Zod Wallop (30 page)

A strange compulsion caused Rene to lift her hand and touch Emily’s pale, full lips. They were cold. Rene moved her hand to brush Emily’s cheek, as a lover might, although her hand was not moved by desire but wonder. How, Rene wondered, could simply looking at this face hurt so fiercely? Emily’s expression was calm, her eyes were the precise blue of that mouthwash Rene had drunk the day of her last suicide attempt. Rene put the thought away as a tear left the blue eye and moved slowly toward her finger and touched it.

The tear burned Rene’s finger and she pulled her hand away.

“Sister,” Emily said, moving closer. Her lips barely moved, but her voice was big, the biggest voice Rene had ever heard, bigger than her father when he was full of Jesus and Jim Beam. The voice filled Rene, like wind filling a sail.

“Sister,” Emily said, reaching out her hand. “We have to leave this room. Soon everyone will be roaring. Everyone will be taking and killing and plundering. They will be full of their contest; the Vile Contenders will strive against each other. Warriors will war. They will make Great Enterprise. They will puff themselves up with false purpose.”

Rene felt herself being lifted to her feet. She turned and looked at Allan, lying there still. She saw the monkey, curled at his feet, the way a cat might snuggle (cats always seeking to meld with the sleeping).

“Yes,” Emily said. “Your champion is slain. But we have two more that will champion us. While all Zod Wallop is full of its importance and strife, we will find the Cold One and the Abyss Dweller and we will have our revenge.”

Rene did not understand completely, but she believed completely. Together they left the room.

They were gone when Harry and the others followed Raymond into the room.

Now Raymond screamed, falling on his knees. “Allan! Lord Arbus!” He moaned. He lifted the bloody monkey in his arms. He began to sob inconsolably. His weeping was wild, his nose running, his breath coming in long, asthmatic wheezes. The walls of the room seemed to expand and contract in sympathy with his labored gasps.

“Dear God,” Helen Kurtis said, kneeling beside Raymond. “Oh Raymond.” She hugged him, the two of them on their knees in their great billowing inventions (his illuminated wizard’s robes, her buttresses of starched fabric and oversized bracelets that Harry had spent hours illustrating). Jeanne stood silently behind the grieving pair. Her mouth was slightly open, as in some photo snapped at tragedy’s first tick, before the realization of horror had settled to the heart, and Harry was rocked cruelly by a vision of that day, that beach.

Their lovemaking had just ended when the girl came to the door of the beach house and said hurry, hurry, and oh did they, and they ran down the beach and everyone (later) said it was not their fault—although no one knew they were making love; no one knew that—because the boy was after all a lifeguard and the girl, the babysitter, came recommended by everyone and if later people said he might have been drinking well maybe he hadn’t been, others said that he had mended his ways and why speak ill of the dead because both were sadly dead and all you could say was what a tragedy and get on (why don’t you get on?) with it?

Raymond’s voice, full of new, booming authority, pulled Harry back into the room.

“Never,” Raymond roared, still cradling the monkey, rocking on his knees, animated by grief, “have two such warriors lived more gloriously or died more righteously. Lord Arbus, how the days will dim without you, best of best men, apes, all creatures of light and freedom.”

“Oh Allan, great knight, passionate-hearted soldier! Oh, you have left a king-sized hole, a hole all the angels could fall through. Robbed of your loyalty, your pride, your energy, I do not wish to rise up and continue. It is only your memory, your still echoing spirit, that will not let me rest, that urges me to the end of this enterprise. Until then, prince.” Raymond leaned forward and kissed the dead boy’s lips. Gently, he lowered the monkey to the floor and arranged it next to Allan. Raymond stood up.

Harry heard a sob and turned to see Robert Furman. The man was sagging badly, shaking. His mouth hung open; he looked like a man who had suffered several severe strokes and lost the efficient use of his faculties, and when he saw Harry staring at him, he said, “I brought this on, thinking I knew what Em needed.” He looked at Harry apologetically. “I’ve got to find her.”

He turned and wobbled out of the room. Harry thought of stopping him, but thought,
Why?
He had no better plan himself. Let Furman seek his niece and make what amends he needed to make. Harry knew who the real culprit was, where the true designer of so much evil lay. He did not have to look far to find him. Mad Blodkin: Harry Gainesborough.

Harry heard sounds of explosion far away, and screams, and the thunder of hooves. Did they have guns in Zod Wallop? Did they have horses?

No, Harry thought. They had no guns, but they had explosive gases and fire and cutting and rending weapons and magics that could kill at short range, and as for horses—the Less-Than rode the hideously mutated creatures called Mires that had been created by Lord Draining’s dreaded Splicers.

Harry had never actually drawn a Mire, so he had no idea how they would look. They would be ugly, of course, and move with a quick, lopsided gait, as though always stumbling.

Stop it
, he told himself.

I’m strapped to some table somewhere
, he thought. Out of my mind raving, pitied by nurses who are inured to my screams. A loony in a bin. None of this is real.

Someone pushed past Harry—a woman in a tight red dress that clung to her svelte form, her hair in black ringlets—and shouted, “I will not, I absolutely will not tolerate this, Allan! Get up this minute.”

Allan would not get up—wretched boy—and Gabriel went to him and stared down at him. Dealing with him had made her very tired and so she lay down next to him.

“I can hardly breathe,” she told him. “You’ve run me such a ragged race, with your escapades, one after another, and your tantrums and…oh, I’m just exhausted, Allan.” She had a thought then, and she sat up and looked at her sullen, spiteful boy and brushed his hair back and said, “Suppose I read a story. I’ve got it here somewhere.” And she pulled the book from her silken bag and read:

Rock yawned. “Gotta get moving,” Rock said. A couple of hundred million years went by. A rock is always slow to take action. A rock watches an oak grow from a sapling to a towering tree, and it’s a flash and a dazzle in the mind of a rock.

What was that?
Rock thinks. Or maybe,
Huh?

Harry listened. And remembered how Amy had giggled. “Daddy, a tree doesn’t grow in a flash,” she had said.

He had read the beginning of this book to her. He remembered now. He had been writing it before Dr. Moore had urged him to write. Yes. He had been telling the story and he had stopped when Amy died.

Harry ran out of the room. The grim hallway was littered with bodies. Some dark, furred thing the size of a large dog snuffled amid the corpses. It heard Harry’s approach and turned, regarding Harry with three small, red eyes. Harry snatched one of the glowing orbs that lighted the hall and threw it at the wall above the creature. The ball exploded with a cascade of arcing light and the creature grunted and lumbered away.

“Harry, wait!”

He turned and saw Jeanne coming toward him, golden, wending her way through the gore of shattered bodies.

“Go back!” Harry shouted.

“No.”

He waited then. She took his arm. “You’re going down to the ocean, aren’t you?”

“I have to,” Harry said.

Jeanne turned him and looked in his eyes. He saw them as he had never seen them before, not fearless—fear was certainly there—but filled with conviction, clear, dark, as luminous and mysterious as the universe itself.

“
We
have to,” Jeanne said. “
We
.”

T
HE
V
AST
H
ALL
of Grimfast was littered with dead bodies. More of the furred beasts moved among the dead, and apocalypse lizards scrambled up tapestries, carrying choice morsels of human flesh.

Neither beast nor human hindered Harry and Jeanne, and they moved gingerly through the carnage and came out of the castle and into the night and the salt wind.

This beach smelled of death and acid. Harry looked up and saw that the pale night sky contained multitudes of black, sailing shapes, a malevolent swarm of Ralewings.

Harry turned and saw Lord Draining come from the side of Castle Grimfast where the stables were lodged. He was mounted on a Mire—
so that’s what they look like
, Harry thought, with a shudder, like creatures made imperfectly from clay by some slow and stupid god—and a hundred of the Less-Than crowded behind the Vile Contender.

Draining held a long pike in one hand, and thrust upon its spiked end, one on top of the other, were two heads, one pale, grinning and sporting a crew cut, the other dark complected with a black mustache.

“Traitors,” Draining said, casting the pike to the ground. “Bahden and Butts. I do not condemn them for enterprise. I do not condemn them at all. May they make a good meal for rawn worms.”

“And now,” Draining said, “for the end of the games. My dear adversary.” The hooded Less-Than parted in a wave, and a man stumbled through.

“The Gorelord himself,” Draining said, pointing. An old man stood up and began to run. He limped as he ran, already maimed, his forces destroyed. Draining laughed. “What poor sport,” he roared. “Without his legions, what poor sport.”

Andrew Blaine ran blindly down the beach. His reason was almost gone. Somehow he had been drugged, he knew that much. This could not be real. He had been in a suite at the St. Petersburg Arms. And suddenly—and this was when the needle must have touched his throat—it turned to a dank, stinking room of stone and rotting wood and mold and a hallway filled with dead bodies, hardly human, and beasts and he had watched as Karl Bahden and Al Butts had been killed by strange, boneless men wielding swords that were wider at the end than at the hilt.

Now he ran and he wondered what drug was so powerful, who owned it, and—something pierced his back as though, in truth, the hallucination of Peake that sat upon a strange beast and leaned forward with a killing lance were real.

Impossible. But the simulation elicited a scream and a mind-destroying applause of pain.

Harry turned away from the gruesome spectacle. “Run.” They fled toward the beach.

“Wait, my friends!” Lord Draining bellowed. “Don’t abandon us.” And he urged his mount forward and the Less-Than surged after him.

Jeanne and Harry ran into the surf. It was rougher than it had been before, perhaps because Zod Wallop’s Ocean of Responsibility was just naturally more turbulent than the Gulf of Mexico or perhaps because Harry’s beating heart churned it.

Lord Draining paused at the edge of the water and dismounted. “Where do you intend to go?” he bellowed. “There is no domain that is not mine.” He drew a small crossbow—his skill was legend—and marched into the water, his cape of desiccated hands fanning out as he made long strides toward deeper water.

“Your pretty wife first,” he said, and Harry turned to see him slip a short arrow into the crossbow. Harry looked for Jeanne and saw that she was twenty feet behind him in the waves.

“Leave them be!” a voice roared, and Harry saw Raymond, standing at the edge of the water.

Lord Draining turned. “Well,” he said. “Come in. The water’s fine.”

“I cannot go in the water,” Raymond said, sounding querulous and young. “I’m sorry, but my mother says I am never, never ever to go in the water again.”

“Well, how sad. If you can’t come in the water, you can’t play.”

Raymond, in his foolish wizard’s clothes, looked dismayed, bested in an argument by a smarter child.

A new voice boomed across the water: “Raymond cannot play, but we can.”

Three figures approached from farther up the beach. The Less-Than moved away quickly, for although they would have attacked the women with impunity, they feared the Cold One more than death.

“Princess,” Lord Draining said. “I see you are fully recovered. Go with my blessings. I’ll give you your own kingdom to the east.”

“Of kingdoms there will be none,” Emily said. “Of love and hate and triumph and despair there will be none. There will only be Blodkin’s vouchsafed gift. There will be the stone. And the stone will not hear the stone and it will be all a silence that the wind will rule and the Ocean of Responsibility will be for no one to charter and the Abyss Dweller will carry the Cold One across all known habitations until the silence is complete.”

“You must think about this,” Lord Draining said. Harry heard fear in that smooth, predatory voice. “This is no revenge, this nothingness. There are powers you could have, and pleasures. Surely you have pined for pleasure in your trance? You must reconsider.”

Emily turned to Rene and said, “Sister, what think you?”

“Fuck em,” Rene said.

They held the hands of the Cold One and entered the water. As they marched forward, Harry heard a sound that seemed—he could think of nothing closer in his experience—like elephants trumpeting.