We left the cells. Aaron, who was not present in this bunch of boogeymen, had taken me to the right. We went to the left, all thirty-one of us in a double line, like real kiddies going on a fieldtrip. I walked at the end, the only one without a partner. The other two night soldiers walked behind me. At first I thought the muted crackling I was hearing, like low voltage, was my imagination, based on the previous times I’d been touched by the enveloping force that was keeping these horrors alive, but it wasn’t. The night soldiers were electric zombies. Which, I thought, would be a hell of a good name for a heavy metal group.
Hamey was walking with Iota, who kept shoulder-bumping my skinny cellmate and making him stumble. I meant to say Quit it, but what came out of my mouth was “Cease that.”
Eye looked back at me, smiling. “Who died and made you God?”
“Cease,” I said. “Why would you tease someone who’s your fellow in this vile place?”
That didn’t sound like Charlie Reade at all. That kid was a lot more apt to say Quit fucking around than what had just come out of my mouth. Yet it was me, and Iota’s smile was replaced by a look of puzzled speculation. He gave a British-style salute—back of one big hand to his low forehead—and said, “Sir yes sir. Let’s see how much you order me around with a mouthful of dirt.”
Then he faced forward again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Playing Field. Ammit. Washing Up. Cake. The Gas-Jets.
1
We climbed stairs. Of course we did. When you were kept prisoner in Deep Maleen, stairs were a way of life. After ten minutes of them, Hamey was breathing raggedly. Eye grabbed his arm and hauled him along. “Hump, hump, hump, Useless! Keep up or your daddy will scold you!”
We came to a wide landing and double doors. One of the two night soldiers leading this fucked-up parade brushed his hands upward and the doors popped open. On the other side was a different, cleaner world: a white-tiled corridor with gas-jets polished to a high-gloss shine. The corridor was an upward-tending ramp, and as we walked in this unusually bright light （it made me squint, and I wasn’t alone）， I began to smell something that I knew from dozens of locker rooms: chlorine, like the cakes in urinals and the stuff in disinfecting footbaths.
Did I know what “playtime” meant by then? Yes, of course. Did I understand what the so-called Fair One was? Ditto. In the cells, eating, sleeping, and talking was all we had to do. I was careful with my questions, wanting to preserve the fiction that I was from the religious community of Ullum, and I did a lot more listening than talking. But I was still amazed by that upward-tending corridor, which looked—almost—like something in an up-to-date and well-maintained sports complex on one of those many campuses where sports are a big rah-rah deal. Lilimar had gone to rack and ruin—hell, all of Empis had—but this corridor looked great, and I had an idea what it was leading to would also be great. Maybe even greater. I wasn’t wrong.
We began to pass doors, each with a hooded gaslight over it. The first three said TEAMS. The next said EQUIPMENT. The fifth said OFFICIALS. Only as I passed that one （still Tail-End Charlie, no pun intended）， I looked at it out of the corner of my eye and OFFICIALS became something in the same tangle of runic symbols as those on Polley’s driver’s license when Kellin showed it to me. I turned my head to look back just long enough to see it said OFFICIALS again, and then a limber stick came down on my shoulder. Not too hard, but plenty hard enough to get my attention.
“Walk, kiddie.”
Up ahead the corridor ended in a splash of bright light. I followed the others onto a playing field… but what a playing field it was. I stared around like the rube from Ullum I was pretending to be. I’d had many shocks since emerging from the tunnel between my world and Empis, but never until that moment did the thought I must be dreaming come into my mind.
Jumbo gas-jets in those traylike holders I’d seen from outside rimmed the bowl of a stadium that would have done a Triple-A baseball team proud. They shot bright streams of blue-white fire into the sky, which were reflected back down off the omnipresent clouds.
The sky. We were outside.
Not only that, but it was night, even though for us the day was just beginning. That made sense if our skeletal captors weren’t able to exist in daylight, but it was still strange to realize that my usual waking-and-sleeping rhythms had been turned upside-down.
We walked across a dirt track and onto green grass atop springy turf. I had been on many playing fields—baseball and football—that were similar to this, but never one that was perfectly round. What game had been played here? There was no way to tell, but it must have been awesomely popular, because the pinwheel pathways leading in and the tiers of seats surrounding the field and rising to the stadium’s circular rim had to mean whatever it was had drawn thousands of Empisarian fans.