And, as Jake and Oy switched their minds back into their proper bodies, the first bullets began to flick the air around them like snapping fingers.
Ten
The fellow leading the pursuers was a man named Flaherty. Of the seventeen of them, he was the only hume. The rest save one were low men and vampires. The last was a taheen with the head of an intelligent stoat and a pair of huge hairy legs protruding from Bermuda shorts. Below the legs were narrow feet that ended in brutally sharp thorns. A single kick from one of Lamla’s feet could cut a full-grown man in half.
Flaherty—raised in Boston, for the last twenty years one of the King’s men in a score of late-twentieth-century New Yorks—had put together his posse as fast as he could, in a nerve-roasting agony of fear and fury. Nothing gets into the Pig. That was what Sayre had told Meiman. And anything that did get in was not, under any circumstances, to be allowed out. That went double for the gunslinger or any of his ka-tet. Their meddling had long since passed the merely annoying stage, and you didn’t have to be one of the elite to know it. But now Meiman, who had been called the Canary by his few friends, was dead and the kid had somehow gotten past them. A kid, for God’s love! A fucking kid! But how were they to know that the two of them would have such a powerful totem as that turtle? If the damn thing hadn’t happened to bounce beneath one of the tables, it might be holding them in place still.
Flaherty knew it was true, but also knew that Sayre would never accept it as a valid argument. Would not even give him, Flaherty, a chance to put it forward. No, he would be dead long before that, and the others, as well. Sprawled on the floor with the doctor-bugs gorging on their blood.
It was easy to say that the kid would be stopped at the door, that he wouldn’t—couldn’t—know any of the authorization phrases that opened it, but Flaherty no longer trusted such ideas, tempting as they might be. All bets were off, and Flaherty felt a soaring sense of relief when he saw the kid and his furry little pal stopped up ahead. Several of the posse fired, but missed. Flaherty wasn’t surprised. There was some sort of green area between them and the kid, a fucking swatch of jungle under the city was what it looked like, and a mist was rising, making it hard to aim. Plus some kind of ridiculous cartoon dinosaurs! One of them raised its blood-smeared head and roared at them, holding its tiny forepaws against its scaly chest.
Looks like a dragon, Flaherty thought, and before his eyes the cartoon dinosaur became a dragon. It roared and spewed a jet of fire that set several dangling vines and a mat of hanging moss to burning. The kid, meanwhile, was on the move again.
Lamla, the stoat-headed taheen, pushed his way to the forefront and raised one furred fist to his forehead. Flaherty returned the salute impatiently. “What’s down theah, Lam? Do you know?”
Flaherty himself had never been below the Pig. When he traveled on business, it was always between New Yorks, which meant using either the door on Forty-seventh Street between First and Second, the one in the eternally empty warehouse on Bleecker Street (only in some worlds that one was an eternally half-completed building), or the one way uptown on Ninety-fourth Street. (The last was now on the blink much of the time, and of course nobody knew how to fix it.) There were other doors in the city—New York was lousy with portals to other wheres and whens—but those were the only ones that still worked.
And the one to Fedic, of course. The one up ahead.
“ ‘Tis a mirage-maker,” the stoat-thing said. Its voice was wet and rumbling and very far from human. “ ‘Yon machine trolls for what ye fear and makes it real. Sayre would’ve turned it on when he and his tet passed with the blackskin jilly. To keep ‘is backtrail safe, ye do ken.”
Flaherty nodded. A mind-trap. Very clever. Yet how good was it, really? Somehow the cursed shitting boy had passed, hadn’t he?
“Whatever the boy saw will turn into what we fear,” the taheen said. “It works on imagination.”
Imagination. Flaherty seized on the word. “Fine. Whatevah they see down theah, tell em to just ignore it.”
He raised an arm to motion his men onward, greatly relieved by what Lam had told him. Because they had to press the chase, didn’t they? Sayre (or Walter o’ Dim, who was even worse) would very likely kill the lot of them if they failed to stop yon snot-babby. And Flaherty really did fear the idea of dragons, that was the other thing; had ever since his father had read him a story about such when he was a boy.
The taheen stopped him before he could complete the let’s-go gesture.
“What now, Lam?” Flaherty snarled.
“You don’t understand. What’s down there is real enough to kill you. To kill all of us.”
“What do you see, then?” This was no time to be curious, but that had always been Conor Flaherty’s curse.
Lamla lowered his head. “I don’t like to say. ‘Tis bad enough. The point is, sai, we’ll die down there if we’re not careful. What happened to you might look like a stroke or a heart attack to a cut-em-up man, but t’would be whatever you see down there. Anyone who doesn’t think the imagination can kill is a fool.”
The rest had gathered behind the taheen now. They were alternating glances into the hazy clearing with looks at Lamla. Flaherty didn’t like what he saw on their faces, not a bit. Killing one or two of those least willing to veil their sullen eyes might restore the enthusiasm of the rest, but what good would that do if Lamla was right? Cursed old people, always leaving their toys behind! Dangerous toys! How they complicated a man’s life! A pox on every last one!
“Then how do we get past?” Flaherty cried. “For that mat-tah, how did the brat get past?”
“Dunno about the brat,” Lamla said, “but all we need to do is shoot the projectors.”
“What shitting projectors?”
Lamla pointed below… or along the course of the corridor, if what the ugly bastard said was true. “There,” Lam said. “I know you can’t see em, but take my word for it, they’re there. Either side.”
Flaherty was watching with a certain fascination as Jake’s misty jungle clearing continued to change before his eyes into the deep dark forest, as in Once upon a time when everyone lived in the deep dark forest and nobody lived anywhere else, a dragon came to rampage.
Flaherty didn’t know what Lamla and the rest of them were seeing, but before his eyes the dragon (which had been a Tyrannasorbet Wrecks not so long ago) obediently rampaged, setting trees on fire and looking for little Catholic boys to eat.
“I see NOTHING!” he shouted at Lamla. “I think youah out of your shitting MIND!”
“I’ve seen em turned off,” Lamla said quietly, “and can recall near about where they lie. If you’ll let me bring up four men and set em shooting on either side, I don’t believe it will take long to shut em down.”
And what will Sayre say when I tell him we shot the hell out of his precious mind-trap? Flaherty could have said. What will Walter o’ Dim say, for that mattah? For what’s roont can never be fixed, not by such as us who know how to rub two sticks together and make a fire but not much more.
Could have said but didn’t. Because getting the boy was more important than any antique gadget of the old people, even one as amazing as yon mind-trap. And Sayre was the one who turned it on, wasn’t he? Say aye! If there was explaining to be done, let Sayre do it! Let him make his knee to the big boys and talk till they shut him up! Meanwhile, the gods-damned snot-babby continued to rebuild the lead that Flaherty (who’d had visions of being honored for stepping so promptly into the breach) and his men had so radically reduced. If only one of them had been lucky enough to hit the kid when he and his little furbag friend had been in view! Ah, but wish in one hand, shit in the other! See which one fills up first!
“Bring youah best shots,” Flaherty said in his Back Bay/John F. Kennedy accent. “Have at it.”