I heard a crash in the backroom, and I heard a familiar voice curse in Chinese — Master Yu shouted out that really awful Chinese curse, the one that a body would almost never think of saying out-loud (maybe you know the curse I mean) — and at that I was on my feet, tossing aside chairs and tables and punching anyone who got in my way, till I reached the backroom, a round meeting room around five-hundred feet large, with a fifteen-foot ceiling, and where I found Master Yu leaping above a small mob of youthful hooligans in fancy duds of all eras, from pinstriped vests and black topcoats to the occasional Chinese silk robe, blithe hatred on their pasty faces and in their dead-empty eyes, brown wilted flowers in their lapels.
My friend jumped gracefully from table to table, kicking heads in mid-air and screaming like a fishwife (or, if you prefer, like a “banshee”) and shouting just horrible insults in Chinese, such as hun tan (rotten egg), and tanhsiao kuei (dead coward) and even ts’ao ni tsutsung shihpa tai (which I won’t translate, and I apologize to anyone who knows what it means). Hopped off a table, kicked one young heir in the forehead, grabbed a roof-beam, swung, let go of the roof-beam and flew, kicked another young heir in the ear with his right foot and a third young heir in the nose with his left foot, grabbed another roof-beam with his feet, flipped forward and settled for a moment in the rafters, then dived; a youth with white hair and a dangling dollar-sign earring threw a bottle at my friend’s head, which, while descending, Master Yu forcefully deflected with the heel of his left foot; the bottle bounced off a young heir’s head, Master Yu landed in the middle of the room on his right hand, flipped upright, kicked the bottle with his right foot, the bottle smashed into the white-haired youth, then landed with a wobble on a table.
I wish you could have seen it.
It all sounded like this: Whoop-crash-whish-fwup-crunch-crunk-crunk-crunk-fwop-fwup-whish-whoop-thunk.
Master Yu stood in the middle of the room, slightly out of breath, but only slightly.
“Get out of my mind, all of you!” he screamed.
The room cleared amid much laughter and gasps.
Our enemies had enjoyed themselves.
“Where’s Althea?” I shouted, and Master Yu just sighed.
“You see?” he exclaimed. “Dead weight. And you and me, with the universe to save.”
From outside, we heard a woman screaming our names. Master Yu sighed again, gave me his .45 and readied his rifle and drew his sword, and we two — both loose-limbed and dizzy — staggered out into the early morning air, the fog of London descending over the towers and spires that wound about the buildings that lined the English cobblestoned street.
A shot rang out from one of the upper windows, and a body in a doorway across the avenue jerked violently to the left, staggered forward, then fell into the street.
A building at the end of the block shook, then burst into flame, and then shot into the air, and exploded overhead. Burning timber fell from the sky.
Relver stood with one arm around Althea’s neck, a gun at her head. A fog rose around him, and he and Althea seemed to ascend out of Albanadíqué, into an alien landscape of crumbling thousand-year-old elegance, and a great glass encasement closed over our heads. Two henchmen stood to his left; two henchmen stood to his right, each over six feet tall, unshaven and solid, in dirty blue tuxedoes. Each of the two henchmen on the left was missing his right eye, just a big gaping hole where his right eye should be; each of the two henchmen on the right was missing his left eye, and each sported a corresponding, unappetizingly empty eye-socket.
I ascended as well, surrounded by my own fog, and I trained the peacemaker on Relver’s head. Master Yu followed, reluctantly, involuntarily.
I could still see Albanadíqué, distantly, some sort of flickering image in a theater, and I looked through the glass encasement, as though we were goldfish in a goldfish bowl. The crowd peered from teahouses and chip shops, and other European-style stores that I couldn’t even begin to understand. Their faces were fascinated and frightened.
“Stay calm, everyone,” I called out, my voice even, my trigger finger still and ready. “We just want the Emerald Gemstone of Thoth, and then we will be on our way. Promise we’ll even pay you for it. A little cash-poor at the moment — who among us hasn’t been a little cash-poor from time-to-time! — but just as soon as I get my hands on a little shinplaster, I will send it right over.”
Various Horaces and Evelyns cowered in the darkness, their faces vast and shadowy-white overhead, but they seemed farther and farther away, dim and dark black-and-white sketches.
We stood in the crumbling street in the middle of the ruins of some European city, beneath crumbling towers, vacant and cobwebbed inns and churches.
“As good as in the post already!” I insisted to the crowd back in Albanadíqué, who were just a light shadow now.
“Trust us!” Althea exclaimed, in an unexpectedly brave and steady voice. “This is for all of you. I swan that it isn’t for us!”
Even if I had not known it myself, I would have believed her. Something in her voice and her bearing made me believe her.
Above us, the clouds cleared slightly, and the King’s white bearded face filled the early morning sky. “Enjoy a cup of tea at Brown’s Hotel,” he said. “Half price on Tuesday.” But he, too, was in shadows.
As the King’s face drifted apart into the clouds, I shouted, somewhat less convincingly, that if the Horaces and the Evelyns of Albanadíqué found us a delightful novelty before, just imagine how many years they’d be dining out on this story with big bugs all across Hell, past and future. I could hear a little murmur.
Relver laughed, and then his henchmen laughed, and they stepped towards us, along the crumbling and deserted European street.
I called out to him that he had made his point and that maybe he could at the very least let the girl go.
He nodded. He said he would free the girl.
If he were feeling particularly generous, I added, perhaps let me go free as well.
Relver laughed again, and then his henchmen laughed again.
“I will let the girl go,” he said. “You, I will kill.”
He snapped a finger, and Althea vanished. Magic-like. I wondered where she was. I wondered if she were anywhere.
He tapped his holster, and his henchmen tapped their holsters.
“On your draw, Mr. O’Hugh,” he said. “Master Yu.”
We were suddenly in a purple field, surrounded by a towering blue forest. A roofless stone church stood in a clearing, and a brook gurgled, somewhere in the distance. Gold and silver flowers that I had never before seen bobbed their heads in the damp air. In the sky, stars, and the eyes of the Horaces and Evelyns still watched us. A great, one-eyed giant stood to Relver’s left, observing, drooling.
Master Yu and I drew and we fired, and the five men laughed at us, and then the giant laughed, and then the Horaces and Evelyns laughed, far overhead, in the very far distance. I fired again, and Master Yu fired, and they all laughed again. Had we missed? Had our bullets hit them, without effect? Or had the bullets disintegrated or evaporated on the way to their target?
A raven flew from the rafters of the roofless stone church, and it landed on Relver’s left shoulder. It cocked its head, curiously.
I took a step back, then another, pointlessly. I held up my hands, my .45 dangled harmlessly from my finger. I dropped it to the ground. Master Yu shrugged, and he dropped his gun, and he stepped back as well.
We turned and ran.
We ran through fields of clover and streams where tiny undines danced and glistened in the ripples, a forest where the bony, horned Jan gant y tan swung in the treetop from his fiery fingertips, a lake where the scaly afanc pranced, a cairn haunted by spritely, vicious spriggans, an isle possessed by a clowder of ferocious, horse-sized and furry cath palug, a mountain peak from which the scaly and horned tatzelwurm roared, past knights who parried and jousted, purple sunrays, screaming meteors that crashed to Earth and exploded across rutted
plains. The forest burst into flame, rousing dragons and hawk-sized locusts that erupted from underground, and together they roared into the sky and then vanished at the cusp of the dome that encircled us overhead.
We ran and ran through this churning landscape, trying to escape from Relver and his henchmen, until, at length, this world ended in a smooth, transparent arc.
We were defenseless, pinned against the edge of the fish bowl, and Relver approached.
I still thought mercy was justified, although, I knew, very unlikely. But I gave it a try.
All I had done, after all, I pleaded to my former friend, was ask to buy a gemstone from a fellow who owned said gemstone, and then try to defend my own self when the shooting started, and who could really take offense at a thing like that? And Master Yu had really not even given that much offense; he was entirely innocent of any insult or frump, if one really thought about it.
As he approached us, Relver called out, “It’s a message, my friends, and I am sorry that your corpses must be the messengers, but that’s the way it is.”
I yearned for my ghosts to join me, but they did not. Perhaps they could not.
But I was not without hope, as it turned out.
I felt a tap on my right shoulder, and I held my breath, and I turned. A dainty hand held my arm, and a tough but pretty face smiled at me, freckled from the Western sun, sometime in another life. She was dressed in a yellow muslin dress, dignified and be-gloved, a perfect fit for this town of betrayed royalty. Her blazing red hair flowed down from a hat bedecked with silk flowers.
Emelina, I said, in my mind, and she nodded, in her mind, without actually nodding, the way we used to speak to each other without speaking, back in 1875, when we were fugitives together, Emelina and I.
Emelina stepped in front of me, and Relver shot, but she brushed his bullets away like gnats. His henchmen shot, and she flicked the bullets to one side with both pointer fingers, and she grinned, having fun. Relver steadied his gun, but Emelina raised her little dragoon revolver and blew his pistol out of his hand, then she blew the pistols out of his henchmen’s hands.
Then she blew off Relver’s head.
Chapter 19
The ruins of Europe dissolved, and we were back on Albanadíqué’s seedily elegant avenue.
Relver’s body tottered for a moment, and then he crashed into the cobblestoned street.
His henchmen ran off in many directions — one to the north, one to the east and one to the south. But no one ran west, toward the jungle. No one would dare.
She screamed after Relver’s henchmen, who were nowhere to be seen. She called them pigeon-livered cowardly bastards, stupid fearful sons of bitches.
“You want to hide behind your Falsturm magic to kill Watt O’Hugh?” she shouted. To the gunmen in the open windows, she bellowed, “You haven’t even seen my best trick yet! Go ahead: use your traitorous Falsturm magic to kill Watt O’Hugh!”
Then she began screaming at the customers who huddled in the tearoom, and then to the town at large.
“Who is next? Who wants to fight me next?”
The town went silent.
“You cannot defeat me now!” she screamed. “And if you try, I will be back for all of you! I will live another ten thousand years, and I will grow stronger and stronger! You will grow weaker as I grow stronger, and I will be back for all of you if you dare to fight me!”
I ran to Relver’s body, grabbed his gun and his bullet belt. I turned to thank Emelina, but she was gone, though I could still hear her fearless taunts in my ears.
Master Yu and I ducked into the haberdashery, peering through the window at the street.
After a few minutes, gunshots in the tearoom. Then a young man ran out, holding Althea by the crook of her arm, and waving a .45 about anxiously, stupidly. I screamed to him. He was nothing but a hobbadehoy, wide-eyed frightened young face, oversized brown pants and billowing white shirt, unkempt young hair flopping over his eyes as he ran. He ducked into the haberdashery as well, where he untied Althea’s hands. He sat back on the floor, out of breath. Althea fell into his arms, tears in her eyes.
He held out his hand to me.
“I’m Elias Pinkney,” he said. “I’m Althea’s fiancé.”
I said that I was pleased to meet him, and that I thought he had some explaining to do.
I left the haberdashery and staggered into the street, where the crowd now began to disperse in the reddish green-grey dawn. Unsteady on my feet, I wobbled into the tearoom, and there was my red-haired savior over by the finger sandwiches, chatting with the matron of the place, who seemed enthusiastic about what she had just seen. The sharpest-sharpshooter in Blue Rock, Wyoming, and now the sharpest-sharpshooter in Hell. I wondered what she was doing here, but then I figured it out. She was here to save me.
I looked into her eyes and touched her cheek.
“I wasn’t sure you would recognize me,” she said. “These aren’t my usual duds.”
“Duds indeed,” I said. She looked beautiful. Beautiful-different. “You needn’t have worried. I’d have recognized that shooting anywhere.” Her aim with a gun, like a witch. Then I added, “Thank you. As ever.”
She smiled.
“The Roman Hippodrome,” she said, “the Central Pacific train, and now the depths of Hell. It’s like looking after a three-year-old, O’Hugh.”
I said I didn’t ask for trouble, but perhaps I lacked a certain level of judgment, that certain knack for staying out of trouble’s way that others had mastered, but which I probably never would.
“Your ghosts helped you when you were saving Althea in the firelit mud of Wemas City,” she said. “But where were they when the fate of the universe was in the balance?”
She raised an eyebrow — her left eyebrow — and I could see cold experience in her eyes.
“The Falsturm and the Sidonians promise justice and equality,” she said, answering her own question, “and they’ve begun to deliver it. Even Billy Golden saw some hope in their movement, on his first few trips through Time. It’s a little more muddled, morals-wise, than a woman held as a slave by a thug down in Hell, isn’t it? Your ghosts haven’t made up their minds.”
“So why are you so sure?” I asked. “Why will you fight for me when my ghosts see the grey-blue muddle in this state of affairs?”
“I’m an ‘independent thinker,’ so to speak, to use this term in the nicest possible sense of the thing,” she laughed, “and I don’t believe the Sidonians value independent thinking. I adore you, Watt — I even loved you for a while (do you remember?[*]) — but this daring rescue mission wasn’t about you. Or anyway not entirely about you!”
She laughed again.
“I am much better at the so-called ‘Dark Arts,’ ” she said, “than I was when you knew me. It would make your head spin, Watt, darling.”
She placed the gemstone into my left hand. Her fingers were warm and cool at once.
“Take this,” she said, “and make the universe safe for immortals.”
The gemstone seemed to vibrate a bit in my hand. Then it stopped. My imagination, I thought. I presumed that it didn’t contain the secrets of the universe.
“We need,” she said, “a drink.”
I laughed and said that she was stating the obvious, but that drinks didn’t really pack the necessary punch down here in Hell.
Emelina smiled.
“I know a place,” she said. “Stick with me. I think I can get you in.”
At the Albanadíqué city limits, the havoc and chaos just behind us, still echoing.
“Do you see it now?” Emelina asked, and I did not, and then she said, “How about now?” and at length Master Yu and Althea and Elias nodded and gasped and insisted that they could see this thing off in the distance that I could not see, and then at further length, after I had squinted till my head near-burst, in the far far distance, a translucent building rose out of the jungle air, just wavering and shimmering like a mirage. Emelina saw my look of asto
nishment, and she laughed, and then, as might be expected, a great crow descended from the dark-cloudy sky. The crow was six feet long, black as night with streaks of white across its back, and friendly eyes. Emelina hopped on the crow’s back, and she stroked the feathers on its neck fondly.
“Follow me,” she said to us, and the crow ascended, glided briskly to the west. We rode along full chisel on our horses, following the crow. We’d have followed Emelina anywhere, which of course is what we were doing.
Chapter 20
Down there in Hell, there is a whole separate world at the very edge of the jungle, housed in a building in the shape of an icosahedron, just southwest of Albanadíqué, and inside this whole separate world there is a doggery, and the proprietor of this doggery serves real booze, not fermented grunter piss, or at least he did back when I visited the area, and the food isn’t made out of stones ground together with shrubs, with a bit of withering crops, muddy water and the occasional rabbit.
We arrived some twenty minutes after leaving Albanadíqué. The icosahedron was entirely invisible, except that we could see it, if that makes any sense to you. We could see it, but it was quite apparent that others could not. No one can see this world unless he is allowed to see it, and Emelina allowed us to see it.
Emelina hopped off the crow, which rose into the air and disappeared into the clouds.
This icosahedron, suspended a bit above the flatlands, bobbing and floating in the sticky wind, was made of reflective glass, with twenty triangular sides, thirty edges and twelve vertices, circumambulated by flinty-white stone steps that climbed to the second floor, where shadows of invisible patrons drifted about in the window; I could hear the lovely timbre of inaudible music in Hell’s dead silence.
Emelina raised her arms above her head and touched her fingers together at the tips, and we — Master Yu, Althea, Elias and I — followed her example, and then the five of us floated together above the icosahedron and descended through the roof.
Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3) Page 18