Dinner at Deviant's Palace

by Tim Powers

  Rivas shivered with fear, but for once it wasn’t for himself. This is big, he thought unhappily, bigger than anyone dreams. I wonder if even the shepherds know.

  Blood is manufactured in the Holy City.

  The bald girl back there said that all newly arrived women—including, presumably, Uri—have been shipped to the sister city. I think I know now what the sister city is.

  And, God help me, I’m afraid I may know what place, there, is Jaybush’s temple.

  He paused indecisively, trying to assimilate this new knowledge, and he remembered wondering who was talking when the far-gones spoke in tongues—what was the origin of the signal for which they were just passive receivers. He had guessed that it might be the voice of Norton Jaybush himself, who, having so to speak eaten their souls from within by means of his devastating sacrament, couldn’t then entirely withdraw his psychic teeth from the shells of the many bodies, so that they resonated when he spoke… but now it occurred to Rivas that if he was postulating psychic teeth, then he was talking about psychic resonances, too.

  If he was correct, the speakers in tongues were mindlessly relaying not Norton Jaybush’s spoken words, but his thoughts. No wonder the shepherds silenced them, now that he was thinking in English.

  So what was that stuff he was thinking in before? A gargling, yodeling, barking sort of language. Rivas remembered once seeing several far-gones all bite their lips at the same instant as they tried to produce some bit of gibberish particularly unsuited to human vocal organs. What language was that? How was it that Norton Jaybush, though born of woman, could, as the bald girl back there had pointed out, thrive in, perhaps require, an environment that strangely poisoned human bodies? Rivas had read old journals written in the decade before Sandoval had reorganized Ellay and set himself up as the First Ace, journals kept during the Dark Year, when for a solid year a yellow-brown overcast of smoke and dust masked the sky and made people wonder if the sun and moon were still out there… and he’d read about the symptoms the bald girl had described….

  Uri—and Jaybush himself, that girl said—are in the sister city, he thought, which I’m now sure is Venice, in his temple, which I’m afraid is probably that terrible nightclub of the damned known as Deviant’s Palace. If I’m going in there after her, it would be useful to be able to hear Jaybush’s thoughts while I’m doing it.

  He climbed back up the ladder and went inside again. He chose the lightest-looking of the five far-gones, a starved boy with no hair or teeth, and gently worked the blood-tap out of his arm. Blood coursed down the bony forearm and dripped from the limp fingers, but the flow seemed to stop when Rivas tied around the elbow a strip of cloth torn from his shirt. Then Rivas unbuckled the straps that held the strengthless body onto the bed, and he lowered it to the floor.

  He climbed down the ladder again, grabbed the kid’s wrists and hauled him out of the shed, crouched and took the body onto his shoulders. Rivas straightened up and took a couple of steps away from the hut to drag the feet clear, and then he was carrying the boy’s full weight.

  So, he thought dizzily, can you carry this all the way down to the beach? One way to find out. And if gets too heavy, I can always just drop him and walk on.

  As he trudged along under his peacefully sleeping, ruined burden, he was reminded of his very first redemption, four years ago; he’d walked back into Ellay through the South Gate carrying his quarry in just this position.

  It had been a favor for a friend. The man who was Rivas’s bass player then had told him that his daughter had run off nearly a month earlier with a band of Jaybirds, and Rivas had offered to try to find the girl by pretending to join the faith himself. It wasn’t a particularly risky thing for him to do, armed as he was with his drink defense and his Peter and the Wolf offense, and he’d managed to find her while her band was still within only a few miles of the Ellay walls, separate her from the band, knock her unconscious and carry her back home.

  In fact the most exhausting part of that first redemption had been the subsequent three days, which he’d spent locked in a room with the girl while she raged and wept and broke things and begged to be allowed to return to the Jaybirds and the seductive oblivion of the sacrament. He’d laughed at her, and with his intimate knowledge of the faith he was able to damagingly ridicule its most illogical tenets. When she’d started doing Sanctified Dancing to avoid thinking about what he was saying, he’d brought in his pelican and accompanied her by playing the most insultingly bouncy and childish dance tunes he knew, and shouting encouragements to her like a square-dance caller.

  Finally, gratifyingly, she’d come out of it, her eyes lost the birdy glaze, and she’d thanked him for giving her mind back to her.

  Rivas had asked his grateful bass player not to tell people about the favor—the Jaybirds were, after all, not a pacifist crew, and theirs was a jealous god—but the bass player now had profound sympathy for other parents in the plight he’d been in, and he couldn’t help mentioning to a few of them the service Rivas was able to perform. Some of these had offered Rivas so much brandy to repeat his feat that he’d been unable to refuse, and by the time he was twenty-eight or so he was making more as a redemptionist than he was as a musician.

  Clouds were scudding more thickly across the sky now, as he could tell without raising his head by watching then reflections in the glass under his metronomic feet, and a damp, chilly breeze tickled his ankles and got in under his torn shirt. I wonder who this kid was, he thought, and whether his parents could have afforded the services of a redemptionist. Unlikely. Brandy’s scarce these days, and even McAn, I’ve heard, won’t go out for less than a hundred fifths. Too late for this kid now anyway. There’s no way back for far-gones, and even without that, starvation and sickness seem to have got nearly all there ever was of him.

  He squinted sideways at the pale, skeletal hand that flapped limply at his side with every step. Who were you, kid?

  Sometimes the breeze from behind slacked, and when it did he thought he could hear the sighing crash of surf, far ahead; and the glass underfoot was frosted-looking now, and he could feel an increasing grittiness of sand with every step. He strained his neck to look forward, and saw that the glass plain ended in a jaggedly shattered edge a few hundred feet ahead. Beyond that was a paleness that had to be sand, and he thought he glimpsed low ragged buildings and points of dim yellow light.

  And then above the scratching of his footsteps and the breathing of himself and the doomed boy, he heard behind him a mix of sounds like a thin stick being whipped back and forth through the air and quick taps on a taut snare drum and the rattling of a length of chain, and it was getting closer fast.

  He spun around, automatically going into a sliding crouch so as not to fall, and saw, still a hundred yards away but closing, the jungle-gym-stuffed-with-old-car-parts figure of one of the trash men skating with a weird grace across the glass directly toward him, approaching with such speed that it grew from a distant dot to a noisy, sky-blotting bulk in only a couple of seconds, and only at the last instant did he manage to collect his wits and frog-hop out of its way to one side.

  Rivas relaxed into the somersault it turned out he was making, and he rolled to his feet several yards beyond the sprawled looseness of the dying boy and watched the skating trash man, well past him now, flail its lawn-mower arms and lean around in a tight, screeching curve that threw up a starlight-glittering spray of glass chips. When it came looping back toward him, working its aluminum-pipe legs to get back some of its lost speed, he waited until it had a lot of momentum and then he feinted to his right and dove to his left.

  The thing reached out an arm for him as it rushed past and succeeded in tearing his shirt, but then like an ungainly top it had spun out in a screeching abrasion of metal on glass, and as Rivas turned toward it it toppled and fell, still sliding.

  Run up and try to disable it while it’s down, he wondered tensely, or run away? Remembering its speed, and his inert companion, he ran toward it.
>
  The thing was making a terrible racket flailing its junk limbs against the splintering glass, but just as he ran up to it, planning to launch a flying kick at one of its knees, it rolled over and wobbled up onto its wide barbecue-grill feet and faced him.

  Rivas skidded hastily to a stop and then just stood and caught his breath, cautiously confident that the thing couldn’t, from a dead stop, close the three yards between them more quickly than he could leap aside.

  He stared at the roughly man-shaped construction. It was at least a foot taller than he was and twice as broad through the chest, but its legs were so ludicrously thin that looking at it was like looking at some biped bug under a magnifying glass.

  Then it spoke, and it had the same sort of wind-in-the-rafters voice as the one that had apparently knocked him out this afternoon. “Brother,” it sighed. “Go back to bed. I’ll put the bleeder back.”

  Rivas remembered the sad bald girl saying she’d soon wind up as one of these, and he had no wish to kill it. He noticed that some of its vacuum cleaner hoses and springs had been torn loose in its fall, and he found himself wishing he knew how to put them back. “Go away,” he said wearily to the thing. “If you try to stop me, one of us will be seriously hurt. I don’t think either of us wants that.”

  “No,” the construction agreed, “but let this go I can’t. I’m…obliged… to stop you.” Starlight glittered remotely in its glass eyes.

  “No, you’re not,” said Rivas. “Go to bed yourself. Do you things sleep? This boy was dying where I found him. I’d die if I stayed here. Roentgens and rads, right? Come on now—you know this is a place it’d be healthier to be far away from.”

  He could hear a valve release a hiss of compressed air before the thing spoke. “It… doesn’t matter what I know,” it said. “It doesn’t matter what you know. Go… back to… bed.”

  Exhaustion made Rivas willing to argue with the thing; the only other choice, after all, was to fight. “What will happen if I don’t? If I continue?”

  “I’ll…(hiss)…stop you.”

  “Would you kill me?”

  “…Not mean to.”

  Rivas looked beyond it, and then risked a glance over his shoulder at the distant wooden buildings down toward the beach. All this crashing around didn’t seem to have attracted any attention yet, but someone was bound to notice this unlikely trio out here on the glass before long.

  “Okay,” he muttered, slumping. He glanced at its knees and tried to estimate which one had been most weakened in its fall; then he decided, and pivoted and lashed out his left foot in a hard kick. He felt it connect and then he was rolling away over the glass, his shoulder numbed by a blow from one of the thing’s arms. He heard a crash behind him:

  Scrambling up, he saw that the trash man had fallen over and was stretching its metal arms out toward its broken-off leg, which lay on the plain several yards away. Rivas ran to the leg and kicked it further away—making a noisy clatter—then chased it, crouched, and picked the object up by the knee with his good hand.

  The thing was scrapingly hunching toward him, hissing, and he stood still until it was within range and then swung his metal club, banging away the claw hand that was reaching for him, and a moment later, backhanded, he took a solid whack at the bucket head; but even as the club rebounded and Rivas started to hop back, the thing’s other arm darted out and caught his ankle. Rivas sat down heavily.

  The trash man was pulling him toward itself, ripping his trouser leg and his skin, and its batted-away other hand was swinging back, clanking as it opened and closed, and the trash man was whisper-screeching, over and over, “Please… please…”

  The thing was suddenly too close for Rivas to swing his club, but he did parry the incoming hand with it. Its other hand moved up to his knee, and for a moment he believed it intended to even the score by ripping his leg off at the knee; its grip was like bolt cutters, and Rivas panted through clenched teeth as he tried not to scream.

  The other metal hand closed on his knee too, and the trash man pulled him so close that Rivas could stare right into the glass-chip eyes. “Please… please…” the thing was still saying.

  He could see wires or tubes under the edge of its chin, and so he raised his club with one hand—the bucket head tilted back to see how the blow would fall—and with his other hand he snatched at the wires and yanked as hard as he could. They tore out and the thing went limp.

  Rivas lay there and he stared into the glass eyes while he got his breath back, and he thought he saw intelligence in the two bits of glass, a mind still in there, helpless now but staring out at him in grieved reproach.

  Finally he tried to stand up, but the metal hands were still clamped onto his knee. He swore, trying not to imagine another trash man skating in from the horizon right now, and with panicky haste he wrenched at them. He managed to open one hand—it looked as if it had originally been a waffle iron—but the other, some sort of stout caliper, he had to break off at the wrist. For a while he tried vainly to work it off over his knee, but then he remembered that the bald girl had said that trustees only had to wear one leg iron. A token of captivity, in effect. Perhaps this metal band might be mistaken for that. Worth a try, he thought; and one would push such a thing up high enough for it to grip, so as not to have it rattling around one’s ankle all day.

  He stood up at last, the trash man’s hand an eccentric decoration for his shredded pants-leg, and wearily plodded to the boy, who of course had slept through the whole thing. He hoisted him up, got him draped over his shoulders again, and resumed his interrupted walk to the beach.

  From far behind he heard a faint, rushing hiss, and he spun around so quickly that he nearly fell over, but it was just rain approaching, so he faced south again and kept walking. It became more audible, a multitudinous pattering behind him, and then swept over and past him, hurrying toward the sea, leaving him to follow more slowly in the downpour.

  He was careful not to lose his balance where the glass ended, for before it gave way to the sand a dozen yards ahead, it became an obstacle course of rain-slick, broken, tilted shards, a fall on which would certainly cut a person up. He moved slowly over this broken glass section, but his pace didn’t pick up much when he’d got past it, for he was in deep loose sand now.

  He squinted up from under his wet eyebrows at the flimsy-looking buildings ahead, and he wished he knew what to anticipate here. What had that girl said? The men are sent to the beach settlement, where they make and repair boats. And they have leg irons welded on. Well, fine, he thought. It sounds like tiring work. I hope they all sleep soundly.

  He saw a gap between two buildings, and as he got closer he saw that it was a street that he was looking down the center of; and a moment later, peering through the sheets of rain, he saw agitated human figures. He stopped and tried to see by the faint reflections of yellow light ahead what the people were doing…. They seemed to be leaping and whirling in the rain….

  Rivas almost grinned. They were doing Sanctified Dancing. And now that he listened for it he could hear over the steady whisper-roar of the rain the rhythmic hand-clapping of the people who stood around watching. No wonder they hadn’t heard his battle with the trash man.

  Well, he thought as he started forward again, this isn’t as convenient as it would have been if they’d all been fast asleep, but it’s better than a few quiet watchful guards.

  He was wondering whether to sneak around the far side of one of the structures—which would involve carrying his increasingly heavy burden an extra couple of hundred yards—or just stomp right down the street in a nothing-to-hide way, giving a birdy grin and a “Shepherd’s orders!” to any inquisitive people… when he realized he didn’t have the choice. He’d been seen.

  A figure with a lantern was striding out toward him, waving, and in a minute he saw that the person wore the robe—and yes, he could see the crooked staff too now—of a shepherd. Rivas knew he was in no shape to outrun anybody, so he just put on a smile and
kept trudging forward… but he was rehearsing in his mind exactly how he’d throw the kid at the shepherd if trouble arose, and in the same motion draw his knife and try for the man’s throat.

  But it seemed that wouldn’t be necessary. The man smiled at Rivas with a little less contempt than shepherds usually showed for people, and when he was close enough for talk to be possible over the sound of the rain, he pointed at the unconscious young man and said, “Runaway?”

  “Evidently,” said Rivas without hesitation. He saw the shepherd’s gaze go to the boy’s ankles and stay there while a wondering frown wrinkled his forehead, so he added, “Got his leg irons off too, somehow, what do you think of that?” He was acutely aware of the pressure which was his knife sheath against the inside of his right wrist.

  The shepherd waved Rivas forward and then fell into step beside him. At least the rain was making the sand firmer underfoot. “I don’t like it,” the shepherd said. “It’s good for them to dance, of course, when it’s that or start thinking the wrong way, but it’s bad that they have to do it so much lately. And now this… sick kid got his irons off and tried to run.” He shook his head. “You,” he said, giving Rivas a stern look that, prolonged for just a few more seconds of silence than it was, would probably have had Rivas tossing the kid and snatching for his knife, “are supposed to see to it that this kind of thing doesn’t happen. You and the other trustees.”

  “Yes,” said Rivas cautiously, thankful that his one-leg-iron trustee disguise seemed to be working. “I know. Well, this’ll spur us to be more diligent.”

  Rivas found that he’d begun walking in a knock-kneed way to keep the shepherd from getting a good look at his leg iron; he realized this would only call attention to it, and he tried to remember how he’d been walking before.

  “Take him straight down the street to the penitence cage,” the shepherd said. “I’ll have the other trustees rounded up. We’ve got to talk about how we’re going to get this situation straightened out. I wish the Lord spent more time here.”