The gas was getting thinner.
Brian was there on his knees, next to a broken wall, whooping with the effort of drawing a breath. His hand was on his chest.
Gregory crawled toward him. He stooped and finally rose. He gagged.
“You okay?” he asked.
Brian nodded, his eyes bright red.
“I got this,” Gregory said between wheezes. He held up the gadget he’d pulled off the assassin’s head. He turned his head and coughed so hard his whole body spasmed.
Gwynyfer was sitting several feet away on the remains of a windowsill. She smiled, waved, and said, “Hey-ho.”
Gregory stared at her.
A voice in his hand said, “Have you killed them?”
Gregory looked at the gadget in his hand. It was an old headset.
The voice asked, “Are they dead?”
He held the speaker up to his ear. Its sound was too metallic and distant for Gregory to be able to tell whether he knew the voice or not.
“No,” he answered, speaking into the little horn on the mouthpiece. “We’re not dead. We’re angry.”
“Who is this?”
“You tell me first.”
“This headset is not your property.”
“I’m sorry,” said Gregory. “Your gas didn’t kill us. It’s no worse than my dog’s.”
There was a click, and the headset went dead.
Gregory shambled over the rest of the rubble to where Gwynyfer sat, looking as if she were perched on a split-rail fence in a field of wildflowers.
He couldn’t believe she would just sit there and watch the two of them almost die of suffocation.
“What are you doing?” Gregory asked her.
“Oh … The haze adds such a very splendid golden tinge to evening’s blue.”
When Brian and Gregory lay in their bunks, high up in the palace’s rambling, rickety corridors, Gregory said, “So who do you think attacked us?”
“I don’t know,” said Brian. “There are two reasons that I can see for someone attacking us.”
“My charm, your shoes?”
“Yeah. Right. Okay, first. First, it could be someone working for the Thusser. If they can hear everything that’s going on in the throne room because of Dr. Brundish’s device, then they know that we’ve been trying to get the Imperial Council to wake up the Rules Keepers and get the Thusser expelled from Old Norumbega.”
“All right.”
“Two: It could be Lord Dainsplint or someone working for him. He would want us dead before tomorrow so we couldn’t help the Earl of Munderplast question him about where he was on the night of the murder. We’re the ones who heard him lie about his alibi.”
“And three.”
“What’s three?”
“People here think you’re in league with the Thusser.”
Brian shifted angrily in his cot. “How could they think that?”
“Because you keep mentioning the Thusser.”
“But that’s stupid! I keep mentioning them because we hate them.”
“Well, I’m just telling you that everyone in that ballroom thought you were in league with the Thusser before you got out of there.”
Brian sat grimly in the dark. Finally, he said, “And you didn’t help much.”
Gregory was genuinely taken aback. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t say anything! You just stepped back into the crowd when they accused me.”
“What did you want me to do? Get burned at the stake along with you?”
“You could have said something. Or Gwynyfer could’ve.”
Gregory turned onto his side. He buried his head in his pillow. “It was embarrassing,” he said. “Everyone was staring at us.”
Brian didn’t say any more. He closed his eyes and thought furious thoughts about how Gregory hadn’t really stood up for him.
It took a long time for both of them to get to sleep.
Out in the darkness of the Dry Heart, the Mannequin Resistance inserted keys into one anothers’ backs and wound each other up, so that they were ready for battle. They stared at a city that they did not truly see, a place of lights and spires and grand walls buckled with gatehouses. They stared through the night at the fairy lights and considered how best to apologize for the damage they were about to do.
Deep within the gut, on endless seas of digestive sludge, men in dark overcoats trawled through the vast expanses in aluminum motorboats. Their faces were blue in the dim illumination of the veins above. Behind them slid large rafts, pulled by ranks and ranks of the seven-legged beasts of burden. On the rafts sat the Thusser army, hunched with their knees under their chins, their eyes open, their mouths frowning.
They sought the city of New Norumbega.
In Gerenford, Vermont, at the edge of a wood, time quivered. Within Rumbling Elk Haven, time sped. Though only a week had passed in the outside world since Brian and Gregory had walked the softly curving streets and young lawns, within the suburb months had passed. Houses had ballooned into fibrous Thusser nests. Their skin of clapboards and brick had stripped away or turned wet and oozing, and now their supporting beams and studs were wound around with cotton-candy insulation and shuddering walls of some alien wrap. Some of the houses were now on stilts, or sprawled across lawns infested with creatures that had scuttled from the Thusser’s own world.
It was night there, too, and the streets were thronged with Thusser settlers greeting each other easily, helping the new folks move in. They stepped aside reverently for the military units that marched past, headed for the borders with the human world. Tanks on twenty or thirty armored legs rumbled past. A metal ship hung in the air. Construction equipment rumbled through ditches.
In each house, embedded in the walls or in the floor, hung humans, lost in folds of architecture like the wad of meat in a fried wonton. They dreamed uneasily, and the Thusser stalked their sleep. Curled up in their nests, slumbering themselves, the Thusser ate human dream, sucking gently at the imagination’s teat.
In one of the houses, in a master chef kitchen that was warping into something inhuman, Prudence stared out of a wall. Across from her, Wee Sniggleping stared back. Their faces were terrified and frozen. They did not blink. The stove buckled and grew tendrils. The marble counter-tops sagged like hot Saran wrap. The room gradually shifted toward something that would cook the meals of the invader.
But the two faces did not shift at all. Their look of horror and shock never ceased.
Now, in the wood that marked off Thusser time from human, sudden jolts of movement burst through the trees. An army sped up, flowed to the barrier. The army stepped through into slower, human time.
There were hundreds of Thusser, wearing their long dark coats. They looked around outside their suburb. They growled reports into speaking-trumpets attached to backpacks. They listened for answers. They began to march.
Some marched along paved roads. Others followed dirt roads through the woods. They were followed by trains of construction equipment — bulldozers that blazed new paths as they rumbled forward.
One detachment reached a house — a double-wide trailer — with a little garden beside it. Among the flowers and vegetables stood cartoon rabbits and deer cut out of plywood.
A Thusser approached the house and knocked on the screen door.
A woman answered. “Yeah. Can I help you?” she said, not opening her door all the way.
“Humanite,” said the Thusser, “be alerted that Rumbling Elk Haven has claimed your house and your land. We shall commence settling here.”
“Ha!” said the woman. “Under what law’s that?”
“We no longer require zoning laws, deeds, or permits. Please yield to me.”
“You and what army?”
The Thusser smiled briefly. He stepped aside and gestured backward.
The woman looked out into the dark forest.
There she saw them, waiting in rows, glowering at her.
She was about to slam th
e door shut when the Thusser on her stoop thrust it open with his palm. The chain ripped off its fastening.
He stepped in.
She screamed.
For a long time, it was silent in the double-wide.
Then the Thusser commander stepped out. He beckoned to his Horde.
By the dawn, the little trailer home was surrounded by freshly dug cellar holes.
The woman, breathing raggedly, sat in a chair, her eyes vacant, a thick, goopy strand connecting the back of her head with the wall.
Through the night, the Thusser dominion was spreading.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Today, thought Brian as he got up. If we don’t figure out who killed the Regent and tried to kill us, we need to give up and get out of here today. We need to find out as much as we can about the way to call the Rules Keepers, and we need to leave the city. We need to go out and find that bishop who’s living out in the Wildwood and forget the Court and the assassin and all of these horrible people.
That was what he thought as he got up, but after breakfast, he found himself sitting on the palace’s great balcony with Gwynyfer and Gregory, watching an assault on the mannequins.
The Court was supposedly sending ambassadorial carts out of the city to speak with General Malark. In fact, these were the same carts that had met Dantsig several days before — carts fitted out with magnets strong enough to drive mannequins crazy and erase their memories forever.
“This is wrong,” said Brian. “This is awful. You just need to leave them alone. You need to agree to let them live in their own territory. They just want to stay down in the gut.” The carts rolled out along the main avenue. People watched from their roofs. “I don’t want to be here,” he said. “I can’t watch this.”
“I don’t want to be here, either,” said Gwynyfer. “It’s frightfully hot out and I’m worried I’ll burn.” She rubbed her arms. She said to Gregory, “When they’ve been destroyed and the Fest has happened, we should all go away to my family’s beach place out in the Organelles. You’d adore the Organelles. Everyone does. They have these crabbish things you can catch and roast, and the fluid is blue and warm…. Can you stay after the Fest?”
Brian watched Gregory sharply. Gregory looked at Brian, guilty, and said, “That would be great.”
“But we can’t,” Brian interrupted.
“You’ve stayed here for days,” said Gwynyfer. “Surely you’re not in such a hurry.”
“It looks like Thusser spies were responsible for the assassination,” said Brian. “Once we prove it for sure, I think the Court will be much more interested in helping us defeat them.”
“In-terested,” Gwynyfer sighed. ”In-terested. It takes a lot to interest us.” She sagged in her deck chair.
The magnetic carts had pulled out of the city limits and were trundling across the desert. Brian watched them with anxiety.
Those poor automatons, Brian thought to himself. When they reach the carts, the magnets will be switched on, and all the robots for an acre around will die.
He couldn’t take it. He stood up. He wanted to scream.
Gregory did not seem bothered. He looked a little nervous, but he was still reclined in a chair, drinking his orange juice out of a champagne glass.
Brian moved to the railing. It didn’t help. He still wanted to yell warnings. He moved toward the door, as if he could bolt through the palace, down through the streets, and make it to the plains in time.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the automaton delegation had stopped, standing in formation, surrounded by guards. The carts were still approaching.
Brian raised his hand. Courtiers lounging on the deck turned to glare at him.
Out in the granular sands, on the carts, Norumbegan soldiers prepared the magnets. They wore nothing metal. Knights sat in the carts, smirking, looking forward to the devastation they would shortly cause — the bodies crumpling, the active brains scrambling, these upstart machines with their dream of life torn from them, seeing the pitiless truth of Imperial dominance as they died.
The soldiers prepared switches.
“Not till we’re close enough,” said the knight in the seat of command. He looked out at the delegation. They stood, waiting for the carts to approach. “Junk-heap heroes,” he muttered. “Come get death.”
He raised one hand in greeting. He put the other hand on the toggle switch that would switch on the electromagnets.
And then he heard a whistling in the air.
On the palace balcony, far above, the Court lazily watched the carts approach the mechanical enemy.
“Any minute now,” said Gwynyfer, leaning forward. “You’ll see them fall apart. They’ll drop to the ground and bump up and down like dying ants.” She smiled and interlaced her fingers, straining to see.
But instead, the Court watched as cannons spewed bombs toward the carts. They watched as the first bombs struck — and the desert spewed up smoke and flame.
Soldiers rushed from the wreckage, tiny, fleeing.
“How did they know?” The Duke of the Globular Colon muttered near Brian. “How did they know it was a trap?”
The Mannequin Resistance rushed past the flaming wreckage of the ceremonial carts. They quickly surrounded the soldiers. The action was tiny, indistinct. Smoke still rose through the morning air.
And Brian had an idea. He knew exactly how the Mannequin Resistance had known the carts were a trap: They’d had the throne room bugged. The listening device that Gregory had found must have belonged to the mannequins.
It all made sense to him now. That was what Dantsig was doing, the night of the murder. When he got the guard’s uniform, he’d snuck into the palace to plant the bug. He’d crept into the throne room, stuck it to the wall, and slipped out.
He hadn’t been in the palace to murder the Regent. He’d been in the palace so that the Mannequin Resistance would be informed of all of the Imperial Council’s decisions and deliberations.
The bug was moved, now — in Gregory’s pocket. General Malark might be hearing everything that was said near Gregory, if the sound wasn’t muffled by jeans.
If there were two listening devices picking up sound in the Grand Hall, the other must be carried by the Thusser agent — the member of the Imperial Council who was probably the murderer.
Brian had faith that he and Gregory would figure it all out. Once Lord Dainsplint had been confronted, and Gugs had admitted he hadn’t been playing cards with Chigger at midnight … then things would be clearer.
The answer was almost within their grasp.
The boy supported himself on the railing, stunned with this wave of realizations. He was sure he was right. He looked out at the triumphant mannequins leading their captives back toward their lines. He couldn’t help but feel triumphant, too.
“Okay, boring,” said Gwynyfer, rising. “Let’s go play shuffleboard for a minute before I have to pop along and dress for the funeral.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
A round lunchtime, the Court held the second state funeral Brian and Gregory had attended since they’d come to the city of the Norumbegans. It was in memory of Sir Pleckory Dither, the knight who’d been killed in the first mannequin bombing attack on the palace. Once again, the streets were thronged with people. Once again, vendors sold roast chestnuts and scoops of icy gelato. They sold balloons painted with faces like corpses.
Gregory and Brian stood near the Earl of Munderplast in a crowd of aristocrats as the parade began. Once again, the nobility of Norumbega were dressed in top hats and the face paint of mourning.
“After the requiem,” said Munderplast, “I shall hold parley with Lord Dainsplint. I have no doubt that we shall discover he has been involved in something dastardly which shall add quite satisfactorily to my dismal opinion of what we’ve all become.”
Brian said, “You could maybe search him, or get that wizard investigator, Thoth-Chumley, to search him. I think whoever is guilty of the murder might be wearing a secret transmitt
er that broadcasts everything to the Thusser. The Thusser are in communication with at least one person in the capital.”
“And we think it’s someone in the Imperial Council,” Gregory said. “Whoever’s responsible for the assassination must have one of those rings.” He pointed at the signet ring on Lord Munderplast’s finger. “He sealed a command to one of the servants with the Imperial mark on the day that the Regent was killed.”
Munderplast held up his own ring and inspected it. “It’s terribly exciting. One feels almost refreshed.” He thought for a moment. “No,” he corrected. “Not refreshed. But as if a new and more vigorous strain of rot and decay had taken over this old body.” He smiled faintly and patted his own belly.
The Imperial band went past at the head of the parade. Behind them came dancers dressed as animals.
Gugs appeared at Munderplast’s side. “I say,” he said, “quite a ruckus.”
Brian still couldn’t believe that the Norumbegans were confronting an enemy army and attending the funeral of one of their own knights, and could only say things like “What a ruckus.” Now he understood why, at the last funeral, Lord Dainsplint had talked about pinning the murder to Dantsig, whether Dantsig was guilty or not. Now Brian hoped it could just be proved easily that Dainsplint himself was guilty. Then Brian and Gregory could point the finger, get their mechanical friends revived, find a way out of this mess of a city, leave Dantsig with the invading host, and head into the hills to find the hermit.
A band of musicians playing weird, wailing pipes walked past. A bagpipe with innumerable little horns was slumped on the shoulders of three men, all of whom blew and pumped its bellows.
Then came a choir, screeching a song in a high-pitched, unnatural voice, saying, “Alas! He has passed! He is out of the Great Body now! He is lost! He is tossed! He is …” They were gone down the street.
And then came the dancing girls, Gwynyfer among them.
She whirled along, doing the old dances of her people. Her eyes were sly and thin. This time, when Gregory waved, she nodded to him quickly before spinning by.
Empire of Gut and Bone Page 18
