Edward Bryant - Dealer's Choice

The Outcast stood at the end of the cavern. Ahead, there was darkness and a cool wind that brushed back his long hair. The Outcast raised his staff above his head; the blazing amethyst at the knobby summit of the stick erupted with light.

The actinic light from the staff just touched the far side of a canyon, revealing that he stood on the brink of a dizzying precipice. Directly across from the Outcast, a large platform jutted out over emptiness. Leaning out, the Outcast could see nothing else — neither above, below, nor to the sides. The staff’s light faded away in all directions into blackness.

The Outcast grinned.

“You could use some light in this place, fat boy.” The voice came from behind him. The Outcast whirled, his cape flowing. A penguin in a funnel hat grinned at him. It wore ice skates on its pudgy feet, gliding toward him as if the broken, rocky floor of the corridor was glare ice.

“I was just about to add some of that,” the Outcast replied. He turned back toward the black canyon. “Now!” he said loudly.

A rumbling came from the emptiness below them, a roaring of torn, fractured rock rising in volume until the Outcast clapped his hands over his ears. Peering down, he saw glowing red cracks appear. Fountains of molten rock spewed from widening crevices on the distant floor, thick lava flowing out. The chill of the cavern vanished in a gust of coiling heat. Tornadoes of frantic air spun around the canyon walls.

The Outcast laughed, clenching his fist in triumph. “Yes!” he crowed. “Look!” he shouted to the penguin over the din. “Look what I can do!”

The penguin skated to the opening, spun once gracefully, and peeked gingerly over the edge.

Far, far below, molten rock collided and heaved in a sluggish, thick river. The fiery glow of lava washed the canyon cliffs with the hues of hell and brushed the distant roof of the cavern with crimson. The rift in the floor of the cave was a hundred feet across and twice that in depth, ripping through the earth like a raw knife wound. A narrow, crumbling ledge edged this side of it, following the lava-etched stone walls in either direction. The fissure angled away into deep perspective on either side, continuing into the unseen distances as it curved in a slow arc.

“You really need a railing,” the penguin observed. “You’re gonna get sued if some tourist falls.” The creature cackled, the funnel hat on its head nearly falling off with amusement. The Outcast, dressed in somber dark clothes with thigh-high leather boots and a wide, black leather hat, gave a brief chuckle.

“It is impressive, isn’t it?” he said. “Bloat’s Moat, they’re going to call it.” The heat had chased away all the coolness. The skin of his face tingled as he gazed down.

“It’s not my climate of choice, Your Bloatness Sir,” the penguin remarked. “But yes, very impressive. Why, you could probably build something half-decent if you really tried.”

Bloat — or rather, the dream-image of Bloat: the handsome raven-haired hero he thought of as the Outcast — scowled. “Damn it, why are you always criticizing me? Nothing I do is ever good enough.”

The penguin grinned up at him, though the glittering black eyes were expressionless. As with all his dream creatures, he was deaf to their thoughts. After a moment the Outcast sighed. He raised his staff once more. The amethyst flared again and rock flowed like pulled taffy from the end of the corridor, arching over the deep canyon in a thin bridge, the far end touching down on the platform across from them. Another cave entrance led out from the platform in the direction of Jersey City.

“There,” the Outcast said. “My little lava moat goes all around the Rox just behind and below the Wall. The passage over there” — he pointed across the bridge — “leads to another corridor circling just inside and well below the Wall. There are passages out from it and up into the Wall itself. I’ll send someone down to guide the jokers through the caverns any intruders can simply get lost — and I’ve set some interesting hurdles for them.”

The satisfaction on the handsome face was open. He was almost smug. “I dreamed it all. I built every piece of it myself and the power grows stronger every day. Each day I can do more with it, and each day the fucking nats are getting more and more scared of me. I am the governor. The Rox is mine.”

“Not yours, bubba. Not entirely, anyway,” the penguin retorted. The creature was sweating; beads of moisture darkened the fur. “Man, some of the things I’ve seen down here don’t come from your mind, Your Overstuffedness. There’s a great big hairy spider, and a dog-faced griffin, and that Polynesian thing Tangaroa that ate three jokers yesterday … You want me to go on?”

The Outcast was scowling. “They come from my other dreams, the ones where I’m walking in someone else’s world. You know that. I’ve seen the spider there, and that Tangaroa thing. They leaked in. I’m sorry, okay? Quit complaining.”

“Everything’s connected, fat boy. When you realize that, I’ll quit complaining. You really think the nats are done with you? You really think that they’re just going to let the Rox keep growing and growing? Hell, they’re already howling about what you did to the goddamn Statue of Liberty, which by the way shows an abysmal lack of taste and sensitivity on your part; it looks like something you’d see in Penthouse. You think they’re just gonna keep doing nothing when the Wall hits Battery Park?” The penguin hawked and spat a gob of ugly green stuff on the floor. “You spend too much time dreaming and not enough thinking.”

“ I’m powerful enough to stop them now. The jumpers are still here and since Blaise left and Molly took over, they’re more under my control than ever. The Rox is bigger than ever. We have hundred of jokers here and more come every day. I have more traps and barriers set up.”

“And the nats are more pissed than ever too.”

“I can handle them,” the Outcast said sullenly.

“Yeah. You and your fucking dreamstuff.”

“ You’re part of my dreamstuff, penguin.”

The creature made a rude noise. “That’s my burden and I have to bear it as best I can. If you really knew how to use your power, you’d set up shop somewhere else.”

“Sure. Like maybe Hawaii, huh?” The Outcast snorted. Below them, lava waves thrashed and broke against canyon walls. “The trouble with you is”

The Outcast stopped, cocking his head as if listening to something only he could hear. “Whassa matter?” the penguin asked.

“Something going on out in the bay. Chickenhawk… the tower watch on the east side is all in an uproar… something about someone riding a horse out in the bay… C’mon.”

The Outcast rapped his staff against the rocky floor of the cavern. The amethyst blazed and they were suddenly no longer in the caverns but in Bloat’s Castle — the old Administration Building, now transformed into something from the land of Faerie. The Outcast could see the body of Bloat — his body — almost filling the huge lobby. High up on that vast mountain of pasty white flesh, stick-thin arms and shoulders sprouted along with a pimply, fat-cheeked boy’s sleeping head. PVC pipes jabbed into that mountain of flesh: stinking black mounds of waste lay along its flanks; the sides were streaked and stained with the tracks of the excrement. Yet despite the foulness of the body, the setting itself was splendid. The lobby sparkled like the interior of a lavish diamond. The columns supporting the distant roof were cut crystal, the walls were glass, the girders and supports silver and gold, the floor an intricate pattern of azure and ruby tole.