On the far side of the hoop, one of the soldiers bent over and threw up. “He’s been turned inside-out,” another whispered in horrified awe. “Oh shit, Lopez,” Sergeant Barker said, making the sign to ward off the Evil Eye. “Poor kid!”
What had been Lopez lay all in a heap, his innards glistening in the sun. Intermingled with them were bones, strangely twisted into shapes that Hanson’s mind could not quite manage to make sensible. At the center of it all was what had to be a core of muscles and skin and cloth. It smelled like the foulest sewer in creation.
The whole wet mass twisted and flopped, suggesting that the soldier was still alive and attempting to bring his body under control again. And it made a noise—a high, weak shrill like violin strings being stroked by someone with no idea how to play them. Which could only be, Hanson realized with horror, the man trying to scream.
“You,” Delgardo said, pointing to the nearest soldier. “Front and center.”
The soldier snapped to and stood at attention. His face was stone. You had to look at his eyes, which were showing the whites, to see how scared he was.
The screaming continued, a high, unbearable noise.
“Right there—” Delgardo pointed down at a bright pink mass that was surely the brain. “Stomp down on it hard.”
“Sir!” the soldier said, but he didn’t move, just stood swaying and sweating and looking as if he was about to throw up.
“Oh, for the love of—” Delgardo pushed the soldier roughly aside. He stepped forward, raised his foot, and stomped.
There was a squelching noise and everybody looked away.
But the screaming stopped.
Delgardo glared at Hanson as if he’d been the one to ignore a direct order, then snapped, “Burial detail! You, you, and you. Be careful you don’t step through the hoop.”
When the body had been properly buried—nobody commented on the color or the texture or the smell of the soil it was interred in—Delgardo, who hadn’t looked at Hanson once in the time it took to dig the grave, said to the man who’d been leading the Stumper, “Stretch out your hands as far apart as you can, and then cut me a length of rope exactly that long.” Then, to Hanson, “Take off your shirt.”
“It wasn’t me that—”
“You had one job,” Delgardo said with icy calm. “To keep us safe. Yet you let Lopez walk through that hoop. For that, you get ten lashes. I’d like to make it a hell of a lot more, but we still need you ambulatory. Consider yourself lucky. Now, take your shirt off, you damned ape!” he roared, his voice rising for the first time. He made a good pretense of outrage, but as Hanson unbuttoned his shirt, he knew what was really going on here. Delgardo had just gotten one of his own men killed; if he was to continue leading them at all effectively—and one of them had already been at the point of mutiny—he needed to slough off the blame on somebody else: a scapegoat. Hanson. It wasn’t fair, but it did make a kind of sense, and that made the punishment that followed just a little easier to bear. Not much, but some. At least something made sense in this mad city. At least something could be understood.
It was working, too. Hanson could tell that by the way the soldiers’ jaws tightened and their eyes glistened as they watched each lash fall. It was clear to see how much they were enjoying this. Somebody even laughed when he cried out in pain. They hated him and they savored every blow. Delgardo was one of them, but Hanson was the stranger, the outsider, and it was his fault they were here, in this awful place. If they hadn’t been here, if they hadn’t had to bring Hanson here, Lopez would still be alive.
Alone among them all, only Sergeant Barker stared down at the ground during the punishment. It struck Hanson that he had a disappointed look on his face, as if his problem child—Hanson—had, somehow, let him down. After one long glance, Hanson determined to look anywhere but at him. Somehow, his quiet disapproval made the ordeal worse.
At last, his punishment was over. Hanson got painfully to his feet and clumsily began to button his shirt. Delgardo turned away, avoiding eye contact. Perhaps he felt some guilt over Lopez’s death, perhaps even some embarrassment for sloughing off the responsibility onto Hanson, for he certainly must know whose fault it really was that Lopez had been killed, and know also that Hanson knew that he knew, no matter how much rage he pretended to feel to cover it up.
On the third day, they were walking through vast lawns with scattered clumps of fruiting elms and the occasional building-or-artifact which Delgardo made no attempt to examine, when the trees abruptly gave way to what appeared to be a forest of termite mounds. Some were small and others as large as buildings and there were thousands upon thousands of them. The Cathedral loomed up on the far side, drawing Delgardo onward like his own personal North Star or maybe that white whale that old wives told little children about, perpetually hunted by a mad sea-captain yet somehow always escaping at the last minute. Hanson remembered those stories fondly, remembered how he’d always rooted for the whale, though even then he’d suspected that in the real world it would long ago have been killed, flensed, and its blubber rendered down into lamp oil.
Delgardo, though, was not looking at the Cathedral but at the termite mounds. Rubbing his chin, he said, “Let’s go take a look, just you and me.” After telling his men to take a break—they could use it too; to a man, they looked ashen for weariness and want of sleep—he led Hanson to the nearest mound. Up close, they could see that the surfaces of the things were riddled with tunnels and that little metal insects came and went from them.
Delgardo picked up an insect and examined it closely. “It’s a machine of some kind. And it’s carrying a speck of metal. Copper, I think.” He set the insect-machine on the mound and it disappeared into one of the tunnels. Then he laid a hand on the mound. “The surface is crumbly, like dried clay,” he said to nobody in particular. Pressing his ear to it, he said, “There’s a grinding noise, like thousands of tiny gears. Some parts of the surface are warmer than others. Over there, I see one with a slick of ice on its north side. Wait here.”
At an imperious wave from Delgardo, the soldier in charge of the Stumper made it kneel. Delgardo rummaged within, came up with a shovel, and returned, whistling, with it slung over his shoulder. “Watch and learn,” he said, and swung the shovel with all his might. The dried surface exploded into powder, and metal insects rained down from the mound, clattering to the ground.
Five strong blows and the top of the mound was gone, revealing what looked to be a half-melted machine in its interior. It was as bright as quicksilver and had what looked to be many-fingered arms, at least a dozen of them. “There!” Delgardo said proudly. He shoved the shovel in the ground, adding, “Do you see it now?”
Hanson stared at the thing, trying to see whatever it was that Delgardo saw. At last, baffled, he shook his head mutely.
“It’s a factory, you lout. The City needs machines to do its maintenance, and those machines are built—or assembled, or maybe even grown—right here. This is the mother lode. All we need do is post soldiers here and every time one of these factories hatches, snatch whatever comes out. This is everything I promised my superiors I’d find, and more. Enough for a promotion, a raise in pay, and a good start on a political career at an absolute minimum.”
“So we’re going back now?” Hanson asked, not really believing for an instant they were.
“Are you mad? Of course not. There’s so much more to be found! These are just things. What I’m after is power.” Something in Hanson’s expression amused Delgardo greatly, then, for he said, “Oh, no, no, no, not the crude sort of power that has to be employed on the likes of you because it’s the only thing that you understand. Not the power to hurt and to kill and to create misery. Every human being in existence has that power. I’m talking about the power to shape history, to bring about real, significant change, to remake the world in my own image. That’s what I’m after.”