The Dragons of Babel (42 page)

So they talked. Numbers were named and percentages haggled. Terms were put on the table and taken off again. There came a brief magical moment when all were in accord and Will stepped in to declare the deal accepted, lest the vixen and the alderman rush past it, going on and on
into the night for the sheer pleasure of negotiating with a fellow professional. Toussaint gave the vixen the key to a room not too close to his own, but certainly not so far away that he couldn't keep an eye on her. The vixen put her hands together and bowed formally. “
Domo arigato.”

“
De nada
,” Salem Toussaint said. Then, “What's that noise?”

Jimi Begood opened the window to discover that the street outside was thronged with haints. They were all staring up at the building. Seeing movement at the window, they began chanting,
“Give-us-the-king. Give-us-the-king.”

“Holy fuck,” Ghostface said.

“Hear that, kid? They love you,” the vixen said. “Step out on the balcony and give ‘em a wave.”

But against all expectations this show of devotion seemed strangely sad to Will. “Why should they care?” he asked. “Were things ever any better for them when the king sat over Babel, Babylonia, and the Contingent Territories? Why should folks who never benefitted from the monarchy welcome its return?”

“Give-us-the-king.”

“His Absent Majesty is the personification and embodiment of justice,” Salem Toussaint said. “So naturally every honest citizen awaits his return, and all who exploit them fear it.” One gold tooth caught the light. “As you can hear, my constituents are all honest citizens.”

“Give-us-the-king. Give-us-the-king.”

Jimi Begood had been tugging on the French doors that opened onto a small and long-neglected balcony. Now they banged open.

“Put that hood back on,” Toussaint said. “Then go out there and let them see you.”

Will stepped out onto the balcony, feeling light-headed and almost dizzy. He looked down on a sea of upturned faces. Then he raised a hand.

As one, every haint in the street cheered and applauded.
Pinpricks of light twinkled as flash cameras took picture after picture. A great wash of love surged up from the crowd, filling Will with an incredible energy. He felt strong enough to lift a bus and deft enough to walk on water. It was a wonderful sensation. He turned from side to side, waving with one hand and then the other, grinning madly. It did not seem possible he could feel this alive.

After all too short a time, hands seized his arms and shoulders and tugged him back inside. He was gasping with exhilaration.

Salem Toussaint was saying something. “
Listen
to me, boy!” The alderman shook Will. “Are you listening? I sent Ghostface out to bring the car around. We're going to get you out of here.” He turned to the vixen. “This proposition is way too dicey for me to be directly associated with it. But I'm getting a funny feeling about it. Take Jimi Begood with you. Everyone knows he's one of mine, but if things turn sour I can always say he went along as an observer.”

Then, to Will again, “Good luck, kid. I still think you're a fool to be doing whatever it is you're doing. But I hope you come through it okay.”

“Thanks, Salem. You're a mensch.”

“I'll hammer a nail in the nkisi nkonde for you.”

T
here were throngs of gawkers standing around the front steps of Old City Hall and almost as many around the back, so Will slipped out a side door. But he was spotted anyway.

Somebody he didn't remember said, “It's the white boy.”

Embarrassed, Will shook the haint's hand. “Hi, good to see you.” He clapped another on the shoulder. “How are you doing?” More and more haints appeared, murmuring in wonder, reaching out to touch him, ghost-soft whispers of fingers stroking his arms, his shoulders. He shook hands and slapped backs like a younger version of Salem Toussaint. “I'm with you,” he said, and “Thank you for your support,” and “Don't think you're forgotten, because you're not.”

Ghostface pulled up in the alderman's Cadillac. He leaned over to unlock a door and Will, Jimi Begood, and the vixen squeezed into the back. Then, slowly, they pushed their way through the gathering crowds. Hands hammered against the hood and roof and young haints climbed up on the trunk. They pulled far enough ahead for Ghostface to stop briefly and pull off the riders, and then they were free.

Sitting in the back seat alongside Will, the vixen abruptly bent over double.

“Are you all right?” Will asked. He saw her ears lengthen and sprout hair. “Oh.”

Nat straightened and, reaching into his shirt, pulled out a brassiere which, with a wink to Jimi Begood, he stuffed into a pocket. Then he buttoned up the shirt, threw away the orchid, and donned a tie that he removed from inside his jacket. “Drive as fast as you like,” he said. “They've got the license number. They'll find us.”

Ghostface turned around, startled. “Where's the fox?”

Nat touched his heart. “In here.” Then he rubbed his palms together. “Okay, we've got one ethnic bloc of voters behind you. Let's line up another.” He checked his pocket planner. “The Cluricauns! Perfect.”

“Nat,” Will said, “I'm not sure I can do this.”

“It's too late to stop it now. You're in the saddle, son, and it's either ride or be trampled underfoot.” Nat flipped open his cell. “Get the big guy in place,” he said. “It's showtime. What do you mean when? When do you think? Right now. Yeah. Yeah. You know where the Society of Cluricauns has their hall? Good. They're having their annual awards banquet tonight. We'll meet you outside.”

A graffito on a pedestrian overpass declared
he is coming
in letters of fire and then drifted behind them and out of sight. Another blazed on the side of a bank.
He Is Coming
burned across an entire block in letters a story high and
HE IS COMING!
snapped and sizzled in blue flames on kiosks and redbrick walls and elevator stations. “Look at them,”
Will said wonderingly. “They're everywhere. Where did they come from?”

“Kind of gives you the shivers, doesn't it? I've had twenty taggers working their humps off for the past three nights. Cost a bundle. They really got the message out, though. It's the talk of Little Thule.”

The Society of Cluricauns was a social and cultural organization providing for the welfare of those descended from the original population of the Blessed Isles. Which was to say, it was a drinking club. But over the years, through the success of its component members, it had acquired significant political clout. Which meant that Salem Toussaint was a familiar visitor there, and that consequently Ghostface had no trouble finding it.

They pulled up in front of a former opera house, onetime movie palace, temporary burlesque parlor, and occasional catering concern, union hall, and furniture warehouse, which the Cluricauns had restored to something like its original splendor and made their own. There was a construction giant slouched in the street outside, cradling a rusty heating-oil tank in his arms. Nat went to speak to the troll who stood, smoking a cigar, in his shadow. When he came back, he showed Will his empty wallet. “That's it,” he said. “We are now officially penniless. If this scam doesn't work out, we are royally skunked.”

But he smiled as he said it, in a way that told Will he was sure the night would go their way.

There was a sprig of fennel over the door. Nat took it down so that the two haints could enter. Jimi Begood led them straight to the banquet hall and they waited outside its double doors. “Patience is a virtue,” Nat said when Will glanced at his watch. “And timing is everything.”

Boom!

Out on the street, the giant had picked up a length of steel girder and slammed it into the oil-tank drum. The sound crashed through the building and stilled the babble of voices inside the banquet hall.

Boom!

The drum sounded louder than thunder. “We three are the entourage,” Nat told Jimi and Ghostface. “We hold ourselves proudly, stay a pace behind Will and to the side, and no matter what happens we show no emotion whatsoever. Can you do that?”

“Man, I work for Salem Toussaint!”

“What he said.”

“That's good enough for me, lads.”

Boom!

Then, as Nat had arranged, the giant lifted his hands to his mouth and shouted in a voice that rattled the floors, “HE… IS…
HERE!
”

As one, Nat and Ghostface slammed open the doors to the banquet hall.

Will strode in. All heads turned to look at him.

To absolute silence, Will walked up the center aisle between the banquet tables, with Jimi Begood flanking him to the right rear and Ghostface to the left with Nat behind him. He climbed the stairs to the dais at the head of the room, and went to the podium. Then he put down his hood, so that everyone could see his face. Nat lifted the gray cloak from his shoulders as unobtrusively as a butler, and Will stood revealed. He was wearing white slacks and a loose white shirt. The light dazzled from him as he stepped to the microphone.

“Hello,” he said. “Before I introduce myself, I'd like to say a few words.

“I'm going to talk about a young dragon pilot—I'll mention no names—who, like so many others, volunteered to serve in the military in order to defend his country and his tower from foreign aggression. He served well and proudly in the War, and great was the mourning among his comrades when his beloved war machine was shot down over the jungles of an obscure rural province known to its inhabitants as the Debatable Hills. But though he was grievously
injured, he did not die. The local folk found him, tangled in his chute, and brought him back to their village, where the healing-women labored long and hard to bring him back to life.

“As you probably know, dragon pilots are half-mortal, because only those of the red blood can withstand the proximity of so much cold iron. The blood of kings flows in the veins of every one of them. So perhaps it was this that the villagers responded to, or perhaps they recognized a certain innate nobility in him. But their own lady-mayor had recently died and so they had need of a leader.

“They made him their liege lord.

“It was a fine thing for a young pilot to rule over a small and peaceful folk. His work was far from onerous. Perhaps once a fortnight, he would be called upon to mediate a dispute, and his decisions were always praised by all, for he dispensed wisdom and mercy in equal measures. Village life was simple but wholesome. Perhaps, too, there was a lass who… well, let's not speak of that.

“But, pleasant though his life might be, the pilot was still an officer in His Absent Majesty's Air Force, and loyalty required that he return to duty. The day came at last when he was strong enough to leave, and so—though his subjects wept to see him go—he did.

“Across the ravaged lands of war he made his way toward the border. In stealth and fear and hunger, he slipped through the enemy's territory. Once he had an encounter with a small troop of centaurs. Great hairy, black-bearded brutes were they, who would have slain him in total disregard of the laws of civilized combat. It was a close thing, yet somehow he managed to outwit and kill them all.

“Alas, his heroism was for naught. He was captured and placed in a prison camp. You can imagine the conditions there: the filthy water, the scanty food, the forced labor, the torture. Yet once again, the pilot knew his duty. He rallied the dispirited inmates under his leadership. He faced down
the camp commandant, and demanded adequate treatment for the prisoners. Finally, he organized a mass escape.

“Thus it was that after many a great hardship, he found himself in Babel again. There he discovered that his term of service had run out while he was in the camp and an honorable discharge had been issued in his absence. I may not have mentioned this, but the pilot was an orphan and, having no family to return to, he found himself at loose ends. So, what with one thing and another, he ended up making a pilgrimage to an oracle who dwelt deep in the darkness in the roots of Babel.

“Was the pilot's way difficult and dangerous? Did he see the sun rise at midnight? Of these matters and much else as well he is sworn not to say. Yet in the end, he won through to the oracle, paid her a price that he may not divulge, and discovered the one thing that he most yearned to know: The secret of his parentage.

“Up from the darkness our pilot rose. He emerged in the Hanging Gardens, and was moved almost to tears by the natural beauty that presented itself to him there. Yet though he now knew that he had a rightful claim to a great inheritance, he did not reveal himself. For he was without personal ambition. Instead, he worked with the underprivileged and established a small business, doing his wee part—as do so many here—to increase the wealth and welfare of the country as a whole.

“Nevertheless, one cannot live in a city without seeing the ills that afflict it. The poverty, the injustice, the lack of leadership and vision. So in his spare hours, the pilot went looking for answers. Up and down the city he walked, meeting with the high and the low, citizens of every class and race, and listening to what they had to say. Until finally he knew what needed to be done.

“Babel is sick for lack of a king. There is the simple truth, which not a man-jack or lady-jill here will deny. All our woes stem from the fact that the Obsidian Throne sits empty.
There is no one to make the hard decisions. Expediency and compromise rule the land. The poor are neglected, the businessfolk are overtaxed, and the nobility grow fat and indolent. Babel needs a king! Yet where can one be found?” He paused for a long moment. Then he leaned into the microphone again.

“My name is Will le Fey. His Absent Majesty was my father.”

As one, everybody in the hall stood up and
roared
.