The Chamber in the Sky Read online

  Down below: four little creatures milling around the kids’ steeds. They were all ridges and blotches and fanned-out crests. Their legs were thin and tiger striped.

  They were called imbraxls. They were used, he knew, to stalk prey in the Wildwood.

  Two imbraxls sniffed at a steed. One slept. One was bored, and howled for its master.

  Someone was here at the shack.

  Darlmore stepped back.

  Imbraxls would be able to follow attractor juice.

  Whoever had crept around the kids’ steeds at that inn hadn’t necessarily wanted the three dead.

  They’d wanted a scent to follow.

  Someone had traced the kids here.

  Darlmore straightened his back. He returned to the kitchen.

  Through the arch, he whispered, “Greg. Gwyn. Brian. Here. Now. No questions.”

  But it was too late.

  The pistol knocked against Brian’s skull.

  “Where’s the Umpire?” asked the gunman.

  Brian protested, “I don’t know!” — a little louder than he needed to. He hoped the others could hear that something was wrong.

  The gunman’s mouth was close to his ear. “Is the archbishop in the kitchen? Whipping up some dish?”

  Brian knew the voice. It was Dr. Brundish, a spy for the Thusser who’d fled the palace in the midst of a siege.

  Brian asked, “Why do you want him?”

  “Where’s the Umpire? Is it here in the hut? Does he have it here, child?”

  “No it’s not! It’s not here!”

  “Then where?”

  “We don’t know!”

  “Quieter. Quieter.”

  “How’d you find us?” Brian asked. “How’d you know we were coming here?”

  “You spoke many times of wanting to rouse the Rules Keepers. That is the old archbishop’s odd hobby, see? I knew that he was somewhere in the Wildwood. So I waited at an inn on the only route into the forest until you arrived, so I could follow you by imbraxl and find him.”

  “You know, the stupid juice you painted on our thombulants almost got us killed. It attracted mites.”

  Brian felt the man shrug. “Thin you out,” he said. “If I lost one precious child along the way … well, less of the brutal, brutal work of killing left for later.”

  At that, Brian flinched.

  The doctor jammed the gun harder against his flesh. “Now. Where is the Umpire Capsule?”

  “None of us know. What do you want it for?”

  “Ready to fall down some stairs?”

  A foot slammed into Brian’s side and he was hurled backward, tumbling toward the staircase. He grabbed at the wall, failed, watched his feet trip, but caught himself on the railing just in time. He spun. He was half sitting a few steps down. He crouched, unsure whether he should stand or duck.

  Dr. Brundish wheezed and considered. “Interesting. I would have assumed you’d use your elbows more.” Now Brian could see Brundish in full. The Thusser doctor stood above him, dressed in a long coat and dirty robes. His round glasses were pulled up on his pale forehead, and he no longer wore concealing makeup. There were dark rings around his eyes — the mark of the Thusser. His bulky, weird body shifted its mysterious lumps beneath his coat and tunic.

  Dr. Brundish took a few steps closer to Brian and whispered, “Let’s go meet the others. Will I have the pleasure of finding them with the capsule?”

  Brian repeated, “We don’t — know — where — it — is.”

  “There is an old tradition that a gentleman in your position should put your hands up.”

  Brian did. He walked down the stairs with the doctor right behind him.

  In the kitchen, they found Gwynyfer and Gregory looking perplexed by the dumplings. Darlmore had just come in the back door from outside and was by the counter.

  Everyone was shocked to see Brundish.

  “My masters approach from the lower organs,” the doctor said. “The tea dance is over.”

  Gwynyfer stepped proudly toward him and said, “The Honorable Miss Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, daughter of the Duke of the Globular Colon, demands —”

  “Oh, clap a lock on it, Miss Gwarnmore. A month from now, His Grace your father will be lined up against a wall and shot with the rest of the yawning frat-lads of noble Norumbega. Burned in one big pile, they’ll be.” He clicked his tongue. “Down to a frazzle and black char.”

  Darlmore’s face was as severe as a cliff. He pointed at the door. “Out,” he said.

  Dr. Brundish’s mouth squirmed in his whiskers. “Archbishop? Yes?”

  “Out.”

  “I’m looking for the Umpire Capsule. You have it?”

  “I don’t. Not here. It lives on its own.”

  “About where?”

  “We don’t know.” He glowered at Brundish. “You the Imperial Surgeon?”

  “Technically, chirurgeon.” The doctor smiled and sucked his teeth. “Regrettably, I have abandoned my position.”

  “I hear my nephew exploded.”

  “Quite so. The young are full of such boundless energy.”

  “You built him as an implant and a bomb.”

  “Don’t look at me, Archbishop. The youth was at an awkward age.”

  “You detonated the Emperor of the Innards.”

  “Not so, Archbishop. Not so. These bad lads stole away my three-way radio. I could detonate no one. It was the Thusser Magister who hit the trigger. We’re in the guts now, you know, the Thusser. The Horde works its way up toward the Dry Heart, even as we speak.”

  “What do you want with the Umpire?”

  “You know exactly what I want with it, Archbishop. Now where do you have it tucked away?”

  “I don’t —”

  “Tell me, Archbishop.”

  Darlmore shook his head. He said, “Defrocked.”

  “I recall. Where is it, sir? Where?”

  Darlmore sneered at the doctor. All look of the hermit in his face dropped away, and he was once again a lord of the Norumbegan Court, brother of the Emperor, scoffing at the ancient enemy of his race.

  Dr. Brundish snarled and fired his pistol.

  There was a quick blip of light.

  Darlmore’s leg burst and he fell to the kitchen floor, spattered with his own blood.

  Gregory stumbled back in shock, knocking into Gwynyfer. Even she looked frightened, her fairy features wide-eyed and alert.

  Thomas Darlmore, once Archbishop of Norumbega, lay rocking in pain near the brick oven, gasping for breath. Blood soaked the leg of his khakis, spreading quickly across his knee.

  Brundish reached out with his free hand and grabbed Brian by the hair, dragged the boy close to him, and stuffed the muzzle of his pistol into the boy’s ear. “I’m no student of human anatomy,” Dr. Brundish admitted to Darlmore. “The head. Important?”

  Darlmore pulled himself up against the pie safe and scrabbled with his knee. “Stop,” he said. “Stop.”

  Gregory and Gwynyfer looked wildly from one to the other.

  Dr. Brundish sucked in breath through his teeth and blew it out in a whistle. “We need to know where the capsule is. So no one thinks any pretty, pretty thoughts about calling the Rules Keepers.” He yanked on Brian’s black hair. “Mr. Darlmore? One more chance.”

  Brian winced in pain. His hair was being torn out by its roots. The doctor continued, “How about we play the game this way? Whoever tells me where the capsule is gets to live. As a guarantee. Until I find the capsule. Then you may skip along.” He smiled. His body shrugged its strange mass from side to side. “Anyone? I have plenty of bullets for you all. Who wishes to be the last to live?” He looked from face to face: Gwynyfer’s, full of anger. Gregory’s, gape-mouthed and confused. Brian’s, pale and shivering. And finally, the ex-archbishop on the floor, who had collected himself and now seemed strong and even-tempered.

  Thomas Darlmore spoke.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Come with me upstairs. I can tell you where the capsule�
��s waiting.”

  The lumpy doctor released his grip on Brian’s scalp. Brian felt the oddly jointed fingers slip out of his hair. He backed away as Brundish skittered a couple hops to the side.

  The boy breathed deeply and held himself up against a counter. His ear still hurt from where the gun had been jammed into it. He blinked tears of pain out of his eyes. He thought frantically about what they could do.

  Gregory would know. Gregory always had a plan. Brian looked up carefully at his friend.

  Gregory just looked horrified. Astonished.

  “Printouts,” Darlmore was saying. “Up in my study.”

  “I did already have a little look-round of your study. When you were out fishing. I saw nothing there. Not related to the capsule.”

  Darlmore held out a hand to be hoisted. He said, “Hand up?”

  “Not a chance, Archbishop.”

  “The printouts I’m talking about are hidden.”

  “Where?”

  “Behind a bookcase. In a safe.”

  If this was true, Brian thought, this was a disaster. Brundish had no reason to keep any of them alive once he found the location of the Umpire.

  “Show me,” said Brundish.

  “I can’t.”

  “Crawl.” The doctor said to Brian, “Step aside, young man. You’re in the archbishop’s way. Slump over in that corner. You might as well accustom yourself to being a corpse. In my professional experience, the patient becomes quite relaxed. At first.”

  When Brian had stepped aside so the way was clear, Brundish bobbled over and nodded his head at Darlmore. The ex-archbishop began a slow and awful crawl across the floor. The man winced with each move. He left a streak of his elfin blood behind him.

  With horror, Brian watched the hermit pull himself over to the staircase that led up to the study. He couldn’t believe Brundish’s cruelty. But he couldn’t believe Thomas Darlmore would betray them, either. He kept waiting for something to happen, for someone to save them.

  Convulsively, Darlmore began to tug himself up, step by step. His dead leg thumped against the stairs. He grunted in pain.

  Brundish leered at the children, then followed the hermit, hopping oddly, as if he, on the other hand, had one leg too many.

  They heard him growling at Darlmore on the landing. He clearly enjoyed the pain.

  The second Brundish had gone, Gregory started waving Brian wildly toward the back door.

  Brian gave a questioning glance.

  Gwynyfer, without speaking a word, pointed at the flour on the counter.

  In the moments before Brundish had come down the stairs, Darlmore had scribbled three Norumbegan runes in the powder. They read: BOATHOUSE.

  Brian didn’t quite understand, but Gregory swiped the flour off the counter, grabbed his arm, and pulled him toward the back door.

  The three of them galloped across the bridge toward the boathouse.

  They heard a cry of anger from inside the house. They heard the gun fire upstairs.

  “What’ll we do when we get there?” Brian asked, falling behind the others.

  “I don’t know,” said Gregory. “Take the boat? Leave?”

  “We can’t leave Mr. Darlmore!” Brian protested. “Dr. Brundish is going to kill him!”

  The others didn’t answer.

  He knew what they were thinking: that they didn’t know what else to do. That Darlmore had given them a chance to escape. That they had to take it.

  They slammed the boathouse door open. They ran for the dinghy. Gregory grabbed some of the gear from the wall and handed it to Brian.

  “We can’t just leave him!” Brian protested.

  Gregory threw things they might need through the hatch. “You can’t help him,” he said. “He doesn’t want to be helped.” He looked straight at Brian. “Bri, Mr. Darlmore didn’t have anything to show Brundish upstairs. He just said that to get the guy away for a second so we could escape. Mr. Darlmore knew that if someone had found the house, there was trouble. He wrote in the flour so we —”

  Then they heard a horrible clomping. Brundish was thundering down the bridge toward them.

  Brian said, “So we’re just going to leave —”

  “Yes!” exclaimed Gwynyfer. She was heaving up a can of gasoline. “Now this shall be delightful!” She ran out the boathouse door.

  Gregory, standing in the dinghy, stared after her. “Don’t ask me,” he said.

  Gwynyfer stood on the little boathouse porch. The doctor hurtled toward her. She shook the gas to douse the bridge. The doctor slowed up and watched her. He raised his pistol. He fired. She flung the can at him.

  The thin bolt of blue fire pierced the can, and the whole mess erupted.

  The flames were tremendous. Gwynyfer tumbled backward into the boat shed, a strange, triumphant smile on her elfin face. There was another explosion. The end of the bridge was an inferno.

  Gregory, swaddled in life jackets, could only look on in admiration.

  Through the flames, Brian saw the doctor retreat back toward the house. There’d be no way for him to get to the boathouse now.

  So he was stuck there, on the other side, with the wounded hermit. If that final shot inside the house didn’t mean …

  Brian didn’t want to think about what would happen to Darlmore. What might have already happened.

  Gregory was handing Gwynyfer into the dinghy. He said, “What was that? With the gas?”

  She laughed and clapped. “Did you see?” she said. “The flames?”

  The boathouse itself was on fire now. Brian crouched low, because the smoke was thick. He couldn’t believe how it dirtied his lungs. He was terrified about the air in the dinghy. It had to hold out for a while.

  He jumped in. They were all secure. They slammed the door.

  In the boathouse, oars hung crossed on the walls caught like kindling. Life preservers split into flame.

  There was a clunk as the dinghy detached itself from the wall.

  Another tank of gas caught, and blew.

  The shed was now nothing but flames on stilts. The fibers around it vibrated with a strange, metallic hum as they heated. The bridge burned.

  Dr. Brundish stood at the back door of Thomas Darlmore’s cabin. He aimed his pearl-inlaid pistol, for no good reason, at the flames. They burned and roiled.

  He didn’t fire.

  He went inside the house.

  The door banged shut on a spring behind him.

  The Imperial palace had finally stopped smoking the day before. Now courtiers combed the rubble. The ramshackle fortress with its turrets and its chimneys lay in four or five huge mounds, messy welts atop the city of New Norumbega.

  On the peak of one of those mounds stood a tall, walking machine that looked like a fortified chair on kangaroo legs. On that striding war-sofa sat several figures: General Malark, a grizzled old soldier with a slice out of his mechanical face; two mannequins from his Corps of Engineers; and, finally, a clockwork troll in the armor of a knight. They looked out over the city.

  New Norumbega did not look healthy in the glaring light of the veins above. It had been bombed by the Mannequin Resistance. Its lopsided palace had erupted and collapsed after the unfortunate explosion of the previous Emperor. The tall townhouses of Wednesday Row had holes torn through their slate roofs. The shanties in the Windings were blasted flat. The bronze dome on the Divine Andraste Theater was crumpled in like green paper. The plywood spire of St. Rugwyth’s Cathedral was in a heap. People ran up and down the streets, shouting, making demands. Jeeps bumbled over the rubble.

  “The fairest of cities brought low,” whispered General Malark. “The walls of chalcedony and gold, the white turrets with their pennants flying, the squares where our masters met and carried on their mysterious trades … so much of it’s in ruins.”

  “Never there,” said the troll Kalgrash. He shook his head. “Remember: Never there, never there, never there.”

  General Malark sadly gazed down at the levers that
controlled their walking battle tower, the clanksiege.

  He said, “So you’ve told me.”

  Kalgrash said, “It was always a wreck. Most of New Norumbega was held together with twine.”

  “I saw the beauty of the city with my own eyes.”

  “All of us are built to see what they want us to see,” said Kalgrash. “I was built after you all left for this world, so they didn’t stick me with the razzle-dazzle blinders. I was built by a really good guy. Wee Snig. I just see what’s there.”

  The general looked out over the city of his former masters through the haze of diesel smoke. He said quietly, “Tell us about the city as it really is.”

  Kalgrash nodded. “It’s a mess. Most of it’s built out of old stuff. There aren’t any town walls. There never were. I don’t know what you thought you were bombing, but there weren’t any walls to knock down. There aren’t any gates. The nice, big houses are made of chunks of dry muscle cut out of the heart. There’s no way this place can stand up against a Thusser invasion, not even for five minutes.”

  Malark pressed his finger to the top of his nose. “The Empress has asked that I defend her city. I can’t refuse.”

  “I’m telling you,” said Kalgrash, “we have got to make some decisions.”

  General Malark considered strategy. “I estimate we have at least two weeks. The Thusser have taken Pflundt, our own fortress down in Three-Gut. But it will take them a while to get here from there. They’ll need subs to get through the veins of flux. Otherwise, there’s no way to get to the Dry Heart from Three-Gut. Not by marching or land vehicles. It’s in a different system. They’re stuck in digestion until they can get enough subs to transport their troops up here. And then we’ll put up a firm fight before they can unload through the airlocks.” He frowned.

  The wind picked up across the desert. General Malark activated the clanksiege and walked several gargantuan steps across the pile of rubble. He faced the machine toward the city’s black railroad yards. Train tracks stitched their way across the salty plain toward faint red arches of muscle.

  “So we have two weeks,” said Kalgrash.

  Malark nodded. “They’re probably running raids on villages down in the guts right now. Trying to find any submarines they can. I’d guess it will take them at least that long to gather a naval attack force. And until then” — he looked around — “we have to fortify this city. Or part of it. We’ll evacuate people from some of the farther reaches. Concentrate them. Build a wall out of the flesh. Dig a fosse. Raise a scarp. Ravelins. Redoubts. Revetments.”