Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

  “Sleep,” said Ounk gently.

  Summer opened her mouth to say that she couldn’t imagine sleeping, and suddenly it turned into a jaw-cracking yawn. She had forgotten somehow that it was the middle of the night, and that she had been to an assembly, and then run through woods and grass, and now that she was standing around talking and didn’t have to panic right this minute…

  She staggered through the open doorway into the cottage and collapsed into the bed without even taking off her shoes.

  She woke in the morning with her head pillowed on Glorious’s flank and the weasel curled in a tight, unhappy ball under her chin. She picked the little carnivore up and put him on her shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” she said to him. “It came out all right.”

  He said nothing, but she felt two quick licks on her skin, there and gone.

  The geese were still awake. They rousted Reginald and then they were on the way, the valet-flock twittering and grumbling and flying mouthfuls of food to them as they walked.

  The valet-flock seemed bigger. Summer tried to count them—unsuccessfully—and finally gave up and asked Reginald.

  “Oh, yes, added some fellows,” he said cheerfully. “Flock-minds get nervous when there’s too few, and of course we’re a much bigger group now.”

  Two of the valet-birds brought a hard-boiled egg nearly as big as they were to Glorious. The wolf opened his mouth gravely and they set it inside. He did not close his jaws again until they were well away, and then gave a single chomp and swallowed.

  “Trusting little beasts,” muttered the weasel.

  “They know that they’re no more than a mouthful,” said the wolf, “and brave companions for all that. I would not eat one, except by mistake.”

  Glorious had listened to the weasel’s tale of the arsonists and the owls who had saved him. He did not blink, and when the weasel had finished, he nodded once, sharply.

  “I owe the forest a favor, then,” he said.

  “The Forester, you mean?” asked Reginald, as the valet-flock packed away the remains of breakfast.

  “They are the same,” said Glorious, and that seemed to be the end of that.

  The lands around Almondgrove were highly civilized, according to Reginald, and that seemed to mean that it was a great deal of lawn and pasture and deep old woods. Perches lined the roads and they passed the entrances to numerous estates. The hoopoe called out the names as they passed—“Herringpelt! Nestfarthing! Achingroost!”—none of which meant anything to Summer, although she did enjoy the names.

  After they left the lands controlled by the noble-birds, the scenery grew wilder. There were small cottages built on stilts for shepherd-birds, often side by side with houses that could have held humans. The trees grew shorter and scruffier. Ankh and Ounk looked down the road behind them often.

  “You have drummed your fingers on my neck for the last hour,” said Glorious without turning his head. “Your thoughts are your own, Summer-cub, but if you need to speak them, I will listen.”

  Summer heaved a sigh. “I’m confused,” she admitted. “I was thinking about Zultan, but he doesn’t make any sense.”

  Glorious cocked an ear back at her. “Things act according to their natures,” he said. “But sometimes our natures are complicated.”

  “Maybe.” Summer scowled. She didn’t know if the problem was that Zultan was strange, or if she just didn’t understand. She’d never been very good at knowing how people would act. It was as if she’d spent so much energy learning to predict her mother that she had very little left to spend on other people.

  “I guess…” She trailed off, then started again. “What I don’t understand is why, if he’s got the Queen-in-Chains, who can smash a whole tower down and kill all the poor dogs…why is he just riding around the country with Grub and a couple of other people? Why isn’t he in charge?”

  “It’s a fair question,” said Ankh, dropping back to waddle alongside Glorious. “If you have a weapon that powerful and you’ve already defeated the only enemy to stand against you, why do so little with it? Why isn’t he ruling us all now?”

  Summer felt a vague relief that it hadn’t been a stupid question after all.

  “Some of us cannot be ruled,” said Glorious. He glanced at Ankh. “I say that not to brag. Orcus would be a difficult pack to unite behind one leader, no matter how large your fangs.”

  Ankh honked a laugh. “Actually, Lord Almondgrove agrees with you. The problem with an immense weapon is that you may take a place with it, but not hold it. Zultan is a man with a handful of troops and one single enormous power. If he wants—oh, food, say, or money—he can descend on a town and threaten to raze it, but that is a hostage system, not governance. And Orcus would be difficult to govern even if he had an army.”

  She gestured with one wing at Ounk and Reginald. “There are simply too many people in Orcus, and we want too many things. Even the Dawn Chorus rules only the Upper Ten Thousand flocks of birdkind, and that only works because it is useful for everyone to have someone to handle trade regulations and to find a place to meet mates.”

  Summer rubbed her forehead. “I wouldn’t want to be in charge of everyone,” she said. “Maybe Zultan doesn’t, either.”

  “Sensible of you,” said Glorious. “And perhaps of Zultan as well.”

  Ankh shook her head. “You hate to think of evil being sensible,” she admitted, “but Zultan’s not a stupid man. What he likely wants is to be feared and to be given what he wants. And he has that, more or less. I suppose the Tower of Dogs seemed the most likely thing to stand in the way of that.”

  Summer rubbed her fingers through Glorious’s ruff, wondering if that was all that there was to it.

  “The other problem,” said Ankh, “is that he dare not bring forth the Queen-in-Chains every time someone opposes him. No one is quite sure what she is, or what she does, but only because no one escaped the Tower. He cannot trust that he’ll be that lucky twice, or three times, or ten. Sooner or later someone will see the Queen and see a weakness, and then he is a man with a handful of troops who used to have a great weapon.”

  Summer sighed. “So that’s all he wants now? To be feared?”

  “Perhaps,” said Glorious. “Or perhaps he has simply been doing this for so long that he no longer knows any other way.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It took them five days to reach the Great Pipes. The land changed around them, the trees growing thin and tall again, reminding Summer of the desert. It was colder, though. Pine needs lay dry and crackling under Glorious’s paws.

  Ankh and Ounk waddled when Glorious walked and flew when he ran. Summer stopped thinking they looked absurd and began to admire the alert arch of their necks and the way they handled their weapons.

  It was strange to feel safer because one was guarded by geese, but among so many strange things, it hardly registered at all.

  At night, they took shifts. One stood guard outside the cottage while the other slept. They did not make any great fuss out of it, they simply did it.

  “It is what we do,” said Ankh, when Summer asked.

  “Since the very beginning,” said Ounk. “When the moon-fox killed the first earth and our ancestors were hatched to guard the second one.”

  “When were hoopoes hatched?” asked Summer.

  Ankh glanced over at Reginald, who was practicing his dance steps. “When the gods were feeling particularly mischievous,” she said.

  “I heard that!” said Reginald, while the weasel snickered in Summer’s hair.

  Summer didn’t recognize the Pipes when she saw them at first. At first they looked like odd mountains, and then like lumpy skyscrapers, and then like a rock formation. It was not until they had come over a ridge and begun their descent into a narrow valley that she realized what she was looking at.

  “Is that a cactus?”

  “It is,” said Ankh.

  “An organpipe cactus,” said Ounk. “The largest in all the world,
so far as we know.”

  It was larger than Summer had realized. The roots were down in the valley and the top stood well above the ridgeline. The many arms of the cactus filled the valley completely in both directions, a wall of knobbly green.

  The Great Pipes were deeply grooved up and down, studded with spines as thick as a fence post. Holes riddled the cactus, edged with gray. Summer feared that it might be wasp damage, until she saw birds going in and out—not little birds, like the valet flock, but enormous woodpeckers the size of Reginald.

  The hoopoe took to the air and flew ahead, calling out. Several woodpeckers looked out of their holes and flew out to meet him. They had pale bellies and wings striped black and white like a tweed suit. Each had a spot of red on top of their heads, far more vivid than blood.

  They circled in the air, then Reginald perched on a cactus spine and the woodpeckers gripped onto the cactus and turned their heads to face him. Summer couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other.

  “Do you think it’s dangerous to live there, with all those spines?” asked Summer.

  Glorious made a hrrrmmm noise. Ounk shook her head. “It would be, but they clip the ends off,” she said. “And down at the base, most of the spines are ground away, for land-walkers.”

  Land-walkers, thought Summer. Does that include human-type people?

  Apparently it did, because a few minutes later, someone came out to meet them.

  He was not exactly the same as the humans in Summer’s world, but he was quite close. His skin was the same buff color as the woodpeckers’ feathers and his hair was the same blinding red shade as their crests. Otherwise he looked perfectly ordinary. He wore a moss-green tunic and his arms were tattooed in swirls of red and violet.

  “May I help you, travelers?” he asked. His eyes lingered on Glorious.

  Summer took a deep breath. “Lord Almondgrove sent us,” she said. (It was easier to say that than Baba Yaga sent me, and she suspected that people would be more likely to believe her.) “May we speak to someone in charge, please?”

  She half-expected him to laugh at her or say something about how young she was, but he did not. Perhaps the wolf and the goose-guards made her seem like someone worth listening to.

  Instead he said, “Is the matter spiritual or political?”

  “…uh,” said Summer. “It’s…err…magical. Which is that?”

  He screwed up his face in thought. “Good question. Well, I will take you to the Temple, and then if we’ve chosen wrong, they’ll send you to the Mayor.”

  “That should work,” said Summer gratefully.

  “Then follow me.”

  The Temple was built deep inside the cactus. Their guide led them into a door in the base of one of the arms. A short flight of stone steps led up to it. The cactus had actually grown into the steps, the green flesh scarred but clearly alive.

  “This must have been here a long time,” said Summer.

  “Centuries,” said their guide. “The Great Pipes are at least ten thousand years old. Organpipes rarely flower until their first century, but in spring, there are so many flowers that the pollen falls like golden snow.”

  Reginald landed beside them. “Capital fellows here,” he said cheerfully. “Always a little hard to talk to woodpeckers. All rat-a-tat-tat, too fast to follow! But decent folk. They say the Temple’s where we want to be.”

  “Excellent,” said the guide, and vanished into the cactus.

  Summer went first, with Glorious beside her, then Reginald, then the goose-guard. It was large enough for two to walk abreast. The inside was cool and dim. She could not figure out what the walls were made of—something like wood, but like no wood she’d ever seen, full of polished hollows.

  “Cactus ribs,” said the guide. “Almost like bones. The most marvelous stuff in the world, but we only harvest a small amount, to keep the Pipes healthy. You can touch it if you like.”

  Everyone unobtrusively found a piece of wall to touch. The guide laughed.

  The ribs had a strange texture under Summer’s fingertips, like a hard sponge. It reminded her of coral branches.

  The guide led them through several oddly shaped doorways. The openings were normal enough at ground height, but rose high in the air in irregular shapes, no two alike. One looked like an elongated heart and the next was a lattice of holes.

  “The doors are where two of the trunks grow together,” the red-headed man explained. “If they lie together too closely, they can begin to rot, and so we must cut away the damaged ribs. But we cut only so much as we must.”

  A flight of steps led down and then the walls belled out around them, into a chamber nearly as large as the hall where the noble-birds had danced. It was full of people, most of them the same buff-and-scarlet as their guide, and it appeared to be a market. There were people behind tables and even more people swirling between the tables, shopping and haggling. Summer saw woodpeckers perched on vertical stands behind tables, selling carvings and fruits and jars of things that looked rather like pickles. She glanced at one as they passed, saw that the pickles had legs, and looked away hurriedly.

  In among the others were a few more exotic persons—green-skinned humanoids and copper-scaled lizards that walked upright, and one family that wouldn’t have been out of place on a street in Summer’s world.

  Ripples of interest went out as their group threaded their way through the hall—“A wolf! Look at that!” and “Is that a dog?” and, “No, the dogs are gone. It’s a wolf, I think.”

  Glorious’s tongue lolled in amusement.

  “I’m sorry,” said the guide, “it’s the fastest route, please forgive them, Master Wolf, we don’t usually see your people here—”

  “Let them look,” said Glorious. “My hide is not so raw that another’s eyes can scar it.”

  It was rather nice, Summer thought, to see someone else briefly baffled by Glorious’s cryptic statements.

  “Oh,” said their guide. “Um, all right. This way, please…”

  They came to more steps. The walls here looked less like bone and more like a fine tangle of roots and earth.

  “The marketplace is underground,” explained the guide, “as are most of the largest rooms. The cactus roots are not so sensitive as the ribs. The Temple is the largest room within the Pipes themselves.”

  The reason for this became obvious as soon as they reached the Temple. Here one of the vast arms of the cactus lay on its side. The grooved walls curved and twisted slightly. Summer felt as if she were standing inside some kind of giant sea creature.

  It was here that they encountered the first actual door they had seen, rather than a doorway. The door was about eight feet high, round, and made of some pale, translucent substance, like pearl.

  Or fingernails.

  …I wish I hadn’t thought that.

  “If you will wait here, please,” said the guide.

  He slipped through the door.

  A wave of incense came through the door as he closed it. It was so thick that the weasel coughed in her pocket and Summer had to wipe her eyes.

  “Guh,” muttered the weasel, sticking his head out. “What is that?”

  “Even I can smell that,” said Reginald, “and I’m not much for the old sniff box.”

  “Burning sage,” said Glorious, lifting his head. “But there is another smell beneath it. Someone is hiding something.”

  Summer stared at the door, but it had no answers. She found herself trying to figure out where one would get a pearl that size, or for that matter, a fingernail.

  “Do they have giant oysters in Orcus?” she asked.

  “They say the island of Shellip is built on a giant oyster,” said Reginald doubtfully, “but it looks like a perfectly ordinary island to me. I don’t know how you’d tell. Why?”

  “I was wondering what the door was made of.”

  “The lower carapace of a mammoth tortoise,” said Ankh. “They are no longer hunted, for they are too rare. I suspect that t
his one is very old.”

  “Nearly a thousand years,” said the guide cheerfully, stepping back through. “Come, travelers, the priestess will see you now.”

  He pushed the door open wide, and they stepped into a very long room. The floor was tiled in marble and the polished ribs of the cactus formed a starburst at the far end.

  The smoke was pouring from braziers on either side of the room. It hung thickly over the ceiling, forming a cloud that one could hardly see through. A series of sneezes came from inside Summer’s pocket.

  A woman stood in front of the starburst. She was tall and stately, clad in long violet robes edged with silver. Her fingers shone with rings and she had vestments made from polished cactus ribs, linked together like chainmail.

  She also looked almost exactly like Summer’s fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hardert, except taller and with slightly different colored skin.

  “The priestess Cereus, Voice of the Great Pipes,” said the guide to them, and then, in a ringing voice, “Your Holiness, pilgrims sent by Lord Almondgrove to see you on a matter most…”

  He paused and glanced at them.

  “Urgent,” said Summer firmly.

  “A matter most urgent!”

  What would he say if I’d said, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal, really,’ I wonder? ‘A matter most casual?’

  Priestess Cereus wore a headdress with a pair of serpents on it. They coiled down over her shoulders, turning their heads and flicking their tongues. It was impossible to see if she had Miss Hardert’s salt-and-pepper hair under the serpents, but it seemed likely.

  “Welcome to the Great Pipes, pilgrims,” said the priestess. If she had followed with, “Please hand your homework to the front of the class,” it would not have surprised Summer in the least. Still, her voice was deeper than Miss Hardert’s, a voice for uttering prophecy and commandments, not a voice for handing in homework.

  The priestess beckoned them forward.

  It was a long way. Glorious’s claws clicked on the stone floor. The valet-flock halted at the doorway, making tiny chirps of dismay at the smoke.