The one who had no name yet opened his eyes. A big dark blur hovered over a smaller blur, connecting with it in some particularly disturbing way. This picture caused an inexplicable revulsion in the newly awakened one, and he immediately closed his eyes again. In the ensuing emptiness, he felt pleasant waves of peace. Though, he might not have been able to give a name to any of the feelings he had just experienced.
However, this idyll did not last long; his hearing began to break through. The two melodies that emerged from the void intertwined, then soloed, appearing to his inner eye in waves of colorful dancing. Eventually, one and then another melody turned into voices. One of these, deep and gruff, like the screech of a rusting gearbox, was overpowered by the other, which sounded like the ringing bell of a chime. They intertwined and separated again unpredictably, unlike any conversation the awakened one had ever heard.
But had he heard any conversations before? And what is a gearbox? As soon as he thought about it, he was surprised to find these very words in himself, giving names to the events he was aware of. And then he was surprised that he was able to discover the very fact of thinking. In an instant, many urges arose in his whole being: to get up, to walk, to help those who were talking. Perhaps he could be useful to them. But no one called him. And yet he should be called. How strange. He fidgeted uneasily and then suddenly fell, crushed by his own body.
"Did it twitch? You said..." asked the ringing voice, belonging to a young man in the Cult robe, with his head hooded.
"I did..." the big guy in a flight suit with a flushed face answered gruffly.
He looked even more intimidating in the light of the morning moons, but the young man showed no signs of fear and held himself with confidence.
"Yeah... You can't be trusted with anything. You use the signal, you bring in the doll that supposedly doesn't function... Or maybe it has the 'eye' in it? And they're looking at us right now out of that metal ass," he pointed at the clumsily fallen doll, and then applauded, "Well done."
The big guy walked over to the doll, picked it up by the leg and sat it down on the stool, leaning its back against the wall. The doll slouched in the pose of a sad drunkard.
"Is that all right with you?" he looked angrily at the man in the robe and hissed through his teeth, "We had no choice. We waited as long as we could. We followed Lila's trail and stumbled upon it in the canal alleys. What were we supposed to do? Leave it there? It's our last lead."
"I've already heard that," the young man replied sadly, and walked toward the column. The wall of the town hall, sticking out in the middle of the thick white fog, was descending behind it into the darkness.
This heartforsaken quarter did not rise to the second, much less the third tier of the City, so it was surrounded on all sides by a fence of tall houses. The bell had long since been removed from the tower – and there, at its very top, on the planked floor, the man in the robe kicked a piece of brick that had fallen from the wall and sadly disappeared into the white veil. The young man sighed and continued:
"And I'll say it again. I can't help you, I don't know where they took her."
Snorri bared his teeth and struck one of the columns so hard that the plaster fell from the domed vault above their heads, and the column twitched treacherously, risking the entire structure collapsing on them.
"Hey, easy there, last thing I need is to die because of another hysteric of yours," the gurgling voice of the octopus came from the dark corner. "Although something tells me someday I will."
"You can't help the Heart if you kill us all right here," the man in the robe sniggered.
"Don't joke with me," the big guy snapped, turning away to another arch.
"I don't. I'm afraid you'll both get caught if you go looking for her," the man grumbled and kicked another piece of brick. It flew down from the town hall, raising a cloud of heart dust that reached for his face.
"You're right," the octopus gurgled.
"Don't piss me off, Raud, don't stand for this scoundrel," Snorri grumbled angrily.
"I stand for common sense. We're wasting our time instead of searching for the rune," the octopus gurgled back nonchalantly.
"That's what I mean!" the big guy roared. "We've got to find Lila, or the whole thing will be for owlies' food, moon damn and blast them."
The man in the robe sighed and said:
"I think she can only be in the Central Prison, nowhere else."
"What if they took her straight to the Cult?" Snorri rumbled in a bass.
"They don't have heart furnaces. So it's useless to, ahem, torture. And they need to loosen her wooden tongue. Only the Central Prison has heart furnaces left."
"How savage. Heart furnaces," the octopus gurgled.
"And what did you expect?" the man in the robe seemed surprised.
"I'd like to burn the whole damned City in these very furnaces," the big guy growled.
"Then how will you be any different?" the octopus sniffed.
"Screw your philosophy, Raud, how do we find Lila?" Snorri roared again.
Their quarrel was interrupted by an unexpected rattling voice:
"Glug-glug-glug-glug-glug! Help me! Hark? We’re familiar with the monkey... Baron would have had it by now! Bloody soulless doll!"
Everyone turned around at the voice. The doll was sitting on the stool, raising its head and looking around at the audience.
"Help! Hark! We're familiar with the monkey! Already has it! Soulless doll!" it repeated and stood up from the stool, walked over to the man in the robe, raised its head at him and repeated, "Help! Monkey! Doll!"
Snorri got next to the doll in two leaps, turned it toward him with a sudden movement, sat down to face it, and almost shouted:
"Where is Lila?"
The doll slightly opened its painted eyes slammed by themselves, slowly wiped the saliva from the visor with its hand, and quietly repeated in its rattling voice, "Glug... glug... glug... Help... Hark... We're familiar with the monkey... Baron would have had it by now... Bloody soulless doll! Winter is approaching."
Snorri lowered his head.
"What does it mean? Glug... glug..." asked the man in the robe.
"Winter is approaching," the octopus gurgled.
"I didn't know that numbskulls could talk," the young man said in surprise.
"You don't seem to know anything at all," Snorri snapped.
"Hey! Take it easy, would you?"
Snorri, pleased that he'd finally managed to put the man out of temper, turned to the octopus and winked. The octopus gave Snorri a long look and let out a contemptuous bubble that rose and burst right in front of the big guy's face.
"Those are the words from the Last Poet's lullaby," said the man in the Cult's robe after a long pause. "Glug by glug, the prison's draining, Chug by chug, cold winter's reigning, Glug by glug, all dreams and wishes, fade with it away."
"Lullaby indeed!" grinned the octopus, "Such a lullaby is only fit for scaring."
"I liked it," the man frowned.
"So, the Central Prison, then," Snorri nodded and turned to the doll, "'Glug-glug' for sure?"
The doll looked at him in amazement, started to show big waves with its hands, and hissed in its ringing voice.
Snorri stood up abruptly, took the doll under his arm, and jumped out into one of the arches. The octopus levitated in the same direction.
"Monkey! Doll!" there was a muffled rattle.
The man in the robe walked to the edge and looked at the balcony platform below him, where the big guy was already pulling the aircycle out.
"Don't thank me for the clue, well, and for answering the call."
"We don't," Snorri muttered, getting into his chair and strapping the doll into the passenger seat.
"If I were you, I wouldn't expect anything good after this meeting and I wouldn't come here anymore," the octopus gurgled and waved to Al.
The latter bowed to the octopus and disappeared into the archway just as the aircycle took off from the tower and began to rise, toward the rooftops faintly colored by dawn.
The wind slapped the doll's face, and the one who had no name yet stared in amazement at the flowing river of the City's eras sprouting into each other. The metal piles of the railroad bridges jutted out of the masonry with tiled roofs. Above them, the imperial stone slabs that held the middle tier hovered. Its belly was riddled with the pipes and boilers of steam engines, and gleamed in some places with the crumbling generators of electrical substations.
The animated one stretched out his arm to grab the spire with the crescent moon, but failed: the spire remained on the slowly passing roof. Then the one who had no name yet, tried to grab the spire that was moving swiftly in his field of vision. But that failed, too. At that moment, a bright disc appeared from behind the rooftops on the horizon. And the doll stretched its hand toward it, groping in vain for air.
"What's wrong with him? Is he signaling? Maybe the jerk was right, and we've got the 'eye' here." Snorri grumbled, looking at the doll in the driving mirror.
Raud, hooked on the man's shoulder, turned his muzzle toward the doll:
"I think this poor guy wants to catch the sun."
But the animated one was no longer looking at the sun, but at his hand, which seemed to him beautiful and exquisite, burning with an orange light, so unexpectedly familiar.
"A doll!" he joyfully proclaimed, raising both hands in the air and looking at them.
"Doll, doll, Baron, we're familiar with the monkey," Snorri mocked. "Tell me what floor Lila is kept on."
"Doll! Monkey!" shouted the doll, waving its arms joyfully.
"Fabulous idiot," Snorri sighed.
"Help! Glug-glug! Winter!" the doll yelled.
"Raud, do something, for all the moons' sake, or I'll break it," the big guy pleaded.
"What can I do?" the octopus gurgled back, crawled from Snorri's shoulder to the back seat, and asked the doll, "What's your name?"
"Glug," the doll answered in surprise, turning its attention to the octopus. "Monkey! Glug-glug!"
"Yes, yes, I know," Raud looked tiredly at the doll. "Where in the 'glug-glug'?"
"Soulless doll," the doll replied affirmatively and folded its arms on the chest.
Raud, swaying like blue jelly in the wind, cast one more glance at the doll and crawled onto Snorri's back. The big guy frowned at the octopus and steered the aircycle downward, circling toward the approaching darkness of the artificial lake; the high wall surrounding it was already ablaze with the scarlet rays of dawn.
Snorri landed on a wall near the hydroelectric power plant at the north end of the complex, where, for reasons having more to do with sloppiness than stroke of luck, there were no sentries at this early hour. The big guy got off his flying motorcycle and walked to the edge of the wall. The water rested beneath him in a steady darkness. Raud flew off the big guy's shoulder and lowered himself onto the concrete surface beside him, stretching its tentacles.
"The plan is simple," said Snorri and adjusted his holster. "You swim under it and activate the lift mechanism. The emergency lever is under the water right at the bottom, near the north end of the wall, where the ladder ends. Once it goes up, I come in. You wait exactly five minutes and put it back down, then you get out to the aircycle and pick me up on the way out. What could be easier than that?"
"Hm. This plan looks like a sieve," Raud replied with a stream of skeptical bubbles.
"Everything we do lately is like a sieve," Snorri muttered, and then asked loudly, "Do you have any other suggestions?"
Raud fell into a muse, and after a significant pause, he asked:
"And how are you supposed to find her?"
"I'll take this idiot with me," the big guy, followed by the octopus, turned to the doll, that immediately responded and waved its hand friendly: "We're familiar with the monkey!"
"Sometimes I think it understands you," Raud said with a chuckle.
"So do I," replied Snorri.
"Bloody soulless doll!" nodded the one who had no name yet.
The big guy took off his heavy jacket. With only his pants on, and the doll tied behind his back, he climbed down the metal ladder from the wall and stepped carefully into the water so as not to draw attention to himself. The octopus levitated after him and disappeared into the dark smoothness, breaking up the surface in concentric waves. The one who had no name yet, for the first time, watched with keen attention as the last stars disappeared, giving way to the bright blue dome of the sky. Snorri's arms were gently pushing the water apart. But the wind was blowing at their backs, so the upper layer of water flowed in the opposite direction. This fascinated the passenger remarkably, and he didn't even notice how they reached the pier in the middle of the lake. In the semi-darkness of the well, formed by a high wall that still did not let the dawn in, concrete slabs connected by wires swayed gently on thick air cushions.
Snorri held on to the edge of the pier and waited. The one who had no name noticed that the big guy was shivering from the cold, and that shiver passed on to him.
"W-when we g-go in, you hit the right shoulder if to the right, the left shoulder if to the left. If straight ahead, you hit both shoulders. Going back, you put your stumps on my shoulders and don't put them down. Is that c-clear? If it's clear, hit once," Snorri said through gritted teeth.
The one who had no name slapped both shoulders of the big guy once.
"Good boy! If you continue at this pace, you will be promoted from idiot to jerk," Snorri chuckled, and then, as if on cue, the pier beneath them began to shuffle. The water rumbled. The spire came out of the water follow by the tower of the Central Prison, with the symbol of the dragon on it. The giant building crawled upward, higher and higher, washing the uninvited guests with a torrent of waves and almost tearing Snorri away from the pier. When it rose to the level of the wall and the waves calmed down, the big guy pulled himself up and got to his feet. At that moment, the metal door in front of them opened and the sleepy face of a policeman on duty appeared.
By the time the guard realized what was happening, Snorri was already in front of him, punching the man between the eyes with his ponderous fist so hard that colored stars flashed like a fan inside his dwindling consciousness. Snorri stepped into a dim room, lit by the gas and oil lamps, which smelled damp and fear. The doll hit both of his shoulders, and he sprinted down the wide central hall; two other smaller aisles, separated from it by arched vaults, extended to the right and left. The animated one whirled his head around, tapping the man's shoulders with both hands. On either side, the guards turned their heads in surprise and the prisoners stopped moaning as they watched the rushing guests go by.
Snorri had already reached the broad well, which led down a spiral stone staircase, when a whistle blew and the guards shouted somewhere above. The doll pointed to the well and Snorri dived into it, jumping from step to step. Like a hurricane, the big guy dashed down to the lower floor and came to a halt, breathing heavily, in front of a corridor drowning in steamy clouds.
"Where to now?" he wheezed.
The animated one tapped again with both hands.
"No imagination at all," the big guy sniffed and slowly walked forward.
The empty cells darkened to his right. And in the distance to his left, from under a door with a wrought iron pattern, a flickering light could be seen. As Snorri approached it, the doll slapped his left shoulder. The big guy leaned against the warm metal and listened, then opened it abruptly.
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