Dinner at Deviant's Palace (11 page)

Rivas had put the animal out of its agony with a shovel, and then tried to comfort the appalled and weeping Uri. What had shocked her, he remembered now, was not the blood everywhere, nor even the pain of the several deep scratches she’d gotten, but the
abruptness
of it; the way grotesque, horrible violence had appeared in their midst with no warning, as if a chunk of icy iron had plummeted out of the cloudless summer sky.

For several miles the boat-wagon rattled along peacefully, while the day grew warmer; at one point a flicker of motion above the verdant ruins ahead caught Rivas’s eye… and his belly went cold a moment later when he saw that it was one of the big-as-your-fist punch-bees looping toward them out of the high branches of a carob tree, the rattling buzz of its six-inch wings audible even a couple of hundred feet away. He’d seen a man hit by one of them once, knocked right off his feet by the impact and dead before he hit the ground because of the three-inch stinger driven right up to the bug’s rear end in his eye.

Rivas was about to jump off the wagon and run when he heard a twang behind him and felt the air beside his right ear thrum like a plucked rope, and a split second later the punch-bee exploded with a wet smack and was suddenly just spray and bits of meat spatting onto the pavement and iridescent shards of wing spinning away like glassy leaves.

Very slowly Rivas turned around on the bench. Nigel, sitting astride the boom, was fitting a second pebble into his wrist-brace slingshot, and then he put the weapon back in his bowler hat and put the hat on his head. He met Rivas’s gaze with eyes as cold and incurious as marbles.

“Good with that thing, Nigel is,” observed Lollypop.

“Yes,” Rivas agreed, re-evaluating his chances of disabling these boys soon and getting a look at the girls in the wagon.

As the wagon went rolling past the carob tree Rivas breathed through his mouth, for the air was sharp with the metallic smell of the killed bee.

Several hundred yards behind, the tumbleweed caught against a metal post from which still hung a few curly strands of a barbed wire barrier that, a century ago, had apparently blocked the whole street. The bush heeled around to a stop. A pinkly translucent head disattached itself from the twiggy ball and blinked around, then snuffed the air. A smile stretched its face like a breath stretches a smoke ring, and a pink arm less substantial than a snakeskin reached down and with some difficulty freed the bush from the barbed wire. The head and arm were retracted again as the tumbleweed began to roll, resuming its interrupted southward course.

Late in the afternoon Lollypop left the at least somewhat maintained succession of bayshore roads and turned east up one of the old highways that mounted inland through the band of jungle and into the dry hills beyond.

“Why the shift?” asked Rivas, watching the water move around from the starboard side to the stern, and then begin to recede.

“There’s a big damned army been moving up the coast last couple of days,” said Lollypop. “Supposed to have come south overland, sacked Santa Ana and Westminster, and now they’re heading toward the bay, along the shore and in boats, burning everything in their way.”

Rivas remembered the fires he’d seen on Long Beach Island last night. They’re at the mouth of the bay now, he thought. “Huh. Who are they supposed to be?”

The old man didn’t answer until he’d guided the horses around a dangerously undercut-looking section of pavement. “Well,” he said, relaxing when they were past it, “we were in Hunningten Town a couple of days ago, and people were saying it was an army from way up north, like San Berdoo.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s possible.”

“Huh.” Rivas leaned back, absently enjoying the coolness on the right side of his face where the sun had been shining on it all day. So, he thought, Ellay’s got soldiers patrolling her western and northern borders, and here comes San Berdoo up from below. I wonder if the Berdoo boys really think they can take her by surprise. Maybe they can. Nearly all the traffic across the Inglewood Desolate is of fairly furtive, untalkative types—Jaybirds, hooters, pimps like my pals here. Maybe they can, at that.

The girls were getting restless by the time Lollypop parked the wagon in a garagelike structure with a roof high enough to let the mast in, and Rivas was trying to hear their voices, for he was sure he’d recognize Uri’s, even after thirteen years. During the long afternoon he’d considered and reluctantly dismissed the idea of asking to see the captives, even on the pretext of suffering a sudden fit of lust; a genuine Blood dealer would know better than to ask, and suspicion seemed easily kindled in his two traveling companions. The voices fell to muttering when the wagon stopped, though, so Rivas hopped down and looked around the big echoing chamber.

Square sunken areas with truncated metal pillars in them seemed to confirm his guess that this had once been some sort of garage, but there were indications too that it had seen other uses not quite as long ago. Several cots and stretchers, their fabric spiderweb-frail after all the desiccating years, were tumbled in the corners, and when Rivas crouched down on the littered floor, hoping to find a weapon, he picked up a tiny squat bottle with a rubber diaphragm instead of a lid. The diaphragm broke to dry bits when he touched it, and whatever fluid the bottle had once contained was long gone.

The unoiled-axle cries of homeward-bound parrots were ringing in the sky faintly—though very loud when, every now and then, a half dozen of the busily flapping green and orange birds would pass over the street in front of the garage—and the shadows were lengthening and the light outside was turning apricot when Nigel scuffed away with a roll of twine and a bag full of old jewelry and aluminum cans to set up some intruder alarms.

“Do you generally sleep in the wagon?” Rivas asked Lollypop.

“Yeah,” said the old man as he tossed some cloth bags to the pavement and then jumped down from the driver’s bench. “The girls inside the cabin, Nigel and me on deck.” He sat down and opened the bags and began pulling out heavy waxed-paper packages. “Hope you like pork,” he said. “Oh,” he added, looking up, “and hitchhikers sleep off the wagon.”

“Makes sense,” said Rivas, who’d hoped for that answer. “I think while there’s still some light I’ll check for snakes and scorpions.”

“Probably a good idea,” the old man allowed.

Rivas wandered deeper into the building, looking around again for something that could serve as a reliable weapon. The inland detour had been a bit of luck for him, but he knew this was about as far east as his companions would be going—from here they’d begin to bear back west, toward the bay and away from Irvine. He’d have to find out tonight if Uri was in the wagon, for if she wasn’t, he’d have to get moving south.

Against one wall an ancient engine block and an equally ancient bed frame seemed to have formed the seed of a particularly convoluted litter pile, and he walked over to it and noisily wrenched some things away: an old chair, a teevee box, the hood of a car, a refrigerator shell so rust-eaten that he could spin it away one-handed….

He was exposing a sign stencil-painted on the bricks of the wall—he could already see the word “AVAILABLE”—so he pulled over a set of metal shelves, making a hellish clatter and sending a million little glass rectangles tinkling out across the concrete floor. He could read the sign now.

CD GUARANTEED SAFE FOOD AVAILABLE HERE_________

There was still chalk dust in the pits in the brick surfaces over the stenciled line, but the only legible notation in that spot seemed to be the last applied, and it was scratched in as if with the point of a knife:

nevermore

Rivas looked over his shoulder at Lollypop, who had gathered wood for a fire and was laying pieces of pork out onto a metal grate. The old graffitist spoke too soon, he thought.

At last he found something that looked possible—it was a whippy length of flat aluminum with a heavy, rusted bolt at one end, and he slipped it up his sleeve so that the bolt was nestled in his armpit and the end of the strip was just concealed by his cuff. And, just as carefully, he was rehearsing in his head a word he didn’t know the meaning of, but which he had heard many times:
sevatividam
, pronounced gutturally with the tongue against the edges of the teeth on the
t
and
d
.

“I guess there’s nothing gonna bite me,” he said, ambling back toward the wagon in the wide doorway. He noticed that his hands were visibly shaking, so he added, “You guys got any liquor?”

“Sure, a fifth of Currency up under the driver’s bench,” said Lollypop. “A cup, too. Don’t take more’n one cupful.”

Rivas opened his mouth to voice the response that had become automatic with him over the years, but then he just nodded. “Okay.” He climbed up to the bench, and as he reached under it for the bottle and cup he risked whispering,
“Uri?”
hoarsely at the floor. There was no reply, and he filled the cup, re-corked and replaced the bottle, and then managed to climb back down without spilling a drop or banging his thumb.

The old man had got the fire going and Rivas sat down on the concrete floor near it and with some trepidation took his first sip of Currency Barrows since the night thirteen years ago when he’d done his imitation of a barking dog.

He was a little disappointed that it didn’t bring back any memories. It was just a mouthful of hard liquor, a bit perfumy and biting, without the clean grain taste of whiskey. Oh well, he told himself; better than gin. He relaxed and, having given up on feeling dramatic about it, set about enjoying, it simply for its alcohol content.

“How is it?” Lollypop enquired.

“Root of all evil,” said Rivas with a satisfied smile. Wouldn’t Mojo be surprised, he thought, to see me knocking this stuff back.

And what, he forced himself to wonder, is Mojo doing right at this moment, do you suppose? Drawing infrequent beers and making frequent apologies for the absence of the legendary Venetian pelicanist? Or hopping and sweating to fill the drink orders of the huge crowd attracted by some new performer? No, Steve couldn’t have got someone else
yet
.

Rivas rolled another sip of the brandy around on his tongue—he was beginning to get used to it—and wondered if he’d ever stand on the stage at Spink’s again. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the place—the high ceilinged room with the bar on the far side and the doors to the left, the lamps, the tables, the strings of dusty paper dolls way up there higher even than the chandeliers…. He wished now that he’d taken the time to really
look
at those strings of little figures holding hands and touching toes. He’d always been curious about them, even before he’d learned that they were the last work of some genius sculptor—Noah Almondine, Rivas seemed to remember his name was—who lost his mind and killed himself in the last year of the Sixth Ace. Rivas had never been able to keep straight the names of all the genius painters and poets and doctors and engineers—and even politicians, for the Sixth Ace was supposed to have been the best Ellay had had since Sandoval himself—who crowded into prominence when Rivas was about seventeen, and then all wound up leaving by the Dogtown gate at about the same time the Sixth Ace was assassinated. Though there weren’t ever any
musicians
in that crowd, Rivas thought, and thanks be to Jaybush for the lack of competition.

All too soon the distant rattling and clanging was replaced by the scuff of Nigel’s returning footsteps. Rivas put down the cup and got up into a crouch, his heart pounding, and frowned dubiously at the pork to explain the move.

Nigel walked into view from around the corner.

“How long have you guys been carrying this pork around?” Rivas asked, trying not to talk too fast or too shrilly. “It looks a little old to me, yes man, little bit old. Don’t need, what, worms, do we, hey? Why, I knew a guy ate some old pork one time, and listen, worms woulda been a blessing to him; he’d ’a’ begged you for ’em, compared to what he got. He came down with—”

Nigel was close enough now, and looking annoyed rather than suspicious at this jabbering.

“—
sevatividam
—”

As Rivas had hoped, the captive girls instantly began shrieking when they heard those five syllables and Nigel, startled by the sudden din, spun toward the wagon.

Rivas sprang up out of his crouch, whipping the length of metal from his sleeve in one motion and whirling it around and back, over his head; when his right foot hit the pavement he was moving at running speed, and though Nigel looked back in real alarm when he heard it, Rivas was already upon him, and with all the strength of his arm and momentum of his rush Rivas lashed the heavy bolt directly into the bridge of Nigel’s nose. Even as Nigel’s head snapped back and his body folded backward, Rivas let go of the aluminum strip and let himself fall with the body, and as they hit the floor together he snatched Nigel’s hat and when he rolled to his feet on the far side of the body he was fitting the slingshot into his hand and over his wrist and aiming it at Lollypop, who’d drawn a knife and taken a couple of steps forward.

The old man skidded to a stop when he saw Rivas draw the pebble back against the increasing resistance nearly to his ear.

“Drop the knife,” Rivas panted.

The knife clattered on the floor. “What have you done to Nigel?” the old man moaned.

“Maybe I overthumped him,” said Rivas, beginning to catch his breath. “Open the cabin.”

“You’re a Jaybird,” said Lollypop.

“No. Open the cabin.”

The old man didn’t move. “That was that speaking in tongues gibberish.”

“Right. I can kill you and open it myself.”

The old man started toward the wagon. “You’re a redeemer, then.”

“One of the out for hire ones,” Rivas agreed. He turned slowly to keep the slingshot aimed at the man, but took a couple of steps back and let the rubberized netting go slack for a moment while he crouched and snatched up the knife. He had the knife wedged into his wrist sheath and the pebble drawn back again before the old man could do more than look around.

As Lollypop turned back toward the wagon Rivas glanced down at Nigel. One eye was wide open and staring up into a darkening corner of the ceiling, the other was nearly closed, and between them was a deep indentation. Rivas’s outstretched arm began to shake, and he wished he was anywhere else on earth.