“Your right name’s for shit, dipstick,” said Kafka. He swung open a cell door. The tarnished steel shrieked. He keyed Detroit Steel’s cuffs and motioned the big man inside. Kafka put Reflector in the adjacent cell.
The brown-haired man abruptly smacked his head hard against one of the doorframe posts. Again. A third time.
Kafka shook his head in disgust. “Don’t bother,” he said to the man called Reflector. “Your skull’ll give out long before you’re recharged.’
“Enough.” said Kafka. “I gotta get back up topside. All of you just thank your lucky stars you’re not outside in the line of fire. This is maybe the safest place on the Rox.”
“Swell,” said Detroit Steel. “we’ll try and be properly grateful for the hospitality.”
The woman prisoner began to weep, keeping her sobs low and strangled in her throat.
“What’s with her?” asked Snotman.
“Problems with her old man,” said Kafka. The woman’s weeping escalated to a virtual wail. Wyungare looked from her to Kafka and then back to the woman. “Don’t you recognize Mistral,” said the jailer. “I admit, she’s had a real bad day.”
“Haven’t we all?” said Wyungare.
Kafka shrugged, smiled after his fashion, and left. At the door at the end of the hall, he turned and called back, “No fraternizing, you four. This ain’t no day camp.” He left, locking the door after him.
After what seemed a suitably decorous time to Wyungare, not to mention safe, he said to his fellows, “Let’s continue with introductions. Consider it an inventorying of resources.”
They all heard the sob from Mistral’s cell. They also heard the black cat’s loud purr as he tucked himself against the woman’s crouched body.
“Ain’t no resource left there,” said Detroit Steel, voice sounding more concerned than his words suggested.
“Don’t be too sure,” said Wyungare. “Look a little deeper.”
The old man stood on a rolling, endless prairie. Grazing buffalo covered the hills just behind him like a black, restless blanket. The smell of them was strong on the breeze, as dark as the creatures themselves and as earthy. The ancient one held his hands out — of the fingers, only the first two on his right hand were whole. There was at least one joint missing on each of the others, the flesh puckered and scarred around ancient wounds. Ancient, that is, except one: the second joint of the man’s little finger was a fresh cut, the joint amputated only minutes ago. The coagulating blood was still bright and wet, and a leather thong was strung tightly around the base of the finger as a tourniquet.
“I am One Blue Bead,” the old man said, and though he spoke in his own language, Teddy could understand it.
“Look, I really can’t stay here,” Teddy said. “I gotta go. I gotta go right now. They’re bombing my Rox.”
One Blue Bead smiled, gap-toothed. “Time doesn’t matter here. You should know that. Because you don’t, I name you Eyes Looking Backward.”
“Name me Sally. I don’t really fucking care. Just let rile out of this fairyland.” Teddy concentrated on the Rox; as he did so, the landscape wavered around him. As if through a stage shim, he thought he glimpsed the ramparts of the Wall and the tumbled-down Manhattan Gate behind the prairie and hills.
No. The Rox was gone again. A compelling weariness hit Teddy, like he’d just done a set of pull-ups. His body sagged. Just wait a minute, then try it again.
One Blue Bead just continued to smile. “You are as impetuous and as ignorant as they have said. And as powerful. But I offered a finger joint to Wakan-Tanka to bring you here. My flesh holds you, at least for now.”
“You’re killing people then. The shelling —”
“Time does not move here as it does in your shadow world. To them, you will be gone but an instant.” The man smiled again.
“The last one who brought me here tried to kill me.”
“Viracocha. I know. I have spoken with him about that, as I’ve spoken to Wyungare. I might try to kill you also, later. But not now.”
“What, then?”
Furrows deepened around the eyes and mouth, deep sun-baked canyons. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to see the face of the one who hurts my people. I wanted to see if it was the face of an enemy.”
One Blue Bead reached out with a mutilated hand, stretching it toward Teddy’s face. Teddy froze, enduring the callused touch on his cheeks, blinking as the hand strayed near his eyes. One Blue Bead’s cobwebbed eyes stared, his breath smelled of herbs and fire and decay. At last the man drew back.
“You are just a fat little boy,” One Blue Bead said. “Not a shaman. Wyungare is wasting his time with you.”
“I’m a fucking joker, asshole. Or don’t you have jokers here in fantasyland?”
“We have nothing here that doesn’t wish to be here,” One Blue Bead replied.
“I’m here.”
The sarcasm seemed wasted on the shaman. “True. And you sent the screaming birds of shining stone, the ones whose wings were flame and who plucked the children from the huts and ate them before the eyes of their mothers.”
“Excuse me?”
“In your world they may have looked much different, but you opened the way for them.” One Blue Bead shook his head. “Boy, don’t you know or care what you do here? Look at the herd.” One Blue Bead gestured at the distant buffalo. “A short time ago they would have hidden the hills entirely. They have sickened because the power of their souls are being stolen from them. The Eagle spirit flew here, but now he hides in his high nest because he is weary. Even the trickster Coyote stays in his lair.”
“Look, don’t you understand? I’m just using what the wild card gave me.”
“Using is not understanding. Listen: in the tales of my people, the first humans were poor and naked and knew very little. So the Old Man who had made them came and showed them which roots and berries they could eat and which they could use for medicine. He showed them how to make hunting weapons and how to kill and slaughter the buffalo, how to make fire to cook the flesh. He also told them that if they wished to have the power of magic, they must sleep. Old Man whispered that a spirit would come to them in their dreams, in the form of an animal. He said that they must do whatever that animal tells them to do. That is how the first people got into the world, boy, through the power of their dreams. Tell me, Eyes Looking Backward, do you listen to your dreams?”
“I don’t listen to skating penguins with stupid hats, and I don’t listen to dreams. I make them.”
One Blue Bead scowled at the defiance. The gesture seemed to dissolve the hold that One Blue Bead had on Teddy. He felt a renewal of the link to Bloat and pulled at the delicate connections. The power filled him and he brought it forth. The prairie faded, the buffalo became the stones of Bloat’s Wall and the clouds the fog of the Rox.
One Blue Bead remained, standing on the stones at the summit of the Wall. Teddy could see jokers all around them, frozen into stances of fright and horror. Shroud was there, pointing at the Outcast and the old Indian with his mouth open in soundless surprise. “You fail the test,” One Blue Bead said. “Again. How many chances do you think we can give you?”
“And I was always such a good student too,” Teddy told him.
The shaman’s face fell into expressionless folds. He spread his truncated, bloody hand, and the world jolted back into motion around the Outcast. Gargoyle sirens were wailing: like a hundred coyotes baying, like the film Teddy had seen of the Howler trumpeting down the walls of the Cloisters. Teddy could sense bodysnatcher flashing by overhead, his mindvoice far too fast and high for Teddy to understand any of the words, and then Pulse’s body was past the Wall and silent, heading out over the bay. A wind parted the fog for a moment: Modular Man, flying outward himself.