Hart & Boot & Other Stories (27 page)

“There’s the egg.”

I shook my head. “It’s crazy. We’ve got to be hallucinating, we’re Vision-heads.”

“Maybe we’re only seeing the truth in a different way.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. Was it a golden egg, or did I just see it that way? “You think it might be the cure. The cure that isn’t supposed to exist. That we read the doc’s mind somehow, and found out about it.”

“I don’t think anything. I’ve never been in this situation before. I haven’t even seen the egg, if it is an egg.”

“I’ll show you.” I opened the refrigerator, dug under the broccoli, and lifted out the egg. I held it wordlessly.

“That’s a lovely potato,” she said. “Where’s the egg?”

I relaxed my hands and let the egg fall. A potato. I wanted to cry.

She shouted and dove, catching the egg before it hit the floor. She looked up at me, and I saw the woman who’d propelled us through the air, the woman who’d shoved a were-ape’s face in the mud. “Crazy! I was kidding! I thought you could take a joke! Yes, it’s the golden egg, I see it!”

I closed my eyes. I could react in one of two ways. One involved shouting and anger. I chose the other. “You’re too much. You really had me going.”

She grunted and handed me the egg. “I like them scrambled.”

I felt its roundness. If it looks like a golden egg, and it feels like a golden egg, let it be a golden egg. “A woman after my own heart.”

I lifted the egg over the pan and suddenly everything shifted. The cold air of the Cellar of Icy Madness chilled me. I held my quarterstaff, with the damsel at my side. Montrose cackled and flung the egg down before we could reach him, before we could possibly reach him, and the egg struck—

—and broke into the pan, where it sizzled. The enormous yolk gleamed, brass-colored. I set the shell fragments aside reverently. When Franny got home, would she see pieces of golden shell, or the shards of a glass test tube?

The damsel, whose name I still didn’t know, looked into the pan with me.

“Maybe we should have it sunny-side up,” I said. “We can share the yolk.”

“Sure.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “And tomorrow, I’ll make breakfast.”

Dream Engine

The Stolen State, The Magpie City, The Nex, The Ax—this is the place where I live, and hover, and chafe in my service; the place where I take my small bodiless pleasures where I may. Nexington-on-Axis is the proper name, the one the Regent uses in his infrequent public addresses, but most of the residents call it other things, and my—prisoner? partner? charge? trust?—my
associate
, Howlaa Moor, calls it The Cage, at least when zie is feeling sorry for zimself.

The day the fat man began his killing spree, I woke early, while Howlaa slept on, in a human form that snored. I looked down on the streets of our neighborhood, home to low-level government servants and the wretchedly poor. The sky was bleak, and rain filled the potholes. The royal orphans had snatched a storm from somewhere, which was good, as the district’s roof gardens needed rain.

I saw a messenger approach through the cratered street. I didn’t recognize his species—he was bipedal, with a tail, and his skin glistened like a salamander’s, though his gait was birdlike—but I recognized the red plume jutting from his headband, which allowed him to go unmolested through this rough quarter.

“Howlaa,” I said. “Wake. A messenger approaches.”

Howlaa stirred on zir heaped bedding, furs and silks piled indiscriminately with burlap and canvas and even coarser fabrics, because Howlaa’s kind enjoy having as much tactile variety as possible. And, I suspect, because zie likes to taunt me with reminders of the physical sensations I can not experience.

“Shushit, Wisp,” zie said. My name is not Wisp, but that is what zie calls me, and I have long since given up on changing the habit. “The messenger could be coming for anyone. There are four score civil servants on this block alone. Let me sleep.” Zie picked up a piece of half-eaten globe-fruit and hurled it at me. It passed through me without effect, of course, but it annoyed me, which was Howlaa’s intent.

“The messenger has a
red plume
, skinshifter,” I said, making my voice resonate, making it creep and rattle in zir tissues and bones, making sleep or shutting me out impossible.

“Ah. Blood business, then.” Howlaa threw off furs, rose, and stretched, zir arms growing more joints and bends as zie moved, unfolding like origami in flesh. I could not help a little subvocal gasp of wonder as zir skin rippled and shifted and settled into Howlaa’s chosen morning shape. I have no body, and am filled with wonder at Howlaa’s mastery of zir own.

Howlaa settled into the form of a male Nagalinda, a biped with long limbs, a broad face with opalescent eyes, and a lipless mouth full of triangular teeth. Nagalinda are fearsome creatures with a reputation for viciousness, though I have found them no more uniformly monstrous than any other species; their cultural penchant for devouring their enemies has earned them a certain amount of notoriety even in the Ax, though. Howlaa liked to take on such forms to terrify government messengers if zie could. Such behavior was insubordinate, but it was such a small rebellion that the Regent didn’t even bother to reprimand Howlaa for it—and having zir rude behavior so completely disregarded only served to annoy Howlaa further.

The Regent knew how to control us, which levers to tug and which leads to jerk, which is why he was the Regent, and we were in his employ. I often think that the Regent controls the city as skillfully as Howlaa controls zir own form, and it is a pretty analogy, for the Ax is in its way as mutable as Howlaa’s body.

The buzzer buzzed. “Why don’t you get that?” Howlaa said, grinning. “Oh, yes, right, no hands, makes opening the door tricky. I’ll get it, then.”

Howlaa opened the door to the messenger, who didn’t find zim especially terrifying. The messenger was too busy being frightened of the fat man for Howlaa to scare him.

***

I floated. Howlaa ambled. The messenger hurried ahead, hurried back, hurried ahead again, like an anxious pet. Howlaa could not be rushed, and I went at the pace Howlaa chose, of necessity, but I sympathized with the messenger’s discomfort. Being bound so closely to the Regent’s will made even tardiness cause for bone-deep anxiety.

“He’s a fat human, with no shirt on, carrying a giant battle-axe, and he chopped up a brace of Beetleboys armed with dung-muskets?” Howlaa’s voice was blandly curious, but I knew zie was incredulous, just as I was.

“So the messenger reports,” I said.

“And then he disappeared, in full view of everyone in Moth Moon Market?”

“Why do you repeat things?” I asked.

“I just wondered if it would sound more plausible coming from my own mouth. But even my vast reserves of personal conviction fail to lend the story weight. Perhaps the Regent made it up, and plans to execute me when I arrive.” Howlaa sounded almost hopeful. “Would you tell me, little Wisp, if that were his plan?”

Howlaa imagines I have a closer relationship with the Regent than zie does zimself, and zie has always believed that I willingly became a civil servant. Zie does not know that I am bound to community service for my past crimes, just as Howlaa zimself is, and I let zim persist in this misapprehension because it allows me to act superior and, on occasion, even condescend, which is one of the small pleasures available to we bodiless ones. “I think you are still too valuable and tractable for the Regent to kill,” I said.

“Perhaps. But I find the whole tale rather unlikely.”

Howlaa walked along with zir mouth open, letting the rain fall into zir mouth, tasting the weather of other worlds, looking at the clouds.

I looked everywhere at once, because it is my duty and burden to look, and record, and, when called upon, to bear witness. I never sleep, but every day I go into a small dark closet and look at the darkness for hours, to escape my own senses. So I saw everything in the streets we passed, for the thousandth time, and though details were changed, the essential nature of the neighborhood was the same. The buildings were mostly brute and functional, structures stolen from dockyards, ghettoes, and public housing projects, taken from the worst parts of the thousand thousand worlds that grind around and above Nexington-on-Axis in the complicated gearwork that supports the structure of all the universes. We live in the pivot, and all times and places turn past us eventually, and we residents of the Ax grab what we can from those worlds in the moment of their passing—and so our city grows, and our traders trade, and our government prospers.

But sometimes we grasp too hastily, and the great snatch-engines tended by the Regent’s brood of royal orphans become overzealous in their cross-dimensional thieving, and we take things we didn’t want after all, things the other worlds must be glad to be rid of. Unfortunate imports of that sort can be a problem, because they sometimes disrupt the profitable chaos of the city, which the Regent cannot allow. Solving such problems is Howlaa’s job.

We passed out of our neighborhood into a more flamboyant one, filled with emptied crypts, tombs, and other oddments of necropoleis, from chipped marble angels to fragments of ornamental wrought iron. To counteract this funereal air, the residents had decorated their few square blocks as brightly and ostentatiously as possible, so that great papier-mâché birds clung to railings, and tombs were painted yellow and red and blue. In the central plaza, where the pavement was made of ancient headstones laid flat, a midday market was well underway. The pale vendors sold the usual trinkets, obtained with privately owned, low-yield snatch-engines, along with the district’s sole specialty, the exotic mushrooms grown in cadaver-earth deep in the underground catacombs. Citizens shied away from the red-plumed messenger, bearer of bloody news, and shied further away at the sight of Howlaa, because Nagalinda seldom strayed from their own part of the city, except on errands of menace.

As we neared the edge of the plaza there was a great crack and whoosh, and a wind whipped through the square, eddying the weakly linked charged particles that made up my barely physical form.

A naked man appeared in the center of the square. He did not rise from a hidden trapdoor, did not drop from a passing airship, did not slip in from an adjoining alley. Anyone else might have thought he’d arrived by such an avenue, but I see in all directions, to the limits of vision, and the man was simply
there
.

Such magics were not unheard of, but they were never associated with someone like this. He appeared human, about six feet tall, bare-chested, and obese, pale skin smeared with blood. He was bald, and his features were brutish, almost like a child’s clay figure of a man.

He held an absurd sword in his right hand, the blade as long as he was tall, but curved like a scimitar in a theatrical production about air-pirates, and it appeared to be made of
gold
, an impractical metal for weaponry. When he smiled, his lips peeled back to show an amazing array of yellow stump-teeth. He reared back his right arm and swung the sword, striking a merrow-woman swaddled all over in wet towels, nearly severing her arm. The square plunged into chaos, with vendors, customers, and passers-by screaming and fleeing in all directions, while the fat man kept swinging his sword, moving no more than a step or two in any direction, chopping people down as they ran.

“The reports were accurate after all,” Howlaa said. “I’ll go sort this.” The messenger stood behind zim, whimpering, tugging at zir arm, trying to get zim to leave.

“
No
,” I said. “We were ordered to report to the Regent, and that’s what we’ll do.”

Howlaa spoke with exaggerated patience. “The Regent will only tell me to find and kill this man. Why not spare myself the walk, and kill him
now?
Or do you think the Regent would prefer that I let him kill more of the city’s residents?”

We both knew the Regent was uninterested in the well-being of individual citizens—more residents were just a snatch-and-grab away, after all—but I could tell Howlaa would not be swayed. I considered invoking my sole real power over zim, but I was under orders to take that extreme step only in the event that Howlaa tried to escape the Ax or harm one of the royal orphans. “I do not condone this,” I said.

“I don’t care.” Howlaa strode into the still-flurrying mass of people. In a few moments he was within range of the fat man’s swinging sword. Howlaa ducked under the man’s wild swings, and reached up with a long arm to grab the man’s wrist. By now most of the people able to escape the square had done so, and I had a clear view of the action.

The fat man looked down at Howlaa as if zie were a minor annoyance, then shook his arm as if to displace a biting fly.

Howlaa flew through the air and struck a red-and-white striped crypt headfirst, landing in a heap.

The fat man caught sight of the messenger—who was now rather pointlessly trying to cower behind
me
—and sauntered over. The fat man was extraordinarily bowlegged, his chest hair was gray, and his genitals were entirely hidden under the generous flop of his belly-rolls.

As always in these situations, I wondered what it would be like to fear for my physical existence, and regretted that I would never know.

Behind the fat man, Howlaa rose, rippled, and transformed, taking on zir most fearsome shape, a creature I had never otherwise encountered, that Howlaa called a Rendigo. It was reptilian, armored in sharpened bony plates, with a long snout reminiscent of the were-crocodiles that lived in the sewer labyrinths below the Regent’s palace. The Rendigo’s four arms were useless for anything but killing, paws gauntleted in razor scales, with claws that dripped blinding toxins, and its four legs were capable of great speed and leaps. Howlaa seldom resorted to this form, because it came with a heavy freight of biochemical killing rage that could be hard to shake off afterward. Howlaa leapt at the fat man, landing on his back with unimaginable force, poison-wet claws flashing.

The fat man swiveled at the waist and flung Howlaa off his back, not even breaking stride, raising his sword over the messenger. The fat man was uninjured; all the blood and nastiness that streaked his body came from his victims. His sword passed through me and cleaved the messenger nearly in two.

The fat man smiled, looking at his work, then frowned, and blinked. His body flickered, becoming transparent in places, and he moaned before disappearing.

Howlaa, back in zir Nagalinda form, crouched and vomited out a sizzling stream of Rendigo venom and biochemical rage-agents.

Zie wiped zir mouth on zir arm, then stood up, glancing at the dead messenger. “Let’s try it your way, Wisp,” zie said. “On to the Regent’s palace. Perhaps he has an idea for... another approach to the problem.”

I thought about saying, “I told you so.” I couldn’t think of any reason to refrain. “I told you so,” I said.

“Shushit,” Howlaa said, but zie was preoccupied, thinking, doing what zie did best, assessing complex problems and trying to figure out the easiest way to kill the source of those problems, so I let zim be, and didn’t taunt zim further.

***

Before we entered the palace, Howlaa took on one of zir common working shapes, that of a human woman with a trim assassin-athlete’s body, short dark hair, and deceptively innocent-looking brown eyes. The Regent—who had begun his life as human, though long contact with the royal orphans had wrought certain changes in him physiologically and otherwise—found this form attractive, as I had often sensed from fluctuations in his body heat. I’d made the mistake of sharing that information with Howlaa once, and now Howlaa wore this shape every time zie met with the Regent, in hopes of discomforting him. I thought it was a wasted effort, as the Regent simply looked, and enjoyed, and was untroubled by Howlaa’s unavailability.