She took a small bite from the spicebread quietly, prompting with her eyes for him to continue.
“You know how they normally are…all stuffed and…like a painting. The little guy always tries to act like he’s so burdened and busy…like what a pain in the neck it is to play the adult and remember everything and make sure the old guy…you know…takes his whatever and craps regularly…there’s a shine in his eyes when he’s with him. When we were leaving the tent city, he hugged him. Looked like a drunk goose, but wow. You don’t see that.”
Sylhauna saw the Recorder again, still and sad against the water, “How’d he wind up with him?”
Ring shrugged, “Dunno.”
“Why does he need a Recorder?”
A pause, “Maybe he’s just famous.”
“You’re gonna help him, right?”
Ring sighed, “Mm hmm.”
Nodding, she tossed the remainder of her spicebread to a small grouping of birds pecking on the brown grass and stepped closer to idly slide her fingers across the haunting figurehead on Farmilion’s dirigible, “Who’s Laoka?”
Eyebrow raised, he watched her a moment curiously, “Head of the Rauchka when they broke away from the imperial courts. What’s he got to do with anything?”
She jutted her lower lip out thoughtfully, “Before they were all-” Then she made bang-bang gestures with her fingers.
“Yeah. They were jesters one time. It’s what the Salt Mystic made them. Are you sure you want to talk about this now?”
“Anything other than today, yes. I heard you and the Sniper a bit back in the cave. Most of your junk there doesn’t make any sense at all. Why aren’t they still clowns? What happened? We could use some clowns as long as they’re not creepy.”
Ring inhaled deeply, considering his words, “The Mystic’s idea; and a pretty good one when you think about it. The higher up you go in the world, the less you hear the truth; and it’s not exactly humble people attracted to jobs like that anyway. No matter how big a deal you were, their job was to tell you your farts still stank and you’re losing your hair…your boobs are sagging. Shaking feathers, cracking jokes, drawing pictures…whatever they wanted to do; but that ‘untouchable’ law is only as good as the people who’ll keep to it.”
Ring shook the canteen idly to drop water onto some ants crawling on the dirt below him, watching them suddenly float on tiny pools of surface tension, “When the Old Man got to be somebody after Sarling, when everybody started asking his opinion and trying to find out about him…started rooting for him, Laoka started embarrassing him to knock him down a bit. It didn’t go well.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t like each other. One time he pulled the Old Man’s nose in front of his kids and some generals, so the Old Man pulled a knife on him. Drew blood. You weren’t supposed to do that, so a little civil war happened: old way versus the new way. Got pretty bad and escalated. Some Rauchka kids slipped something into Nanny Talgo’s drink that made her simple minded. That’s when the Old Man decided he’d delete the entire Rauchka race from the Record. All of them.”
“He missed. There’s a bunch of them. They’re scary though, not funny at all.”
Nodding, “He lobotomized their Recorders, dug out parts of their brains. Chained Rauchka to posts in the Salt Flats. He hired wicked midwives to make their babies spastic or retarded. That’s the kind of man he was, so they did what they had to do. The Malthus helped; but there was only a handful of them left anyway.”
Ring set the canteen aside and stood, shaking out his legs from sitting too long, “So one day under heavy mortar fire at the Leylands and in front of his maps, Laoka turned around at the sound of his name to see two Rauchka grip his wrists and chain them together. He was betrayed. They dragged him to the Old Man, breaking most of the bones in his arms on the way and asked for it all to stop. Talgo leaned in close, whispered something to Laoka that no one else heard, and poured a bottleful of acid into his left ear.”
Sylhauna grimaced, “What did he whisper?”
Ring shook his head, “Nobody heard. But remember what I just told you if the idiots in the plazas with the banners and signs start shouting for another Talgo to be in charge. And this thing today…with Balcister…” He stopped short, interrupted.
“Old Dustle.” Knotwhistle’s voice suddenly drew their attention from below, breaking their fancy. He was standing alone and stupidly, yet mumbling, holding something taupe and draped over both arms. He said nothing further, but rather squinted his eyes and frowned. He looked at Sylhauna and held up for her his gift. It was his coat. He was offering her his coat. When she recognized it as such, she touched her chest with her palm and thanked him. Awkwardly, with nothing further in his plans, Knotwhistle took a step backwards.
“Dustle was a good one. Showed them how to be.” As was his way, the very old man trailed his words off as he lumbered away, dragging his leg somewhat like a sack and pointing his face to his side erratically along his path. Ring watched him leave, but didn’t comment.
It was a very short time following that Misling stood up and dusted off his pants and walked in a determined fashion directly up the hillside within the rail bed much as Ring had suggested he would.
“You might bring your new coat, Dear Heart. I have no idea what’s happening next.”
11 SCREAMING
Nested and entwined within the Judge’s cliffside palace were cobbled passageways and stairwells opening mostly behind tapestries in great rooms and storage areas. It was winsome public gossip that Stendahl, often left alone growing up, would disappear for days into the old walls such that the kitchen staff would scatter blocks of chocolate and bread and fruit about the counters untidily to find it had disappeared unattended. One favorite recount of many visiting statesmen often smilingly retold in Alson was of diplomats and department heads patiently sitting motionless while the little fellow skulked beneath the heavy oak table thinking himself unnoticed and trying to paint their shoes. Things of this sort are what emboldened many in the markets and parks and public houses to address Stendahl as a young man whom they’d helped raise.
In such a passageway, musty and serpentine leading to the grand hallway, Stendahl dragged almost violently behind him a Recorder. Shoving aside the yellowing tapestry, he made for the parade balcony outside which overlooked the flagged courtyard and beyond that, the city itself. The vicious column of smoke lingered still; and new fires had broken out. Stendahl gripped the Recorder’s head by the temples and shoved his face forward at chest level like a lantern, fitfully coercing the struggling fellow to observe the happenings below. In a pained and choked voice out of line from his typical purring velvet, Stendahl shouted.
“Liar!”
When the Recorder struggled free, he took a step backwards and cast the sort of puzzled and yet judging stare Recorders would at times let slip. It said one was caught for all time in the full light of day at being an ass. There were names for such stares. This Recorder scurried from the room, bumping loosely into one of Peri’s watchmen at the doorway who’d seen but a moment of events on the cold balcony, having been looking for the young man.
“Get out of the open!” The watchmen gripped Stendahl’s sleeve and tried to shove a railgun into the young man’s palm. Stendahl was much taller than the soldier-policeman; and although he didn’t resist or unduly delay moving back into the grand hallway, he did purposefully let the weapon fall to the mahogany floor.
“What were you doing out there?! Pick it up!”
Grotesquely, Stendahl only looked at the slender bole weapon resting where it had dropped. Having no time to press further, the watchman relented and led Stendahl with his own railgun drawn but exposed on his flank.
“Whatever. Just move!”
At the landing of the ceremonial stairway beside its massive winged silver statue they were joined by a second watchman who slipped into place like a bird in formation.
“Got your back!”
“Roger that
, thanks. We’ll make for VIP lockdown. Any sign of a breach?”
“Not really. Spurious alarms, maybe.”
The two of them continued on either side of Stendahl, professionally and cleanly sweeping the area in protection until at last entering a freight elevator. The first watchman slammed shut the cage door and struck a key from his pocket lanyard against a panel projected from the bulkhead. The elevator hummed mightily and started downward.
“Emeresca…Blade Watch.” He was taut and spoke out the side of his mouth in introduction to his fellow, still watching the cage door.
“Trope…Engineering Corps.”
“Engineers?” Emeresca chuckled and cast a glance at Stendahl with his tossed white hair and char-black and wrinkled silk shirt. “They’re scraping the bottom for you, aren’t they, Bubba?”
Stendahl ran his eyes across the soldier, pausing on a coiled sigil on his shoulder patch, “You are Rauchka?”
Emeresca ignored Stendahl’s query as if neither the inquiry nor the inquirer mattered, “Trope, what’s going on outside? I’ve been dark.” He leaned against the wall and loosened his railgun’s shielding straps around his forearm.
“I’ve been at my battle station since I heard about Balcister. I just went there to the landing…didn’t know what else to do. No one’s answering. I’ve been trying to decide if I should go out and find some way to help.”
“Last order I got was to go find this guy and get him underground. What did you hear about the assault? Do they know who did it?”
“I heard Venom Watch ran into a Red Witch platoon and got burned down. No survivors. But they also said there were suicide blasts all over town; and not all that’s true. I mean, nobody really knows what’s going on, do they?”
Emeresca’s eyes betrayed a muted awe as his voice trailed, “Venom Watch.”
“I know. Should we locate anyone else first?”
“Just stick with me. Peri and the high hats are supposed to meet down there.”
Suddenly and entirely out of context, there was a scream from below their feet, a male scream deep and uncontrolled. It was close and utterly horrifying in its intensity. Stendahl stared at the floor and stepped to one side, close up against its burnished interior wall.
“What the crap was that?!” Trope went pallid. Emeresca slammed his palm against the emergency stop. They stared at one another waiting on something further to happen…something to clarify and make sense of things so as to properly react. Yet the creaking elevator went as still as pastureland.
“Man’s voice. The only people here now are watchmen…soldiers. What would make a soldier scream like that?”
“Don’t freak out, man. My little brother is a watchman; and he’s afraid of everything.”
“Was that your little brother?!”
“Calm down. Let me think.”
“Perhaps the lockdown is a trap.” Stendahl rubbed his forehead. His odd expressions were always difficult to make out; but he at that moment had the look of someone flailing in seafoam, gasping.
“Keep quiet.” Emeresca was trying to look in charge. They waited with fading hope that something definitive would happen, even another scream to help along a decision on what to do.
“Are we going to keep going down or what?” Trope scratched his neck nervously, more than would be necessary for an itch.
“I don’t know. Just wait.”
“They blew up Balcister freaking Tower…I think waiting is a bad call. If I was going to send a message, I’d blow up this place.”
“They blew up Balcister to take out communications.”
“Whatever. That guy was screaming. I say we go back up and run for it.”
“That’s a longer trip than we have left! Lockdown has blast bunkers. We could sit out the War of the Rupture down there and sip tea all along.”
“You sip tea! He was screaming at something, man. The Red Witch are down there already; and we’re stuck in a little box! We should never have got on this thing.”
“They’re not down there, Trope. They blew up Balcister with stooges…losers they tortured and brainwashed. Nobody’s down there.”
“Then who was screaming? And who are you trying to convince anyway?”
“We’ll surprise them. We know they’re waiting on us.”
“Get us back up!”
“What about your job, soldier? We’re supposed to get this guy to lockdown and protect this facility.”
“I build roads!”
Emeresca shifted position to place his back to the control button, ensuring none but himself had sufficient access to make this decision. He tried his throat communications again, receiving no response.
“Emeresca enroute. Anyone copy?” He paused, then spit. “Why aren’t the backup comms working?”
Wiping his shining forehead, Emeresca looked at Stendahl, “What’s your vote?”
The young Talgo looked on, steady jade eyes not yielding to tears but rather sparkling suddenly with tiny ghosts of the elevator lights, “With swords for eyes and iron for will, he’s become a man who was never young…”
“What is he talking about, man? He’s saying something weird.”
“He’s just coping.”
“It’s a poem.” Stendahl’s face was pale, his eyes rolled to one side looking back at them.
Disregarding Stendahl and continuing to sieze his honor, Emeresca quickly pawed the controls again to restart their journey downwards. He pointed his face at the floor as if it would soon drop beneath his feet so as to push his fellow watchman from his peripheral vision. Trope surrendered to the decision and gripped his weapon tighter as the heavy freight elevator lumbered down again, doubtless imagining all that was frightful about the Red Witch.
“I’ve never seen one of them.”
The Red Witch nation’s fighters were fierce and without conscience, speaking a language wherein objects were named based on how they might kill and actions distinguished by the level of pain or confusion they might cause. Perhaps no thought choked fear from a soldier of those days more than slipping into such hands. The Red Witch nation was born in the dissolution of the Salt Mystic system generations before; and the attendant lapse of the order and ecstatic structure it had long provided gave way to a vacuum which was filled with cutthroats and mercenaries. Whereas the Malthus worked the received will of the state, backed by the insight of the Recorder Pool and the Augur’s interpretation, hammering out a reality in human affairs that was deemed appropriate for the forces and players of the times, those who grouped under banners such as the Red Witch were imitations, thieves of style and tricks who only used the manner and not the genius of the noble orders. As such, they were an abomination.
Emeresca sliced the quiet with nervous chatter, nodding toward Stendahl. “My mom thinks you’re my little brother or something.”
The watchman continued since they were close to the bottom and the silence was worse than rambling, “She likes you more than me sometimes.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
Trope knelt facing the cage and aimed his railgun. Emeresca followed suit, preparing for its opening. Stendahl slid himself behind them, pushing against the walls such that his fingers had squeezed into a ghostly white.
“On the balcony…you called that Recorder a liar…what was that?” Emeresca nervously tapped the the grip of his railgun waiting; but Stendahl kept silent, plucking at his lip. The watchman let it go.
There was a massive shake as the elevator grounded against the lowest level. The faint spirits of talking could be heard close by. The ProMat cage peeled open first, then the heavy door, rumbling along its worn track. Stendahl remained behind the two of them, and so was hidden from the view of those beyond the opening.
“Watchmen! Don’t move!” The two of them shouted loudly and leveled their weapons at those in the corridor, a volatile and unsteady step away from unleashing a kinetic torrent of electromagnetically hurled slugs.
Six pale young women stood in the corr
idor watching Emeresca and Trope as if they were street art. The ladies were unremarkable, of the sort one would find at children’s sports fields or in shopping areas. Their apparel was loose cotton, turquoise and opal bangles, of the fashion common in those days yet splattered with red gore. They smiled politely, one with curly brown hair and high eyebrows even waved. At everyone’s feet being ignored was a dead watchman, torn apart and his head twisted fully backwards. His body was actually in pieces, the skin at the torn parts stretched and hanging loosely.
“Put your weapons on the ground slowly.” Trope was assuming weaponry as he spoke; but the strangers had none. The ladies only looked on courteously as if waiting on a bus and willing to share the shade.
“What happened to him! Did you people…?” His voice just stopped. They had torn the man apart with their hands and were smiling at him.
Tearing Down The Statues Page 13