The Empire of Gut and Bone Read online

  Dantsig was not following. The automaton was shivering. Pallid. The magician stood by the man’s side, holding the magnet near his heart.

  “Another step, troll,” said the wizard, “and your friend will be magnetized. His engine’ll be wrecked. His memory blanked.”

  Kalgrash hesitated.

  “That’s right,” said the magician.

  And to the guards near the troll, he barked, “Now.”

  They brought up some kind of electrified wand — slapped the troll on the shoulders.

  Kalgrash gave a strangled cry, his eyes wheeled, and he fell to the ground, senseless.

  TWELVE

  Later that day, funeral rites were held for Duke Telliol-Bornwythe.

  The Norumbegans always knew how to make the most of a celebration, and burials were no exception. The Court had mourning costumes and ornaments stored away like some family’s prized Christmas decorations, and all day, the drones and their overseers labored to carry boxes of black sashes and banners out of the vaults. They prepared the city for a gala interment.

  By four o’clock, crowds had gathered on the streets, awaiting the Court’s huge parade, in which the body of the dead Regent would be carried from the palace to the field of tombs outside the city and buried deep in the muscle of the Great Body’s Dry Heart. Citizens thronged in the alleys and on metal rooftops and wicker porches to watch the procession pass.

  In the great plaza just below the palace, the Court gathered to watch the parade start on its route. They themselves would have to join at the end and walk in step behind the corpse’s carriage. They wore black top hats, veils, black dresses, dark swallowtailed coats, and their faces were marked with face paint in signs of mourning (two blue stripes streaking from the eyes to symbolize tears; a line of white dots across the forehead to suggest vision into another world; or a fat red bar across the neck to indicate death). Drones in black robes passed through the crowd, passing out deep glasses of the Wine of Weeping and little sandwiches made of the Bread of Suffering, ham, cheese, and Dijon mustard.

  There, among chattering nobles, stood two human boys — one, stouter, with glasses, looking extremely uncomfortable. The other looked like he had recovered from all shock, and he was ready for a good show. They both wore black satin sashes, despite the fact that they were otherwise much less formal than the crowd around them: Gregory in cargo pants and a polo shirt, Brian in jeans and sneakers.

  The boys jumped when someone put an arm around them both. Lord Chigger Dainsplint stood between them, smiling as if he knew something they didn’t.

  “Terribly solid of you to show up and mourn our Regent,” he said.

  “We were told to come,” said Brian. “We … we don’t have to, if you think it’s not right….”

  “I’m not sure how truly, deeply cut up your friend here is about the passing of our dear duke into the other world.”

  “I’m plenty cut up,” said Gregory, through a full mouth.

  “You’ve had seven sandwich halves,” said Dainsplint.

  “Grief makes me hungry.”

  “Then you’ll be ravenous to hear that your mechanical friends have been shut off. They’re both being held as suspects in the murder. One of them was seen by palace staff wearing a guard’s uniform and sneaking around the corridors right around midnight, the witching hour. Which was when Duke Telliol-Bornwythe took the old iron to the gut.”

  “What?” said Brian. He turned pale. “Kalgrash and Dantsig? They’re dead?”

  “No, no, no, no. They never were alive. And at the moment, they’re just shut off. Until after their trial.”

  “After their trial?” asked Brian. “But then how will they defend themselves?”

  “Well, see, that’s why the blighters have been shut off. This way there won’t be any confusion. People so often say awkward things when they’re tried for murder.”

  “Dantsig and Kalgrash didn’t do this,” Brian insisted.

  “Right around midnight, one of the servants saw a guard he didn’t recognize walk toward the Regent’s bedroom. A man with a goatee. A few minutes later, the intruder comes out and walks the other way. We know your pal Dantsig was in possession of a uniform. He had it on last night. And he was in possession of a goatee. So it does not look good for your chums. Oh, look, the sadness is starting.”

  The palace band had issued forth from the gates, and now crossed the square playing solemn music. Drummers played low, growling beats. Ranks of palace servants in Imperial tunics walked in stately rows carrying wands and staves of power. Behind them came a troupe of girls in plain linen doing death dances in elaborate face paint.

  “There’s Gwynyfer!” exclaimed Gregory, waving.

  She did not notice him, but moved smoothly in the motions of her troupe. They spun and skipped in ancient steps, a remnant of some forgotten religion that the Norumbegans had practiced when man had still lived in caves.

  “Gwynyfer!”

  “Gregory,” said Brian, recalling him to their conversation.

  “Yeah, there she is!” Gregory said, waving even harder.

  She danced past through the crowd, moving lightly over the dirty road littered with crushed malt-ball boxes and wrappers for bat jerky. She was followed by a troupe of noble boys, near naked, painted a thick blue. Their hair stuck up straight with lime. They kicked a wooden head between them as the crowd cheered and screamed.

  Gregory grinned and watched the ritual soccer.

  Brian turned back to Dainsplint and protested, “You can’t just condemn Kalgrash and Dantsig without a fair trial! There must be other suspects!”

  “We’re holding the two manns shut off until the wizard in charge of the investigation has unspooled their memories and read through them.”

  “When is that going to happen?”

  “We hope, never.”

  “Then what evidence do you have?!” Brian screamed over the oboes’ mourning dance. “You’ve got to look at their memories! That’ll prove that they’re not guilty!”

  “That’s precisely it, old duck. Why would we want to prove that? It would be extremely inconvenient for all of us. If it wasn’t one of the mannequins, then it was one of us — and really, it could have been any of the great and noble in this palace. Then the whole rotten Court would be thrown into disrepute. This way, with your Dantsig fingered as the perp, the people can gather around a common enemy — the Mannequin Resistance. Boo, hiss. Otherwise — look around at these faces. Look at those chaps in the toppers and the ladies in the weeping weeds. Any one of them could be guilty. We all hated Telliol-Bornwythe. We’ll all hate whoever takes over for him. (And may I express, incidentally, my own fond wish it might be me who next carries the uranium baton of the Regent. Let the world hate me. I don’t give two bits about hate. It improves the complexion, like wind.)”

  “So you’re saying you don’t believe in a fair trial?”

  “What I’m saying, my boys, is that it would be a deuced mess if your clockwork friends woke up or if we plumbed their memories and they turned out to be innocent. So the Imperial Council will keep on delaying the Wizard Thoth-Chumley from investigating properly until after the trial. By then, the manns will be convicted and thrown in the clink, to be tortured, killed, reassembled, and tortured again until we’re all tired of the game, at which point they’ll be scrapped for parts. And the real murderer — if it wasn’t your tough nut Dantsig — will sleep in peace. Such is the way of the world.”

  Even Gregory looked horrified at this speech. He stared, agape, at the grinning man who lounged between them.

  “It must have been someone else in a guard uniform!” said Brian. “Let me talk to them! To Dantsig and Kalgrash! They’ll tell me the truth.”

  “That’s the problem, little man.”

  A clumsy, ancient automaton, brought out only for funerals by the look of it, staggered past, decorated to symbolize the Norumbegan Empire Herself, Grieving. Her face was a painted mask of sorrow. Two fountains squirted from her ey
es. Her hand reached mechanically into a hole in her chest. She pulled out red flower petals and threw them to the crowds.

  Brian suddenly turned to Chigger Dainsplint. “Where were you, then?” he said. “You could be guilty. Where were you at midnight?”

  “Why, if my little human friend isn’t a detective as well as a weeping advocate for the rights of manns. As it happens, I have an alibi. Gugs and I were down in the basements, playing cards until the hours went wee. Here, turn away. Turn away.” He swiveled the two boys away from the parade. A great, squawking fanfare went up — more like a klaxon than a trumpet. Everyone in the crowd swiveled, covered their eyes, ducked.

  “It’s Death,” said Lord Dainsplint.

  “What do you mean?” Gregory asked, trying to turn and look. Dainsplint grabbed the boy’s head roughly and kept it facing toward the wall.

  “It’s someone dressed as Death,” Lord Dainsplint explained. “He walks in the parade. If you catch a glimpse, you’re the next person to die.”

  “Death?” said Gregory, still trying to look. “What’s he look like? What’s the costume?”

  “No one knows, you imbecile. If they looked at it, they’d die. So no one’s ever seen the blasted thing.”

  “So how do you know there’s anything there?” Gregory asked. “There might be nothing. There might not be anyone.”

  “You’ve touched the matter with a needle. Now stop trying to turn your soupy little eyes on the unknown and wait for the all clear.”

  The yodeling of the warning cry on some primitive horn was awful to hear. Brian shut his eyes.

  Another trumpet blast announced that Death had passed.

  Now came the corpse itself, led by another troupe of dancers. They wore long peacock feathers and pheasant plumes and golden ornaments all over their bodies. The throng threw red flower petals at them, and the dancers threw white petals back.

  Right behind them was the dead Regent, held aloft by courtiers dressed as the Old Gods of Norumbega. He sat on a chair made entirely of flowers and basketry. He was sitting up, facing forward, his eyes studded with two glowing gems. He bobbed as he moved along the dirt in flurries of white and red. His dead hands clutched the arms of this final throne, tied in place with satin bows and twine.

  “A last word to you, Brian, old lump. This is what I came to say to you: Watch yourself. Both of you, listen. No one wants to hear about the old days. No one wants to hear about Earth, or the City of Gargoyles. No one at all wants to remember the Thusser. We don’t want to hear about the Mannequin Resistance. We want to forget it all. That’s doubtless why someone killed the Regent — if it wasn’t your friend Mr. Dantsig. You’re disturbing people. There are already whispers around the Court that you need to disappear. Yet you insist on talking about things that aren’t good for you or good for any of us. So: Shut up, my friend, and live to whine another day. Keep up your clack, and find yourself poisoned or stabbed in the gut. See?”

  With that, Lord Rafe “Chigger” Dainsplint tipped his top hat, bowed, and joined the crowd of courtiers that was following the funeral cart.

  Brian and Gregory were pushed along. They were part of the procession, too, now. They followed along the main avenue, rose petals falling all around them. They could feel people point at them from windows and doorways, gawking at the human cubs. They felt thoughts of the citizens skitter across their minds, the psychic prefixes and suffixes of the throngs who watched the parade.

  “You don’t know Dantsig didn’t do it,” said Gregory.

  “No.” Brian looked miserable. “But I bet he didn’t.”

  “He threatened the Regent. I heard him. He said he’d finish him.”

  “If we could only talk to Kalgrash. I bet he could explain.”

  “You saw Dantsig last night. Come on! He could have done it!”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Brian thought about it. “Would he have agreed to go back to the prison if he’d just killed the Regent? No, I don’t think he would have. He would have found some way around his programming. He would have worked out an excuse to escape.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t.”

  “Maybe,” said Brian, “Dantsig was framed. Maybe he was set up. I think that’s what Lord Dainsplint believes.”

  “You mean, the real murderer arranged for Dantsig to get out of prison for the night wearing a uniform, just so he’d look guilty?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Brian said. “So right after this, we’re going down to the prison. We’re going to try to find out where Dantsig got that uniform. Because I bet that he didn’t have to go far to find it. And I bet that whoever left it out for him to find was the real murderer.”

  The dancers in front of Gregory and Brian spun around and flung out their arms. The funeral throne with its corpse bobbed through muddy streets strewn with crushed flower petals and trampled snack wrappers. The procession passed between great hillocks of garbage, out into the white plains burning with heat, and at last to the tombs, where a choir stood ready to sing the Regent’s requiem.

  Brian and Gregory were no longer among them.

  THIRTEEN

  The captain of the guard at the prison spoke in a torrent. When Brian and Gregory presented themselves at the gate and said they wanted to see Kalgrash and Dantsig, the captain, lying on a bench, said, “You can see them, and I do mean see them, sure, but not talk to them, no, because they’re all shut off and I shouldn’t even be letting you in anyway, but, you know, I don’t see it’s no harm. I been letting people in all day for small change.” He opened the gate and let the boys in. “Now listen, you can’t go into the cell, because that’s illegal, but I’ll take you to the guardroom outside the cell and you can look in at them, but remember, these guys is, they’re killers. You should’ve seen what they made of this place last night escaping, and now, whoo-boy, I tell you, now we know they’re assassins sent by the Mannequin Resistance, whoo-boy, I look at them and I think, we are lucky they didn’t do more mayhem when they were scraping their way out of the clink. They could’ve done a number on us — I mean, this one of them, he has teeth like something you’d gore a buffalo with — big number in fancy old armor — never seen a piece like him. The toffs up the palace, they told us keep a lid on the Mannequin Resistance angle, but that’s an angle everybody’s talking about, so we got crowds coming here before the funeral just to take in the bodies of these manns. I’ll tell you, these guys’re something else. Cold, hard killers. Come on this way. That’s the cell in there.”

  Gregory looked around the round courtyard, the open guardrooms, the pits in the dirt. He couldn’t believe it. The place was a dump.

  He felt bad for Brian. Bri was clearly freaking, but trying to pretend he was in control.

  Brian said, “So … Did anyone come visit them yesterday? Did anyone come before the murder?”

  “No, I mean, they wasn’t news then, except it was kind of funny, they were expecting we’d release some of the other manns we got in captivity here in some kind of trade, but really, they’re all turned off and their heads stacked up over in the shed. No way we were going to activate them again just so they could take up the banner again and rob people down in the Entrails or whatnot. The Regent handled that pretty good except that windup general declaring war against us, which we heard they done, and now who knows, because there aren’t many of us willing to be guards and soldiers, though it’s a calling and an honor, and we really do not want to have those manns surrounding the city because, for one thing, we don’t got no moat or no towers or nothing like in the old days, when we had them things, and I don’t want to be standing there in this getup with a blunderbuss and all the manns who been living out in the Lower Extent of Pipes, fighting off antibodies with their bombs and pistols and crossbows and shurikens and suchlike.”

  They had reached the guardroom. Behind wooden slats, the marines who’d accompanied the boys in the sub were slowing down, not having been wound.
They stumbled gradually about in their cell.

  Behind another door, tied shut with rope, lay Dantsig and Kalgrash.

  Gregory saw Brian look sharply away. Brian made a show of walking around the guard nook, examining the heating coil and its frayed wire, the table with its deck of cards and burnt saucepans and spoons and cheese-crumbled knives.

  Brian said, “I heard that one of them — the one with the goatee — he wore a guard’s uniform last night when he got into the palace.”

  “Yeah,” said the captain of the guard. “Big, big stink there, I’ll tell you. Big, big stink because, see, where’d the uniform come from, see? I mean, what I’m asking is, if it was one of us who didn’t have on our uniform, then, you might ask, what were we wearing? For example, Talbot, who wasn’t on duty yesterday, but who sometimes, he wants to stand in front of Nature in his altogether and let the wind play over him and remember simpler times. If it had been him standing stark naked with his arms spread under the dying light of the veins and dreaming of hunting antelope and spearing aurochs, wearing nothing but the skin the gods painted him with back when mammoths roamed the Earth, if he’d been doing that while meanwhile these characters over here sneaked his uniform and it fit just right and then they went up the palace and offed the Regent, you can see there would be some difficult questions that would come to me as captain of the guard about who I hire and whether they ain’t too nostalgic for days of savagery and yore.” The captain sorted through some potato chips on the table and ate several. “But Talbot wasn’t on duty and none of the rest of us, we don’t go in much for stripping at work, so the palace is yelling, ‘How did this joker get a uniform at your establishment?’ and I’m, ‘Didn’t get one here — no way,’ but, see, that one, his name’s Dantsig, he told the Court magician who’s investigating, Thoth-Chumley, that he just picked up the uniform off that bench there and it fit perfect, and chippy, choppy, la la la. So I gotta wonder, how did it get there?”

  “Are you sure,” asked Brian, “that there’s no one who came yesterday who might have left it there?”