Uri—and Jaybush himself, that girl said—are in the sister city, he thought, which I'm now sure is Venice, in his temple, which I'm afraid is probably that terrible nightclub of the damned known as Deviant's Palace. If I'm going in there after her, it would be useful to be able to hear Jaybush's thoughts while I'm doing it.
He climbed back up the ladder and went inside again. He chose the lightest-looking of the five far-gones, a starved boy with no hair or teeth, and gently worked the blood-tap out of his arm. Blood coursed down the bony forearm and dripped from the limp fingers, but the flow seemed to stop when Rivas tied around the elbow a strip of cloth torn from his shirt. Then Rivas unbuckled the straps that held the strengthless body onto the bed, and he lowered it to the floor.
He climbed down the ladder again, grabbed the kid's wrists and hauled him out of the shed, crouched and took the body onto his shoulders. Rivas straightened up and took a couple of steps away from the hut to drag the feet clear, and then he was carrying the boy's full weight.
So, he thought dizzily, can you carry this all the way down to the beach? One way to find out. And if gets too heavy, I can always just drop him and walk on.
As he trudged along under his peacefully sleeping, ruined burden, he was reminded of his very first redemption, four years ago; he'd walked back into Ellay through the South Gate carrying his quarry in just this position.
It had been a favor for a friend. The man who was Rivas's bass player then had told him that his daughter had run off nearly a month earlier with a band of Jaybirds, and Rivas had offered to try to find the girl by pretending to join the faith himself. It wasn't a particularly risky thing for him to do, armed as he was with his drink defense and his Peter and the Wolf offense, and he'd managed to find her while her band was still within only a few miles of the Ellay walls, separate her from the band, knock her unconcious and carry her back home.
In fact the most exhausting part of that first redemption had been the subsequent three days, which he'd spent locked in a room with the girl while she raged and wept and broke things and begged to be allowed to return to the Jaybirds and the seductive oblivion of the sacrament. He'd laughed at her, and with his intimate knowledge of the faith he was able to damagingly ridicule its most illogical tenets. When she'd started doing Sanctified Dancing to avoid thinking about what he was saying, he'd brought in his pelican and accompanied her by playing the most insultingly bouncy and childish dance tunes he knew, and shouting encouragements to her like a square-dance caller.
Finally, gratifyingly, she'd come out of it, her eyes lost the birdy glaze, and she'd thanked him for giving her mind back to her.
Rivas had asked his grateful bass player not to tell people about the favor—the Jaybirds were, after all, not a pacifist crew, and theirs was a jealous god—but the bass player now had profound sympathy for other parents in the plight he'd been in, and he couldn't help mentioning to a few of them the service Rivas was able to perform. Some of these had offered Rivas so much brandy to repeat his feat that he'd been unable to refuse, and by the time he was twenty-eight or so he was making more as a redemptionist than he was as a musician.
Clouds were scudding more thickly across the sky now, as he could tell without raising his head by watching their reflections in the glass under his metronomic feet, and a damp, chilly breeze tickled his ankles and got in under his torn shirt. I wonder who this kid was, he thought, and whether his parents could have afforded the services of a redemptionist. Unlikely. Brandy's scarce these days, and even McAn, I've heard, won't go out for less than a hundred fifths. Too late for this kid now anyway. There's no way back for far-gones, and even without that, starvation and sickness seem to have got nearly all there ever was of him.
He squinted sideways at the pale, skeletal hand that flapped limply at his side with every step. Who were you, kid?
Sometimes the breeze from behind slacked, and when it did he thought he could hear the sighing crash of surf, far ahead; and the glass underfoot was frosted-looking now, and he could feel an increasing grittiness of sand with every step. He strained his neck to look forward, and saw that the glass plain ended in a jaggedly shattered edge a few hundred feet ahead. Beyond that was a paleness that had to be sand, and he thought he glimpsed low ragged buildings and points of dim yellow light.
And then above the scratching of his footsteps and the breathing of himself and the doomed boy, he heard behind him a mix of sounds like a thin stick being whipped back and forth through the air and quick taps on a taut snare drum and the rattling of a length of chain, and it was getting closer fast.
He spun around, automatically going into a sliding crouch so as not to fall, and saw, still a hundred yards away but closing, the jungle-gym-stuffed-with-old-car-parts figure of one of the trash men skating with a weird grace across the glass directly toward him, approaching with such speed that it grew from a distant dot to a noisy, sky-blotting bulk in only a couple of seconds, and only at the last instant did he manage to collect his wits and frog-hop out of its way to one side.
Rivas relaxed into the somersault it turned out he was making, and he rolled to his feet several yards beyond the sprawled looseness of the dying boy and watched the skating trash man, well past him now, flail its lawn-mower arms and lean around in a tight, screeching curve that threw up a starlight-glittering spray of glass chips. When it came looping back toward him, working its aluminum-pipe legs to get back some of its lost speed, he waited until it had a lot of momentum and then he feinted to his right and dove to his left.
The thing reached out an arm for him as it rushed past and succeeded in tearing his shirt, but then like an ungainly top it had spun out in a screeching abrasion of metal on glass, and as Rivas turned toward it it toppled and fell, still sliding.
Run up and try to disable it while it's down, he wondered tensely, or run away? Remembering its speed, and his inert companion, he ran toward it.
The thing was making a terrible racket flailing its junk limbs against the splintering glass, but just as he ran up to it, planning to launch a flying kick at one of its knees, it rolled over and wobbled up onto its wide barbecue-grill feet and faced him.
Rivas skidded hastily to a stop and then just stood and caught his breath, cautiously confident that the thing couldn't, from a dead stop, close the three yards between them more quickly than he could leap aside.
He stared at the roughly man-shaped construction. It was at least a foot taller than he was and twice as broad through the chest, but its legs were so ludicrously thin that looking at it was like looking at some biped bug under a magnifying glass.
Then it spoke, and it had the same sort of wind-in-the-rafters voice as the one that had apparently knocked him out this afternoon. «Brother,» it sighed. «Go back to bed. I'll put the bleeder back.»
Rivas remembered the sad bald girl saying she'd soon wind up as one of these, and he had no wish to kill it. He noticed that some of its vacuum cleaner hoses and springs had been torn loose in its fall, and he found himself wishing he knew how to put them back. «Go away,» he said wearily to the thing. «If you try to stop me, one of us will be seriously hurt. I don't think either of us wants that.»