River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  The captain threw back his black cloak to reveal its blood-red lining, then stumped to the railing and lifted both his not-quite-hands to his mouth. “Ahoy the Ice Box!” he bellowed, his voice echoing and reechoing across the water. “This is Grasping John Vice, captain of the Black Tureen. We have come for your gold. If you open the great door, we will leave the women and children untouched, and we will kill no man who surrenders.”

  The Ice Box stood silent as stone.

  “We’re in range, Cap’n,” the bosun called.

  “Prepare the boats and the landing crews.” Grasping John hobbled a few steps closer to the great gun before striking a pose of stoic resignation. “And bring me the firing match.”

  Orlando felt Chief Strike Anywhere tense beside him. One of the pirates emerged from a bolthole somewhere with a bundle in his arms, only its tiny red head protruding from the blanket. The bundle was crying, a thin, small sound that nevertheless tugged at Orlando’s heartstrings.

  “All hands in place, Cap’n,” the bosun shouted.

  Several of the crew began to dance, arms folded, cutlasses out and gripped in their hairy fists.

  “Wicked, wicked, wicked, we,”

  they sang, dreadfully out of tune but in a cheerful jig-time,

  “Bad we are as men can be,

  Rotten work, we’ll get down to it,

  (If it’s good, we didn’t do it.)”

  “Evil, evil, evil us,

  Some are bad but we are wuss,

  Dread deeds we perform with glee,

  We aspire to infamy!”

  The captain smiled indulgently, then beckoned with his hook. The sailor with the crying bundle skittered forward and delivered it into Grasping John’s clasper. The bundle’s noises intensified.

  “Let us see if the Thunderer can melt yon stronghold’s icy reserve, eh, my salt-flecked swine?” The captain flung the blanket aside to reveal a squirming, shivering baby match, a miniature version of Strike Anywhere and his wife. He clearly intended to scrape the infant’s sulphured head on the rough deck, but before he could do so, something had leapt through the space near Orlando’s ear and was shivering in the black sleeve of Grasping John’s coat. For a moment the entire foredeck stood frozen and silent. The pirate captain did not drop the baby boy, but he did lower him for a moment to inspect the arrow lodged in his arm.

  “A mysterious someone seems to be shooting things at me from the poop,” he observed evenly. “Some of you filthy fellows hurry up there and kill him.” Then, as a dozen unshaven, scar-faced pirates rattled up the gangway, and Orlando and Fredericks scrambled to their feet in cold-stomached anticipation, Grasping John took the baby and rubbed him down the length of the massive cannon barrel, so that the small head sparked and then flared. As the infant began to cry, the captain lifted him and lit the cannon’s great fuse.

  Groaning in fury and pain, Strike Anywhere vaulted off the poop-deck. He landed in a group of confused pirates, scattering them like bowling pins. In a moment he had reached the pirate captain and snatched the blazing child from the man’s metal hands. He plunged the baby’s head into the bucket used to cool the cannon barrel, then lifted out the weeping, spluttering infant and held him close against his chest.

  Orlando turned from this drama as the first of the pirates reached the poop, avidly waving his cutlass. Then, in the next five seconds, several things happened.

  Thargor-reflexes slowed but not gone, Orlando dodged a cutlass-blow, stepped aside, and swung his broadsword in a flat arc; he smacked the leading pirate in the back and sent him flying off the roof, even as the tattooed buccaneer behind him fell back down the steps with one of Fredericks’ arrows in his striped midsection.

  Chief Strike Anywhere took his dripping, screaming child and leaped over the railing into the water. Grasping John watched with dark amusement, curling a mustachio with the end of his hook.

  The fuse on the Thunderer burned down, vanishing inside the barrel for a split instant before igniting the powder with a roar like Judgment Day. The cannon vomited fire and the carriage heaved backward against its chains. The entire ship rocked, so that Orlando, Fredericks, and their pirate attackers all fell flat.

  The massive cannon ball hissed across the water and smashed into the huge handle of the Ice Box, breaking it off and denting the door.

  For a moment after all this had happened, as the echoes of the Thunderer’s eruption died away, everything was still. Then the Ice Box’s massive door, tall as a mountainside, slowly swung open.

  They were not, Orlando realized, in a very good position. Although at least half of Grasping John’s crew were climbing into the boats, with the obvious intention of rowing ashore to attack the gaping Ice Box, most of the rest seemed content to concentrate on killing Orlando and Fredericks. The original half-dozen had been defeated, but another dozen or so were already scrambling up the gangway, brandishing sharp objects of various sorts.

  Chief Strike Anywhere had disappeared over the side, having secured his wounded papoose and presumably no longer interested in the cartoon corsairs or anything else. The tortoise-guarded canoe lay out of sight below the railing of the Black Tureen, and even if they could fight their way to it through the mass of ugly buccaneers, the pirate ship had drifted far enough toward the beach that there was no guarantee the canoe was still at the larger ship’s side.

  Need a new plan, Orlando realized. Any plan at all, actually.

  One of the last of the landing boats swayed in its davits as a snarling, swearing band of caricature sea-criminals struggled to lower it away. Orlando slammed aside a swiping attack by the first of the new pirates coming up the stairs, then shouted to Fredericks, “Follow me!”

  His companion, who had either run out of arrows or the room to shoot them properly, was using his bow as an awkward sort of shield while fighting back with a cutlass liberated from one of their attackers. “Where?”

  “The boats!” Orlando paused for balance, reminding himself that although he was much stronger than he would be in his own brittle-boned form, he did not have Thargor’s superhuman muscles anymore. He grabbed at one of the mizzen lines and swung out over the heads of their jostling attackers, then dropped to the main deck. In too much of a hurry to see whether Fredericks had indeed followed him, he rushed to the landing boat and managed to shove the nearest pirate overboard before the man saw him. Of the three others, two were steadying the swinging boat, so Orlando engaged the third. Fredericks appeared at his side a moment later, and together they quickly dispatched Orlando’s opponent. The other two, armed only with knives, considered the matter for a moment, then sprang down from the boat and disappeared in the direction of the foredeck. As Orlando and Fredericks had discovered, the cartoon pirates were less fearsome than they appeared, but the sheer weight of their numbers still made them dangerous.

  “By the Toils of the Tortugas!” Grasping John bellowed from the foredeck, his cloak a-flap in the rising breeze. “They are escaping! Is there not a single man on this tiresome sauciére who can fight? Must I do it all myself?”

  Orlando and Fredericks moved to either end of the jollyboat, then, at the count of three, both swung their swords and chopped at the ropes that held the boat suspended over the rail. The ropes, as almost everything else in the simulation, did not behave as their real-life equivalents would have, but parted with a satisfying twang as soon as the blades touched them. The boat dropped the dozen feet to the river, sending up a splash of white foam.

  Orlando could not at first decide whether it would be best to follow the other pirate boats toward the land at the base of the Ice Box, or to strike out deeper into the river. Fredericks pointed out a group of pirates rolling a heavy cannon toward the gunport on their side.

  “Follow the other boats—he wouldn’t fire at his own men,” Orlando declared. They bent over their oars and swept in the direction
of the beach, hurrying to catch up with the landing party. A few moments later, with the river’s edge still a hundred yards away, a dark something cracked past over their heads and struck the boat just in front of them, flinging pirates and bits of pirates in every direction.

  “Wrong again,” Fredericks helpfully pointed out.

  They sculled on, heads low. The cannon fired, and then fired again, the shells throwing up gouts of water on either side of them. When they saw the waters growing shallow, they tumbled overboard and swam for the beach.

  As they emerged from the river, conscious that they were trapped between Grasping John’s cannon and his invasionary force, they heard a flare of trumpets and a great shout. The defenders of Ice Box were streaming out through the broken door and onto the beach to meet the buccaneers. Orlando’s relief was mixed with a certain amount of amazement, because a stranger force would have been hard to imagine.

  The vanguard, a sort of literal cannon fodder, was a squadron of militant vegetables, the very antithesis of the partying tomatoes and beets they had seen earlier. Squash of many colors and shapes waved asparagus spears. Sullen-looking yams were backed by a line of huge eggplants, scowling purple things as terrifying as wild elephants. The leader of this martial salad was a handsome carrot waving a sword in the air and shouting, in a thin but dramatic voice, “For God and Saint Crisper!”

  As the first of the vegetables met the pirate assault, more unusual defenders leaped down from the Ice Box, most of them freshly sprung from labels and packages. A pride of Scotsmen with kilts and claymores tootled bravely on bagpipes as they marched, setting the pace for a squadron of clowns (with their companion unit of attack-trained, overdressed poodles) and a horde of shining-eyed, red-cheeked children shrieking like harpies and waving sharpened serving spoons. There were salamis dressed as gondoliers who brandished their poles like quarterstaffs, growling bears off honey jars, and milk-bottle cows of many different sizes and shapes whose glassy fragility was offset by their curving translucent horns and sharp-edged hooves. A camel, a small troop of djinni on a flying carpet, and several others too distant or too obscure for Orlando to make out completed the defending force. There were even several flour-dusted and slightly nervous Quakers, perhaps acting as battlefield observers to make sure the combatants obeyed some Kitchen Conference’s rules of war.

  Orlando’s pleasure at the defenders’ emergence was quickly tempered when he realized that the Ice Box residents seemed to consider them just more pirates—he and Fredericks were nearly beheaded by pole-swinging gondola pilots before it became clear that the stripe-shirted sausages were singing “O sole mio” as a war cry rather than as a welcome. They decided to retreat to the outskirts of the battlefield, and not a moment too soon, for an explosion that cratered the linoleum in front of the Ice Box announced that Grasping John had resumed his shelling from the Black Tureen.

  They found a shadowed nook at the base of a cabinet near the Ice Box but well-removed from the hostilities, then settled down to watch the battle in comfort and comparative safety.

  Orlando had found it difficult from the beginning to understand the Kitchen’s internal logic, and cartoon warfare proved just as incomprehensible. Some things seemed absolutely arbitrary: a hump on the camel’s back, when thumped with a pirate’s oar, simply popped up elsewhere on the camel, but a yam struck by a similar oar immediately became many little diapered baby yams. The salami-gondoliers, when “killed” by a hard blow or a swipe from a cutlass, fell into a row of neat slices. But the pirates, who were presumably made from condensed gravy, seemed quite solid, even when wet. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any consistent order to any of it, which Orlando (who liked to know the rules) found particularly frustrating. People—if you could call them people—stretched or inflated or broke into pieces, but there was no death in the sense of someone being killed in their normal form and staying recognizably dead—even the pirates they had stabbed or chopped on the boat just sort of tumbled away. In fact, Orlando felt sure all these combatants, winners or losers, would be back in their old shapes tomorrow, whenever “tomorrow” came.

  This would have been perfectly acceptable, and even quite interesting, but unlike their enemies, he and Fredericks had shown no tendency to stretch or bounce or otherwise adjust to the weirdness of the place and its dangers. Orlando severely doubted they would survive being diced by pirate swords, for instance, as had just happened to one of the eggplants. And if he or Fredericks died here in the cartoon world or in any of the others . . . then what?

  It was a question that had to be answered, Orlando decided, but he hoped they wouldn’t find out the hard way.

  The Kitchen’s night crept past and the battle raged on. The defenders at first fought a slow retreat to the very base of the Ice Box, where vegetable pulp spattered the white enamel as the last of the fighting eggplants laid down its life, then the tide turned and the defenders pushed the buccaneers back down the beach until the besiegers were knee-deep in the river, fighting for their lives. For hours neither side could win a decisive advantage. Attack met counterattack, back and forth, until most of the combatants were disabled or as dead as cartoons could be expected to become. The sagging Ice Box door had been pitted by cannonballs until it resembled a map of the moon, but Grasping John had long since run out of ammunition and the guns had fallen silent. Now the last defenders fought the final few pirates hither and thither through the julienned remains of their heroic comrades.

  “How are we going to get out of here when this is over, Orlando?” Fredericks asked. “Without that Indian . . . Do we have to go all the way down the river?”

  Orlando shook his head. “How would I know? I guess so. Unless there are other ways out. Didn’t the tortoise say there are people in the Ice Box who can answer questions? ‘Sleepers’ or something?”

  Fredericks gave him a hard stare. “No, Orlando. Possibility not. We’re not going into that thing to go hunting for some even weirder cartoon monsters. Forget it.”

  “But that’s how these things work, Frederico. You have to figure out what the rules are. You want information, you have to pay a price. Come on. If there was a way out of here and it turned out to be right next to us, wouldn’t you rather take a little trouble to find that out than go all the way down to the end of the river, like you said?”

  “A little trouble. That’s fenfen. You always get your way, Orlando, and I always pay for it. You and your utterly brilliant ideas. If you want to go climbing around in that thing, go ahead, but nothing’s going to get me in there.”

  “I rather think you’re wrong,” suggested a third voice.

  Grasping John Vice stepped into view around the edge of the cabinet. The arm struck by the Indian’s arrow was bandaged with a wide piece of white cloth, but there was no sign of blood. A flintlock pistol, screwed to his wrist in place of the clasping device, was leveled at the two of them. “You see, in part thanks to you two, I have very little crew left. So I’m afraid I will need some help hauling my gold out of the Ice Box.” He leaned toward them with a theatrical leer. Up close, it was easier to see that he was not a real person—the sharp angles of his face were exaggerated, his features unwholesomely smooth, like a doll’s.

  “So your pirates won?” Orlando asked dully. He was furious with himself at being taken by surprise. The captain would never have gotten within fifty yards of the real Thargor without being noticed.

  “It is what is called, I believe, a Pyrrhic victory.” Grasping John gestured with his hook at the silent battlefield, littered with the remnants of attacker and defender. Nothing stirred. “Still, it means there will be many fewer with whom to share my rightful booty.” He jabbed the pistol at them. “So get up. And you, man,” he said to Orlando, “if you have anything warmer to wear than that absurd acrobat costume, I suggest you put it on. It is rather cold inside, I’m told.”

  As they waded through the slaw of the battle
field, Orlando scavenged a vest—Grasping John called it a “weskit”—and a pair of calf-length trousers whose pirate owner was no longer in the vicinity, having apparently been struck so hard by projectile puffed wheat that he had been blown right out of his clothing. With Captain Vice never more than a meter or two behind them, but also careful not to draw close enough to be attacked and disarmed, they mounted from the floor of the Kitchen onto the bottom shelf of the Ice Box. There the captain’s words proved prophetic: The air beyond the door was indeed very cold, and despite his additional clothing, Orlando was shivering before they had been inside a minute.

  The bottom shelf was as crowded with dwelling places as any other part of the Kitchen they had seen, but all the boxes, jars, and containers of various sorts were empty—a refrigerated ghost town. As they made their way down the main street between the boxes, the wind sighed through the open door, rustling a discarded napkin. They were able to climb onto the second shelf from the top of the tallest carton, whose now-deserted label read “Ship of the Desert—Fresh Dates,” and whose humped resident Orlando had watched meet her tragicomic end on the battlefield below, broken in half when one of the pirates had produced a handful of straw and thrown it on her back.

  The second shelf was as untenanted as the first. A row of cardboard egg cartons stood open and deserted, the brave soldiers once housed therein having flung themselves down from this very shelf onto the besiegers, when for a grim moment it had seemed that defense would fail and the pirates would storm the Ice Box itself. Several of the pirate victims of that kamikaze sacrifice still lay at the base of the Ice Box, halted inches short of their goal, embalmed in drying yolk.

  They continued up two more shelves without seeing another living thing, a journey that took well over an hour, including several trampoline-hops across cellophane-wrapped bowls and a scary crawl along the loose handle of the meat and cheese drawer. Then, on the top shelf, near the back, Grasping John’s quest was at last rewarded.