The Empire of Gut and Bone

by M. T. Anderson

  He struggled. The crowd was too thick. Gregory waded toward him.

  They were all over Brian — sharp darts of pain — roiling like insects in some gruesome hive, ripped away from a wall and revealed piling near their queen. His legs quivered and shot up with new, sharp snaps. His arms were twisted. His shirt sagged.

  He couldn’t breathe to scream. They were dragging — he could almost see, through the crowd of scuffed brogues and dancing pumps — they were dragging him toward the balcony.

  His hair — he felt shocks of his hair pulled out like kernels off the cob. Across the floor … he grabbed at things he felt … but they were just a litter of plasterboard … slipped through his fingers. His arm jolted as someone dug their thumbs into the joint of his elbow.

  “For the glory of the Stub!” they hissed. “Our Imperial Majesty the Stub!”

  He flipped over, kicked at them. Gregory was at his side, shoving, screaming, “No!”

  And Brian found himself being heaved up.

  He was outside. On the balcony. Above the city.

  The hot wind from fires blew across his face. Light was red. The city burned.

  Arms lifted him, tearing at his clothes.

  He swung out — facedown — the crater of the square below him — eight stories below — He screamed.

  They held him.

  He struggled.

  They still held him fast.

  They prepared to drop him.

  Gregory hoarsely yelled. He lunged. They forced him back.

  Brian wheeled his hands in the empty air.

  And then, just as they were about to drop him, a voice said, “Excuse me. Lords, ladies, is this the Imperial Council of Norumbega?”

  The elfin rout halted, intrigued.

  They all looked back into the Grand Hall. It was a beautiful youth with golden, feathered locks. He was dressed in a white flag of truce. He held his head on a platter. “I have been sent by the Mannequin Resistance.” Awkwardly, he explained, “Your phone is out of order.” The youth’s head on the platter, it appeared, was attached by a few wires to his shoulders. This youth, the messenger of the armies that had ceased their fire, announced, “Your lordships, your ladyships, I bring dire news. The Thusser Horde are in the Great Body.”

  He said, “They have taken Pflundt.”

  And at that, the Stub began to make a noise.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The hum was low but loud. It made the floor of the throne room vibrate. Courtiers turned from the messenger to the Stub, and saw their monarch gazing at them with an intelligence he had never shown before.

  The regal plug’s gaze swung across each face there, as if inspecting them for the last time. Then the pupil rolled up in the socket. It faded like a good-luck message in a Magic 8 Ball.

  The eye was blank and white. The hum got louder.

  “He’s going to detonate!” Gwynyfer yelled, and she bolted toward the exit, waving for others to follow her.

  Gregory grabbed Brian’s wrist, dragged him out of a clump of stunned viscounts, and headed for the great staircase. “She’s right,” said Gregory. “I can feel it. Something’s up.”

  Ex-Empress Elspeth was staring at the Stub as if waking from a dream. “Not my son,” she said. And again, but this time more triumphantly: “Not my son! He’s not!” She even began to smile. “No. No, he isn’t. He’s a bomb. And a radio. And a very bad boy.”

  She took her feckless husband’s hand. “Come along, Randers,” she said to him. “Let’s leave the thing to pout. Think about what he’s done.”

  The eye of the Stub had grown milky gray.

  The courtiers stumbled and pushed on the stairs. There were too many now — too many to fit, and they were shoving and screaming at each other. They were gasping:

  “Servants’ stairs — use the servants’ stairs!”

  “You use the servants’ stairs!”

  “I wouldn’t deign.” (Shrieks as people fell, as people were stepped on.) “This is the absolute crush of the season, darling. Everyone will be watching. Get your hand out of my face. You’re smearing my dimples.”

  Back in the empty throne room, the Stub sat upon his throne. His eye was black and glittering.

  On the floor in front of him, Gwestin lay spread in subservience. His shirt was off. His head was bowed. His lips kissed the plaster dust. “I am Your Majesty’s last servant,” he said. “I served you better than all the others. All the others have fled. I am Your Majesty’s true protector. May Your Imperial Majesty live long and be vaulted into godhood when you pass on. May Your Imperial Majesty inherit not only the Empire of the Innards, but the space of mouths undiscovered, and eyes that might lie above, and the Great Body’s hands or tentacles, and may you thrive always, with this Great Body to serve where you lack even a torso of your own, O most mighty Stub, most glorious monarch, most —”

  And then his king exploded.

  Out in the desert, where General Malark sat in a wooden conning tower built atop three slow beasts, he saw the palace erupt. He saw its side blow out. He saw the burning junk rain down.

  Hurled to the side, Gregory couldn’t catch his breath. The staircase had buckled. He heard groaning.

  It was not animal groaning, he realized. He was in a wooden gantry attached to the side of the palace, and it was sagging. Courtiers crawled around him. Brian, shaking, was sitting next to him. Gwynyfer pulled herself toward him. He held out his hand for her.

  “Hold on!” Gregory said. “Hold on to … a railing or something. We’re tipping. We’re tipping!”

  Some strut cracked. The gantry wobbled free of the wall and swung.

  Gregory and the others clung to banisters. They were looking down at the trash heap fifteen feet below.

  Another wooden buttress snapped.

  They were heading right into the junk.

  They screamed.

  The gantry fell.

  They hit, curling their bodies as the staircase slewed into the trash.

  Flaming debris still drifted down around them.

  A huge, ragged hole in the palace wall smoked. The air was almost unbreathable.

  Gregory, Brian, and Gwynyfer kicked their way to the surface. Courtiers around them moaned and crawled through old drapes and discarded shoes. The kids gave them a hand.

  The palace sagged. Two of its turrets had fallen off. Fires still clearly raged inside.

  “The palace!” Gwynyfer choked.

  Gregory looked grimly up at the hole that disgorged thick smoke into the newly polluted haze of the Dry Heart.

  When Gwynyfer was off a few paces, helping the Mistress of the Robes disentangle herself from some heating ducts, Gregory muttered to Brian, “I guess this is what they get for crowning a candy corn their king.”

  No one seemed to notice that Kalgrash and Dantsig, having snapped the chains off their handcuffs, were helping people up out of the rubble. In fact, many people took it for granted. They were mechanicals, after all.

  No one questioned that the Empress Elspeth was now in charge, no longer Ex; or that the Earl of Munderplast, candidate for the Melancholy Party, would act as her Grand Chamberlain and Prime Minister.

  No one protested — except Lord Dainsplint himself — when the Empress decreed, in a voice dead with exhaustion, that he should be exiled into the desert.

  No one argued when Brian and Gregory said that they had to leave and seek the Empress’s brother, Archbishop Darlmore, where he lived as a hermit. No one complained when they said they needed backpacks with food and water and maybe a map. No one, now, believed that they should delay in their quest to waken the Rules Keepers and halt the Thusser Horde from their inevitable march.

  No one was particularly surprised when the mannequin messenger, his head held under his arm (his platter had been lost in the blast), requested a grand parley and a truce between the Mannequin Resistance and the Norumbegan overlords.

  “The mannequins offer their aid and help to Your Imperial Highness,” he said to th
e Empress, bowing his head (with his free hand). “We have a common enemy that shall destroy us all,” he said. “They have already taken our capital, Pflundt. None of us were there to repel them. We recommend, therefore, that we put aside our differences and join forces to protect the integrity of the Empire.”

  “Good show,” said the Empress.

  The headless youth indicated the burning city. “Here in this magnificent capital, massed safely behind your impregnable walls, we shall withstand a siege until the humans can awaken the Rules Keepers.”

  “Our impregnable walls,” the Earl of Munderplast repeated desolately, looking at the ragged line of candy-colored huts that marked the edge of New Norumbega. He muttered, “By the sacred rood of Woden.”

  “If we are joined together,” the youth said with a bright smile on his face (under his arm), “who can defeat us?”

  The Empress said, “Jolly thought, that.” And to her anxious subjects: “We’ll work out the finer details later.” She wriggled her fingers vaguely.

  Kalgrash raised his armored hand. “No,” he said loudly. “Work out the details now.” He looked at Dantsig’s hard face. “The mechanicals won’t fight unless you grant them freedom.”

  The Empress scowled. “I see.”

  “And then give up Three-Gut and the mannequinheld entrails.”

  The Empress smiled to herself. “Does one mean a territory currently held by the Thusser? You wish me to grant it to you?”

  “Yup,” said Kalgrash. “Because it’s not going to be held by the Thusser for long. We’re going to get it back. And it’s only fair: If we fight for it, if we win it, we own it. Simple, simple, simple.”

  No one spoke out while the Empress, with irritation in her eyes, considered the demand. No one needed to point to the armies already ringed around the smoking city. And so she said, “Granted. If you successfully protect New Norumbega from the Thusser invasion, we shall declare Three-Gut and the mannequin-held entrails to be your own sovereign state. Your own kingdom or republic or theocracy or what have you. To protect as you will. If you can.” She waved her hand. “Congratters.”

  She did not seem happy about it. Neither did the rest of the Court.

  But Dantsig laughed and clapped once. He looked like he wanted to do a little dance, but couldn’t, standing on the rubble and before the Empress of the Innards.

  Kalgrash had a satisfied smile on his face.

  Out in the plains, beneath the slow, soaring shadows of bubbles in the veins, the mannequins waited for news. They did not know it, but they had a home now. It was a home occupied by the Thusser, but still, it was a kingdom for windup citizens, a place where they could turn the key in one anothers’ backs without a blue-blooded Norumbegan hand to knock it away.

  In the rubble, the irritable Empress turned to Brian and Gregory. “Well, boys, you did chivvy out the assassin, as promised. I rather think that’s the last we’ll be seeing of old Gwestin. Except perhaps when we dust. He’s in a million bits.”

  “We want to leave the city as soon as possible,” Brian said.

  “You want me to thank you, don’t you?”

  Brian shrugged. He didn’t really want her to thank him. He didn’t care what she did, as long as she let him go.

  “Well, I don’t need to thank a human,” she said. “I don’t.”

  Brian nodded.

  But then Gwynyfer Gwarnmore stepped forward. “But I want to thank him,” she said. “And I want to go with them.” She turned to her father. “Gwynyfer Gwarnmore presents the Duke with the following petition: Requested, that she be allowed to accompany the human boys on their quest to find Archbishop Darlmore. Requested, that she be given money and mounts for the expedition. Requested, that her parents continue in their affection for her until she returns home, at which point they may assess her success and decide whether praise or scorn would best greet her efforts.”

  Her father granted her petition.

  And so, first thing the next morning, a procession of five-footed beasts set off into the saline deserts of the Dry Heart.

  Brian rode on one, Gregory and Gwynyfer on another, and a third was stocked with their tents and much of their water.

  Kalgrash and Dantsig did not go with them. They remained behind to assist in the new alliance between mannequin and breather. Kalgrash was the only mechanical who wasn’t programmed to see a city of clean stone and white marble in place of the real squalor of New Norumbega, the garbage pits, the hovels painted like fine mansions. So he hugged Brian and shook hands with Gregory and Gwynyfer, and he watched the three of them on their steeds lumber away from the crumpled palace.

  They passed down the great avenue of the city. No one else paid them any heed. The Norumbegans were too busy clearing away the rubble from a day of bombing.

  The three beasts passed between the ranks of the Mannequin Resistance. The automatons were already preparing to march into the city gates (which they still believed stood as before). They made preparations to repel the Thusser, whenever the Thusser arrived. They carried their banners through the heat, calling out orders.

  Into the bright morning of the Dry Heart the three beasts rode, and Brian, for the first time in days, was happy. Gregory was contented, riding with Gwynyfer. Gwynyfer was clearly thrilled to be part of something that would take her beyond the courtesies of the shattered palace.

  Brian was leaving behind the murk and confusion, the backstabbing and the political lies of the Court. It had only been a few days, but it felt like forever.

  Still, he thought, he was glad it had all happened. He and Gregory had seen things and noticed things that the adults around them had not. He and Gregory, two humans, had proved themselves as smart — or at least less lazy — than the elfin race who despised them. And now they were on their way to save the world.

  He felt good again. Sure of his purpose. He smiled at the dazzling granules around him.

  So they made their way across one chamber of one heart in a cluster of hearts, hanging in a net of ropy veins; while at the verge of one stomach, in the fortress of Pflundt, the Thusser scurried along the narrow corridors, preparing to launch their attack; and elsewhere, farmers tilled the rich soil of livers, and miners drilled into fats, and the wings of twelve lungs unfolded from a central stem, and people surged through veins in submarines and made their way on flightless birds through the labyrinthine tripe; and all of the Great Body, ancient as it was, prepared for its next convulsion.

  About the Author

  M. T. ANDERSON is the author of the National Book Award-winning Printz Honor book The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party and the Printz Honor book The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves, as well as Feed and Thirsty. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is made of gut and bone.

  Praise for M. T. Anderson’s

  THE GAME OF SUNKEN PLACES

  “Highly original and enormously entertaining.”

  — The New York Times Book Review

  “Anderson builds to a climactic series

  of surprises that, exploding like fireworks,

  will almost certainly dazzle readers.”

  — Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Deliciously scary, often funny,

  this tour de force leaves one marveling

  at Anderson’s ability.”

  — Booklist, starred review

  and

  THE SUBURB BEYOND THE STARS

  “A masterful tale.”

  — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “A fun and gripping read, with action,

  suspense, and creepy monsters that will

  keep readers up late — and make them

  want to keep the lights on.”

  — School Library Journal

  “A funny and eerie tale told with

  impeccable writing, and at minimum,

  kids will come away a bit smarter

&
nbsp; just for having read it.”

  — Booklist

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2011 by M. T. Anderson

  Cover art by David Frankland

  Cover design by Steve Scott

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

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  Library of congress cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  First edition, June 2011

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  eISBN: 978-0-545-38877-1