“Fight?” Stanley repeated. His face and Cup’s face was less than a handspan apart now. “I don’t need to fight. You know what would happen if you touched me? Maybe I should let you find out. Maybe I should let you throw a punch. You look like you want to.”
“Cup, don’t,” I said. For I just knowed something bad was going to happen if she did. I think Cup knowed it too. She didn’t make no move to hit Stanley, nor even to push him away from the gun, but just stood there. By and by, he shouldered past her and went back down the stairs.
“Guess you’re not as stupid as you look,” he called out as he went.
Cup and me glanced each to other. We was both of us troubled by what we just had seen. “If I could work this thing,” Cup said, nodding towards the gun, “I’d blow that little turd into pieces.”
I shaked my head. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to try, any more than it would of been a good idea to punch Stanley in the head. Magic wasn’t a thing I believed in mostly, but there was lots of things about Sword of Albion that seemed somewhat like magic. This was a place as big as a village made all out of metal, that floated on the water like it was made out of cork. It was a place where doors opened by their own selves – at least sometimes – and where even tech like the DreamSleeve could be made to do things it wasn’t meant to. I thought we should keep our heads down until we knowed a little more about what was going on here.
There was a story a boy named Dog Runner told me once, when we was sitting around a fire in Many Fishes village late at night. It was about a fisherman who was catched out in a heavy storm and blowed out of the lagoon into the deep ocean. His boat turned over and he fell into the water and sunk down and down. When he was come to the very bottom, he found a village there that was just exactly like his own. Everyone he knowed was there, including his own wife and their two children. The onliest difference was that the people there had big round eyes like fishes’ eyes, that didn’t ever blink.
“Am I here too?” the man asked his wife. “Is there another one of me, like there’s another one of everyone else?”
“There was one like you,” his wife said. “But he’s gone up to live in your world. And you got to live down here with us now for aye and ever.” And she hugged him close, and the children come and sit on the bed beside the two of them, and the man knowed it was true. His skin crawled at the thought of one of these fish-eye people coming back home to his house and his wife opening the door all unknowing.
“Let me speak to your chief,” the man said. “For mercy’s sake, let me speak with him and beg him to let me go.”
“Our chief is the wizard Stannabanna,” the wife said, “that some call a demon. And the onliest way you get to speak to him is by being dead.”
Then the three of them et the fisherman, flesh and bone and hair.
I thought of that story now, as I stood on Sword of Albion’s deck and watched Stanley walking away from us, with his shoulders hunched over and his hands in his pockets. In thinking of it, I seen for the first time how saying Stanley’s name – his full name of Stanley Banner – was almost the same as saying Stannabanna. The boy wasn’t no wizard or demon, or at least he didn’t show like one. But this place was like that village in the sea – a place where real things was turned upside down and inside out, and there wasn’t no easy way of getting home again to what we knowed.
8
By the time we come down off the platform, Stanley was a long way across the deck and we had got to run to catch him up. When we did, he didn’t slow down or even bother to look at us. It seemed like he was sick of the sight of us.
“Oh hey,” he said. “It’s Saint Francis of Assissi and Robin the Girl Wonder. How’s business, guys? Still looking out for all god’s creatures?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, except that he was making fun of us again, so there didn’t seem no point in saying anything back.
We come to the doors of the shaking room, that I knowed now was kind of like a bucket in a well, drawed up and down to take people from one level of the big ship to another. There was a silver plate next to the door down here, just like the one I seen up at the top. Stanley stepped in front of the plate and touched his hand to it. The doors opened but he didn’t go in. He turned back to face us again. Then he looked past us and give a kind of a gasp. He pointed with his finger to some place off behind us.
“Oh no,” he said. “Someone just tossed a bag of kittens over the rail.”
When we turned to look, Stanley stepped backward at a fast lick, inside the shaking room.
“Jesus,” he said. “Oldest trick in the book.”
The doors slid closed.
Cup seen it happen and jumped forward to stop it, but she was just too late. “Hey!” she yelled. She banged on the doors with her hand, but they stayed shut. “Hey, dead god damn it! We’re stuck out here!”
“He’s probably gone by now,” I said. “The room goes up and down.”
“I know it, Koli. I figured that the same time you did. But I bet that little needle-fart is right on the other side of this door right now, laughing at us.”
“Then let’s not give him no more to laugh at,” I said. I walked away from the doors, out into the open space in the middle of the deck. “There’s got to be other ways to get back inside.”
I turned in a slow circle, looking all around. The towers mostly looked the same, except for the ones that was burned or fallen down. We was too far away to be able to see whether any of them had doors at the bottom, but it seemed like a good bet that they would.
We went to the nearest one and then to the next, and on and on, looking for a way in. Some had no doors that we could find. The ones we did find wouldn’t open to us, either when we walked up to them or when we knocked. It was getting on towards evening now and the wind, which had been fierce cold this whole time, was getting even more of a bite to it.
“We got to find some shelter,” Cup said, “or we’re like to freeze out here.”
Just then, I seen another door up ahead of us and across on the other side of the boat. It was not a way into one of the towers but a trapdoor set into the deck its own self. I nudged Cup and pointed, and we both set off towards it. Even if it wasn’t nothing but a store space, I thought we could climb down inside and close the hatch over us.
When we got closer, we seen that the trapdoor’s cover was open all the way. It had a big bolt on it, and the bolt was on the inside, so it could not be no cupboard under there. A few steps more brung us to the top of a big, wide flight of stairs going down under the deck.
We stopped and looked each to other. It was really dark down there. After the first three or four steps, there wasn’t anything you could see at all. It was like looking down a well.
But then Cup set her foot on the top step and lights come on all at once, all the way down.
“You think this is a good idea?” I said. “If we get lost down there, we might not ever get found again.”
“Better than getting frost-bit out here,” Cup said, and started down. I was just about to set off after her when I heard a kind of a whining sound like a bluefly might make. Something shot down out of the sky to stand right in front of us about three feet off the ground.