Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

«Mine's already in the city. How's this—you make some kind of commotion out in the street to get the attention of anybody who may be hanging around here and I'll drag your boy over to this alley for you, and then I'll take his place in the wagon.»

McAn stared at him with genuine horrified awe. «You're going in there to get yours?»

Rivas nodded hopelessly.

And I thought I was walking the farthest, most insanely dangerous edge just by having come this far, thought McAn. Impulsively he tossed his knife to his left hand and held out his right. «Rivas, I've always figured you for a posturing, slimy son-of-a-bitch, but by God, I'll tell anyone who'll listen that you're the best damn redeemer there ever was.»

Rivas gave him a fragile smile and took the extended hand. «Thank you, Frake.» He sheathed his knife. «Let's get moving before they bring the conscious members of this band over here.»

Rivas didn't know how McAn did it, but no more than half a minute after the young man had loped back up the alley there came a splintering crash from the street, followed by a lot of screaming; he even heard one voice, evidently that of a far-gone startled right over into the last stage, begin babbling about how tasty it was when everybody helped to boil down the heavy water.

Thanks, Frake, thought Rivas. He sprinted to the wagon, rolled the luckily emaciated boy over the rail, crouched to get him draped across his shoulders, then straightened up and, gritting his teeth against the possibility of losing consciousness himself, plodded to the alley. At the last possible instant he changed his mind and instead of simply heaving the kid like a sack of gravel, squatted down and rolled him almost gently onto the pavement.

The unconscious young man was wearing clothes very similar to his own, so Rivas just hurried back to the wagon, climbed in and lay down in the same position the boy had been in, with his face well concealed under someone's limp shoulder, and then let his breathing and heartbeat slow down. After a while he heard a muted scuffling from the direction of the alley, and thought he heard a whispered, «Thanks, Greg. Good luck.»

The morning began gradually to warm up, and Rivas heard the rumble of other wagons arriving in the enclosed yard. From time to time he heard desultory conversation, though he didn't catch any words. He actually fell asleep for a while, but came instantly awake when closely approaching boots and hooves clocked on the pavement and the wagon shifted as someone—and then a second person– climbed onto the driver's bench. «These all still out?» someone asked. Rivas heard the jingling of harnesses.

«Yeah, looks like. Buckled up there? Okay, let's go, the rest of you walk alongside.

The wagon jerked, then the axles began creaking and it was moving. Rivas could hear the footsteps of the conscious members of the band walking beside the vehicle; to judge by the snifflings and hitches in breathing, at least one of them was quietly weeping.

He felt the grating shifts of a couple of slow turns, and then all too soon the rattle of the wheel rims became a soft hissing and he realized they'd left the pavement and were crossing the hundred yards of pale sand that ringed the Holy City like a gritty moat, presumably merging with the real beach sand on the seaward side. It occurred to him that it would be very easy to break out in a high, keening wail that could be maintained indefinitely by doing it while inhaling too . . . and as soon as he thought of it, it became difficult not to do it.

One of the plodders alongside must have felt something similar, for the hot noon air was abruptly shaken with glossolalic jabbering.

Rivas wasn't particularly surprised when no one silenced this babbler—he'd already come to the conclusion that the shepherds did that to keep them from revealing something . . . but who cared what might be learned by people who were in the very process of entering the Holy City?

» Annoyances! » croaked this far-gone now. «What do I care? Deal with it yourselves, you idiots, I'm not to be interrupted in my cooking . . . . Sevatividam can't be bothered with these provincial problems . . . far places, long ago

times, I take a longer view . . . . What if it was your dreaded

Gregorio Rivas? He can't impede me . . . .»

Rivas had stiffened with panic, assuming that they knew who he was and were only conducting this performance to let him know, albeit a bit elaborately, that he was caught; he assumed the wagon would now stop, the bodies slumped around him would leap up, and he'd find himself surrounded by triumphant shepherds with drawn-back slingshots. But the wagon kept rolling and the plodders kept plodding and the speaker in tongues babbled on: « This stinking boat, you're trying to kill me, careful, ow . . . »

Rivas began, one muscle at a time, to relax. Could it simply have been a coincidence? Who the hell was it that was talking, anyway? Obviously not the individual Jaybirds. Was it Norton Jaybush himself? How? And why in English now, when a few years ago it was all just gargling? Though the word—or name— Sevatividam showed up in both versions. . ..

». . .Leave me alone, I'm about to give the sacrament in Whittier ,» the helplessly babbling man went on. « Oh, look at them all, turn around, you damned old carcass, I want to see them all . . . . Sevatividam's blessings on you, my dears . . . give me your push, children, your at-a-distance strength . . . you never use it yourselves, you don't need it . . . I wish I could just take that from you, not use you all up so fast . . . but it seems to be linked to your minds, so maybe you do need it . . . hard luck. . . . Oh, some first timers, how tasty . . . . At this point the stuff became more the

way Rivas remembered it from his own days as a Jaybird, just grunts and burping and conversational-tone yodeling.

The sweat from his moment of panic cooled him and he had nearly relaxed back to the degree of tension he'd been in before it, but suddenly he tensed up with fear again, for the light had dimmed and the air was a degree or two colder and he knew that they were even now under the high stone arch of the gate . . . and when the brightness returned and the chill passed he felt only worse, for he knew he was now on the inner side of the high white walls. As if to emphasize it for him, the gates slammed loudly behind the wagon.

The vehicle was riding perfectly smoothly now, the wheels making a featureless noise like water being slowly poured into a metal pan. Rivas had begun shivering among the tumbled bodies in the wagon bed, for he could tell by the very scent of the air—a sort of garbagey sweetness with burned overtones mixed with the fish smell of the sea– that he was in entirely unknown territory. He was pretty good at faking and bluffing the Jaybirds in the camps and stadiums and meeting places out there in the hills, though not even too successful at that lately, but now he was in the house of Norton Jaybush himself, the man—if he was a man—through whose generosity the Jaybirds had whatever they had of power and fearsomeness. In here he might find anything.

There are only two things, he thought, that I can be reasonably sure are in here to be found: Uri, and my own death.

The wagon slowed, and a man's voice said, «All of you—this way,» and the sounds of the wagon's pedestrian escort—the babbling of the far-gone, the snuffling and sobbing, and the thudding of all the footsteps—receded way to the right while the wagon resumed its course straight ahead, in a silence that only strung Rivas's nerves tighter.

Quite a while later reins flapped and the wagon came to a stop—after a weird sensation of sliding that made Rivas wonder if they were on a vast sheet of glass—and the shepherd in the driver's seat spoke: «One dozen as promised, Mister Trash Heap, sir.» Rivas heard the other man on the driver's bench laugh nervously.