The Sea Peoples(61)

Toa snorted. “You should have seen her mum. When she wasn’t just chopping people up with those two kukris—ah, now that was a pleasure to see. Sort of like one of those machines they use on sugarcane at the mill . . . but she was just about as dangerous when she turned on the charm, straight up. Left people wondering why they’d agreed to sell her their liver for five pence and a pint of the mild and bitter.”

They were standing around a food cart of a sort she’d seen in many cities, though in Darwin they reached the status of an art form. This one had an internal charcoal grill, selling various flavored drinks and simple foods. The elaborately braided salty bread thing they called a pretzel was particularly interesting, given the way she’d suddenly remembered how ravenous she was.

Pip reached for the bottle of lemonade, then hesitated. “Wait a minute—didn’t you say we should refuse food and drink?” she said.

Deor put mustard on the sausage in a bun he’d bought. “Only those offered as gifts,” he said. “That creates . . . debt, you might say, which makes for bonds. Where we are now, there’s little difference between symbol and reality. Exchange doesn’t have the same effect.”

Pip looked down at the pretzel. “Why do we need to eat at all?” she said.

Deor grinned again. “Because our minds—the part that make our bodies work, that has an image of our physical selves in it—think we do. Try not breathing! Your body is back on that bed, breathing Baru Denpasar’s air . . . but you’ll go blue in the face and faint here, too.”

Grimly: “Which is why a blow here can hurt you there.”

“So now we know where this man linked to Prince John lives,” Thora said, taking a bite of her own sausage. “What do we do? Break into his house and make him talk?”

Deor shook his head, half-admiringly. “Not so straightforward, oath-sister.”

She snorted, chewed and swallowed. “You’ve used those words to me often enough over the years! And sometimes you were right, and sometimes straightforward was better than twisty. What then?”

“The man . . . the shadow of the man that lives forever here in the dream of a mad God . . . is only a finger on the hand of the Power which snatched our John away. Once it becomes fully aware of us and strikes, we will have little time before we return to the waking world . . . or do not. Death is not the worst threat to us, or to the Prince.”

Thora signed the Hammer. “Why isn’t it already aware of us? If this place is its domain?”

“I am not sure. Perhaps because those Powers who wish human kind well and those who are our guardians shield us; and also because it is mad.”

He frowned. “I spoke with the High King a few times of the Prophet’s War . . . which was also not merely a thing of blades and bows, politics and the contentions of kings. The Power behind the Church Universal and Triumphant . . . and I think behind the dynasty in Korea who sent the men who killed him a generation later . . . is . . . not mad. Malevolent in human terms, yes, and hostile to us, to the whole world of matter. But mainly it is alien.”

“If it’s not mad, it’s stupid,” Thora said. “I’ve talked with those who were commanders in the Prophet’s War too—even with High Marshal d’Ath.”

She smiled for a moment. “Now, there’s one who should have been a Bearkiller! She’s wasted among Associates. They all said that the enemy then, everyone under the CUT’s control, just walked up to problems and hit them with a hammer. If the hammer broke, it looked for a bigger hammer. The war was only serious because they had a lot of hammers, including ones that hit us in ways only the Sword of the Lady could parry.”

“Neither mad nor stupid, but alien,” Deor insisted. “From what the High King said, just to operate in our world, in contact with human minds and spirits, was agony to it. It did not . . . does not . . . comprehend us well. He once told me that the Powers said to him that that Enemy was not evil in our sense, not in its own place and time. That was how it manifested in the world of common day, of course.”

Toa grunted. “This Yellow Raja, Yellow King, King in a yellow ragpicker’s outfit . . . that bugger seems pretty evil to me. And I’m not one to say someone’s bad just because they’re out to kill me. That can be just business, or a difference of opinion, like.”

Deor nodded. “This Power we deal with here . . . this King in Yellow . . . it is more like us, and understands us better. And it is both mad and evil, in our own sense. Perhaps less powerful than that Other who was the Prophet’s patron, but more subtle. This world we see around us—and its future, which we also saw, and the time beyond that—are already full of it, like threads of mold growing through bread.”

Pip listened closely, and the pretzel suddenly tasted like ashes for an instant. She chased it with a gulp of lemonade.

Oh, this is like the Men with Swords and Things with Tentacles, she thought. We’ve been lucky in Oz since the Blackout. Our encounters with this sort of thing have been smaller and more out-of-the-way.

“That bit we saw first—with the Hell Horse—was the far future of this world?” she said.

“It was a time after time, I think. A place . . . or time . . . where all things have collapsed into each other; past and future, good and evil, life and death. A mad God’s endless revenge.”