Against A Dark Background (37 page)

`Sounds it,’ Miz said.

`What’s that?’ Zefla said, pointing down.

Eh?’ said Leeskever.
Ah; now that is one of those tangle-teeth I was telling you about.’

`This the beast that has a taste for your companions?’ Zefla asked him.

`Might even be the same one, for all I know,’ Leeskever said.

They watched the long, striped back of the tangle-tooth as the quadruped padded slowly through the jungled confusion of roots, stalks and long tatters of fallen membrane on the level below.

Sharrow remembered the airship, and the animal Geis had killed. When he’d returned, blooded, to the gondola, he’d presented her and Breyguhn with nothing more nocuous and shocking than the animal’s ears.

She had accepted her still-warm gift gracefully. Breyguhn couldn’t bear to touch the blood-matted thing. Still, while Sharrow had thrown hers away the day they left the Autumn Palace estates to return to their respective schools, Breyguhn had kept her trophy for years.

Dloan came out of the deep country the following morning, morose and unsuccessful. He’d had to shoot two inept bandits, but apart from that he hadn’t seen anybody. There might well be rebels and the like in the deep country, but they’d kept well out of his way.

They set off back to the town that afternoon with the wind soft behind them. Several troupes of stom flew over them a kilometre up, heading in the same direction. Leeskever nodded wisely.

They paid him at the same inn on the outskirts of the town they’d eaten at the day after they’d first arrived. Miz went into town alone, disguised. Their rooms were still being kept for them; a beggar had asked after them and the innkeeper had given him the note they’d left for him. Nobody else had inquired about them.

‘A decent bed and hot water!’ Zefla said, marching into her and Sharrow’s room. `Fucking luxury!’

She slept well at first, then woke during the depths of the night wondering what was happening, and thought there was something long and cold crawling over her skin at her throat.

She sat up, whimpering and pulling at her nightdress, then felt to the skin at the top of her chest, and with her hands there, looking into the utter darkness, hearing Zefla stir and make a fading, still-asleep huh-ing noise, she realised what was happening.

It was their way of saying they were still in touch, even here. So much for being off-net.

The feeling was like a cold finger drawn across her skin, right round the base of her neck, like an executioner sketching where the axe will fall. Then another line, then another and another, each one further out than the last.

The shape of the Crownstar Addendum was traced out on her skin, to the last strand, the last planet of the system.

The long looping orbit of Prensteleraf was drawn around her neck and down over the tops of her breasts. After a while, when no more happened, she lay down in the soft, sagging bed again.

The final signal, a few moments later, was a surprise: a single heavy but not painful line drawn around her scalp, about where would sit the rim of a hat, or a crown.

This was not a dream, she told herself before she fell asleep again.

But still, in the morning, she was not sure.

`I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ Miz whispered.

Dloan shrugged. He scratched his head, looking down at the great broad tail lying on the dust of the reeking cage. He lifted the tail, then put it back down again. ‘I need something to hold it up,’ he whispered.

`Well don’t look at me!’ Miz hissed, crouching at the stom’s snout with a tank of gas. He pumped the handle a few times and pulled the trigger again, squirting the gas towards the beast’s nostrils. Miz put his kerchief up over his mouth and coughed.

Dloan looked round.

Hurry up!’ Miz said.
This stuff is making me sleepy!’

Dloan took his knife and went to the stom’s side; he reached up and started cutting the ropes holding the animal’s left wing into its body.

‘Dlo!’ Miz said, eyes wide. `Are you crazy?’

Dloan said nothing; he let the ropes fall to the stinking floor of the cage. The stom’s great black wing unfolded gently like a collapsing tent. The beast stirred a little. Miz flinched back, gulping, then came forward again, spraying the gas quickly into the stom’s snout.
Shh!’ he told the sleeping animal.
Shh! There, there . . .’

Dloan removed one of the planks that had held the wing straight, took it to the rear of the beast and by propping it between the wall and the cage floor, used it to keep the stom’s tail up off the dust. Then he disappeared underneath the tail.

Miz glanced at the front of the cage. Even with the intensifier glasses on the night was appallingly dark. Zefla was watching the zoo night-watchman’s hut, but Miz felt horribly vulnerable stuck in this cage crouched centimetres from the snout of an animal that looked like it could swallow him whole.

Not that he was sure he’d have swapped with Dloan. He watched Dloan’s feet kick on the floor of the cage as he pushed himself further in underneath the stom. Miz looked away.

He looked up at the barred ceiling of the cage. Of all the things he could ever have imagined doing in his life, squatting in a stinking cage surrounded by the rotted, half-eaten corpses of glidemonkeys in the middle of the night in the remotest, most backward part of the Entraxrln of Miykenns drugging an animal the size of a light aircraft while an accomplice interfered with the beast’s genitals, would not really have been the first to leap to mind.

The stom made a deep, sighing noise. Miz pumped more gas at it. Dloan wriggled out from underneath its rump.

Got it?’ Miz asked. Dloan nodded. Miz patted the animal’s snout gently.
Poor bitch; probably the most fun she’s had in years, and she slept through it.’

Dloan stood there, holding a wooden scraper and a small sealed pot, his trous and jerkin stained. He had an odd expression on his face.

Miz squirted one last burst of gas at the animal then stood up. `Right; let’s get going before she starts screaming rape.’

`No,’ Dloan said, coming towards him.

`No?’ Miz said, letting Dloan take the gas canister from his hand. Dloan put the scraper and pot down on the floor and crouched at the animal’s snout; he pumped the canister, spraying the gas into its nostrils.
Dloan!’ Miz said, incredulous.
What are you doing?’

`Trying to kill it,’ Dloan said. He kept pumping and kept spraying, while Miz shook his head and walked round in a circle, head in his hands, muttering.

Dloan pumped until the canister was empty and a dew of evaporating droplets lay around the animal’s nostrils. Little rivulets ran down its snout and fell spotting to the dust. Dloan swayed as he crouched there, mechanically spraying from an empty tank; Miz went over and grabbed him, choking on the cloud of gas. He pulled on Dloan’s massive shoulders and finally got him to move; they collapsed back on the floor of the cage. Dloan came to, shaking his head.

Oof!’ Miz wheezed.
Get off me!’

Dloan stood unsteadily, shaking his head. He swayed, looking at the silent animal, then retrieved the pot and the wooden scraper and stumbled for the rear of the cage. Miz followed him, scrubbing out their tracks in the dust as he went.

They re-locked the door with a piece of bent wire, collected Zefla from her look-out position near the watchman’s hut, and rendezvoused with Cenuij at a postern in an unlit section of the castle precincts.

`You stink,’ he said as Miz handed him the sealed pot.

`Oh, shut up,’ Miz told him.

Lines of bunting hung above the main square of Pharpech town; stalls, traders and entertainers provided foci for the swirling, milling crowds of people celebrating the annual migration of the glidemonkeys and the return of the stom, and especially the Royal Troupe.

Noise blared from the castle end of the square, where a group of men pretending to be stom danced round in a cleared arena in front of the royal reviewing stand. The stom-dancers held their arms out, displaying giant black wings made from dyed membrane and springy bark strips as they ran at and turned round each other, making unconvincing roaring noises. Priests and monks sitting in the higher levels of the reviewing stand and dressed in ceremonial robes, kept up a running cantillation describing the proceedings.

The King sat with the Queen, trying not to fall asleep.

Sharrow nibbled at a blister-fruit sorbet as she and Miz walked through the crowds, refusing offered bargains and brandished foods.

`No; I think it’s just that he’s finally cracked,’ she said.
The vaginal secretions of a female stom.’ She shook her head.
He probably doesn’t need the stuff at all; I bet he just did it as a joke on you and Dlo.’

He’d better not have,’ Miz said, eyes narrowing.
Or he’ll find some unpleasant things being done to him as he sleeps.’

A great cry went up; children dressed as glide-monkeys ran into the arena in front of the reviewing stand and scampered squealing and giggling before the great black swooping shapes of the stom-dancers.

The King jumped, woken from a daydream. He clapped dutifully as the children over-acted, pretending to die, flapping and jerking on the cobbles of the arena to the sound of further cheers.

Deep in the castle, in the apothecary’s work-shop, a long trestle table held a collection of beaten metal canisters, each with a detachable top holding a pump-handle and a trigger. A pair of mud-coloured, slimly fingered hands gently lifted the most ornately decorated of the canisters on the table - the one with the royal crest on it - opened it up and smeared a clear, greasy gel round the bottom of the pressure vessel, and carefully replaced it.

The male stom nest-space, hollowed out of a huge trunk six hundred metres above the ground-layer three kilometres north of the town, was a dark and rank-smelling cavern of a place. The way up to it was by hoist-cage and internal ladders rising through narrow, blocked-off rainwater down-channels. There was an ante-chamber to the roost itself where the King, his courtiers, other members of the royal family, nobles and their hangers-on all assembled, crowding into the dark, springily floored, candle-lit space, talking in hushed voices while Royal Guards checked that the male stom there in the nest-space were quiet and restive and generally looked as though they were settling down for the night.

The atmosphere was unsurprisingly tense; Cenuij felt it affect even him. The air was warm and stank of male stom and sweating nobles. He slid through the crowd of men with their canisters of taggingpaint and their guns and swords. He stood behind the King’s archimpietist as the priest exorcised the gas canisters of any divine influence. Then he slipped away to the hide at the end of the nestspace itself, to try and find a vantage point.

There was still a little light left from the dusk outside. Cenuij crouched down and peeked out of a vertical slit cut out of the back of the roost cavern, surrounded by the boots and legs of men peering through horizontal slits higher up. It was like being blind. Miykennsians were supposed to have rather better night-vision than Golterians, but he wondered how any of them could see anything in this gloom.

`Here we are,’ the scratchy, nasal voice of the Queen said, and Cenuij felt somebody bump into him. He looked round.

The Queen - a blousy creature with far too much make-up, zero dress-sense and apparently so incapable of ever deciding what jewellery to wear each morning that she simply threw on all of it -ushered her eldest son forward.

Daddy’s new choirboy will look after you,’ she whispered. She smiled toothily at Cenuij.
Won’t you?’

Cenuij looked at the child; six or seven, fat, all gums and gapped teeth, grinning idiotically and holding a model stom in his hand. There was some sort of sweet-smelling sticky stuff round his mouth.

Cenuij smiled insincerely up at the Queen.

`Of course,’ he said. The boy handed him the model stom, climbed over him leaving a trail of stickiness and plonked himself down in Cenuij’s lap, hogging the view through the slit and forcing a gasp of breath from Cenuij, who had to lift the child up for a moment to sit him in a position where he wasn’t crushing his testicles.

`Make sure he keeps quiet!’ the Queen whispered.

The boy stuck his nose into the viewing slit, wiping his hands on Cenuij’s cassock. Cenuij stared at the back of the child’s grubby neck and thought of several different ways of complying with the Queen’s request.

The first few noblemen and courtiers were those brave enough to choose or unlucky enough to be landed with stom at the far end of the roost, near the mouth-shaped exit. They crept up through the centre of the chewed-out cavern, past the dozing forms of hunkered-down stom, . one or two of which watched them go past and made deep, rumbling noises that made their neighbours restless, but otherwise the stom did not react.

It was difficult for Cenuij, with so low a vantage-point and a fat, sticky child in front of him, to see much of what was going on, even though his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, but he knew that what was supposed to be happening was that the man concerned approached his selected stom, gently sprayed the sleeping gas into its snout, then sprayed a patch or two of paint onto the side of its barrel chest, just below and forward of the wing root. Judging by the general mutters of approval and the reappearance of each of the men concerned - looks of considerable relief on their faces - everything was going according to plan.

It came to the King’s turn. He had opted for one of the stom near the middle of the cavern; a large, middle-aged beast he’d seemingly chosen for a couple of years running because it had an excellent record at taking glide-monkeys. Cenuij ignored the sickly-sweet smell of the child in his lap and edged closer to look out over the boy’s grease-slicked hair. He watched the dark-clothed figure crouch down and walk between the rows of snoring, rumbling animals.

The King approached the stom he’d selected. Cenuij could just see him giving his gas canister a final couple of pumps. Then he aimed it at the snout of the huge sleeping animal, spraying it for a couple of seconds.