A City Dreaming by Daniel Polansky Read Free Book Online Page B

on him that you could see. But after a moment, the goblin faltered, looked down at his roller skates, and backpedaled into the dark.
    There was a brief moment when M thought maybe they’d be able to bluff their way past, but then there was the sound of loosed steel and one of the goblins was angling a rusted dagger at Stockdale.
    Hari Kumar Stockdale was many things: He was a lover of nineteenth-century adventure stories. He was a frequent wearer of hats. He had once seen service on a whaling ship. He could not use chopsticks.
    He was a very hard man to kill. Inside of his jacket pocket was a gravity knife, a four-inch handle with a blade much larger, and then it was outside his pocket, and then it was open. If M knew Stockdale at all, and M did, this was one of the happiest moments of his life, playing Aragorn in the dim outskirts of reality. Worth the trip, you had best believe. And he proved himself up to the challenge, neatly dodging the goblin’s attack, pivoting and responding in a fashion that left the green-skinned creature bled white and tumbling, gracelessly, into the train tracks.
    The remaining hobs shrieked and faded back the way they had come.
    â€œYou don’t really carry that everywhere, do you?” M asked.
    â€œOnly when I leave the house,” Stockdale said.
    â€œWhere are they going?” D8mon asked, sounding a bit worried. It belatedly occurred to M that he didn’t really know D8mon all that well, knew him to get a drink with maybe, but not to stand back-to-back against the rising tide.
    â€œTo fetch us some tea and scones, I would think,” M said. But just in case he was wrong, they overturned a couple of the nearby benches, barricading themselves along the platform.
    There was a horn blast that made M think of a hanged man shitting himself, and then they rolled out of the darkness four deep, carrying knives and chains and planks of wood with nails sticking out of them. They hooted and they hollered and they screamed madness in their gutter speech. Stockdale held his blade aloft, looked ecstatic to be doing so. One of the goblins came closer than it ought, and Stockdale’s counterfeit Caliburn struck a second time, and the thing screamed and fled backward, missing an ear and much of its face.
    â€œThe blood of Edward the Black runs in my veins!” Stockdale bellowed. “William the Marshal and John Churchill! Chandragupta and Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur! I am Hari Kumar Stockdale, and I will die with my boots on!”
    M was happy that someone was having a good time. The pack, the scrum, perhaps even the mob of goblins, were now wary of the barricade and of the flashing blade that hid beyond it, contented themselves by skating back and forth just out of reach of melee weapons and shouting.
    D8mon pulled an iPod out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, pointed skyward. It crackled and sparked for a quarter of a second, and then there was a sound like a MIDI thunderclap and a streak of light seared the chest of the foremost redcap, before dovetailing and hitting two more behind him. The rest scattered back into the darkness.
    â€œNot bad,” Stockdale said.
    â€œThank you,” D8mon said. “I wish I’d brought my laptop, then you’d really have seen something.”
    â€œWhat’s the hourglass read?” M asked.
    D8mon looked over his shoulder for a minute. “There’s less sand in the top half than previously.”
    â€œLovely.”
    â€œThey seem to have slacked off, at least.”
    But then the platform began to, if not shake, at least resound loudly enough that one could be forgiven for thinking it was shaking. The thing that lumbered into the torchlight did so on its own two feet, rather than gliding along on a set of wheels. The thing did not seem graceful enough to remain upright, had it been roller-skating, though it made up for its lack of agility by being huge and muscled and mean-looking. It was