Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Five: Round Six!]
12-26-2012, 09:48 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
The map of the underground was a silvery spider on the wall, spreading out into the fringes of the Silver City as Jen traced her finger along the route that Muninn pointed out to her. Something about the world was becoming more angular. Her hair hung down a little straighter. Her thoughts proceeded more logically than they ought have. “We can’t be this far away from Hector, can we?” she asked the raven. “We should be going on foot.”
”The streets of the Silver City are deceptive, my Queen—and so am I. You’ve been walking in circles.” The bird shrugged his wings innocently.
Jen sighed. “There’d better be a point to all this. I had enough of a spirit quest last round.”
”Yes, your spirit is prepared for battle,” admittted Muninn. ”You’re ready to face Xadrez, yes, and Kath too, should she raise her beautiful-ugly head again. But the Charlatan changed the course your spirit must take.” Jen descended further into the dark tunnel, hopping gracefully over a turnstyle. ”Are you prepared to see your home destroyed? To see Kracht again? See, this battle is no longer fair for anybody. Unfairness is the root of the Charlatan’s power.”
”What’s Kracht have to do with any of this?”
”You know. You can feel him.”
In this, at least, Memory did not lie to Jen. Something green and young and rough around the edges was marching around the periphery of her magical senses—something that would take more than a Silver City to break.
“He’s the key to all this, isn’t he?” asked Jen. “We’re in another one of his time loops.”
Muninn squawked. ”A key needs a lock. A rock is just a material.”
Tunnels stretching out to either side of Jen stretched endlessly into the darkness. She stood behind the yellow line. ”The girl. The third contestant.” Jen searched her memory, found it coming easier to her in the presence of the raven. “Right before he died, he mentioned an ‘Emma Broderburg.’ Last round I spoke to what I guess must have been her sister.”
”A lock is a much more delicate instrument than a key,” advised Muninn. ”One mustn’t force it.”
A distant roaring. Either Jen’s train was approaching, or Cedric had found a weighty monster to kill, up above. “Kracht was forced, in the end,” Jen noted, almost conversationally. “Turned into a door and then kicked down. Imagine the panic. He was living his life according to a routine, and then, just... everything falls apart.” Muninn didn’t respond. “Nothing lasts forever, I guess.”
Deep in the tunnel there shone a light. ”Kracht was the last of your toy soldiers,” suggested the raven. ”You cared for him as you care for a piece of property.”
”That’s not fair,” dismissed Jen. The train barreled down the tunnel, shrieking as though in pain or anger.
”It’s not an insignificant care,” mocked the raven. ”You always cared more for things than for people.”
The brakes locked into place, not gracefully. Sparks shot up as the wheels skidded on the rail. The train emerged into the station a little too fast, a silver bullet with no windows and a barely perceptible door. There was nothing elegant about the Silver City, Jen saw. It was not the groundwork for a human-dominated utopia but an ugly silver paint-splatter over everything sensible people might appreciate about the world. To Muninn she said, “That’s not fair either. The lines between people and things are blurred here.”
The train reached a halt, its doors snapping open hungrily. The raven flew inside and beckoned. ”Toy soldiers,” he repeated. ”You were supposed to be twenty-three then and a queen grown.”
”Also not fair.” Jen leapt inside the train and the doors shut behind her. Inside the car dim fluorescent lights reflected off every surface, accentuating the lack of windows. The former monarch took a seat on an uncomfortable bench. “I was eleven from the moment I came here through the moment I left. Only my body aged. And that was a temporary effect.”
The raven eyed her judgmentally.
“I was a kid,” Jen repeated.
The train began to roll along the track with a metallic howl. Memory ruffled its black feathers began to speak.
* * * * *
The adult Jen had an athletic, underfed look, fidgety and tightly wound. Her dimples wobbled a bit, her hair clawed at her face like external veins, and her eyes were elsewhere. If it weren’t for the gold lace delicately sewn into her swishy knee-length green dresses she would have looked more like an assassin than a queen, a force of chaos rather than order. She sat in her throne cross-legged or not at all. She could be called, but never summoned; sought, but never found. In those last couple of years if Jen felt that you needed her she would come to you, never when you expected her and frequently when you weren’t sure you wanted her around at all.
In spite of the wobbliness of monarchical authorities in those days things were peaceful in the Place. The major troublemakers and schemers were banished, assimilated, or dead. The monsters were more mischievous than cruel, held in check by a burgeoning population of heroes and adventurers. Wealth and magic poured out of forgotten places; wishes were granted; the world made just enough sense for ordinary people to get by but not so much that extraordinary people couldn’t find extraordinary circumstances to work with. The gods gambled with low stakes, content for the most part to sit out on the porch of the world and watch the sun set over an era.
Just before it went down over the horizon you could sometimes see a flash of green.
In the palace those days there was a constant creaking, a low groan like something about to snap. This was the grinding of the joints of the toy soldiers, who made up the majority of the palace staff nowadays, most of the Queen’s original followers having since been given minor dominions or sent abroad on important tasks. The toy soldiers were not quite inhuman enough that you would feel polite sitting in a room with one and not offering it a seat or something to drink. Sometimes they would even accept with a gruff and wooden “Thank you” out of their copper-hinged mouths.
There were toy soldiers of all sizes, genders and demographics, some dressed anachronistically in the styles of another dynasty, others spiffily reflecting the fashions of Queen Jen’s mythical home. They cooked food, they washed dishes, they tended to the horses, they saw to the defense of the palace, they alternatingly welcomed and turned away guests. A wind-up toy cat usually failed to catch the rats, who were alerted to its presence by the ticking of its gears. A clockwork cuckoo marked the time and sang songs of broken families and discontent. Queen Jen, who appreciated both craftmanship and servitude and who was becoming increasingly dismayed by the notion that she was a woman grown now and would have to put aside her toys and childhood things and be a proper queen, loved her wooden soldiers, considering them to be the perfect servants.
The creator of the toymen was none other than the toymaker Klaus Gepetrovich, one of a long tradition of powerful magicians in the Place refashioning themselves as Santa Claus analogues. This one, though he had the magic and the dedication, lacked the physical presence to be a proper Kringle—he was a were-stick-insect, dark and thin and rough about the skin even on a new moon, beardless, wide-eyed, and who smiled only in epileptic bursts. On the full moon he stretched fifteen feet, coiling around his toyshop and working uninterrupted for three days at a stretch. There was something about the toymaker that inspired pity, some quality about his thin and trembling face that begged decent people to take him in and cruel people to cause him pain. Jen had saved him from a malicious toy drive puppeteered in secret by the Infraternity of the Krampus Campus on the southern borders of the Place a year back, and had taken him under her wing—specifically, under the northern wing of the palace, establishing a toyshop-slash-arboretum in a vast unused space that had probably once been something other than a cave.
Down in his workshop, Klaus didn’t have a list of who was being naughty or nice, but he did have a calendar--a novelty item promising a new made-up word every day--and made sure to remember his queen’s birthday. The made-up word for the day in question was “vunderdaut,” an adjective describing the state of foolishness one enters between a run of uncanny good luck and its inevitable reversal. Jen, who usually made sure to read the calendar hanging up on the wall when she went to visit Klaus, was distracted in this instance by her birthday present, which stretched wall-to-wall across the workshop.
“You shouldn’t have,” gushed the queen, surveying the scene laid out before her. It was a miniature replica of the entire Place made up in green felt and wood, with mountains carved out of diamonds, blue-dyed water pumping out tiny waves and tidal patterns, and a dollhouse palace that opened up to reveal the miniature toy soldiers toiling away inside.
“Of course I should have!” assured Klaus. “Anything for milady’s birthday.” His thin legs tramped a careful path over village and road, hill and stream, circling Jen possessively. “Milady likes?”
“She loves,” corrected Jen, ducking her head as the lantern sun swung overhead, illuminating the tiny caves hidden deep in the tiny forests. Klaus bristled. At this stage in his lycanthropism he used words only as a formality, resisting his natural urge to communicate through chemicals and the movement of his antennae. Jen nimbly stepped over lake and meadow to survey the floating moon, which spun lazily around the miniature Place. It was a beautiful moon, catching the light of the lantern sun and spilling its reflection in precise phases. “Is this real moonrock?” she asked.
“Yes,” confirmed the werestick. “But the true significance of the gift is yet to be known! Behold!” A bug-leg stuck out of the folds of Klaus’s robes and flicked a switch. With a surprisingly loud horn-blast, a delicately crafted model train snaked out of a cliff face and made a leisurely circuit of the model, rattling in playful ellipses around Jen’s legs, wafting potpourri-scented steam into the air. Klaus knelt down beside the locomotive, peering into the tiny glass windows. “The beginnings of a toy infrastructure. Standardized time, standardized distance. A beautiful, simple wind-up nation for the young queen to play with.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Jen. The moonrock, she understood, was exacerbating Klaus’ lycanthropism, bringing out more and more of his stick-mind at the expense of the man. Having more reason to distrust humen than insects on the whole, she didn’t think much of it. “Just remember that this would only work in the toy-world,” she reminded her toymaker. “I destroyed all the real standardizations years ago.”
Klaus made a highly ambiguous clicking noise. “I noticed,” he said. “My calendar has been acting strange of late.”
Jen’s head turned to the wall. Vun – der – daut (a): the state of foolishness one enters between a run of uncanny good luck and its inevitable reversal. “It’s not my birthday,” she said.
“No, it isn’t,” said Klaus. “Come receive the rest of your present.”
Jen became cognizant all at once of the noise pollution that she had visited upon the castle through her reliance on the toy soldiers. Ticking, whirring, creaking. A bomb about to go off, or a building about to collapse. An old woman’s body pushed beyond endurance. Vun – der – daut. The queen followed her toymaker into the back of his workshop, wrapping her hands around the spot on her hip where she ought to be keeping her sword.
The model train arrived at the dollhouse palace. Choo-choo. A little doll dressed all in green stepped across the drawbridge and boarded. The train departed, carrying the toy queen with it.
* * * * *
The silver bullet cut its way through the tunnels as the Silver City dug them out, burrowing deeper and deeper below the Place, upsetting gold veins and silver arteries, awakening things that ought to stay buried. Jen, listening to Muninn whisper in her ear, was only vaguely aware of the train’s movement as the rail sloped gradually downward, resolving itself into a near-vertical helix.
The silver train was no toy, had no whistle to warn passersby of its approach, released no steam. Its exhaust was the same foul mixture of heavy metals and fumes that seemed to seep out of every pore of the silver city like sweat off of some immense and evil-made golem. Jen didn’t notice her own vertigo and disorientation until the car leveled out and stopped abruptly with a snarl and a hiss.
The doors opened and admitted several dozen indistinct beige Amalgam fragments holding what appeared to be empty goldfish bowls in their arms. They milled into the train, squeezing shoulder-to-shoulder into every available seat, making half-intelligible small talk though their ill-defined mouths.
Muninn squawked and flew up into the carry-on rack above the seats. Jen, repulsed by the sticky quality of the fragments and the cheap, rough fabric of their orange jumpsuits, elected to stand, holding onto a pole in the middle of the car. A single fragment shared the pole with her, clinging to it easily with one hand, clutching his goldfish bowl in the other as the train took off again. He looked at his wrist expectantly, tapping his foot. “You know, you don’t have a watch,” Jen pointed out, trying to make conversation.
The beige man tried to roll its eyes and succeeded merely in making a bloop sound and spreading an eerie ripple across its face. ”Timezz mezzerd in pruhgress,” it explained. ”Wuddur thabbordurz zof thuzZilver Zitty? Do thennemies of-hummannaddy ztill walk thuh-Hurth? In theez metricks dewey mezzure thuppazzage of time-hyeer.”
”And does it measure up?” asked Jen. “Everything going according to schedule?”
”Thuhinnvizzible Hand alwuhzz makes thuChrainz runnontime,” gargled the fragment defensively. ”Ztill therezz much wuurk tuhbead duhn.”
The train suddenly accelerated and began to slope upwards, leaving Jen clinging desperately to her pole with both arms. The fragments sat calmly and affixed their goldfish bowls to their jumpsuits. Helmets. Space helmets. Jen only hadn’t seen it because the idea seemed somehow more absurd than empty goldfish bowls.
“What kind of work?” she dared to ask over the ambient noise of the train’s ascent.
”Whir gohunduh duhstroy thuh moon,” explained the fabric, his already distorted voice muffled by his helmet. ”Ur help wud be muh-chappreshee-hated.”
Hector, deprived of his memory and instructed in caution by his shoulder-perched thought, stayed back from the front of the stampede, merely directing it in Cedric’s direction. Even his seemingly limitless power had been taxed in the creation of this assault, which would at best prove a distraction to the fire-knight—dragons, rhinoceri, big cats, large dogs, landsharks, low-flying magnet-eagles, chinchillae and chimarae of all sorts, all funneled through the main street of the Silver City in a single direction, accelerating constantly as a natural result of their incongruity with their environment and with each other.
Cedric stood in the middle of the square, five towers rising around him in the shape of a hand. The primal force of the animal kingdom, unleashed by a boy-king too afraid to fight his own battles, bore down on him. The perfect knight decided that the resultant battle would not be an effective use of his time. He had already sown an environment inhospitable towards all this pesky life. The problem would resolve itself without his aid.
Before the wave of flesh and claw and fang and tusk bore down on him, the nose of a great subway train burst out of the ground beneath him and carried him laughing smugly into the air. Hyenas, apes, ostriches all circled around the event, some banging harmlessly off the side of the car without decelerating, others stopping to look, only to be trampled by the rest of the multitude. The stampede dispersed, slipping between the five finger-towers like so much sand.
Emma Broderburg watched an octopedal alligeightor and four or five penguolins in armor-plated tuxedos pass by on the sidewalk, seeming to her to be hurried but polite. She coughed. In her weakened state, she was possessed by an instinctive need for shelter, for a home to rest her head, for a home-cooked meal. The Silver City was not inviting in this fashion. The doorways and awnings were all sharp angles, hard concrete and leering statuary. Amalgam fragments peered out of the windows in the way one peers out one’s window when one is holding a gun or at least a baseball bat out of sight.
She coughed again.
”There you are,” Hector said, stepping out from behind an alley and immediately realizing his mistake. Humans, he supposed, all looked the same to him, especially in the shadows of the buildings, which seemed to cast an aura of conformity, reducing browns and auburns and blondes to a dull beige, rendering individuals into averaged-out pieces of a whole.
The girl looked at him quizzically, holding her arms. Something was wrong with her. She didn’t look very much like Jen the First at all, he realized. He pitied her instantly. “Sorry,” he said. “My mistake. Thought you were someone else.”
The girl wiped her nose. ”One of those faces,” she suggested. She did not have one of those faces; rather, she had one of those faces.
Hector looked up. The bullet (which he saw more as a rocket than a subway train, it being perfectly sealed and vertically oriented) had left the ground completely and was making rapid progress out of sight towards the moon. He could no longer make out the figure of Sir Cedric clinging to its nose, but could easily imagine the monster-slayer looking down at him and grinning. He shuddered and turned back to the girl. “Do you need a place to stay?” he asked her.
The girl looked around contemplatively. ”I’m looking for someone,” she said. Then: ”I don’t know if I’ll be here for long.”
Hector shrugged. He reached his hand out imploringly. “Come see my flying whale,” he begged. “I have to take care of some things, but I can get you where it’s warm.” This was, to some extent, a pretense—without his memory he was not certain exactly what he was supposed to “take care of,” though he suspected there was something.
”The belly of a whale sounds nice,” admitted the girl.
Huginn gave an impatient caw.
The map of the underground was a silvery spider on the wall, spreading out into the fringes of the Silver City as Jen traced her finger along the route that Muninn pointed out to her. Something about the world was becoming more angular. Her hair hung down a little straighter. Her thoughts proceeded more logically than they ought have. “We can’t be this far away from Hector, can we?” she asked the raven. “We should be going on foot.”
”The streets of the Silver City are deceptive, my Queen—and so am I. You’ve been walking in circles.” The bird shrugged his wings innocently.
Jen sighed. “There’d better be a point to all this. I had enough of a spirit quest last round.”
”Yes, your spirit is prepared for battle,” admittted Muninn. ”You’re ready to face Xadrez, yes, and Kath too, should she raise her beautiful-ugly head again. But the Charlatan changed the course your spirit must take.” Jen descended further into the dark tunnel, hopping gracefully over a turnstyle. ”Are you prepared to see your home destroyed? To see Kracht again? See, this battle is no longer fair for anybody. Unfairness is the root of the Charlatan’s power.”
”What’s Kracht have to do with any of this?”
”You know. You can feel him.”
In this, at least, Memory did not lie to Jen. Something green and young and rough around the edges was marching around the periphery of her magical senses—something that would take more than a Silver City to break.
“He’s the key to all this, isn’t he?” asked Jen. “We’re in another one of his time loops.”
Muninn squawked. ”A key needs a lock. A rock is just a material.”
Tunnels stretching out to either side of Jen stretched endlessly into the darkness. She stood behind the yellow line. ”The girl. The third contestant.” Jen searched her memory, found it coming easier to her in the presence of the raven. “Right before he died, he mentioned an ‘Emma Broderburg.’ Last round I spoke to what I guess must have been her sister.”
”A lock is a much more delicate instrument than a key,” advised Muninn. ”One mustn’t force it.”
A distant roaring. Either Jen’s train was approaching, or Cedric had found a weighty monster to kill, up above. “Kracht was forced, in the end,” Jen noted, almost conversationally. “Turned into a door and then kicked down. Imagine the panic. He was living his life according to a routine, and then, just... everything falls apart.” Muninn didn’t respond. “Nothing lasts forever, I guess.”
Deep in the tunnel there shone a light. ”Kracht was the last of your toy soldiers,” suggested the raven. ”You cared for him as you care for a piece of property.”
”That’s not fair,” dismissed Jen. The train barreled down the tunnel, shrieking as though in pain or anger.
”It’s not an insignificant care,” mocked the raven. ”You always cared more for things than for people.”
The brakes locked into place, not gracefully. Sparks shot up as the wheels skidded on the rail. The train emerged into the station a little too fast, a silver bullet with no windows and a barely perceptible door. There was nothing elegant about the Silver City, Jen saw. It was not the groundwork for a human-dominated utopia but an ugly silver paint-splatter over everything sensible people might appreciate about the world. To Muninn she said, “That’s not fair either. The lines between people and things are blurred here.”
The train reached a halt, its doors snapping open hungrily. The raven flew inside and beckoned. ”Toy soldiers,” he repeated. ”You were supposed to be twenty-three then and a queen grown.”
”Also not fair.” Jen leapt inside the train and the doors shut behind her. Inside the car dim fluorescent lights reflected off every surface, accentuating the lack of windows. The former monarch took a seat on an uncomfortable bench. “I was eleven from the moment I came here through the moment I left. Only my body aged. And that was a temporary effect.”
The raven eyed her judgmentally.
“I was a kid,” Jen repeated.
The train began to roll along the track with a metallic howl. Memory ruffled its black feathers began to speak.
* * * * *
The adult Jen had an athletic, underfed look, fidgety and tightly wound. Her dimples wobbled a bit, her hair clawed at her face like external veins, and her eyes were elsewhere. If it weren’t for the gold lace delicately sewn into her swishy knee-length green dresses she would have looked more like an assassin than a queen, a force of chaos rather than order. She sat in her throne cross-legged or not at all. She could be called, but never summoned; sought, but never found. In those last couple of years if Jen felt that you needed her she would come to you, never when you expected her and frequently when you weren’t sure you wanted her around at all.
In spite of the wobbliness of monarchical authorities in those days things were peaceful in the Place. The major troublemakers and schemers were banished, assimilated, or dead. The monsters were more mischievous than cruel, held in check by a burgeoning population of heroes and adventurers. Wealth and magic poured out of forgotten places; wishes were granted; the world made just enough sense for ordinary people to get by but not so much that extraordinary people couldn’t find extraordinary circumstances to work with. The gods gambled with low stakes, content for the most part to sit out on the porch of the world and watch the sun set over an era.
Just before it went down over the horizon you could sometimes see a flash of green.
In the palace those days there was a constant creaking, a low groan like something about to snap. This was the grinding of the joints of the toy soldiers, who made up the majority of the palace staff nowadays, most of the Queen’s original followers having since been given minor dominions or sent abroad on important tasks. The toy soldiers were not quite inhuman enough that you would feel polite sitting in a room with one and not offering it a seat or something to drink. Sometimes they would even accept with a gruff and wooden “Thank you” out of their copper-hinged mouths.
There were toy soldiers of all sizes, genders and demographics, some dressed anachronistically in the styles of another dynasty, others spiffily reflecting the fashions of Queen Jen’s mythical home. They cooked food, they washed dishes, they tended to the horses, they saw to the defense of the palace, they alternatingly welcomed and turned away guests. A wind-up toy cat usually failed to catch the rats, who were alerted to its presence by the ticking of its gears. A clockwork cuckoo marked the time and sang songs of broken families and discontent. Queen Jen, who appreciated both craftmanship and servitude and who was becoming increasingly dismayed by the notion that she was a woman grown now and would have to put aside her toys and childhood things and be a proper queen, loved her wooden soldiers, considering them to be the perfect servants.
The creator of the toymen was none other than the toymaker Klaus Gepetrovich, one of a long tradition of powerful magicians in the Place refashioning themselves as Santa Claus analogues. This one, though he had the magic and the dedication, lacked the physical presence to be a proper Kringle—he was a were-stick-insect, dark and thin and rough about the skin even on a new moon, beardless, wide-eyed, and who smiled only in epileptic bursts. On the full moon he stretched fifteen feet, coiling around his toyshop and working uninterrupted for three days at a stretch. There was something about the toymaker that inspired pity, some quality about his thin and trembling face that begged decent people to take him in and cruel people to cause him pain. Jen had saved him from a malicious toy drive puppeteered in secret by the Infraternity of the Krampus Campus on the southern borders of the Place a year back, and had taken him under her wing—specifically, under the northern wing of the palace, establishing a toyshop-slash-arboretum in a vast unused space that had probably once been something other than a cave.
Down in his workshop, Klaus didn’t have a list of who was being naughty or nice, but he did have a calendar--a novelty item promising a new made-up word every day--and made sure to remember his queen’s birthday. The made-up word for the day in question was “vunderdaut,” an adjective describing the state of foolishness one enters between a run of uncanny good luck and its inevitable reversal. Jen, who usually made sure to read the calendar hanging up on the wall when she went to visit Klaus, was distracted in this instance by her birthday present, which stretched wall-to-wall across the workshop.
“You shouldn’t have,” gushed the queen, surveying the scene laid out before her. It was a miniature replica of the entire Place made up in green felt and wood, with mountains carved out of diamonds, blue-dyed water pumping out tiny waves and tidal patterns, and a dollhouse palace that opened up to reveal the miniature toy soldiers toiling away inside.
“Of course I should have!” assured Klaus. “Anything for milady’s birthday.” His thin legs tramped a careful path over village and road, hill and stream, circling Jen possessively. “Milady likes?”
“She loves,” corrected Jen, ducking her head as the lantern sun swung overhead, illuminating the tiny caves hidden deep in the tiny forests. Klaus bristled. At this stage in his lycanthropism he used words only as a formality, resisting his natural urge to communicate through chemicals and the movement of his antennae. Jen nimbly stepped over lake and meadow to survey the floating moon, which spun lazily around the miniature Place. It was a beautiful moon, catching the light of the lantern sun and spilling its reflection in precise phases. “Is this real moonrock?” she asked.
“Yes,” confirmed the werestick. “But the true significance of the gift is yet to be known! Behold!” A bug-leg stuck out of the folds of Klaus’s robes and flicked a switch. With a surprisingly loud horn-blast, a delicately crafted model train snaked out of a cliff face and made a leisurely circuit of the model, rattling in playful ellipses around Jen’s legs, wafting potpourri-scented steam into the air. Klaus knelt down beside the locomotive, peering into the tiny glass windows. “The beginnings of a toy infrastructure. Standardized time, standardized distance. A beautiful, simple wind-up nation for the young queen to play with.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Jen. The moonrock, she understood, was exacerbating Klaus’ lycanthropism, bringing out more and more of his stick-mind at the expense of the man. Having more reason to distrust humen than insects on the whole, she didn’t think much of it. “Just remember that this would only work in the toy-world,” she reminded her toymaker. “I destroyed all the real standardizations years ago.”
Klaus made a highly ambiguous clicking noise. “I noticed,” he said. “My calendar has been acting strange of late.”
Jen’s head turned to the wall. Vun – der – daut (a): the state of foolishness one enters between a run of uncanny good luck and its inevitable reversal. “It’s not my birthday,” she said.
“No, it isn’t,” said Klaus. “Come receive the rest of your present.”
Jen became cognizant all at once of the noise pollution that she had visited upon the castle through her reliance on the toy soldiers. Ticking, whirring, creaking. A bomb about to go off, or a building about to collapse. An old woman’s body pushed beyond endurance. Vun – der – daut. The queen followed her toymaker into the back of his workshop, wrapping her hands around the spot on her hip where she ought to be keeping her sword.
The model train arrived at the dollhouse palace. Choo-choo. A little doll dressed all in green stepped across the drawbridge and boarded. The train departed, carrying the toy queen with it.
* * * * *
The silver bullet cut its way through the tunnels as the Silver City dug them out, burrowing deeper and deeper below the Place, upsetting gold veins and silver arteries, awakening things that ought to stay buried. Jen, listening to Muninn whisper in her ear, was only vaguely aware of the train’s movement as the rail sloped gradually downward, resolving itself into a near-vertical helix.
The silver train was no toy, had no whistle to warn passersby of its approach, released no steam. Its exhaust was the same foul mixture of heavy metals and fumes that seemed to seep out of every pore of the silver city like sweat off of some immense and evil-made golem. Jen didn’t notice her own vertigo and disorientation until the car leveled out and stopped abruptly with a snarl and a hiss.
The doors opened and admitted several dozen indistinct beige Amalgam fragments holding what appeared to be empty goldfish bowls in their arms. They milled into the train, squeezing shoulder-to-shoulder into every available seat, making half-intelligible small talk though their ill-defined mouths.
Muninn squawked and flew up into the carry-on rack above the seats. Jen, repulsed by the sticky quality of the fragments and the cheap, rough fabric of their orange jumpsuits, elected to stand, holding onto a pole in the middle of the car. A single fragment shared the pole with her, clinging to it easily with one hand, clutching his goldfish bowl in the other as the train took off again. He looked at his wrist expectantly, tapping his foot. “You know, you don’t have a watch,” Jen pointed out, trying to make conversation.
The beige man tried to roll its eyes and succeeded merely in making a bloop sound and spreading an eerie ripple across its face. ”Timezz mezzerd in pruhgress,” it explained. ”Wuddur thabbordurz zof thuzZilver Zitty? Do thennemies of-hummannaddy ztill walk thuh-Hurth? In theez metricks dewey mezzure thuppazzage of time-hyeer.”
”And does it measure up?” asked Jen. “Everything going according to schedule?”
”Thuhinnvizzible Hand alwuhzz makes thuChrainz runnontime,” gargled the fragment defensively. ”Ztill therezz much wuurk tuhbead duhn.”
The train suddenly accelerated and began to slope upwards, leaving Jen clinging desperately to her pole with both arms. The fragments sat calmly and affixed their goldfish bowls to their jumpsuits. Helmets. Space helmets. Jen only hadn’t seen it because the idea seemed somehow more absurd than empty goldfish bowls.
“What kind of work?” she dared to ask over the ambient noise of the train’s ascent.
”Whir gohunduh duhstroy thuh moon,” explained the fabric, his already distorted voice muffled by his helmet. ”Ur help wud be muh-chappreshee-hated.”
Hector, deprived of his memory and instructed in caution by his shoulder-perched thought, stayed back from the front of the stampede, merely directing it in Cedric’s direction. Even his seemingly limitless power had been taxed in the creation of this assault, which would at best prove a distraction to the fire-knight—dragons, rhinoceri, big cats, large dogs, landsharks, low-flying magnet-eagles, chinchillae and chimarae of all sorts, all funneled through the main street of the Silver City in a single direction, accelerating constantly as a natural result of their incongruity with their environment and with each other.
Cedric stood in the middle of the square, five towers rising around him in the shape of a hand. The primal force of the animal kingdom, unleashed by a boy-king too afraid to fight his own battles, bore down on him. The perfect knight decided that the resultant battle would not be an effective use of his time. He had already sown an environment inhospitable towards all this pesky life. The problem would resolve itself without his aid.
Before the wave of flesh and claw and fang and tusk bore down on him, the nose of a great subway train burst out of the ground beneath him and carried him laughing smugly into the air. Hyenas, apes, ostriches all circled around the event, some banging harmlessly off the side of the car without decelerating, others stopping to look, only to be trampled by the rest of the multitude. The stampede dispersed, slipping between the five finger-towers like so much sand.
Emma Broderburg watched an octopedal alligeightor and four or five penguolins in armor-plated tuxedos pass by on the sidewalk, seeming to her to be hurried but polite. She coughed. In her weakened state, she was possessed by an instinctive need for shelter, for a home to rest her head, for a home-cooked meal. The Silver City was not inviting in this fashion. The doorways and awnings were all sharp angles, hard concrete and leering statuary. Amalgam fragments peered out of the windows in the way one peers out one’s window when one is holding a gun or at least a baseball bat out of sight.
She coughed again.
”There you are,” Hector said, stepping out from behind an alley and immediately realizing his mistake. Humans, he supposed, all looked the same to him, especially in the shadows of the buildings, which seemed to cast an aura of conformity, reducing browns and auburns and blondes to a dull beige, rendering individuals into averaged-out pieces of a whole.
The girl looked at him quizzically, holding her arms. Something was wrong with her. She didn’t look very much like Jen the First at all, he realized. He pitied her instantly. “Sorry,” he said. “My mistake. Thought you were someone else.”
The girl wiped her nose. ”One of those faces,” she suggested. She did not have one of those faces; rather, she had one of those faces.
Hector looked up. The bullet (which he saw more as a rocket than a subway train, it being perfectly sealed and vertically oriented) had left the ground completely and was making rapid progress out of sight towards the moon. He could no longer make out the figure of Sir Cedric clinging to its nose, but could easily imagine the monster-slayer looking down at him and grinning. He shuddered and turned back to the girl. “Do you need a place to stay?” he asked her.
The girl looked around contemplatively. ”I’m looking for someone,” she said. Then: ”I don’t know if I’ll be here for long.”
Hector shrugged. He reached his hand out imploringly. “Come see my flying whale,” he begged. “I have to take care of some things, but I can get you where it’s warm.” This was, to some extent, a pretense—without his memory he was not certain exactly what he was supposed to “take care of,” though he suspected there was something.
”The belly of a whale sounds nice,” admitted the girl.
Huginn gave an impatient caw.