Chapter #23In the Court of the Dead King by: Seuzz   It's completely dark by the time you park in front of the old house, and the sodium vapor lamp at the street corner casts an acrid glow into the night. The chain-link gate clanks as you open and close it, and your boots thump dully on the sidewalk and the wooden porch. Galaxy's old doghouse huddles in the corner.
The porch light is off, and you fumble at the latch as you let yourself in. You click on the living room lights. The air is dull but clean: Connie and Laverne do a good job keeping it aired out. Your eye tracks over the furniture: the low sofa, the big rocker, the recliner.
The metal cane that still leans in the corner.
You drop your pack to the floor and walk over to it. You hesitate, then pick it up.
No thunderbolt fells you.
The cane is light but sturdy. You close your eyes and test its heft. In your mind's eye it feels like a scepter.
The atmosphere deepens, and you draw a deep breath.
The silence prickles.
You keep your eyes shut, but open your mind and spirit and heart. There are no walls where you are standing. There is no roof. But distantly, so distantly they might be the walls of night, you sense the presence of battlements. The softly glowing clouds in the purple, twilight sky are pennants. The ten bright stars are jewels in a crown.
You sink to one knee and bow your head. There is a touch at your shoulder, but still you keep your chin down.
A heavy but soft presence, like a mantle, settles about your shoulders, and you feel yourself lifted back to your feet. You are no longer alone, there are others here, though only a few dozen. Your eyes are shut fast, but you can see them clearly. Starlight—soft but bright—plays about them, and about you too. It shifts, casting different complexions of color and shadow across them, and across you. It is like a stately dance, and you know that somewhere trumpets are playing.
You smile proudly, for this is where you belong. This is the great court.
But your smile widens and sharpens. You snicker to yourself.
The music and the dance continues uninterrupted, unchanged.
You snap your eyes open. The room is dingy and yellow under the old incandescent bulb, but you can still sense the cohort marching. Its spirit dims as you withdraw, but the music never alters even as it fades to an imperceptible murmur beneath and behind the hum of the room. An air of benignity and welcome still shimmers in the air.
So the fading presence in the house is blind to your imposture. Good. Your cheek twitches as you fight down an involuntary smirk.
But infiltrations must be perfect, even in moments of solitude. You bow your head and lift the cane with reverent grace to your forehead. "I love you, Dad," you say in a voice with just the right choke to it. Gently, you put it back in its corner.
He would understand the business that comes next. And as though he were sitting in the old rocker, you carry it out exactly as it should be done.
* * * * *
You start by completely unpacking your gear. You put the waste in the trash, and set the little bit of leftover food on the kitchen counter. Weapons you lay on the table. You spread out the blankets to air. In the laundry room, you fill the washing machine with soap and water, and dump all the filthy, smelly clothes—jeans, socks, shirts, pullovers—into it in one great clump. You scrub out your canteen and water pump.
You go through the pantry and refrigerator, noting with approval and gratitude that Laverne has restocked your supplies. You repack the fresh stock with the leftovers: trail mix, jerky, dry soup mixes, coffee, some of Aparjita's Indian fry bread. You get a fresh propane tank for the portable burner.
From the bedroom you fetch and tightly fold clean clothes and blankets. You clean and polish the three knives, and exchange the old medicines for new pills, bandages, and unguents. You carefully check each arrow in the quiver, and the bow. By this time the clothes have finished washing, and you hang them outside on the line.
You are bone tired by now, but you take all the gear to the living room, triple check your cheat sheet, match each entry to an item on the floor, and patiently repack: food, clothes, medicine, cooking gear, blankets, fishing rods and lures, weapons. But something's still missing.
You groan. How could you almost forget it again? From the parlor you retrieve the battered, smelly leather Outback hat. You prop the pack by the door and balance the hat atop it.
Now you can finally get ready for bed. You peel off your clothes and throw them in the washing machine, then pad naked to the bathroom. Under lukewarm water you lather yourself all over five times, and shampoo thrice, digging deep into your scalp and beard. You squeeze the water off your body and step from the tub.
Since you have just returned from a hard session in the mountains, you permit yourself a careful and minute examination of your new body in the mirror. You are rather pale all over, except on your hands and arms and the back of your neck, but even there the color is muted. Your skin is drawn tight over rock-hard muscles, though, and tufted on the calves and forearms with black hairs, and you've a rug spread across a massive chest. You've got scars, new ones that are red and old ones that are white, slashed across your torso and limbs, and the dimple of a bullet wound in one shoulder. From this latest adventure, though, you've nothing worse than some nasty insect bites.
You can hardly lift your legs, but you trim your toenails, and clip off some of the worst curls in your beard; and with a straight-edge you scrape off the hair that carpets your throat and neck down to the top of your breast bone. From the dresser in the old bedroom you take and pull on gray tidy-whities and some jean cutoffs; from the linen closet, a single sheet. You lock the front door, put out the lights, and go into the back yard.
A bright moon is waxing in the east, and you do a double take at it. Your heart hammers. Why does the Moon bother you, even frighten you? Why does your stomach plunge, as though the ground has dissolved beneath your feet? You stare at it until your eyes hurt, but the answer never comes. And the Moon, which at first seemed to regard you back with an active, probing intelligence, gravely withdraws, and by the time you drop your smarting eyes it has once again turned into a dumb and merely reflective rock.
You wrap the sheet about your shoulders and drop cross-legged to the grass. You bow your head, fold your hands, and let your ousiarchs come. Not until they appear does it occur to you that they might have abandoned you.
But they come as they do every night, Malacandra to wrestle you, Lurga to press you. You give no quarter, and are so comfortable with your prodigies that you've no trouble turning them away, as you always do, pinning Malacandra and crushing Lurga until they dissolve like mists into your body. You open your eyes briefly into the darkness—and your senses tell you it's a little past two in the morning—and you wrap the sheet more tightly about yourself. The grass murmurs about your head, and you sink more deeply into sleep.
* * * * *
Your eyes snap open and in a smooth movement you sit up. Your muscles creak, and you stretch quickly, limbering yourself up just enough that you can move without discomfort. You scoop up the sheet and trot inside. The sky in the east is a faint pink, but the stars are still bright.
You take another shower, a scalding hot one this time, and do a quick set of stretches and push ups after drying off. You fire up the last bit of wash from last night, put your cutoffs back on, and fix a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, ham, green peppers, onions and pan-softened cherry tomatoes; a slab of pungent jack cheese; burnt toast with strawberry jam; a tall glass of orange juice, a short one of milk, and a cup of strong, bitter coffee. You wash up and put the dishes and cook ware in the rack to dry; fetch and fold the clothes from the outside line; and hang the wet ones up, trusting Laverne or Connie to bring them in the next time they're over. You then change into the day's travel clothes: fresh jeans, thick socks, a white tee, a heavier muscle shirt, and a green flannel hoodie. You bang the dried mud off your hiking boots and pull them on. You make a last check of the house, put out the lights, swing your pack onto your shoulders and shove the hat onto your head. On the porch, you kiss your finger tips and press them to the top of Galaxy's old dog house. Then it's out to the truck, tossing your gear into the back.
But you don't start it right away. Instead you check your messages. There are brief acknowledgements from Dey and Hyde-White that don't need replies. But there's also a text from Cox—"what now boss?"—that plainly needs an answer.
You can't take them with you to Bixby; the job there is far too dangerous. You don't want to leave them at loose ends in Olympia, either. Nor do you want to send them away to a Fane facility, from which it might take too long to retrieve them.
But you finally decide it's either that, or insert two of them into Steve and Connie Patterson, to act as your local eyes and ears, if nothing else.
Condign punishment for the goddamned motherfucker who got you into this mess ten years ago.  | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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