With that, off she went, up the wall and onto the eaves of the roof above me. She leapt along the gutter there, and I followed after her, out of the alley, into the town.
Eastrim was a dismal place. A small city of narrow streets and lousy air. That weird and awful smoke hung over everything, and it stank. The streets were paved with cobblestones. Low wooden buildings leaned toward each other from the curbs as if they would topple together into the roadway at any moment. The people moved in dense packs, shoving and cursing one another. They all seemed to have the same flat, round, pale, and dirty faces, the same dulled and gaping expressions, as if they were dumb beasts rather than women and men. They wore torn, dirty, colorless robes belted at the waist by ropes. They trudged beneath the overhanging eaves, carrying buckets, loads of wood, sacks of potatoes, or caged, squawking birds and animals. I saw men beating mules with sticks, trying to get the stubborn creatures to pull wagons full of hay or lumber. I saw women sweeping thresholds, emptying chamberpots out of windows, or cleaning house and tending children, visible through their open doors.
I gaped at all of it. I had seen paintings like this. Renaissance paintings, medieval scenes. I felt like a traveler in imagined time, a three-dimensional modern on the flat backdrop of the fantastical past. Was I a real man in a make-believe world or a make-believe man in the real world? Whatever—it mesmerized me. I had to force myself to stop staring like an idiot, just to glance up now and then and check on Maud’s progress as she leaped from roof to roof and wall to wall.
I followed after her through the bizarre maze of streets.
Now and then, through a gap between the buildings, I caught a glimpse of the castle from which I’d just escaped. It was an impressive sight: six mighty towers and a central keep, the walls fierce and formidable. It stood on raised earth above the city, in cleaner air above the smoke. A moat of dull water surrounded it. I wondered which tower I’d been in when I was arrested beside the body of Lady Kata. I couldn’t tell for sure.
The rodent and I continued along the stinking, smoky streets. After a while, we came out into a broader plaza surrounded by shops and bordered by an official-looking structure decked with flags. The smoke was thicker here, the smell was worse. Soon I saw why. There was a bonfire in the middle of the square. The noxious green-black miasma was pouring up out of it.
On another side of the open space, a crowd was gathered, raising a great noise. The sound drew my attention. I looked over as I passed through the plaza—and I found myself staring at a dreadful spectacle.
Prisoners were being put to death, right then, right there, out in public. There were five of them, all men, each held in a small cage, each cage suspended by a chain on a pole, holding it only a few feet off the ground. Guards, much like the guards who had arrested me, were sticking the points of their long spears through the bars, piercing the flesh of the men within. The men shrieked in agony, helpless to avoid being punctured and shredded. The guards chose their spots with care, keeping the victims alive as long as they could. They were laughing as they worked. And the spectators were cheering them on with wild fervor, their peasant faces contorted with glee and rage. They were shouting “Traitor! Traitor!” They were shouting “Give it to them!” and “Make it last!” It was like a sporting event in a madhouse.
I slowed down to watch. A woman passed by me. She was large, grimy faced. Carrying a basket of laundry in her hands. She seemed to have paused on her way somewhere. She was watching the torture too—watching and snickering through a toothless grin.
“What did they do?” I asked her.
“These?” she said in a hoarse crow’s caw of a voice. “They’re the latest to betray the revolution, that’s what. They plotted to bring back the queen.”
The queen. Elinda. I remembered her name from my computer’s character list and from the testimony against me at the trial. Lady Kata, the woman I was accused of murdering, had been her lady-in-waiting. So had Lady Betheray, the raven-haired beauty who had testified against me.
“These are the latest, you said?” I asked the laundrywoman.
She nodded. “These are the latest—and those are the last.” She gestured with her basket toward the bonfire.
I looked. I had only noticed the burning pile of wood before, but now I saw that, mingled with the logs and boards, there were bones, human bones—limbs and hips and grinning skulls—some with a last coating of boiling flesh just now bubbling away. That explained the awful smoke, the awful smell.
I grimaced and swallowed my gorge and turned my eyes away. As I did, I caught a glimpse of Maud on a ledge above me. She beckoned me urgently. I had to go.
I hurried out of the square, down another narrow street, and to a small mews not far away. The stables were lined up here, one after another. Blacksmiths working at their anvils and forges, grooms brushing down horses, stablers pitchforking hay. The smell of animal dung mingled with the more deathly, more dreadful smell from the bonfire back in the plaza.
I hesitated. Several streets led out of the mews, and I didn’t know which one to take. I looked up at the rooftop, searching for my rodent friend. I didn’t see her. But even as I looked, I heard her whisper to me over the clanging anvils and neighing horses.
“Psst. Over here.”
She was clinging to the corner of a small building just beside me, just head high. I moved to her.
“See that man over there?” she asked softly. She gestured across the mews with her weirdly human face. I followed the gesture.
Across the way, there stood a big man—a blacksmith, well over six feet tall, broad in the chest, domed at the belly, and muscular in his shoulders and arms. He had a great black beard and bright eyes and a few loose strands of black hair across his bulbous head. He wore a leather apron over his robe and held an iron pair of tongs in one hand and a hammer in the other. He was holding a piece of iron in the tongs, turning it in the bright orange fire of a forge, watching it as it started to glow red.
“I see him,” I said softly.
“He’s our contact. Go over to him,” Maud whispered. “Say to him, ‘I go my way.’”
“I go my way,” I repeated. “Is it code?”
“It means we are with the queen.”
“Right, we’re with … Wait, what?”
Annoyed, Maud began to repeat it slowly, like I was an idiot. “We are with—”
“Yeah, no, I heard you. But isn’t that why they were killing those people back there? For supporting the queen?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And we’re with them?”
“Of course we’re with them,” said the squirrel-girl. “Look around you. This was a great city before the revolution.”
“I’m sure it was but—”
“But what?” she snapped.
“I’m already wanted for murder.”
“Then you have nothing to lose.”
“Ha ha,” I said. But I guess she had a point at that. I sighed. “All right.”
“And keep it quiet. Don’t let anyone hear you. The council has spies everywhere.”
“Great.”
Looking at the scene all around me—as if I could somehow spot the spies among the mews workers—I crossed over to the blacksmith. He had begun hammering the hot iron now, shaping a shoe. The ringing blows were loud, too loud to speak over. I stood close, waiting for him to take a break.
He was in the midst of lifting his hammer into the air when he noticed me.
“What the hell are you looking at?” he said. His voice was guttural and ferocious.
I began to whisper, “I go my …”
“What?”
“I go …”
“Speak up. I can’t hear you! What the hell’s wrong with you?”
I looked around the mews. Either everyone was listening to me while pretending to go about their business or I was imagining it. Probably I was imagining it. I tried again, leaning as close to the blacksmith as I thought I could without him bringing that h
ammer down on my head.
“I go my way,” I said.
The blacksmith just stared at me ferociously.
I dropped my voice even lower. “It means I’m …”
“What?”
I leaned even closer, spoke even lower. “I’m with the queen. I go my way.”
Still, the blacksmith didn’t react. He just stood there, just glared at me, his hammer lifted. I thought for sure he was about to raise an alarm. I could already see myself locked up in one of those cages in the plaza. I could already feel the spears going into me, gouging and shredding my flesh.
But no. Now, without a word, the blacksmith simply lay his iron and tongs and hammer down on the anvil. Without a word, he turned and walked into the stable just behind him.
Standing alone now, I looked around me at the mews, at the other smiths and the stablers and the grooms working away on the horses. No one seemed to be looking back at me, but I felt they were. I felt they were all stealing secret glances my way, getting ready to call for my arrest.
A few endless moments went by. Then the blacksmith came back out of the stable. He was leading a sleek, black stallion, already saddled and reined.
It was a magnificent beast. I’d ridden horses before, but they were tamed ranch horses rented for an afternoon on some family summer vacation or other. They were nothing like this. The glistening stallion snorted and tugged at its reins. Its hooves danced restlessly on the cobbles, kicking up dust. The blacksmith handed the reins to me. I stared at them. I looked up at the horse. The horse whinnied. It threw its head this way and that, its white eyes rolling.
The blacksmith leaned close to my ear, so close I felt his hot breath on me. “Let wisdom reign,” he murmured low. His eyes were filled with hot passion. When I drew back and looked at him, he nodded gravely as if to confirm that we were brothers in a great cause.
Well, what could I do? I nodded back in the same manner, trying to look like I knew what the hell was going on. Then—there seemed no choice—I mounted the stallion. I tried to do it all in one swift motion—you know, to catch the royalist fervor of the moment by heroically swinging into the saddle and dashing away. Let wisdom reign. Giddyap! In fact, the best I could do was claw and scramble and climb inelegantly into the seat, my face pressed stupidly into the stallion’s mane. Finally, I worked myself upright, holding the reins in my hand and trying to look as much as possible like an equestrian statue.
Then I nearly fell on my head as the horse took off.
It moved as if it knew the way. Stepping high and lively, it cantered to the edge of the mews, then pulled up short, tossing its head. There was a shocking streak of gray-brown something, so near my face it almost toppled me backward. Maud. The rodent-woman had leapt from the wall and now landed expertly on the pommel. As if this was what it had been waiting for, the stallion trotted away.
We rode through the streets. The peasants grudgingly stepped aside to let us pass. I tried to sit straight and look authoritative, as if I were guiding the beast, but it really did seem to know where it was going. Whenever it hesitated, Maud whispered in its ear, and on we went again.
We trotted down one street, then another, then another. Then I looked up and there, ahead of us, were the gates of the city.
My insides twisted, instantly tense. I could see this wasn’t going to be easy. There were high stone walls, two high, arched iron gates, and guards with swords and spears posted all along the ground and up on the battlements. The gates were open, and a steady flow of people, vehicles, and beasts were passing in and out of town under the guards’ watchful eyes. Merchants with carts piled high with jugs and boxes, pilgrims with sacks on their backs and staffs in hand, peasants on foot and knights on horseback, and farmhands, men and women both, dusty from the road with their sheep and cows trudging along beside them.
With Maud whispering in its ear, the stallion took its place in the flow of people heading toward the exit. With every step that brought us closer to those guards, my guts twisted tighter. Did they know I’d escaped? Were they watching for us? Waiting for us, ready to spring a trap?
When we were only a few yards away from the gate, Maud pulled back from the stallion’s ear and turned to me. Close-up like this, it was creepy and even a bit disgusting to see her woman’s face protruding from her ratlike head.
“Try not to act like such a fugitive,” she said.
Then, without waiting for my answer, she leapt off the saddle.
“Wait, where …?” I started to say—but she had already disappeared into the dust around the feet of the pedestrians. And of course I understood: if the guards were looking for me, a man traveling with a mutant rat would be hard to miss.
All the same, with Maud gone, I felt very alone and uncertain. My horse and I moved closer and closer to the gate and to the guards. I tried to calculate how long it would’ve taken the executioner to get out of the sewer and raise the alarm, how long for the guards to bring word down to the gate, how long it had taken me to travel out of the sewer and through the town. But it was no good. I’d lost all sense of time amidst the danger and confusion. I had no way of knowing whether the guards at the gate were ready for me or not.
The crowd of jostling people and carts and animals moved along, and I moved with it, closer and closer to the exit, closer and closer to the sharp, scanning gazes of the guards. No one said anything. The dust of travel swirled around me. I tried to focus my mind as I had below ground. Now the gate was right in front of me. Now the arch was over my head. Now I was passing out of the city.
And before I fully realized what had happened, I felt the gun pressed into the base of my neck. I looked up, startled, into the rearview mirror and saw the feline face of the androgyne assassin.
“Drive,” he said.
I HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN ALL THIS. THE KITTEN-faced killer in the back seat of my Nissan. The author, Sean Gunther, in his house, on the floor of his living room, dead, shot dead. All this inexplicable madness had been swept from my consciousness by the inexplicable madness back in Galiana: the guard and the executioner after me, the Shit Monster hunting me from the gutters, the work of keeping the lights of the protective fairies bright …
I felt a wave of hysteria pass over me. It wasn’t the gun—the gun that had killed Gunther—ready to fire into the base of my brain. It wasn’t just the gun, anyway. It was everything. The whole lunatic situation. The lunatic thoughts in my own head. Shit Monster! Fairy lights! Galiana! Christ, it had all seemed so real just two seconds ago. It had felt real, even smelled real. The death of the guard, watching the guard destroyed as his screams were smothered in his throat by sewage. It had seemed totally real at the time.
But now—now all at once—it seemed like it must’ve been a dream, some sort of elaborate subconscious psychological metaphor for who the hell knows what. This—the killer, the corpse in the house, the gun at my neck—this was real. And yet this also seemed impossible, a nightmare.
“Don’t make me say things twice, baby boy,” Kitten Face said, tapping the back of my head with the gun barrel. “Get going. Follow the ’Stang.”
The Mustang. Right. Billiard Ball, the shaven-headed thug, was in the black Mustang just in front of me. The car was just now pulling away from the curb, speeding off with a screech of tires. I got the Nissan going and shot after him, following his red taillights through the darkness.
I drove in silence at first. I was trying to reorient myself, to reassemble what was happening here in LA. I tried to remember: my talk with Sean Gunther. Another Kingdom. Ellen Evermore. Her picture in his phone. It came back to me. She had read my script. She had wanted me to read her book, and then she had withdrawn it. Why? Global. That’s all Gunther had been able to tell me before he passed out. That was his last word to me on the subject before his brutally casual murder.
All these thoughts were vague and tangled, mixed up with other thoughts, flashbacks of my escape from the dungeon and my journey through Eastrim to the gate. I felt a sense o
f regret. I wished I could have used my time in that other world to give some thought to this one. Maybe I could have come up with a plan of escape or figured out a way to smuggle a weapon from that dimension into the here and now.
But how could I have? I’d been so desperate just to stay alive. Just to get out from below ground without being devoured by the Sewage Creature from Hell. There had simply been no time to think about anything else. So here I was, a prisoner again, helpless again, under threat of death again.
I glanced up in the rearview mirror. Kitten Face saw me and pursed his lips to send me a taunting little kiss. Mwah. Oh yeah, I remembered that too. His campy bullying and how it got under my skin.
We traveled through the Hollywood Hills in purple darkness, on winding roads between trees made silhouettes by deep night. Now and then, I stole a glimpse at the killer in the rearview. He was barely paying attention. He looked bored. He looked as relaxed and indifferent as he had when he flicked his wrist to snuff out Sean Gunther.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
With an off-handed gesture, he thwacked me on the back of the head, hard enough to make me grunt. “Ow!”
“You didn’t ask Mama’s permission to speak,” he said. And he gave me a pout, as if this was all just some sort of flirty game between us. What a psycho.
We came down onto level ground and cruised over to Sunset Boulevard. The late traffic on the strip was thinning. The Mustang up ahead of me passed smoothly under billboards and neon marquees. The colored lights played over my windshield as I followed. We headed toward Beverly Hills.
I tried to think. What should I do? My eyes scanned the scene outside. What if I saw a cop? Could I honk the horn and try to get his attention? Could I leap out at the next red light and run for it?
But that gun. The killer’s gun. I remembered how it had held me frozen back at Gunther’s house, how I’d stood there paralyzed by it while Kitten Face tormented me. I hadn’t had the courage to make a play then, and I doubted I had it now.
I wished I had my fairy bodyguards swirling around me. I wished all I had to do was focus my mind and have their lights glow and protect me. But that world was worlds away in who knew what fantastic territory of my obviously broken brain. The best I could do here was try to concentrate as I had back there, try to focus through my fear and clear my mind.
Another Kingdom Page 12
