Dinner at Deviant's Palace (20 page)

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.”

“Me too,” Rivas croaked.

They were almost even with the buildings now, and he could see that the street between the rows of wooden structures was a cracked, sand-scoured section of some ancient highway.

The shepherd was lagging behind, but Rivas forced himself to keep walking at the same pace and, much more difficult, not to turn around constantly to keep an eye on him. So it was almost a relief when the man said, “Oh, say,” and Rivas had an excuse to stop and look back.

“Yes?”

“Why do you suppose your man ran
north
?”

To see the pretty bald girls, thought Rivas. To go skating with the trash men. “I don’t know,” he said.

The shepherd nodded thoughtfully. “Well—see you soon. We’ll be in the gun room.”

You bet, thought Rivas as he turned back toward the dancers and started walking again. Hold your breath till I get there, okay?

The clapping was loud now, and Rivas could see the spectators lined up on both sides of the street. The dancers were contorting enthusiastically in the rain in spite of the two feet of chain that linked every pair of ankles, waving their arms over their heads, some skipping in short runs across the pavement and some Bo Diddleying in place. Their clothes slapped wetly around their ankles and wrists, and the ones that weren’t bald snapped their wet locks and beards around like whips. Most of them had their eyes closed, and on each face was a nearly identical expression of quiet satisfaction.

Rivas walked right down the middle of the street, trying to stay out of everyone’s way, for no one gave any sign of seeing him.

The section of highway ended not far beyond the dancers and soon he was walking on wet sand again. He was sure he could hear a faint booming of surf now, and he peered ahead worriedly, fearing that he might not, after all this, be able to find a boat. I’ll ditch this kid and swim if I have to, he thought. I wonder where the penitence cage is, and how long it’ll take that shepherd to catch on that I’m not coming back.

The sand was giving way to old concrete again under his aching feet, and then to his astonishment he was walking on what appeared to be
new
concrete. In some ways it struck him as more miraculous to be able to make and lay concrete than to be able to manufacture ammunition.

He glanced to his left, which was southeast, and dimly saw tall pale buildings in the distance, made into abstract geometrical shapes by the night and the rain and the miles that separated him from them. And it came to him that what he was seeing was the Holy City. The shabby structures on the glass and sand behind him were like toolsheds tucked away out of sight at the back of a big estate…

The ocean is the front door, he thought; the gate the wagon brought me in through was the back door—the servants’ entrance.

Rivas stopped and stared… and then felt goose pimples prickling his arms, for he’d noticed a sphere suspended in the air above the buildings, and it had to be huge to be visible at all at this distance, and there was no glint of light at its bottom to indicate a fire, and he was suddenly sure that the bald girl
had
meant helium balloons… but where could Jaybush be getting
helium
?

Though slumped as loosely as ever, the boy suddenly began speaking, and Rivas was so startled that he nearly dropped him.
“Who is it?”
the boy had burst out.
“Oh, him. When will the fool learn to come around to where I can see him, he knows I can’t roll over….”

Rivas was very glad this hadn’t happened when he was talking to the shepherd. There was no mistaking it for anything but genuine speaking in tongues, and far-gones could no more decide to escape than they could fly.

He’d noticed a dark band parallel to his course on his right and he’d been slanting toward it, and now he could tell by the sound of the rain falling there that it was a wide trench full of water. Looking to his left he saw another one further away, and now he noticed a similar band ahead that diagonally connected the two. Canals, he thought. Newly constructed, too, unlike the ones in Venice. Why is Jaybush so fond of canals?

When he arrived at the canal edge he crouched and rolled the young man off his shoulders onto the new concrete, and then he stood up and simply luxuriated in the ability to stand up straight and feel cold rain on the back of his neck, before climbing down into the water. It was warmer than the rain, and he swam out to the middle of the forty-foot-wide watercourse to see how deep it got. He discovered that even out here he could stand on the bottom and still have his chin out of the water. He went back and fetched the kid and then, towing the limp body behind with a collar-grip that kept the sleeping face above the surface of the water, he began moving down the canal toward the sea, sometimes swimming and sometimes wading. The buoyancy the salt water gave them made southward progress much less strenuous, and Rivas wished the canals had extended all the way up to the bleeder huts.

The canal walls tended to throw every splash and gasp back at him as echoes, so he had no hint that he was being pursued until he saw a ten-foot line of blindingly bright yellow light appear high up on the canal wall a dozen yards ahead and then instantly sweep back, past him and well over his head, and recede away northward faster than any bird.

He gaped after it in wonder, and several seconds later realized that it must have been the beam of a searchlight. Rivas had read of such things, and though he wasn’t sure whether or not they worked by electricity, he knew they required a level of technology he thought had been lost many Aces ago.

He resumed dog-paddling down the canal with his bobbing, sleeping burden in tow, a little more quickly now.

“
CAREFUL WITH THAT STUFF!
”

Rivas snapped out of his doze and glanced around at the dark, malodorous space under the pier. Boots slowly thumped against the boards over his head; the men on the pier carried lanterns, but little of their light reflected under the pier and it was more by the phosphorescence of the water that Rivas was able to see that the bald, toothless boy was still moored safely to one of the pilings by the back of his shirt, which Rivas had looped over a projecting nail head. The breakwater stopped the waves half a mile out, and the rain tended to flatten what waves there were inside, but Rivas had been worried when he’d moored the unconscious far-gone there that even the gentler rise and fall of the sheltered water might float him loose—in which case, of course, he would quietly have drowned.

Rivas unhooked his own arm from over the cross brace he’d selected for his personal mooring, and as he worked fingers and elbow to get the circulation going, he stared at the dim blur just above the water that was the boy’s head. Rivas wondered what he’d do if the kid started speaking again, or even snoring. Drown him? Certainly wouldn’t be difficult.

But he knew he couldn’t, even though any dog or cat—hell, hamsters, mice, bugs—had more intelligence than a far-gone. Somehow ripping the throat out of that trash man, on top of having tried to knife Frake McAn and having killed Nigel and the two hooters and that shepherd, had broken something in him. He felt crippled by pity, by empathy—he felt that now it would sicken him to kill flies.

It scared him to realize it, as if he’d suddenly discovered he was losing feeling and control in his left hand.

“I said
careful
, damn it,” came again the voice that had waked him.

“I’m being careful, brother,” came a petulant younger voice. “You want these in the water yet?”

“Nah, they’re cool enough in the rain. You can tie the baskets on the rings, though. And use square knots, will you? Like I showed you. Last trip two of the baskets came loose and sank, and I caught all kinds of hell for it.”

“Okay.”

Slow footsteps and a clinking drag of chain moved from behind Rivas to over his head and then out to the end of the pier, and the strangely cowled hull of the big boat there went down a little and then rose. Low waves spread out through the pilings and gave Rivas a salty slap in the mouth.

For quite a while then there was no noise except for occasional chain clinks and footsteps from the boat and aimless humming from the man on the pier above—Rivas had plenty of time to wish for food and dry clothes, and to decide that his increasing ability to see was due to the imminence of dawn rather than a gradual improvement of his night vision. Then he heard the sudden shifting of a length of chain on the boards over his head.

“Look sharp, Brother Willie. Shepherd.”

“Right. Thanks.”

Soon Rivas heard hoofbeats… and then he heard them with agonizing clarity as the horse was ridden right out onto the pier. “Good morning, brother!” came a new voice, tense but trying not to show it. “Are you alone?”

“There’s Brother Willie, too, on the boat, getting the baskets tied to the gunwales. Nobody else.”

“Have you seen anyone else tonight?”

“Uh… not since the worried lads left for the dance. They through yet?”

“Not yet. Slowing down, though. Well, here, take this thing—don’t point it at me! Idiot. It’s a flare pistol. If you see anybody but your regular crew, shoot it. You pull the trigger, here, let me show you—that thing. Okay?”

Rivas saw the boat dip and rise again, and guessed Brother Willie had come to the rail to look. Again a little wave surged past, and Rivas glanced worriedly at the far-gone. I hope, he thought, that Jaybush doesn’t get up—and start thinking—this early.

“Shoot it at whoever?”

“No. It’s a
flare
gun. It shoots flares. Shoot it up into the
sky
, okay?”

“Sure. Who is it we might see?”

“None of—well, why not. We think an impostor may have come in on one of yesterday’s wagons. A guy broke out of one of the bunkhouses and apparently killed one of the constructs and kidnapped a donor. I actually saw him last night, but he had a leg band and I thought he was a trustee. So it’s important to me personally that we get him back. If you’re the ones who first see him… I won’t forget, understand?”

“Sure, brother. We’ll keep our eyes open.”

“Be careful. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but it seems fairly certain that Gregorio Rivas was at the Regroup Tent a couple of days ago. They grabbed him, but he had corrupted a sister, and she freed him. She’s in the sister city now, appropriately enough, undergoing remedial discipline. He hasn’t been seen anywhere else since, including Ellay, so the guy here last night might be him.”

Rivas had winced and bared his teeth during the shepherd’s statement, remembering Sister Windchime—her hair the color of the dry brush on the hills, her long athletic legs, her alertness and repressed compassion, and her evident doubts of the faith—and then he made himself stop remembering her.

“Uh… sun coming up,” put in Brother Willie. “We better be getting the Blood into the baskets and into the water, huh?”

There was a silence then that even Rivas, under the pier, could tell was awkward.

“I mean, uh, the harvest powder,” Brother Willie amended nervously.