Empire of Gut and Bone Read online

  “Wow,” said Gregory. “That was quite an intro.”

  Gwynyfer laughed. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to.

  They watched each other carefully, ready for flirtation.

  “So,” said Gregory. “I’m from Earth.”

  “I know. We all know.”

  “And you’re from the Globular Colon.” She nodded at that and Gregory nodded slowly with her. “That’s awesome,” he said. “Super neighborhood.”

  “Really.” Her tone was ironic. “You like it?”

  “Great schools. Really good hockey team.”

  She touched him on the nose. “You’ve never been.”

  “No. But I may pass that way.” He winked. “Get it?”

  She laughed again.

  He told her, “We’re trying to free our friend Kalgrash. He’s an automaton.”

  “I thought you were here to warn us about the Thusser.”

  “That, too. We’re very exciting. We’ve got a finger in every pie.”

  Gregory was starting to feel secure again. After days of nothing but weirdness, he felt like he was on firm ground. He knew how to deal with girls.

  Except that Brian interrupted. “Gregory, we’ve got to go. We have to try to meet with the Emperor and the Regent. We’ve got to talk to someone, quick.”

  “The Emperor?” said Gwynyfer. “The Stub?”

  Brian looked confused. Gregory made the introductions: “Brian Thatz, let me present you to Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of the Globular Colon.”

  “It’s good to meet you,” said Brian without humor, “but we’ve got to go.”

  “We were just talking,” said Gregory.

  “Well, any minute, they’re going to take us in to meet the Emperor.”

  Gwynyfer Gwarnmore smiled a secret smile.

  “What’s going on there?” prodded Gregory cutely, as if coaxing a baby to give up its sippy cup. “What’s the widdle smile about?”

  “I just don’t think you’re really going to get much help from the Emperor.”

  “He’s a kid, right?” said Gregory.

  She shrugged. Gregory couldn’t help but notice that her shoulders were superb. “I guess,” she said.

  Brian hesitated. Gregory told him, “I’ll be with you in a couple.”

  Brian nodded and walked away.

  Gregory jabbed his thumb back at his friend. “Always on the job. It tires me out. Sometimes I want to just lie back, eat the buffet.”

  Gwynyfer smiled at him, and he felt the glow, as if the acoustic-tiled ceiling had just lifted and let butter in.

  He felt his brain drenched in things she was not saying.

  Brian, meanwhile, was listening to the young nobleman with the polka-dot bow tie and the slicked-back hair, who old Munderplast had introduced as Lord Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint, a prominent member of the Norumbegan Social Club.

  “Outrageous,” Lord Dainsplint was murmuring to another young buck of the Norumbegan Social Club, this one a vaguely bucktoothed type with floppy blond hair. Dainsplint said beneath his breath, “The Regent’s a fool. An absolute fool. Why did he let the bally mannequins declare war? Why right now?”

  “You mean,” said the floppy-haired gent, “with the Fest coming up.”

  “Exactly, Gugs. The Fest. Next week. And it will be one sorely drippy Fest if the city is surrounded by manns with cannon.”

  By manns, he apparently meant mannequins. Brian thought that even his abbreviations sounded snobby.

  “It is not our way to invite trouble,” said Lord “Chigger” Dainsplint. “Lolling, that’s our way. Letting the bloody manns do whatever their little tin hearts desire, so long as it’s far away and dull.”

  “What if the manns actually find a way around their prohibitions? And manage to attack us?”

  “I know, Gugs. It’s not impossible. And do you know, the thing which bothers me in that case — the little detail I find troubling — is the utter lack of walls. It’s my understanding, Gugs, that an important part of resisting any besieging force that has catapults and mortars and howitzers and so forth is a bloody wall. And maybe a moat. What was the Regent thinking? Really. This is the end. He’s crackers.”

  Suddenly, the floppy-haired man called Gugs caught sight of Brian listening. He said to Lord Dainsplint, “Ah, Chigger, old pal, it appears small apes have large ears.”

  Chigger Dainsplint turned. “Well, hello, little chimp! Still worried about those Thusser?”

  Brian glared at the man. He didn’t want to be rude to his elders, especially not his elders by several hundred years, but his elders were being rude to him. “You should be worried, too,” Brian reprimanded. “Once they settle Old Norumbega, they might come through the portal to settle New Norumbega and the Innards.”

  “Not particularly likely,” said Chigger. “I’ve never met a Thusser who’d asked specially to live in a spleen.”

  “The little thing is slightly peevish,” said Gugs. “Is it right in the head, do you think?”

  “It does seem to say the same things over and over,” said Chigger. “Like a seal clapping in an empty big top.”

  Brian had never heard an adult be so mean to him. He was shocked.

  “The Thusser,” said Gugs, “are hardly anything now but an old wives’ tale.”

  Chigger Dainsplint said, “Quite right, old fish. Nothing doing.”

  Suddenly, it was time to try to pitch the reconquest of Old Norumbega to the Emperor. Trumpets were blowing. Heralds were rolling back some fire-retardant folding doors on tracks, revealing an inner throne room.

  A herald announced, “Now come forward the members of the Imperial Council, His Excellency the Regent, and the two human diplomats! With fear and adoration, bow before His Imperial Majesty, His Sublime Highness, the Emperor of Old Norumbega, New Norumbega, and the Whole Dominion of the Innards, Elector of the Bladders, Prince of the Gastric Wastes, Sovereign of Ducts Superior and Inferior, Lord of All!”

  Brian looked hastily toward Gregory, who was taking too long shaking Gwynyfer Gwarnmore’s hand.

  “This way, old bean,” said Chigger Dainsplint to Brian, beckoning with a jerk of the head.

  The rest of the crowd fell silent. They slid to the ground, touching their heads to the porous, pink floor.

  Eleven remained standing, walking forward, stepping over the prone bodies: Eight members of the Imperial Council (including Lord Dainsplint, his pal Gugs, and the gloomy, medieval Earl of Munderplast), the Regent, Brian, and Gregory. They all worked their way across the Grand Hall to the throne room.

  Passing through the great archway, between the fire-retardant panels into a new, lower, darker chamber, a room of cheap old wallboard scribbled with royal designs in flaking paint, a room of unmatched chairs and a brown hassock, the boys saw for the first time the young Emperor of Norumbega and, on either side of him, his father and mother.

  Brian and Gregory both immediately recognized the parents: They were the bright young things who had, the year before, ridden ghostly palfreys through the Haunted Hunting Grounds. They had bickered with Brian and Gregory on the Imperial barge while the boys tried to grab their crown. They had ridden down the slope near the palace on lunch trays. They had once been the rulers of this eldritch tribe: a blond man, witty and urbane, and the love of his life, a playful woman with a knowing look.

  Now they were middle-aged. In human years, they would have been fifty or sixty at least. They sat on either side of the throne, both gray, wearing simple circlets of gold on their heads. The man, who was introduced as Ex-Emperor Randall Elismoore Fendritch, wore an old crew-necked tennis sweater with pulls in it and dirty white flannel trousers. He was sunk deep in his chair, his head upright, but his back slumped, his legs sprawled out in front of him, his shoes scuffed. His wife, Ex-Empress Elspeth Fendritch, wore a flapper dress from the 1920s. The lace near the underarms was stained yellow with old sweat.

  They had abdicated for their son, who presumably sat be
tween them, on the throne. Gregory stared. Brian looked quizzical.

  It was not a person enthroned between the Imperial couple. It was a Stub. A vaguely conical lump of white flesh, perhaps almost a foot tall. On one side, facing forward, was a single, wide eye. To mark the other side, there was a patch of acne.

  The Regent bowed before the Stub, and, having announced the Stub’s parents, announced the Stub itself: “Gregory Stoffle and Brian Thatz, I present you to His Imperial Majesty, the Stub. Long may he prosper.”

  The councillors looked at the boys expectantly.

  Ex-Emperor Fendritch looked at them expectantly.

  Ex-Empress Elspeth looked at them expectantly.

  Brian and Gregory repeated raggedly, “Long may he prosper …?”

  “Excellent,” said the Regent. “Close the panels. We’ll converse.”

  For the next hour, the boys told their story yet again.

  The Ex-Empress and her husband recognized the boys immediately. “Hullo,” said Elspeth, drinking some whitish water from a tumbler, “I believe it’s those little human wags who sneaked your crown.”

  “Whisk me if you aren’t right. So it is, Elsp. The same little blighters. I remember them wet.”

  The Ex-Empress asked, “You win your Game?”

  “We did,” said Brian. “We won it for you.”

  “Grand,” said Elspeth without any enthusiasm whatsoever. “You make off with the ancient, sacred crown of the realm, never to be seen again, you send the Thusser into a diplomatic panic, and then there’s a war, but yes, swell, congratters on the Game, I s’pose.”

  “Ah, time travel,” said the Ex-Emperor wistfully. “Remember, dearest, the time travel? There is no company, chaps, like oneself in a few hours. Especially if one bets on the horses.”

  “So you were the future,” said Elspeth, a little sharply. “You were the future, and now here you are. The future stands in front of us.”

  Brian nodded. “I guess.”

  The Ex-Emperor was taken up with a plate set on a TV tray in front of him. “I need someone to cut my meat into smaller pieces,” he said. “This is awful. Very tough. It’s like trying to eat mah-jongg.”

  “His Ex-and Her Ex-Imperial Majesties are members of the Council,” explained the Regent. “I am the head of that Council. We shall all be most interested in your story.”

  “Grippers,” said Elspeth.

  “Go ahead,” said the Regent.

  Brian and Gregory started to talk.

  “Address the Stub,” said the Regent. “He is the Emperor of us all.”

  Acutely uncomfortable, the two boys spoke to the Stub, which occasionally looked at them, but only as its maniac eye swept over the room, lingering one place, darting to another, the eye of a man trapped behind a wall.

  Halting, hesitating, interrupting each other, the boys told the story of how they’d played the Game. The boys spoke on in that throne room in that ramshackle city buried somewhere in the guts of a pulpy world. The murals on the walls, Brian and Gregory could now see, were floral designs, perhaps drawn by the Emperor and Empress themselves some years before: wreaths, swags of flowers, ferns in vases, sketches of old Emperors wearing the crown Gregory had stolen, all painted with poster paints or drawn in thick pastels. They were darkened by the smudges where torches hung. The room smelled like burning oil.

  As the boys told their story, the audience did not seem to be very interested in what they had to say. The six members of the Norumbegan Social Club kept exchanging looks — and neither Brian nor Gregory could tell what those looks meant.

  The Ex-Empress and her husband were particularly entertained, at first. They liked very much the parts about themselves, and often asked questions.

  “Were we very lovely to see, boys?”

  “Did you think us the charmingest thing ever to ride before you in panoply? You may be honest. Deathly honest.”

  But then the story evidently went on too long. The Ex-Emperor and his consort grew bored and started to stare. The members of the Norumbegan Social Club were blowing smoke rings. One was arranging papers from his briefcase. The Earl of Munderplast was bent double in his chair, as if with gas pains, his arms crossed.

  Only the Regent listened, and he listened closely. His eyes swiveled from Gregory to Brian, watching both faces. There was nothing of the practical joker about him now. He seemed deadly serious.

  Eventually, on the other side of the fire-retardant panels, music started up. It sounded like jazz tunes, but taken apart and stuck back together again wrong. When it became clear that Chigger and Gugs were tapping time to the music, wishing they were elsewhere, Brian stopped mid-sentence. He said, “You know, we’re trying to help you, too. We’ve come a long way.”

  Gregory agreed, “We came through that stupid portal for you.”

  “You could at least listen,” said Brian. “What we’re telling you is important. It’s about your own kingdom.”

  “It’s just,” said Chigger, “you’ve spoken for so very long.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Gugs, raising his pipe.

  “Because we need your help and you need our help,” Brian protested.

  Chigger fixed him with a gaze. “We,” he said deliberately, “don’t need any help. From anyone. We are a sublime species.”

  Brian gaped. He didn’t know what to say. He was tired and hungry. Fleetingly, he thought of his home, how much he wanted to be there — and then remembered that Boston itself and his parents and their apartment were all threatened by the spread of the Thusser settlement — and that if he and Gregory didn’t get this elfin court to intervene, if he didn’t convince these snobby, drawling men in their bow ties and vests to observe the Game again, the Thusser would gradually blot out everything in North America — so he didn’t know whether there would even be a home when he got back to Earth. He wondered what else he could say. These courtiers were so sure of themselves, so quick with their words, and everything about the way they spoke and thought was strange to him. He tried to come up with more arguments.

  Suddenly, the Regent rose. “The worthy gentlemen, the worthy lady will be pleased to hear that I have a recommendation to make to His Imperial Highness, the Stub. Having listened intently to these boys’ story, I have hit upon a plan of action that I intend to pursue.”

  Brian and Gregory shuffled away from the center of the room. The Regent, Duke Telliol-Bornwythe, walked before the Imperial Council. The jazz music played in the background, sounding like fragments of broken nightclub mirrors reflecting dancers in white silk gowns and kid gloves. “We have,” said the Regent, “not always been happy here. Some say this city is not the equal of that fine metropolis in which we lived centuries ago, beneath the mountain. Therefore, I propose that we shall abandon this place.”

  “What’s this?” protested the Ex-Emperor Fendritch.

  The Earl of Munderplast had sat up abruptly, and finally was listening.

  The Regent nodded. “Indeed. Abandon it. That’s my plan. Leave it to the mannequins, see? They arrive, surround the place. Prepare to take the city by storm.

  “We, meanwhile, have all left — except maybe a skeleton crew of soldiers and drones who’ll stay behind to carry out the gag.

  “The mannequins can sit waiting for us to engage them in battle for as long as they want. Nobody will resist them. I’m sure that, finally, they’ll move in on the city. But it will be an empty victory. Nothing but a shanty city. Empty. No one here.

  “We will be back in Old Norumbega, beneath the mountain. The city which we built with our own labor and which we should, by rights, rule.”

  “Lord Regent,” said Chigger Dainsplint, “this is the absolute end.”

  But Brian was overjoyed at this suggestion. “You mean, sir, you’ll stop the Thusser?”

  “No speech by the chimplings,” said the Regent sharply. “This is a meeting of the Imperial Council, and I demand all simians quiet their hoots.” He smiled. “But yes, my lad, I do indeed intend that we wi
ll retake the City of Gargoyles. We’ll enforce the Rules, give the Thusser the boot, and move back into our old haunts. What?”

  Chigger Dainsplint said, “This is absolute idiocy.”

  “If necessary, we’ll exile the Thusser to this place,” said the Regent. “They prefer things a little drippy. All the mucus will be congenial. No one will be here, once we’ve gone. No one but the machines, of course, who the Thusser can keep or dismantle as they see fit.”

  Brian did not feel so good about that — the idea of the automatons facing a Thusser invasion — and he started to say something, but the Regent glared at him and shut him up.

  Already the rest of the Council was protesting.

  “This is our home, Regent,” Ex-Emperor Fendritch complained. “You’re asking us to flee? Without a fight?”

  “New Norumbega is our home,” Chigger Dainsplint agreed, slicking back his hair with a thumb.

  “So say you,” said the Regent, “because you own a third of the city, Dainsplint. But our citizens may feel differently.”

  Lord Dainsplint argued. “We can’t even slap down the ruddy mannequins — we don’t have a chance against the Thusser Horde.”

  “You’re sending us to our deaths,” Gugs proclaimed. “And at a deuced inconvenient time, too.”

  “It’s the Fest next week,” one of the other councillors pointed out.

  “That’s right. We still haven’t discussed the Fest,” said Lord Dainsplint.

  The quietest of the councillors raised his hand timidly. “I have my report on floats.”

  No one listened to him. Lord Dainsplint said, “We are not a people made for warfare. We’re made for commerce and delight and whatnot. And you are dragging us —”

  “My mind is made up,” said the Regent. “I have spoken.”

  “You must listen to the Council,” Dainsplint said.

  “I do not need to listen to anyone but the current reigning Emperor,” said the Regent. He turned to the Stub. “Your Majesty?” He bowed.