Chapter 16 - Cowsowhorseacropolis
A long skein of salmon-skin, bristly rope creaked and ran stiff through open air. A grunt sounded above. The taut weave shifted up with a jerk. Then the line stopped and swayed. The same voice growled.
“I can’t figure it, Mr. Grey. How in the bubbles are you so… so…” asked Ordus.
Mr. Grey, clinging tight to the scratchy rope’s bottom, looked up. Above him, Ordus strained against a metal rail. He heaved at his end of the rope with legs, arms, and back all at once. Empty space, and the too-thin-looking cord, lay between them.
Mr. Grey said, “It isn’t all me. The violin and coffin have some weight.”
Ordus breathed hard. He craned his head over the rail and met Mr. Grey’s stony gaze. He stage-yelled. “What do you think you’re doing?! I told you; keep your eyes on the higher scaffolds. If we’re spotted, we’re finished.”
Mr. Grey looked dutifully higher, to the upper reaches of a giant marble torso. That same instant, a huge, primeval hissing filled the air. Dark smoke-clouds geysered across the marble. Forward movement set the rope swaying like a pendulum. Slow, mechanical energy filled Jodee’s giant, moving fortress of marble and metal; her Cowsowhorseacropolis.
One leg - two grooved pillars of marble, connected by complex metal ligaments, thick as a tram-car is long - lifted. It whooshed through the air. It hoofed the ground. The impact juddered up the leg, through the smooth torso, along the metal rails, and down the rope, where it vibrated through Mr. Grey.
The cowsowhorse siege-engine released another burst of diesel-flavored fumes. Then it rested, building energy for another stomp. Gradually, the rope pendulum stopped.
Ordus heaved again, and Mr. Grey shifted another fraction toward the rail. The diegeonary spoke in an exhale. “It’s not that you’re heavy. You are. That’s just not what I meant. No, there’s something else.”
“Is it that I’m a tourist?” suggested Mr. Grey.
“No. It’s not the same with that friend of yours. Honeydew. Why isn’t she here anyway? Helping this infiltration?”
“She thought it wasn’t quite her business,” said Mr. Grey; a rephrasing of Honeydew’s actual words: ‘This Coats vendetta is stupid’.
Despite Ordus’ orders, Mr. Grey’s eyes drifted from the polished torso’s upper reaches. With one hand he squeezed the prickly rope, though a harness made him secure. With his other hand he dug into his pocket. He watched, for a spell, the ticker’s hand. Each tock synced with one of Ordus’ rope tugs. Mr. Grey forced his eyes to stay on the juddering ebony bar behind the crystal face. He wished Ordus would talk more, though he understood a muffled tongue was their ally in here. Mr. Grey willed a host of idle thoughts through his mind; anything that might occupy his senses. He thought of the Great Fishes, the oracle, The Lost City. He thought of Wine Medo. He started thinking of Tom. At last, unable to resist a nibbling, macabre compulsion, Mr. Grey looked down.
Space prowled below. A vast tract of open air. It seemed to tug Mr. Grey by his toes, even as Ordus yanked him higher. An insane thought entered Mr. Grey’s head: ‘Why not unbuckle the harness?’ He folded his arms across his chest, as though tying them up.
The ground lay a long, long, long way underneath all that emptiness. Panache unrolled in rough-and-tumble-and-tawny hills, patchwork quilts of cottonfruit farms, and the thin midnight lines of undersea rivers. Across it all, the pale pillar-hooves of the Cowsowhorseacropolis stomped. Another foot lifted, whooshed, fell. The land rippled under its force.
The ripple passed through a series of dark lines across the land, in the direction of the colossus’s march. Mr. Grey knew these were the Defense Force soldiers; arranged in orderly columns, mounted on regular-sized cowsowhorses, their guns locked and loaded.
The opposing force, Jodee’s vast tourist horde, swarmed directly under Mr. Grey. They marched in less-organized clusters, dressed in varied robes and sun-hats, and armed with shoulders and clubs. The horde cavorted through the fields and heaths, closer to the Cowsowhorseacropolis’s marble hooves than Mr. Grey would call advisable. As bees sally from their hive caves, and flit in throngs among the knots of blooming flowers; just so did the mighty multitude cavort beneath the colossus.
Mr. Grey’s notice fell suddenly, through the empty space, onto a tourist he recognized. He saw Nuggets, wearing his rosebush-suspender robe, waving his tiny cloth visa - tinier through the long, empty distance - over curled hair. Mr. Grey watched the youth dance right into the shadow of the recently raised hoof. Mr. Grey’s hands squeezed a creak of complaint from the rope’s fibers. Just before the hoof sent quake-through-land and shudder-through-torso, Nuggets danced aside. Mr. Grey relaxed his grip on the rope.
The recognition spurred a new thought in Mr. Grey. Something he hadn’t considered. “Um, Ordus?”
“What?” said the diegeonary after a gasp. “Did you figure it out?”
“Figure what out?”
“What I said a stomp ago! What separates you from that Honeydew? From others too.”
“Oh, I can’t say.”
“Then what do you want? I’m out of breath here.”
“I wondered: should we be worried about being seen? We’re infiltrating in broad Sun-Fish-light?”
“Of course not! The Sun Fish picks sides. And he’s picked ours, no doubt about that. He’ll hide our entrance. In a way the Prawn Fish never could,” Ordus jerked the rope.
Mr. Grey thought the drifting diesel fumes the likelier source of any stealth. Instead of saying so, he said, “Oh,” He checked his ticker again and let a few tocks and tugs pass. Then he said, “Does that mean the Sun Fish wanted us - Honeydew, the partisans, and me - to find the Lure? And he concealed us - again, all our group - from your searching? So that we could retrieve it”
“Do you want to help or not?” Ordus gave an even sharper tug.
“I would like to be of assistance, yes.”
“Then you just keep those grey eyes on the upper decks,” Mr. Grey did as requested; until the ground again beckoned. After a moment, Ordus continued, “It’s something with your playing…”
“What about my playing?”
“For the last time; the distinguishing feature.”
Ordus’s voice sounded loud and close. Following a final, angry yank of scratchy rope, Mr. Grey felt a hand beneath his shoulder. He reeled his head from the ground and found himself face-to-face with the diegeonary. Mr. Grey clambered over the rail with Ordus’s help. They stood together on the metal Cowsowhorseacropolis scaffold; a marble shank on one side, the breezy air on the other.
“Something about the way you keep timing,” said Ordus. He prodded Mr. Grey’s violin coffin and lifted his trumpet from the scaffold. “No matter what I do, I always get a little out of whack. It’s a word like that! Like ‘whack’…”
Mr. Grey shrugged, “This helps,” He showed his smooth, clean ticker.
Ordus took it and stared hard, boring into the glass face. He said, “Useful device you’ve got here.”
“You can borrow it for the mission, if you like.”
“What? Don’t you need it to keep… keep…”
“I’ve enchanted before while it was under repair. If I have to do any fiddling, and I hope it won’t come to that, but if it does, I should be able to keep…”
“TEMPO!” shouted the diegeonary.
They heard the tramp of other footsteps on the catwalk. Ordus grabbed Mr. Grey and pulled him through a flush door in the marble; into Jodee’s Cowsowhorseacropolis.
Heavy air surged through the corridor and smacked against Mr. Grey’s face; warm, wet, smelling like a hay pile after rain. Mr. Grey knew the air from his Abyssal Desert travail. He had expected to meet cowsowhorse breath again at some point in his existence. He had not, however, expected to find himself plunging one’s very throat.
Sepulchral clanging and a seething wheeze warned Mr. Grey to the corresponding intake of steam. He and Ordus flushed against the bolted struts lining the marble wall. The savory breath shook the fastenings in their metal holes. It pulled Mr. Grey’s anchor shawl loose and caught his violin coffin like a sail. Ordus’s trumpet gave a sharp squeak, and the diegeonary shoved a hurried thumb over the mouthpiece.
The breath-cycle ended. The air current faded with a distant rumble and a gasp. After a tock, they felt the concluding vibration of another cowsowhorseacropolis stomp. Ordus and Mr. Grey moved from the walls. They picked up where they’d left off, sneaking down the marble tunnel.
Ordus said, “We’ve got a moment before the next breath.”
Mr. Grey said, “I did hear you the last few times. Just letting you know.”
“Can you please walk softly? We’re trying to go unnoticed. And yeah, I know I’ve said it a few times. This time’s different.”
Mr. Grey tried muffling his office-hallway stride. “How’s it different?”
“Because, we’re here.”
They rounded a corner and stepped up to a circular threshold of metal riveted to marble. Beyond lay a room crowded with pistons, pipes, and spouting vapor. Tubes - glowing with heat or sparkling with rime - ran up the walls and across the ceiling like veins. Dense, hissing clouds and tree-like pillars of marble made hiding-spots throughout the wide, long, low-ceilinged space. Based on their threshold view, Mr. Grey and Ordus seemed to be alone. They listened, and heard only the spouting-vapor whistle.
Mr. Grey and Ordus entered the lungs of the Cowsowhorseacropolis colossus.
Mr. Grey ducked a burst of scalding steam. He crouch-walked from under it and asked, “This is where we’ll find Jodee?” He looked around with usual stoicism, not at all reflecting his inward doubts.
“Of course not! What made you think that?”
“You said we were ‘here’. I thought that meant Jodee’s throne… helm… saddle-place.”
“Sounds like your mistake in assuming. I meant we wouldn’t have to deal with colossal breaths once we pass the steam-lungs. Jodee’s at the Ocular Chamber, near the front. Count on it.”
“Didn’t we walk from the front? We traveled through the throat to reach the lungs.”
“Do you want to lead?” Ordus spun on Mr. Grey. The diegeonary had drawn his gun, and held it akimbo with the trumpet. He swung both for emphasis. “Look, it’s not exact biology. Follow my lead, help me pose as a tourist if we hit trouble, and we’ll reach Jodee pronto.”
Ordus waited for an answer. Mr. Grey reached for his ticker-pocket, but remembered he’d given it to the Diegeonary. Instead he shifted the violin coffin from one hand to the other.
Mr. Grey’s eyes had tracked Ordus’ gesticulation of the gun. Now he asked, “So, what’s the plan when we reach Jodee?”
Ordus dropped his shoulders. He said, “Question after question after question. There’s no trust with you, is there? What do you mean ‘plan’? We’re stopping her. Before she brings this colossal cowsowhorse and her tourist hordes into Wargermopolis.”
“Stop her, how? I did bring blank visas, just in case.”
“By force,” Ordus fist-pumped his gun hand.
“We could try reasoning with…”
Just then, their whispered chitchat met a hitch. An unexpected jet of air whooshed from a close valve. It scattered a steam cloud draped between two of the room’s squat pillars. The vapor wall disappeared, and Mr. Grey and Ordus realized they weren’t alone.
There stood Candlehead; broad shoulders thrown back, heroically; tapered top towering; bronze armor glistened in the damp. His bagpipes rested in an elbow, squeezeready. Candlehead’s wick flashed to sudden, blazing existence.
Ordus groaned. “I should’ve known. Candlehead… Man, how are we supposed to take him on?”
Ordus lifted the trumpet and the gun from the floor. Candlehead moved to squeeze, but Mr. Grey said, “Now now now, let’s discuss. Mr. Candlehead, I think Jodee needs to face her situation’s reality. They’re not entirely legal, her activities.”
“Y…Yeah,” added Ordus. Then, with a forced scoff, “Don’t you know? The Defense Force is already assembled. The whole force. All the king’s men. You partisans? Not a plankton’s chance. Might as well give up now. Besides,” he added with slowly-improving feigned confidence, “Mr. Grey’s a master enchanter, same as you. You can’t… you can’t HOLD A CANDLE to the both of us together! Mr. Grey’s with me. He’s picked a side, and that side’s the law. ”
“That last part is true,” said Mr. Grey.
Candlehead reached into his treasure sack with a free hand. He tossed a fragment of Famous Last Words to the marmoreal stage; the price of an enchantment.
Ordus shivered despite the steamy room. His trumpet drooped toward the marble. He raised the gun; aimed its dark tunnel at Candlehead’s runny wax.
Mr. Grey unbuckled his coffin with desperate speed. He said, “Well Ordus, we practice our scales for a reason, don’t we? A little music should help us all relax.”
Ordus looked at Mr. Grey with fear and disbelief written in his eyes. Sweat fountained from his chestnut hair. His trigger finger shook. He said, “Are you crazy?! We can’t enchant against Candlehead. He’s too strong. A demifish. Maybe once; when he was only a mortal man named Pollo. Now he’s cursed and blessed by the Blob Fish. He won’t…”
“Sorry,” Mr. Grey interrupted. “Did you say Pollo?”
“That was his name.”
Mr. Grey turned to Candlehead. He’d watched - or perhaps, ‘observed’ - them without interrupting. Mr. Grey said, “Mr. Candlehead, I’ve heard your real name - Pollo - in another context.”
Candlehead waited.
“My boss is Jack York. He said he knew you in the war.”
Still no reaction.
“I must tell you, he’s always been on the king’s side. He supports the Odormoats. I don’t think your old war friend would favor this choice. Aligning yourself with Jodee.”
Ordus’ gun dipped. He glanced between Mr. Grey and Candlehead. Mr. Grey waited, crouching at his open coffin, watching for a sign from the waxy demifish.
Candlehead moved; only to throw his shoulders back more heroically, and position the bronze bagpipes comfortably in his shoulder crook.
Ordus sighed and sagged. Mr. Grey finished unbuckling his violin. He tightened his bow and checked his tuning. Candlehead let him. Ordus goggled at Mr. Grey. Mr. Grey noticed, shrugged, and said, “We don’t have a choice. We have to play.”
“You madman…” whispered Ordus. Then he laughed. “I guess you’re right,” He clicked the safety on his gun and holstered it. With one hand he brought up the seashell trumpet. With the other, he reached into his own treasure purse. He tossed two sets of old spectacles on the ground.
“If we’re gonna enchant, might as well make it grand,” said the diegeonary.
An instant flurry of violin vibrates the steamy lung. Each note warps the clouds, conjuring nebulas of indigo and canary-yellow. At the same moment, bagpipes squall. A swine-like screech, and the steamclouds pulse and undulate, writhe and wrap, slither like tentacles at the violin. Before scalding vapor wraps the grey form, a brassy, blaring trumpet condenses the tentacles. They hit the floor. A rainpatter at the violin’s feet.
All three instruments strike at once. Sharp strings, piercing pipes, a roaring horn. Horn and violin alternate notes. The trumpet strikes. Condensed water explodes off rimy pipes near the blazing wick above the bagpipes. The violin strikes. A cloud jumps color. Pale pearl, dense black, neon green; dizzily flashing. But no cloud reaches the blazing wick. A pipescreech, an enchanted command, stops the steam before the fire, like a sheltering glass dome.
The trumpet sputters out. The tide turns. Steam-colors shift, vainly. Clouds gather. They close like thunder-bearers. Violin and trumpet are surrounded in lowering walls. Color flashes fainter and fainter in the dark.
Then the trumpet clamors heavy, just before the walls close. Two seven-note measures of bright, screeching triumph. Two peals breaking cloud-walls down in buckets.
Now a struggle. Now the trumpet cries in fits, just raising steam between pillars. Now the violin screams in sixteenth-flurries, turning steam to grey or tinting it copper. Trumpeter and fiddler flee for the colored clouds. But at each newmade hideout, bagpipe screeches shatter the fog. The horn strikes again. The steam liquifies. The floor flash floods. But the blazing wick steers the waves with his pipe. He leads water - overtakes horn and fiddle - with his drones. The mist clears. The bagpipes close in.
A gapless wall of scalding steam obeys the pipes’ jig. It falls over the trumpeter. The burning wall stifles the trumpet’s squeal. The violin picks up what slack it can. Color-bearing notes shake the misty room. The pale marble and pale fog run with gingerbread tints, caramel hues, shades of walnut and hickory and cedar. The violin races to camouflage the fallen hornman.
The bagpipes scream; remorselessly vulgar. They shake the clouds - eerie wailing - making them shiver to the corners. The scream drowns the room: ancient, inhuman, noisy. Steam meekly compresses. Walls of vapor squeeze to the marble’s thickness. The violin flashes scantly. It only darkens the walls. The fiddler and trumpeter are caught in dark clouds, a monster squall, a dooming tempest with bagpipe thunder.
Coughing and gasping sound from within; the steam thickens to a choke. Wail after wail after wail, squeeze after squeeze, the bagpipes spew their reedy dirge. A burst of trumpet summons a pocket of air. A vital breath. The pipes give orders, the mist closes instantly. Another trumpet burst; another closing-in; a losing battle. The piper with blazing head steps toward his crafted steam-prison. Thick, hot, choking steam licks the fiddler and trumpeter like fire.
The violin and trumpet creak with naked, stripped, tones. Barely they hold an enchantment. The bagpiper doesn’t see the steam outside his storm. It creeps like a ghost off the wet floor and wet pillars, tinted like marble by the violin’s tunes. Shrill, picked notes; a sudden rush of strings; colors flashing through the fresh-crept mire. The blazing man backsteps. Just enough, for the fiddle and trumpet breach the cloud walls.
The stingers of the violin, the brash trumpet notes, just set them free. Nowhere near victory. The bagpipes squeal on: terrible, loud, fishly powerful. Measures pass, steam forms and moves and changes color, and all three instruments battle blind.
The bagpipes surge, breaking a wall, moving into a clearing of pale floor. There stand the fiddler and trumpeter; sawing the string; pumping the slide. The burning wick flickers forward. The pipes pull the walls close around all three.
The violin stops. The floor - falsely colored as marble, concealing its nature - reverts. A hidden film of bright, glittering water reflects the candle’s burning brand. The candle wavers. The piper steps back, but too late. The trumpet rings like the sound of sunshine. From its tubes, a most melodious chorus. Dew vibrates as mist off the shelled bell. Beneath all three, the wet floor detonates in cloud, like a stomped bag of flour.
The wick light vanishes.
The trumpet stops. The bagpipes’ thunder rolls off. With final notes, the violin crystalizes the steam. Vapor walls turn window-clear.
A forest of marble trees. A wet and stony fiddler. A red-faced and scalded trumpeter. Splayed on the ground beneath both; a doused demifish.
The music fades. The steam disperses. The Cowsowhorseacropolis steam room pistons squeeze, hiss, and stop.
Mr. Grey and Ordus hurtled along the metal-ribbed, marble tunnels of the colossus. Distantly they heard barking orders from a Glory Days Soldier.
“Disperse or face the consequences!”
Ordus’s gallop matched Mr. Grey’s tripled steprate through a looping ascent. A final corridor twist placed them at a wide balcony, cousin to the one they’d infiltrated. The pair slammed in sync against the railing. Both wrapped their hand around the cold metal pipe: Ordus’ splotchy with a bloody flush and pale-knuckles; and Mr. Grey’s dry as a baking stone. They leaned out and looked down.
Jodee’s disordered horde clustered round the stilled hooves of the colossus. Over the crowd fell the four-pronged umbra of the marble stalactite udder. Some tourists hunched low behind their pluckier comrades, as though struggling under the shadow’s weight. Most of the throng simply laughed and jeered. They held heads, shoulders, and primitive weapons high. These were the unplagued pick of Jodee’s partisans. What did it matter that their war machine stayed its hooves? In the righteousness of their cause and the vigor of their health, they felt invincible.
In two steady, organized arcs on the colossus’s flanks, the Glorious Defense Force stood at the ready. Their hands held guns. The chambers of the guns held bullets.
No more did the land judder under the colossus’ quakemakers. Nowhere among the cottonfruit fields and coral heaths did The Wind run. All was settled. Even the soldiers held position with eerie calm; their arcing formations seemed like deep ruts cutting the land.
Only the tourists under the colossus’ shadow moved. They taunted the soldiers. When the Odormoats fell, they said, Defense Force HQ would be among the open attractions.
One defense force soldier stepped out from the rigid line. Standing far out of the colossus’ shadow, his metal pauldrons and breastplate glinted under the Sun Fish’s blazing quills. Stripes across his armor’s embossed Prawn Fish icons marked him an officer. He cried an order; in the same voice Mr. Grey and Ordus had heard in the tunnel.
“Tourists: disperse! Your colossus stands beaten. Return to Wargermopolis. Find a cologne distributor. Protect yourselves from others, and others from yourselves. Keep within the city’s allotted tourist zones; within the allotted zones of all the bubbles. Follow these orders, and avoid corrective action!”
Mr. Grey didn’t catch the tourists’ response. That instant, one of the cowsowhorse colossus’ last breaths issued from the hallway. From the enthusiastic and varied gestures returned to the officer, however, Mr. Grey imagined the comeback less-than-gentlemanly.
The wheeze whistled into nothing. Tourists’ jeers drifted to where he and Ordus leaned over the rail. Mr. Grey picked a voice from the tumult.
“The war machine may be stopped,” came Nuggets’ deep-voiced cries, yowling over the others. “We’ve still got Jodee. We’ve got Candlehead. This is a movement bucko. Like… it won’t be quelled. You lay down your gun. You backed the wrong cowsowhorse!”
Mr. Grey flicked his eyes pell-mell over the horde. He spotted the downy cheeks and rose-suspendered robe of the young man. Nuggets held no weapon. He waved his little fabric visa like a flag at the soldiers.
The officer standing before the Defense Force line shook his head, sadly. He lifted a hand, slowly. As one, the guns on both sides snapped up. In sync, the hammers clicked back. The smooth, rifled pipes gawped at the tourist crowd. Each one carried the flame-backed promise of lead.
The officer said, “Last warning. Disperse or be shot.”
Mr. Grey saw that this time the officer’s command held sway, backed as it was by threat of firing squad. A wave of second thoughts raced through Jodee’s horde. Clubs lowered. Shoulders dropped. Voices fell. Near the crowd’s edges - the members closest to the openings between the two Defense Force arcs - a few tourists stepped toward escape. Mr. Grey saw Nuggets drop the visa-waving hand. The young man wore a dumbstruck, open mouth as he stared down those long, dark rifle-tunnels; as though he only now recognized their existing-ending capacity. For a moment, Mr. Grey thought the tourists would disperse.
But not all the crowd were influenced. Not even by the officer’s direct threat. From his high perch, Mr. Grey heard one voice rise above the murmurs of the rethinkers. “See how the king holds his crown? Speak against the laws, and his thugs sink to threats!” Then another voice, from a different quarter. “Listen to this soldier’s talk! They haven’t men or bullets enough for all of us, and they know it. They rely on fear for power!” Mr. Grey recognized the voices. Not these exact ones, but the type. The same firestarters he’d seen and heard in the mobs of Starharbor. The ones from the bean-factory riots. Word by word, these louder members built a levee to check the reconsidering wave. Voice by voice, they filled their fellows with a mortal courage.
Standing on their high scaffold, Mr. Grey and Ordus watched all this unfold on a broad scale. They watched the tide turn; watched belligerence sweep back over the horde; watched the leading edges step toward the guns with cruder weapons raised; watched the misguided tourists stare, dauntless, into the firing squad.
Mr. Grey snapped his head to Ordus. “You have to stop this,” he said in a quick, not-so-stable voice. “Tell the soldiers we’ve stopped the colossus, we’ve beaten Candlehead. Tell them not to shoot. You’re their leader.”
Ordus wore a furrowed brow and upset eyes to mirror Mr. Grey’s inward worry. He called out, “Hey! Glorious Defense Force, stand down you morons. We won! There’s no need to shoot,” Each of his cries came out as a whispery rasp; his throat, steam-scalded in their fight with Candlehead, could not shout.
Mr. Grey took up the call. He yelled - genuinely yelled - down, “Up here! You’re commander’s orders: stand down! Don’t shoot!” But just as Mr. Grey yelled, another sepulchral gasp of the colossus drowned his voice. Ordus heard him, and looked at Mr. Grey. The hairs on the back of his neck stood. No one below noticed the calls.
Mr. Grey watched Nuggets raise his visa-banner. The young man stepped forward. Other tourists did the same. The leading tourists edged toward the Defense Force lines. They swung their clubs. They flung their taunts. The soldiers took aim. The officer gave another sad shake of the head.
Mr. Grey turned to Ordus. “If we fix the steam-breath,” he began. “If we get the colossus moving, just for a bit, it might…”
The soldiers fired.