The Chamber in the Sky Read online

  “It’s true,” said Gregory. “The heartbeat kicked us, like, a hundred miles down the artery.”

  The master of caravans shook his head again. “Well, if you want to ride off into the Volutes toward Three-Gut right now, my lady, it’s your flaming funeral. But you’d better take everything you need with you: food, tents, everything. Supplies aren’t reaching out that way right now. Haven’t sent anyone out there for a week.”

  Brian thought of something, and asked, “Did you hear any rumors — I mean, a couple of weeks ago — of a big capsule of some kind being carried through the Volutes by three giant mannequins? Called the Umpire? They stayed for a while at Turnstile and then came down here and headed for Three-Gut.”

  The master of caravans considered. “Sure. Heard about that. Some bounty hunters tried to shut them down and sell them for parts. One of the big mannequins turned on them and — I guess threw some punches. Flattened them all.”

  “Was there any word where exactly the giants and their capsule were headed?”

  “No one was asking. Big, unhappy things. So. My lady. What can I do for you? A covered wagon and two thombulants? A three-legged and a five-legged? And supplies? Maybe I can interest you in a tent? Or a tent for your servants here, and for yourself, a silk pavilion? With your coat of arms? And cloth of damask to lay on the ground? And you’ll want some sweetmeats? And …”

  Brian didn’t speak as Gwynyfer purchased a crazy list of supplies — until she suggested a trumpeteer to announce their arrival in each new village. Then he gently said that he wasn’t sure that they needed their own private elfin herald.

  Gwynyfer grumbled, “The boys want to rough it.”

  The master of caravans told them to give him a few hours, and they’d be ready to head off into the low corridors and weird turnings of the lesser Volutes.

  “Now,” said Gwynyfer, “for disguises. Thusser fancy dress.” She made inquiries after local wizards.

  There was one enchantment shop in town. Brian was excited to see what it looked like. He’d never been in a store that sold spells before.

  Gregory didn’t seem that excited about the magic shop. He followed Brian and Gwynyfer by several steps, as if he wasn’t with them at all.

  The shop was disappointing. The shelves were empty. It was just a big empty storefront with a woman in an apron sitting behind a counter, reading a gardening magazine.

  They told her they needed Thusser disguises. Something to make them look like the Horde.

  “Going to a party?” she said. “It’s all the rage with the kids right now. Thusser and prisoner theme parties. They call it Horde and Veg. With couples, one goes as the Thusser and the other goes as the brain-dead.” She reached down by her feet and pulled out three tiny little machines with clips. She went over to a drawer and fished out three little cannisters of some kind to install in the clip-on devices. She plunked the three units down on the counter. “There you are,” she said.

  Gregory picked up one of the little devices, looking it over suspiciously.

  “Attach it to your belt, love,” the woman said. “Then click it on.”

  Gwynyfer picked one up and flicked the toggle switch.

  Instantly, she was more dismal looking. She had on a long coat and had dark circles around her eyes, and her eyeballs themselves were black.

  “What happened to your eyes?” Gregory said.

  “That’s what the Thusser eyes look like,” the wizard-woman explained. “They only wear normal eyes to be polite.”

  “Hm. That’s funny, because I haven’t really found them to be very polite,” Gregory said. “And what about our, you know, brain waves or whatever?”

  “It’s a fancy-dress disguise,” said the wizard-woman. “It hides who you are. But they’ll be able to tell you’re hiding who you are, if they ever bother to check. It’s more to trick the eye than the brain.”

  Gwynyfer clicked off her disguise. “Marvelous,” she said. “It even makes my hair less honey-ripe and gorgeously buoyant. Which really is a tremendous feat.” She reached into her pocket for her wallet. “One wouldn’t think the technology existed to de-volumize these golden locks.”

  Brian asked, “How long do these disguises last?”

  The wizard shrugged. “Till the batteries give out, love. Like all of us.”

  They went to a restaurant and sat at a table outside. They stared at menus. Their silence was awkward. Normally, Gregory would have been cheerful. He loved the adult feeling of going to a restaurant and selecting items off the menu without his mother and father looking over his shoulder. But it was different because Gwynyfer wasn’t going out with him. It could have been great, them sitting there together outside and ordering whatever they wanted, and laughing and making private jokes and explaining their jokes to Brian, like they were all in Paris or something, except they were in entrails.

  Instead, no one talked. Gregory wanted to ask what “brioche” was, but there was no way he was going to reveal to Gwynyfer that he didn’t know a word. Angrily, he ordered breast of branf and a triple-layer chocolate mousse cake.

  Outside the circle of sidewalk tables, the heraldic bacterium hopped excitedly from claw to claw and flung himself into the air for little spins on his wings at the sight of their food.

  Brian announced, “I have a name for the bacterium.”

  “You’re going to name it?” Gwynyfer protested. “Do you name your body lice?”

  Brian said proudly, “Tars Tarkas.”

  “Huh?” said Gregory.

  Slightly bashful, Brian explained, “Tars Tarkas the Thark. It’s the name of my favorite six-limbed character from literature.”

  Gregory snorted. “I think it’s not literature if there are characters with six limbs. That’s one of the rules.”

  Brian said defensively, “And I don’t have body lice.”

  Gwynyfer suggested, “Well maybe if you call their pet names loud enough they’ll come back.” Then she repented and said, “I’m sorry, Bri-Bri. I forget you saved the fam. And us, too. Our hero. We are, of course, frightfully thankful.” She reached over and patted his hand. “You can call your vermin whatever you wish.”

  Gregory gave Brian a hard, knowing look. It said: You didn’t save anyone’s family. You accused them of murder.

  Brian turned his eyes toward his entrée.

  The lesser Volutes were a strange and creepy place. The ridge of cartilage surrounding the cavernous entrance was carved into a frowning, fanged face ringed with garlands of flowers. Once the wagon rolled through that gate, the three kids were in dark tubes branching in every direction. At the major crossroads, travelers had carved village names and arrows into the walls.

  The thombulants wore huge electric lamps strapped to their backs so the kids could see where they were going. The beasts ambled up and down through the black, looping intestines, pulling the covered wagon behind them.

  When they came upon a hut or a village, Brian would get out and ask if anyone had seen the Umpire Capsule. No one had.

  They talked to shepherds who wandered through the intestines with their flocks of red sheep grazing on the mosses that grew on the walls. One of the shepherds had heard a story of something like the capsule being carried through the dark caverns of the Volutes, but he didn’t know anything more.

  They stopped for lunch with the shepherds. Brian had to distract Tars Tarkas so he wouldn’t chase the flock. He and the germ played fetch. Tars Tarkas was so happy, his tail twitched with joy. He scampered under the legs of ewes, whirring and clicking with the thrill of the chase. Brian smiled and watched his weird pet fly up and catch twigs thrown in the air. Tars flew back and forth over their heads.

  When they were done eating, they left the flock behind.

  As they traveled along into the dark, they encountered fewer and fewer Norumbegans.

  On the second day of wandering through the Volutes, they came upon a village that had been burned. The huts had been made of junk in the first place: bedspri
ngs, crates, and loose rubble. Now everything was charred. Holes had been kicked in the walls.

  No one was there.

  “The Thusser raiding parties,” Gwynyfer whispered. “Bad show.”

  From then on, everything they encountered was abandoned and ruined.

  They could not tell whether it was day or night anymore. They rarely encountered veins of lux effluvium. The landscape, therefore, was just miles of dark, winding intestine. They slept once. The thombulants slept, too, and blew steam out of their vents.

  Gregory sat apart from Gwynyfer. He did not speak much to her. Brian watched them. He wondered why they fought. Gwynyfer did not seem angry, but she did not speak much. None of them did.

  Eventually, they came upon a village built on a rise near a bulging vein full of glowing lux effluvium. The vein was fading for the night. The village was made entirely of old rubber tires in stacks, like black, dirty igloos with tin roofs.

  No one seemed to be around. Just old machines, abandoned oil drums, and car parts. The wagon rolled slowly into the circle of radial tire dwellings.

  “Tars is frightened,” whispered Brian. The bacterium was crouched on top of the wagon’s canopy, flicking his head back and forth.

  “Maybe he smells disinfectant,” Gwynyfer said unkindly.

  But Gregory was also looking cautious.

  And then doors began to open.

  Things began to come out.

  They were not human. They were not Norumbegan. They were complicated and feathery or leafy. They moved on stalks.

  They surrounded the wagon.

  In New Norumbega, the Mannequin Army was worried. Several of the other hearts in the Great Body’s cluster were now beating irregularly, and every six or seven hours, a tremor would shake New Norumbega. This did not make it easy to build walls through the streets of the ruined town.

  The tremors also uncovered things. The heaped, broken palace slid and crumbled. One day, a group of mannequin workers moving rubble sent for General Malark. They said they’d found something that looked important.

  The general and Kalgrash climbed across the broken expanses of concrete and burnt wood.

  “They say it was uncovered in the last earthquake,” Malark explained.

  Kalgrash shook his head. “These earthquakes make me nervous. Nervous, nervous, nervous. They’re getting bigger. I don’t like this Great Body moving.”

  “You should have seen it during the Season of Meals, Kal. Things shooting through all the passages. Everyone washed away. It was awful.”

  The troll said, “I’m telling you, we should all just abandon this place. Soon as the Thusser are knocked out of the Game.” They climbed down into a pit. “What is it the workers found down here?” Kalgrash asked.

  “They don’t know. It’s a room that was lost somewhere in the palace. The ruins just showed up when the debris shifted.”

  Lamps lit a cave in all the jumbled trash and the remains of walls and floors.

  Kalgrash and Malark ducked and went in.

  It was half of a room. The ceiling had fallen and crushed the other half. In this half, there were big, old, yellowing computers, a dot matrix printer, and stacks of old printouts bound into books. On the wall was a poster that showed the Emperor Randall leading off an ice-skating extravaganza. There were cables everywhere.

  Kalgrash clicked the knob on a radio. It didn’t go on. He followed the cord down behind the desk. It was plugged into the wall, but there was no power.

  Malark was sorting through a huge, messy roll of paper that had long ago spilled out of the printer. “Look,” he said. “Some kind of messages.”

  Kalgrash went to his side. Malark held up a lantern and asked, “You’ve had reading installed, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah. Last week. English and Norumbegan.”

  “Don’t know if either of those will help you. It’s in Norumbegan, but it’s mostly abbreviations and numbers and … I don’t know.”

  Kalgrash read several entries. They were dated, and talked of the Game. They announced players and winners and losers.

  “It’s from Wee Sniggleping,” said Kalgrash. “Friend of mine back on Earth.” He looked down at the mess of wires. “Is there any way to get electricity running through these units again? This looks like some kind of communication center. We should try to get it back in working order.”

  “No reason we can’t power it up,” said Malark. “But it will be harder to figure out where all the cables go.”

  A soldier stepped forward. “Sir,” he said. “Nim Forsythe, sir. From the Corps of Engineers. I’m an electrician. The equipment is attached to a long piece of wire that must have been an antenna of some kind. With tiny writing on it. Magical writing.”

  “I bet,” said Kalgrash. “It must have been able to transmit and receive across the barriers between worlds.”

  Malark considered. “All right,” he said. “Let’s move all this equipment into our section of the city. Carefully. And nothing gets taken apart without being diagrammed. When it’s all set up there, we’ll power up and see what we have.”

  He ducked out of the low passage and went to issue orders.

  Kalgrash looked back at the paper readout.

  That was the day the Game had begun. A few months before that, he knew, he’d been built and activated. His memories went back years, but Wee Snig had admitted that Kalgrash was just a little over a year old. He flipped back through the pages of statistics and requests and numbers. He couldn’t make sense of them.

  But there, in a list on June 7th, was a line item:

  He had no idea what the numbers meant, or the abbreviations vac and rel. He knew what expense meant. That was how much magic they’d spent activating him.

  June 7th. He’d been born — activated — on June 7. He tried to remember that day. He couldn’t recall anything in particular. He was never careful with a calendar.

  The last summer had been a good one. Before the Thusser came. Very green, very humid. That summer, he’d done a lot around the yard. He’d sat by the riverbank fishing. He’d made stews out of mushroom caps. Or at least that’s what he remembered.

  But he knew that one of those many days when he remembered walking to the top of Mount Norumbega for a fresh breeze and a view of eagles, it had actually been his first day alive. It must have been June 7th. That day, he supposed, he’d walked down the leaf-littered path from Wee Snig’s workshop on the peak for the first time, and as he’d walked, he’d forgotten Wee Snig a little more with each step, and he’d remembered the warm lair under the bridge which, in reality, he had never seen before.

  He had come home after his hike — he thought of it as home, and thought of his walk there as a hike — and he had pulled out ice tea that someone else had made and he had poured himself a glass. He had recalled stirring in lemon himself. That evening — who knew? It had been his first night alive, but it had seemed to him like a thousand others. Maybe he had watched the fireflies come out in the glades, winking like a vast computer console. Or maybe it had rained.

  In the dark beneath the ruins, he stared at the record of his making and waited for the engineers to come.

  Deep in the Volutes, in a town made of tires, heaped creatures stood by the doorways of their huts, unmoving, surrounding the kids’ cart.

  Brian scrambled to get out the rifle.

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” whispered Gwynyfer. “They’re the fungal priests of Blavage.”

  “The what?” said Gregory.

  Gwynyfer had already stood up and was addressing the monsters. “The Honorable Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, daughter of His Grace Cheveral Gwarnmore, Duke of the Globular Colon, greets their ancient and holy presences, the fungal priests of Blavage; she requests audience and asylum.”

  The largest of the mounds moved forward on its complicated, vegetable limbs and gestured gracefully that she should step down from the wagon.

  She jumped off and then bowed.

  The large mound spoke slowly and so
ftly, as if its voice was not produced through a throat and mouth. It said, The fungal priests do welcome you, brave animals, kind animals. Come rest. Take water.

  “Won’t say no,” said Gregory, and he hopped out of the wagon. To Gwynyfer, he whispered, “What’s going on? Can you do, like, an introduction?”

  She explained, “The fungal priests were here before the Norumbegans came. Not in this sad burg, but in Blavage. It’s a spot in Three-Gut they’ve been living at for centuries. They’re famous.” She asked them, “Why aren’t you at your sacred circle there?”

  Burned. Fire. Many are soil now. An animal walks in lines and ranks. An animal puts to the torch our kin. We come, bowed and bent, through uncommon ways and the path of nutriment and find now these huts, this haven. We begin again.

  “Hi! I’m Gregory. I’m a person. It’s great to meet you. Do you ever not talk like that?”

  “Their Norumbegan isn’t great,” Gwynyfer said. “But they’re a very popular costume, as you can imagine. More popular than Thusser.”

  Brian said, “I’m Brian. Did the Thusser destroy your … your city or whatever? Your sacred circle? At Blavage?”

  The belly fills with dire animals in dark fiber. Vessels eclipsed. The kind machines wind down and stop.

  Gwynyfer asked the heap, “Would the fungal priests mind terribly if we stayed here and slept? The thombulants need to rest.”

  Rest, indeed. We go about our chores. We pray to the Great Body. We pray, for the Great Body wakes.

  “Yeah,” said Gregory. “We were wondering about that. Why does the Great Body have to wake right now?”

  For minds in strife are within it. For there is unrest. For there is anger. It stirs. We pray for its return. We greet its coming nausea.