THE NEXT MORNING was cold; fog, like the ghost of stone, had spread another sedimentary layer over the already mostly buried old landscape, so that the building Rivas had taken shelter in stuck up out of the indistinct gray flatness like the last spire of a city reclaimed by desert sand. He stood on the roof with one foot up on the crumbled coping, and as the sun made the fog band glow a ruddier and ruddier pink in the east and then rose above it and began to dispel it, he studied the emerging view and wondered where evening would find him.
At last he decided that the fog had thinned enough for travel to be practical, and he started to turn toward the fire escape—but he’d caught a suggestion of motion out of the corner of his eye, and he turned back to the landscape that stretched away below his perch.
A vertical line was slowly moving over the fog far away to his right, which was north, and after he’d stared at it for a few minutes he decided that it was a boat’s mast, and that it was approaching. Nothing in that for me, he thought, and he had again started for the stairs when a thought struck him. How, he wondered, can that mast be approaching so steadily when it seems to carry no sails? The river certainly provides no strong current this far south, and at least when I last passed through these parts any oceanic currents would only be moving the other way on this side of the bay.
Curious in spite of himself, he limped stiffly back across the roof to the coping and stared at the mast, which was much closer now, perhaps only a mile away. It was rocking back and forth, and sinking and rising, much more than could be caused by the surface of the bay, and at last Rivas realized that the mast must be attached to a wagon that was moving down the uneven bay side roads.
He watched it until he was pretty sure where it would pass, and then he hurried down the fire escape to wait for it, not sure yet whether he meant to hitch a ride, steal a horse, or just satisfy his curiosity about the vehicle. When he got to street level he hid behind a clump of bougainvillea, confident that the bush and the remaining traces of fog made him invisible.
If he hadn’t heard the clopping of hooves first, he might have thought he’d miscalculated his position and was down on the bay shore, for the vehicle that soon appeared out of the fog, first as a shadowy silhouette and then with proximity gaining detail and color, was more boat than wagon in spite of the four horses pulling it. A wide hull flared like an up-blown skirt above the axles, with cowls around the wheels, and the pole that projected up from the front of the cabin was indeed a mast; from his hiding place Rivas could see the horizontal boom stretching away behind, over the roof of the cabin.
The cabin itself was a wooden shed as compact and solid as a Jaybird recruiting wagon, and Rivas thought he could guess what business these early morning travelers were in. His suspicion became virtual certainty when the vehicle approached close enough for him to see the freshly splintered and dented spots along the hull, and a couple of broken ropes that swung in the air and flicked an occasional drop of dew from their fog-wet, frayed ends.
As Rivas mentally put together a cover story that might make him seem to be a useful hitchhiker, he squinted now at the men themselves, who were slouched on the high driver’s bench, which was shielded at the rear and the sides by sheets of aluminum so frequently dented that they now had a uniformly hammered look. The men seemed to have fared about as well as their boat-wagon: they too were battered but evidently still functioning. The wagon was close now, and would pass him if he waited much longer.
Rivas took a deep breath, crossed his fingers and then stepped out from behind his bush. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully.
The driver snapped the reins and pulled a brake lever, and the wail of the brake shoes echoed away up and down the street as the wagon ground to a halt, the mast swaying overhead.
“What do you want,” the other man said, looking down without enthusiasm at Rivas. “We don’t pick up hitchhikers.” A bowler hat sat loosely on top of a blood-speckled turbanlike bandage, and under it his tanned face was so lean and pinched that it was hard to imagine him ever having eaten a decent meal, or even ever having smiled.
“Too risky,” jovially agreed the driver, a white-haired old man wearing a baseball cap and overalls. Like his companion, he too wore several bandages.
Rivas smiled at them. “I was just wondering if you ran into the same gang of Jaybirds that jumped me last night. I managed to run clear, but they got my wagon and all my… stock.”
The old man stared down at him. “Stock,” he said thoughtfully.
“What, uh, do you gentlemen deal in?” Rivas inquired, his eyebrows high.
After a pause in which he glanced cautiously around at the nearby buildings, the old man said, “We’re redeemers, son.”
His partner nodded absently.
And I know what sort, thought Rivas. “Ah,” he said. “Commendable. I’m a… pharmacist, myself.”
“You’re a Blood dealer,” said the old man.
“And you’re pimps,” said Rivas affably.
After another pause, the old man nodded. “Correct, son. And yes, it was a gang of Jaybirds—those damn shepherds, resenting us cutting a few ewes out of their flock. They get all your Blood?”
“All I had with me. And my horse and wagon. I’m lucky I still have my head.”
“Ah. Too bad. Blood’s the only thing that’ll quiet ’em down when they’ve got the birdy fits.”
“Yeah.” Hence my story, thought Rivas. “You know Ratty Frazee?”
“Sure,” said the lean man. “You know he’s dead?”
“I heard something about it. What happened?”
“Some damn redeemer.”
“One of the out for hire redeemers,” the old man clarified. “They say it was Greg Rivas, snatching some girl for her parents. You knew Frazee?”
Rivas shrugged. “Did some business with him.”
The two men up on the bench seemed to relax a little. The lean man took his hat off and peered into it. “Where do you go for more Blood?” he asked, apparently addressing the hat.
“I’ve got some stashed in a sewer outside Hunningten Town.” Rivas guessed that this pair had at least a couple of girls in their wagon—the Jaybirds wouldn’t have sling-shotted the vehicle so savagely otherwise, and the fact that these two were alive was proof that the Jaybird shepherds hadn’t caught up with them—and hijacked Jaybird girls were nearly always routed to Hunningten Town and then by sea up to Venice, because the pacifying Blood was so plentiful there. Perhaps the main complaint the average prostitute runner had about the universe was the fact that female communicants, unlike the less readily saleable males, never did reach the placid, tractable far-gone stage, and in order to be used had to be regularly tranquilized with doses of Blood.
The lean man put his hat back on. “Hunningten’s on our way.”
“Yeah, you can ride there with us if you like,” the old man said.
“Thanks,” said Rivas, climbing over the wheel cowl… a bit awkwardly because of his mangled thumb. “I’ll pay for the ride when we get there.”
“Sit by me,” the old man added. “Nigel will sit in the roof behind.”
“I’d be cautious too,” acknowledged Rivas as he settled himself on the bench Nigel had just vacated. The last of the fog had drifted away down the bay and he savored the smell of eucalyptus on the warming air as the old man flicked the reins and the wagon lurched into motion.
“If you need to re-stock,” the old man said, “you could sail north to Venice with us too—can always use an extra pair of hands on a boat, and I think this old barge needs some patching up this time. I think the shepherds messed up the keel hinge, and half the line’s shot.”
“Sure, sounds good,” said Rivas, though reflecting inwardly that no power on earth could ever get him to enter Venice from its seaward side, where the most altered of the city’s denizens limped, hopped and swam about on unimaginable errands in the canals of poisonous Inglewood… on the narrow, ever-shifting beaches whose mulitcolored sand was sown with lumps of fused glass and occasional ancient but undecaying bone fragments… and even in the very shadow of the structure known as Deviant’s Palace.
Though in his years in Venice Rivas had prided himself on being a particularly wild, nothing-to-lose young man, boating by moonlight down canals sane people shunned even at noon and participating in several foolish duels, he had taken care never to venture within blocks of Deviant’s Palace. But the stories he’d heard about the place still colored his nightmares: stories of fantastic towers and spires that threw dark stains on the sky, so that even at noon stars could be seen twinkling around the warped rib-cage architecture of its upper levels; of nonhuman forms glimpsed weeping in its remoter windows; of what creatures were sometimes found dying in the canals that entered the place through high arches, and what things these creatures some times said; of wooden gargoyles writhing in splintery agony on rainy nights and crying out in voices recognized by passersby as those of departed friends…. The place was supposed to be more a nightclub than anything else, and Rivas remembered one young lady who, after he’d impatiently broken off their romance even more quickly than he’d instigated it, had tearfully told him that she was going to get a waitress job at Deviant’s Palace. He had never permitted himself to believe that she might really have done it, in spite of the evening when a walruslike thing that a gang of fishermen had netted and dragged to shore and were butchering by torchlight rolled its eyes at him and with its expiring breath pronounced the pet name she’d always called him….
The boat-wagon rattled on southward along the old streets, putting on a little more speed as the sun came up and let the old man see where the potholes and washouts were. For the first half hour of the ride Rivas didn’t ask about the girls his companions had rustled, for he didn’t want to seem too interested in their business; but the thought that Uri might be in the wagon right below him made him unable to consider anything else, and finally forced him to speak. “How many have you got?” he asked with feigned casualness, jerking his wounded thumb downwards.
“Four,” the old man said. “Or maybe it’s three now. Nigel overthumps them sometimes.”
“Vermin,” commented Nigel from behind.
“Nigel doesn’t care for ladies.”
“’Specially birdy ones,” Nigel explained.
“I see,” said Rivas, nodding.
Jesus, he thought, what a pair. If I can think of a way to work them ill before I ditch them, I’ll do it. And if Uri’s in this wagon, I’ll kill them. And if Uri’s in here and dead, I’ll…
He turned away as if to look at the inland countryside, for he feared that his amiable smile was turning into some less reassuring expression. Several tumbleweeds were rolling across a field parallel to the wagon like skeletons of some spherical species; and as the things crested a grassy rise and spun free in the air for a moment Rivas thought he saw a faint rosy shadow or stain on one of them… but the old man was speaking again and Rivas had to turn and face him.
“My name’s Lollypop,” the old man said.
Given ten tries, thought Rivas, I think I might have guessed that. “I’m Pogo Possum,” he said on the spur of the moment, it being a pretty safe bet that neither of these fellows would be well read. “You been in this… trade long?”
“Since the sixth year of the last Ace, Nigel and me both. We were around when young Jaybush first appeared and started recruiting followers. Hell, I used to live in Irvine, in a house that’s behind the white walls today—or was, I guess, until the big explosion in the last year of that Ace.”
Rivas nodded. The rumors of the midnight flash and deafening roar behind the white walls—and speculations that Jaybush himself had died in the blast, for he subsequently went into cloistered seclusion in the Holy City—had shaken the whole structure of the faith, and Rivas, at the age of twenty-one, had taken advantage of the confusion and quietly left the Jaybirds and fled to Venice.
“Did you ever see Norton Jaybush?” Rivas asked.
“Oh hell yes, in those days before he retired into his damned city he was everywhere.” Lollypop shook his head wonderingly. “Can’t really blame people for following him, you know? That man was hard to beat. Still is, I suppose, just doesn’t have to prove it anymore. Yeah, I seen him make a dead man get up and walk around and talk to his family—and I mean dead, this guy was bloated up and stinking.”
“Trees bent over when he walked by, like bowing,” said Nigel. “We seen it.”
“It wasn’t any big thing at all for a hundred birds at once to circle around over his head neat as the rim of a dish, like a big damn whirling halo, and not a peep out of one of ’em.”
My rival for Uri’s devotion, thought Rivas uneasily. And one time father figure of my own, too; though luckily only through the jaybushes, the surrogates, the representatives of him. I probably wouldn’t have had the—the what? Strength of character? Certainty of my identity?—to leave the faith if I’d been dealing with Mister Messiah Jaybush himself. And I’d never have dared to disobey him so directly by going straight to Venice as soon as I ditched the faith. Jaybush had nothing but condemnations for that sinful place.
He was startled then by a quick, rhythmic thumping from inside the wagon under him, and it wasn’t until Nigel, at the rear of the roof, pounded his fist on the wood and yelled, “Save it, slut—they gonna teach you a new dance,” that Rivas realized what the noise had been. One of the girls was evidently having doubts, losing a little of her confidence that the world was in Jaybush’s hands and all was well; for the peculiar running-in-place, arm-waving activity known as Sanctified Dancing was the recommended means to clear the mind of uncomfortable thoughts. Like speaking in tongues, it had never held any attraction for Rivas.
He knew it couldn’t be Uri—this would be only her third day in the faith, and she wouldn’t have been taught Sanctified Dancing yet—but if she actually was in this wagon he wondered what she was making of the spectacle. Often, he recalled, it was kind of scary when someone erupted into it, stamping and waving and gasping, eyes generally screwed tight shut, and it had to be scarier still when it started happening in a dim confinement and you didn’t even know what it was.
He remembered being with her once when her cat dragged itself into the yard, its hind legs useless because of a broken back. Rivas and Uri had been breathlessly rolling around in the grass behind a toolshed in the Barrows yard, and when Uri leaped up and ran to the struggling cat, her eyes were still a little unfocused, her lips swollen—and then when she’d tried to pick it up, the cat had screeched and spun in the grass and Uri had lurched back with bright drops of blood already rolling down her slashed fingers and pattering onto the grass.
Rivas had put the animal out of its agony with a shovel, and then tried to comfort the appalled and weeping Uri. What had shocked her, he remembered now, was not the blood everywhere, nor even the pain of the several deep scratches she’d gotten, but the abruptness of it; the way grotesque, horrible violence had appeared in their midst with no warning, as if a chunk of icy iron had plummeted out of the cloudless summer sky.
For several miles the boat-wagon rattled along peacefully, while the day grew warmer; at one point a flicker of motion above the verdant ruins ahead caught Rivas’s eye… and his belly went cold a moment later when he saw that it was one of the big-as-your-fist punch-bees looping toward them out of the high branches of a carob tree, the rattling buzz of its six-inch wings audible even a couple of hundred feet away. He’d seen a man hit by one of them once, knocked right off his feet by the impact and dead before he hit the ground because of the three-inch stinger driven right up to the bug’s rear end in his eye.
Rivas was about to jump off the wagon and run when he heard a twang behind him and felt the air beside his right ear thrum like a plucked rope, and a split second later the punch-bee exploded with a wet smack and was suddenly just spray and bits of meat spatting onto the pavement and iridescent shards of wing spinning away like glassy leaves.
Very slowly Rivas turned around on the bench. Nigel, sitting astride the boom, was fitting a second pebble into his wrist-brace slingshot, and then he put the weapon back in his bowler hat and put the hat on his head. He met Rivas’s gaze with eyes as cold and incurious as marbles.
“Good with that thing, Nigel is,” observed Lollypop.
“Yes,” Rivas agreed, re-evaluating his chances of disabling these boys soon and getting a look at the girls in the wagon.
As the wagon went rolling past the carob tree Rivas breathed through his mouth, for the air was sharp with the metallic smell of the killed bee.
Several hundred yards behind, the tumbleweed caught against a metal post from which still hung a few curly strands of a barbed wire barrier that, a century ago, had apparently blocked the whole street. The bush heeled around to a stop. A pinkly translucent head disattached itself from the twiggy ball and blinked around, then snuffed the air. A smile stretched its face like a breath stretches a smoke ring, and a pink arm less substantial than a snakeskin reached down and with some difficulty freed the bush from the barbed wire. The head and arm were retracted again as the tumbleweed began to roll, resuming its interrupted southward course.
Late in the afternoon Lollypop left the at least somewhat maintained succession of bayshore roads and turned east up one of the old highways that mounted inland through the band of jungle and into the dry hills beyond.
“Why the shift?” asked Rivas, watching the water move around from the starboard side to the stern, and then begin to recede.
“There’s a big damned army been moving up the coast last couple of days,” said Lollypop. “Supposed to have come south overland, sacked Santa Ana and Westminster, and now they’re heading toward the bay, along the shore and in boats, burning everything in their way.”
Rivas remembered the fires he’d seen on Long Beach Island last night. They’re at the mouth of the bay now, he thought. “Huh. Who are they supposed to be?”
The old man didn’t answer until he’d guided the horses around a dangerously undercut-looking section of pavement. “Well,” he said, relaxing when they were past it, “we were in Hunningten Town a couple of days ago, and people were saying it was an army from way up north, like San Berdoo.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s possible.”
“Huh.” Rivas leaned back, absently enjoying the coolness on the right side of his face where the sun had been shining on it all day. So, he thought, Ellay’s got soldiers patrolling her western and northern borders, and here comes San Berdoo up from below. I wonder if the Berdoo boys really think they can take her by surprise. Maybe they can. Nearly all the traffic across the Inglewood Desolate is of fairly furtive, untalkative types—Jaybirds, hooters, pimps like my pals here. Maybe they can, at that.
The girls were getting restless by the time Lollypop parked the wagon in a garagelike structure with a roof high enough to let the mast in, and Rivas was trying to hear their voices, for he was sure he’d recognize Uri’s, even after thirteen years. During the long afternoon he’d considered and reluctantly dismissed the idea of asking to see the captives, even on the pretext of suffering a sudden fit of lust; a genuine Blood dealer would know better than to ask, and suspicion seemed easily kindled in his two traveling companions. The voices fell to muttering when the wagon stopped, though, so Rivas hopped down and looked around the big echoing chamber.
Square sunken areas with truncated metal pillars in them seemed to confirm his guess that this had once been some sort of garage, but there were indications too that it had seen other uses not quite as long ago. Several cots and stretchers, their fabric spiderweb-frail after all the desiccating years, were tumbled in the corners, and when Rivas crouched down on the littered floor, hoping to find a weapon, he picked up a tiny squat bottle with a rubber diaphragm instead of a lid. The diaphragm broke to dry bits when he touched it, and whatever fluid the bottle had once contained was long gone.
The unoiled-axle cries of homeward-bound parrots were ringing in the sky faintly—though very loud when, every now and then, a half dozen of the busily flapping green and orange birds would pass over the street in front of the garage—and the shadows were lengthening and the light outside was turning apricot when Nigel scuffed away with a roll of twine and a bag full of old jewelry and aluminum cans to set up some intruder alarms.
“Do you generally sleep in the wagon?” Rivas asked Lollypop.
“Yeah,” said the old man as he tossed some cloth bags to the pavement and then jumped down from the driver’s bench. “The girls inside the cabin, Nigel and me on deck.” He sat down and opened the bags and began pulling out heavy waxed-paper packages. “Hope you like pork,” he said. “Oh,” he added, looking up, “and hitchhikers sleep off the wagon.”
“Makes sense,” said Rivas, who’d hoped for that answer. “I think while there’s still some light I’ll check for snakes and scorpions.”
“Probably a good idea,” the old man allowed.
Rivas wandered deeper into the building, looking around again for something that could serve as a reliable weapon. The inland detour had been a bit of luck for him, but he knew this was about as far east as his companions would be going—from here they’d begin to bear back west, toward the bay and away from Irvine. He’d have to find out tonight if Uri was in the wagon, for if she wasn’t, he’d have to get moving south.
Against one wall an ancient engine block and an equally ancient bed frame seemed to have formed the seed of a particularly convoluted litter pile, and he walked over to it and noisily wrenched some things away: an old chair, a teevee box, the hood of a car, a refrigerator shell so rust-eaten that he could spin it away one-handed….
He was exposing a sign stencil-painted on the bricks of the wall—he could already see the word “AVAILABLE”—so he pulled over a set of metal shelves, making a hellish clatter and sending a million little glass rectangles tinkling out across the concrete floor. He could read the sign now.
CD GUARANTEED SAFE FOOD AVAILABLE HERE_________
There was still chalk dust in the pits in the brick surfaces over the stenciled line, but the only legible notation in that spot seemed to be the last applied, and it was scratched in as if with the point of a knife:
nevermore
Rivas looked over his shoulder at Lollypop, who had gathered wood for a fire and was laying pieces of pork out onto a metal grate. The old graffitist spoke too soon, he thought.
At last he found something that looked possible—it was a whippy length of flat aluminum with a heavy, rusted bolt at one end, and he slipped it up his sleeve so that the bolt was nestled in his armpit and the end of the strip was just concealed by his cuff. And, just as carefully, he was rehearsing in his head a word he didn’t know the meaning of, but which he had heard many times: sevatividam, pronounced gutturally with the tongue against the edges of the teeth on the t and d.
“I guess there’s nothing gonna bite me,” he said, ambling back toward the wagon in the wide doorway. He noticed that his hands were visibly shaking, so he added, “You guys got any liquor?”
“Sure, a fifth of Currency up under the driver’s bench,” said Lollypop. “A cup, too. Don’t take more’n one cupful.”
Rivas opened his mouth to voice the response that had become automatic with him over the years, but then he just nodded. “Okay.” He climbed up to the bench, and as he reached under it for the bottle and cup he risked whispering, “Uri?” hoarsely at the floor. There was no reply, and he filled the cup, re-corked and replaced the bottle, and then managed to climb back down without spilling a drop or banging his thumb.
The old man had got the fire going and Rivas sat down on the concrete floor near it and with some trepidation took his first sip of Currency Barrows since the night thirteen years ago when he’d done his imitation of a barking dog.
He was a little disappointed that it didn’t bring back any memories. It was just a mouthful of hard liquor, a bit perfumy and biting, without the clean grain taste of whiskey. Oh well, he told himself; better than gin. He relaxed and, having given up on feeling dramatic about it, set about enjoying, it simply for its alcohol content.
“How is it?” Lollypop enquired.
“Root of all evil,” said Rivas with a satisfied smile. Wouldn’t Mojo be surprised, he thought, to see me knocking this stuff back.
And what, he forced himself to wonder, is Mojo doing right at this moment, do you suppose? Drawing infrequent beers and making frequent apologies for the absence of the legendary Venetian pelicanist? Or hopping and sweating to fill the drink orders of the huge crowd attracted by some new performer? No, Steve couldn’t have got someone else yet.
Rivas rolled another sip of the brandy around on his tongue—he was beginning to get used to it—and wondered if he’d ever stand on the stage at Spink’s again. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the place—the high ceilinged room with the bar on the far side and the doors to the left, the lamps, the tables, the strings of dusty paper dolls way up there higher even than the chandeliers…. He wished now that he’d taken the time to really look at those strings of little figures holding hands and touching toes. He’d always been curious about them, even before he’d learned that they were the last work of some genius sculptor—Noah Almondine, Rivas seemed to remember his name was—who lost his mind and killed himself in the last year of the Sixth Ace. Rivas had never been able to keep straight the names of all the genius painters and poets and doctors and engineers—and even politicians, for the Sixth Ace was supposed to have been the best Ellay had had since Sandoval himself—who crowded into prominence when Rivas was about seventeen, and then all wound up leaving by the Dogtown gate at about the same time the Sixth Ace was assassinated. Though there weren’t ever any musicians in that crowd, Rivas thought, and thanks be to Jaybush for the lack of competition.
All too soon the distant rattling and clanging was replaced by the scuff of Nigel’s returning footsteps. Rivas put down the cup and got up into a crouch, his heart pounding, and frowned dubiously at the pork to explain the move.
Nigel walked into view from around the corner.
“How long have you guys been carrying this pork around?” Rivas asked, trying not to talk too fast or too shrilly. “It looks a little old to me, yes man, little bit old. Don’t need, what, worms, do we, hey? Why, I knew a guy ate some old pork one time, and listen, worms woulda been a blessing to him; he’d ’a’ begged you for ’em, compared to what he got. He came down with—”
Nigel was close enough now, and looking annoyed rather than suspicious at this jabbering.
“—sevatividam—”
As Rivas had hoped, the captive girls instantly began shrieking when they heard those five syllables and Nigel, startled by the sudden din, spun toward the wagon.
Rivas sprang up out of his crouch, whipping the length of metal from his sleeve in one motion and whirling it around and back, over his head; when his right foot hit the pavement he was moving at running speed, and though Nigel looked back in real alarm when he heard it, Rivas was already upon him, and with all the strength of his arm and momentum of his rush Rivas lashed the heavy bolt directly into the bridge of Nigel’s nose. Even as Nigel’s head snapped back and his body folded backward, Rivas let go of the aluminum strip and let himself fall with the body, and as they hit the floor together he snatched Nigel’s hat and when he rolled to his feet on the far side of the body he was fitting the slingshot into his hand and over his wrist and aiming it at Lollypop, who’d drawn a knife and taken a couple of steps forward.
The old man skidded to a stop when he saw Rivas draw the pebble back against the increasing resistance nearly to his ear.
“Drop the knife,” Rivas panted.
The knife clattered on the floor. “What have you done to Nigel?” the old man moaned.
“Maybe I overthumped him,” said Rivas, beginning to catch his breath. “Open the cabin.”
“You’re a Jaybird,” said Lollypop.
“No. Open the cabin.”
The old man didn’t move. “That was that speaking in tongues gibberish.”
“Right. I can kill you and open it myself.”
The old man started toward the wagon. “You’re a redeemer, then.”
“One of the out for hire ones,” Rivas agreed. He turned slowly to keep the slingshot aimed at the man, but took a couple of steps back and let the rubberized netting go slack for a moment while he crouched and snatched up the knife. He had the knife wedged into his wrist sheath and the pebble drawn back again before the old man could do more than look around.
As Lollypop turned back toward the wagon Rivas glanced down at Nigel. One eye was wide open and staring up into a darkening corner of the ceiling, the other was nearly closed, and between them was a deep indentation. Rivas’s outstretched arm began to shake, and he wished he was anywhere else on earth.
Lollypop had climbed up over the wagon’s stern and unbolted the cabin door, and Rivas hurried forward as it swung open. Three girls were standing inside, blinking in the orange firelight; they were smiling uncertainly, evidently still supposing that Rivas’s imitation of a far-gone receiving the sacrament had been genuine.
He peered closely. None of them was Uri.
“Step down, girls,” he said with weary gentleness. “You’re free.”
Their smiles disappeared, but they climbed down and wandered aimlessly toward the fire.
“Climb in there,” Rivas told Lollypop, “and, carefully, bring the fourth girl forward.”
The old man disappeared inside the cabin. After a moment he called out, fearfully, “She’s dead.”
“Bring her forward.”
“You’ll kill me.”
Maybe I will, thought Rivas helplessly. But, “Don’t be silly,” he said. “This is just a job to me.”
There was scuffling and thumping in the darkness, and then he saw a long, dark-haired body rolled to the cabin’s threshold.
“Let me see her face.”
Lollypop lifted the head and turned it toward Rivas. It wasn’t Uri.
Rivas wasn’t aware of how tense he’d been until his shoulders relaxed. “Not the one I’m after,” he told Lollypop. “Get inside and shut the door.”
There were tears on the old man’s face. “You can’t lock me in here! This cabin’s built tough, I’d starve to death, just shoot me right now—”
“I’m not going to lock it, relax. I’m just going to pile some stuff in front of the door so I’ll hear it if you come out. The dead girl you can leave in there with you or roll out onto the deck.”
Lollypop rolled her back inside. “I can’t be alone,” he muttered as he pulled the door closed.
Rivas let the slingshot go slack and tucked it into his shirt, then ran back into the dark garage, picked up the old bed frame and carried it back to the boat-wagon. He threw it onto the deck, climbed up himself, and leaned it up against the closed cabin door. “There,” he called. “If I’m still around when this falls, I’ll hear it and come back and kill you, okay?”
The old man was mumbling inside, possibly to the dead girl, but there was no specific reply.
Rivas let the slingshot go slack and tucked it into his belt, walked around to the driver’s bench and grabbed the bottle of Currency, then hopped down to the floor. During the day’s ride, he had noticed that the harness of the horses was an unusual style, with some sort of hinge and pin arrangement as well as buckles on the harness straps, and a light English saddle on each horse; now he put the bottle down, carefully, and walked up to the front right horse to get a closer look at the harness.
Each of the pins, he saw, had a ring on the top end; he yanked one out of its hinge and the harness strap fell away. He smiled almost sadly. Ready for anything, you boys were, he thought; Jaybird shepherds, punch-bees, the necessity of having to take to the water… even, I see, for having to abandon your vehicle altogether and proceed on horseback without unbuckling anything. I’ll bet old Lollypop is going to be a little more careful about picking up hitchhikers, though. Rivas yanked out another pin and tried to remember what length he liked stirrup leathers to be.
“Where’s the jaybush?” came a voice from right behind him, making him jump and gasp.
He turned to the girl. She was tall, with pale hair; she was silhouetted against the comparative brightness outside, and so he couldn’t see her expression, but, knowing Jaybirds, he didn’t figure there would be much to see anyway. “Sorry, miss,” he said. “There isn’t one anywhere near.” He looked past her. “Where’d the other two go?”
She shrugged.
“Good luck to them.” He went back for the bottle and tucked it into his shirt and then pulled the last pin, freeing the horse from the wagon. “And good luck to you,” he added, wondering if she’d know how to give him a leg up.
“Where are you going?”
He looked back at her in exasperation. Why couldn’t she have wandered away with her friends? “South.”
“South?” she said with sudden eagerness. “To the Regroup Tent?”
“No, dammit, I—” He paused. Why not? What better cover could he hope for than the role of a Jaybird who’d become separated from his band and was waiting to be caught up with or reassigned? Especially if he was accompanied by an obviously genuine stray Jaybird girl. “I mean yes,” he said.
“Can we start tonight?” she asked. “I feel terrible being away from everyone.”
“Yes,” said Rivas, leading his horse around so that he could reach the harness pins on the left front one. “I’d like to get away from this place as soon as possible.”
The girl glanced around blankly, apparently giving Nigel’s corpse no more attention than she gave the neglected pieces of pork. Obviously home was wherever the Jaybirds were, and every other place was simply a place where they weren’t, only to be passed through and not worth a second look. Rivas had read somewhere that toads could perceive only two categories: a fly, and everything that was not a fly. This girl seemed to have the same sort of two-position attention switch.
“Since it’s not where everyone is,” he amended wearily. She smiled and nodded, and he went on, “Sure, there’s still enough light for us to cut a couple of miles out from between us and the Regroup Tent.” He handed her the reins to the second horse. “Can you ride?”
Her smiled disappeared. “Yes,” she said, taking them.
He realized that it must have been a skill she’d acquired before becoming a Jaybird, during her renounced old life, and that while she was willing to use it to get back into the bosom of the church, she’d take no pride or joy in it.
“Well,” he said, “if I fall off, come back for me.”
Without replying the girl hiked her left knee up, got her sandalled foot into the left stirrup, and effortlessly swung up onto the horse; Rivas noticed that her legs, under the coarse cloth robe, were long and graceful. She’d have fetched a good price in Venice, he thought—and I’m glad I saved her from that. And what the hell am I looking at a girl’s legs for when I’m trying to find Uri?
At his second try Rivas got into the saddle. “Follow me,” he said, and led the way out onto the street.
When the quiet tick-tock of the hooves had receded away down the street, the garage was silent… but not quite still. The sunlight became redder and dimmer as it slowly advanced across the concrete floor, the remaining two horses blinked incuriously from time to time, and a shadow without a body drifted from the street into the garage, hard to see because it was the same color as the twilight glow. It turned like an unhurried underwater swimmer and tensed slightly when it saw the raw pork, but moved eagerly forward when it saw Nigel’s corpse. It lifted its legs in a crouch, and when gravity finally coaxed it down to the floor its insubstantial fingers fluttered over Nigel’s face and hands, trying to find an open wound.
Then finally the wagon’s cabin door was pushed open, and a bed frame toppled onto the deck with a tremendous crash. The transparent creature, immensely startled, darted away like a minnow, and by the time the snuffling Lollypop had shuffled across the deck and climbed down to the floor, the thing was clinging upside-down to one of the ceiling beams, as tight and still as a pink glass bat.
The old man sat down beside the body and began haltingly whispering to it while the light crept further into the garage and grew dimmer and the creature on the ceiling beam blinked and rolled its big eyes and one of the Jaybird girls, outside, made a steady clanging racket but no vocal complaint as she tried patiently to extricate herself from one of Nigel’s intruder alarms.
At last Lollypop picked up Nigel’s body, carried it to the wagon and laid it on the deck. He climbed back aboard, rolled the dead girl out of the cabin and dumped her over the gunwale, and then gently dragged Nigel inside and closed the door behind them.
Five minutes passed, then the ceiling-clinging thing let go and spread its arms and legs and spiraled down like an autumn leaf and touched down, silently, on the dead girl’s face.
There was no further motion in the garage; and after a while the Jaybird girl outside got free of the alarm and wandered aimlessly away into the night, and then the silence was unbroken.