The Stub sat on its throne. Its eye swiveled back and forth. It showed no sign it knew anyone was calling it by name.
“Clearly the old plug’s not in agreement,” said Lord Dainsplint.
“His acne,” said the Regent, “burns a particular red at the moment. I call that heated with excitement.”
The Ex-Empress suggested, “He may need to be rubbed down with lard. It soothes the skin.”
“So it is decided,” the Regent pronounced.
“It would be terrible,” said Lord Dainsplint dangerously, “if the current Regent and the head of my party were to think himself a hero, but act the fool, and be martyred for his silly ideas. Cut down in the prime of his power. It would look poorly in the history books.”
“It would be equally unfortunate,” the Regent responded, “for one of the most prominent men in my party to be convicted of treason and spend the rest of his days in a dungeon. Or, even worse, to be used as bait for the mannequins.” He smiled. “You are all dismissed.”
“We shall not go,” the old Earl of Munderplast growled, “until we have held further parley upon this matter.”
“Chaps,” said Gugs, “we’re missing the tea dance.”
“There is that,” Lord Dainsplint complained.
“At least send the humans out,” said Ex-Empress Elspeth. “You never know where there might be spies.”
“You are excused,” said the Regent.
The two boys backed out of the room, facing the Emperor, as they had been told to do by Dantsig.
The panels slid shut behind them. In the Grand Hall, there was a dance going on. Couples swayed lightly to the music.
Gwynyfer Gwarnmore was at their side. “And how did your audience go?”
Gregory looked to Brian. “I dunno. How did that go?”
“Well, I think. The Regent is on our side. I really think he’s going to do something.”
“If the others don’t stop him,” said Gregory.
“Spiffers,” said Gwynyfer, and smiled.
“The, uh, the Emperor,” said Gregory, “he isn’t really like we expected him.”
Gwynyfer nodded. “He is a bit disappointing. The whole Court was quite surprised when he was born. It happened to the old Emperor, too — the Ex-Emperor’s uncle: His heirs were all just spirals or dolls or piles of dust. People thought it was a Thusser curse.”
“Isn’t anyone worried?” Brian asked. “That he’s your Emperor?”
“He doesn’t seem like he’ll ever be a great dancer,” said Gregory with a smirk, and Gwynyfer laughed and shook her head.
The Council meeting went on while Gwynyfer and the boys stood at the side of the dancing throng. The heralds played their weird jazz on their trumpets and trombones and krummhorns; the lords and ladies danced, smiling, in their faded finery; a crooner sang of love — and in the blood vessels and lower guts, transport subs full of mannequin soldiers swarmed toward the Empire’s capital as their onetime overlords debated the decorations for the coming Fest.
In two hours, night fell. The electrical generators that caused the lux effluvium in the veins above the city to burn so brightly were gradually shut off, and the sky faded to a faint blue glow.
All over the city, little parties in dirty courtyards lit up their grills and poured out drinks into chipped old cups. For some hours more, the Court continued to dance in the Grand Hall and to promenade on the piazza, watching the carrion bats descend into the huge garbage heap that piled up next to the palace’s Great Keep.
And some time after that, the lights in the palace went out. A few guards patrolled the hallways. They did not notice a fellow soldier passing them, as if on the way to some duty.
The Regent sat in his bedroom, his hand and face dissected by light that fell through the remains of some old stained-glass window. The lines of the lead that held the panes in place fell across his skin, wrote their way along his robes and down his sleeves. He considered how clever he had been, and relished his forthcoming glory. He worried about how difficult it was sometimes to control them all, those piffling dukes and braying duchesses — how tough it was to pull the strings without others seeing. He figured he would have to look into the history of that old Game, rediscover its Rules, find the wretch Archbishop Darlmore. No one had talked about that yet…. And he’d have to watch carefully. There were so many who thought he ruled too absolutely, for a Regent. They wanted him to —
There was a soft knock at his door.
He opened it. A soldier stood before him. Without invitation, the soldier stepped in.
The Regent caught the scent of thought and recognized its imprint before he saw the face in shadow beneath the helmet. “Ah,” he said. “It’s you.”
“I’m sorry, Your Excellency.”
“You think you are going to kill me.”
The soldier said, “Yes.”
“You know,” said the Regent in a joking tone, “the thing about plots on one’s life is —”
“The time for witty banter is over,” said the intruder, stabbing the Regent in the gut and dragging the knife upward.
The Regent fell. The soldier leaned down and, with another stroke of the blade, made sure the Regent was dead. He left the knife in the body. It wasn’t his knife anyway.
Then he stepped back out into the corridor.
Over the next hours, the black lines from the lead in the stained-glass windows moved across the corpse, reading it carefully.
In the morning, when the light was strong again, when the galvanic engines were switched on and the veins bubbled and shone bright, a servant came in to serve breakfast — screamed — and the body was found.
Across the Empire, the Regent was declared dead.
ELEVEN
It was still night when Brian first noticed something wrong in their chamber. They had been given a tiny room with two bunks, a little round window, and almost no floor. He was on the bottom bunk. He lay awake on his pallet. He was anxious.
The walls were decorated with magic marker. The designs were alien: long, parallel lines, diagrams that must have had some mystical meaning, curlicues that looked like heads of lettuce. They were brightly colored, and Brian could make them out, even in the dark.
He tried to close his eyes. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t shake the feeling that time was passing, and the Thusser were spreading, and the only beings equipped to stop them were completely incompetent. He had never imagined the Norumbegans were this irresponsible, this frivolous. It did not —
He opened his eyes. He thought he’d felt something on his face.
Nothing.
It was nothing but a breeze. It must have come in through the open window.
He closed his eyes and turned over. He folded his pillow over his head. He tried to think positive thoughts. The Regent, Duke Telliol-Bornwythe, was convinced, for one thing. He clearly wanted to at least try to claim back the City of Gargoyles. And —
The window had been closed when Brian went to bed.
Brian’s eyes snapped wide.
The round window was open. It had somehow been pried.
Something could have slipped into the room.
“Gregory,” Brian whispered.
He heard his friend move in the upper bunk, and fall back asleep.
He whispered again, “Gregory,” and then he fell silent.
He’d seen the claw.
A huge hand was carefully feeling its way into the room, as if something was about to shove itself through the open window.
Brian sat up. He crawled out of bed. He stood and watched as —
“Kalgrash!” he cried.
At this, Gregory sat up. “Wha —?”
“Shhh!” said Kalgrash. “Shhh, shhh, shhh!” His head popped in through the window. “What do you think this is? Hush the band and stop the ticker-tape parade.”
“How did you get out?”
“Long story.”
“Why am I not surprised?” said Gregory.
“Ho
w are things going here?”
“Fine,” said Brian. “Have they reprogrammed you?”
Kalgrash pawed at his own skull. “Uh … naw. Don’t think so.” He knocked briefly on his head. “They don’t realize that I’m not set up to serve them like the rest of the mannequins are. As usual, intelligence is my secret weapon.”
“Good job,” said Gregory. “You hide it really, really well.”
“Someone’s cranky about being woken up,” said Kalgrash.
“So now you’re out, where are you hiding?” Brian asked.
“That’s a tough one.” He admitted, “The real problem is me. Dantsig might be able to get away with walking around looking Norumbegan. But, eh, yeah, some of us have knifelike teeth used to rend the hide of the mastodon. And full Renaissance body armor. And claws made to swipe at the flanks of scaly wyrms. We find it hard to get nannying jobs.”
Brian said, “You need to tell Dantsig that the Mannequin Resistance is coming to lay siege to the city. On his account, too — because the Regent broke his word and took you guys prisoner.”
“Hey,” said Gregory. “How are you outside our window, anyway?”
“There’s a balcony,” said Kalgrash. “We used rope. Dantsig found out which room you were in.”
“How?” Gregory asked.
“Ask him yourself,” said Kalgrash, jerking his thumb upward.
A pair of black leather shoes swung past the window.
Dantsig dropped down beside Kalgrash.
He was wearing a soldier’s uniform and helm.
“Hiya, kids,” he said. “Just taking care of some business.”
“How’d you find out where we were?”
“In this getup?” said Dantsig. “I just asked inside. Hey, Kal, we got to go.”
“Wait!” said Brian. “Where do we find you?”
“In prison,” said Dantsig.
“You can’t go back to prison!” Brian protested.
Dantsig looked cagey. There was an awkward silence.
“He promised,” Kalgrash said. “It’s expected he’ll be there in the morning.”
Brian realized that the automaton could not go against a promise made to one of his Norumbegan masters.
“But hey,” said Dantsig, “did you see how I did this? Slipping out at night? Full charge, huh? Bright red danger?” He made a weird sign with his hand that might have been a Norumbegan thumbs-up.
“You still have to obey the Norumbegans?” Gregory said. “They’ve imprisoned you! And now you’re out! So run away!”
“Look, kid. It’s easy enough for you to say, there in your pj’s. It’s not so easy for those of us hanging out here, from a rope. For us, we have to find ways to get around orders.”
“What were you doing?” Brian asked.
“I don’t know,” said Kalgrash. “I was lying on a dome, counting veins in the sky.”
“There was something I had to take care of,” said Dantsig. “Let’s go, Kal.”
“Don’t go back,” said Brian. “They’re going to reprogram you. That’s their plan.”
Dantsig hesitated. He looked sour. “Maybe they won’t,” he said.
“You’ve got to stop them if they try,” Brian urged. “You can’t let them.”
“Just run away!” Gregory exclaimed. “Go out into the desert or the snot-field or whatever that is out there! You don’t need to eat! You don’t need to drink! Hide out until General Malark arrives to —”
Someone knocked on the wall. “Hey,” said a muffled voice through the plasterboard. “Can you two stop arguing?”
Brian and Gregory looked, astounded, at each other. Then at the window.
The window was empty of trolls.
There was only one newspaper boy in Norumbega Nova. Most Norumbegans thought they were too good for jobs, for work, for hawking tabloids, so they were still in bed, heaped up with covers, in tiny rooms blackened by smoke and built out of old wooden doors and dried clippings of flesh, staring at their ceilings when the news broke.
“Historic edition!” cried the paperboy. “Historic edition! Regent murdered in his sleep! Mannequin Resistance threatens attack! All of New Norumbega thrown into confusion! Collectible edition!”
All over town, the Norumbegans were slow to rise.
“Are we, darling, thrown into confusion?” asked the Duke of the Globular Colon.
His wife blew on her coffee. “I don’t feel so terribly confused, Chev, dear…. Tousled…. The pillow has not been kind to my coiffure. But not confused.”
Their daughter, Gwynyfer Gwarnmore, watched them with electrified eyes. She was excited. Something was happening. The Court of Norumbega would never be the same. She bowed her head. “Your daughter requests permission to step outside and buy the paper.”
“Your father assents.” He raised his hand negligently.
She raced outside to stop the paperboy from bawling his news.
Gregory and Brian awoke to the sound of screaming in the corridors. Assuming the Mannequin Resistance had already arrived, they quickly got dressed and rushed out to see what was happening.
Out in the halls, members of the nobility were shouting to each other. Drones paced by obliviously. The robots carried loads wrapped in burlap on their back.
When the boys heard that the Regent was dead, even Gregory, usually so jokey, was shocked. “There he was … he was right there,” Gregory kept saying. “I can’t believe it.”
Brian was biting on his lip. “You realize what this might mean?” he said. “The Regent was the one who wanted everyone to fight the Thusser. Now who knows …”
“This sucks,” said Gregory.
“I wonder,” said Brian. “Who did it?”
“This is such a mess, I can’t even imagine,” said Gregory. “We’ve got to get the Council focused. On Earth. Going back.”
“Yeah,” Brian agreed.
“They have to get the Thusser out of our houses.”
Brian looked concerned. Gregory noticed Brian had looked concerned whenever he mentioned the Thusser being in the cities. Despite what Brian said, Gregory distinctly remembered them being everywhere. Walking along streets by telephone poles. Sitting in Laundromats. Crouched in airplanes. And sitting at the kitchen table, watching Gregory’s mother cook.
He remembered.
“Gregory,” said Brian. “I know it’s bad. But I’m telling you, the Thusser have made you have memories that aren’t real. They’re making us forget what the world was like without them.”
“I remember them being at my soccer games since I was a kid,” said Gregory, pouting.
Brian shook his head grimly.
A magician strode along the corridor, wearing a double-breasted suit. Trumpets were blasting warnings from the balconies.
The city, now, was full of confusion.
Slick Chigger Dainsplint and the bucktoothed Gugs ran across the Grand Hall, whispering to each other.
“Poor old blighter,” said Gugs. “I rather told him to watch his neck.”
“It’s my understanding that his neck was just fine. The problem was really in the chest region.” Chigger smiled tightly at some baronets who bowed deeply to him.
Gugs looked very carefully at his friend, almost inspecting him. He asked, “I say, Chigger. When did it happen?”
Chigger looked back, equally careful. “The death?”
“Yes. When did it happen, I wonder?”
Chigger said, “I believe it happened right after he was stabbed, old thing.” With that, he strode off to conduct preparations for the burial ceremony.
Heralds were blowing lamentation tunes in the piazza.
Though the Norumbegans did not like unrest, they did like gossip, and the alleys were full of it. Elfin women and men sat on overturned oil drums, arguing about the Court. The little, low-ceilinged eateries were full of babble, talk of knives and midnight and a soldier seen who had not been a soldier for real. The murder just proved what they had all suspected: No one up there in
the palace could be trusted.
Street artists spray-painted stenciled images of the Regent in his skullcap on pebbled walls. Poverty-stricken lords hung black sheets out of the windows of their huts in mourning. Everyone turned their pots and pans upside down to keep luck in their houses.
Through the main square, a Court magician walked, surrounded by guards. He was headed for the prison to begin an interrogation.
The Earl of Munderplast sat on his bed, half dressed. He looked down at his bare knees, knobby and ancient.
“My love,” said his wife. “My love, won’t you simply tell me where you were last night?”
Kalgrash and Dantsig were crouched on the floor, playing marbles with balls of dried earth, when the magician in pinstripes kicked open the door.
“Where did you get the uniform?” he demanded.
Dantsig crossed his arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You were seen. Up at the palace. Walking through the halls in a uniform. Where’d you get it?”
“I found it.” Dantsig said no more. The sorcerer in the suit waited. Dantsig stared right at him, determined to say nothing.
The magician reached into his coat and pulled out a large red magnet. He walked gradually toward the automaton.
Dantsig slid backward on the floor. Guards came forward and grabbed his arms.
“I don’t want to scramble you. Tell me where you got the uniform.”
Dantsig looked from face to face. “The outer room. It was lying on the bench. So I borrowed it,” he said. “But what’s —”
“That’s as good as a confession,” said the magician. “I charge you with the death of His Excellency the Imperial Regent of Norumbega, Duke Telliol-Bornwythe. The offense is treasonous. It carries a sentence of non-death. Torture. Continual collapse and reactivation.” The wizard gestured flatly to the two mannequins who crouched on the floor. “For the moment, take them out and shut them down,” he said. “Until the conviction is official.”
Kalgrash screamed. He tried to fight. The guards clustered close about him.
He threw them. He took three bulky steps toward the door.
Then he looked back.
Dantsig was not following. The automaton was shivering. Pallid. The magician stood by the man’s side, holding the magnet near his heart.