and shouted so that I could hardly hear the penguin.
"What do you mean?" I asked it.
The penguin did a triple axel in front of me and came to a dead stop, showering me with ice flakes. "Well," it said. "Bosch's world was also marked by huge, terrible upheavals. The years of his life were marked by pestilence and unrest: economic, social, political, religious. The writers and artists of his time reflected a nearly universal pessimism. A sour lot, all of them, obsessed with death and violence and decay." The penguin began skating backward, effortlessly. "Like you, big guy," it said.
The penguin turned and glided away under a low bridge. Above it, crossing the pond on the bridge, Tachyon was being beaten by a large toad creature with the face of Blaise who brandished a hugh wooden penis. Durg, looking like a thing of shadow, walked behind them.
Tachyon was wearing a dress but otherwise looked like the Tachyon of old, not Kelly. I could hear the wailing torment in his mind and regretted once more that I hadn't told Meadows about her. Maybe, maybe he could have gotten her out.
Not now.
"That's right, flagellate yourself with the guilt. It's good for you."
"You can read my mind?" I asked the penguin. "What there is of it." It cackled loudly.
I could not read the penguin's thoughts at all. The penguin was a vacuum in the world, an emptiness. Like Durg.
"'All that happens can be performed by demons,"' the penguin quoted. It winked. "Thomas Aquinas."
"Is that supposed to be significant?"
"Could be. Could mean that if you want to rule in a place most of the nats think of as hell, you'd better get ruthless, asshole." The penguin pointed across the bay. There I could see Manhattan, but there were no skyscrapers, just millions upon millions of people like maggots on a piece of rotting meat in July. They were fighting, quarreling, killing. Above them, demons with disfigured hateful faces spat fire on them, pissed great floods of acid, or shat streams of boiling pitch. I could hear the faint screams and smell the stench of burning flesh on the wind.' The sky was blood-red above them.
"Alchemy and witchcraft were real stuff then," the penguin intoned. I could feel the agony of the people washing over me now, a relentless, thundering, screaming tide of it. I wanted to hold my hands over my ears to shut it out.
"Devils pranced, incubi and succubi prowled the night," the penguin continued. "Monsters lurked in the dark forests."
"Like jokers in the city," I murmured as if answering some damn refrain in church. With the words, I could see a vision of my people in Jokertown, flitting like angry ghosts from shadow to shadow, many of their lips tinted with the blue of rapture. The nats turned their faces away in fear and loathing.
"Bosch's world was a world for youth. Old age began at thirty. By the time you were twelve, you were already doing your life's work." The penguin was spinning in front of me on one foot. "Only the young can be innocently cruel or unintentionally evil. Like a child, Bosch viewed the world through symbols and icons-so did everyone else. When you put on a priest's vestments, you were the church. A king was not just the ruler-he was the country."
"I am the Rox."
"So you say," the penguin replied. "Is that why so many of your jokers are looking to Blaise and Prime as the Rox's leaders? Is that why so many jokers are offering to pay the jumpers to transfer them to a nat body? You're losing it, fatboy. It's all dripping through your useless little fingers." The penguin's tone was so mocking that I reared up like a giant cobra, ready to slam my entire weight down on the fucking bird. Sledding jokers screamed as I tossed them aside like fragile toys. "I am the ruler here!" I shouted. "There is no Rox without me!"
"The human condition in Bosch's world was caught up in pessimism, folly, and evil," the penguin shrugged. "Bosch snared the visions in his fevered imagination and made them real. Can you make your dreams real, fatso?"
I "Yes!" I was shouting, but the heat from the Manhattan fires was stifling now and very close; the flames seemed to mule my roar. The snow was melting everywhere; the ice thinned underneath the penguin as it laughed at me. The toad-Blaise had stopped his torment of Tachyon to look at me with evil, calculating eyes.
Suddenly,