Billy and Reave bombarded him with questions.
‘Where are we, man?’
‘How the hell did you get here?’
‘How do we get out of here?’
The Minstrel Boy held up his hands.
‘Hold it! Hold it! Dumbo behind me might suddenly decide that there’s nothing in the regulations says I get to talk to you. So listen. If you can just hold on a while longer I’ll try and get you out of here. Okay?’
‘How soon?’
‘I don’t know. It ain’t easy. You won’t be going anywhere.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Dur Shanzag.’
‘Dur Shanzag?’
‘I can’t talk now. Don’t worry, I’ll swing it. I don’t know how you could get into any more shit if you worked at it.’
‘Okay, okay. We know, just try and get us out.’
‘I told you, don’t worry.’
He stepped back out of the cell and the door was slammed shut. Briefly it opened again.
‘What’s the other guy called?’
‘The Rainman.’
‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do for him.’
The Minstrel Boy ducked out, and again the door was slammed. Billy and Reave looked at each other.
‘What the hell. Did that happen?’
‘Seemed to.’
‘But his clothes and everything?’
‘Who knows?’
The Rainman stood up.
‘Who was your friend?’
‘The Minstrel Boy, a guy we met on the road back in Graveyard.’
‘Some useful friend to have in a strange city.’
‘I sure hope so.’
‘And me, boy, I can tell you. Say you met him in Graveyard?’
‘Sure, we travelled with him from there to Dogbreath. You know Graveyard?’
‘Graveyard, sure I know Graveyard. Jived up many a thunderstorm for them guys to slide their old rigs through.’
He looked at them intently.
‘What did he look like, back in Graveyard?’
‘Much the same, only with dirty blue jeans instead of those fancy clothes, and his hair was dark. Why?’
The Rainman shook his head.
‘It’s nothing. One of those things stuck in the back of your mind that you can’t quite bring out. Maybe it’ll come to me later.’
They waited, straining their ears for any possible footfall, but nothing happened. It had long ago become impossible to gauge the passage of time. Billy and Reave had lost that skill altogether when they first stepped into the nothings. The sudden appearance of the Minstrel Boy receded and became confused. They began to think it was an absurd way of snapping their minds. To add to their problems, they had begun to get ravenously hungry, and thirsty too. Nobody was ready to drink the foul trickle that ran along the guttering. At one point there was a commotion of voices a long way away, and they held their breath to see if it came nearer. Then the sounds died, and hope of immediate release faded.
It was just when any faith in the Minstrel Boy’s return had all but disappeared that the door creaked open, and he walked in.
‘I’ve done it, you’re free.’
‘Free?’
‘Well, almost free. I’ve got a release order, and you don’t have to be interrogated by the Ghâshnákh. You could say that you were substantively free.’
‘We can get out of here?’
‘Sure, right now.’
‘That’s great. Where do we go?’
The Minstrel Boy frowned.
‘That’s one of the problems, but I’ll tell you about it when we’re out of here.’
Billy shrugged.
‘Just as long as we’re out of this filthy cell.’
Again surrounded by guards, they walked out of the cell, along the corridor, and up the stairs. Groans and snarls came from the other cells as they walked past. The release of a prisoner seemed a great novelty.
They were again pushed into the stone-flagged room where the Uruk sat behind his high desk. Billy, Reave and the Rainman were lined up in front of him, and he scowled at them with distaste.
‘Release orders? Release orders? You scum have friends in high places. They won’t help you if I ever get my hands on your filthy bodies again.’
Two of their guards were dispatched to fetch their clothes, and the three of them hastily dressed. Their bags, porta-pacs, and even their guns were returned to them, and then the Minstrel Boy initialled a sheaf of forms. Finally they were released, and they followed, the Minstrel Boy out into the street. Once outside, Billy caught up with him.
‘Where are we going now?’
‘To the barracks.’
‘Barracks? What barracks?’
The Minstrel Boy avoided Billy’s eyes.
‘That was one of the things I had to do to get you out. In order to get the release papers, I had to enlist you in the Free Corps.’
‘The Free Corps? What in hell is that?’
‘It’s … uh … part of the army.’
Billy stopped dead in the street.
‘The army? Are you trying to tell us that we’ve joined the goddamn army in this place?’
He swung round to Reave and the Rainman.
‘This idiot’s gone and got us into the army.’
The Minstrel Boy took Billy by the arm.
‘Keep moving, you don’t want to get arrested again. There was no other way, Billy. It was a case of jail or the Free Corps.’
They walked on, Billy shaking his head.
‘I don’t understand any of this. You better start from the beginning.’
‘Okay, listen. This is Dur Shanzag, and it’s a long way from Graveyard or Dogbreath.’
***
She/They rose slowly through the threatening mists. Her/Their mind was not required to continue the upward motion, and She/They allowed it to retreat into the memories of the almost infinite past. It drifted back to Her/Their hardly remembered birth, the fusion of shapes and colours that had condensed and blended and produced Her/Their triple form. She/They could go back no further than the triple form. Before that there had been something, an order that had enabled Her/Them to transcend and escape the chaos that had overtaken everything else.
The achievement of the triple form had been followed by centuries of contemplation while She/They had ordered and stabilized the space that She/They occupied. It was a long period of calm that had been savagely brought to an end by the arrival of the first disruptors.
The arrival of the disruptors had started the long battle that She/They had waged against the encroaching mists of the twisting chaos.
It was the start of a hateful, searching period in which She/They had moved across the fabric, attempting to stabilize the sectors She/They covered.
She/They had become the continual prey of the disruptors, and, for a very long time, She/They had directed Her/Their intelligence at the problem of what they were, and where they originated. It had never been possible to come in close proximity of the thing without Her/Their objectivity being damaged by the disruption process. All Her/Their observations led towards the assumption that the disruptors were some strange halfway point between animal and machine.
She/They had never solved the problem of their coming. Before the disruptors Her/Their triple form had not existed. There had been form and there had been consciousness, but beyond that, all memory was hazy and tattered. Her/Their creation was inexorably linked with their arrival. It was almost as though they had given Her/Them birth as they first tore into the fabric of reality.
She/They was produced out of the disruption. The logical opposite to disrupters and the wake of chaos. By the same logic it should follow that She/They was their equal. That would only be disproved either when they shattered Her/Them and diffused Her/Their form into the clouds of unstable fabric, or when She/They extended a state of unchanging order throughout Her/Their entire area of experience.