'The port exit, if you want to go,' said Tiny. 'Over there.' And they set out to push their way through the congealing clot of flesh. Someone gripped Truck's shoulders: Horst-Sylvia, the biological sculptress, with her heaving coloratura bosom; yellow, motionless eyes stared into his own in passive, mute interrogation. Her jewels glittered. He dragged himself away.
'I… ' said a voice near him, in the nightmare tones of the partially deaf, 'I… eye… aye… ' A dreadful, stammering pause. 'I know… what you mean. Hermann… Hermann Goring… so… such a… '
The King's guests were desperately trying to reassure — reactivate — themselves: but it could never be the same again. They had allowed it to run down, they were separate, isolate. The damage was done.
The walls of the cistern lurched through a haze of heat. Despite his sleep, he felt exhausted. He was punched in the small of the back, but when he swung bloodthirstily around, no one met his eyes. He could hear himself breathing. He ground his knuckles into his eyes, fighting the drowsy hysteria emanating from the guests, who had begun to shove one another about silently like animals in a pen. When he took his hands away again, the floodlights stabbed him unerringly in that one sore spot on his retina.
He blinked. The exit was plain. But beside it, like a black beacon, had appeared a tall figure in a soft-brimmed hat. A pale hand beckoned. He thought he was hallucinating. It stood by his escape route like Death at the feast. He tried to laugh, made a dry, choking sound. It was Sinclair-Pater's courier, the anarchist in the black cloak.
'They all want me, Tiny,' he whispered. A boot scraped down his shin, ground into the small bones of his foot. He fell over. The guests began to mumble; faces hung above him like decaying moons. Tiny dragged him upright. They were ten paces from the bolthole when, flanked by two massive Denebians, Chalice Veronica, aware that the party was terminal, blocked their way.
His face was gray and awful, the corners of the lips stretched high and wide, yellow teeth and red gums peeled, the brutal revelation of the skull beneath. He chuckled, and saliva trickled down his chin.
'You're too much of an attraction to leave, Captain,' he said. 'They all want you, but I seem to have cornered the market. So why not enjoy yourself?' He raised his track-marked arms, swept the cistern with a gesture. 'All life is here! Art, sophistry, crime — '
'You told me that before,' said Truck weakly, 'and all they talk about is this bloody Hermann Something-or-other.'
The King's Denebians advanced in a quick, deadly crouch, but the man in the black cloak was quicker. From nowhere, he placed himself between them and the anxious Truck. His bright blue eyes glittered with laughter; his long white hands flickered hypnotically: and a perfect, long-stemmed green carnation lay along his palm, beads of moisture sparkling in the minute folds of its petals.
'Captain Truck wants to leave the party, Veronica,' he said, and his voice was cold and lively, like air from outside. He watched the King closely. 'Why be impolite?' The flower vanished; the white hand, amused, danced in the air, then plucked it from behind Veronica's ear. 'You know, I think that's mine. Good Lord.'
'You know who I am,' said the King softly. 'Don't be a fool. I rule down here. I am the King.'
The anarchist shivered with laughter. It filled him, it brimmed out into his hands; every finger writhed with it — they flicked, clicked, produced a little disposable syringe. He looked down at it with amazement.
'You know, I believe that's yours.' He went closer to Veronica and said in a low voice: 'You know who sent me. You know what the carnation means. Pater is within striking distance, King, however far away he seems. Pater is always within striking distance.'
His shoulders shook as if he could no longer contain his mirth. The syringe snapped in his fist. He cast the shards up into the glare of the floodlights, and no one ever saw them again. He clapped one hand to Truck's shoulder, the other to Tiny's; he urged them gently forward. An entire pack of playing cards showered from beneath his cloak. The King stepped back, his face collapsing into a senile mask, cunning and silly and frightened.
As they left the cistern, two women began a listless fight, rolling on the floor, kneading one another's flesh with blunt fingers.
Out in the maze of unlighted streets behind the Renfield mail pits (where they had risen from the ground in a fog of their own breath, three tiny figures darting and ducking beneath the concave midnight, dwarfed by rockets and the dark fret of access gantries), Tiny Skeffern grinned jauntily and said: 'Lucky for us you came along, I expect.' He rubbed his hands. 'Christ, but it's cold up here.'
'There was no luck in it.' The anarchist — his friends called him Himation, possibly a reprisal since, in the youthful belief that entertainment should have a moral end, he stole their money and retrieved it from the most embarrassing places — stared back the way he had come. 'But I got you out in time, it seems. I suspected some hours ago that Veronica had already made his deal with the Cow of all the Galaxy.' He spat into the darkness. 'If so, hell have to face her without you, and his party will be over for good.'
Cor Caroli, the killing star, shone out above the Snort through wisps of high cirrus. Down by the river, the wrecking yards were silent.
'I feel quite sorry for the old fool.'
Himation glared down at the little musician. 'Don't be naïve,' he advised, and wrapped his cloak tighter round him suddenly. 'You've been to Avernus, and seen those yellow-faced men in their alligator shoes, peddling the stuff in gangs under the lamplight at Egerton's Port. They look like vultures, they look like preachers, they look like corpses; but the King is worse than any dozen of them. He's Death's uncle, with a finger in filthier pies than Earth-heroin.'
He shrugged at his own fervor.
'You can go back to your ship now, Captain,' he said to Truck, who was regarding Cor Caroli as if it had done him some deep personal injustice, overcome with self-concern. 'I'll come with you if you decide to take up Pater's offer. If not, I have other transport arranged. It would be worth your while, perhaps, to talk to him.'
'I'll see him,' said Truck. He was beginning to regard himself as a responsibility he wasn't fit to take on alone. 'I can't think of anything else to do.' He examined his feet. 'I wonder what he wants me for.'
Himation refused to be drawn,
'Good. As we may have to take your boat back from the Port Authority, we'd better hurry.' He strode off, his cloak flying out behind him. For a moment, he looked so like Dr Grishkin that Truck was forced to repress a shudder. But as they passed rapidly into an area of wan mercury lamps, the impression was dispelled. It was the second time he had placed himself willingly in someone else's hands.
Tiny, running to keep up, asked, 'If Veronica is so dangerous, how come he gave us up so easily?'
Amusement filled Himation's hands. The green carnation appeared briefly and spectrally between them.
'Pater told me what to say. That old junkie terrified me, but he knows Pater could cut his supply-lines at a thousand places between here and the rim of the Galaxy. Pater is a little more flexible than Narcotics Section; and, unlike IWG and UASR, he has nothing to lose if Veronica closes down completely.'
This gnomic accusation they couldn't get him to explain.
'Do that thing with the flower again,' said Tiny. 'You know.'