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Snake Arms found him looking at some early Gray One weaponry and armor, much of it cut from car parts and old utility tools.
"Future father of my child!" she called. She was dressed, if you could call it that, in a costume made out of silk patching, snakeskin, feathers, and lines of beads, both atavistic and glamorous somehow. She had multiple, thick layers of makeup on, giving her face an otherworldly whiteness.
"Baby come?" Valentine asked.
"Just kidding. Women don't know so fast, you know."
"We go again now?"
"What are you, punchy? You don't want to be seen arriving late under the Baron's nose."
He kept glancing down at her costume.
"Like it? The enlisted ranks do. It's what keeps me in my trailer with some of the other wives. If they hauled me to the officers' whorehouse, I think there'd be a riot."
"Top come off, you'll see riots plenty," Valentine said.
"I have to get backstage. See you later."
Valentine caught up to his group and they entered the big auditorium.
Perhaps next to the Memphis Pyramid's stadium, it was the largest indoor structure Valentine had ever entered. Unlike the Pyramid, smoke hung heavy in the air and it smelled like a pig show.
The main auditorium of the old church reminded Valentine of a gigantic pup tent. Thick wooden beams, six of them, rose to the ceiling, where skylights admitted the evening light at the pinnacle. There was a balcony-one part glassed in, presumably for the families with small children when it served as a church.
Valentine was surprised to see the cross still there. It was a simple one, made of the same thick, wrought-iron bolted beams of the ceiling, and it hung down at an angle over the congregation, making Valentine think of a set of last rites he'd seen performed by Father Max over a dying woman in his youth. He'd held the cross before her face at just that angle. Whether that had been the original architecture or a recent change Valentine couldn't tell.
There was too much activity to look at.
The Gray Ones, for the most part, filled the lower level. The church's pews had been turned into benches to better accommodate them. A few clan leaders of the Deathring Tribe had their own furniture brought in, or perhaps it was permanently placed there, waiting for them, great perches like oversized Roman chairs.
The human soldiers inhabited the balconies, emblazoned with painted battalion symbols and specialist patches. The iconography was fierce, colorful, and oddly Midwestern, featuring hawks and foxes and coyotes and an out-of-place cobra. More humans sat upon the old altar riser, which projected out into the pews, though that part of it was empty for now.
Valentine marked the Gray Baron from his seat off to the Baron's right on the main floor. He sat in a plain, high-backed chair, flanked by two flag bearers, human and Gray One, the Grog with what looked to be a red-and-black checkerboard design with a few spiky icons stitched in the square's contrasting color, and the human holding the other, the modified tricolor of the Iowa State flag, featuring a pair of sharpened parentheses crossing each other-the locked bull horns, he'd heard them called, but it might also be stolen from a pre-2022 Chanel handbag.
Valentine thought he looked like something out of another age. He could see this man sitting on a smoky Tatar's throne or commanding some cut-off Victorian regiment in Afghanistan.
He had a heavy, sloping forehead and a mountain spur of a nose hooked like a hawk's talon. But even the oversized nose was nothing compared to the Pancho Villa mustache. It was like a curtain obscuring his upper lip and the sides of his mouth. It made his expression rather difficult to read; Valentine couldn't tell if he was smiling or frowning.
A network of scars crisscrossed his face as though a maniacal game of tic-tac-toe had been played with an assortment of scalpels. Valentine had enough battle wounds to know they couldn't have been accidental. Unless the Gray Baron had stuck his head into an oversized lamprey's mouth, someone in his past had made a point of cutting him up into shreds.
Flanking him, discreetly behind the flags, were three Reapers.
Valentine had never seen Reapers like this. They were fleshy-he thought fat Reapers didn't exist, it seemed the Kurians drained off calories along with the vital aura the Reapers transmitted. Despite the bellies and love handles, their faces shone hard and alert, yellow eyes watchful of the few empty square yards in front of the Gray Baron's throne. Rich red, white, and black war paint striped their bodies in a series of Vs, and their claws and a band across their eyes were a deep blue.
The Gray Baron had a woman next to him, a rather hard-faced brunette with an athletic build. Her hair was piled up tight atop her head, bound together by a pair of stilettos in Asian hairstick fashion. Valentine wondered if the blades were just for show. She had her own stool, but chose to drape herself over the back of his chair, playing with his hair.
Next to the Gray Baron on the stage was a feeble-looking old Grog gone white and bent-Danger Close, Valentine guessed. He tried counting bullet wounds in the thick old hide and stopped after nine. He was attended by a bevy of six she-Grogs, wives, daughters, concubines, or some combination. They all carried little ceremonial working blades, like the skinning knives native tribes of the Arctic north use to separate seal blubber from skin.
A few Golden One representatives watched the celebration, stone faced. They stood apart from both the humans and the wild Grogs. The celebration was like some fantasy of a black mass. Grog warriors ran up with linked bags of netted heads, tossing them so the line hung over the massive cross at the front of the church.
A gong sounded, and the auditorium began to go quiet. From somewhere behind the curtained "stage" Valentine heard kettledrums pound slowly, a deep and thrilling sound that touched you in the pelvis. It grew louder, or perhaps the crowd grew quieter, and then the Gray Baron led Danger Close out on the platform projecting near the center point of the auditorium.
"My brothers ..." he began.
Danger Close repeated the words in a Gray One dialect Valentine more or less understood.
The Gray Baron kept it brief. The most auspicious season for war had begun.
