Mountain of Black Glass, Page 29

  "There are those who say that the Builders are still out there somewhere, of course." The abbot spread his hands, as though admitting an unpleasant truth. "They believe that at some unimaginable distance there is a place that is . . . not-House would be the only way I can explain it. That out at the very edge of things, the Builders are still building. But the Builder cults have diminished during my lifetime—a long stretch of peace and prosperity will have that effect."

  Before Renie could even begin to wrap her mind around the idea of a house that was an entire world—that literally had no edge, no ending—tall, skinny Brother Factum Quintus stalked back into the room, arms now full of rolled papers and parchments whose ends stuck out in all directions, so that he looked like a sea urchin on stilts.

  ". . . It's actually very interesting when you think about it," he was saying, as if he had never stopped the original conversation. "Most of our research in the Sanctum Factorum is about the original building of things—we have paid so little attention to the repairs, which have their own styles quite as fascinating and individual. Of course, there are records of some of the refurbishments, but far too few." Unable to see past the parchments, he bumped into the abbot's desk and stood there for a moment, a piece of flotsam balked by a seawall. "Yes, yes. There is a monograph there waiting to be composed, a genuine gift to learning that could be made," he went on, although everyone else in the room must have been invisible to him, but he had evidently started this monologue while by himself anyway.

  "Brother Factum Quintus," the abbot said gently, "you are babbling. Please put those down—the table is just in front of you."

  The scrolls cascaded to the tabletop like a pile of jackstraws, Factum Quintus' narrow, bug-eyed face was visible once more. He was frowning. "Ballflowers, though—those are also to be found in the Neo-Foundationist period ruins, and I worry whether we should consider those parts of the House as well. We would have no repair orders, though, since those early folk were evidently a people without letters or numbers."

  "I think we can dismiss the Neo-Foundationists for now," the abbot told him. "Come, brother, show these good people what you have found."

  Factum Quintus began unfurling his collection of documents, spreading one yellowed, curling sheet atop another and directing various onlookers to hold down various corners until the abbot's desk had entirely disappeared beneath an autumnal mulch of what could now be seen as building plans, working orders, and hand-lettered invoices. They spanned what seemed centuries, from naive illustrations margined by mythical creatures, without a single truly straight line in the whole drawing, to quite modern-looking blueprints with each duct and ornament carefully included.

  The gawky monk was in his element, and kept up a running commentary as he leafed backward and forward through the layers. ". . . Of course that would be in the Sunrise Attics, several days away, and upstream at that, so it seems unlikely. But those repairs done to the Spire Forest could certainly qualify, and I'm sure . . . hmmm, yes, here, quite high gypsum content, so that's definitely possible."

  Renie stared at the great pile of documents. "Aren't you worried about something happening to them?" She thought the monks seemed rather cavalier for an order of book-protectors. "What if one of them got torn?"

  "It would be a tragedy, of course," said Epistulus Tertius, who had returned to his normal, albeit still pinkish, shade. He narrowed his eyes. "Goodness, you don't think these are the original documents, do you?" He and Brother Custodis Major shared a quiet chuckle, and even the abbot smiled. "Oh, no. These are copies of copies. Rather old, some of them, and still valuable, of course—even in this modem age it is difficult to make good copies of the original documents without risking damage."

  Factum Quintus had quietly continued his own monologue, paying no attention to the conversation going on around him, and now lifted his finger as though he had reached a significant point. "If we imagine that this person has come within the last few days from the place this plaster fell—and it seems likely, or the plaster would have been dust by now—then I suppose we can narrow it down to two places," he said. "This bit has probably come from either the Spire Forest or the Campanile of the Six Pigs."

  "That's wonderful." Renie turned to the abbot. "Do you have a map so we can figure out how to get there?" She looked down at the table, layers deep in plans of every type. "I suppose that's a silly question."

  Before the abbot could answer her, Factum Quintus suddenly said, "Actually, I can show you both places. I am fired with the idea of doing some useful work on facade repair." He shook his head. His eyes were remote, but a light was in them. "It is almost entirely unexplored territory."

  "Are these places so far away?" Florimel asked him.

  "No one has even dreamed of doing a categorical survey of repair work," he murmured, focused on glories only glimpsed by others. "Yes. Yes, I will go and at least make a beginning."

  The abbot cleared his throat. Brother Factum Quintus took a moment to register it.

  "Ah," he said. "If you, Primoris, and Brother Factum Major will allow it." His face took on a slightly sullen look, a child denied a sweet before dinner. "I can't imagine what harm a quick trip to look at some of the trefoils in the Spire Forest would do. I am months ahead of schedule on that tile work—I have finished Hipped Roofs entirely and have done most of the preliminary cataloging for Sloped Turrets as well."

  The abbot looked at him sternly, but if Factum Quintus had something of the child in him, his elders seemed to indulge that child. "Very well," the abbot said at last. "If Brother Factum can spare you, then I will give my permission. But you must do nothing to endanger yourself. You are a servant of the Library, not a member of the Corridor Guards."

  Factum Quintus rolled his large eyes, but nodded. "Yes, Primoris."

  "Thank God," said Renie. It was like letting out a long-held breath. "Then we can go. We can go look for Martine."

  "Code Delphi. Start here.

  "I do not know if I am even speaking loud enough this time to leave a record that can be found later. I dare not speak any louder. He is gone, but I do not know when he will be back.

  "He is the most terrifying person I have ever met.

  "He took me so easily. I had only a moment to recognize that something was wrong—dear God, despite my senses that should have told me he was close by! But he found a combination of factors—noise and the heat of a brazier and the confusing movement of children laughing and running—and he was upon me before I knew it. I was knocked to the ground and his arm closed around my neck and within moments he had choked me unconscious. I'm sure the people around us only saw somebody fall and someone else try to help. He would have every excuse to pick me up and carry me. Maybe he even let someone else do it, a Good Samaritan bearing me away to doom without knowing it. He knocked me down and squeezed me silent in an instant, just with the pressure of his arm. He is shockingly strong.

  "And it was Quan Li's arm across my neck. Somehow, that makes it even more dreadful. He inhabits the body of someone we thought we knew, like an evil spirit. Like a demon.

  "I must stop and think. I do not know how long I can safely speak.

  "I am in a room, deserted like some of those we explored earlier, but very small, hardly a half-dozen meters from side to side, and with only one obvious entrance, a door in the far wall. I do not know whether we are still in the great house—I woke up here, and remember nothing of how I came—but it feels much the same. Ancient furniture is stacked in the corner, except for one chair he moved into the center of the room, and in which he was sitting not ten minutes ago, telling me cheerfully about the terrible things he could do to me any time he wanted. My hands are tied above my head with some kind of cloth, and the cloth is knotted to something I cannot quite sense, a lamp fixture perhaps, or an empty water pipe. He has at least tied me so that I am seated on the floor—my arms hurt, but I could be in a worse position, especially if he leaves me here for a long time.

  "I am frightened. It i
s all I can do . . . not to cry. All that keeps me from complete collapse is the knowledge that the others will be looking for me. But that makes me frightened for them—very frightened.

  "He is a monster. The human kind, yes, but that is much more terrible than some creature built of code, programmed to act out but no more burdened with choice than an automatic door—step on the pad, break the beam, the door opens or closes. But this is a man. He thinks and then he acts. He enjoys the terror—oh, how he enjoys it. The quiet way he speaks proves it to me—he fears to let his own joy get the better of him.

  "Oh, God, I am so frightened. . . !

  "No. That will do me no good. If I am to live, I must keep thinking. I must think every moment. I must remember every detail. He could be back any time, and who knows what fancy will have taken him then? He spoke to me when I awakened here—he said many things. If this monster has a weakness, it is that he likes to talk. There is a great silence in his life, I suspect, around this most important thing to him, and so when he can speak to those who he knows will not live to violate his secrecy, his enforced silence, he can let himself go. And since he has opened himself to me, of course, that means . . . oh, God. No, I cannot think about such things—it will freeze me. I must think hard about where I am, what is happening, what I might do to escape. . . .

  "But he is proud, this creature—proud like Lucifer, who wanted too much. Please let me make him pay for his pride, for his contempt. Please. . . ."

  "I will continue now. I am ashamed by my own tears, but I am not good at being helpless. What I am good at is remembering, and I will do my best to repeat what he said. The first thing he told me was, 'Don't bother to pretend. I know you're awake,' This was scarcely something I knew myself at that moment. 'I heard your breathing change. If you give me trouble, I won't kill you, but I'll make you wish I had. You know I can do that, don't you? This whole simulation network is very realistic, and that includes pain. I know—I've been experimenting.'

  "I said that I heard him. I tried to keep my voice steady. I do not think I succeeded.

  " 'Good,' he said. "That's a start. And if we're going to work together, it's important that we understand one another. No tricks. No bullshit.' He had abandoned the Quan Li voice entirely—whatever filters had been used were turned off. It was a masculine voice, with what I thought was a mild Australian accent, a cultured overlay on something that was stronger and earthier.

  " 'What do you mean,' I asked him. 'Work together?'

  "He shook his head—at that moment, the only movement in the room. 'Sweetness,' he said, 'I'm disappointed in you. I'm not a stranger on the street, I know you. I've been traveling with you for days and days. I've slept next to you. I've held your hand. And if anyone knows the clever tricks you can do with your sonar or whatever it is, it's me.'

  " 'So?' I asked him.

  " 'So I've got a little problem to solve and I may not be able to do it myself. See, I'm not one of those old-fashioned blokes, too proud to get help from a woman.' He laughed, and the most ghastly thing was that if you had not heard the words on either side, you would have thought it the laugh of a charming, cheerful man. 'You aren't going to force me to explain all the tricks I can use to convince you, are you? I'm very good with sharp things.'

  " 'I've noticed,' I said, half in anger, half hoping just to keep him talking.

  " 'You mean Sweet William?' He smiled, reminded of a pleasant memory. 'I did rather spread his insides around, didn't I? That was the knife I took from the flying girl. Pity I couldn't bring it into the next simulation—you wouldn't any of you have laid a hand on me then. Or if you did, you wouldn't have got it back with all the fingers still on it.' He chuckled again. 'But don't worry. I've been knocking around this simulation long enough to take care of that problem.' He lifted a wicked-looking knife out of his belt. It had a finger guard, like the basket hilt of a saber, but the blade was short, thick, and heavy. 'Nice, this,' he told me. 'Cuts bones like they were breadsticks.'

  "I took a breath, suddenly feeling that almost anything would be better than having him come near me with that ugly thing. 'What do you want from me?'

  " 'Simple, Sweetness. I want you to help me figure out the lighter. Oh, and just to save us both time and trouble, don't think I'm so stupid that I'm going to let you handle it, or even get near it. But you're going to use some of those special perceptions of yours to make sure that I'm getting every last bit of good out of my little windfall.' His broad grin on Quan Li's face was like seeing the skull beneath the skin. 'I'm a greedy bloke, you see. I want it all.'

  "Then, despite his professed reluctance of a moment before, he spent several minutes describing in loving detail a grotesque catalog of human body functions and how they each could be made to yield unbelievable pain, assuring me that all this and more could happen to me if I resisted him or tried any tricks—the complete master-villain's litany, as in a bad netshow. But the eager tilt of his shoulders as he talked, the slow curling and uncurling of his fingers, kept reminding me that this was real, that he was not another construct, but a psychopath set free in a world without penalties. Worse still, he promised me that first he would take Renie and the others and do all those things to them as I watched.

  "I have never wanted someone dead before, but as I heard him speak in flat, conversational tones of how he would keep little Emily screaming until her larynx gave out, I had fantasies of my anger turned into some kind of energy, leaping out from me to burn him into dirty ash. But whatever new abilities this network has given me, they are passive ones. I could only listen as he talked on and on, heaping prospective cruelty on prospective cruelty until it all became a murmur and I lost the words.

  "When he had finished—when, I suppose, he had exhausted his momentary passion—he told me he was going out, and. . . .

  "God help me, he is coming back. He is dragging something . . . or someone. God help us all!

  "Code Delphi. End here."

  This is the most foolish thing I can even imagine," Del Ray whispered. Long Joseph had invoked seniority, so Del Ray was wedged far back into the corner behind the dumpster while Joseph was near the outside edge.

  "And you are the most cowardest man I ever see," Long Joseph replied, although he was more than a little nervous himself. He wasn't worried so much about Del Ray Chiume's Boer hitmen, who still had the faint air of make-believe about them—they sounded so much like something from an entertainment that Joseph couldn't help considering them in that light. But he knew that a hospital quarantine was enough of a serious situation that if they were caught they would go to jail, at least for a while, and he was beginning to feel he should get back to the place where Renie and the others were.

  "I should have shot you when I had the chance" Del Ray muttered.

  "But you didn't," Long Joseph pointed out. "Now shut that mouth."

  They were huddled behind the trash containers in the Durban Outskirt Medical Facility's garage, a place only sparsely occupied with parked cars because of the quarantine. Del Ray, faced with Joseph's relentless lobbying, had called in a few family and neighborhood favors: if everything went just right, they would be able to get inside. Which as Del Ray kept pointing out, would be the least difficult part.

  Long Joseph didn't care. The cabin fever that had spurred him to escape from the Wasp's Nest military base had subsided during his wanderings, and the thirst that had troubled him at least as badly had been slaked several times over. With his mind working a little more clearly now, he was beginning to suspect that if he went back without having accomplished anything besides drinking a lot of Mountain Rose, Renie and the others might think poorly of him.

  Even that Jeremiah, he will look at me down his nose. The thought was hard to bear. It was bad enough to have your daughter think you were an irresponsible fool, but to have that womanish fellow thinking the same thing—somehow that made it worse.

  But if he came back with news of Stephen, perhaps even news of an improvement in his condition, the whole
thing would look much different.

  "Oh, Papa," Renie would say. "I was worried, but now I'm glad you went. That was so brave. . . ."

  He was jolted from his imaginings by a sharp elbow in the rib cage. He started to protest, but Del Ray had his finger to his lips, begging Joseph for silence. The elevator was coming down.

  The orderly emerged from the elevator doors pushing a heavy cart full of packaged medical waste—gauze, sharps, and emptied chemical ampoules. As he trundled it toward the disposal chute at the far side of the underground space, looking like a lost astronaut in his bulky Ensuit, Del Ray and Joseph slid out from behind the dumpster and hurried toward the elevator. With a burst of speed, Del Ray got his fingers in the door just before it closed; the elevator dinged, but the orderly did not hear it through his heavy plastic mask.

  When they were inside and the car was traveling back up, Del Ray fumbled the surgical scrubs out of the paper bag. "Hurry up," he hissed as Joseph laboriously transferred the contents of his pockets, including a squeeze bottle half-full of wine the color of cough syrup. "For God's sake, just put it on!"

  By the time the door clanged open on the second floor, their own clothes were in the bag and they were both wearing institutional garments, although Long Joseph's showed an alarming amount of calf above his white socks. Del Ray led him quickly down the hallway, which by good luck was deserted, and into the orderlies' changing room. Ensuits hung on hooks all down one wall like the discarded cocoons of giant butterflies. A pair of men were talking and laughing in the shower, just out of sight around a tiled partition. Del Ray took Joseph by the elbow, ignoring the older man's mumble of irritated protest, and shoved him toward the wall of environment suits. Despite some fumbling with the closures, in less than a minute they had them on and were back out in the hallway again.

  Del Ray was struggling to reach his pocket and had to stop and unseal the suit to get his hand into his surgical scrubs. He pulled out the folded map his cousin had drawn for them. It was not the most reliable-looking of documents: the cousin was no draftsman to begin with, and his tenure as a hospital custodian had been brief, ending with an argument with his supervisor over punctuality, something that Del Ray's cousin apparently hadn't been any better at than drawing.