The Dragons of Babel (27 page)

“Who's in charge here?” Will shouted. “What are all these soldiers doing on the tracks? Isn't anybody in charge?”

“Lord Weary has placed Captain Hackem in command of the defenses for the left Uptown tunnel,” a weary-looking hulder said. “Chittiface is responsible for the right Uptown tunnel. And he himself commands the forces defending the Downtown tunnel. Hello, Jack.”

“Hjördis!” Will cried in astonishment. “You're back.”

“Everybody's back. All the johatsu who fled have returned to the tunnel. Every last one of them.”

“But why?” Earlier, Will had urged the lady-thane not to abandon Lord Weary's cause. Now he knew his counsel had been wrong. She had left and been right to do so. She should have stayed away.

“I don't know.” Hjördis looked stricken. “It defies all reason. Perhaps there is a compulsion on us. But if so, it is of a force greater than any I have ever known or heard rumor of, for it drives a multitude.”

“Where is Lord Weary? If anybody understands this mystery, it will be he.”

“Lord Weary charges you to consult with him before the battle begins. On what matter, he does not say.” Hjördis turned away. “Now I must leave. I have a field hospital to oversee.”

Will watched her leave. Then he turned to Tatterwag and held out a hand. “Give me your combat knife.”

Knife in hand, Will clambered over the barricade and kick-started his bike. Then, though it broke his heart to do so, he plunged the knife into the fuel tank. Gasoline sprayed into the air and drenched the ground. Up and down the tracks he rode. The ties made it a teeth-rattling ride and spread the gasoline from wall to wall before the Kawasaki sputtered to a stop.

“There!” he roared when he was done. “Now, when the hell-hounds come sniffing after us, this will render them nose-deaf!”

That done, he strode off to confront Lord Weary, Tatter-wag in tow.

The Downtown tunnel fortifications were simpler than the Uptown barricades—a single barrier that reached almost to the ceiling, without crenels or even a walkway along its top—but correspondingly more massive. He found Little Tommy Redcap overseeing the work there in Lord Weary's place. Johatsu carried box after box to the I-beams and duct-taped them to the foot of the supports. Others ran electrical wires from box to box. They could only be explosive devices.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Will demanded.

“What the fuck does it look like I'm doing?” Little Tommy Redcap lifted his voice: “Yo! I need more primers here!”

“It looks like you're preparing to bring half the buildings in the Bowery crashing down on our heads.”

The haint who came running up with the box of primers was puffing on a lit cigar. Little Tommy Redcap snatched it from the johatsu's mouth and started to fling it away. Then he stopped and stuck it in his own mouth instead. “If you knew, why did you ask?”

“If this is done by Lord Weary's orders, then he's crazy,” Will said. “If you touch those things off, you'll kill us all.”

“You think I'm afraid of dying?” Little Tommy Redcap laughed and then tapped the ashes from his cigar onto the primers for emphasis. “It's a good day to die!”

“You're crazy, too.”

“Maybe so, but I still got things to do. You got any complaints”—Little Tommy Redcap jerked a thumb upward—“take' em up with the head honcho.”

High overhead was a gallery that Will did not remember seeing before, in a wall that was taller than it could possibly be. (The station seemed larger, too—but he had no time to worry on it.) Lord Weary's face was a pale oval afloat in the darkness like an indifferent moon gazing down upon the wickedness of the world. “I will,” he said. “How do I get up there?”

11 T
HE
F
ALL
F THE
E
MPIRE

There was a stairwell that Will had never seen before. Two insect-headed guards in green leather armor uncrossed their pikes for him but recrossed them when Tatterwag tried to follow. Leaving his lieutenant behind to argue, Will took the steps two and three at a time. Heart pounding—when had he last rested?—he burst into the gallery.

Lord Weary was leaning over a marble balustrade, contemplating the scene below. He glanced up briefly. “Join me.”

A strange lassitude overcame Will and all sense of urgency left him. It was as if in the presence of his liege he had no ambitions of his own. Unhurriedly, he joined the elf-lord. Together they gazed down on the scurrying johatsu. A salt breeze blew up, dispelling the stale air of the tunnels. It seemed to Will that he caught a hint of flowers as well. An unseen sun was warm upon his back. “What place is this?”

“A memory, nothing more. My attention wanders, I fear.” Suddenly they stood in a clean, empty room of white marble. A light wind flowed through its high windows. A black absence sat in its center. From some angles it looked like a chair.

“Is that…?”

“Yes. You behold the Obsidian Throne.” The air darkened and the vision faded, returning Will to the stale smells and staler prospects of his life underground. Briefly, Lord Weary was silent. Then he said, “The final conflict approaches. Can you hear it coming?”

Will could. “What's that sound?” he asked. “That… howling.”

“Just watch.”

The howling grew until it became a quartet of train whistles shrieking almost in synch. Louder they grew, and louder still. The thunder of iron wheels filled the station. The ground underfoot trembled with premonition.

Then the Uptown barricades exploded. Fragments of beams, barrels, and soldiers were blasted into the air as locomotives smashed through the hastily assembled defenses.

There were four of the great beasts, running in unison, with plows affixed to the fronts of their cabs and they did not slow as they passed through the station. Shoulder to shoulder they sped, grinding troops under their wheels. At the Downtown tunnel, they crashed through the barricade and its defenders and, with final triumphant howls, rushed headlong into darkness, leaving hundreds dead in their wake.

Will clutched the balustrade, his eyes starting from his head. The screams and shouts of the survivors echoed and reechoed in his ears like surf. He could not master his thoughts; they tumbled over each other in meaningless cascades. “You knew this would happen,” he said finally, fighting back nausea.
“You arranged
this.”

Lord Weary smiled sadly. He leaned over the railing and shouted, “Redcap!”

In the wake of the trains had come the mosstroopers. Somebody fired a magnesium flare at the first squadron to arrive, setting afire the gasoline Will had sprayed throughout the tunnel. But it did not stop them. Burning and
ravening, the dire wolves entered Porte Molitor and began killing the survivors. Behind them came the mosstroopers, weapons ready. At their head, Will thought he saw the Burning Man.

Yet amid all this confusion, Lord Weary's voice carried to its target. Little Tommy Redcap looked up from the smoldering body of a dying wolf. “Sir?”

“Are the explosives ready?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Stand by the igniter and await my command.”

“Sir!” Little Tommy Redcap turned and disappeared into the fleeing, fighting, panicking mob.

So great was Will's befuddlement then, that it did not surprise him to see Tatterwag leap from the stairwell with blood on his jacket and Jenny Jumpup's pistols in his hands. “Traitor!” he cried, and discharged them both point-blank at Lord Weary's head.

“Ah,” the elf-lord sighed. “Like so many things, this moment was far more pleasing in the anticipation than in its realization.” He opened a hand and there lay the two freshly fired pistol balls.

He let them drop to the floor.

“You bore me.”

All the color drained from the swamp gaunt's face. He raised his hands pleadingly and shook his head. With neither hurry nor reluctance, Lord Weary reached toward him. His fingers closed not upon Tatterwag, however, but around a filthy old greatcoat. With a moue of distaste, he tossed it over the rail.

“What did you just do?” Will asked, shocked. “How did you do that?”

Hjördis stepped from the stairwell, just as Tatterwag had a minute before. “He's a glamourwallah,” she said. “Aren't you?”

Lord Weary smiled and shrugged. “I was the King's Master of Revels,” he said. “Not that His Absent Majesty
ever called upon my services, of course. Still… I had talent, I kept in practice. More than one member of the court was of my devising. Once I threw a masked ball at which half of those attending had no objective reality whatsoever. The next morning, many a lord and lady awoke to discover their bedmates had been woven of naught but whimsy and thin air.”

“I don't understand.”

“He creates illusions,” Hjördis said. “Very convincing ones. For entertainment. When I was living in a shelter near the Battery, the government sent a glamour-wallah down for the winter solstice and he filled the streets with comets and butterflies.” Then, sadly, “Was Tatterwag nothing, after all, but one of your creations?”

Lord Weary cocked his head apologetically. “Forgive an old elf his follies. I made him for a grand role, if that makes any difference. He would have shot me just as I was about to take my perilous place on the Obsidian Throne, and then died in reprisal at the hands of our hot-blooded young hero here.” He indicated Will. “Then, lying in his arms, I would have begged Jack to ascend the throne in my place. Which, because he was ambitious and because it was my dying wish, he would have done.

“Alas, my interest in this game has flickered to embers long before I thought it would. What can one do?” He looked past Will to Hjördis. “I suppose you are here for some reason.”

“Yes. Your munitions teams have planted explosives on the support beams of the buildings above us. If they are set off, all the johatsu and the Army of Night will die.”

“And this bothers you, I suppose?” Lord Weary sighed. “Foolish child. They were never real in the first place.”

Abruptly the cries, shouts, and other noises from below ceased. Hjördis stared over the balustrade down at the suddenly empty tracks and platforms. There were no corpses, no shattered barricades, no mosstroopers or burning wolves,
no rebel army, nothing but the common litter of an abandoned subway station. “Then… they were all, johatsu and' troopers alike, your creations? Only Will and I were…?”

Lord Weary raised an eyebrow and she fell silent.

At last, she spoke again. “I had thought I was real,” Hjördis said in a monotone. “I had memories. Ambitions. Friends.”

“You grow maudlin.” Lord Weary reached for her. His fingers closed about a mop. This, like the greasy overcoat that had been Tatterwag, he tossed lightly away.

“I'm next, I suppose,” Will said bitterly. He clenched his fists. “I
loved
you! Of all the cruel and wicked things you've done, that was the worst. I deserved better. I may not be real, but I deserved better.”

“You are as real as I am,” Lord Weary said. “No more, no less.” He was growing older before Will's eyes. His skin was as pink and translucent as a baby's, but loose upon his flesh. His hair was baby-wispy, too, and white. The tremor in his voice was impossible to ignore. “Take from that what comfort you can. For my part, I sought to put off enlightenment through treason and violent adventure. But now I see the unity of all things, and it seems that senility has come for me at—”

Lord Weary's eyes closed and his head sank down upon his chest. Slowly and without fuss, he faded away to nothing. With him went the balustrade, the gallery, and all the light from the air. Will felt the darkness wrap itself about him like the warm and loving arms of Mother Night.

He did not know if he existed or not, nor did he care. Lord Weary's war—if it had ever begun in the first place—was over.

W
ill awoke to find himself lying on the subway tracks. He staggered to his feet and then had to leap madly backward when a train came blasting down the tunnel at him. When his vision returned, Will began to walk. He did
not know how much of what he had seen and felt and done had actually happened. Friends had died—but had they truly? Were Bonecrusher, Epona, Jenny Jumpup, and all the rest mere phantasms? And if they didn't exist, if they never
had
existed, did that free him of the obligation to care about them? He looked at his hands and recognized scars he had earned during his stay in the underworld. They at least were real.