Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

Don't put on the act for me, old boy. I know you hate 'em all, every one of em.

He frowned and focused his eyes. Where had he heard that recently? Who was it that had said that to him? He couldn't have been sober at the time, or he'd remember. Unless he'd been overpoweringly sleepy . . .?

It's me you love. Me only.

It was last night. A dream? Yes, of course it had been a dream, a fever-warped one. He tried to remember something more about it, but couldn't.

At midmoming he killed two doves with Nigel's slingshot, and as he was awkwardly butchering them another sentence from his dream came to him. You're too ashamed to admit it, the voice had said.

Rivas paused, the bloody knife hovering over one of the half-dismembered birds, and he tried to remember what the dream had been about and who in it had been saying these things to him. Then he remembered seeing something in the dream . . . a person . . . himself? Was he looking in a mirror? And why, of all things, did he see himself sucking his thumb?

He finished butchering the birds, and started a fire by dampening some shredded cloth from his shirt with Currency and then banging together various rocks and bits of scrap metal until some sparks fell on the shreds and ignited the alcohol vapor. Then he spitted the doves and cooked them over a fire of powdery old lumber pieces. His companion didn't seem surprised when he let her have one of the birds, served with a mock flourish on a Ford hubcap, but she didn't look pleased either.

«What's your name?» Rivas asked her between bites as he leaned back against the big splintered sign that shaded them. He'd whimsically chosen it for their lunching spot because of the archaic message painted on it in big stark letters: ALL CANNIBLES HEREABOUTS CRUCIFYED– NO EXEPTIONS.

She gnawed a charred breast for a few moments, then said carefully, «Sister Windchime.»

He smiled. «I like that. I'm Brother—» What, not Pogo, «—Thomas.»

«It's nonessential for you to like my name,» she said irritably. Rivas remembered that nonessential was a pretty harsh term of disapproval among Jaybirds. «And why do you have that bottle of money?» she went on.

«To sterilize wounds and start fires,» he said virtuously. «Why? You don't think I'd drink it, do you?»

«How long have you been a follower of the Lord?»

«I was recruited when I was eighteen,» Rivas told her, truthfully.

«Huh,» she said. «You can't have taken the sacrament very often if you're still walking around at your age.»

Unable to think of a reply, he just shrugged.

She leaned back against the sign and pitched the breast bone into the fire. «I don't—what's the matter?» she asked, frightened, for he'd leaped to his feet and his face was gray.

«Uh—» He turned and squinted back the way they'd come. «Nothing. But we're wasting time. Let's get moving—if we crank, we can be at the Regroup Tent tonight.»

He didn't begin to relax until they were mounted and riding south down a well-preserved highway, and even then he kept glancing back anxiously; for he'd suddenly remembered a little more of his dream and he was pretty sure now that it hadn't been a dream at all, that he really had been mockingly spoken to, very late last night, while he was feverishly half awake—spoken to by the hemogoblin whose face was somehow a caricature of his own.

And he was sure, too, that the glimpse he'd remembered earlier, the glimpse he'd thought was of himself sucking his thumb, had actually been a fevered memory of seeing that thing sucking its sustenance from his self-inflicted knife wound.

When the sun was near meridian two columns of smoke appeared in the south, and a third began upwardly staining the blue sky within the next half hour. Rivas and Sister Windchime couldn't hear anything but the grasshoppers and lizards in the dry grass around them, but every time a long straight length of street offered a chance to see some distance, Rivas stood up in the stirrups and peered, trying to see through the mirage ripples and guess whether the troubles ahead—whatever they were, some consequence of the advance of the San Berdoo army, he supposed—would obstruct his progress toward the Regroup Tent.

After a while the street they'd been following turned sharply to the southwest, and they had to strike out across the fields and flattened housing tracts. Eventually they were fortunate enough to find a southward-snaking dry riverbed, and they rode down the middle of it for almost an hour before noises from ahead made Rivas call to Sister Wind-chime, softly, «Stop.»

«What is it?» she asked, already a little nervous herself.

«I don't know exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's people coming this way. Whoever it is, we don't need 'em. Come on,» he said, quickly hopping out of the saddle to the gravelly dirt, «let's get up the slope here.»

Sister Windchime dismounted and they led the horses up the eroded slope. After the first few minutes of dusty scrambling they were in shade among trees, and at the crest of the slope they found a segment of narrow paved road still not quite reclaimed by colonies of tall asphalt-crumbling weeds and the downhill tug of the annual floods.

«Quiet now,» Rivas whispered. «We'll just let 'em move on past us and then be on our way again.»

Over the rustling of the branches around them he could now hear a sort of windy ululation and a faint metallic clatter—but it wasn't until the first scream raised startled crows from the trees ahead that Rivas realized what must be going on. It's a band of hooters, he thought.

Though he'd several times talked to people who'd survived hooter attacks and once or twice come across the remains of people who'd run afoul of them, Rivas had never seen a band of them himself, and he wasn't eager to. He was glad he and the girl had found concealment, and he hoped everyone down there in the riverbed would be too busy to note the tracks of two horses on the dusty bank.

Again, and more loudly now, came the eerie fluting sounds, discordant and choppy.

«It's hooters, isn't it?» the girl whispered.

«Yeah,» he said. More fervently than ever he wished he'd grabbed Nigel's hat. The shift from motion in sunlight to stillness in shade had got him disoriented again, and thoughts were as hard to hold onto as lively fish in a bait tank. He caught one, and was able to add, «Probably running down some luckless fugitives from the troubles along the coast.»

Branches framed a segment of the gravel riverbed below, and as the hoarse yells and thudding footsteps and the clatter of bicycles got louder, Rivas kept his eyes on it. Almost unconsciously he had taken out the loaded slingshot and hooked it over his wrist. He felt Sister Windchime's hand close tightly on his shoulder, but he couldn't spare her a glance to see what her expression was.

«What are you going to do?» she whispered.

«Nothing, don't worry. This,» he whispered, raising the slingshot, «is just in case they try to come up here.»

Minutes passed and the sounds grew louder and sweat tickled his forehead and neck. Damn, he thought tensely, why do there have to be all these obstacles? All we want is to get to the Regroup Tent, get back to where we belong, in the hands of the Lord. The affairs of the world are ephemeral, I believe that, and the ways of the Lord are all important, I believe that too—so why must the world's ways always be so noisy?

A particularly raw scream erupted only a short distance ahead, and seemed to shake the leaves. Someone was cursing exhaustedly and a child was sobbing.

«We've got to help them,» Sister Windchime whispered.

Rivas glared sternly at her. «Are you backsliding, sister? Everyone dies, and if they are of the Lord it's a cause for rejoicing, and if they're not then their death means less than that of a fly.» Though it's noisier, he amended. «Perfect yourself before you take it upon yourself to improve the condition of others.»