Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

After a few minutes he scrambled to the next bush, then to a boulder he could lie behind, then to a shallow gully. . . . Half an hour later he thought he heard shouting in the wind, but it was hard to be sure, for by this time he was well up into the inland end of the valley, and the patter of the rain on stone and leaves, and the trickle and splash of newborn streams, tended to drown out more distant sounds.

He paused, though, and looked back down the valley. The Regroup Tent was a gray mushroom far away, difficult to distinguish from the bulks of the hills because of the mile of veiling rain that hung between it and him.

He grinned. Redeemer, redeem thyself. So long, Sister Sue.

Late in the afternoon he found a building—once some kind of office, apparently—and decided that smoke against this gray-mottled sky would not constitute much of a risk, so he frictioned up a fire of plywood shelves and antique invoices in the open doorway and warmed himself and baked his clothes dry. He tried not to torment himself with thoughts of food or—though he had managed to slake his thirst at a pool of rain water—liquor. Finally, dry and warm and at least not much sicker than he'd been this morning, he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do right now except, with massive reluctance and not even a drink, review his situation.

Well, he told himself, Uri's gone now, but everything you could do you did do. You not only have Barrow's five thousand fifths, you earned them: you took the sacrament twice; you were actually shot, though nobody'll believe that; twice a hemogoblin attached itself to you; you had to kill four men; and if it weren't for the unlikely intervention of that girl, Sister Windchime, you'd be a grinning, babbling moron at this very moment. Oh, and that guy knocked you down this morning, and damned hard, too. And you cut hell out of your thumb. And God knows if you still have a job at Spink's.

He glanced around at the rusty, dusty old filing cabinets and wondered if any of the generations-dead people who'd worked here had been in the habit of caching some liquor somewhere. One heard of such finds occasionally.

Suddenly and shamefacedly he remembered the incomparably greatest suffering he'd sustained during the course of this last, unsuccessful redemption: the loss of Uri herself! For thirteen years he'd planned to go find her as soon as he'd got some real money and could give her the kind of life she deserved, and for these last three days he'd been out actively risking his life to find her . . . and now she was gone, snatched from him just at the very moment—what a touch—the very moment when his three-day search, no, thirteen-year pilgrimage, was within seconds and inches of being completed!

He was sure to get some good lyrics out of all this.

Then with an unwelcome clarity that memory can rarely manage, he re-heard how Barrows had described him four nights ago: « . . . Just a kind of shrewd, cunning insect.» And though he'd laughed then, all at once he was astonished at how thoroughly Barrows had understood him. My God, Rivas thought now, you're going to get some lyrics out of this, are you? Sister Windchime may be birdy, but she's twice the human being you are, boy.

Well, he replied to himself defensively, I'm a professional songwriter—what am I supposed to do, pretend I don't derive my songs from the things that happen to me?

No, clown, what you're supposed to do now is the same thing you were supposed to do yesterday. Go get Uri.

But they took her into the Holy City.

So?

So no one has ever come out of the Holy City except a few jaybushes and shepherds. Even Norton Jaybush himself hasn't been seen since entering there ten years ago. Everyone knows that a redemption attempt ends when the quarry goes in there. And no, I don't think such an unheard-of effort is called for by the unheard-of price I screwed Barrows into paying. (Though how on earth could I have bargained for Uri's soul?)

Now memory replayed a statement of his own, one he'd made to Barrows that same night: «Evidently she's worth five to you, but not ten.» So what do you tell yourself, boy? he thought. Evidently she's worth a cut thumb and a few scares, but not worth putting your life on the table on a long-shot chance?

Against this question he involuntarily held up a sheaf of treasured images: his apartment on First by the North Gate, with rain and night outside and himself inside with warm lamplight and a pipe and a drink and a book; long summer afternoons with the feet up on a sunny balcony rail, and a friend or two, and a cool beer standing right where his hand could reach it; the pleasant certainty of new pretty girls to charm and impress and possibly take to his bed, and the equally pleasant certainty of being comfortably alone in that bed later . . . .

And at length he realized, bleakly, that all this did not balance the scale. Not when Uri's life was what was being weighed. He had to go to Irvine and get into the Holy City and get Uri out.

God damn her, he thought fervently, for getting us into this.

Fracas Mcan scowled fiercely at a harmless couple of Jaybird girls who were ambling down the other side of the street, and was edgily gratified to see them register alarm and duck into one of the ubiquitous prayer parlors, for the response indicated that his shepherd disguise was convincing—at least to the rank and file. And he only had a couple of blocks still to go before he got to the imminent-departure yard, and it looked like he wouldn't have any trouble getting there while the morning dew was still wet on the wagon he was after, and before today's fresh batch of wagons began to be wheeled in. Just so he didn't run into a genuine shepherd! He supposed they probably had some system of passwords or winks or some damn thing that would instantly expose him as a phony. What a damnable advantage Rivas had in actually having been a Jaybird for a few years!

McAn was scared. In all his previous redemptions he'd been careful not to go anywhere near Irvine, and now here he was only a long stone's throw from the high, inward-slanting white walls of the Holy City itself.

He touched the knife strapped to the inside of his left wrist, but it didn't give him quite the confidence it usually did. He'd been feeling less than confident ever since the parents of this quarry had reluctantly explained to him that the first redeemer they'd hired to retrieve their son had limped back to Ellay with a bullet in his leg and a story of having been shot at by Jaybird shepherds armed with real working guns and live ammunition.

McAn had asked for five hundred fifths with half payable upon agreement, the most he'd ever asked for a job, and he had explained that he would search only in the areas north of the Seal Beach Desolate. They had objected to that at first, as his clients aways did, but he gave them his standard explanation: that the residual radiation—an impressive phrase—was simply so great in those distant regions that no sane person would spend the kind of time there that even the easiest redemption would require, and that even if a Jaybird could be found and snatched at that point, he or she, and probably the redeemer too, would die like a Venetian fish-eater long before they got back to Ellay.

McAn had always known that the story wasn't entirely true, but until the day before yesterday he'd never worried about how much of an exaggeration it might be.