by Lionel Fenn
The Wamchu stood in the middle of the road and threw knives. Lots of knives, four of which landed in the skulls of his own men, two of which creased the thighs of the greenman and the lad, and one of which glanced off the bat and buried itself in a nearby tree, which instantly shriveled like a pricked balloon.
The clash of steel, the groans of injury, the shrieks of the dying, all were absent from this skirmish, since those who were wounded died without a sound, and those who were not wounded were wounded so slightly that in the heat of the moment they were able to clench their teeth against the pain and fight on.
At the death of the seventh Moglar, from a well-aimed rock dropped from Tuesday's beak from a height guaranteed to exhaust her before she could make it to the Wamchu, who was her primary target, the two remaining giant dwarves recalculated their positions vis-à-vis old age, and ran up the slope, thinking they had a better chance in the main war on the other side.
Gideon lowered his bat and gulped for air.
Red found another blue shrub, much larger than the first one.
Tag and Lain bound each other's thighs while Tuesday crooned soothingly to take their minds off their agony.
"Well?" Gideon said.
The Wamchu fussed with his hair, searched his cloak and blouse for more weapons, and smiled. "You think you have defeated me, hero?"
"No."
"You think you have me now, at your mercy?"
"No."
Lu glanced at the slope, then looked across the plain and laughed—loudly, and long, and shook a fist at his adversary. "You are a fool, Gideon! This is only a temporary setback, and I shall return with enough stout men to crush you into the ground!"
Gideon imagined he could do just that. "What about Agnes?"
"Agnes," the man sneered, "can take her Day, and shove it where it'll—"
He never finished.
One moment the Wamchu was standing in the middle of the road, and the next the road had opened a perfectly circular hole beneath him. He had only time enough to yelp before he dropped, straight down, and the hole closed over him.
It was as if, Gideon thought, he had never been.
"Wow," he said.
"Agnes," said Lain.
"Trouble," said Tag.
"Now what?" asked Tuesday.
"There," said Gideon, and pointed his bat to the northeast.
Tuesday stared in the direction he indicated, stared at her brother, then took wing and flew as high as she could without getting dizzy. When she returned, she waddled up to him and slapped him a good one on the calf.
"How did you do that?" she said.
He pointed again.
She slapped him again. "No. I mean, how did you know there was a city over there?"
Gideon knelt beside her and put a brotherly hand on her neck. "Because," he said, "Lu didn't bring us out of the Shashhag at any old place along the line. He said there was a door, remember? And on the other side of that door was this trail, this road, and that was no accident.
"He also said that he was taking us to Thazbinn, and it had to be along here somewhere."
"You figured that out all by yourself?" she said.
He smiled and kissed her pate. "I am the hero, after all," he told her.
"So, hero," she said, "how do you know Agnes won't open a hole under us, too?"
He stood angrily and marched off, wondering why it was that whenever he came up with a decent idea, coupled none too closely with a bit of luck, someone always had to come up with a question he couldn't answer. Why the hell couldn't they just let it be, just once, and let him revel for a few minutes in his own internal glow of satisfaction.
"Well, Giddy?" she shouted after him.
"I don't know, okay?" he called back. And stopped, turned, and said, "And for the last time, would you please stop calling me—"
All right, he thought; all right, who's the wise guy?
The road was empty.
Everyone was gone.
And so, when he looked down, was the ground beneath him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It wasn't the first time Gideon had noticed the Wamchu family's penchant for using chutes when a simple "come with me, please" would have done. As it was, this was better than most—the slope was gentle enough to prevent him from feeling as if he were falling, the metal of which it was constructed was friction-free enough to keep his jeans from burning through at the seat, and though the tunnel through which he passed wasn't much more than an elongated blur, he also caught glimpses of some rather impressive murals the subjects of which seemed to concentrate on various degrees of disorder and disruption among civilian populations of cities burning down around their heads.
At one point there was an intersection with a route to his left, but it came upon him too rapidly for him to do anything but make a futile grab for the edge of the wall, yanking his hand back just in time when he realized that grabbing the edge would have neatly amputated his fingers, and a good portion of his palm if the grip had been a strong one.
He felt himself in no immediate danger.
The ride was almost completely silent.
And for the time being, he was at least free of those horrid battle sounds, which, muffled though they were by the Scarred Mountains being between him and the action, were haunting enough when he considered the lives being lost.
Another intersection, just as the chute banked to the right, and as he passed it he heard Tuesday singing.
Making the best of it, he supposed, and pulled in his arms as the tunnel began to narrow, the chute's angle decreased and rose, and he found himself sweeping upward and to the left.
Another twist and turn, and another intersecting tunnel gave him a winking glimpse of Red on his back, legs in the air, and Tag sitting astride his belly, holding onto his forepaws and using them to steer.
If I see a white rabbit, he thought, I will give myself a medal for not screaming.
Down again.
Up again.
The friction-free surface showed signs of wearing out, as did the seams and cheeks of his jeans.
He attempted to dig in the heels of his boots, but nothing happened; he tried the baseball bat, but all that did was make the metal walls resound like an off-key gong; and finally he tried leaning back and enjoying the trip, except that he had a terrible suspicion of what lay at its end, and he wasn't exactly sure he knew how to get out of it.
Suddenly, as he was thinking that there might be something in Whale's pouch to aid him, the chute straightened, the tunnel ceiling vanishing upward, and he saw some yards away a large room approaching at a speed deceptive by its slow progress toward him, or he toward it.
After the relative darkness of the tunnel, the light in the room was blinding, and he covered his eyes, braced himself, and managed only a few mild obscenities and a groan before he was shot out of the tunnel mouth, into the air, across the room, and onto a tall pile of multicolored, thick cushions, another one of the Wamchus' odd little touches for their prisoners.
He bounced, slid, scrambled, and managed to reach the floor on his feet—a little wobbly, but ready for anything.
And ready he was to get out of the way when Red and Tag flew over his head, followed swiftly by Tuesday, who was frantically trying to conquer the unusual skill of flying backward, and Lain in a shower of tipless arrows that had come loose from their quiver.
He made no move to untangle them from the pillows. Once he was assured they were uninjured—mainly by listening for signs of pain amid their varying exclamations and curses—he examined the room more closely.
Fifty feet on a side, he estimated, its floor covered by a massive, thick, shaggy carpet a uniform and comfortable brown, its walls save where the chute ended unbroken by openings of any sort, and unrelieved by tapestries or paintings or the pathetic scrawls of previous incarcerants. In fact, aside from the pillows and the carpet, there was nothing in the room at all. And though there was plenty of light, he could find no source.
He wondered, then, where the Wamchu was, if he had been here and had been taken away, or if he'd been routed to yet another place.
Then Red, needing a good long brushing to get the chute-blown tangles out of his hair, came up to him and lowered his head so that they exchanged meaningful glances. The lorra was panting, and his eyes, though no longer black, were a definite temperamental grey. Gideon stroked his neck, tugged playfully at the beard, and patted the animal's muzzle until the lorra had calmed. Once done, they began a systematic search of the walls, which, Gideon noted, were made of an odd sort of brown-gold wood that did not seem to have any grain at all.
Tuesday flew to the ceiling, hovered, darted, hovered again, and returned to report failure. "This place is like a damned prison, Gideon," she complained.
"Well, what the hell did you expect?"
"A steak. The condemned duck is supposed to get a steak before it's executed."
Lain, trailing behind them and double-checking the solid virtue of the walls, raised an eyebrow. "My dear, what makes you think we're going to be executed?"
"Stands to reason," she said.
"Oh."
"We could always get out," Tag called to them from just to the right of the pillows.
"Of course we could," Gideon said, laying on the sarcasm to be sure the boy wasn't disillusioned. "If you find the door, open it, and we'll just walk out, okay?"
"Sure," said Tag, and opened the door.
—|—
Gideon was in an alley narrow and choked with piles of neatly stacked garbage crawling with the largest and most well-fed calico rats Gideon had ever seen in his life. The feeding rodents had ignored him when he slipped out of the room, froze when Red appeared, and ran like hell when Tuesday flapped out to land on the lorra's shoulder.
"Incredible," Gideon said.
"Thazbinn," said Lain, looking up at the sky. "Also, close to sunset."
The buildings were of stone carved into the size and shape of irregular bricks, and the few windows overlooking the alley were too high for them to see into, even if they could have seen through the shutters that were closed and locked over them. In the distance they could hear the unmistakable clamor of pedestrian traffic, market sellers, gongs, whistles, horns, and the infrequent crack of an impatient whip.
For a moment they were undecided about the direction. Whatever was to their left was hidden because of a sharp turn the alley took, and what they could see to their right was little more than a glimpse of passing movement through the intricate network of garbage mounds. Lain and Tag professed never to have been here in their lives, Red was no help, and Tuesday refused to fly in any direction to scout for possible escape.
"Damn," Gideon said. "We can't stay here all night, you know. She's bound to find out we're gone, and I am not waiting around to see what she'll do when she does."
"I have a fairly decent idea," Lain said.
Gideon, in order not to hear it, struck out to his right, weaving through the intricacies of garbage-maze suballeys until he crouched behind an imposing cone of orange peels and peeked around it.
"Looks to be a main street," he said to Lain, who was rummaging through the mounds for discarded arrow tips. "We could lose ourselves in that mess and she'd never find us."
The greenman looked doubtful, both at the idea and the V-shaped walnut he'd found in a discarded pair of socks. "We are not citizens," he reminded him. "We may be spotted all too easily."
"But if we hurry," Gideon said, "we might be able to find out where the palace or mayor's house is, and that's probably where Agnes is, and that's probably where Ivy is."
Lain considered it, but gave no encouragement. "She might be in the prison, have you thought of that?"
"But that's where we just were, weren't we?"
Lain shrugged.
Jesus, Gideon thought, and broached the suggestion to Tag, who was pawing through the garbage for something to eat since, he reminded them all, they hadn't had a bite since they'd started out that morning.
"Forget your stomach for a minute!" he snapped. "Just tell me whether or not you're going with me, for god's sake."
"I think it would be better if we stormed them, you know? Really scare them to death and panic them, and that way we wouldn't be any different from anyone else."
"Tag, you can't storm a city once you're inside it. The idea of storming is to get inside. We don't have to get inside. We're already inside. Storming—" He heard thunder, closed his eyes, opened them, and saw Red quickly devouring the main source of his cover.
"We go," he decided. And straightened. And began to walk toward the street. "Move it, children, before the bad guys come."
"Wouldn't it be quicker if we went over the rooftops?" Tag asked hopefully.
Gideon glared over his shoulder. "Sure. You find the stairs in these solid walls, and I'll follow you on my knees."
"Sure," said Tag, and pointed to the stairs.
—|—
Incredible, Gideon thought as he rushed up after the others and found himself on a wide rooftop that gave him a panoramic view of the entire city, or that part of it that wasn't hidden by a series of glittering white towers clustered in the city's center.
"What are they?" he asked the greenman.
Lain took off his cap, scratched his head, replaced the cap, and said, "They are the fabled towers of Thazbinn, if I have it right."
"No kidding. What do they do?"
"I wouldn't know. They're only fabled, not terribly useful. Look nice, don't you think?"
The wall around the roof was only waist-high, certainly low enough for him to shove the man over and later claim it was an accident. But he only smiled, and walked to the building's front, skirting a round stone structure that he assumed was the entrance to a stairwell leading down to the street, though a quick examination failed to uncover an entrance.
He leaned over, Tuesday poked her head over, and Red sat and refused to look.
The street two long stories below was wide and, now, massed with thousands of people moving purposefully in all directions. He could see shops, stalls, riders on things that looked like giraffes with their necks cut off, wagons, carts, riders on things that looked like lorras shaved to the bone, the rich, the poor, the hearty middle class, riders on things that looked like nothing he'd ever seen before and was sorry he was looking at now.
And every one of the people he saw—young, old, ugly, beautiful, fat, thin, well-nourished, starving—was carrying a weapon of some kind. A new weapon, or at least a weapon that was in remarkably good condition if it was an old one dug out of the attic for the occasion. They looked, in fact, as if they were preparing for an invasion, and the invaders were going to have a hell of a shock when they showed up.
He pulled away from the wall and looked around him. Most of the neighboring buildings were no taller than this, but they were separated by gaps that ranged from ten to twenty-five feet. Behind them was a street much like the one he'd just seen.
"I don't know," he said, dropping down to sit with his back against the wall. "I don't know. We're here, and it's where we've been trying to get all this time, and I don't know what to do next."
Ivy, he thought.
"We could wait," Lain said.
"For what?"
"For Agnes to make her next move."
"Oh sure." Then: "Oh shit."
He was dumb. He was stupid. How could he have thought that their escape from the chute room was a matter of extreme good fortune? Agnes was not, by any account, a dense and dim woman. She was up to something, and they had been permitted to go free. Permitted, and she was probably watching them right now, and laughing.
Tuesday made a swift waddle around the wall, and returned with her beak snapping. "Well, let's go, let's go, boys. If we stay here we'll never get this thing done. Four days, my dears, in case you've lost count. Tomorrow's three, and we can't afford to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves."
Lain frowned.
Gideon told him to p
ay her no mind, because she always got hyperactive just before a crisis crashed down on her head. It was, he explained, an instinct she had. A little uneven in its control, but useful on double dates.
Tag, meanwhile, had been examining the circular structure closely, hunting, Gideon imagined, for another one of his tricks—like an elevator or something.
"Hey," Tag said, waving at them frantically. "Hey, c'mon, I've found an elevator."
Gideon stood and grabbed Lain's arm desperately before the man could run off. "How does he do it, huh? I mean... how does he do it?"
"I don't know him well," the greenman said, "but I would suggest that he simply looks for the obvious. We, being sophisticated beings, tend to obscure things with the complex. Which may be a trifle facile, perhaps, but not terribly far off the mark, I shouldn't doubt."
Right, Gideon thought, and ran over to collar the boy before he disappeared down the hole he'd uncovered in the curving wall.
Gideon closed the door carefully.
"No," he said. "Not now."
"But why?" Tag protested. "This is our chance!"
"And that," Gideon said, pointing up, "is night. Night is dark. At night it's hard enough finding your way around the places you do know when there isn't any light."
And there was no light.
None from the shops, none from the empty streets, and barely enough from the moon and stars to let them see the ends of their respective noses and muzzle and beak.
"Tag," he said, "you don't know this place, I don't know this place, Lain doesn't know this place. Assuming there isn't anyone in this building who will kill us on sight because we are who we are, what happens if we get lost? If we get lost, we'll never find her, don't you understand?"
"Well..." The boy hit the wall with his palm. "Yeah, but we're already lost, so how can we get any loster?"
"Oh god, lobster," Tuesday wailed quietly. "Jesus, kill the little brat before I starve to death."
The argument continued until it was too dark to see, and though Gideon felt guilty about not immediately charging off to save Ivy, or fight Agnes, or discover the whereabouts of the Wamchu, he also knew that for a change he was right. They needed rest, and they needed food, and they needed a plan. To do anything else would be stupid, irresponsible, and a sure sign he was beginning to believe he really was a hero.
