‘Did you have this done to me?’
The kobold managed to laugh. ‘Not me. But I would hav-ve, pathless-ss one.’
Bill Chambers snarled. ‘Pogue mahone, gobshite.’
Joshua said, ‘So what the hell happened to you, McCool? Contractual dispute, was it?’
‘Or-hrrders again,’ came another voice, canine, but with a more liquid quality than the rest. Female. ‘My or-hhrders. Always my orders . . .’
Joshua turned to the group of dogs by the podium. He recognized the tall warrior – Snowy. He still had that ray gun dangling from his Batman-type utility belt, like a prop from one of Lobsang’s old 1950s sci-fi movies, alongside crude blades of metal and stone. He stood at ease, but with an air of constant, competent alertness.
He was watching over another, a female, the one who lounged, very dog-like, on the grass. It was she who had spoken about orders.
Sally was studying Joshua with some sympathy, leavened by amusement at his probably obvious disorientation. ‘Classic Long Earth set-up, isn’t it, Joshua? A mash-up of three disparate sapient species – four if you count the Rectangles builders, off-stage – nurtured on separate Earths and now all mixed up together like this.’ She nodded at the reclining female dog. ‘Joshua, meet Petra. Granddaughter, ruler of this city – this Den, whatever – which is called the Eye of the Hunter.’
‘Granddaughter?’
‘Two down in the hierarchy from the Mother, I think. The big boss of this doggy nation is the Mother, then you get Daughters, Granddaughters—’
‘Petra?’
‘A human nickname, apparently. You’d probably ruin your epiglottis if you tried for their true names. Not that we mere humans are told them anyhow.’
‘We’re not the first to pass through here, then.’
‘Evidently not. Those damn combers get everywhere, don’t they? . . . Now pay attention. Petra’s in charge, and she knows it.’
Joshua faced Petra. ‘It was your orders to staple me?’
‘Let me make it plain, Josh-shua. What is it we each-shh wann-t? You, the tr-hrrollss. Yes? Make peace.’
‘That’s why I came here.’
‘Me too,’ Sally said.
‘Ve-hrry good. But I care not for you, or tr-hrrolls. Though t-hrroll music pleases. I care for these.’ And she plucked the ray gun from Snowy’s belt, hefted it in her graceful fingers, pointed it straight at Joshua’s head – and pulled what was obviously the trigger.
He didn’t flinch, though from the corner of his eye he saw Jansson and Bill shrink back. Of course nothing happened. It wasn’t the moment in the game for him to die, though he suspected that would come later.
The Granddaughter said, ‘Weapons. Come from him.’ She gestured at the cringing, grinning kobold. ‘Where from? From scentless wo-hhrlds.’
Sally murmured, ‘She means, stepwise. These canine conquerors can’t step. Which is why they needed to staple you.’
‘Weapons make Eye of Hunter-rhh strong Den. Stronger than foe dens.’
Granddaughter, Joshua thought blearily. Dogs had big litters. This granddaughter of the queen must have a lot of rivals.
Sally said, ‘Joshua, you need to understand. As far as I can make out these canines don’t care about us, or about stepping, the parallel worlds. All they care about is their own wars, their own agendas, their conflicts. We’re just a means to an end.’
‘We’d be the same, probably.’
‘Right. And all they really want, right now, is weapons to fight their wars.’
‘The ray guns?’
‘But weapons die.’ The Granddaughter threw the weapon, a kind of laser pistol, Joshua saw, contemptuously on the floor. ‘That-tt one knows.’ She pointed at the kobold. ‘Whe-hrre weapons a-hhre. How to get. They dhrr-ibble into my hands, for ho-hrrible price, then die. Enough. We have per-hrrsuaded him to help.’ She fingered something at her neck, a scrap of flesh dangling on a thong. It was an ear, Joshua saw. A kobold ear. And beside it, on a second thong, now he looked more closely – a ring, like his own, a Rectangles ring. ‘But kobold has no weapons-ss fo-hhr us.’
‘Prob-lemm for me,’ hissed the kobold, his anxious grin showing bloody teeth, his gaze flickering over the humans’ faces.
‘I’ll bet it is,’ Joshua said.
Joshua couldn’t figure it all out yet, not quite. But these rings, from the world a few steps away, were evidently crucial. As Sally had seen. And by retrieving their own ring she had sought some kind of advantage.
‘Here’s the deal,’ Sally said quickly. ‘The beagles want more ray guns. They are in caches, over in Rectangles.’
‘They are where? In what?’
Sally gritted her teeth. ‘Is this really the time for an archaeology lesson, Valienté? Just listen . . .’ She spoke very rapidly, and he realized she was hoping the beagles, and the kobold, wouldn’t be able to follow fully. ‘The caches the kobold raided before are all exhausted. Locked up. To get at fresh ones he needs another key.’
Joshua’s mind, unusually flexible for once – maybe it was the goad of the lingering pain – made the connection. ‘The key is the ring we found in the cave of bones. The ring I kept, the ring you took from the airship—’
‘The ring I now have secreted on my person,’ Sally murmured. ‘But they don’t know I have it.’
‘I’m not surprised. And the ring the Granddaughter is wearing—’
‘Opened a weapons cache that’s now exhausted.’
‘He needs a new key. He, or his buddies, must have combed Rectangles for the keys. How come he didn’t find the one we did?’
‘On the finger of a long-dead corpse? Some taboo, maybe. Or instinct. He’s not human, Joshua. He’s not going to seek stuff out the way a human would.’
‘OK. What now?’
‘So here’s the deal we made. The beagles can’t step, right? So we go over to Rectangles – that is me, Jansson, the kobold. He shows us where the cache is, we open it with the ring, we come back with more ray guns, nicely charged up. That was the plan. But I’ve been playing for time, Joshua. For a month now. Time before I had to give away our only advantage. Time before I had to hand over high-energy weapons to these sapients we’ve only just met. I just hoped something would turn up, that we’d find some other way out. You were a wild card, Joshua. Once you got here – if you got here at all – I hoped I could use you to force a bluff, somehow. Get out of here, get to the trolls. Instead of which—’
‘Here I am with a crossbow stitched to my back. Sorry to let you down.’
‘Don’t apologize,’ Sally said without a hint of irony. ‘Not your fault. Once again I didn’t guess the non-human motivation right.’ She sighed. ‘Look. While you were out we talked, came up with a deal. I think we’ll have to hand over the damn weapons. If they exist, if we can bring them back. The deal is that if we do make it back with the weapons, you get to speak to the trolls. But you’ve also become a kind of hostage, to make sure we won’t just step away out of here.’
‘Maybe you should do just that. Step away. Take Jansson, Bill with you—’
She sighed, irritated. ‘You’ve always been an idiot, Valienté. If I left you here I wouldn’t care, but Helen would kill me. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good in the long run. We have to handle this situation with the trolls here somehow. And resolve humanity’s relationship with the beagles. We come back, and then, when everybody’s got what they want—’
Joshua, his back twinging every time he moved, turned to the Granddaughter. ‘Yes, what then, uh, Granddaughter Petra? Are we free to go?’
She smiled. Her lips pulled back over gleaming teeth. It was an almost human expression, if a chilling one. ‘You will still be alivve. And perhaps you will live on, if you display honour-rhh . . .’
Joshua tried to make sense of that.
Bill spoke up. ‘Joshua. Remember, they’re not human. “Honour” meant something different to that gobshite kobold, didn’t it? I wonder what “honour” means to a sentient sp
ecies descended from pack-hunting carnivores.’
‘I have a feeling I’m going to find out,’ Joshua said with dread. ‘First things first.’ He stood carefully, but his back flared with pain and he staggered, until Sally grabbed his arms. ‘Where are the trolls?’
65
SO, FULFILLING THEIR part of the deal, Jansson, Sally and the kobold stepped back to the Rectangles world.
Despite a strong dose of anti-nausea pills, the steps still felt like the usual punches in the gut to Jansson. When she got at last to the Rectangles, she folded over, groaning.
Sally stood over her, rubbing her back. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Never gets any easier. Not since the very first time I stepped.’
‘On Step Day. I know. Out of my father’s living room, with a Stepper he made, and left behind.’
Jansson, doubled over, thumped the ground, frustrated. ‘It’s not just the stepping. This damn illness, it gets in the way of doing stuff. You know?’
‘I can imagine.’
The others waited the few minutes it took her to recover enough to stand straight. Sally was grave, patient. The kobold stood alongside her, restless, his own injuries obviously paining him. But he oddly aped Sally’s stance, and he cocked his head as if in mock-sympathy, his gaze flickering from one face to the other, as if seeking approval. Jansson turned away from him, repelled.
She managed to stand up and look around. There was the airship hovering overhead, Joshua’s Shillelagh, a massive, competent-looking, reassuring presence. Jansson took a deep breath. This world smelled of dryness, of baked, rusty stone. But it didn’t smell of dog, and that was a huge relief.
Sally touched her shoulder. ‘Look. I have to go back, with these reptile ray-guns, whatever, for the sake of Joshua. Always assuming we find the guns at all. But the beagles can’t reach you here; they can’t step. You could just go, Jansson. Get into that airship and—’
Jansson smiled tiredly. ‘And leave Joshua behind? Sally, I’ve known him since he was a boy. He is what he is, he’s where he is, partly because I was in his life from the start. You know? Pushing him. Like you, I’m not about to leave him now.’ She looked at the kobold. ‘Though I have to admit I don’t know why this one hasn’t scarpered already. Why did you hang around to let them beat you up?’
‘Drugs-ss,’ the kobold said simply. ‘They drugged poor Finn McCool. Could not ss-step.’
Jansson said, ‘But you just stepped with us. The drugs have worn off now. Yet you’re still here.’
Sally grinned, an expression that reminded Jansson uncomfortably of the beagles, the wolf-people. ‘Oh, he knows that if he runs I will track him down. You won’t be able to hide. Will you, you little prick? Wherever you go I will find you, and kill you.’
The kobold shrugged; he had already seemed nervous enough. ‘Poor Finn McCool,’ he repeated.
The heat, the dryness, were sucking at Jansson’s strength. ‘Shall we get on with this?’
‘Good idea.’ Sally glanced down the dry valley, at the looming stone mass of the building there. ‘Not too healthy for any of us, hanging around that thing.’ Suddenly she had a ring in her hand. ‘This what you need, Finn McCool?’
On the beagle world, the trolls had gathered by a river bank. Joshua and Bill walked towards them. Bill was carrying a backpack containing Lobsang’s patent translation device.
Every step caused Joshua precise, relentless agonies. His lower back felt hot and damp, and he wondered if his stitches were ripping open as he carried the weight of the crossbow gadget. If so, the blood loss might kill him slow, even if he didn’t step to give the weapon the chance to kill him quick. Even his dodgy shoulder was hurting, a grace note added to the symphony of agony from his back.
He tried to concentrate on his surroundings. The river was wide, strong, placid, and its banks were dominated by green fields and forest clumps. From the fields, the beagles’ strange herd beasts had come to drink, sipping at the lapping water, lowering their misshapen heads.
And the trolls were here, by the water. A band of them had gathered at the closest point of the river to the Eye of the Hunter, where irrigation channels and open sewers cut across the ground to the town. As always the troll group, though sedentary in this world, was mobile in the Long Earth; at the fringe of the pack, scouts and hunters continually flicked away and returned, like ghosts.
There were hundreds of trolls, in this one band. Joshua could see they had been here for some time; the ground was scuffed and muddy, and there was a strong, unmistakable troll musk in the air. There were more bands like this, Joshua could see, spread along the river bank, and on the far side, and deeper into the country. The long call, unending, seemed to hang above them, a cloud of elusive memory.
Surely there were still trolls out there across the Long Earth; nobody had any real idea how many trolls there were in total. But this really did look to be where they were concentrating, he could see that. The centre of gravity of the troll population.
And the band before him was the very pivot of it all, as far as he was concerned. For there was Mary, the runaway from the Gap, and her cub Ham, unmistakable in the remnant of the silvery spacesuit the nerds at the Gap had dressed him up in.
As Joshua and Bill approached the trolls did not quite fall silent, but the volume of their song diminished. Ham sucked his thumb as he watched them, wide-eyed, apparently curious, like all young mammals.
Bill slipped the pack off his shoulders and unloaded it. It contained a tablet, blank and black, a couple of feet square, with a fold-out stand. Bill set this up, and placed the tablet to face the trolls.
Joshua glanced down. ‘That’s it? No on-switch, no boot-up?’
Bill shrugged. ‘Black Corporation shit. It’s not like the troll-call translators that Sally described, by the way, those trumpet things. Some kind of new Black Corporation shit. You figured what you’re going to say here? How you’re going to convince them that humanity loves them after all?’
Joshua had purposefully not thought this far ahead. He was no public speaker, and even preparing for town meetings back at Hell-Knows-Where tended to make him freeze up. ‘I figured I’d wing it.’
Bill patted him on the shoulder, gingerly. ‘Good luck with that.’ He stepped back.
Joshua faced the trolls, standing straight, trying to ignore the liquid pain of his back. He was aware of them watching him, hundreds of pairs of those dark, unreadable eyes – backed up, he reminded himself, by hundreds of pairs of hairy arms, and fists like steam hammers. And he was the representative of a humanity that was probably still treating their kind as brute beasts across a million worlds. What the hell was he going to say?
He spread his hands. ‘Good afternoon.’
‘Actually it’s still morning,’ muttered Bill.
‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you all here today.’
‘That’s it. Start with a gag.’
The trolls were motionless.
‘Whew. Tough crowd.’
‘Shut up, Bill—’
‘I didn’t say that, Joshua.’
Joshua turned. A figure stood beside him, tall, erect, still, with shaven head, in an orange robe, and with a broom in his right hand. ‘Lobsang.’
‘I don’t mean to steal your thunder, Joshua. But I figured you could use a little backup.’
‘You can never have too much backup,’ Joshua muttered.
Lobsang smiled, and for an instant he flickered, shuddering into a cloud of boxy pixels – Joshua could see the green prairie through his substance – before congealing again. A hologram, then, projected from the box. Lobsang took a step forward, glancing back at the translator box. ‘Hit it, boys.’
The thrilling sound of a mass choir burst from the translator box and filled the air, a pounding, repetitive chant, a thousand voices. To Joshua’s ears it was not quite human, not quite troll, but a blend of the two.
The trolls looked astonished. They stopped grooming, stood up, all their
faces turned towards Lobsang. And already, Joshua could hear, the song of the trolls was echoing the translator’s riffs.
Lobsang raised his arms, brandishing his broom. ‘My friends! You know me. I am Lobsang, who you know as the Wise One. This is Joshua. They call him the Wanderer. Yea, the Wanderer! And we have travelled far to speak to you . . .’ As he spoke he backed up his words with rudimentary sign language, and his own voice sounded over the chorus from the translator box, thin, high, distinctive, like a Bach trumpet.
‘Just when I thought my life couldn’t possibly get any weirder,’ Joshua muttered.
Bill said, ‘I guess he can take this off around this world. Speak to as many trolls as he can get to. A hologram’s not going to grow tired. The Lobsang world tour, 2040. The good thing is we haven’t got to listen to it every time he does it . . .’
Sally handed Finn McCool the ring. ‘Show us.’
‘Eass-y,’ said the kobold. He took the ring between his supple finger and thumb, set it on his upturned palm, spun it –
The ring blurred into the air, still spinning, shot past Jansson’s face like a bright blue hornet, and made straight for the big stone building. It burrowed into the dirt at the base of the building’s face, whirring like a drill bit, throwing up a spray of sand, until it had disappeared.
There was stillness, silence.
Sally seemed irritated. She glanced at the kobold. ‘Now what?’
‘Juss-t wait.’
Jansson smiled at Sally. ‘You OK?’
Sally shook her head. ‘I just get annoyed by stuff like that. Magic-ring crap. What a stunt. I mean, I could imagine how that could work: miniature accelerometers to detect the spinning that activates it, some equivalent of GPS to figure out where it has got to go, some kind of propulsion – magnetic? Even micro-rockets of some kind? Just a dumb trick, to impress the credulous, easily distinguishable from magic . . .’
The Long War Page 35