“Dlo!” Miz said, eyes wide. “Are you crazy?”
Dloan said nothing; he let the ropes fall to the stinking floor of the cage. The stom’s great black wing unfolded gently like a collapsing tent. The beast stirred a little. Miz flinched back, gulping, then came forward again, spraying the gas quickly into the stom’s snout. “Shh!” he told the sleeping animal. “Shh! There, there…”
Dloan removed one of the planks that had held the wing straight, took it to the rear of the beast and by propping it between the wall and the cage floor, used it to keep the stom’s tail up off the dust. Then he disappeared underneath the tail.
Miz glanced at the front of the cage. Even with the intensifier glasses on the night was appallingly dark. Zefla was watching the zoo night-watchman’s hut, but Miz felt horribly vulnerable stuck in this cage crouched centimeters from the snout of an animal that looked like it could swallow him whole.
Not that he was sure he’d have swapped with Dloan. He watched Dloan’s feet kick on the floor of the cage as he pushed himself further in underneath the stom. Miz looked away.
He looked up at the barred ceiling of the cage. Of all the things he could ever have imagined doing in his life, squatting in a stinking cage surrounded by the rotted, half-eaten corpses of glide-monkeys in the middle of the night in the remotest, most backward part of the Entraxrln of Miykenns drugging an animal the size of a light aircraft while an accomplice interfered with the beast’s genitals, would not really have been the first to leap to mind.
The stom made a deep, sighing noise. Miz pumped more gas at it. Dloan wriggled out from underneath its rump.
“Got it?” Miz asked. Dloan nodded. Miz patted the animal’s snout gently. “Poor bitch; probably the most fun she’s had in years, and she slept through it.”
Dloan stood there, holding a wooden scraper and a small sealed pot, his trous and jerkin stained. He had an odd expression on his face.
Miz squirted one last burst of gas at the animal then stood up. “Right; let’s get going before she starts screaming rape.”
“No,” Dloan said, coming toward him.
“No?” Miz said, letting Dloan take the gas canister from his hand. Dloan put the scraper and pot down on the floor and crouched at the animal’s snout; he pumped the canister, spraying the gas into its nostrils. “Dloan!” Miz said, incredulous. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to kill it,” Dloan said. He kept pumping and kept spraying, while Miz shook his head and walked round in a circle, head in his hands, muttering.
Dloan pumped until the canister was empty and a dew of evaporating droplets lay around the animal’s nostrils. Little rivulets ran down its snout and fell spotting to the dust. Dloan swayed as he crouched there, mechanically spraying from an empty tank; Miz went over and grabbed him, choking on the cloud of gas. He pulled on Dloan’s massive shoulders and finally got him to move; they collapsed back on the floor of the cage. Dloan came to, shaking his head.
“Oof!” Miz wheezed. “Get off me!”
Dloan stood unsteadily, shaking his head. He swayed, looking at the silent animal, then retrieved the pot and the wooden scraper and stumbled for the rear of the cage. Miz followed him, scrubbing out their tracks in the dust as he went.
They re-locked the door with a piece of bent wire, collected Zefla from her lookout position near the watchman’s hut, and rendezvoused with Cenuij at a postern in an unlit section of the castle precincts.
“You stink,” he said as Miz handed him the sealed pot.
“Oh, shut up,” Miz told him.
Lines of bunting hung above the main square of Pharpech town; stalls, traders and entertainers provided foci for the swirling, milling crowds of people celebrating the annual migration of the glide-monkeys and the return of the stom, and especially the Royal Troupe.
Noise blared from the castle end of the square, where a group of men pretending to be stom danced round in a cleared arena in front of the royal reviewing stand. The stom-dancers held their arms out, displaying giant black wings made from dyed membrane and springy bark strips as they ran at and turned round each other, making unconvincing roaring noises. Priests and monks sitting in the higher levels of the reviewing stand and dressed in ceremonial robes, kept up a running cantillation describing the proceedings.
The King sat with the Queen, trying not to fall asleep.
Sharrow nibbled at a blister-fruit sorbet as she and Miz walked through the crowds, refusing offered bargains and brandished foods.
“No; I think it’s just that he’s finally cracked,” she said. “The vaginal secretions of a female stom.” She shook her head. “He probably doesn’t need the stuff at all; I bet he just did it as a joke on you and Dlo.”
“He’d better not have,” Miz said, eyes narrowing. “Or he’ll find some unpleasant things being done to him as he sleeps.”
A great cry went up; children dressed as glide-monkeys ran into the arena in front of the reviewing stand and scampered squealing and giggling before the great black swooping shapes of the stom-dancers.
The King jumped, woken from a daydream. He clapped dutifully as the children overacted, pretending to die, flapping and jerking on the cobbles of the arena to the sound of further cheers.
Deep in the castle, in the apothecary’s workshop, a long trestle table held a collection of beaten metal canisters, each with a detachable top holding a pump-handle and a trigger. A pair of mud-colored, slimly fingered hands gently lifted the most ornately decorated of the canisters on the table—the one with the royal crest on it—opened it up and smeared a clear, greasy gel round the bottom of the pressure vessel, and carefully replaced it.
The male stom nest-space, hollowed out of a huge trunk six hundred meters above the ground-layer three kilometers north of the town, was a dark and rank-smelling cavern of a place. The way up to it was by hoist-cage and internal ladders rising through narrow, blocked-off rainwater down-channels. There was an antechamber to the roost itself where the King, his courtiers, other members of the royal family, nobles and their hangers-on all assembled, crowding into the dark, springily floored, candle-lit space, talking in hushed voices while Royal Guards checked that the male stom there in the nest-space were quiet and restive and generally looked as though they were settling down for the night.
The atmosphere was unsurprisingly tense; Cenuij felt it affect even him. The air was warm and stank of male stom and sweating nobles. He slid through the crowd of men with their canisters of tagging-paint and their guns and swords. He stood behind the King’s arch-impietist as the priest exorcised the gas canisters of any divine influence. Then he slipped away to the hide at the end of the nest-space itself, to try and find a vantage point.
There was still a little light left from the dusk outside. Cenuij crouched down and peeked out of a vertical slit cut out of the back of the roost cavern, surrounded by the boots and legs of men peering through horizontal slits higher up. It was like being blind. Miykennsians were supposed to have rather better night-vision than Golterians, but he wondered how any of them could see anything in this gloom.
“Here we are,” the scratchy, nasal voice of the Queen said, and Cenuij felt somebody bump into him. He looked round.
The Queen—a blousy creature with far too much make-up, zero dress-sense and apparently so incapable of ever deciding what jewelery to wear each morning that she simply threw on all of it—ushered her eldest son forward.
“Daddy’s new choirboy will look after you,” she whispered. She smiled toothily at Cenuij. “Won’t you?”
Cenuij looked at the child; six or seven, fat, all gums and gapped teeth, grinning idiotically and holding a model stom in his hand. There was some sort of sweet-smelling sticky stuff round his mouth.
Cenuij smiled insincerely up at the Queen.
“Of course,” he said. The boy handed him the model stom, climbed over him leaving a trail of stickiness and plonked himself down in Cenuij’s lap, hogging the view through the slit and forcing a gasp of br
eath from Cenuij, who had to lift the child up for a moment to sit him in a position where he wasn’t crushing his testicles.
“Make sure he keeps quiet!” the Queen whispered.
The boy stuck his nose into the viewing slit, wiping his hands on Cenuij’s cassock. Cenuij stared at the back of the child’s grubby neck and thought of several different ways of complying with the Queen’s request.
The first few noblemen and courtiers were those brave enough to choose or unlucky enough to be landed with stom at the far end of the roost, near the mouth-shaped exit. They crept up through the center of the chewed-out cavern, past the dozing forms of hunkered-down stom, one or two of which watched them go past and made deep, rumbling noises that made their neighbors restless, but otherwise the stom did not react.
It was difficult for Cenuij, with so low a vantage point and a fat, sticky child in front of him, to see much of what was going on, even though his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, but he knew that what was supposed to be happening was that the man concerned approached his selected stom, gently sprayed the sleeping gas into its snout, then sprayed a patch or two of paint onto the side of its barrel chest, just below and forward of the wing root. Judging by the general mutters of approval and the reappearance of each of the men concerned—looks of considerable relief on their faces—everything was going according to plan.
It came to the King’s turn. He had opted for one of the stom near the middle of the cavern; a large, middle-aged beast he’d seemingly chosen for a couple of years running because it had an excellent record at taking glide-monkeys. Cenuij ignored the sickly-sweet smell of the child in his lap and edged closer to look out over the boy’s grease-slicked hair. He watched the dark-clothed figure crouch down and walk between the rows of snoring, rumbling animals.
The King approached the stom he’d selected. Cenuij could just see him giving his gas canister a final couple of pumps. Then he aimed it at the snout of the huge sleeping animal, spraying it for a couple of seconds.
The stom didn’t react for a moment. The King crept forward toward it, spray-can held out in front of him.
The stom shook itself; its great long head came up. The King stopped, then stepped back. The people around Cenuij went very still. The stom opened its mouth and made a yawning motion. The King sprayed gas at its head for five, ten seconds. The stom shook its head, then opened its mouth and roared. It reared up on its legs until it almost touched the top of the cavern, unfolding its wings as its bellow echoed through the nest; stom throughout the roost stirred and came awake; two on either side of the King woke up too, their snouts waving in the air.
People started to shout and scream. The boy on his lap tried to force his head up into Cenuij’s chin so he could see better; he rammed the boy’s head back down, fastening himself to the slit.
“Run!” people shouted. “Run, Your Majesty!” The stom in front of the King wobbled and staggered forward; he raised the gas canister and squirted more gas at it; the beast reared upright again and stood swaying. The two stom on either side rose up too; others at the back of the cavern lumbered off their nest-bowls, shuffling forward, necks craning, trying to move down to the middle of the roost and blocking the view from the rear of the cave.
“Guards!” somebody shouted. Cenuij felt a delicious thrill in his guts. The boy on his lap started to cry. The King’s stom—just visible above the heads of the other animals—fell slowly forward and disappeared. There was a scream from the middle of the cavern. The floor shuddered. People screamed and shouted all around Cenuij. He clenched his fists. The boy squirmed out from his lap and ran away through the forest of legs.
Royal Guardsmen ran into the roost chamber, guns drawn. They fired at the animals nearest them, guns roaring and snapping; bullets and laser bolts burst amongst the crowded animals, producing screams and roars and clouds of smoke and vaporized skin. The three rearmost stom whirled round and charged the guardsmen, who kept on firing but had to retreat. Two stom fell howling to the ground, heads ruptured, pumping blood; one crushed a guardsman under it, another wounded animal grabbed one of the men, picked him up and tossed him against the curved wall of the chamber with one blurring shake of its head. A fusillade of shots tore open its chest and it fell. Behind it, the push toward the cavern mouth became a rush, then a stampede; the floor vibrated to the thudding, thumping steps of the giant beasts and the air was filled with their cries and the noise of the guards’ guns as they advanced again.
The people around Cenuij yelled and shouted and stamped their feet. He pushed his face against the slit, trying to hide his smile.
The firing went on, flat-sounding in the soft-walled roost. Three more stom fell as they crowded round the far end of the cavern, calling and screaming as they piled up there, trying to escape.
“The King! The King!” people cried as the guardsmen fought their way across the fallen bodies of the stom to the center of the cavern.
“The blockhead’s dead, you brainless toadies,” Cenuij whispered.
The last few of the stom able to escape did so, launching themselves from the cavern mouth into the late dusk light. Dead and dying animals lay bleeding or struggling to move on the floor of the roost. The guardsmen reached the middle of the cavern.
Cenuij composed his face into an expression of abject grief and got ready to look away from the slit. He breathed deeply, closing his eyes for a moment.
“Look!” a voice cried. He opened his eyes again.
Something moved above the guardsmen, on the wall of the nest-space near the roof. A tiny figure, waving.
“The King!” somebody shouted. “Hurrah!”
A great cheer went up.
Cenuij stared, appalled.
The tomb was a part-buried black granite cube that had been placed, on Gorko’s instructions, on a hill beyond the formal gardens of house Tzant.
She remembered when the tomb had first been emplaced; one of the old servants had taken her back out after the ceremony so that she could see it again without everybody else around. The duenna told her that the tomb was important and that grandfather Gorko had wanted her to see it like this. Neither Sharrow nor the duenna could guess why. Then they had gone back to the house, for cakes.
The other children had always been frightened of the black sarcophagus, because halfway up one side there was a small smoke-glass window and if you got a flashlight you could shine it in and see the embalmed corpse of old grandpa Gorko sitting in his best scuffed ballistic hides on his favorite motor-bike, crouched over the handlebars as though still alive, his black helmet and mirrored visor reflecting the flashlight and seeming to stare back out at you.
Most of the children her age ran away shrieking when they saw the old man’s cadaver, but she recalled thinking it was nice that Gorko had been put in a place where the little smoke-glass window showed the valleys and hills of the house parklands, so that grandfather could still have a pleasant view, even in death. And she never forgot that grandfather Gorko had wanted her to see the tomb specially, even if she still didn’t understand why.
When—as happened every season or two—her father’s chasing pack of debtors drew too close to his heels and he had to leave the latest hotel in the middle of the night and head for the temporary sanctuary of Tzant, she’d always liked to visit the tomb on the hill. She’d climb up one of the nearby trees, pull herself along an over-reaching limb and drop down to sit on top of the sarcophagus, listening to the trees in the wind and looking out in the same direction as her grandfather.
In the shade of the trees, the black granite was cool to the touch on all but the sunniest days, and sometimes she would lie or sit there for hours, just thinking. There was a sentence—just three words—engraved on top of the tomb; it said THINGS WILL CHANGE in hand-sized letters cut a finger deep into the granite. People were a little puzzled by the words; it was neither a recognized saying nor a maxim of Gorko’s. But it was what he had wanted for his epitaph, and so there it was.
Every now and a
gain she would clear the fallen leaves, broken twigs and dead insects from the little water-filled trenches of the tomb’s inscription. One winter she had prized the letter-shaped lumps of ice out of those trenches and thrown them one-by-one at Breyguhn, who was chucking snowballs up at her from the ground; one of the thrown letters had gashed Breyguhn’s cheek and she had run off screaming back to the house.
She lay back on the cool stone, her head cushioned by her coat. She hadn’t been up here for years. She looked up at the pattern of darkness the coppery leaves made against the blue-green sky, feeling the warm breeze move across her arms and face. She closed her eyes, remembering the first time she’d made love in the open air, a few months earlier in a bower in a shady, out-of-the way courtyard buried in Yada’s sprawling history faculty. That had been one evening during Fresher’s Week, she thought. She tried to remember the young man’s name but couldn’t.
She put a hand out to feel the chiseled letters of the cube’s strange inscription.
There was talk of the tomb being moved when the World Court sold house Tzant next year. She hoped it would be allowed to stay where it was. Probably some other noble family would buy the estate, or some newly rich person or big company, but she couldn’t see why they would object to letting her grandpa rest peacefully in his chosen tomb, looking out over a favorite view. She could understand somebody wanting to make the place their own if they moved in, but would they really grudge one small corner of the estate for the remains of the man who’d built it?
She closed her eyes. Yes, she supposed they might. The size of the tomb and the fact it was out of the way were both irrelevant details; it was a symbol, and the physical size of a symbol had no bearing on its importance—it was the thought that mattered.
Today hadn’t gone too badly so far, despite all her fears. She had managed to avoid both Geis and Breyguhn at the funeral; Geis had arrived late anyway, lucky to have got compassionate leave at all for somebody who hadn’t been a close relation, and Breyguhn had been as concerned to keep out of Sharrow’s way as Sharrow had been to ignore her.
Against a Dark Background Page 30
