The Empire of Gut and Bone Read online

  “All of this perhaps bearing upon Lord Dainsplint.” The earl nodded. “Though God forbid, of course … God forbid …” He smiled. “My boy, let us go to the prison.” He clapped. “It is time that we woke your friends up from their long nap.”

  THIRTY

  When Gregory found Gwynyfer, she was leaning against a wall, talking to a girl dressed in wild, swooping pheasant feathers — one of the Ex-Empress’s maids-in-waiting who’d danced some mortality mazurka in the procession. The girl’s face was painted with black spirals on each cheek.

  Gwynyfer saw Gregory and gave him a little curtsy. She excused herself to her friend (“Miss Gwynyfer bids a fond farewell to the dear Miss Rose. May the gods settle like butterflies upon her skirts.”), pushed herself off the wall, and sauntered over to Gregory, wrapping her shoulders in a woven shawl.

  “Are you okay?” Gregory asked.

  She answered, “It’s shiver-making.”

  Gregory nodded seriously. Coolly, as if he wasn’t boasting, he said, “We were standing right next to Gugs when it happened.”

  “Poor Gugs,” said Gwynyfer, shaking her head.

  “We were right there. He just — it was weird. There was a bang, and he looked around, and then … We thought he was staring at the ground. But he was collapsing.”

  “That’s awful. Dying in a crowd, surrounded by others — terrible. When I die, I want Death to print me a private invitation.” She smirked at the tackiness of public collapse.

  Gregory wanted to be able to laugh, but he was a little shocked. He just stared at her. It seemed like she was making a joke out of Gugs’s brute fate. He tried to smile. He could tell it wasn’t very convincing.

  Gwynyfer looked around. “Where’s your potty little friend?”

  Suddenly, Gregory felt protective of Brian. He didn’t want her to laugh at him, to despise him. He looked around on the street, hoping Brian wasn’t following him. “He’s busy,” Gregory said. “Investigating.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Always investigating. Danaan love a duck.” She took Gregory’s arm. He couldn’t believe his luck. Her arm was so light. She was saying, “Have you heard they think it might be Lord Dainsplint?”

  “It’s … Oh, yeah. Yeah. They do think so. Because of, really, what we’ve been saying for the last couple of days. About who had an alibi. I mean, it’s our investigation that’s really made them suspect Lord Dainsplint.”

  She skipped a couple of steps, dragging his arm with her. “It is too, too very thrilling,” she said. She sounded like one of the women of the Court, but her grin was a girl’s.

  Gregory didn’t know what to think. He still felt the shock of Gugs’s collapse — and couldn’t believe Gwynyfer didn’t feel it — but then again, there was her arm touching his, and people were looking at him with envy, and there she was herself — the descendant of a goddess, a fairy duchess wanting to walk out with him along the garbage-lined avenues of this elfin metropolis. It was like something from a daydream.

  Guards ran past, blowing whistles.

  Gwynyfer’s striking eyes widened. “They’ve found him!” She grabbed Gregory’s hand and ran.

  There they were, he thought, holding hands, running through the crazy city. Weird, elephantine beasts of burden swayed in the streets, pulling carts. Cages full of chickens teetered in courtyards. She yanked him through a slim gate in a fence and over a piece of rough ground where ragged grass grew, littered with rusting cans. “Whoa, Nelly!” he said, almost tripping.

  “Come on! Shortcut!” she cried. “The hunt’s in full cry!”

  She pulled him under a curtain hung in an arch — and ducking, he laughed, because she’d almost tangled him up and lost him. She laughed, too, tickling his knuckles — and he realized he was having a great time.

  They slid down an embankment and clattered through a passageway, swerving to avoid men with a tub of steaming water. They heard the piercing whistles of the guards nearby.

  They scampered down a stone staircase and ran through the shacks at the edge of the city. The air was filled with blue smoke. They tumbled across the main street, now looking left and right to see if they could catch the pursuit. The guards were nowhere to be seen.

  They wandered down an alley.

  Their hands were swinging between them now. There was no more dragging. Gregory loved the slenderness of her fingers. He loved that they were enjoying the same rhythm in their arms.

  He didn’t know when he’d felt better.

  Until someone grabbed him by the collar and yanked him to the side.

  Gregory stumbled — pulled Gwynyfer after him. She yelped.

  Gregory saw the muzzle of the pistol before he saw who held it.

  It was Lord Dainsplint. He held the gun near Gregory’s temple. “Topping!” he said with slightly crazed and frantic good cheer. “Hostages!”

  “I don’t suppose that you’re innocent,” said Gregory, “and that we’ve made some kind of terrible mistake?”

  “I fear that, no, I am guilty, and you may find it hard to keep your head wholish.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Brian, the Earl of Munderplast, and the Wizard Thoth-Chumley stood in a shed in the prison, surrounded by old machinery: sooty dynamos, decaying batteries, rattling fans. Everything was grimy with dust.

  The wizard had laid Kalgrash and Dantsig facedown on a worktable. He had opened up their backs and attached wires.

  “All right, okay,” he said, chewing gum and flicking switches. “Yup. Yup. Voilà.”

  He turned a dial.

  — wouldn’t let them shut him off! He would knock them all down! He would make a break for it! There was no —

  Kalgrash blinked. He looked around, startled.

  He was in a dark little room with lots of old machines. Brian was there, and an old guy in a black velvet tunic, and a wizard in a double-breasted suit.

  “Uh, what happened to my fight scene?” he asked.

  “Two days ago,” said the wizard. “Move your left arm. Okay. Right arm. Okay. Left leg …”

  While he flexed his limbs, Kalgrash asked Brian, “What’s going on?”

  The old man, the Earl of Munderplast, answered, “You, foul automaton, have been accused of assassinating the Imperial Regent of the Empire of the Innards. We have awakened you to see what you plead.”

  Kalgrash held up his hands. “Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty.”

  “So we suspected,” said Munderplast. He told the wizard, “Now switch on the truth.”

  Kalgrash narrowed his eyes, but before he could speak, there was a jolt. He couldn’t move. He could feel his voice like a little speaker lost in his throat.

  The Wizard Thoth-Chumley took out a pad. “Explain your whereabouts the night you escaped from the prison.”

  Kalgrash heard himself explaining how he and Dantsig had crept out of their cell, found a uniform for Dantsig, and headed up to the palace. Helplessly, though he tried to be vague, he told them that he suspected Dantsig had planted a bug in the Imperial throne room. He told them that he had stopped by Brian and Gregory’s room to talk.

  “Did you, now?” said the Earl of Munderplast with withering interest. “After planting a bug in the throne room, you stopped to talk with this child here?” The earl looked with disgust at Brian and asked, “And you, my boy, are well-known to the automatons?”

  Brian clearly didn’t know how to answer.

  The wizard kept asking Kalgrash questions. The clockwork troll couldn’t help but answer.

  Carefully, Lord Dainsplint forced his two hostages along alleyways, stopping carefully at each cross street to make sure the “bobbies,” as he called the guards, didn’t spot him.

  He was not alone, as it turned out. He had a girlfriend with him — a woman Gregory had never seen at Court — a blond woman whose hair looked too blond to be real and whose lips were too red to be fake. She wore a quiet, gray skirt suit of an old-fashioned cut.

  “You shouldn’t take them, Chigs,” she
said. “This is just going to get you into more trouble.”

  “Things have already gone rather wrong, darling of my heart — rather south.” Chigger peered around a corner. “We need all the dashed help we can get.”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t shot someone,” said Gregory. “That might be where you went wrong.”

  “I didn’t realize people would cotton on to Gugs’s death so quickly,” Chigger complained. “I should have shot your friend Brian first. He alerted all and sundry. Then people were looking around … and there I was …”

  “I think letting us go would impress the jury, ” said Gregory.

  “Keeping you with me will ensure there won’t be a jury,” said Chigger. “Nor a trial. Turn leftish and stay smart. No tricks.”

  Gregory felt desperate. He knew that Chigger — not just a criminal, but a Norumbegan, with no conscience to speak of — would feel no remorse for killing him. And they were getting farther and farther from the guards who might stop him. There was no way the soldiers he’d seen running about up above would ever find their way through this jumble of tiny streets. Rapidly, he tried to think of ways to alert someone as to where he was….

  Gwynyfer was inspecting the woman. “Who are you?” she asked. “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “Alice,” said the woman. “Alice Nabb.”

  “Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, daughter of the Duke of the Globular Colon, greets Miss Nabb and wishes —”

  “Oh, preserve me,” said Lord Dainsplint. “We’re not curtsying at an ice-cream social. More’s the pity.”

  Gregory thought this was his chance to get in good with Chigger’s girlfriend, to convince her she really didn’t want him and Gwynyfer along for the ride. He said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Gregory.” He held out his hand.

  Gregory looked down and saw that Alice’s hand was wrapped in a scarf. She’d been hit. There’d been gunplay.

  “They got you,” said Gregory.

  She nodded, shrugged. Her arm moved clumsily. “They hit my hand,” she said.

  Gwynyfer still appraised the woman carefully. She repeated, “I’ve never seen you at Court.”

  Alice Nabb scowled. She gestured toward Chigger. “This one,” she said, “wants to keep me hidden. It makes him nervous when I’m around.”

  “If the good lady would be so kind as to ‘stow it,’ “ growled Chigger.

  “Darling —”

  “Don’t.”

  They were on the outskirts of the city, creeping along a row of low shacks. A half mile away, across the granular sands, a set of four cannons faced the city, surrounded by automaton infantry.

  And suddenly, Gregory had an idea. He knew how to get word of where Chigger was taking them. He thought of Brian’s last words to him. He reached into his pocket.

  “Keep moving,” said Chigger, waving his gun. He yanked them into the next alley.

  Gregory had the mannequins’ little bug held loosely in his fist, concealed. Carefully, distinctly, he said, “I can’t believe the Mannequin Resistance is so close. Did you see those four cannons?”

  “Yes, I saw the four bloody cannons.”

  “This is crazy, Lord Dainsplint,” said Gregory, trying to speak clearly enough so that the bug would transmit everything he was saying. “Kidnapping me and Gwynyfer Gwarnmore won’t do you any good. You’d sure better hide well, so that the Court can’t find you. Because if they captured you, it would mean a real embarrassment for the whole government. Complete confusion. (Which way here, on Magnolia? Left? Okay, left on Magnolia.) Imagine — one of the candidates for regent turning out to be a murderer — it’s a real embarrassment for the whole of Norumbega. Very tough in a time of war. If they could actually find you and haul you in, they’d be able to prove that you murdered the last Regent and they’d —”

  “Would you stop gabbling?” Chigger said.

  “Right, here? On Goibniu Lane?”

  “Please stop flapping your lips. My skull is splitting with a thousand headaches.” The man threw open the door of a hut.

  “In here? You want us to go into this hut?”

  “Of course I wish you to go in. The gently applied pistol might be considered a wee hint.”

  “Gosh, those mannequins look pretty determined, don’t they? It would be bad if they knew exactly where you were, too. They might try to capture you to disgrace the Court for all sorts of reasons.”

  “What is the purpose of your inane monologue?”

  “I would really hate to be facing those mannequins we saw back there. Especially if I was the kind of person who had ever wanted the mannequins dead. I would be feeling really apologetic, right about now. Like, ‘Whoa, mannequins, I am soooo sorry. I did not mean that “dead” thing at all.’ ”

  “Are you suggesting,” asked Lord Dainsplint, “that I murdered the Regent?”

  “Of course,” said Gregory. “Why else would you kill Gugs but to shut him up so he wouldn’t say where you were on the night of the murder?”

  Chigger gave a grim laugh. He looked pale and crazy. “If only,” he said. “But no, my boy, I was nowhere near the palace that night. I was here in this hut. With Alice.”

  Alice looked sadly at the floor. Her face was filled with shame.

  “She is my girl,” said Chigger. “And has been for some years.”

  She sat, facing away from them, her face sorrowful. She unwound the wrap on her hand.

  Gregory and Gwynyfer looked at Chigger in confusion.

  “So why didn’t you tell the Court where you were?” Gregory asked. “Why did you have to kill Gugs?”

  Alice’s hand was unwrapped. She held it out and inspected it. A bullet had taken off three fingers. Gears and rods were visible, poking out of the shattered skin.

  “Because,” said Lord Dainsplint, “I could recover my political career after a simple assassination. But no one would ever forgive me — let alone cast their vote for me — if they found out that my own true love is an automaton.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  So you see,” said Brian, “it couldn’t have been Dantsig or Kalgrash. It must have been one of the Imperial Council. Like Lord Dainsplint.”

  The Wizard Thoth-Chumley had forced both automatons to speak truthfully — and both had confirmed what Brian had guessed long before: that Dantsig had spent the evening peacefully bugging the throne room, and didn’t even know where the Regent’s bedchamber was in the maze of the palace. Now they sat in the prison — Thoth-Chumley, Kalgrash, the revived Dantsig, and the Earl of Munderplast — frowning at one another and wondering what to do next.

  Reports occasionally came that the city guards had lost Lord Dainsplint’s trail.

  The earl said to Brian, “You claim it was a member of the Imperial Council. But most of us were either with the Ex-Empress and Ex-Emperor or were in the bowels of the palace, scheming — poor fools, we — to assassinate the Regent the next day at noon.”

  “But Lord Dainsplint wasn’t either place.”

  “No … I discover, much to my delight.”

  The Wizard Thoth-Chumley flipped through his notebook. “I have a list, your lordship, of where all the members of the Council were at the time of the murder.” He slid it toward the earl.

  Brian read it, too, through eyes enchanted so they could understand the runic script of the Norumbegans.

  It said:

  “As you may see, milord,” said the wizard, “four were in the Ex-Empress and Ex-Emperor’s suite, enjoying their hospitality after the tea dance. Four, though you all initially denied it, were in the basement, planning the Regent’s assassination. One of you was at home, with his family, and one — Lord Dainsplint — has not yet explained his whereabouts.”

  “It is a sorry kind of time,” mused the Earl of Munderplast, “when ‘planning assassination’ is the purest proof of one’s innocence.”

  “So it seems, milord, that Lord Dainsplint is our man.” The wizard went to the door that led into the prison courtyard and yelled for a guard.
When one scurried over, Thoth-Chumley asked the man if there was any news of the fugitive Dainsplint.

  Brian whispered to Kalgrash, “How are you feeling? Are you okay?”

  “Oh, zippy. Swell.” Kalgrash shook his armored arms. They rattled. “I can’t believe they shut me off like that.”

  The Earl of Munderplast said sharply to Brian, “It is sweet that you take such an interest in the well-being of our enemy. Such compassion. I am moved verily to tears.”

  Dantsig stirred. His speech was still slurred and he still had the slow movements of someone just waking up. “The kid knows his friends. He knows —”

  The Wizard Thoth-Chumley ran back into the room. “Game’s afoot,” he said. “Lord Dainsplint was seen a half an hour ago at the edge of the city with a woman and two hostages: Miss Gwynyfer Gwarnmore and your friend Gregory.”

  Brian felt his stomach drop.

  “Let’s go,” said Thoth-Chumley. “We’ll have to move quickly if we’re going to save their lives.”

  In the hut at the edge of town, Gregory and Gwynyfer sat on the floor, while Lord Dainsplint kept watch through the wooden shutters to see if anyone was coming. Alice Nabb, automaton, sat miserably on the sofa, which was decorated with a thin floral scarf, her little attempt to lighten up the house. Her oval-screened TV was on, though the sound was off. Norumbegan shows floated past in black and white without sense or reason: objects falling off of heights. Bushes slowly crawling up slopes. A man with a handkerchief sneezing and waving at someone offscreen.

  “You’re saying you didn’t murder the Regent? “ Gregory insisted. “You really pretend you didn’t?”

  “No, I don’t pretend, you little wretch. I actually didn’t. I was here dining with Alice. She whipped me up a pork chop and some crème brûlée.” He said to Alice, “Now that tragedy has befallen us, my darling, I fear you never will master crème brûlée. For future reference, the crust is supposed to be baked only to a delicate golden-brown; yours was less amber than umber.”

  Alice turned away from him on the sofa. Her shoulders were low, and it looked like she would have cried, if tear ducts had been installed.