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River of Blue Fire, Page 26

Tad Williams


  It was strange to think of the old house again, to see so clearly his mother’s heavy curtains and thick Savonnerie carpets, when all of it—and all of the people except him—were so many, many years gone.

  Felix Jongleur was the oldest human being on Earth. Of that he felt certain. He had lived through both World Wars of the previous century, had watched the foundation and decay of the Communist nations of the east and seen the rise of the city-states along the Pacific Rim. His fortune, established first in West Africa, in bauxite and nickel and sisal, had grown with the years, spreading into industries of which his hommes des affaires father, Jean-Loup, could never have even dreamed. But though his fortune was self-renewing, Jongleur himself was not, and as the century and the millennium waned, the bolder news agencies readied their obituaries, with the emphasis on the mysteries and unfounded assertions that had clouded his long career. But the obituaries remained unused. In the decades after the turn of the new century, he had abandoned day-to-day use of his dying body in favor of an existence in virtual space. He had slowed his physical aging by, among other things, experimental cryogenic techniques, and as the facilities of virtuality had improved—in large part because of research funded out of his own fortune, and the fortunes of like-minded folk he had gathered around him—he had found himself reborn into a second life.

  Like Osiris in truth, he thought. The Lord of the Western Horizon, slain by his brother, then resurrected by his wife to live forever. The master of life and death.

  But even in the sleep of gods, there could be bad dreams.

  “Great is he who brings life to the grain, and to green things,” someone was singing nearby. “O, Lord of the Two Lands, he who is mighty in worship and infinite in wisdom, I beg that you hear me.”

  He took his hands away from his face—how long had he been sitting this way?—and frowned at the priest who writhed on his belly at the bottom of the steps. Sometimes the rituals he had designed annoyed even him. “You may speak.”

  “O, Divine One, we have received a communication from our brethren in the temple of your dark brother, the burned one, the red, raw one.” The priest bumped his face against the floor, as though even to speak of that entity pained him. “They wish most urgently to drink of your wisdom, O Great House.”

  Set. The Other. Jongleur—no, he was fully Osiris again; he needed the armor of godhood—straightened on his throne. “Why was I not told at once?”

  “They have only now spoken to us, Lord. They await your divine breath.”

  No one would interrupt his meditations for a problem germane only to the simulation—it was unthinkable—so he knew it must be the engineers.

  Osiris gestured, and a window opened before him in the air. For half an instant, he could see the anxious face of one of the technicians from the Temple of Set, then the image froze. The technician’s voice fizzed and died, then crackled into life again, like a radio signal during sunspot activity.

  “. . . Need a greater . . . readings are . . . please give us . . .” The voice did not come back.

  The god was perturbed. He would have to go to them. He would have none of his usual time to prepare. But it was not to be helped. The Grail—everything—depended on the Other. And only he, of all the Brotherhood, realized how precarious a foundation that was.

  He gestured again. The window disappeared. A score of priests carrying something huge and flat came hurrying forward from the shadows at the back of the great hall. The other priests struggled to get out of the way, but some could not and were knocked down and then trampled by those carrying the ponderous burden. Osiris took a breath to calm himself, to find the peaceful center where problems were solved and death itself had been so often outwitted, as two score of priests raised the polished bronze mirror before him, groaning beneath its immense weight.

  Osiris rose, and watched himself rise, observing with a little satisfaction even in this moment the majesty of the Lord of the West standing before his throne. He walked forward until he could see nothing but his own brazen reflection, paused for one last moment, then stepped through.

  The temple was deserted except for half a dozen men in desert-pale robes. The priest-technicians were so upset that none of them remembered to kneel as Osiris appeared, but the god put aside his displeasure for the moment. “I could not understand your message. What is wrong?”

  The chief engineer pointed to the door of the tomb chamber. “We can’t get through. It . . . he . . . won’t let us.”

  Osiris thought the man seemed curiously intense, his energy almost feverish. “Are you speaking metaphorically?”

  The priest shook his head. “He’s resisting communication, but his readings are very, very low. Frighteningly low.” He took a breath, and ran his hands through hair that did not grace the shaven-headed sim. “It started about an hour ago, a real fast downturn. That’s why Freimann was trying to communicate—just to see if he was capable of it, or if he was . . . I don’t know what you’d call it. Sick.” Again the quaver in the priest’s voice, as though at any moment he might burst out laughing or weeping.

  “Someone other than me spoke to him?”

  The head shake was more emphatic now. “Freimann tried. I told him we should wait until you got here. But he was top of the onsite CoC and he overruled me. He got on the direct line and tried voice communication.”

  “And nothing happened.”

  “Nothing? No, something definitely happened. Freimann’s dead.”

  The god shut his eyes for a brief moment. So this was the reason for the technician’s overexcited state. Would he have to deal with two emergencies at the same time, a tantrum by the Other and a mutiny among his hired lackeys? “Tell me.”

  “Not much to tell. Just . . . he opened the line. Asked if . . . if the Other was there. Did it . . . did he, sorry . . . did he want something. Then Freimann made a funny noise and just . . . stopped. His sim went rigid. Kenzo dropped offline and found him on his office floor, bleeding from the nose and the corners of his eyes. Profound cerebral hemorrhage, as far as we can tell.”

  Osiris swallowed an involuntary curse; it seemed inappropriate to bring other deities into his own godworld, even in name only. “Is someone taking care of it?”

  “It?” A strangled laugh escaped the technician. “You mean Freimann? Yes, security has been called in. If you mean the other ‘it,’ none of us are going near him. We’ve been convinced. He doesn’t want to talk to us, we don’t want to talk to him.” The laugh again, threatening to turn into something else. “This wasn’t in the job description, you know.”

  “Oh, pull yourself together. What is your name?”

  The priest seemed taken aback—as if a god had time to memorize every one of his worshiper’s names. “My real name?”

  Behind the mask of the deity, Osiris rolled his eyes. Discipline was breaking down entirely. He would have to think of a way to stiffen this whole department. He had believed he had hired tough-minded types. Obviously, he had underestimated the effect of daily contact with the Other. “Your Eyptian name. And make it quick, or security will have to drop by your office, too.”

  “Oh. Oh. It’s Seneb, sir. Lord.”

  “Seneb, my servant, there is nothing to fear. You and the others will remain at your positions.” He had been tempted to give them all the afternoon off while he dealt with the Other’s latest bit of bad behavior, but he didn’t want them talking to each other, reinforcing their fears and comparing notes. “I will speak with him myself. Open the connection.”

  “He’s closed it, sir—Lord.”

  “I realize that. But I want it open, at least on our end. Do I make myself clear?”

  The priest made a shaky obeisance and scuttled off. Osiris drifted forward until he hung before the great doors to the tomb chamber. The hieroglyphs incised in the dark stone glowed, as if aroused by his presence. The d
oors swung open.

  Inside, the subtle cues of a throughputting connection were gone. The black basalt sarcophagus lay as cold and inert as a lump of coal. There was none of the usual charged air, none of the feelings of standing before a portal into a not-quite-comprehensible elsewhere. The god spread his bandaged arms before the great casket.

  “My brother, will you talk to me? Will you tell me what is paining you?”

  The sarcophagus remained a mute lump of black stone.

  “If you need help, we will give it to you. If something is hurting you, we can make it stop.”

  Nothing.

  “Very well.” The god floated closer. “Let me remind you that I can also give pain. Do you wish us to make it more difficult for you? You must speak to me. You must speak to me, or I will cause you even greater unhappiness.”

  There was a subtle change in the room, a tiny adjustment of angles or light. As Osiris learned forward, he heard the voice of Seneb, the priest, in his ear.

  “Lord, he’s opened . . .”

  “Shut up.” Idiot. If these were not such difficult positions to fill properly, I would have him killed this instant. The god waited expectantly.

  It rose up as if from some unimaginable distance, a shred of voice from the bottom of a deep, deep well. At first Osiris could hear it only as a sussuration, and for a moment he feared he had been mistaken, that he was listening to the movement of the sands of the endless desert outside. Then he began to hear words.

  “. . . an angel touched me . . . an angel . . . touched me . . . an angel . . . touched . . . me . . .”

  Over and over, the refrain went on, as scratchy and remote as something played on a gramophone back in Felix Jongleur’s childhood. Only the bizarre lilt to the painfully inhuman voice demonstrated that the words were supposed to have a melody. The god stood listening in amazement and confusion and more than a little fear.

  The Other was singing.

  IN his dream he thought it was an airplane, something from a history-of-flight documentary, all struts and guywires and canvas. It passed him, and someone in the cockpit waved, and there was a smiling monkey painted on the plane’s side, and even though it was flying away now, the sputtering noise of the engine got louder and louder. . . .

  Orlando opened his eyes to darkness. The noise was right next to him, and for a moment he thought the dream had followed him, that Renie and !Xabbu were flying toward him and would take him back to the real world. He rolled over, blinking blearily. Chief Strike Anywhere was snoring, and it did indeed seem as loud as a small plane. The Indian’s outsized nose was bouncing like a balloon in the stream of his exhaled breath. His squaw lay curled beside him, snoring in coloratura counterpoint.

  It’s a cartoon. It still hadn’t quite sunk in. I’m living in a cartoon. Then the dream came back to him.

  “Fredericks,” he whispered. “Where’s Renie and !Xabbu? They came through with us, but where are they?”

  There was no reply. He turned to shake his friend awake, but Fredericks was gone. Beyond the empty bedroll, the flap of the teepee fluttered in the wind of the chief’s noisy slumbers.

  Orlando clambered to his knees and crawled toward the flap, heart suddenly pounding. Outside, he found himself surrounded by boxes and bottles, and although he could not easily make out the labels in the near-dark (the lightbulb had been dimmed so that it barely shone) he could hear the sound of loud snores coming from some of them as well. To his left, the facing wall of the kitchen cabinets led up to the sink, as invisible from his position as the top of a tall plateau. There was no sign of Fredericks there, and no visible way for him to have climbed it. Containers of various kinds blocked Orlando’s view to the other side of the table. He walked forward, stepping carefully past a wrapped bar of something called Blue Jaguar Hand Soap, which rumbled rather than snored.

  He saw the glow first, a faint red light outlining the edge of the table like a miniature sunset. It took him a moment to make out the dark silhouette. Was it Fredericks? What was he doing standing so close to the edge?

  Orlando was suddenly very frightened for Fredericks. He hurried forward. As he sprinted past a jar of Captain Carvey’s Salts of Magnesia, a groggy voice demanded, “Hark at that! Who goes there? What bell is it?”

  There was something odd in his friend’s posture, a slump in the shoulders, a rubberiness to the neck, but it was Fredericks, or at least the current cartoon version of him. As Orlando drew nearer, slowing because he was afraid he might stumble over something so near to the edge of the dark tabletop, he could hear a faint voice that at first he thought was Fredericks talking to himself. It was barely audible, a murmur that rose and fell, but within a few steps Orlando knew that such a sound could not be coming from Sam Fredericks. It was a deep, harsh voice that hissed its sibilants like a snake.

  “Fredericks! Get back from there!” He approached very slowly now, not wanting to startle his friend, but Fredericks did not turn. Orlando put a hand on his shoulder, but there was still no response.

  “. . . You’re going to die here, you know,” the hissing voice said, now quite clear, although still pitched very low. “You should never have come. It’s all quite hopeless, and there’s nothing you can do about it, but I’m going to tell you anyway.” The laugh that welled up was as ludicrously melodramatic as the chief’s snores, but it still set Orlando’s heart pattering again.

  Fredericks was staring down into the red glow beyond the tabletop, simplified Pithlit-face slack, eyes open but unseeing. Scarlet light glimmered in the depths of the black iron stove, and flames licked at its grille like the hands of prisoners clutching prison bars. But something more substantial than the flames was moving within the stove.

  “Hey, wake up!” Orlando grabbed Fredericks’ arm and pinched. His friend moaned, but still gazed slackly at the stove and the dancing flames.

  “And there you are,” the voice crackled up from the stove. “Come to save your friend, have you? But it won’t do any good. You’re both going to die here.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Orlando demanded, trying to pull Fredericks away from the brink.

  “Hell, indeed!” said the voice, and laughed again. Suddenly Orlando could see the shape that had been camouflaged by the flames, a red devil from some ancient book or opera, with horns and a tail and a pitchfork. The devil’s eyes widened, and he flashed his teeth in an immense, insane grin. “You’re both going to die here!” He was dancing in the heart of the stove, stomping up the tongues of fire like he was splashing in a puddle, and although Orlando knew that it was all a simulation, and a particularly silly one at that, it did not stop the rush of fear that ran through him. He grabbed Fredericks firmly and dragged him away from the edge, and did not let go until they were stumbling back toward the teepee.

  “I’ll be seeing you again!” the devil shouted gleefully. “You can bet your soul on that!”

  Fredericks pulled away from him as they reached the tent door, rubbing his eyes with his balled fists. “Orlando? What’s . . . what’s going on? What are we doing out here?” He swiveled to examine the now-silent tabletop. “Was I sleepwalking?”

  “Yeah,” Orlando said. “Sleepwalking.”

  “Scanny.”

  The chief was awake, sharpening a huge tomahawk on a stone wheel that had apparently come out of thin air, like so many other things, since it had certainly not been in the teepee before. He looked up from the hail of sparks as they entered. “You awake. That good. Midnight soon.”

  Orlando wouldn’t have minded a bit more sleep, but each bit of Otherland seemed to have its own cycles of time. He and Fredericks would have to catch up whenever they found a chance.

  “I just realized Renie and the rest didn’t come through,” he said quietly to Fredericks as the chief and his squaw began packing things into a deerskin bag. “I mean, we would have seen them in the sin
k, right?”

  “I guess so.” Fredericks’ expression was morose. “But how could that be? They went through like the same time we did.”

  “Maybe there are different levels on the river. Maybe flying through sends you somewhere different than sailing through.”

  “But then we’ll never find them! They could be anywhere!”

  Chief Strike Anywhere stepped toward them and pointed to Orlando’s sword. “You have big knife. That good. But you,” he said to Fredericks, “no knife. That bad.” He handed Fredericks a bow and a quiver of arrows.

  “Pithlit never uses a bow,” Fredericks whispered. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  “Try to shoot only people that aren’t named Orlando.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  The chief led them to the tent flap. His wife stepped forward to hold it open. “Find Little Spark,” she said. “Please find.”

  She was not in the least like an actual person, but the tremor in her ridiculous pidgin English was real, and Orlando’s chill abruptly returned. These people thought they were alive. Even the cartoons! What kind of madhouse were they stuck in?

  “We’ll . . . we’ll do our best, ma’am,” he said, and followed the others out onto the tabletop.

  “Jeez,” he gasped. “This is hard. I never realized how strong Thargor was.”

  Fredericks started to say something, then clamped his jaw shut as the rope swung them out from the table leg, so that for a moment they were spinning over empty darkness. Strike Anywhere had long before outsped them in the downward climb, and they had no idea if he was even still on the rope.

  The rope swung back, and after a few unpleasant thumps against the table leg they resumed their careful descent. “I still feel like Pith-lit,” Fredericks said, “but he was never that strong to begin with.”