Omega Point (33 page)

  "There'll be lookouts," warned Richards.

  "Nay, I think not," said Piccolo. "We venture right into the heart of Hog's power. He will be complacent."

  "But what if he isn't? We don't want to blow the game," said Tarquin.

  "Boys, boys, boys. I'll climb up the outside of the mountain. You lot go in with the pigs. That way, if anything goes wrong, I can come and rescue you. I'm good at rescues. Sound OK?"

  "I suppose," said Richards.

  "Indeed," said Piccolo.

  The final pylon neared; beyond, a steep run of cable. The men hurried through the hole, pushing squealing swine out of the way. The pigs defecated in fright, and huddled away from them.

  "Here we go," said Bear. He laid himself spread-eagled upon the roof. "Watch out below!" he shouted, then rammed his claws into the wood as far as he was able. The car approached the last pylon.

  The truckle wheel above the car bounced upon some device within the pylon's frame. The rope continued to move, but the truck was no longer being pulled along with it.

  The boxcar slowed for a moment, seeming as if it would stop. There was one final bump, and it went over the edge. Richards watched through a crack in the wood as the car dropped. His stomach was left trailing as the car hurtled down toward the mountain. The pigs squealed. The mountain's topsy-turvy base rushed up to meet them. There was a metallic rumble as something connected with the wheels above, the entire car lurched violently forward as its truckle grabbed at the rope, and it was moving slowly again.

  "Ow!" whispered Richards. He rubbed his face where it had smacked into the wood. He put his eye back to the crack. The cable ahead curved round a series of wheels bolted directly into stone. The terminus was ahead.

  "Mr Richards!" hissed Piccolo. "Get away from there! We must make ourselves ready to disembark!" A sound of cracking wood came from above and Bear's claws disappeared from the ceiling.

  There was a series of muffled thumps and the car came to a standstill. The pirates and Richards took out their weapons.

  "Ready, men?" whispered Piccolo.

  "Arrr!" whispered the pirates.

  "As Odysseus was before Polyphemus," growled Tarquin.

  The sound of bolts being drawn back preceded a loud bang as the door was pulled down to form a ramp. The sound of fluting voices came up through the floor, accompanied by the grunts of frightened pigs. There were several levels to the enormous car, and Richards and company were at the top. As each floor was cleared, a section of floor was let down to make a ramp to the level lower, and the pigs herded out. Each time it was done, a fresh chorus of terrified squeals echoed through the boxcar as the floor dropped away underneath the swine. As they went out, there was a further commotion, sounds of pain, the clang of hammers, the hiss of hot brands on skin. The boxcar filled with the aroma of burning hair where it competed with the stench of shit. Every new piggy cry sent a palpable wave of fear through the remaining animals, so by the time the swineherds reached the third floor the boxcar was rank and noisy.

  The fourth floor was unloaded. Only one more lay between the stowaways and Lord Hog's servants. Richards tried to catch sight of them through cracks in the floor, but all he could make out were blinking shadows. Their words were tangled with trotter scrapes and fearful oinks, but whatever they were speaking, it was no human tongue.

  Piccolo gestured to two of his crew. He pointed to the corners behind the trapdoor and moved a finger across his throat. The pirates nodded and, as quiet as cats, secreted themselves, knives in hands, amongst the pigs.

  "Ready?" said Piccolo very quietly. All present nodded. "Remember, lads, quietly! Do not advertise our presence, lest we bring the whole mountain down on us."

  Tarquin growled. In this confined space he could not shift his hide or Richards would be hampered by a corset of stone. Richards fingered his gun and sabre nervously.

  The seconds stretched themselves out. The pigs on the floor below were driven out, and the herders undid the bolts beneath. There was a crash as the door fell open and one luckless piggy tumbled through. The creatures started up the ramp.

  The creatures were of the same species that Circus had been, only larger. He had been, after all, in some respects, a true dwarf. At a metre and a half they would have towered over the transmogrified Pl'anna. They were heavily muscled, shock-pikes gripped in their kangaroo-paws.

  They gabbled their singsong tongue, jabbing at pigs with their sticks. One of them stopped and grabbed at the other's naked arm.

  Their frog-eyes widened; the hole in the roof. They walked toward it cautiously, pikes outstretched. They were handspans from Richards when they stopped and poked at the edges, exchanging swift sentences of alarm.

  They died silently as two pirates stalked up behind them and slit their skinny throats.

  Another creature came to the bottom of the ramp, calling out for his colleagues. He had time for a look of deep surprise before a thrown knife took him in the eye. Three pirates crept down the ramp onto the floor below. They gestured that it was clear.

  Three more of the grey-skinned gabblers were dispatched before the band of men reached the outside. By a brazier full of coals another fell, taken in the throat by a crossbow bolt. The last, armed only with a branding iron and a pair of tongs, charged forward shouting to die upon the point of Piccolo's sword. The men held still for a moment, until sure there was no sound of alarm.

  "That was, if I say so myself, not too troublesome," said Piccolo, wiping his quill-blade clean. "If we survive the world's end, that's a pot of grog I owe the each of you."

  They had emerged onto a flat shelf of grey rock jutting out from the base of the mountain, which grew huge and heavy above their heads. On a broad workbench were the tools of the drover's trade: chain, nose rings, anvils, branding irons, bronze tags, paint and the like, a tall pile of clothes heaped to one side of it.

  The upside-down peak of the mountain was a few yards wide, like a fat column. There was a door hewn into it. Within, the beginnings of a staircase.

  "And that would be the way into the Anvil," said Richards.

  "There is only the one way," said Tarquin. "Where is the secret way?"

  "They are one and the same," said Richards. "Trust me."

  "Shall I lead, or shall ye?" said Piccolo.

  "You go ahead," Richards said, his eyes moving from the top of the car to scan the empty rockface. He frowned. "I hope Bear's OK."

 

The stair was damp and stank. Generations of terrified swine had left their mark in rills of ossified urine. The steps were worn and slippery with effluvia and old blood.

  The group proceeded, checking every shadow in the rough passage. There was little to be seen; no other ways led out from the blue gloom. Despite their cautious pace, they soon reached the back of the line of pigs processed before their assault on the drovers' camp. These had been chained together in inhumane fashion, a ring forced through the nose of each, a second piercing the flesh above the tail. Chains had been passed through these to link the pigs together in a long train. They walked slowly, heads down, their fear-haunted eyes an indication that they had not always been as they were.

  The pirates matched apace with the rearmost swine. The steps wound upward, becoming broader with each turn. As they grew in width, so the light grew brighter, filtering down through fissures in the stone along with cold drops of water. The screeches of small things scuttling in the dark stung the ears of the band.

  They came to a rough crossroads. A narrow fissure went through the stairs, a stone bridge carrying them across. To one side the fissure widened out, its sheer walls plunging to depths unknown. But to the other it was narrow. Richards shut his eyes and consulted the information given to him in Secret. It was a strange sensation, this form of clear memory. He'd become so used to being bound in flesh he'd come close to forgetting what he truly was.

  "Look," said Richards as quietly as he could. "On this side the ravine goes up. It is climbable. This is the secret way in."

  Piccolo joined him, craning his head at the distant light. "That is the truth, Mr Richards."

  "We have to go up here. These stairs go right into the middle of the mountain, and we will not be safe there."

  "Quite," said Tarquin. "You'll still have to announce yourself to Hog."

  "I'm working on that," said Richards.

  "If he does not listen, my friend, we are lost no matter what. At least this way we may go down with a shout, if little else," said Piccolo.

  The climb was easy, for the walls were rough and close enough together that they could brace themselves in the gap. They reached the top quickly and hauled themselves out into a shallow cave. Behind them rose another cliff, to their front the heart of the Anvil.

  The group crept on and hid behind boulders at the mouth of the cave, raising careful heads over this natural parapet.

  The heart of the Anvil was a roofless cavern nestled in the centre of the mountain's cupped plateau, a perfect natural amphitheatre. Stalagmites protruded from the floor, their stalactite counterparts gone, a sky hazy in their stead. A rift in the wall opposite the cave looked out onto this same unclear air. All round the amphitheatre were tiered rows of stone benches, facing inwards to the very centre, the centre where stood the Temple of Hog.

  At the very centre of this very centre was an altar of black granite upon a dais carved with frightening reliefs. The sides and top of both stone and platform were stained matt with a substance no one needed to name. Rusted manacles, likewise soiled, were attached to its four corners. A ring of seven Y-shaped columns surrounded the dais, the flat centre of each reached by free-standing bridges arcing in from an outer ring of stone. Set above them was a frieze of dragons, wyrms and chimerae.

  In the seats sat thousands of the grey-skinned creatures as still as the statues, as drab as the stone. Were it not for the soft breeze of their exhalations their presence might not have been noticeable at all.

  For five minutes it remained like this. The pirates, Richards and his companions exchanged glances, unsure of what to do, too wary to speak.

  There came a scuffing of footsteps, loud in that deathly hall. Seven human monks filed into the room and walked round the temple. They wore crimson robes and baseball caps, a badge above each depicting a grinning cartoon pig in a chef's hat brandishing a cleaver. As each Y-shaped column was passed, a monk crossed the bridge and took up cross-legged station within. When the last monk, a senior-looking fellow with a huge peak to his cap, had occupied his place, he produced a small copper gong from his sleeve. He tapped a clean ring from it, and the monks began a nasal chant.

  The hall was full of sudden rustling. The creatures blinked, as if waking from a long sleep, and settled into a counter chant to that of the monks, repeating one word over and over again.

  "Hog, Hog, Hog, Hog, Hog, Hog." The name grew from a whisper to rumble out like surf and they pounded their feet upon the stone. "Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog!

  "Hog!"

  The chanting and pounding ceased, and the hall was cast back into silence.

  Uneven footsteps, one a brisk click, the second the long, rasping drag of the uninvited, hook-handed maniac, a whistling wheeze singing in each.

  Lord Hog limped into the arena.

  The crowd went wild.

  Hog was a porcine ogre. His fat belly swung low over the top of checked trousers, a filthy apron struggling to keep it in. He wore nothing underneath this, exposing a ruddy torso covered in wiry hair. His fists were three-fingered trotters, his digits spiked with greening nails. Beneath his snout tusks poked from lips whose ill fit caused drool to stream from his mouth. He balanced ungainly upon his trotters, one twisted into a wart-ridden club. Atop his head towered a dirty chef's hat, and about his waist was cinched a thick belt of leather from which depended blades and cleavers of all shapes and kinds, the mark of his trade, the mark of the meatman.

  Hog held up a foretrotter. The crowd fell silent.

  "Hog!" it bellowed through yellowing tusks. "Hog is here!"

  A wave of adulation swept the cavern.

  Hog looked about satisfied, nodding his head as a greedy farmer nods when he counts his cows.

  "Bella Maria," whispered Piccolo.

  "Brothers!" Hog cried, his words poorly formed, each followed by a spray of glutinous saliva. "Disciples! Children! Mooks! Hog is here!"

  "Hog! Hog! Hog!"

  "We are gathered here today to celebrate the mystery of life! The transformation of flesh into sustenance! Existence through destruction! The world bleeds and dies, yet you, my mooks, will prosper. Hog will provide! Hog will feed his children! Hog on, brothers!" he roared.

  "Hog on, brother!" bellowed the crowd.

  "Hog on!"

  "Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog! Hog!" chanted the mooks.

  "Brothers! It is time for the sacrifice, the rotation of the great wheel, the turn of life into death into life! Brothers! Today you will feeeeeeed!" He roared this last deep from within his gut, and the rocks shook.

  The mooks became a frenzied mob. Their chanting became a guttural wail, devoid of intelligence.

  "Lot-ter-ry, lot-ter-ry, lot-ter-ry, lot-ter-ry," they sang.

  "Yes! Yes! O my brothers, o my children! Yes, it is time. Time for the lottery! Hog on, brothers!" he yelled again, his watery eyes wild with delight.

  "Hog! Hog! Hog!"

  "Fetch me my cauldron! Bring me my tongs!"

  The crowd bayed. Into the arena came four fat mooks dragging an enormous pot on poles and chains. A fifth followed the cauldron party in, carrying a pair of tongs as tall as itself. Their eyes were covered with crusted bandages, yet they had no trouble ascending the steps to the dais. They strained as they lifted the steaming cauldron onto the altar. It rocked as they deposited it, its contents slopping upon the defiled stone.