The Chamber in the Sky (21 page)

“Oh, you,” said the Empress. “Thought I'd had you magnetized.”

The crowd shouted horrible names at her. They threw pieces of metal.

Kalgrash shielded her — the woman who'd tried to have him killed — and walked with her and the earl toward the tent where the computer waited for them.

Out in the desert, the flesh of the Dry Heart was tearing. The whole plain rattled. Another heartbeat, somewhere else — and the flux swelled up from the
ground, the lake of it stretching across the dunes, washing through villages and over tombs.

Kalgrash, the Empress, and the earl stumbled into the communications tent. The crowd screamed for blood outside.

Soon they would get it.

Kalgrash said to the guard, “Nim, go out and keep people away.”

The man nodded and darted outside, shouting, “Please be orderly! Please!”

The equipment glowed on the desk.

“Oh, one of those,” said the Empress, looking at the computer. “Frightful sort of time to play Pong.”

“The code!” Kalgrash shouted. He couldn't control his anger anymore. He took the Empress of the Innards by her shoulders and shook her. “Your Highness! The code! To release the Rules Keepers!”

(A tide swept across the desert. Houses and towers tumbled in its waters.)

The Empress said, “Munders, do you recall the Treaty of Pellerine? Some centuries ago?”

The Earl nodded. “Oh, in the old labyrinth of memory, where so many ancient and noble things be wrought, there, in some neglected corner do I recall —”

Kalgrash dragged the man to the folding chair. “START TYPING!” he said. “START TYPING THE CODE!”

(The tide smashed against the walls. And another wave. And another, throwing up bursts of garbage. Broken concrete plates slid backward as the waves retreated. Electrical poles were engulfed as new waves hit, splattering green spray.)

Concentrating mightily, the Earl of Munderplast — who was not a typer — began pressing buttons one finger at a time. His old, wizened finger picked out one rune after another. Slowly. Slowly.

Another earthquake hit.

This time, half the tent collapsed. Chunks of building thudded into the ground.

The whole Great Body writhed in pain.

The flux broke through the walls. It poured down in great bursts. It sloshed through the streets. People struggled to climb higher, but everything had collapsed.

In the sagging communications tent, plaster dust hung everywhere. Kalgrash saw the old man still hunched over the computer. “Keep typing!” he screamed.

The guard, Nim Forsythe, called in, “Ma'am! Sirs! The flux is in the streets! It's rising!” The Empress gathered her robes in one hand to prepare for the inundation.

“Done!” said the Earl of Munderplast. He hit
ENTER
. “And sent!”

“Yeah!” said Kalgrash. He felt incredible relief. Help was coming. That's what mattered.

He looked at the screen.

Then he realized what had happened. Part of some roof, falling onto the other half of the tent, had cut off
the antenna. The computer hadn't sent the code off to the capsule.

“Nim!” he shouted. “Get in here! We have to fix this!”

The guard charged back in.

Kalgrash pointed at the end of the antenna wire that poked out of the rubble and the torn green cloth of the tent. He pointed at the other end of the wire, coming out of the back of the computer. It was clear where the falling debris had cut the wire.

“We have to join those two ends together,” said Kalgrash. “Don't touch the wire itself — just the insulation. There's like a million volts going through there. Until the flux wipes out the generators.”

They each grabbed an end and pulled them toward each other. A few pieces of concrete shifted. The two automatons yanked.

There was no way the severed pieces of wire were going to touch anymore. Three feet of antenna were missing.

“Lackaday, lackaday,” groaned the Earl of Munderplast. “We all shall die most dismally.”

Then Nim Forsythe, mannequin guard, looked at Kalgrash and at the Empress of the Innards. They heard the tide of flux thundering into the city. They heard the screaming of the people. Nim Forsythe climbed on top of the desk.

And he reached down and grabbed the other wire from Kalgrash's hand.

He touched the two ends of the exposed wire with his bare thumbs.

Immediately, he jolted. The current was running through him. He had become part of the antenna. His mannequin brain scrambled — blew.

“Hit return again!” yelled Kalgrash to the old man at the keyboard. “Send again! We only have a second until —”

The medieval Earl of Munderplast pressed
ENTER
. The code was sent.

And Nim Forsythe, who had given his life to save the empire, collapsed, all memory blanked, all energy sapped, all workings fused.

General Herla, commander of the Thusser Horde in the Great Body, smiled as he watched the drills bore into the Dry Heart. He stood on a submarine observation deck surrounded by officers and by the idiot corpses of Norumbegans who'd half sunk into the walls.

“They're finished,” said one of the officers. “I'm sure most of the Norumbegans in the Dry Heart are already dead.”

General Herla said, “Give it another few minutes. Then we can pull the drills out and send a sub in to explore the wreckage.”

Without thinking, he leaned on the face of an old, dreaming Norumbegan man who'd been absorbed into the pipes and wires of the sub. With his elbow on the man's gaping mouth and broken jaw, he stared out at the hole in the heart.

As the signal code from the communications tent flew through organs and between worlds, the tide of flux swept almost as quickly over houses and tombs and towers. Families on rooftops screamed. People at the base of the new city walls splashed toward steps. Kalgrash stomped toward a high mound of rubble with the Earl of Munderplast over his shoulder. He let forth a long warrior's yell, but there was no one to smite and no one to hear.

Parents lost hold of children. Buildings shifted and collapsed. Huge sparks flared where the electrical generators of the city died. Hands reached out. Mouths gasped for breath.

Soon, there would be no place left to stand.

New Norumbaga sank beneath the waves.

T
hree mechanical giants stood, holding a gothic capsule on top of a mountain. It was a sunny day late in the summer. There was a sky, which was blue, and far to the east lay the Presidential Range of New Hampshire: Washington, Jefferson, Adams. Though the sun was warm, a brisk breeze blew.

The arched door of the capsule popped open. Three kids and a slithering little six-legged dragon stepped out. The blond boy dropped and kissed the ground. “Earth, I love you! I love you, Earth!” Gregory exclaimed.

Brian looked down at the foot of Mount Norumbega. On the lawns below, where once woods had stood, now billowed the nests of the Thusser. In the distance he could see the white steeples of Gerenford overgrown with Thusser warts. The Horde had spread far into the countryside.

He turned to look at Gwynyfer. She was crouched, looking upward anxiously. “What
is
it?” she said. “It's so
empty
.”

Gregory and Brian looked up. Gregory explained, “The sky. It's a sky. We have one here.”

They didn't have time to explain. The giants began to speak, one word from each of them at a time. “The.” — “Rules.” — “Keepers.” — “Have.” — “Adjudicated.” — “They.” — “Have.” — “Determined.” — “A.” — “Foul.” — “On.” — “The.” — “Thusser.” — “Side.” — “The.” — “Thusser.” — “Horde.” — “Have.” — “Illegally.” — “Occupied.” — “Disputed.” — “Territory.” — “They.” — “Shall.” — “Be.” — “Flushed.” — “Out.”

Gregory cheered and slapped Brian on the back. Brian, catching on, cheered, too.

“The.” — “Thusser.” — “Horde.” — “Have.” — “Forfeited.” — “The.” — “Game.”

It was won. The Thusser were out.

“The.” — “Rules.” — “Keepers.” — “Arrive.”

There was a hiss, and on three sides of the gothic capsule, circular windows opened, and a great gale blew out, as if something massive had swept into the world and hovered above them.

The kids could see nothing, but they could feel the three great motions of wind. Stone bugles on the capsule blew siren-blasts of warning.

Far down in the Thusser suburbs and the deadened streets of town, other capsules appeared. Other round hatches opened. There was a noise of great winds.

Now the three invisible beings, the Rules Keepers, swept down over the slopes of Mount Norumbega. Brian and Gregory and Gwynyfer could see the treetops boil as the great presences passed — and for brief instants, they
got a glimpse of unearthly beings, of too many dimensions to see at once, just a quick vision of hide, a few angled limbs, many eyes. And then unseen creatures reached the Thusser subdivision and started to pull the place apart.

They blew at the great, billowing sheets of Thusser nests. They scrambled lawn furniture. They tore at houses. They dragged apart walls. And there were many of them now, all seen only through their deeds: roofs pulled asunder and fantastical walls blown apart.

Down in that suburb, Thusser fathers ran out of their houses, screaming at the Rules Keepers, preparing spells; mothers chanted magic words of ill intent; Horde children longed for something to scratch at and kill. As fast as they poured out of their houses, they were whipped away into exile, sent back to their world, draining into nothing like people made of sand.

The Thusser army, slipping though the valleys of Vermont, heard the distant blast of stone trumpets. They heard the rumble of something like a steam train rolling straight toward them through the sky. They looked up, and the few who'd trained to see other dimensions caught a glimpse of limbs and mouths and all the eyes.

The Rules Keepers fell on the Thusser army and tore it apart. Infantry in their long, black coats were hurled back into their world. Commanders struggled to keep ranks neat, but they were pulled out of their machines and spun until gone. Tanks were wrenched into pieces.

Deep below the mountain, in the City of Gargoyles, where old stone houses were cankered with blobby condos, fierce gusts slammed along the streets, pulling up Thusser
construction by its roots. The winds roared through the caverns. Thusser struggled against it. They cast up quick enchantments, but nothing could protect them. The Rules Keepers seized them, and their earthly bodies crumbled. Their bladder homes melted.

Slumbering bodies were left in the alleys — humans, hypnotized, who had hung in the web of Thusser settlement. They were coated with strands of insulation. They did not move. They stared, unaware, into the darkness.

Struggling over boulders and between spruce, Brian, Gregory, and Gwynyfer watched the landscape tear itself apart. They saw houses heaving. They winced as Thusser were tossed up into the air and atomized.

There was a never-ending sound of wind in their ears.

In the Great Body, capsules appeared in Pflundt, and the Horde soldiers remaining there were helpless against the blasts of wind that shot down from the cliffs. They were all guilty of fouls. They had all passed illegally through the contested territory on Earth. They were all doomed to exile back in their own world.

Far out in the marshes, a capsule appeared and blew notes of warning from its stone bugles. Hatches opened. The surface of slime rippled as invisible beings shot out across it.

In small villages seized by the Horde, lean-tos and huts collapsed as the wind hit and frenzied soldiers were snatched and blinked out of being.

In the flux stream, Thusser on subs looked out into the green darkness and saw frothing, bubbling forms shoot toward them. They felt their vessels shudder. Then the things had passed through the walls and were on board with them.

Panicked soldiers clambered through hatches, pushing their mates out of the way, shoving other Thusser with knees and with hands in the face. Captains called for regimental wizards to do something —
do something
— but no one knew what they were up against. They watched their sailors disappear like monuments of sand blown by a fierce desert wind.

Subs drifted, empty, in the tide.

Green waters washed through the rubble that was once New Norumbega. Hundreds of people — live and mechanical — sat on islands, watching plastic garbage drift past. Occasionally, another shudder would run through the Great Body, and everything would jump up and down. The army was drenched.

The Empress of the Innards, her gloomy Prime Minister, and Kalgrash the troll sat on a pile of fallen pillars with their elbows on their knees.

They saw a woman sloshing toward them in Wellington boots. “Your Highness!” the woman called. “Message from General Malark.”

“Is he officially a general?” the Empress wondered. “I can't now recall.”

The troll growled, “He's a general.”

“Must you be so sour?”

The messenger started climbing the pillars. “The Thusser have stopped drilling, ma'am!” she said. “Their subs are just sitting there. Admiral Brunt is going to move in and see what the situation is.”

Kalgrash perked up. “They're gone!” he said. “Gregory and Bri did it! The Thusser are gone!”

The messenger said, “General Malark says that if the navy can seize the drill ships, he'll order them to be backed slowly out of the holes they've dug. He says that the pressure of the flesh will close up the holes, as long as they're slow about it and careful with the drills.”

Kalgrash stood up. He threw his arms wide. “We're saved, saved, saved!”

The Empress Elspeth inspected the messenger. “That's ripping news. We've got to send out scouts to see what's still standing. Pray where did you find those ducky Wellies?”

Hopping down the side of Mount Norumbega, Gregory, Gwynyfer, and Brian felt time itself righted. The Thusser had built a bubble where seconds flowed faster — and now that bubble was tapped, and burst, and a shock wave of missing hours and crunched days slammed into the forest, the mountain, and Rumbling Elk Haven itself.

It hit the kids. Their hair flew, mussed by passing minutes.

They stumbled and fell. Their stomachs churned. Gregory retched. They saw streaks of light flash against the sky. Again, they caught quick, jolting visions of the Rules Keepers sweeping incomprehensibly through the air.

Deep in the caverns beneath the mountain, one last Norumbegan, Wee Sniggleping, stirred in the darkness. He had been captured by Thusser and hung up in some settler's basement near a two-in-one washer/dryer. He looked around dully and found himself freed. He coughed and inspected his hands. Slowly, he awakened from his Thusser dreams.

He crawled along the cobbled street. Streamers of Horde nest trailed behind him. His head was pounding.

“Prudence?” he croaked. “Prudence, my dear, if you're lying on a side street near here, do give a holler. Truly: If you'll only say you're alive, my dear, I'll whip you up an omelet.”

The air was still. The sky was serene and blue.

At the foot of Mount Norumbega, nothing moved. The landscape was one gigantic jumble. There were vast red scrapes of wet earth where nothing grew. The suburban houses of humans lay in crumpled piles: wallboard, clapboard, sheets of shingles; struts and frames and marble countertops. Plaster dust and two-by-fours. Sleeping
owners were curled among the ruins. Streets were cracked. Cars were overturned.