Gregory, scrambling forward, covering his face with his shirt, dimly saw Brian start choking. Brian’s hands were around his neck. His eyes were wide. Gregory took two short, darting steps over the rubble toward his friend — and then saw the guard charging up the mound of debris toward them, his blunderbuss still spitting gas.
Gregory reacted by instinct. He closed his eyes and plunged toward the assassin, hand out. He half ran, half slid up and down the mound.
The killer was not expecting anyone to head toward him.
Gregory’s hand slammed into the man’s chest. The assassin raised his gun to batter Gregory’s head — he swung it —
— and he would have sliced Gregory’s skull right open if Gregory hadn’t pushed the man, felt the man topple backward by two steps, arms swinging to right himself.
Gregory had his eyes clenched shut. He had his shirt and his hand over his nose and mouth. He couldn’t see a thing. He felt the uniform. His hand crawled upward. He whapped the man’s face. He tried to tear off the mask. He felt a strap and pulled. The assassin collapsed toward him, smacked him in the neck.
Gregory fell.
He gasped. The smoke filled his lungs. He saw stars. He coughed. He retched. The man was stumbling away. Gregory realized that he must have pulled the mask off. The assassin bellowed with sneezes. Gregory heard the bricks shift as the killer retreated.
The gas was still thick all around Gregory and he couldn’t see Brian now. He had no idea where his friend was. He raised himself up on his elbows. He pulled himself forward.
A voice muttered something under Gregory’s belly. He jumped.
Something was in Gregory’s hand. Something he’d pulled off the assassin was talking.
He coughed and coughed. He was crawling down the slope, toward the square. Tears streamed down his face. He rubbed at his eyes wildly, but his hands were covered with grit. He sagged to the side and rolled before he could stop himself.
The gas was getting thinner.
Brian was there on his knees, next to a broken wall, whooping with the effort of drawing a breath. His hand was on his chest.
Gregory crawled toward him. He stooped and finally rose. He gagged.
“You okay?” he asked.
Brian nodded, his eyes bright red.
“I got this,” Gregory said between wheezes. He held up the gadget he’d pulled off the assassin’s head. He turned his head and coughed so hard his whole body spasmed.
Gwynyfer was sitting several feet away on the remains of a windowsill. She smiled, waved, and said, “Hey-ho.”
Gregory stared at her.
A voice in his hand said, “Have you killed them?”
Gregory looked at the gadget in his hand. It was an old headset.
The voice asked, “Are they dead?”
He held the speaker up to his ear. Its sound was too metallic and distant for Gregory to be able to tell whether he knew the voice or not.
“No,” he answered, speaking into the little horn on the mouthpiece. “We’re not dead. We’re angry.”
“Who is this?”
“You tell me first.”
“This headset is not your property.”
“I’m sorry,” said Gregory. “Your gas didn’t kill us. It’s no worse than my dog’s.”
There was a click, and the headset went dead.
Gregory shambled over the rest of the rubble to where Gwynyfer sat, looking as if she were perched on a split-rail fence in a field of wildflowers.
He couldn’t believe she would just sit there and watch the two of them almost die of suffocation.
“What are you doing?” Gregory asked her.
“Oh … The haze adds such a very splendid golden tinge to evening’s blue.”
When Brian and Gregory lay in their bunks, high up in the palace’s rambling, rickety corridors, Gregory said, “So who do you think attacked us?”
“I don’t know,” said Brian. “There are two reasons that I can see for someone attacking us.”
“My charm, your shoes?”
“Yeah. Right. Okay, first. First, it could be someone working for the Thusser. If they can hear everything that’s going on in the throne room because of Dr. Brundish’s device, then they know that we’ve been trying to get the Imperial Council to wake up the Rules Keepers and get the Thusser expelled from Old Norumbega.”
“All right.”
“Two: It could be Lord Dainsplint or someone working for him. He would want us dead before tomorrow so we couldn’t help the Earl of Munderplast question him about where he was on the night of the murder. We’re the ones who heard him lie about his alibi.”
“And three.”
“What’s three?”
“People here think you’re in league with the Thusser.”
Brian shifted angrily in his cot. “How could they think that?”
“Because you keep mentioning the Thusser.”
“But that’s stupid! I keep mentioning them because we hate them.”
“Well, I’m just telling you that everyone in that ballroom thought you were in league with the Thusser before you got out of there.”
Brian sat grimly in the dark. Finally, he said, “And you didn’t help much.”
Gregory was genuinely taken aback. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t say anything! You just stepped back into the crowd when they accused me.”
“What did you want me to do? Get burned at the stake along with you?”
“You could have said something. Or Gwynyfer could’ve.”
Gregory turned onto his side. He buried his head in his pillow. “It was embarrassing,” he said. “Everyone was staring at us.”
Brian didn’t say any more. He closed his eyes and thought furious thoughts about how Gregory hadn’t really stood up for him.
It took a long time for both of them to get to sleep.
Out in the darkness of the Dry Heart, the Mannequin Resistance inserted keys into one anothers’ backs and wound each other up, so that they were ready for battle. They stared at a city that they did not truly see, a place of lights and spires and grand walls buckled with gatehouses. They stared through the night at the fairy lights and considered how best to apologize for the damage they were about to do.
Deep within the gut, on endless seas of digestive sludge, men in dark overcoats trawled through the vast expanses in aluminum motorboats. Their faces were blue in the dim illumination of the veins above. Behind them slid large rafts, pulled by ranks and ranks of the seven-legged beasts of burden. On the rafts sat the Thusser army, hunched with their knees under their chins, their eyes open, their mouths frowning.
They sought the city of New Norumbega.
In Gerenford, Vermont, at the edge of a wood, time quivered. Within Rumbling Elk Haven, time sped. Though only a week had passed in the outside world since Brian and Gregory had walked the softly curving streets and young lawns, within the suburb months had passed. Houses had ballooned into fibrous Thusser nests. Their skin of clapboards and brick had stripped away or turned wet and oozing, and now their supporting beams and studs were wound around with cotton-candy insulation and shuddering walls of some alien wrap. Some of the houses were now on stilts, or sprawled across lawns infested with creatures that had scuttled from the Thusser’s own world.
It was night there, too, and the streets were thronged with Thusser settlers greeting each other easily, helping the new folks move in. They stepped aside reverently for the military units that marched past, headed for the borders with the human world. Tanks on twenty or thirty armored legs rumbled past. A metal ship hung in the air. Construction equipment rumbled through ditches.
In each house, embedded in the walls or in the floor, hung humans, lost in folds of architecture like the wad of meat in a fried wonton. They dreamed uneasily, and the Thusser stalked their sleep. Curled up in their nests, slumbering themselves, the Thusser ate human dream, sucking gently at the imagination’s teat.
In one of the houses, in a master chef kitchen that was warping into something inhuman, Prudence stared out of a wall. Across from her, Wee Sniggleping stared back. Their faces were terrified and frozen. They did not blink. The stove buckled and grew tendrils. The marble counter-tops sagged like hot Saran wrap. The room gradually shifted toward something that would cook the meals of the invader.
But the two faces did not shift at all. Their look of horror and shock never ceased.
Now, in the wood that marked off Thusser time from human, sudden jolts of movement burst through the trees. An army sped up, flowed to the barrier. The army stepped through into slower, human time.
There were hundreds of Thusser, wearing their long dark coats. They looked around outside their suburb. They growled reports into speaking-trumpets attached to backpacks. They listened for answers. They began to march.
Some marched along paved roads. Others followed dirt roads through the woods. They were followed by trains of construction equipment — bulldozers that blazed new paths as they rumbled forward.
One detachment reached a house — a double-wide trailer — with a little garden beside it. Among the flowers and vegetables stood cartoon rabbits and deer cut out of plywood.
A Thusser approached the house and knocked on the screen door.
A woman answered. “Yeah. Can I help you?” she said, not opening her door all the way.
“Humanite,” said the Thusser, “be alerted that Rumbling Elk Haven has claimed your house and your land. We shall commence settling here.”
“Ha!” said the woman. “Under what law’s that?”
“We no longer require zoning laws, deeds, or permits. Please yield to me.”
“You and what army?”
The Thusser smiled briefly. He stepped aside and gestured backward.
The woman looked out into the dark forest.
There she saw them, waiting in rows, glowering at her.
She was about to slam the door shut when the Thusser on her stoop thrust it open with his palm. The chain ripped off its fastening.
He stepped in.
She screamed.
For a long time, it was silent in the double-wide.
Then the Thusser commander stepped out. He beckoned to his Horde.
By the dawn, the little trailer home was surrounded by freshly dug cellar holes.
The woman, breathing raggedly, sat in a chair, her eyes vacant, a thick, goopy strand connecting the back of her head with the wall.
Through the night, the Thusser dominion was spreading.