Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

The others cheer while Pignose wipes his blockteethed mouth with the back of one scaly arm and bows with mock humility.

This then is what has intermittently lit the plain all this time.

Batface’s stone arm lowers again and clutches like a penny arcade crane. Stone muscles bunch as the granite arm lifts its prize into the air. Not a naked prize like all the others. This prize is wearing filthy jeans and a torn black T-shirt and a light jacket.

“Son of a bitch.” Niko hears his own voice yell against the choral tide. The heedless dead part round him.

The gargoyles pass the oddity among themselves and sniff at his clothes like dogs and frown and scratch themselves and poke and prod the man who is not complaisant like his confederates among the dead but screams and even takes a swat at one of the gargoyles leering at him. The fist hits stone and the man howls louder. The gargoyles laugh. Even though this is the man who struck and robbed him Niko can’t help but admire his defiance. But admirable or not the son of a bitch is wearing Niko’s clothes.

Niko cups his hands by his mouth and shouts a name. He shouts it louder, trying to be heard above the crowd and constant hiss of bloodfall. Shouts a third time, and above him the conversation and laughter die. Niko finds himself the subject of huge-eyed scrutiny. A great scythe-nailed stone hand lowers and clenches Niko’s bloodmatted hair and lifts. Oh what has he done. Niko presses down on the giant fingers so that his weight is supported more by his hands than by his hair but it still hurts a lot. An enormous batlike face swims into view. Niko shouts the name once more and Batface frowns. He looks at Pignose on his right who’s using a woman’s sharpened thighbone to clean his granite nails and looking mildly bored by the woman’s piercing screams. The man wearing Niko’s clothes has gone limp.

“Hey,” calls Batface, shaking Niko like a kitten. “This one knows Gery.”

Pignose doesn’t even glance at Niko. “No kidding.”

“Yep. Knows his true name.”

This gets Pignose’s attention. The gargoyle flicks the remnant woman over the far side of the wall and she screams as she falls out of sight. Pignose rises to his hooves to stride across the parapet, stone wings flaring in the breeze of his motion. He bends to examine Niko. “Never saw it before.” The breath that washes over Niko’s face would blister paint.

“Should I toss it back?”

Stone wings ripple as Pignose shrugs. “Might as well light it up. Why’s the other one wearing clothes?”

“Who knows. Different jurisdiction?”

“Well they’ll burn good anyhow. Oh what’s this one yelling now? I can’t make it out.”

“Hold on.” Batface shakes Niko again and Niko yells louder. “Clearer, how bout,” the gargoyle requests.

“Fly me down,” yells Niko.

Pignose leans toward Niko until his head fills Niko’s vision. He grins and Niko becomes quite aware of the human gore slathered on the gargoyle’s granite teeth. “Tell you what,” Pignose says. “Since you’ve had the bad manners to yell somebody’s true name to everyone here, I’ll fly you all the way to the far wall.” The pigsnouted head turns right. “Asmodeus. You still got that slingshot?” And turns back. “Now what is it going on about?”

“It says,” says Batface, “This has been willed where what is willed must be.”

Pignose’s granite eyes narrow. “Oh for crying in the sink.”

“Look, what’s this all about?” says Batface. “Do I toss it back or do we make it a crispy critter? My arm’s getting tired.”

The others laugh and Ramhorn calls him a pussy.

“It’s a bad angle,” Batface insists, and they laugh again.

Pignose purses stone lips at Niko. “Go ahead and put it down. That this has been willed stuff is one of the old keys. It’s mortal.”

“Mortal.” Batface holds Niko before him and frowns as he inspects him like a new kind of Ken doll. “No fooling.” Shaking his head he sets Niko on the parapet.

Niko starts to say something to Pignose but the gargoyle holds a finger up for him to wait and turns his attention to the man wearing Niko’s clothes who has apparently passed out from the pain of trying to tear his hair out of his scalp to free himself. Now Pignose nods at Batface who draws the limp clothed figure back while Pignose takes a deep breath—

Again Niko shouts Stop, stop.

Batface lowers the man and inclines his monstrous head at Niko. “It’s really starting to get on my nerves.”

Pignose glares at Niko, cheeks bulging enormously. He lowers his head and spews his noxious fiery breath. Screams renew from the dead below and an awful smoke and bacon smell wafts up.

Pignose wipes his gleaming chin. “What is it now?”

Niko points. “Those are my clothes. He stole them from me.”

“Do I look like a cop to you, meat pie? I don’t give a fat rat’s ass if they’re the Pope’s pajamas.”

“Please, I’d like them back.”

“Ooh, please it says,” Ramhorn says to Pignose. They curtsy and bow to one another like courtiers and then Pignose grins unpleasantly at Niko. “What are you willing to do to get them back?”

Niko hesitates.

“Guess he don’t want em that bad,” says Batface, dangling the unconscious dead man.

“What do you want me to do?” calls Niko.

The gargoyles frown thoughtfully and glance among themselves and shrug. Then they grin and set the clothed man down on the parapet. “Wake him up,” Pignose tells Batface.

Pignose turns to Niko and smiles. “You’re going to fight him for your clothes.”

THE FAR SIDE of the Battlements is a sudden raw dropoff that could be two hundred feet or two hundred miles, Niko can’t tell as he gazes over the edge because a pure and famished darkness swallows the face of the cliff below a hundred feet. To his left the warm red river vomits from the arch to become a spraying frothing bloodfall that disperses into fine red mist to rain upon whatever horror lies below, ferrying its tumbling voiceless cargo to some lower deeper fate.

A ramp is carved into the Ledge. It begins on the near side of the arch and angles down until it disappears into the bleeding dark. A sick parade of thoughtless dead marches downward without end, so many dead no floor of ramp itself is visible, so many that they spill over the edge of the ramp and tumble down the sheer face of the Ledge. Ravenous darkness swallows the ramp as it descends. The blind abyss is filled with screams and earthen rumblings and a distant thunder, the deep arrhythmic grinding of a factory of despair.

The Battlement wall is twelve feet thick and solid rock so far as Niko sees. He takes his time because it’s about to become his arena as he fights a dead man for his clothes. The dead man is awake again and naked now. Niko’s clothes are draped across an embrasure near the waiting gargoyles. Jacket shirt pants and even underwear but not his shoes and socks. Niko insisted the clothes be removed so he can meet his opponent on equal ground. And why fight to get them back if they’re torn to uselessness by the fight itself?

Niko stretches out and gazes down the far side of the wall, covertly sizing up his opponent. The man is not some kind of bruiser. He’s tall and bony and welldefined, which is even worse. Tall and bony guys are hard to fight. For one thing they’ve got range. It hurts to block them. It hurts to hit them. It hurts a lot when they hit you. Then there’s the fact that Niko can’t kill the man because the man is already dead.

Bony just stares at Niko without expression as Niko stretches out. Pale blue eyes and thinning brown hair. Scalp encrusted with blood where he tried to pull his hair out to escape Batface’s clutch. Smoker’s teeth in yellowed disarray. He doesn’t look afraid or worried or eager. He probably just doesn’t care. After all he’s been through down here this is probably a resort massage.