River of Blue Fire, Page 63

  He considered it only a moment, his heart rabbiting in his chest—the overworked heart that he could feel, but which was not actually in this marionette body.

  If they do that to me, and the pain is as bad as Fredericks said, I won’t make it.

  In the hour before dawn he slipped into a half-dream, a place of long, dark halls. The sound of a softly crying child was always around the next corner, somewhere in the blackness. He knew it was important he find the child—who was frightened and lonely—but he did not know why. He hurried on, feeling his way through unfamiliar spaces, while the quiet sounds of loneliness and heartbreak remained always just ahead.

  It was only as he realized that the sound had become more like the harsh breathing of an animal that he remembered where he was, and suddenly came awake, still in the blackness behind his own tight-shut eyes but with the cold desert night on his skin. The sounds continued, now near, now a little farther. Something was sniffing its way around the camp.

  Orlando opened his eyes just a slit, his heart again pounding in his chest. A strange, hunched shape was silhouetted against the stars, bending and then straightening; when it stood upright, moonlight reflected from bright, animal eyes. Orlando reached for the Thargor-sword lying at his side. Long campaigns in the Middle Country had taught him always to sleep with it within reach.

  With his fingers curled around the hilt he paused, willing his pulse to slow, composing himself for the conflict to come. As though it suddenly sensed his waking presence, the thing froze, becoming just another shadow. The snuffling noises stopped. Orlando leaped to his feet and shouted a warning to Fredericks even as he brought the sword around in a sweeping arc. The first blow landed, the flat of the blade thumping against something solid, and he was raising the sword for another cut when a very human-sounding shriek stopped him dead.

  “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!”

  Orlando wavered. The dark shape was rolling on the ground before him. He looked around wildly, wondering who had spoken. Fredericks was struggling out of the sailcloth, clearly still confused and half-asleep. It was only when the thing cried out again that Orlando realized that the intruder he had struck was talking about itself.

  “Don’t hurt him any more! Poor fellow! Poor fellow!”

  It writhed at his feet, making little whimpering noises into the dirt. Orlando wished again they had Chief Strike Anywhere with them, or at least his fire-making expertise. He lowered the point of his sword until it touched the intruder, who stiffened and fell silent.

  “We’re going to wait until it’s light,” he said slowly and clearly. “You are not to move until then. Do you understand me?” Without thinking about it, he had fallen into Thargor’s gruff, commanding tones.

  “Most generous, that is,” the dark shape said eagerly. “Upaut, it hears you.”

  “Right. Well, Oopa-oot, if that’s your name, just lie still. The sun will be up soon.”

  Fredericks, his face a pale blur, remained a healthy distance away from the prisoner. As they waited, he and Orlando (in an old trick from their adventuring days), talked calmly of all the prisoners over the years who had tried to escape them and who had been skinned or otherwise mutilated in reprisal for the trouble of catching them again. Upaut, whatever it was, seemed to take them at their word: although it begged them not to say such terrible things, it remained huddled on the sand until the first light began to brighten the eastern sky.

  In the gray dawn light, their prisoner was revealed to be essentially human, tall and ropy and with mottled gray-brown skin, wearing nothing but a grimy loincloth. But instead of a man’s head it had doglike, pointed ears that been shredded at the tips, and a gray, furry snout. After it revealed impressive yellow fangs, which winked into view when it unfurled its long tongue to lick its lips, Orlando kept his blade even closer to the prisoner’s throat.

  “It’s a werewolf,” Fredericks said calmly. They had both seen far worse in the Middle Country. “Pretty sad-looking one, too.”

  “Do not kill it!” The creature rubbed its muzzle in the sand at Orlando’s feet, making the rest of its words hard to understand. “It will go away, back into the hot Red Land! It has promised never to haunt the Black Lands again, and it will go back into the desert, even if it is hungry and lonely!” It rolled one amber eye back to see the effect this plea was having. “It only came down to see who the powerful strangers were, who float so bravely in the sacred waters of Father Nile.”

  “The Nile?” said Orlando. “So we’re in Egypt, then.” He looked at the bony creature kneeling before him and felt the tug of memory. He had not spent his young life studying fatality in all its variations for nothing. “And this has to be what’s-his-name with the jackal head—Anubis, the Death God.”

  “Noooooooo!” The prisoner began to roll on the ground, throwing handfuls of sand over itself, like a crab trying to dig its way to shelter. “Do not say that cursed name! Do not talk of the one who stole Upaut’s birthright!”

  “Jeez, sorry,” said Orlando. “Bad guess.”

  The thing that called itself Upaut rolled onto its back, its long arms and legs curled protectively over its belly. “If you spare its life, it will tell you the secrets of the Red Land. It has been living here for many moons. It knows where the fat beetles hide. It knows where the flowers bloom at midnight, the tasty flowers.”

  Fredericks was frowning. “I’ve seen this type before. He’ll wait until we’re asleep, then slit our throats. Let’s just kill him or something and get going.”

  “No, this reminds me of something. In Tolkien—you really ought to read that, Fredericks, I keep telling you. Text. The interactives miss all the good stuff.”

  “Words, all those words,” said Fredericks with lofty disdain. “Utterly slow.”

  Orlando would not be deterred. “See, someone said they were supposed to kill a guy like this, but Frodo the Ring-bearer said not to do it. ‘Pity stayed his hand,’ or something like that. And it was important.” He couldn’t remember just at this moment what the situation had been, but he knew he was right.

  “This isn’t a game and it isn’t a story, Gardiner,” Fredericks pointed out crossly. “This is our lives. Look at the teeth on that hairy mama-locker. Are you crazy?”

  “If we spare your life,” Orlando asked the kneeling prisoner, “will you be our guide? Promise not to try to hurt us?”

  “It will do just as you say.” Upaut sat up, his long torso gritty with sand, his eyes bright. “It will be your slave.”

  Orlando was certain there was something else he needed to do; after a moment, he remembered. “You need to swear on something important. What is the most sacred thing you can swear on?”

  For a moment Upaut straightened; a distant look clouded the yellow eyes. “It will swear on its godhood.”

  “You’re a god?” said Fredericks, lip curling.

  “It is most definitely a god,” their prisoner declared, a little huffily. “Of course it is. Once, before it earned the anger of the Lord Osiris, it was a great warrior-god, one of the chief protectors of the dead.” Upaut stood, achingly scrawny, but taller by the height of his long-eared head than even the Thargor sim. In the blue dawn light, he looked quite spectacularly alien; even his voice grew deeper. “Once,” the creature declared solemnly, “it was known to all as Khenti Amenti—’He Who Rules the West’.”

  Upaut stood, staring at the mountains, rose and orange with the light of the morning sun, clearly remembering better days. Then the moment passed; tattered ears sagged and shoulders slouched. “And which of the one thousand and nine hundred gods are the glorious masters?” he asked them pleasantly.

  “Us?” said Orlando. “We . . . we’ll tell you later.”

  Upaut was very excited by the boat. “It had a boat once,” he told them, sniffing the prow appreciatively. “Long and beautiful, it was—rowed by a
dozen lesser gods while Upaut itself stood before the mast. It towed the sun’s royal barque when it went aground on the rough parts of the sky. Great was Upaut!” He threw his lupine head back, as though he might howl. “Great in reverence among the Lords of the Black Land. Another of its names was ‘He Who Opens the Way’!”

  Orlando wasn’t quite sure how to respond. In this place, it could all be true—or as true as anything else was. “So what happened?”

  The wolf god looked around in some confusion, as though it had forgotten others were present. “What?”

  “He asked what happened,” Fredericks said. “And why do you always call yourself ‘it’?”

  “Poor fellow, poor fellow!” Upaut was clearly moved by his own predicament. He folded his long legs so he could sit down in the middle of the boat. “Let us go upon the beautiful river and it will tell you the sad tale.”

  As Orlando poled the boat out into the slow current, he wondered how it had happened that they had gained a slave, but he was still doing the work himself. But before he could point out this seeming incongruity, Upaut was in full flow.

  “Once Ra, the sun, was pharaoh of all creation, and all was as it should have been. But in time he became old and full of trembling, and wished to give up the burdens of kingship. His sons and daughters by then had duties of their own—Geb the earth, Shu the air, Hathor the night sky full of milky stars—so Ra gave kingship over gods and men to his grandsons, Osiris and Set.

  “Set ruled these red southern lands, Osiris the black and fertile lands of the north. Set was great in magic, but Osiris, too, was great in magic, and he was also great in cleverness and very jealous. So he set a trap for Set. He invited his brother to a banquet, and had his artisans make a great chest of cedar wood, covered in gold. When the banquet was finished, Osiris said that the wonderful chest should belong to whoever it fit. Set climbed in, and Osiris and his warriors fell upon him, closed the chest, bound it, and threw it into the waters of Hapi the Nile, so that Set was drowned. But this you must know already, brother gods, and Upaut will hurry to tell of how it was itself brought low.” The wolf god shook his long-snouted head.

  Orlando had made a bit of a study of Egyptian mythology, unpleasantly fascinated with its death-cult reputation; now he was puzzled. The Osiris myth was the best-known bit of the whole thing, but he would have been willing to bet that it was the other way around—Osiris betrayed and murdered by Set. He shrugged. Who knew how things worked here? Maybe someone had spent a zillion credits and then messed up the easy bits, got the story wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Upaut was declaiming again. “So Osiris became Lord of the Two Lands, and declared himself King of the Dead as well, so that Set’s body was given into his keeping. The grandson of Osiris—some even say his son—Anubis, the jackal-headed one, became Osiris’ chief minion, and to him the Lord of Life and Death gave the duties that had once been mine, that of protecting the dead on their journey to Ra’s blessed bosom, which we call ‘The Rites of Coming Forth by Day’.” The wolf god paused and shook his head; there was a glint in his eye which belied his next words. “But Upaut was not bitter, although Upaut’s offerings were taken away, and all its duties and honors and titles, until it was little more than another servant in the palaces of the dead, with few worshipers or houses of its own. But then other servants of Osiris, even less exalted than Anubis, began to plague Upaut. Tefy and Mewat, they were named, called by some ‘the Twins,’ and they were not even gods, but spirits of the darkest sort, demons from the Underworld. But they were favored servants of Osiris, and they took what they wanted, giving back nothing.

  “From Upaut they stole the final prizes of godhood, Upaut’s last temple, last few priests. They destroyed that place of worship, threw down Upaut’s standards, broke in pieces Upaut’s armor and chariot, bespoiling everything for no greater reason than that Upaut was now weak and they were strong in their lord’s favor.

  “When Upaut, who had once ruled the kingdom of the dead, went to Osiris asking that the lord’s servants be restrained, that there be some recompense, Osiris became angry. ‘How dare you come to me and tell me what you deserve?’ he said, growing in might and stature until his crown touched the ceiling of his throne room, his eyes burning with fire. ‘Who are you? What are you? You are no god anymore. You are less than a mortal man, even. Go into the Red Lands and live like a beast.’ So Upaut was banished. And the Lord of Life and Death declared also that if it calls itself anything but the name of a beast, even the life it has will be extinguished, and it will squeak and flutter in the Great Darkness forever.”

  Anger and despair made Upaut’s voice tremble. The great amber eyes closed and the wolf’s head drooped to his chest. Orlando, poling the barge off a sandbar, found himself sympathetic enough that he resented having to steer the boat a bit less than he had before the story had begun, but he also thought the onetime Lord of the West was a bit prone to melodrama. Still, it couldn’t be easy to lose your godhood.

  Fredericks, as if thinking along the same lines, said quietly: “It’s kind of like it was for you when Thargor got killed, maybe.”

  There are things I’m a lot more worried about losing than Thargor, Orlando thought, but said nothing. As the wolf god clenched and unclenched its clawed hands, making little sounds of self-pity, Orlando turned his attention back to the wide river and the seemingly boundless desert.

  Upaut roused himself from his misery eventually, and spent the rest of the long, hot day regaling them with stories of his god-days, at least half of which seemed to revolve around his constant battles with the arch-serpent Apep, the monster whose mission in life seemed to be daily attempts to devour the sun god Ra and his celestial barge. When Upaut had not been flinging spears at Apep, he had apparently been entertaining a ceaseless parade of females, both goddesses and mortal priestesses. While the first few descriptions of these particular types of worship piqued Orlando’s adolescent interest, and the constant use of the phrase “it revealed its glowing godhood” had a certain amusement value, by the fifth or sixth he had begun to notice a sameness to the tales—in his own memory, Upaut was as stalwart and inexhaustible as any fertility deity—and by the time the wolf god had begun the dozenth tale of amatory conquest, Orlando was ready to brain him with the barge pole.

  Fredericks had fallen asleep beneath the shelter of the sailcloth some time earlier, leaving his companion stuck as the god’s sole audience, a maneuver for which Orlando was already planning several intricate schemes of revenge.

  “Do you know where Priam’s Walls are?” Orlando asked suddenly, more in hopes of forestalling the tale of Upaut’s seduction of Selket the Scorpion Goddess than in expectation of information. If the wolf god was a creature of this simworld, it wouldn’t know about any other, and the chances they had stumbled immediately into the one they were seeking had to be at least a thousand to one.

  Still lost in a reverie about Selket’s exoskeletal charms, Upaut took a moment to respond. “What is that? No, that is not a name it has heard, therefore it doubts such a thing exists. There is the temple-palace of Ptah, which is known as Ptah-Beyond-the-Walls. Ptah the Artificer is another one who has risen high during Osiris’ reign, although he is true friend to no one, not even the Lord of the Two Lands. Is that what you mean?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Orlando’s back was beginning to hurt. Whatever kept him in the simulation seemed also to have assigned him a fairly arbitrary level of health and strength—far greater than his own, but quite a bit less than what the tireless Thargor would have received in any simulation that recognized the Middle Country’s ranking system. “Maybe you should handle the boat for a while.”

  Upaut’s eyes grew wide. “May it do so? It has not been allowed to steer a craft since Osiris cast it down.” He stood, towering and spindly, and took the barge pole in trembling hands. As he set the pole for the first time and pushed off, the wolf go
d began to sing under his breath, a simple, up-and-down melody that in other circumstances Orlando would have found almost pleasant.

  He crawled under the sailcloth, nudging the protesting Fredericks until his friend moved over. Orlando felt terribly hot, and now that he had stopped moving, his head was beginning to pound.

  “Where are we going anyway?” Fredericks asked drowsily.

  “I don’t know. Downstream.” Orlando squirmed, trying to find a position that would allow his back muscles to unkink.

  “And then what? Keep going in and out of different simworlds until we get to this Priam place?”

  “That could take us years,” Orlando said dully. It was a horrible problem, but he couldn’t think about it with his head throbbing like this. He felt a flash of anger at Fredericks, who always had to be told, never just thought things through by himself. Herself. “We have to come up with another way to find it,” he said. “We can’t just go on like this until we get lucky, Fredericks. I won’t last long enough.”

  “What do you mean. . . ?” the other asked, then broke off and fell silent. Orlando rolled on his side, turning his back on his friend, and tried to find a comfortable position against the hard deck.

  Upaut’s voice rose, a dreamy singsong, chanting the same words over and over until Orlando had no choice but to listen.

  “Supreme one, beautiful in adornment,

  Your armor bright as the barque of Ra

  Mighty in voice, Wepwawet! He Who Opens the Way,

  The master in the West,

  To whom all turn their faces—

  You are mighty in majesty!

  Wepwawet, hear now this prayer.

  Khenti Amenti, hear now this prayer.

  Upaut, hear now this prayer. . . !”

  It was with a slightly uneasy feeling that Orlando realized the wolf god was singing his old hymns to himself.