Dreamstuff, most of it, though the huge torch that sat just behind Bloat’s head and dominated the setting was real — having once graced the hand of Liberty. The Outcast surveyed his home with pleasure, not wanting to relinquish the dream and wake up once more as Bloat and knowing that he must.
As he hesitated, they heard a dull rattling like a stack of plates being jostled, and Kafka entered the lobby. The roach-like joker scuttled toward the sleeping Bloat.
“Governor! Wake up! Chickenhawk is claiming that one of your creatures is coming in over the bay. The Twisted Fists had a skirmish with the Coast Gu—” Kafka stopped, swiveling his stiff body to look at the archway where the penguin and the Outcast stood. The Outcast’s and Kafka’s gazes met. In his head, Kafka’s mindvoice was wondering who was with the penguin.
“You can see me? You really can?” the Outcast started to say, incredulous, and in that moment, his orientation shifted and he was suddenly Bloat, staring down at Kafka from atop the grotesque heights of his body. The penguin, alone now, waved at him from the archway and waddled away. Kafka’s thoughts were confused, wondering if he had actually seen anyone with the penguin at all, and then he dismissed the incident entirely.
Too damn many strange things around here…
“Did you hear me, Governor?”
“I heard you,” Bloat said, and his voice was no longer the Outcast’s mellifluous baritone but his own adolescent squeak. “Be quiet and let me listen a moment.” Bloat let the flood of voices in his head wash over him, picking out the mind of Chickenhawk in his high tower in the castle.
Strangest damn thing … a monster horse with glowing eyes and the guy with the antlers … riding on top of the damn waves…
“It’s not mine,” Bloat told Kafka. “Not outside the Wall. But it’s heading this way.’
“I’ll alert Molly and get a reception committee together.”
“Good. We’ll see what happens when it hits the Wall.”
Bloat closed his eyes again, waiting, listening to the eternal commentary inside. Closer, closer, and then he felt the mental push at the edges of his awareness. Prod, prod: the Wall pushed back against the will of the intruder. “It’s not mine,” Bloat said aloud to Kafka. “And there’s only one intelligence; the horse is an extension of his mind, somehow; they’re linked. Calls himself Herne the Huntsman… Ahh, there — he’s through. A strong desire to be here. Forget Molly, Kafka — you and Shroud go out with a party to meet him. Herne has some information for us.”
Bloat opened his eyes as Kafka nodded and relayed the instructions from a walkie-talkie around his neck.
Bloat twisted his atrophied shoulders so that he could look out from the glass-walled castle to the darkness of the Wall. “This should be interesting,” Bloat said. “Very interesting.”
The bodysnatcher woke up pissed.
She rolled off the futon onto the cold flagstone floor, and got to her feet, groggy and disoriented. It made her mad. This meat was as hard to start as an old car on a cold morning. She shook her head to clear the cobwebs away, and stumbled to the window. She made a fist, slammed it hard against the rough stone wall. Blood dripped from her knuckles. Somehow the red wash of pain made her feel stronger.
From the courtyard below, she heard the shouts of joker guards, the clatter of weaponry, the metallic clang of the portcullis as it fell. Her lancet window overlooked the battlements of the inner keep and the narrow stone causeway that connected the fortress to the outer wall, a good mile south across the vast salt expanse of the moat.
A man on horseback was thundering down the causeway.
The bodysnatcher watched him come. The causeway was barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast, a stone ribbon stretched over the deep black waters of the bay, but the rider came on at a hard gallop. His horse was gigantic, black as a starless night, its hooves striking sparks off the stone as it charged. The rider looked almost as huge.
A door banged open behind her. “What’s going on?” asked Blueboy. He came up beside her, a slender black kid no more than sixteen, naked under a torn policeman’s shirt that he wore unbuttoned like a cape. Blueboy liked to jump cops and appropriate their uniforms and badges. “Jesus,” he said as he stared out the window. “What the fuck is that?”
“A joker,” the bodysnatcher told him. Jokers disgusted her, but this one was magnificent. The rider’s eyes were glowing green, and his legs were the hindquarters of a stag. A huge rack of golden antlers grew from his forehead.
The rider drew up his horse before the gate. “Open,’ he said. It wasn’t a request. His voice was a bass rumble. He was naked and golden, legs and chest covered with coarse red hair. A red-fawn mane grew halfway down his back. “Open!’ he roared again.
There was no answer from inside the walls. The rider pulled on the horse’s braided mane. The stallion reared back, snorting, and brought its front hooves down hard on the portcullis. Wrought iron rang and bent. The jokers on the battlements flinched, and brought their guns to bear.
“Let him in,” the bodysnatcher called down to them.
“You gone crazy, Zelda?” Blueboy asked.
“Don’t call me Zelda,” she snapped. She’d killed Zelda herself, stuffing a sock in her mouth and pinching her nostrils shut until she suffocated, after she’d been left blind and crippled. Since then the bodysnatcher had stolen a half-dozen bodies, but even the ones that looked good from outside felt wrong on her. She never kept them long: they didn’t fit.
There was the sound of running footsteps in the courtyard below. A squad of armed jokers spread out across the cobblestones. Kafka was with them, rustling faintly as he ran. The little brown cockroach-man carried a walkie-talkie instead of a gun. “Governor says, open the gate,” he announced.
“That’s what I’ve been telling them,” she called down.
The portcullis got halfway up and stuck, bent hopelessly out of shape by the blow it had taken. The rider dismounted and left his horse outside as he entered the castle. He had to duck low to get his antlers under the portcullis.
Inside, surrounded by jokers clutching automatic weapons, he straightened to his full height, towering over all of them. With his antlers, he stood well over ten feet. Across his chest was slung a magnificent golden horn, carved in the shape of a dragon. Cloven hooves clattered on the cobblestones as he moved, and his genitalia swung heavily between his legs. There was no doubt that he was male. The bodysnatcher looked from the stag-man to Blueboy’s more modest equipment, and laughed. The other jumper flushed.
“Take me to your governor,” the rider commanded.
Kafka nodded. “Shroud, Mustelina, escort him to the throne room. Elmo, see to his horse.”
“What horse?” he asked. He threw back his head and laughed. His laughter was loud and deep as thunder.
The bodysnatcher glanced back beyond the gate. The huge black stallion had vanished as silently as smoke. There was nothing out there but night.
“Jesus,” Blueboy said, beside her. He shivered and wrapped the policeman’s shirt a little more tightly around his skinny chest. “What’s going on?”
“Go get Molly,” the bodysnatcher told him. “Tell her to meet me in the throne room.”
The rider had to duck again to pass through the archway. He was the most beautiful thing she had seen since her own body had been taken from her. She wanted him.