2
Pursey and his two-man kitchen crew came back shortly thereafter, accompanied by a pair of night soldiers. Their blue envelopes were noticeably weaker—pastel instead of almost indigo—so somewhere above us the sun was up, although probably hidden under the usual bank of clouds. Given a choice between another bowl of chicken stew and seeing daylight, I would have picked daylight.
Easy to say when your belly’s full, I thought.
We put our bowls and cups in the cart. All of them shone, making me think of how Radar had licked her bowl clean in better days. Our cell doors slammed shut. Day above, but another night for us.
Maleen settled down with rather more burps and farts than usual, but eventually those were joined by snores. Killing is a tiring and dispiriting job. The wait to see if one will live or die is even more tiring and dispiriting. I thought of adding Hamey’s pallet to my own to pad the stone floor we slept on, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I lay looking up at the always-black barred window. I was exhausted, but every time I closed my eyes I saw either Cla’s in that last moment when they were the eyes of a living man, or Stooks with his hand held to his cheek to keep his stew from dribbling out.
At last I slept. And dreamed of Princess Leah by the pool, holding my mother’s funky hairdryer—the Purple Raygun of Death. There was a purpose for that dream, either Empisarian magic or the more ordinary magic of my subconscious trying to tell me something, but before I could get hold of it, something woke me. A rattling sound and something scraping on stone.
I sat up and looked around. The dead gas-jet was moving in its hole. First clockwise, then counterclock.
“What—”
That was Iota, in the cell across from me. I put my finger to my lips. “Shhh!”
That was just instinct. Everyone else was asleep, a couple moaning with what were undoubtedly bad dreams, and there were certainly no listening devices, not in Empis.
We watched the gas-jet rock back and forth. At last it fell out and hung by its metal hose. Something was inside. At first I thought it was a big old rat, but the shadowy shape looked too angular to be a rat. Then it squeezed through and scuttered quickly down the wall to the puddly stone floor.
“What the fuck!” Iota whispered.
I stared, dumbfounded, as a red cricket as large as a tomcat hopped its way toward me on its muscular back legs. It was still limping, but only a little. It came to the bars of my cell and looked up at me with its black eyes. The long feelers rising from its head reminded me of the rabbit ears on Mr. Bowditch’s old-school TV. There was an armored plate between its eyes and a mouth that looked frozen in a fiendish grin. And there was something on its underbelly that looked like a scrap of paper.
I dropped to one knee and said, “I remember you. How’s the leg? Looks better.”
The cricket hopped into the cell. That would have been easy for a cricket in the world I’d come from, but this one was so big it had to squeeze through. It looked at me. It remembered me. I reached out, slowly, and stroked the top of its chitinous head. As if it had been waiting for my touch, it fell on its side. There was indeed a bit of folded paper on its armored belly, stuck there with some kind of glue. Gently, I pulled it free, trying not to rip it. The cricket regained its six legs—four for walking, it looked like to me, and the two big ones in back for jumping—and leaped to Hamey’s pallet. Where it resumed looking at me.
More magic. I was getting used to it.
I unfolded the paper. The note was written in letters so tiny I had to hold it close to my face to read it, but there was something else that seemed far more important to me just then. It was a little bunch of hair, held to the note with that same gluey substance. I lifted it to my nose and smelled. The aroma was faint but unmistakable.
Radar.
The note read: Are you alive? Can we help you? PLEASE REPLY IF YOU CAN. Dog is safe. C.
“What is it?” Eye whispered. “What did it bring you?”
I had paper—one small sheet—from Pursey, and the stub of pencil. I could reply, but to say what?
“Charlie! What did it—”
“Shut up!” I whispered back. “I need to think!”
Can we help you, the note asked.
The big question had to do with that pronoun. The note was from Claudia, of course. Somehow, probably because of Radar’s sense of smell and innate direction finder, my dog had found her way to Claudia’s house of sticks. That was good, that was wonderful. But Claudia lived alone. She was an I, not a we. Had Woody joined her? Perhaps even Leah, mounted on the faithful Falada? They would not be enough, royal blood or no royal blood. But if they had mustered others, the grayfolk… was that too much to hope for? Probably it was. Except, if they really believed I was the promised prince, then maybe…