by Lionel Fenn
It wasn't easy to fall into two traps at the same time.
He looked over his shoulder.
Ivy winked at him.
He turned.
Ivy sheathed her dagger and put her hands on her hips.
He held out his arms.
She stared at them, stared at him, and pointed to the open door across the way. "She's in there, Gideon."
"I figured that," he said. "But you're here, and for the moment, that's all that matters."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"I know I heard you, but I don't know what you're talking about."
He sighed gratefully, his arms lowered, and he leaned back against the alley wall, content for the time being just to know she was still alive, and in one rather decent piece.
"Gideon?"
"What I'm talking about," he said, "is coming all this way to get you free after those flying things took you away, that's what I'm talking about."
"But I got out," she said.
"I know you got out."
"So what are you doing here?"
He touched the bat in its holster, told it to stay where it was, he was in control no matter what it looked like, and smiled at her. "I came here to rescue you. You didn't need it, but I came anyway."
"Oh, I needed it," she said. "You just weren't here to do anything about it."
"But I was coming," he said, his voice rising.
"So's the Day, but that didn't help me." Then, before he could speak again, her eyes widened. "Oh! You mean, you came to rescue me, but I already got out so you don't have to rescue me after all, but it was the thought that mattered because you were on the way and couldn't know that I'd gotten out."
"Yeah," he said. "I guess."
"Y'know, that's really sweet."
"Sure," he said glumly, and turned his attention back to the open door.
"I mean, you did all that for me."
"Right," he muttered, standing when he thought he saw movement in the dark room beyond the open door.
"I suppose you want me to take my clothes off then, so you can get your reward."
He looked at her, at the blouse whose buttons she was toying with, and shook his head. "No."
"What?" Her eyes narrowed and her voice deepened. "What do you mean, no?"
"No," and he nodded his head toward the door.
"Well, Jesus, you sure are hard to please, Gideon Sunday. Do you have any idea how many times I've almost taken off my clothes for you? Do you have any idea what all that does to my self-respect, not to mention my self-esteem?"
"No," he said, and tried to wave her silent when he saw something white flash past the door.
"Well, it doesn't do it any good, I can tell you that," she grumbled. "And what's going on over there?"
"I don't know. What is that place?"
Ivy stood openly beside him. There was no sense attempting to hide because there was nothing to hide behind, and it was broad daylight so there was no sense trying to pretend they were part of the wall or something sneaky like that.
"It's the Thazbinn Monetary Disposal Center," she whispered, tickling his ear with the breath of her words. "It's where the people bring their taxes."
"Bring them? They bring them?"
"Of course. You think someone comes along and takes them from people?"
"I've heard of it, yes."
"What a quaint idea."
They waited, and a few seconds later they saw the white flash again, like a ghost pacing the room.
"Why is Agnes there?" he asked.
"Because she wants to be."
"No," he said, turning to look at her and blinking when he saw her eyes not more than two inches from his own. "I mean, what's so special about that place? Why didn't she choose one of the other towers?"
"There's nothing really special about it at all," she said, frowning. "Gideon, why are you wasting time asking me all these questions?"
Patience, he cautioned.
"Because I need to know before I go in there. If there's something special about it, I don't want to be surprised. I am not a great fan of surprises, especially in this place."
"Well, that makes sense."
"Thank you."
"But there's nothing special."
"Then why did she choose it?"
She took a disconcertingly deep breath. "Because, when you're Agnes Wamchu, you can pick any goddamned place you want, that's why. Jesus."
He nodded, and inched forward until he could check up and down the street. Which was empty. After which checking, he looked up at the finger-like projections at the tower's top. Which were clear of guards. After which checking, he looked behind him down the alley. Which was clear except for Red, Tag, and the duck. Who were trying to move quietly so not to alert anyone who didn't need alerting at this time, and at the same time trying not to startle either Gideon or Ivy into attacking them before they knew who it was who was moving up the alley toward them.
To accomplish this, Tuesday was whistling the theme from her last movie, very quietly.
Gideon held Ivy's arm and drew her back toward the group, waved them all hurriedly back to the next street, and pushed them around the corner. He did not scold them for leaving him on the rooftop to face Agnes on his own, and he did not ask them where they had been all this time while he was risking life and limb trying to find them, and Ivy, who didn't need finding, and only peripherally the Wamchu, who seemed to have temporarily dropped out of the picture.
What he said was, "We are going to rush the tower." And wondered where the hell he had gotten such a stupid idea, though it might not have been so stupid had he given it some thought.
"Why?" asked Tag, who was trying to explain to Ivy that he and the goat had been trying to rescue her when they got lost in the Fromdil Forest, but it was the thought that counted, and didn't she think she owed him something for that?
She didn't.
Tag was depressed, and the giant goat didn't give a damn.
"Because Agnes is there."
"Is there a back door?" a voice asked over his head.
Leaping back to avoid an ambush, he spotted Lain's face poking over the lip of the roof. "No," he said when he got his breathing back in order.
"Did you check?"
He looked at Ivy. She shook her head. He nodded. "I checked."
Lain, using a skill Gideon didn't know the portly man had, agilely climbed down the face of the wall and landed neatly on his feet. When he subsequently fell over, Tag put him on his feet and dusted him off.
"Then I expect we shall have to rush the door," said Lain, "though you understand, don't you, that if anyone in there wants to stop us, they'll be able to pick us off one by one."
It was a consideration. They discussed it. They also discussed the sky, which was filling with those massive, high, terraced clouds, sending messages in lightning between them, the resulting thunder beginning to echo endlessly down the empty streets.
The wind picked up, and blew clouds of dust off the rooftops, out of the alleys, into their eyes.
"Gideon," Tuesday said, and with a puzzled shrug he followed her down the street, until she stopped and bobbed her head to get him to kneel at her level.
"Are you really going to go in there?" she said.
"She's in there," he said. "As long as she's in there and we're out here, she can sit there until the Day, and then come out to where we are and skin us alive. If we're lucky."
Her beak opened in a silent hiss, closed, and she moved until her head was pushed lightly against his stomach. "This isn't kidding around anymore, is it?"
"Was it ever? Really?"
She didn't answer. She didn't have to.
"Gideon?"
He laid a hand on her neck, stroked her feathers.
"You weren't such a bad player, you know," she said so softly he could barely hear the words.
"Thanks."
"You just never got the breaks."
He smiled, though she couldn't
see it. "Thanks, but it's not true. I was at the top of my form when I was mediocre, and you know it as well as I do."
"Well, I'm your sister and I can't say things like that."
"You used to."
"I'm a duck now. Ducks have a code."
"You said them when you were a duck."
"That's the code," she said.
He laughed, and pushed her away gently so he could look at her face. "Are you going to come with me?"
"Are they?"
"I don't know. Ivy probably will. Lain, maybe. I don't know about Tag, he's awfully young, and you never can tell about the goat."
And finally: "I don't know either."
"That's okay. You're a duck. It's the code."
"I'm also your sister, you sonofabitch."
He stood, looking down at her, and walked slowly back to the others, took a breath and asked them to stay where they were while he made his way back up the alley. No one argued, and when he reached the other end he stood square on the street, arms folded across his chest, and watched the tower, the open door, and the storm building above him. His hair blew into his eyes, but he did not blink; his bat felt light in his hand, but he did not heft it; the voice of self-preservation was screaming in one ear, and the voice of what-the-hell was whispering in the other.
He listened to neither of them.
So, he said to himself. You can either stand here all day and look heroic, or you can get your ass in gear and see what happens.
And decided that as long as they were going to keep calling him "hero," he might as well stop feeling sorry for himself and do something about it.
Damn, he thought then: that's what I was afraid you'd say.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The clouds continued to mass, here and there merging in cacophonous collision, all of them turning black and bulging with unreleased rain. Glimpses of blue sky were few and far between, and the heavy twilight that covered the city was tinted faintly with green.
The lightning, its colors gone, reached for the city now, and more often than not struck at the crooked fingers of the five towers. The explosions were deafening, but the stone remained unmarred.
And in the mouth of the alley, Ivy stood with a dagger in one hand, a rather ordinary club in the other; her hair had been rebraided more thickly so that, if she wanted, she could clobber a Moglar simply by shaking her head.
Lain had begged for time, then run off without explanation, returning an hour later with fragments of stone in his hand. With Tag's help, he fashioned arrowheads from them, and with Red's help and some of his hair, he affixed them to the shafts his boys had given him as their going-away present.
Tag waited beside Ivy, dagger in one hand and Lain's rapier in the other, licking his lips and shifting his weight from foot to foot. He had suggested they scale the walls and come down from the top, but was at a loss to find convenient ladders with which to do so, and could think of no other way to get there unless Tuesday carried them. When she refused, adamantly, he chided her until she belted him with a wing.
The duck and the goat stood together, or rather one atop the other, and turned their heads away from the wind that screamed down the streets and shrieked along the alleys. Red's eyes were dead black; Tuesday's eyes were closed.
Gideon had his bat, and decided that sneaking up on the open door would be not only a farce in terms of having nothing to use to sneak with, but also a farce in terms of trying to maintain anonymity, since it was evident that the door was open as an invitation to a specific person or group of people and animals, and he was it, and so were they.
When he started across the street, walking, he heard someone mutter what sounded like a prayer behind him.
When he reached the door and hadn't been bolted, zapped, electrocuted, fried, bombed, stabbed, punctured, or trampled, he wondered what the hell he was doing wrong.
At the threshold he waved to the others.
They waved back.
He waved again.
They smiled and waved back.
He raised a fist, shook it, turned his back and went in, came right back out and stood there until they joined him in varying states of eagerness, none of which offered much promise for the future. As a measure of confidence in their abilities, then, he motioned them in ahead of him, pushing a little, smiling a lot, and twitching his bat at the backs of their knees until there was only Tuesday left, defiantly on her feet.
She looked at the door, at the tower, at the lightning, at the city, and said, "Fuck the code," and bit him on the leg.
—|—
The room was surprisingly circular, a good and brisk forty paces side to side, and the only one on this floor as far as any of them could tell. It was also completely barren of furnishings or wall hangings, and only Tag muttered an oath when the door slammed behind them.
There were no windows, or torches, but the walls themselves seemed to glow from within, providing them with enough light to see that they ought not to be here.
In the center was a spiral staircase carved from crimson stone that took a hell of a lot of turns to reach the ceiling, a not so good fifty or sixty feet away.
Two weeks, he thought glumly; it's going to take us two goddamn weeks to do one floor at a time, and when we get there we'll be so damned dizzy we won't know our own names.
With a sigh born of the knowledge of the inevitability of a rotten time ahead, he approached the staircase warily, took hold of the iron banister and looked up. The gap in the ceiling that led to the second story was filled with light, but he could hear no voices nor sounds of things or people moving around.
So far so good, he thought, and started up, turned around and asked Red if he thought he could make it. The lorra checked his footing on the stone steps, nodded, and backed away, snorting almost a laugh at the dismay on Gideon's face.
Oh, well, he thought, and started up again. One step at a time, listening at every step, keeping his gaze on the opening until it was level with the top of his head. The staircase, he noted, continued on, so far up he couldn't see its end; and what he could see of the room told him it was as empty as the one he was leaving behind. That didn't bother him. Not as much as the shadow he saw on the wall.
Regripping the bat and taking a breath for courage, he charged up and away from the staircase, spinning for a sign of what caused the shadow—the shadow of a very tall man with long hair and a cloak.
He saw it just as the others crowded up behind him.
It was the Wamchu.
"Oh," said Ivy quietly.
"That's one way to put it," Gideon said.
The Wamchu had been shackled to the wall, his arms stretched over his head, his legs spread, his feet just barely touching the bare floor. His head was lowered so that his hair covered his face, and he was wearing his red-lined cloak, and not a stitch more.
"My," said Tuesday. "There sure was a lot of him under all those clothes."
There were no other instruments of torture or confinement in the room, and Gideon walked cautiously over to see if the man was still alive. The chest, full-muscled and tanned like fried chicken, stirred, but barely. And though Gideon could see no indication of external injury, he had no doubt that Agnes was the one who had done this, and that the Wamchu was never going to be a threat to anyone again.
"Gideon!" Tag whispered sharply from the staircase.
He turned, and the boy pointed up, made signs of people walking around, made another sign that they ought to adjust the Wamchu's cloak a little, for decency if nothing else.
Gideon didn't care. He was disappointed that a confrontation with the man had been taken from him, but he was also wise enough to understand that a man who looks for a confrontation with someone like Lu Wamchu ought to be damned grateful that it was taken away from him. Unless, of course, that confrontation was going to be replaced by another one.
"Well," Ivy said to the duck, "I can see why he had three wives."
Gideon motioned to Lain, who walked with him
up the steps. It was a little crowded, but he figured that having two fighters explode into the room together was better than being picked off one at a time. When they reached the top, however, he realized that the greenman's portliness was going to prevent anything but getting stuck if they tried it, so he charged up himself, Lain right behind, and the five Moglar guards seated at their luncheon table had only enough time to wipe their mouths and grab their weapons before Gideon was upon them. And Lain. And the lorra. And when Tag came puffing into the room behind Ivy, it was all over.
"You know," the lad said, "if all I'm going to do is climb stairs, I might as well go all the way up and wait."
"Patience," Gideon told him with a clap on his shoulder. "See if they have something longer to use than your knife."
They did—a pike with a pitchfork on one end and a chain mace on the other. A few practice swings that demolished the table and one of the corpses, and Tag pronounced himself ready, though the weapon was a good four feet taller than he and had a tendency to drag on the floor with the most appalling noise. Ivy solved the latter problem by loosely wrapping both ends with bits of leather she cut from the Moglar's armor. Tag protested. Ivy explained that a good thrust or whack would easily shear the leather off. He muttered, but accepted the solution with reasonable grace, then took up his position at the staircase.
Gideon began climbing.
Lain and Red followed.
Ivy came next and told Tag to watch where he was pointing the thing, while Tuesday told him to watch where he was pointing that thing in the other direction.
The fourth room was as empty as the first.
In the fifth they found several ancient chests filled with jewels of all descriptions, bound stacks of paper money, leather sacks of gold coins, silver candelabra and table settings, a solid gold suit of armor, eight watercolor portraits of the Wamchu, seventeen dressers whose drawers were crammed with exquisite silk clothing, and a nine-foot-tall sculpted bottle of purple liquid, which Ivy explained was an extract from a ferocious ant that, when taken internally—the extraction, not the ant—would give one an added fifteen years of good health, barring accidents, war, and unnatural stress.
