into one of the broken windows. Give me a hand up.”

  “How will you get out?”

  “Problem for later.”

  Gregory tested his shoe against the brick. Gwynyfer came to his side, and just when he thought she was going to lock her hands together to give him a hand, she pulled him to her and kissed him on the mouth.

  Gregory breathed in sharply with surprise. He smelled the scent of her. He felt how soft her lips were and how strong her arms were.

  Then it was over, and she’d woven her fingers into a basket for him to step on.

  He leaped up, pushing off against her hands. He grabbed the brick sill of the window. He struggled upward. When he’d pulled his legs up, he gave her a thumbs-up.

  Gwynyfer sauntered around front. She walked over to the single guard.

  “Hi-ho. You must be one sorry soldier, stuck here when everyone else is off to paint the town red. I call that a too pitiful predicament. Where the blood and glory?”

  Meanwhile, Gregory found himself crouching above what looked like a crammed waxworks museum. Hundreds of mannequin citizens stood motionless, uncranked, in whatever pose they’d struck before they’d wound down and dropped off.

  He surveyed the crowd. No giants. No obvious capsule. He’d have to search more thoroughly.

  He sidled over and grabbed on to a heating pipe that ran up beside the window. The paint flaked off in his hands. He shimmied down to the floor.

  He made his way through the silent, eerie storeroom of persons. Hands were caught mid-gesture. Mouths were making words. Eyes stared at him. He had to duck to squeeze under arms.

  Nothing. He saw butlers, maids, pilots, a string quartet. No giants. He pushed open some large swinging doors and discovered an even larger gallery of motionless mechanicals. He climbed up an iron staircase to a walk-way where he could see all of the mannequins at once. He passed a set of actresses frozen in poses as witches. Or maybe, he considered, they were actual witches.

  And then he saw motion.

  Just to his right.

  He froze.

  Nothing moved.

  There was no sound. Two vast storerooms of people stood silently.

  Gregory slowly turned his head.

  Past a couple of newspaper reporters, there was another window.

  It was his own reflection that had startled him.

  He let out his breath. Idiot, he thought, shaking his head at himself.

  But then he really panicked.

  He pushed toward the window, pressing at his face.

  There were no rings around his eyes. He was not wearing a long, black coat. His ears were human. His disguise was gone. The batteries had died.

  And if his batteries had died, then Gwynyfer …

  Gwynyfer chatted happily with the guard. She had told him the usual story about having bumped off her parents on Earth. Then the conversation lagged, so they talked about downhill skiing.

  Gwynyfer was saying, “In fact, that is the one thing that is happy-making about moving to Earth. The skiing. You may have done psionic skiing in the Tenebron, floating and flying and what not, but do you know, have you ever tried substance? I mean a mountain, a physical mountain, and snow? It’s terribly exciting. They have mountains there on Earth. In a place called New Hampshire. And you use gravity. It is too, too thrilling.”

  For some reason, as she made this speech, the Thusser guard looked at her with surprise, then suspicion, and finally amusement.

  Gwynyfer decided the best thing for it was just to push on. “You know, when we rule all of the Great Body, there’s also skiing here. Sludgier than on Earth, but still. Yes? … Long live the Horde and all?”

  A band of soldiers was walking past. The guard whistled between his fingers and called them over.

  “Friends?” said Gwynyfer. “How too delightful.”

  She was surrounded by soldiers. They looked her up and down.

  “While a girl always appreciates the glances of a crowd,” said Gwynyfer, “you do know it’s not polite to gawk? Perhaps I’ll just skip along.”

  “Mademoiselle,” said one of the officers, “we were just judging a lady of quality. You’re of a radiance not often seen in these war-torn, gastric wastelands. We’d like to serve as your escort up the hill.”

  Gwynyfer didn’t like the sound of this. She smiled prettily at them. “Why, though your offer recalls an age of chivalry long past, and while I deeply appreciate it, I regret I’m not headed up the hill.”

  “Mademoiselle, you’ll find that exercise livens up your limbs and promotes circulation. And we offer you perhaps the last exercise you’ll enjoy for a while.”

  “I call that a little ominous, officer.”

  “Accept my apology for any undertone of hostility or brutish command. Of course I would not wish to cast a shadow over your last day, mademoiselle.”

  “My last day? Why my last …?”

  Then she looked down.

  There was a ghost of a dark coat fudging the air around her jacket sleeves. And, she imagined, her eyes probably showed through the costume as it faded.

  Her disguise was gone. She was a Norumbegan surrounded by Thusser soldiers in the center of a fortress ruled by the Horde.

  “Perhaps,” she said with a sigh, “I do fancy a brisk walk up the cliffs.”

  It was clear to Gregory that the capsule and its bearers were nowhere in the ranks of the deactivated mannequins. A thousand things could have happened to it. It might never have reached Pflundt. It might still be toiling across the goopy wastes. It might have come to Pflundt and left. And worst, it might have been discovered already by the Thusser and destroyed.

  Gregory started to thread his way back to the window he’d come into. He hoped he could make it back up the pipe and out.

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sp; The front doors to the building, several rooms away, slammed open.

  Gregory froze. He backed away into the shadows, intertwining himself with mannequin businessmen. Someone could be looking for him. If Gwynyfer was caught, they might have suspected there was someone sneaking around in the building.

  A single pair of footsteps was coming up a flight of stairs.

  Gregory ducked and made his way toward the wall.

  The door to the room Gregory was in burst open.

  Gregory kept close to the floor. He froze.

  He stayed that way, caught in the room of immobile bodies which all stood like the exhibits of bears and badgers and moose at a natural history museum.

  For a long time, he stood still. He admired how smart he was.

  Then his muscles began to hurt. His back twinged. He was in a weird position.

  He didn’t hear any other sound in the room. No more footsteps.

  Gradually, so slowly it felt like not moving at all, he lifted up his head.

  There was a tide of faces around him. Some had their mouths open. Some had their eyes closed.

  Over near the door he’d heard bang open was a young man facing his way and a young woman facing the other way.

  Gregory froze again and tried to see if the young man moved. He couldn’t remember if the guy had been there when he came in. A mustache. A bowler hat. He would remember a bowler hat.

  The light fell through the broad windows and floated like old, brown times through the air.

  Gregory stared at the man’s face. The man stared back at him.

  But it was the woman who raised her arm — the arm of a Thusser soldier — and released a stream of thick yellow gas right toward him from the nozzle of a gun.

  Gregory caught her eye in the reflection of the window. She’d been watching. He’d moved too soon.

  The gas roiled across the hall, passing over the heads of the frozen mannequins.

  The soldier waded through the crowd toward him. She wore a mask over her nose and mouth.

  Gregory bolted toward the pipe he’d climbed down. He grabbed hold of it and started pulling himself up. He kept slipping. She was getting closer. The cloud was almost around him.

  It hit. His eyes burned. He had to close them. He couldn’t hold on to the pipe. He fell backward, choking.

  He hit the floor and rolled, gagging, fighting for breath.

  They sat in a row in the prison yard: Gregory Stoffle, Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, Brian Thatz, and Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint. Their hands were by their sides. They stared at the cobblestones.

  Overhead, the lux effluvium burned a bright, hot white.

  All four of them were dressed in shapeless gray clothes. They sweated from the heat beating down on them.

  Tars Tarkas lay beside the four of them with all six of his short little legs sticking out to the sides and his tail trailing through the dust. His tongue stuck out of his beak and he panted. The afternoon seemed endless.

  Gwynyfer said, “I call this a pretty kettle of fish.”

  Dainsplint daubed at his wet forehead with the hem of his smock. He said, “I do so love to see friends reunited. Stirs the old heart, hm?”

  Gregory and Brian looked at each other. The last time they’d seen each other Gregory had been kicking Brian’s bleeding ankles while Brian limped in circles with a cackling Thusser beauty queen.

  Whenever Brian looked at Gregory’s face, he could not help remembering the jolts of pain at every third step: kick two three, kick two three. When Gregory looked at Brian, he felt ashamed, and then he felt angry, because he had only been trying to help, and Brian obviously didn’t understand. Brian closed his eyes and dropped his head.

  Across the stone yard, children chased moths.

  A huge fleet of submarines chugged through the veins. The walls vibrated as they passed by, their propellers spinning. Swimming things sank or scurried.

  A balloon with many eyes and a single flipper watched them burble past. When the coast was clear, it began to swim quickly and purposefully away.

  Kalgrash the troll and the Earl of Munderplast — the gloomy, old Prime Minister of the Empire of the Innards — sat perched on a broken slab of concrete, taking tea.

  “Shan’t end well,” grumbled Munderplast in a voice that sounded like a sad, bored prisoner speaking from a dungeon several rooms away. He looked out over the mess of the city and said in his weird, medieval mutter, “Your walls … your walls, with strength and mickle might up-builded … We of the Court cannot help but notice that they do not enclose our palace.”

  Kalgrash corrected him. “The remains of your palace.”

  “No reason to be unkind. We are all of us remains, dear troll. Vehicles of decay.”

  “We said we’d protect the Norumbegan people. And we will. But we couldn’t protect the whole city. So we chose part. Not the palace. Anyone who wants to can flee behind the walls.”

  “Aye. And your other ventures? What of your computers, dredged out of the wreckage? Any messages, any missives sent from yon other sphere?”

  “No. Not a peep. We have them set up and they’re on, but there’s nothing happening. There’s no one to talk to us.”

  “Oh, dear troll. I will talk to you.” The old man patted the troll’s claw. For a moment, they sat companionably, looking out at the ruins. Munderplast asked politely, “Does our beloved Empress — may the gods smile always upon her — does our beloved Empress still persist in trying to kill or to magnetize you?”

  “Yup, yup, yup,” said the troll, eating shortbread. “Last night she tried to have a pallet of bricks dropped on me. But accidentally, the rope didn’t break. Day before that, it was a metal-eating virus in my cot.”

  “You escaped, I wot?”

  “I came back late. By the time I got there, it had eaten the bed.”

  The Earl of Munderplast shook his head. “One fears for the politician who can’t carry out a simple assassination. Utter incompetence … Still, I suppose, better for you this way: living … in as much as living is occasionally superior to deathly oblivion.” The earl sipped his tea. “Occasionally,” he repeated. “Very occasionally.”

  A boy came leaping and jumping over the gravel pits toward them. “Sirs!” he yelled. “Sirs! The Thusser are on the move! General Malark sent me! The Thusser are on the move!”

  The kid reached their side. He wore the jacket of an Imperial herald. He was out of breath from scampering over the ruins of the palace.

  Munderplast asked, “What news, child?”

  “There’s a mechanical spy down the flux veins. It saw the Thusser fleet. Stolen subs — a whole heap of them on their way up here. General Malark says twelve hours away.”

  Munderplast stood. He tossed his old china teacup and saucer off to the side. They cracked on the rocks.

  “Alas and alack and ‘To arms,’” said the earl. “Things are about to get worse.”

  Gregory and Brian stood in line for brown rice. It was the first time they’d been alone since Gregory was shoved through the doors of the prison.

  Brian said, “Sometimes there’s a little pork fat, too. Or something like pork.”

  Gregory nodded. They stood for a while longer. The line wasn’t moving very fast.

  The rice was cooked in a big metal half-barrel over a pile of embers. The air smelled like burning oil and hot steel.

  Gregory said, “I’m sorry. You get it … I mean … that I had to? … Kick you?”

  Brian just stared at him. He didn’t know what to say. Of course he got that.

  Gregory continued, “If I didn’t kick you while you danced, Gwynyfer and I would have been captured. They already suspected us. Because of our accents and because the disguises shielded our thoughts.”

  Brian nodded.

  Gregory said, “And also, if Gwynyfer hadn’t started dancing with you, that kid Aelfward would have kept you hanging up in those chains.” He shook his head. “That was terrible. That was awful. I hated seeing you like that.”r />
  Brian nodded again. “I know you did.”

  “So there’s nothing else I could have done. You know?”

  “I know.”

  Gregory stuck out his hand. “So … shake? Friends?”

  “Friends,” said Brian. He shook Gregory’s hand.

  But he didn’t know whether they would ever truly be friends again.

  Just as trumpets had sounded above the walls of Pflundt down in Three-Gut, now sirens wailed on the walls of New Norumbega. Citizens crawled out of their huts dragging plastic bags filled with possessions, rushing for the neighborhoods the mannequins had fortified.

  Kalgrash and the general sat in the clanksiege, perched on top of the crude new walls. The troll had to be at General Malark’s side to tell him what was real and what were simply the illusions of Norumbegan glamour.

  “What a mess,” muttered the general, watching the crowds of elfin Norumbegans inside and outside the walls. There were brawls down below, and people were running around without point, ignoring the orders of mannequin soldiers. Some people were trying to drag their most expensive pieces of furniture along with them to safety — things their parents had brought hundreds of years before from Earth. Others were looting empty shops and smashing windows, kicking down the doors of apartment buildings to see what was left to steal.

  Soon the Thusser would be mooring their submarines at valves surrounding the capital. They’d be crawling out of the ground. They’d be forming ranks in the desert, just as the mannequins themselves had done three weeks before.

  Kalgrash and General Malark watched the Empress and her Court borne along on chairs carried by serving-men. She and her servants made their way heavily down hillocks of trash. The Empress cooled herself with a fan.

  The troll and the general watched as, in the distance, out in the bright plains, mannequin marines headed off to their vessels to do battle with the oncoming Thusser fleet.

  “Good men,” said the general. “Good women. But they can’t win.”

  “What do you mean?” Kalgrash asked, horrified.