Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

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 on 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 sometimes 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?»