Fantasmagoria (26 page)

Velma screamed and dropped to the floor.

Vernal turned. Sciever was at the front, still covered in bandages and smiling at him through the glass. Yunique stood behind in a heavy cowl. Vernal hadn’t recognized her under the thick hood and coat. Robots didn’t like rain. Vernal ran for the back room as gunshots rang out. But they weren’t for him. Sciever was letting himself in the locked door. Velma bawled in the corner as the Murderling walked to the back.

Vernal hit the back door and shook it. He shook and shook and shook. “No, no, no . . .”

“Hello, runt.” Sciever pointed his gun at Vernal.

Vernal turned. He kept his hands at his side. “Sceve . . . How you doing?” Vernal smiled. It revealed his chipped teeth.

Sciever turned his head to Yunique, who stood wide-eyed and smiling by the counter. “Good call.”

“I’m going to get the reward, right?” she asked.

“Oh yeah. Mr. Pimpernel will be very pleased. Very, very, very pleased.” Sciever motioned Vernal to the front. He stepped clear as the runt passed.

“How much am I worth?” It was a point of pride for Vernal. “It better not be less than a hundred large.”

“Don’t kid yoursel--”

Vernal charged the mechanoid, hoping to get to the shattered glass of the front door, but she grabbed him and they fell to the ground, knocking the giant dildo into a corner. Vernal cocked his wrist out of instinct and stabbed. The stinger tore the mechanoid’s pseudoflesh and struck hard plastic.

Sciever stepped on Vernal’s hand and produced a pair of pliers. “Nuh uh,” he cautioned. “That old trick’s not gonna work again. That’s how you killed Rabid, you sonuvabitch.”

Sciever pushed on Vernal so hard that the stirge’s stinger ejected. Vernal grimaced. The Murderling gripped the serrated barb with the pliers as Vernal lay on Yunique, who held him to her ample breasts. Velma covered her face and sobbed as Sciever ripped the larva from Vernal’s stained palm. It squirted blood and trailed sinew. Vernal screamed.

The Murderling tossed it away and laughed as Vernal whimpered into the whore’s body. “How many times did you think you were gonna get away, huh?”

“One more,” Vernal quipped between gasps. Both his hands hurt. He stared at the fresh hole in his palm. It was oozing blood.

Yunique stared. Her made-up face was flawless except for the drooping eyelid. “This is for Dobie. I wasn’t done with him yet.” She head-butted the scoundrel with the dome of her robotic skull and knocked him out.

(TWENTY-EIGHT) The Chamber of Ten Thousand Skulls

“You gotta admit, no one will look for you here.” Gilbert smiled.

“How’d you know about this place?”

“I had to come to the temple once.” It was a planning session with the Hand that Pugs had arranged ahead of the show at Hoosegow. Gilbert had gotten lost and discovered the chamber before being escorted off the grounds. “It’s kind of a long story.”

Jack looked around the room of skulls. It was an ossuary, a locked chapel in a grotto on the grounds of the Minion-Kraxus Temple, whose tower Gilbert had seen rising over the rooftops. The temple stood near the far entrance to the covered promenade, close to the exit so as to receive worshipers from the city. Unlike Goyen and Xueyin, Kraxus had no formal church, but his popularity on the mainland had grown in recent years amid periodic water shortages and famine. The floating island had been spared the worst of it, but the roster of the Minion-Kraxus Temple swelled all the same. The Black Hand started offering protection services to the penitent and donated the grounds for the church. Jack wasn’t sure what they got out of the deal, but it must have been good.

Jack and Gilbert had wound their way through the maze of the Arcade using the temple spire as a guide, careful to avoid the neon-lit promenade. They passed several back-alley Neverod dens and a saurus fight. Men and women smoked long, thin pipes and screamed over a pit as two blood-soaked raptors shrieked in battle below. It was illegal, and Jack paled to think what would happen if even one of those creatures escaped, but he said nothing and neither did the fight’s patrons. The citizens of the Arcade knew to mind their own business, especially in the dead of night.

The temple had not been difficult to find. There was a crowd, some kind of midnight mass. That made getting onto the grounds easy. The gate to the grotto, however, was locked; Gilbert had worked his magic with some tweezers and pins from Marcy’s first aid kit, which he had stashed in his lead pants. He’d cracked the box in seconds. Vernal had lied; there was no piston. Jack wasn’t surprised in the least. Truth was a suit the stubby man tailored to his needs.

Gilbert grunted as he held the key in his teeth and squinted into Jack’s keyhole. Working by candlelight was difficult.

“Did you know her well?” Jack broke the silence.

“Marcelline?” Gilbert shook his head. “Not really,” he mumbled. He took the key out of his mouth. “But then it kinda seemed like she didn’t really let anyone know her.”

“Back in the day, Erasmus messed her up pretty good. To make a point.”

“I saw.”

Jack turned. “She showed you?”

“Don’t move.”

“Sorry.”

“You mean did I see under the patch? Yup. Why?”

“The Marcelline I knew wouldn’t show anyone.”

Gilbert scowled. “Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“I think I can set this so you don’t ever need to wind yourself again.”

Jack raised his head. “What?”

Gilbert nodded. “Yeah . . . If you wind the key forward, then it releases energy from your primary coil to your gears.”

“I know that.”

“But it looks like a counter-turn engages a flywheel that allows you to control the energy transfer yourself. I think.”

Jack couldn’t remember a time he wasn’t slave to the key. “You’re joking.”

“No,” Gilbert pleaded. “I’m not.” He counter-turned with a single click. “There. How does that feel?”

Jack wanted to answer his new friend, but the sensation was indescribable. It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t rapture. It was clarity, completeness. He felt no rush, no surge. He was calm, as if his brain registered there was no need for any more anxiety.

“Good,” he said. “Real good.”

Gilbert smiled and removed the key. “What do you want to do with this?”

Jack looked at his ancient shackle. He took it and put it in his pocket.

“Anyone who has the key can switch you back.”

Jack nodded. He fingered the key like a rabbit’s foot, feeling up and down its spiral rows of metal teeth. He couldn’t give it up. Not yet.

Gilbert carried the candle to a skull-wall and sat on the ground. “I’m exhausted. I’ve been pumping adrenaline so long, I hadn’t felt it until now.”

“What else did she say?”

“Marcy?”

“Yeah.” Jack clenched his working fist. He was growing strong.

“She said she was dying, lung cancer I think.”

“And she really said to tell me that?”

“About not forgetting?”

Jack nodded.

“She really did. What does it mean?”

“Why did she send you after me?”

“She said you’re the only person in the world who could kill Erasmus Pimpernel.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Fuck. Not you, too.”

He walked toward the entry to the cavelike grotto directly across from the candle-covered altar. The pair only dared light one wick, lest they be discovered. As it shone in Gilbert’s hand, the flickering light made the skulls dance. There were thousands, all laid there at the end of the Great War.

“I’m not going to kill Erasmus for you people. I’m not. I’m going to kill him for me. And for the kids. And that’s it. And the rest of you can shove it up your ass.”

“I’m sorry, Jack.” Gilbert leaned against the browned skull-wall and yawned. “I’m not trying to make things worse for you. I promise. To be honest, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I just had to get out of there, and I had nowhere else to go.”

Jack leaned against the wall. The entryway curved and sloped up to the gate. Beyond that was a stone courtyard and then the temple, a black ziggurat capped in a spire. Just like the surrounding walls of the compound, it was intricately carved from midnight marble. The spines of its corners were shaped like vertebra. Scenes from the Destroyer’s dark mythology danced across its surface. Each level of the ziggurat depicted the history of a different avatar. Someone had painted “Kraxus is coming” in giant red letters across the side. At least, it looked like red paint. Organ music and distant chanting echoed out from the black stone halls, but all the doors were sealed. Smoke and incense curled to the night sky. Jack wondered what was going on inside.

Gilbert sighed. “A few months ago, all I wanted was to find a cure. I have this condition, you see, and it’s getting worse. I have headaches all the time. I wake up every single day and think, this might be my last.” He rubbed his eyes. “Do you have any idea how fucked up that is?”

Jack snorted. “Yup.”

“Pugs showed up and promised me answers. All I had to do was help him with Pimpernel. That didn’t seem any worse than waiting to die. Pugs had this whole elaborate plan to make it look like I was an international political assassin hiding out in Freecity. Can you believe that? He had the Hand dangle me in front of Pimpernel. I guess Pugs figured Erasmus was looking for new help on account of you not being around.”

Jack made a face.

“But now Pimpernel is after me, and Pugs is after me, and the Amazons are after me.”

“Amazons?” Jack turned his head.

“Yeah.” Gilbert yawned. “They have a Fury. A real one. I saw her. She killed Ner--”

“LaMana. I heard.” Jack looked at the black temple. “I just saw him.”

“Really?”

Jack nodded.

“I thought you guys were enemies.”

“Why are the Amazons even here? It’s a big risk for them.”

“Sperm.”

Jack turned again. “What?”

“Never mind.”

“Whatever. I don’t give a shit. I’m going to kill Erasmus, or he’s going to kill me. Simple as that.”

“Can you do it?”

Jack looked down at his body. “Not like this.”

“If I fixed you up good as new, what about then?”

Jack looked at his dangling arm. He nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Gilbert sat up. That wasn’t the answer he was expecting. “You know Hoosegow Prison?”

Jack nodded. “We used to brace people there.” He thought for a moment. “A lot of really bad shit happened at Hoosegow.”

“Marcy said all my stuff is there, all my tools and everything, and there’s a whoooooole bunch of mechanoid parts. You know the place I am talking about?”

Unfortunately, he did. “The sublevel, under the old aqueduct.”

“We can go there, in the morning. There’ll be more people on the streets and we can just slip out into the city.”

“And hope we don’t get stopped by the Empire on the way.”

“We gotta try.”

Jack nodded. “All right. Hoosegow then.”

“Great.” Gilbert smiled and leaned back. He shut his eyes. “I’m so tired. I wish I was a mechanical man.”

No, Jack thought. You don’t.

§ § §

Jack covered Gilbert’s mouth and he woke with a start. He’d been whimpering in his dreams.

“Shhh. We got company.”

Gilbert nodded and Jack removed his hand. The pair crept toward the gate and peered out. It was still dark but close to dawn. The black ziggurat was silent.

“Where?” Gilbert whispered. Then he saw. He covered his own mouth.

The white woman was walking across the courtyard and up the temple steps. Her skin shone in bright contrast to the dark stone. Every few paces she stopped and sniffed the air.

“You’ll need to make a break for it,” Jack said. “Go to Hoosegow. I’ll try to slow her down. Make sure you’re not followed.”

Gilbert looked worried.

Jack sighed. “If I can, I’ll meet you there.”