RIVAS FORCED HIMSELF TO do nothing more than look over at the boy, who was still peering around worriedly. He tried to remember what the old man who had left when he’d arrived had looked like. Jeez, he thought. Not too tall, white hair—could have been the same guy. And he didn’t let me see his face, though he must have seen mine. And the kid here warned me that I’d better not be after birdy girls.
I’d better assume it’s the same guy—and leave here fast, now.
As he backed away from the railing, trying to seem casual, he caught another glimpse of the barge out on the sea, and he thought he saw a row of dangling ropes along its side.
And then something tore across the top of his head so hard that he was flung forward across the railing, which broke loose at one end and swung out away from the rooftop like an outward-opening door, and then bent downward as the hinge end buckled.
With his legs more than his hands Rivas clung, sideways and nearly upside down, to what had been the railing and was now an ill-moored ladder swinging over an abyss. He’d heard the screams as at least two of the other men had tumbled away toward the sea so far below, and a couple of yards above him he could see one other man clinging to the penduluming railing; and beyond the kicking legs of that man he could see the rage-contorted face of old Lollypop himself, who was jigging wrathfully along the edge of the roof, trying to get off a second shot at Rivas with a slingshot he’d no doubt bought in memory of dear dead Nigel.
The slingshot thrummed, the man above him heaved and screamed, and Rivas unclamped his legs from the iron bars and plummeted toward the sea, spinning and flailing and hoping to land feet first, and he heard the mosquito-buzz of another missile passing very close to his head.
The water felt like concrete shattering under him when he hit it, and it punched the air out of his lungs and left him thrashing, weakly, God knew how far under the surface, in a churning cloud of bubbles. He didn’t know which way was up until the bubbles stopped shaking and began wobbling in one direction, and then he flapped and kicked himself up after them.
The first thing he did after he broke the surface and shook the hair out of his eyes was crane his neck to look upward, and his eyes widened in horror, for here came Lollypop bicycling down through the air and getting bigger every instant, in a jump that seemed likely to land him right on top of Rivas.
With nearly the last of his strength Rivas lunged spasmodically toward the shore, throwing a bow-wave that was engulfed by the tremendous booming splash as the old man hit the water directly behind him, and the big surging wave from that swept Rivas even further in, as well as knocking out what little air he’d managed to draw into his stunned lungs.
Ahead of him the sea water splashed in shadow around the stout concrete pillars that evidently supported this entire waterfront block. Old nets and hammocks had been strung from column to column and served as perches for at least a dozen children, who were all staring at him in awe. Even in the sudden dimness Rivas could see their baldness, and as he paddled further in under the overhang he noticed too the suggestive wrinkles on their necks and the webbing between the fingers and long toes. He made it to one of the unoccupied nets, the splashing of his progress echoing among the pillars, and he floundered up into it and turned back to face the wide circle of flat white water. He fumbled his knife out and gripped it in his left hand and then sagged limp to let his lungs get themselves straightened out.
Can I kill him? he asked himself. I have to… but that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to.
He realized that some of the wetness on his face was blood, and with his knife hand he clumsily felt the top of his head. There was a long ragged scratch there, as if he’d tried to part his hair in the middle with a saw. He shivered and wondered whether he’d even have felt anything if the missile had struck an inch or two lower. When he brought his hand down he saw that some red had got on the knife blade, and he wondered if soon there might be more on it.
He managed to take a deep, shuddering breath. Back in the breathing game, he thought. But for how much longer? With a clarity of imagination he hadn’t known he was capable of, he saw his own arm drive the knife toward the old man’s throat, felt the blade cut through gristly resistance until his hilt-gripping fingers hit against the Adam’s apple, and saw the twitching body slosh back in the water, saw the spreading stain, the round eyes of all these children….
Very slowly, almost without volition, he tucked his knife back into its sheath and pulled his sleeve down over it.
His eyes were on the patch of sea where a thousand little bubbles were still making the water hiss, though the choppiness had rebounded back in and spoiled the momentary flatness. He felt a calm that wasn’t entirely of exhaustion, for he was remembering his rush from behind at Nigel five days ago, and the alarmed expression that had been on Nigel’s face in the instant before Rivas’s club broke his forehead.
The bubbles had mostly disappeared, and the long leisurely waves resumed their pace… and Rivas realized, certainly more with relief than with anything else, that old Lollypop would not be resurfacing. Well, he thought, that was quite a jump, and he was an old man… and who knows, maybe he couldn’t swim, maybe he just wanted to explode my skull with his boot heels before he drowned.
Because of Nigel. Huh.
Suddenly he remembered the barge he’d seen. My God, he thought, springing up in the net, I’ve got to see where it docks! See if Jaybush’s “temple in the sister city” really is Deviant’s Palace. He glanced around and saw stairs way back in the shadows, and he let himself fall back into the water and began swimming toward them.
Several men were sitting on ledges against the inner wall, and there was a narrow boat rocking in the water near them; clearly their business was salvage, and if much more fell down from above they’d be rowing out. But though they turned their expressionless eyes on Rivas, they had obviously decided he wasn’t worth bothering with, and he attained the slimy stone stairs with no obstacle but his own weakness. He didn’t allow himself time to rest, but hurried up the stairs.
The stairs extended quite a way up, and after three or four ascending circuits of the stairwell he began to see rays of sunlight lancing through the dimness from gaps in the masonry; he stopped to peer through each one that he came to that faced the sea side, but each time there was some close stone or wooden surface blocking his view of the ocean.
At the first landing he ran out onto a wide concrete terrace where a dozen men were laboring at the cranks and capstan bars of a crane, the chain-supported arm of which stretched thirty feet out over the water, and Rivas looked around wildly, trying to orient himself. After a few seconds he spied the dangling roof-railing, way above him and off to his left. There was no one hanging on it now. He looked northwest, but at this lower level a warehouse wall blocked his view of half the ocean—the half that included the barge and Deviant’s Palace. For one impetuous moment he thought of running out along the crane arm like a tightrope walker, but the cable being hauled in lay along the top of the boom, and was wet, and kept hitching and jerking.
The workmen were staring at him apprehensively, and he realized that his scalp must still be bleeding. “What’s the,” Rivas gasped, “quickest way up to where that railing is hanging?”
One of the men frowned. “Some guys fell off there a few minutes ago.”
“I know.” He waved inexpressively. “One of them was me. So how do I get back up there?”
After a pause to think about it the man gave him a string of instructions, including one “really long jump,” and concluded with, “but they’ll just throw you off again.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Rivas agreed, hurrying away.
Five minutes later he was climbing up the ladder down which Lollypop had fled at Rivas’s previous arrival, and he paused when he was a foot below the edge of the roof. What, he thought, peek? Or scramble right up?
Scramble up, he decided. He got his feet a couple of rungs higher, then grabbed the roof edge and jackknifed up, rolling to his feet as quickly as he could on the slanting roof.
The old man with the long beard stared at him in fuddled surprise. “Didn’t happen to bring another bottle?”
Rivas shook his head and, looking around cautiously, shuffled out to the now unrailed western edge.
“Then,” said the old man sadly, “your credentials have expired. Hey, kid! Here’s the guy your old buddy dove in after!”
Rivas looked back, and his heart sank to see the blond young man stand up resolutely from beside the arch, cuffing tears from his face.
“Aw, hell, kid,” Rivas said in a tone of weary, scared exasperation. “I didn’t do it. He shot at me and then jumped in, remember?”
“He was,” the boy said brokenly as he drew a long knife from his belt, “just beginning to… forget about… Nigel. And then you had to remind him… and now he’s dead.”
Rivas flipped back his cuff and got his own knife into his left hand and waved it around, just to make the boy back off. The boy kept advancing. Rivas swore, then turned to look northeast.
The strange barge was, as perhaps he should simply have assumed, at rest beside the white stone centipede of a dock in front of Deviant’s Palace.
Quickly he turned back to the roof, and saw that if there had been a chance of getting back down the ladder without a fight, it was gone now. Lollypop’s young friend was only a few steps away, clearly waiting for Rivas to move away from the roof edge, and he was warily watching Rivas’s knife.
Rivas wondered how the Rivas of a week ago would have handled this. The footing wasn’t the greatest up here—probably he’d have tried a long kick at the boy’s knife hand and, as close to simultaneously as possible, a wide, unaimed slash that could be relied on to strike somewhere between forehead and throat.
What he did was smile, sheathe his knife and step off the edge of the roof.
His fall was controlled this time—he was careful to keep his body straight and his feet together, and as he took and held a breath he wondered if the workman by the crane was watching. When he hit the water and was under it he spread his arms and kicked to keep from hitting the bottom. He was pleased with the unruffled way he’d handled it until he remembered that old Lollypop was drifting around down here somewhere in the dark water—maybe above him right now, grinning and reaching for him with cold hands—and he flinched to the side, swam spasmodically for a few strokes and then did a panicky thrash up to the surface. This time when he surfaced and shook the wet hair out of his face, he looked anxiously down. He swam fairly hastily toward the pillars and when he was in among them in the shadow of the massive overhanging masonry he became aware of a spattering sound.
He paused to lift his head and blink around, and he realized that the mutant children perched in the nets and hammocks were clapping their webbed hands, clearly hoping he’d do it one more time.
Lisa was standing out on the little pier in front of her house when Rivas came trudging up the canalside path. He’d stopped dripping, and his hair wasn’t as damply spiky now, but his shoes still squished when he walked.
“Afternoon, Greg. I gather you fell into the canal last night; do it again today?”
“The ocean,” he said. “Twice.”
He’d decided not to approach Deviant’s Palace from the seaward side, not at first, anyway, but to reconnoiter the place by simply walking in the front door. Beyond that he wasn’t sure. Order a drink? If the legends were accurate, the place was as much a bar as it was anything else. Ask for a job? He shuddered.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
“I keep thinking I hear a hurt animal in the canal. This is the third time I’ve been out to look.” She shrugged and started toward the house. “Oh well.” She squinted back at him over her shoulder. “You don’t look like you found your person.”
“No.” Thinking of her carpet, he kicked off his mud-caked shoes on the porch and peeled off his socks.
She looked surprised at the courtesy, but didn’t remark on it. “Well,” she said, “while you were off looking for somebody, somebody was here looking for you. He left a—” She stopped, and looked at him.
He had frozen in the act of hanging the socks on the porch rail. “A… hurt animal,” he said.
She nodded. “In the canal. Do you know something about it?”
“Maybe.” Jesus, he thought, what does it take to kill one of those things? And I’ve led it here. “Have you ever heard of, uh, hemogoblins?”
“Yeah,” she said, her eyebrows halfway up to her hairline. “Vampire ghosts in the southern hills, right? Is that what I’ve got in my canal, one of those?”
He straightened up and spread his hands helplessly. “Well, I—yeah, if I had to make a guess. I thought I killed it last night. I twisted its head off, for God’s sake.” He sat on the rail, next to his socks, and stared unhappily at the floor. “I’m sorry, Lisa. I didn’t mean to lead it to your place. It’s been following me around for days, sneaking up and saying disgusting things to me. I think it’ll follow me when I go, but just in case, if you can get any screens for your windows, just for a couple of days, I’d—”
He stopped, for he’d finally looked up at her, and the mixture of pity and apprehension in her eyes startled him. He reviewed the last few things he’d been saying, and suddenly, after one flash of indignant anger, he was laughing—and then a moment later the laughter was shaking him as if it were a pack of invisible dogs, and he had to fall off the rail on one side or the other so he let himself fall in, and he sat rocking and hooting on the boards of the porch floor while tears coursed into his beard and Lisa, backed up to the far rail, smiled twitchily in an effort to keep from joining him; but soon she was laughing as hard as he was.
As the laughter subsided, Lisa stepped away from the rail, pushed a stray lock of hair back from her forehead, and sighed. “Screens,” she said weakly. “And some of that spray. Isn’t there a spray?”
Rivas snapped his fingers. “Now why didn’t I think of this earlier? We’ll get a leash on the thing and sell it to somebody as a guard dog.”
She giggled. “And… and what, something about blood. Do they say pure-blood dogs? I guess not. Still, there’s a joke there somewhere.” Her smile had worn off. “In the old days, you’d never have thought it was funny that somebody thought you were crazy.”
“I nearly didn’t today.”
“But you’re not, are you? Crazy?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You did twist the head off a vampire out there last night?”
He nodded. “Not easy, with this bad hand.”
“What a world.” She opened the front door. “There’s screens in the shed. I’ll put ’em up. Oh, I started to tell you—a guy came looking for you and left a note.”
“Not Jack Frenchfry,” Rivas groaned, getting to his feet. “Middle-aged, skinny, lechy grin?”
“No,” said Lisa from inside the house. “Where’d I put it—here we go.” He’d followed her into the kitchen and she handed him an envelope. “This guy had a beard and only looked about twenty-five.”
Shaking his head blankly, Rivas tore open the envelope and took out the enclosed card. “Nice paper, hm?” he said.
On the front of the card, in handsome calligraphy, was written, “Mister Gregorio Rivas”. He flipped it open. “…is invited,” the card went on, “to have dinner at eight o’clock tonight at the Venice house of his one-time spiritual father… if he knows where the place is; and I can’t believe he does not.” It was signed, in a different and messy scrawl, “SEV.”
Lisa had been peering over his shoulder. “This Sev wouldn’t be who you’re looking for, would he, Greg?”
“Uh,” said Rivas, reflecting that he’d been a fool to let himself be recognized last night. “No. But he knows where she is.” His heart was thumping too quickly and his mouth was dry. His hand began to shake and he put the invitation down.
“What’s wrong, Greg?” He didn’t answer, so Lisa turned to the liquor cabinet and asked as casually as she could, “Will you be accepting this invitation?”
Mechanically Rivas took and drank deeply from the glass of whiskey she handed him. “Aaahrrr,” he said quietly, almost conversationally. His face was pale. “Maybe I will,” he said wonderingly. “God help me, maybe there isn’t any other way…”
She looked uneasily at the invitation and then back at Rivas. “Where is the place?”
He gave her the ghost of a smile. “Promise not to try to do anything about it?”
“Well… okay.”
He sighed. “It’s Deviant’s Palace.”
Lisa sat down and had a drink herself, from the neck of the bottle.
A lot of its substance had been lost in the canal—it had been set back days. It had expected resistance, certainly, some obstinacy on Rivas’s part, but it had not expected treachery—for he had taken two steps toward it, obviously intending to cooperate, before suddenly backing away and making that remark about go suck a fish—nor had it expected sudden senseless violence.
It bobbed again to the surface and noticed that the sun had set. It rolled its milky eyes toward the house and bared its teeth in a smile. He was back! He must have returned while it had been brooding oh the canal bottom. With a lot less effort than would have been required yesterday, the thing kicked its diminished body up into the air, glancing sadly back down at the canal. So much hard-won blood wasted, just spilled into the water! And so much of the thing’s substance—intelligence, even, it admitted—gone with it. Well, it promised itself as it drifted back down, I’ll catch up with him again, and this time it won’t be seduction. It’ll be rape.
Suddenly the thing came to a stop in midair, undulating like a fish to stay in one place. There he was! Rivas was leaving the house! The thing spread itself to catch the breeze, and followed.
You can still turn back, Rivas told himself hopefully as he walked away from Lisa’s house. More truly than ever, you’ve earned Barrows’s five thousand fifths. Getting this far has all but destroyed you, and now the enemy even knows who and where you are!
But I know who and where he is, too. And at this point I’m afraid I simply can’t back away. I don’t think it’s even for Uri’s sake anymore. It’s for my own sake. Too many hard-won things will have turned out to be worthless if I don’t read the last page. Too many people, including a substantial amount of Gregorio Rivas, will have died for nothing.
He knew that if he hadn’t been so devastated by the events of this past week he’d never have dreamed of following this present course, but that knowledge didn’t slow his steps. Maybe, he thought wryly, a released stone falls because it chooses to.
He’d transferred his knife to a makeshift pocket in the collar of his shirt. It would probably be overlooked in a quick search, and if it should come to seem necessary, one hard slap at his own chest would send it up into his jugular.
There were still streaks of orange in the western sky, though squares and dots of yellow light were beginning to appear in the dark structures around him, and he smiled at the flashy, vulgar, colorful, vital town. I’m not sure I appreciated the place when I lived here, he thought. My focus was always too narrow.
A chair scraped on a darkening second floor balcony, and in the early evening stillness he heard the clink of a bottle on a cup edge, and then a faint splashing. “Evening, man,” said a courteous voice.
“Evening,” said Rivas, waving up at the balcony.
At Inglewood Street he turned north, and, not having the remotest idea what Jaybush’s dinner might consist of, he climbed up onto the wagon of a traveling kushi seller. With a glass of cool beer he munched his way through two skewers of hot teriyaki beef and green onions. The beer and food cost only three jiggers but it tasted wonderful, and as he climbed back down to the pavement Rivas wondered if he’d ever really paid enough attention to food.
He continued north, over a couple of torch-lit canal bridges, and he was glad he’d thought of food when he had, for he’d have been reluctant to eat at any of the ubiquitous restaurants and snack stands in this area. The stuff sizzling in these pans was highly spiced and often couldn’t even be distinguished as meat rather than fish or fowl—as if, and it wasn’t inconceivable, these cooks had access to some hitherto unknown class of animal. Rivas had always been told to avoid dining spots that didn’t have dogs hanging around the kitchen door, but he’d never understood whether the advice meant you’d be better off not eating the product of kitchens that smelled so bad as to repel even dogs, or if it meant that the lack of dogs was the result of the cook’s policy of catching any that chanced by and cooking them. In any case he couldn’t see any dogs around these places.
Women, and persons who were probably men dressed up as women, smiled peculiarly at him from open doorways, and children with knives offered to give him a cheap shave, and several old Blood freaks who had very evidently not taken off any article of clothing for any purpose for quite a while shambled up and asked him if he had any brandy to spare. As politely as he could, Rivas managed to elude all of them.
The buildings were tall in this area and crowded together with just grudged alleys between, and Rivas knew that direct sunlight probably never got down this far. The pavement was uneven cobbles, either individual stones or crumbled asphalt, and the eternal mud between the pieces was faintly luminous, so that he seemed to be walking on a ghostly spiderweb. Vibrations like bouts of fast drumming shook the walls from time to time, and once he thought he heard a lot of awkward voices raised in atonal song, and always there was the sleepy smack and buzz of the huge flies that nested way up under the eaves.
Rivas had his knife out now and was tapping the blade along the wall as he walked, to let the dwellers within earshot know that he was armed, but after turning west near Arbor Vitae and winding his way down another hundred yards of alleys and ladders and half-roofed courts he stopped doing it, for it was assumed that everyone here was armed, or else so horribly diseased that their mere proximity was dangerous.
The pavement had been getting muddier, and when one of his feet sank to the ankle he knew that there was now no pavement at all, though the walls crowded in just as closely on either side. At the frequent cross alleys he looked both ways, but the few lights he could see were dim and far away. Somewhere behind him human conversation had stopped being an element of this dark cityscape. The only voice sounds he heard now were occasional shouts, screams, curses and insane laughter, and he couldn’t decide whether he was being paced by someone who paused frequently to vomit or if there were simply a lot of upset Venetian stomachs tonight.
Finally he came to a section where the mud was uncomfortably warm and the walls were a soft claylike stuff that would hold the tracks of fingers dragged along it, and some fluid was bubbling out of the cracks between the soggy bricks. There were hundreds of little shelled animals like barnacles on the walls and underfoot, waving cilia that stung when they touched his skin. The entire tunnel—for a flexing, fibrous roof had been put up over the alleys here—was dimly glowing, and the wet breeze kept changing direction at regular intervals, blowing into his face for several seconds and then fumbling at the hair on the back of his head.
There was a collage of smells—hot metal, mildew, bad teeth—and then the tunnel narrowed to a small ragged opening that he had to scramble up a slope to get to, and then he’d squeezed through it and leaped clear and was rolling on cold, gritty, normal pavement.
He scrambled to his feet and for a moment he was tempted to bless himself as his mother had taught him decades ago, for here, separated from him by only one high-arching canal bridge, and beyond that an ascending flight of steps, was Deviant’s Palace itself.