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Terrifying and just a little magnificent.
The front of a tavern had been ripped away and its bar broken up. Bottles were being handed out to whoever passed by. Jane found herself clutching a pint of peppermint schnapps. It tasted dreadful. But after a while she got used to it.
Smashing and looting, the mob flowed forward until something up ahead—a dead end, a split in the road—made it pause in indecision. Slowed to a walk, Jane again spotted Li
Li
Bone Head certainly looked the part. His skull was enormously thick, lopsided, and deathly white under close-cropped hair. Blackwork sun wheels were tattooed onto his forehead and cheeks. His eyes were lifeless, pits of ash.
He gri
Desperately ignoring him, Jane said, "Do you have any idea where we are? You don't have to come with me. Just point me in the right direction and I'll find my own way home."
With withering scorn, Li
Li
"The Barrows!" somebody shouted. Li
They moved at a fast stride, almost a trot. The intoxicating smell of their sweat surrounded Jane, like rotting fruit. The mob was not chanting now, but making an extraordinary noise, a surf of voices with occasional high cries lifting up from the surface in sonic spikes, and a bass rumble that vibrated in the pit of her stomach and never stopped. It buzzed and crackled in her head like an amphetamine high, constant, unchanging, and yet complexly varied, a symphony to chaos.
Jane ran a hand through her hair. It crackled. She no longer wanted to get away. What was happening was too exciting, too vital in an awful way, to relinquish. She had to see what came next. Weightless, a charged particle in the current of the mob, she let it carry her away, offering not the least resistance to its will.
Abruptly Jane was inside an appliance store. Everywhere dim forms were snatching up camcorders, CD players, minifridges. A box was dumped into her arms. Bewildered, she took it.
A soot black imp jumped from the shadows and cheerily shouted, "Fire! Fear! Fire! Get out! Get out!"
Flames leaped up behind him.
Everyone tried to squeeze out the front at once. For a fearful instant Jane thought she was going to be crushed and feared for her life. She was blocks down the road before she thought to look down and see what she had.
A microwave oven.
It really was a remarkable bit of luck. She had a serious need for a microwave back in her room, and because there was no way she could ever shoplift anything so large, she decided to keep it.
Lugging the oven, though, Jane found she could not keep up. By degrees she lagged behind, steadily slipping to the rear of the mob. Until finally, arms and shoulders aching, she had to sit down on some steel-and-concrete steps by an old industrial canal. She felt exhausted.
The last of the mob flowed away. The air chilled. The roar of voices sank to a mutter, one that rose sporadically from different parts of the City, as if the mob were a monster that could exist in several places at once. She stared down at her feet, at the litter of rusty metal scrap, plastic crack vials, and cigarette butts. Her head was still buzzing.
The mob had sucked up all vitality from the streets and buildings as it passed. In its train paint blistered, popped, and released spores of rust in tiny puffs. Asphalt buckled. Stucco fell away from brick in patches. Trash multiplied by the curbs and bobbed in the oily waters of the canal. Walls crumbled.
From the interiors of gutted buildings, weeds sprouted with necromantic speed. As Jane watched, a vine pushed its way from a crack at the base of a concrete bridge pier, and grew into a labyrinthine tangle of thorns. Deep in its heart roses bloomed whose attar, like spoiled milk, drew in some species of winged sprites no larger than her fist.
With a tinkling of small bells the sprites sped over the canal. They traveled in pairs, hauling equally diminutive prisoners at the ends of twin ropes no thicker than threads. Headlong they plunged into the gloomy thicket.
Tiny screams pierced the night.
As an alchemist-to-be, Jane understood natural processes. Balance had been destroyed; it had to be restored. But she didn't have to watch. She had caught her breath. It was time to go. She stood, leaving the microwave on the steps. She didn't really want the damned thing after all.
A gout of vomit splashed the road. She danced back, but still flecks of it spattered her shoes.
Three hyena-headed creatures leaned over the rail of an overpass above her. "Hey, watch it!" she shouted.
One, the sick one, appeared not even to notice her. A second brayed at her distress. The third stepped up on the rail, unbuttoned his fly and shook his prick at her. "Bite on this, honey!"
"Shitheads!" she yelled.
"This bitch," the prick-waggler said coldly, "needs to be taught a lesson." His friend was already casting about for a way down. "Over there!" he cried. Leaving their drunken comrade clutching the rail, they ran toward a stairway on the far side of the bridge. Terrified, Jane ducked into a doorway and discovered that it was the entrance to a less obvious stairway up to the street they had just vacated.
At the top she paused as first a dozen and then a hundred misshapen creatures raced by. Her tormenters had been front-ru
Safe again.
Jane had not run far when an enormous roar exploded up ahead. Abruptly the street opened into a great five-sided square. Like gas molecules escaping from compression the mob sped up and spread out to fill the new space. With a thrill of fear, Jane realized where they were.
This was Oberon Square. On four sides were taverns, record outlets, hardware stores, haberdasheries, and the like. On the fifth the massive obsidian front of the single most infamous penitentiary in all the Great Gray City jutted over the plaza like the massive prow of an ominous black freighter.
The Long Barrows.
Confronted with the place itself, the mob proved oddly reluctant to attack. It broke into smaller groups on the other four sides, ignoring the obvious target. The storefronts were covered with security grates and blast screens but there were unprotected windows higher up. The mob pelted them with stones and brickbats.
On an impulse too swift for apprehension, Jane picked up an empty beer bottle, cocked her arm, and threw. Her window shattered. She tossed her head and crowed. A troll patted her back, making her stagger.
It felt great.
The madness of the fairy host engaged her fully then, wrapping about her like a pair of gauze wings. She took a deep breath, drawing the swirling, effervescent feeling deep into her lungs and abdomen. Once done, it was inevitable. She was one of them now, body and soul, a citizen of the mob.