The Dragons of Babel (21 page)

Lord Weary shook his head in agreement. “There is no lore-master of Babel's secret ways. They are too many, and too varied.” His sea-green eyes studied Will gravely. “Now. Tell us what drove you here.”

“Speak carefully or truthfully,” the Whisperer said in his ear, “or you will not survive the meal.” Will spun around, but there was nobody there. He looked into Lord Weary's stern face and decided it was the truth.

He told his tale, concluding, “Since that time, I have been cast out of my village and ill fortune has pursued me across Fäerie Minor all the way to the Dread Tower. Perhaps I have been cursed by the dragon's death. All I know is that from that day I have had no place to call home.”

“You have a home here now, lad,” said Lord Weary. “We shall be a second family to you, if you will have us.”

He laid a hand on Will's head and a great flood of emotion washed over Will. Suddenly, and for no reason he could name, he loved the elf-lord like a father. Warm tears flowed down his cheeks.

When he could speak again, Will asked, “Why do you live down here?”

It was a meaningless question, meant simply to move the conversation to less emotional ground. But, “Why does anybody live anywhere?” the Whisperer said in his ear. Will spun around, and there was nobody there.

Then, graciously, Hjördis explained that though those above dismissed the dwellers in darkness as trolls and feral dwarves, very few of them were subterranean by nature.

Most of the thane-lady's folk were haints and drows, nissen, shellycoats, and broken feys—anyone lacking the money or social graces to get along in open society. They had problems with drugs and alcohol and insanity, but they looked after one another as best they could. Their own name for themselves was johatsu—“nameless wanderers.”

“Are there a lot of communities like this one?”

“There are dozens,” Lord Weary said, “and possibly even hundreds. Some are as small as six or ten individuals. Others run much larger than what you see here. No one knows for sure how many live in darkness. Tatterwag speculates there are tens of thousands. But they don't communicate with each other and they won't work together and they are perforce nomadic, for periodically the transit police discover the settlements and bust them up, scattering their citizens. But the Army of Night is going to change all that. We're the first and the only organized military force the johatsu have ever formed.”

“How many are in the Army, all told?”

The thane-lady hid a smile under a paper napkin. Stiffly, Lord Weary said, “You've met them all. This is a new idea, and slow to catch on. But it will grow. My dream will bear fruit in the fullness of time.” His voice rose. “Look around you! These are the dispossessed of Babel—the weak, the injured, the gentle. Who speaks for them? Not the Lords of the Mayoralty. Not the Council of Magi. His Absent Majesty was their protector once, but he is long gone and no one knows where. Somebody must step forward to fill that void. I swear by the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, and the Golden Apples of the West, that if the Seven permit it, that somebody shall be me!”

The johatsu froze in their places, not speaking, barely breathing. Their eyes shone like stars.

Hjördis laid a hand over Lord Weary's. “Great matters will wait upon food,” she said. “Time enough to discuss these things after we eat.”

W
hen all had eaten and the dishes had been cleared away, Hjördis lit a cigarette and passed it around the table. “Well?” she said at last.

“When last we were here,” Lord Weary said, “I left some crates in your keeping. Now we have need of them.”

A shadow crossed the thane-lady's face. But she nodded. “I thought as much. So I had my folk retrieve them.”

Six Niflheimers stood up, faded into darkness, and returned, lugging long wooden crates between them. The crates were laid down before the table and, at a gesture from Lord Weary, Tatterwag pried open one with his bowie knife.

Light gleamed on rifle barrels.

Suddenly the taste of death was in the air. Cautiously, Will said, “What do we need these for?”

“There's going to be a rat hunt,” Lord Weary said.

“We're hunting rats?”

Lord Weary grinned mirthlessly. “We're not the hunters, lad. We're the rats.”

The Niflheimers had been listening intently. Now they crowded around the main table. “We call them the Breakneck Boys,” one said. “They come down here once a month, on the Day of the Toad or maybe the Day of the Labrys, looking for some fun. They got night goggles and protective spells like you wouldn't believe, and they carry aluminum baseball bats. Mostly, we just slip away from' em. But they usually manage to find somebody too old or sick or drugged-up to avoid them.”

“It's a fucking
hobby
for them,” Tatterwag growled.

“Last time, they caught poor old Martin Pecker drunk asleep, only instead of giving him a bashing like usual, they poured gasoline over him and set it on fire.”

“I saw the corpse!”

“This is a mad notion and a dangerous folly,” the Whisperer said. “Their sires are industrialists and Lords of the
Mayoralty. If even one of their brats dies, they'll send the mosstroopers down here with dire wolves to exact revenge.”

“I fear retaliation,” the thane-lady said, and then, with obvious reluctance. “Yet the Breaknecks' predations worsen. Perhaps it is time to meet violence with violence.”

“No!” Will said. He had eaten almost nothing, for his stomach was still queasy from the stench of Niflheim, and Bonecrusher's death weighed heavily upon him. If he closed his eyes, he could see the sparks rising up around the wodewose's body. He hadn't wanted to kill the creature. It had happened because he hadn't thought the situation through beforehand. Now he was thinking very hard and fast indeed. “Put the guns back.”

“You're not
afraid?”
Lord Weary drew himself up straight, and Will felt his disapproval like a lash across his shoulders.

“I can take care of the Breaknecks,” Will said. “If you want me to, I'll take care of them myself.”

There was a sudden silence.

“Alone?”

“Yes. But to pull this off, I'll need a uniform. The gaudier the better. And war paint. The kind that glows in the dark.”

Hjördis grinned. “I'll send our best shoplifters upstairs.”

“And explosives. A hand grenade would be best, but—no? Well, is there any way we can get our hands on some chemicals to make a bomb?”

“There's a methamphetamine lab up near the surface,” Tatterwag said. “The creeps who run it think nobody knows it's there. They got big tanks of ethyl ether and white gasoline. Maybe even some red phosphorus.”

“Do we have anybody who knows how to handle them safely?”

“Um… there's one of us got a Ph.D. in alchemy. Only, it was back when. Up above.” Tatterwag glanced nervously
at Lord Weary. “Before he came here. So I don't know whether he wants me to say his name or not.”

“You have a doctorate?” Will said. “How in the world did you…”—he was going to say
fall
so low but thought better of it—“… wind up here?”

Offhandedly Lord Weary said, “Carelessness. Somebody offered me a drink. I liked it, so I had another. Only one hand is needed to hold a glass, so I began smoking to give the other one something to do. I took to dueling and from there it was only a small step to gambling. I bought a fighting cock. I bought a bear. I bought a dwarf. I began to frequent tailors and whores. From champagne I moved to whisky, from whisky to wine, and from wine to Sterno. So it went until the only libation I had not yet drunk was blood, the only sex untried was squalid, and the only vice untasted was violent revolution.

“Every step downward was pleasant. Every new experience filled me with disdain for those who dared not share in it. And so, well, here I am.”

“Is this a true history,” Will asked, “or a parable?”

“Your question,” Lord Weary said, “is a deeper one than you know—whether the world I sank through was real or illusory. Many a better mind than mine or yours has grappled with this very issue without result. In any event, I'll make your bomb.”

I
t took hours to make the plan firm. But at last Hjördis rose from the table and said, “Enough. Our new champion is doubtless tired. Bonecrusher's quarters are yours now. I will show you where you sleep.”

She took Will by the hand and led him to an obscure corner of the box-village. There she knelt before a kind of tent made of patched blankets hung from clotheslines. “In here.” She raised the flap and crawled inside.

Will followed.

To his surprise, the interior was clean. Inside, a faded
Tabriz carpet laid over stacked cardboard served as floor and mattress. A vase filled with phosphorescent fungi cast a gentle light over the space. Hjördis turned and, kneeling, said, “All that was' Crusher's is yours now. His tent. His title…” She pulled her dress off over her head. “His duties.”

Will took a deep, astonished breath. It seemed too awful to kill the wodewose and bed his lover all on the same day. Hesitatingly, he said, “We don't
have
to…”

The thane-lady stared at him in blank astonishment. “You're not gay, are you? Or suffering from the Fisher King's disease?” She touched his crotch. “No, I can see you're not. What is it, then?”

“I just don't see how you can sleep with me after I killed your… killed Bonecrusher.”

“You don't think this is
personal
, do you?” Hjördis laughed. “Blondie, you're the most fucked-up champion I ever saw.” At her direction, he took off his clothes. She drew him down and guided him inside her. Then she wrapped her legs around his waist and slapped him on the rump.

“Giddy up,” she commanded.

So galloped the chariot-horses of night. Briefly, the first time he came, Will could sense the scryers of the political police searching for him. But half of Babel lay between him and
les poulettes
, and then Hjördis was guiding his head downward to her orchid and he was too busy to think any more.

In the morning (but he had to take Hjördis's word for it that it was morning), Will went out with two of Lord Weary's scouts to look over possible locales for the plan. Then he returned to the box city and sorted through the heaps of clothing that the Niflheimers had brought him, some dug out of old stashes and some custom stolen for the occasion. Carefully, he assembled his costume: Biker boots. Mariachi pants. A top hat with a white scarf wrapped around the band, one end hanging free behind like a ghostly foxtail, with a handful of turkey feathers
from the Meatpacking District splayed along the side. A marching band jacket with a white sash. All topped off with a necklace of rat skulls.

With the phosphorescent makeup, he painted two red slashes slanting downward over his eyes, a straight blue line along his nose, and a yellow triangle about his mouth to make a mocking, cartoonish grin:

With luck, the effect would be eerie enough to give his enemies pause. More importantly, the elves would see the glowing lines on his face, the top-hat-feathers-and-scarf, and the necklace of skulls, but they wouldn't see
him
. Once he wiped off the makeup and ditched the uniform, he would be anonymous again. He could walk the streets above without fearing arrest.

“I'll just need just one last thing,” he said when he was done. “A motorcycle.”

T
wo days later, the Army of Night's outposts came running up silently with news that the Breakneck Boys had entered the tunnels. Will had already scouted out the perfect place for a confrontation—a vast and vaulted space as large as a cathedral that had been constructed centuries ago as a cistern for times of siege. A far more recent water main cut through it at the upper end, but otherwise it was much as it had been the day it was drained. Now he sent out decoys to lure the Boys there, while he made up his face with phosphorescent war-paint and wheeled his stolen motorcycle into place.

“You stonesouped them,” a voice whispered in his ear.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” Will said. “But if I'd asked for the
motorcycle first, I wouldn't have gotten it. And after this stunt, nobody's going to mind.”

“Or else you'll be dead.”

“Tell me something, Whisperer. I never hear anybody else talking directly to you. Why is that?”

“Because you're the only one who can hear me.” The whisper was soft and intimate, with a mocking edge to it. “Only you, sweet Will.”

“Who
are
you?”

Silence. The Whisperer was gone.

Will waited in a niche behind a pillar at the lower end of the cistern. For the longest time there was no noise other than the grumble of distant trains. Then, faintly, he heard drunken elven laughter. He watched as the decoys ran past his station like two furtive shadows. The voices grew more boisterous and then suddenly boomed as the Breakneck Boys emerged from a doorway near the ceiling at the upper end of the cistern.