Farley’s futuristic gun spoke again, a staccato of dry coughs followed by a crash so big, the theater shook.
Barnabus is no more, Riley realized. The Rams have lost their most fearsome fighter and King Otto has lost his brother.
Riley should have been scurrying down the corridor, a trip he could make blindfolded; but instead he was thinking about Otto, huddled in the orchestra pit, waiting for the bullet to send him the way of his brother.
Go, Riley told himself. Flee.
Otto had never done anything for him. Never brought nothing into his life but grief and anxiety.
So why are you still here, Riley? Be off into the city.
But the boy was stricken by a sudden sense of compassion.
That’s Chevie’s fault, that is. I was never compassionate under Garrick. Unto dust, Garrick always said. The only concern you need have about life is to preserve your own and that of your master.
He could follow Garrick’s path no more. An attempt must be made to save Otto.
“Blazes and tarnation,” swore Riley, and he opened the small hatch that linked the trap room to the orchestra pit.
Chevie somehow knew that her time in the Smarthole was drawing to an end. Perhaps time was the wrong word for her trip, as it could not be measured in minutes or seconds. Space didn’t work either, as there was no sense of traditional movement. If anything, the experience was closest to a fevered dream that seemed simultaneously totally real and utterly impossible.
Chevie recalled from past experience that when the journey ended, her senses would be addled by what Professor Smart had christened the Zen Ten.
Everything is all right and outta sight, Smart had quipped in the famous talk at Columbia University during his U.S. lecture tour. When those little virtual particles annihilate, a person gets literally plugged into the universe.
This dazed and confused period had been only quantum-jecture at the time, but now Chevie knew for a fact that the Zen Ten existed and it could last a lot longer than ten seconds. In fact, she would have been willing to bet that Smart had only picked the figure ten because it rhymed with Zen and so made for a catchy phrase.
Stay alert, she told herself. Stay focused.
Then she was coughed up into the real world and the fugue of time foam smothered her senses.
Chevie began to giggle.
I’m back in a Victorian basement. This is hysterical.
Across the room she saw the Thundercats coalesce and solidify, and this was even more hilarious.
“You two look ridiculous,” she said.
Vallicose and Witmeyer did seem a little pathetic at the moment, snuffling on all fours like two large pigs in their knee-length, flesh-colored Thundercoats.
Vallicose smiled broadly, and it did not suit her face.
“We are going to kill you slowly, heathen,” she said, which took the good out of the smile. “You are in league with Lucifer.”
Chevie knew she should be upset by the idea of a slow death, but the Zen Ten had her in its clown-glove grip. “Lucifer? Is that Lucifer O’Malley from Venice? He owes me ten bucks.”
“There, you see?” said Vallicose, pointing and also drooling. “Venice is in Italy, which is near France. She’s a Jax spy.”
Witmeyer had the good sense to be worried, but her face couldn’t show it yet.
“I have an idea. Let’s kill her quickly and then move right on to figuring out what is going on here.”
Vallicose punched her partner playfully on the shoulder.
“Now now, Lunka. Slow killing, I said.”
Witmeyer giggled. “Stop it, Clover. You are such a silly. Quick killing.”
Chevie thought she might collapse from the shock at what happened next.
Oh my God. No one is ever going to believe this. Do I even believe it?
Vallicose and Witmeyer began tickling each other.
“Slow kill, Lunka.”
“No, fast kill.”
“Slow, slow. A thousand cuts.”
“Clover, one cut across the throat. Fizz, and it’s all over.” Witmeyer mimed the fizzing blood with wiggling fingers at her neck.
“What is that?”
“It’s the blood, fizzing.”
“Blood doesn’t fizz, Lunka.”
“If you puncture the jugular. Just a tiny hole.”
“Spray. Blood sprays, and it’s impossible to get out of a uniform.”
I could kill them now, thought Chevie. Two quick kills. I would be saving myself a lot of heartache, and the Blessed Colonel knows that Victorian Londoners are not ready for tickling Thundercats.
But she could never do something like that, no matter which one of her personalities was dominant at the time. And Chevie reminded herself that there was no such thing as a Blessed Colonel back here. Just a run-of-the-mill colonel who was about as far from blessed as it was possible to be.
I couldn’t kill Smart and I can’t kill these two, Chevie realized, and then she added an alarming addendum to that thought. But they could certainly kill me.
She stood shakily and checked herself for wormhole mutations. Nothing visible. No dinosaur head or duck feet, but she would scrutinize every square inch later and also have a good root about in her own brain.
Sometimes the changes are not physical.
And with the Zen Ten playing with her mind, it was difficult to know whether or not her neurons were firing on all cylinders.
Concentrate on one thing, she told herself.
Find Riley.
On their last adventure, she had taken the lead, steering the boy through his twenty-first-century experience; now she was the fish out of water, stumbling around in a mud-floored basement. Riley would provide her compass.
The last time I wanted to go home. This time I don’t even know if my home exists anymore. And if it does, do I really want to go back there?
Chevie lurched toward the doorway, giggling as she went, deliberately not glancing at the Thundercats, in case she burst out laughing and incapacitated herself.
“Look,” she heard Witmeyer say. “The child is escaping. And Smart gave her something, I saw it. A key. It could take us home.”
Vallicose reacted to this hilarious news by laughing until her throat was raw, and then she said in a jovial tone, “Don’t worry. The Lord will lead us to her, and then we shall kill her slowly and take the key from her godless corpse.”
Chevie felt the key warm against her skin and she used the damp brick wall to steady her as she made good her escape.
Find Riley.
Godless corpse? she thought. Hilarious.
Riley peered through the trap-room hatch, and there was Malarkey, huddled in a corner behind a stack of wooden music stands that would provide no more protection than a showgirl’s fan. The Ram king wore a strange expression, which Riley realized was a stew of primal rage and utter despair.
Like Jekyll and Hyde at the same time, thought Riley, who was very partial to the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and counted Treasure Island as the finest adventure story he had ever read.
It was odd to see the High Rammity like this. So human. Without any of the customary airs or swaggers about him.
This is the real man, Riley thought. This is Otto Malarkey, not King Ram or Golgoth.
A narrow beam of red light drew complicated jitters on the black wall, and as Farley’s voice drifted from above, Riley momentarily mused, The words carry well despite Farley’s reedy tones. Madame Orient has fine acoustics, so she does.
“Ah, Your Majesty,” said the tattooist. “I was looking for you, as I wish to augment your last tattoo. A few touches of crimson, perhaps.”
A few touches of crimson. It could be the title of a penny dreadful. Once that laser-sighting dot settled on Malarkey, then he was as dead as Dick, as the old saying went
, referring to the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin. That red dot, which Riley happened to know was called a laser, would ensure that a bullet flew true to its mark. And weapons bearing the laser sight did not happen to misfire or explode in the fist with any regularity.
Simply put, Malarkey’s goose was not just cooked, but served on a silver platter with all the trimmings.
Riley could not help thinking that were he to let matters take their course, then one of the flies in his ointment would be removed for him. But this was an uncharitable thought, and he dismissed it the moment it popped into his head.
Riley thrust his arms through the hatch space.
“Malarkey! King Otto! This way!”
The Ram seemed not to hear him, mesmerized as he was by the red dot, and so Riley had no choice but to duck through the portal and tap Malarkey’s arm.
“This way,” he hissed. “Survival lies through here.”
Malarkey moved with the speed of a veteran bludger, grasping Riley’s shoulders and squeezing as though to crush.
“No, King Otto,” grunted the boy. “It’s me, Riley. We need to flee this lurk. Farley’s run a-muck.”
Otto’s eyes remembered where he was.
“Farley, that snake.”
Riley shook free. “Yes. Farley. Now get a move on or we’ll be grinning at the daisy roots. We’re all coopered up down here.”
Garrick had often tried to beat the slang out of Riley, but in stressful situations it floated to the surface, and it did seem to slice through Malarkey’s stupefaction.
“We is rightly coopered ’ere,” agreed Malarkey. The red dot was a mere second’s jittering away now. “Lead on, Ramlet.”
Riley did not need telling a second time, turning on a penny and diving bodily through the trap-room hatch into the welcome arms of velvet shadows. Malarkey swept the music stands aside and followed his subject through the portal, scrabbling across the mud floor to put some distance between himself and the infernal dot.
A stream of lead followed them, plowing a trough in the floor until Farley’s line of sight was cut off by the iron frame.
“What ho, Farley!” shouted Malarkey. “Can’t you augment my tattoo around corners?”
Riley rolled his eyes. Why must there always be baiting when there was fleeing to be done?
“Down here, Otto,” he said urgently. “A shilling will get you ten that Farley ain’t reached the bottom of his bag.”
Otto huffed, unbuttoning his silken vest, exposing diverse blades and hooks slotted therein. “I ain’t opened mine yet, there’s the diff. All’s I need is a squint of Farley’s ugly counting house in that there doorway, and I will deal him the big bounce, even if I have to mount the cart for it, so help me, crisscross.”
He don’t get it, Riley realized. Otto thinks the odds are even apart from Farley’s gun. He thinks we have wrested the upper hand.
“No, King Otto. We must quit this lurk, toot sweet.”
Otto chose a baling hook and a glittering dirk from his arsenal. “You quit, boy. Hightail it to the Hidey-Hole and raise the troops. I’m for bloody vengeance.”
“Are you cowering like a craven cur, Otto?” came Farley’s taunt from above. “Is the great king afraid of his ink man?”
Malarkey’s face seemed to glow red in the dark. “Listen how he pokes at me. The cove what murdered poor Barnabus.”
Riley felt his own temper rise. “You would do like the Light Brigade, would you? Kill your own self through pig-headedness. Who will avenge Inhumane then?”
But Malarkey was not in the humor for plain logic. The red mist was in his eyes, and he would rather die than retreat.
“Barnabus dead,” he said, scraping hook and blade together, till sparks marked the contact. “Barnabus dead. Barnabus dead.”
Barnabus dead, thought Riley. I think His Majesty’s brain ain’t open for business.
Their situation, though already dire, worsened considerably with the hop-roll of a small metal cylinder through the hatch. On its arrival the cylinder hissed and spun as though it contained a frantic serpent.
“Grenade!” shouted Riley.
But if he had hoped his exclamation would galvanize the king, his hope was in vain, for Malarkey simply glared at the little bomb as if his stare alone could defuse it.
“Blooming hell,” said Riley.
Their salvation rested squarely on his shoulders. He would save them, or they would not be saved.
I must assault my king, he thought; and he ducked under Malarkey’s weapons, barging Otto’s person backward onto the loaded trapdoor platform, allowing his own self to tumble on afterward. Once both sets of limbs were more or less inside the platform’s borders, he kicked the lever, activating the power of four compression springs and a three-hundred-pound counterweight. In rehearsal, the resulting force had been enough to catapult Riley ten feet into the air overhead, where he would land on the uppermost chair in a stack; but with Malarkey on the platform, they would be lucky to clear the stage, and only then if one of the Ram king’s legs did not foul up the workings.
Perhaps Malarkey’s meaty limbs would have snagged in the trapdoor, but Riley was never to find out. The grenade exploded, its force gathering under the platform like the hand of God and accelerating Ram and Ramlet clean through the trapdoor and spinning them downstage, platform in splinters around their ears.
Otto took the brunt of the concussion, as he was closer to the blast, but his trunk was saved from shrapnel by the reinforced platform. However, the platform’s planking wrought considerable destruction on Malarkey’s flesh when it splintered, shredding his back more comprehensively than any bosun’s cat-o’-nine-tails.
Riley was thrown onto his back, legs dangling over the lip, unable to tell whether he was coated with royal blood or his own. His skull hummed like a belfry at one minute past the hour, and his heart seemed to have decided to bust out of his chest.
Otto ain’t stirring, he thought, his head being angled toward Malarkey. The king is dead.
But dead the king was not, as evidenced by the flute of blood Otto coughed up on the boards.
Farley’s head appeared stage left at the apron, peeping almost comically from the stalls.
He looks like a bird, thought Riley, with his noggin a-wobbling in that manner.
“Ah, both still alive,” said Farley. “Excellent. Excellent. This is the best afternoon’s fun I have had for a long time.” He mounted the steps. “This is what’s going to happen, Malarkey. Once I have put an end to your reign, then I return with my squad to the Hidey-Hole and make an offer of employment to the leaderless Rams. Those who take the shilling, as it were, will become part of a new world order. Those who don’t will be joining you in whatever hell is reserved for murdering criminals.” Farley dipped into his bag and came out with six shells in a circular clip, which he used to fill the revolver’s chambers. “Speed loader,” he explained. “I had our gunsmith fabricate the thing for me. Do you like it? Little inventions like this are going to help us take over the country.”
Farley knelt at Malarkey’s side and placed his revolver barrel at the king’s temple. “I wish I had more time, Malarkey, because a hanging is what you really deserve. A bullet is too good for you. You ought to be strung up in Trafalgar Square for the whole city to see. Good old-fashioned British justice.” He sighed. “But the explosion will bring the constables, so a bullet to the brain will have to do.”
It seemed to Riley that his eyes were the only part of him functioning, as per usual. He could see the instrument of his death, but he couldn’t do anything about it. One bullet for Malarkey and the second for him.
Tom, he thought, I never found you. I failed.
Farley cocked his weapon, amused by Malarkey’s total helplessness.
“Look at you, Otto. The mighty Golgoth.”
That was surely an end to the gloat
ing. To delay any more would tempt fate.
“Good-bye, Your Majesty,” said Farley.
Then something fast erupted from the wings at stage left. A figure attached to a pair of legs that moved so quickly they seemed like blue fans. One of the legs swept upward and kicked Farley in the side of his head. Hard. The tattooist moved backward on his hunkers, like a drunken Cossack, until his momentum took him over the lip of the stage and into the orchestra pit below. Judging by the level of clatter, Riley reckoned that his landing was not a cushy one.
P’raps he fractured half a dozen bones, thought Riley. We can only hope.
The blue-clad legs bent at the knees and Riley’s savior knelt before him. The shock of recognition brought the boy’s voice box back to life.
“Miss Chevron,” he said. “It is yourself in the flesh, come to save me once more.”
Chevie’s face was pale with concern for her young friend, but she smiled to hide it.
“That’s right, kid,” she said, running her hands up and down his torso and limbs, feeling for breaks. “Someone has to look out for you. I leave you on your own for a hundred years and look what happens.”
Leaving posthaste, everyone agreed, was a good plan. Everyone agreed except Farley, that is, because no one consulted the tattooist; even if they had, a fortune-teller would have been needed to interpret the drool pooling by Farley’s cheek.
Farley. The hangman. She had been reading about him all her life.
No. Wrong.
Old Chevie, whipped Chevie, had been reading about Farley all her life.
But that Chevie was gone. She was now…
Traitor Chevie?
The real Chevron Savano. And actually, truth be told, when you got a look at this Farley, he was a little underwhelming.
“This guy did the damage? This old guy? He’s like, a hundred.”
“I would guess sixty,” said Riley defensively. “And wiry with it. A drill enthusiast, I’ll wager.”
Chevie peered into the orchestra pit where Farley was tangled in a heap of music stands. “And anyway, I thought he was a friend of yours, Riley.”