Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

It began hissing, in bursts, and then it whispered, «Rivas.»

«Get the hell away from me,» he told it in a voice shrilled by tension.

«Need little blood,» the thing pointed out.

Rivas pulled loose his clotted knife and tossed it onto the dirt. The move reminded him of tossing a crust of bread to a stray dog to keep it from following you. «Take that first,» he said unsteadily. «I'll wait right here until you're done with it.» He'd seen a gravelly stretch a few yards to his right, and as soon as the thing began to suck the knife he planned to dive over there and then just keep flinging handfuls of rocks until the thing was so shredded and scattered that it wouldn't ever be able to pull itself back together.

But when the hemogoblin reached out and touched the bloody knife it instantly became much more clearly visible, and Rivas saw that its face, impossibly, was a perfect caricature of his own; and a moment later he was running away with the boundless energy of absolute panic, his knife and all thought of strategy forgotten.

When he rolled to a gasping halt five minutes later– having followed the last street of his zigzagging course past the point where, undercut by the bay, it ended in a muddy slope—his panic had thinned out to mere apprehension, and he was able to note with chagrin the mud that now caked his once white clothes.

He sat up, gingerly rubbing his abraded palms together, and stared back up the slope he'd just cartwheeled down. The black ash band exposed in the soil's cross section was clearly visible, and he remembered his father saying that it was always about two feet under the surface anywhere one went, so it wasn't difficult for Rivas to calculate how far he'd tumbled—about twelve feet, he decided. Lucky I didn't break a leg, he thought as he stood up, suppressing a groan– or my neck.

It occurred to him that he was hungry, and he stared out across the broad wrinkled face of the water, which was beginning to glitter gold under the late afternoon sun. He was far enough south so that the fresh water of the Ellay River would be fairly well mixed with the sea, and there might be some salt-water fish out there; he wasn't nearly hungry enough to experiment with the sort of fresh-water specimens that somehow throve in the Inglewood Desolate. But how was he to catch anything?

Then to the north he saw a sail, and when he squinted at it he recognized the sophisticated rigging the Jaybirds used. All at once thankful for the broad smears of mud on his clothes, he carefully but quickly picked his way along the shoreline until he came to a gap in the bank, a water-cut cleft choked with age-rounded chunks of broken concrete . He clambered up over them, pausing a couple of times to admire the line of decorated tile that ran across one edge of a few of them, and up at street level he shambled toward the clustered, tumbled, vine-hung buildings, hoping at least to find edible vegetation.

He didn't seem to be able to keep his mind on the concerns of the moment, though; just as he'd paused to peer at the century-old decorations on the broken stones, he found himself shading his eyes to look up at the rooftops and balconies around him, where now only lizards, birds and the occasional cat sunned themselves, and he was imagining what it would be like to waste an afternoon picnicking up on one of them with Uri on the return trip. He wasn't considering the odds against his finding her, nor the fact that a lot of hard psychological crowbarring was required to even partially free a person's mind from the Jaybird template. He finally found an avocado tree and managed to knock down a couple of avocados and then he climbed a fire escape to the top of a three-story building and sat there and stared at the slow sunset while he chewed them up.

Two distinct lines of smoke stood up from Long Beach Island in the south, and when the sky began to get dark he thought he could glimpse the winking yellow dots of distant fires.

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.