Farley’s futuristic gun spoke again, a staccato of dry coughs followed by a crash so big, the theater shook.
Barnabus is no more, Riley realized. The Rams have lost their most fearsome fighter and King Otto has lost his brother.
Riley should have been scurrying down the corridor, a trip he could make blindfolded; but instead he was thinking about Otto, huddled in the orchestra pit, waiting for the bullet to send him the way of his brother.
Go, Riley told himself. Flee.
Otto had never done anything for him. Never brought nothing into his life but grief and anxiety.
So why are you still here, Riley? Be off into the city.
But the boy was stricken by a sudden sense of compassion.
That’s Chevie’s fault, that is. I was never compassionate under Garrick. Unto dust, Garrick always said. The only concern you need have about life is to preserve your own and that of your master.
He could follow Garrick’s path no more. An attempt must be made to save Otto.
“Blazes and tarnation,” swore Riley, and he opened the small hatch that linked the trap room to the orchestra pit.
Chevie somehow knew that her time in the Smarthole was drawing to an end. Perhaps time was the wrong word for her trip, as it could not be measured in minutes or seconds. Space didn’t work either, as there was no sense of traditional movement. If anything, the experience was closest to a fevered dream that seemed simultaneously totally real and utterly impossible.
Chevie recalled from past experience that when the journey ended, her senses would be addled by what Professor Smart had christened the Zen Ten.
Everything is all right and outta sight, Smart had quipped in the famous talk at Columbia University during his U.S. lecture tour. When those little virtual particles annihilate, a person gets literally plugged into the universe.
This dazed and confused period had been only quantum-jecture at the time, but now Chevie knew for a fact that the Zen Ten existed and it could last a lot longer than ten seconds. In fact, she would have been willing to bet that Smart had only picked the figure ten because it rhymed with Zen and so made for a catchy phrase.
Stay alert, she told herself. Stay focused.
Then she was coughed up into the real world and the fugue of time foam smothered her senses.
Chevie began to giggle.
I’m back in a Victorian basement. This is hysterical.
Across the room she saw the Thundercats coalesce and solidify, and this was even more hilarious.
“You two look ridiculous,” she said.
Vallicose and Witmeyer did seem a little pathetic at the moment, snuffling on all fours like two large pigs in their knee-length, flesh-colored Thundercoats.
Vallicose smiled broadly, and it did not suit her face.
“We are going to kill you slowly, heathen,” she said, which took the good out of the smile. “You are in league with Lucifer.”
Chevie knew she should be upset by the idea of a slow death, but the Zen Ten had her in its clown-glove grip. “Lucifer? Is that Lucifer O’Malley from Venice? He owes me ten bucks.”
“There, you see?” said Vallicose, pointing and also drooling. “Venice is in Italy, which is near France. She’s a Jax spy.”
Witmeyer had the good sense to be worried, but her face couldn’t show it yet.
“I have an idea. Let’s kill her quickly and then move right on to figuring out what is going on here.”
Vallicose punched her partner playfully on the shoulder.
“Now now, Lunka. Slow killing, I said.”
Witmeyer giggled. “Stop it, Clover. You are such a silly. Quick killing.”
Chevie thought she might collapse from the shock at what happened next.
Oh my God. No one is ever going to believe this. Do I even believe it?
Vallicose and Witmeyer began tickling each other.
“Slow kill, Lunka.”
“No, fast kill.”
“Slow, slow. A thousand cuts.”
“Clover, one cut across the throat. Fizz, and it’s all over.” Witmeyer mimed the fizzing blood with wiggling fingers at her neck.
“What is that?”
“It’s the blood, fizzing.”
“Blood doesn’t fizz, Lunka.”
“If you puncture the jugular. Just a tiny hole.”
“Spray. Blood sprays, and it’s impossible to get out of a uniform.”
I could kill them now, thought Chevie. Two quick kills. I would be saving myself a lot of heartache, and the Blessed Colonel knows that Victorian Londoners are not ready for tickling Thundercats.
But she could never do something like that, no matter which one of her personalities was dominant at the time. And Chevie reminded herself that there was no such thing as a Blessed Colonel back here. Just a run-of-the-mill colonel who was about as far from blessed as it was possible to be.
I couldn’t kill Smart and I can’t kill these two, Chevie realized, and then she added an alarming addendum to that thought. But they could certainly kill me.
She stood shakily and checked herself for wormhole mutations. Nothing visible. No dinosaur head or duck feet, but she would scrutinize every square inch later and also have a good root about in her own brain.
Sometimes the changes are not physical.
And with the Zen Ten playing with her mind, it was difficult to know whether or not her neurons were firing on all cylinders.
Concentrate on one thing, she told herself.
Find Riley.
On their last adventure, she had taken the lead, steering the boy through his twenty-first-century experience; now she was the fish out of water, stumbling around in a mud-floored basement. Riley would provide her compass.
The last time I wanted to go home. This time I don’t even know if my home exists anymore. And if it does, do I really want to go back there?
Chevie lurched toward the doorway, giggling as she went, deliberately not glancing at the Thundercats, in case she burst out laughing and incapacitated herself.
“Look,” she heard Witmeyer say. “The child is escaping. And Smart gave her something, I saw it. A key. It could take us home.”
Vallicose reacted to this hilarious news by laughing until her throat was raw, and then she said in a jovial tone, “Don’t worry. The Lord will lead us to her, and then we shall kill her slowly and take the key from her godless corpse.”
Chevie felt the key warm against her skin and she used the damp brick wall to steady her as she made good her escape.
Find Riley.
Godless corpse? she thought. Hilarious.
Riley peered through the trap-room hatch, and there was Malarkey, huddled in a corner behind a stack of wooden music stands that would provide no more protection than a showgirl’s fan. The Ram king wore a strange expression, which Riley realized was a stew of primal rage and utter despair.
Like Jekyll and Hyde at the same time, thought Riley, who was very partial to the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and counted Treasure Island as the finest adventure story he had ever read.
It was odd to see the High Rammity like this. So human. Without any of the customary airs or swaggers about him.
This is the real man, Riley thought. This is Otto Malarkey, not King Ram or Golgoth.
A narrow beam of red light drew complicated jitters on the black wall, and as Farley’s voice drifted from above, Riley momentarily mused, The words carry well despite Farley’s reedy tones. Madame Orient has fine acoustics, so she does.
“Ah, Your Majesty,” said the tattooist. “I was looking for you, as I wish to augment your last tattoo. A few touches of crimson, perhaps.”
A few touches of crimson. It could be the title of a penny dreadful. Once that laser-sighting dot settled on Malarkey, then he was as dead as Dick, as the old saying went
, referring to the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin. That red dot, which Riley happened to know was called a laser, would ensure that a bullet flew true to its mark. And weapons bearing the laser sight did not happen to misfire or explode in the fist with any regularity.
Simply put, Malarkey’s goose was not just cooked, but served on a silver platter with all the trimmings.