Sea of Silver Light, Page 74

  What's happening. . . ? was all he had time to think, then Userhotep rose up beside him, still screaming, another knife in his hand and his face acrawl with squirming shapes. The priest fell across the altar, smashing Paul's head back against the stone and filling his head with blackness.

  His limbs, now free, were on fire, and his heart felt like a motor working on bad fuel. His head felt worse. Somebody was under each of his arms, holding him up.

  "My God, he's all wet—he's bleeding. . . !"

  Paul recognized Martine's voice with a rush of gratitude. He tried to open his eyes but they were full of something salty that burned. "Shallow. . . ." he gasped, struggling unsuccessfully to support his own weight with his legs. The returning circulation felt like a swarm of murderously stinging ants. "Shallow cuts. They only . . . started. . . ."

  "Don't talk," ordered Florimel from his other side. "Save your strength. We'll help you, but we have to get moving."

  "I never thought I would see the yellow-faced one like this." This was a voice Paul did not know, deep and hoarse; it came from somewhere close to the ground, as though its owner were kneeling. "Look at him wiggle like a worm on a hot rock." The laugh was gleeful. "That is a powerful spell you hold in your hand, fellow."

  "Just want out, me," Paul heard T4b say. The boy sounded as breathless as if he had just run a marathon. "Before that sayee lo killer come looking for us."

  "Should we finish him off?" Florimel asked, and for a moment, in his pain and confused exhaustion, Paul thought his friends were planning to put him out of his misery.

  "Look, look!" a tiny, high-pitched voice said almost inside his ear. "All blood! You fall down, mister? Look like zoomflier ripscrape, huh?"

  "What the hell is going on?" Paul moaned. "What happened?"

  "You speak lightly of finishing off Ptah," said the hoarse voice, going on as if Paul had not spoken, "but I must tell you that to kill a god changes the shape of heaven—especially one so important as the Lord of the White Walls."

  "Wells is not our enemy," Martine said. "The real monster is coming—he might be here at any moment."

  The voice by Paul's knees snorted. "If your enemy is our new lord and master Anubis," he said, "then you don't need any other enemies. If he catches us he will crush you—and me, too—like dust beneath his black heels."

  Paul had at last managed to blink his eyes clear. The figure before him was not kneeling. It was a dwarf of some kind, with a great tangle of beard and a shockingly ugly face which widened in a grin as he saw Paul looking at him.

  "Your friend can see again," he said, then bowed. "No need to thank Bes for saving you and your companions. There is little work for a household god in a land where all the households have been smashed into ruin." The dwarf laughed. He seemed to laugh a lot, but Paul could not help noticing that he didn't seem very happy. "However, I suppose all my work could be called little work."

  Paul shook his head, dazed. A yellow monkey the length of his finger was hovering just before him now. A moment later a half dozen more joined the formation. "Nobody tells us where 'Landogarner is," the tiny ape complained. "You know? And Freddicks?"

  Robert Wells lay on the stone floor a few feet away, writhing as though in the grip of a seizure, clutching at his bandaged head. The priest Userhotep was crumpled against the far wall in a spreading dark pool that reflected torchlight.

  "What's going on?" Paul asked again, helplessly.

  "We'll tell you later." Martine reached up from under his arm and patted his face. Her hand lingered there for a moment, cool and reassuring. "You're safe now."

  "As safe as the rest of us, anyway," said Florimel darkly. "Here are your clothes."

  "Leave Wells," Martine said. "It's time to go. I don't know exactly how far it is to the gateway."

  "Gateway. . . ?" Paul's head felt as though it were sloshingly full of black paint or dirty oil, something sticky that kept fouling the connections. There were two other people in the room, he saw, the prisoners who had been brought in just before Paul had been dragged out. When Nandi Paradivash saw him looking, he limped over.

  "I am glad you are alive, Paul Jonas." Patches of Nandi's skin had been scraped raw on his face and arms, and he had gruesome, hand-shaped burns on his legs. He seemed shriveled, a shadow of his earlier brave and resourceful self. "I will never forgive myself for betraying you." Paul shrugged, unsure of what to say. Nandi seemed to want some kind of absolution, but at the moment Paul could not make much sense of such an abstract idea. "Mrs. Simpkins and I. . . ." Nandi gestured awkwardly to the woman, "we were . . . prisoners of the man called Dread for many days."

  "We'll talk about it later." The Simpkins woman sounded rational and calm, but her shadowed eyes did not meet Paul's, and her hands drooped like they were boneless.

  "Can you walk if we help you, Paul?" Martine asked, "We have to hurry and it will be hard to carry you. We distracted the guards, but they'll be back."

  Bes chuckled and trotted to the door, then pulled it open. Paul could hear distant shouts in the corridor. "It is impressive how much distraction you can cause when you give a torch to a troop of flying monkeys."

  A yellow cloud of simians exploded into the air and out into the hallway.

  "Burn burn burn!" they squealed, whirling like a dust devil. "Burn all pretty!"

  "Big fuego!"

  "Ruling Tribe!"

  T4b lurched after them. He was holding one of his hands as though it hurt. Paul could not help noticing that the hand was glowing.

  Supported by Martine and Florimel, Paul staggered out of the cell. He had to step over one of Wells' legs, which jerked and twitched as though electrified.

  The sun overhead was a vast white disk, the air outside Abydos-That-Was so dry and hot Paul could almost feel it sucking the moisture out of his lungs. Ruined, fire-blackened buildings stood on all sides of the great temple, some still bleeding dark smoke into the sky. Dread appeared to have thrown a party here much like the one in Dodge City.

  Paul needed to lean a little on Florimel, but he had regained enough strength that Martine could let go of him and walk down the stone pier that jutted out from the back of the temple into the flat brown water of a wide canal. The monkeys hovered around her for a moment, then darted forward to inspect the immense golden barge waiting at the end of the pier like a floating hotel. Martine stopped halfway down the span and turned slowly from side to side.

  "It's not here." Her voice was tight with growing panic. "The gateway—I can feel it, but it's not here."

  "What does that mean?" Florimel demanded. "It's invisible?"

  "No, it's simply not here. I could sense it out here when we were inside. I can still feel it, very strongly, but. . . ." She turned until she was facing away from the temple, looking down the river valley to the south. "My God," she said slowly. "It's . . . it's far away. But it's so strong! That's why I thought it was just here, at the edge of the temple." She turned to Bes, who watched her with the serene calm of someone who saw and even made miracles himself every day. "What's out there?"

  "Sand," he growled. "Scorpions. More sand. It's closer to the point to talk about what isn't out there—water, shade, things like that." He tugged at his curly beard. "That way lies the Red Desert."

  "But what's out there? What am I sensing? Something big, powerful—an opening." She frowned; Paul guessed she was searching for a way to explain that the dwarf would understand. "Some . . . some very big and dark magic."

  Bes only shook his head. "You don't want to go there, woman."

  "Damn it, we have to!" Martine came back up the pier toward him. "Just tell us. We will make our own choices."

  The bearded god stared at her for a moment, then shook his head again. "When the little apes found me, I came to help you because I regretted how I had left these two—he gestured toward Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins, "—at an evil time in the temple of Ra, Now you want to go somewhere even worse? I am not the most noble of gods, woman, but neither do I wish to send goo
d people to their ruin."

  "Just tell us what is out there!" snapped Martine.

  Mrs. Simpkins stepped forward; her uselessly dangling hands made her look like a begging dog. "We need to know, Bes," she said. "After that, it's up to us, not you."

  He looked at her angrily. "The Temple of Set," he said at last. "The house of the Lost One. That is what you sense out there in the desert. It is a hole into the underworld, a place that even great Osiris entered like a mortal man being dragged alive into his own tomb. And if you go there you will be lost forever."

  Martine stared toward him, an unreadable expression on her sightless face. Nandi and T4b limped back from the end of the pier where they had been examining the vast barge.

  "Like, all these black guys with oars in there," T4b reported. He still cradled his glowing hand as though it hurt him. "Just sitting, staring at nothing. Locking scanned."

  "Go, then," Bes said to Martine. "Just step onto the boat and say where you wish to go. The boat will take you. You will be there sooner than you wish."

  "We have to do it," she said quietly.

  "Then you go without Bes." The little god turned in disgust and began to walk back toward the temple. "May the seven Hathors give you a merciful ending."

  Mrs. Simpkins turned to call after him. "Thank you for helping us! God bless you!"

  Bes made a gesture, half-fare well, half-dismissal. The monkeys wheeled around his head for a moment, then fluttered back toward Paul and the others.

  "Is it just me," Florimel asked heavily, "or is someone always telling us that we are going to hate the place we are going even worse than where we are?"

  Even in the hot Egyptian air, Paul was shivering. "Well, they've been right every time," he said.

  "Code Delphi. Start here.

  "We have been incredibly lucky. No, I have been incredibly lucky. My desperate attempt to find help roused the Wicked Tribe, and the children themselves located the little god Bes, friend of our fellow prisoners Nandi Paradivash and Bonita Mae Simpkins. That in itself was a great stroke of fortune—the tiny Tribe children could never have lifted the bolt on our cell door themselves, but Bes is far more powerful than his stature would suggest. He is a god, after all.

  "And against all my dark certainties, we have rescued Paul Jonas as well, injured and traumatized, but still alive, still sane. Even now, his skin washed clean of blood, his many wounds bandaged to the best of my ability, he is sleeping beside my feet. Nandi and Bonnie Mae have also survived torture, although there is a shadow across them both. The virtual galley slaves are rowing the barge of Osiris upstream, like an engine that does not care who is driving—upstream toward the Temple of Set.

  "I did not need Bes to tell me how dangerous our journey is. Orlando and Fredericks were drawn to this temple once, sucked in like leaves into a whirlpool, and Orlando said they barely survived it. Still, I cannot help feeling at least a little optimistic, foolish as that is. We are still alive, when good sense proclaims we should not be. And we have escaped from under the very nose of Dread, at least for a moment. Something inside me dances like a child let out into the garden after a long boring day inside. I am alive! There is nothing more important than that. It is all I have. For the moment, it is enough.

  "But as I sense Paul lying near me—so deep in exhausted, trembling sleep that he resembles Robert Wells after Javier jabbed that strange, glowing hand of his into the back of Wells' head, dropping someone who was a great god in this Egyptian simworld straight to the floor like a slaughtered bullock—I cannot help wondering what it all means. Is it only luck that we are again rescued? We are inside an operating system that has been fed with the idea of stories, so perhaps the thread of coincidence and strange chance is not so unbelievable. Perhaps T4b having been damaged in just the way that would save us makes a kind of sense—perhaps it was part of the story of the network. But that does not explain every odd stroke of fortune that has affected us. I came into this network by my own choice, trying to help Renie Sulaweyo find her brother, absolutely unaware that it might have anything to do with that long-ago day I lost my sight. How could such an extreme coincidence be?

  "Unless there is more to this idea of story than anyone understands.

  "After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?

  "If so, the universe, from the finest quantum dust to the widest vacuum spaces, does indeed have a shape. It begins 'Once upon a time. . . .'

  "And if it is true, then only we humans, poor, naked semi-apes crouching in the thin light of our single star, marooned on the rim of a minor galaxy, can determine whether there will be a 'Happily ever after'?

  "It makes my head hurt to think of it. It is a possibility too large and strange to contain for long, especially when we are still in such danger.

  "The ship of Osiris breasts the sluggish river current, rocking beneath me, the timbers creaking, the oars beating an inhumanly steady rhythm. We are heading up the Nile to the darkest place in this world, maybe in any of these worlds. I am very tired. I think I will try to sleep for a little while.

  "Code Delphi. End here."

  Dread floated in the white spaces of his bone-sparse Outback castle. The yip of a dingo sounded through the archway, offering a weird but compelling counterpoint to the piano melody shivering in the air. Dread muted the light, pushing the arid landscape into twilight so he could better see the abstract which Dulcie Anwin had prepared for him.

  He frowned, annoyed by having to pay attention when he would rather have drifted and daydreamed. The abstract was an expanding treasure box of charts, three-dimensional graphs, and lists of assets—a neat summation of the hugely various holdings controlled by Felix Jongleur. A forest of markers sprang from each point, containing information about access and connection, and for a little while he entertained himself with contemplating how each subcorporation, holding company, and business asset could be used as an instrument of pain.

  He listened with pleasure to the lonely, atonal lurch of the piano. I can make a true symphony out of it, he thought. An economic collapse here, a plague there, so that even the rich ones cop it sweet. War, famine—all the bloody horsemen of the Apocalypse, one after the other. Like World War Three, but in slow motion. Which will make it easier to enjoy.

  Of course, I'll have to play it carefully—make sure it doesn't get too far out of hand. After all, I don't want anything happening to me, now do I?

  But before the real fun could begin he had to get the last details dealt with. It was one thing to be able to access Felix Jongleur's high-level information, another to implement the kind of wild art projects Dread was now envisioning. Surely at some point Jongleur's absence would officially become Jongleur's death, and his various boards of directors and successor-designates would step in, sending armies of accountants and data analysts ahead of them. Before that happened, Dread knew he would have to firm up his own controls, transferring the assets and connections he needed into his own hands.

  Did he need Dulcie for that? No. She had lived out her usefulness. In fact, she knew far too much. Another day or so while she helped him handle the various transfers of power, then her trip to Australia would end. He had decided that he could combine the need for an unsuspicious resolution with a little pleasure for himself, after all. Who would be surprised if an American tourist were to be found robbed and murdered in one of the seamier parts of Sydney?

  The piano was joined again, not by a wild dog this time, but by the quiet beeping of an urgent message. Dread considered ignoring it, but knew it might be from Dulcie. Since they had such a short time left together, he wanted
to keep her working. A good manager didn't waste an asset.

  To his surprise, the call was on a line he hadn't yet used. The head that filled the view-window was shaved bald, the robes streaked gray and black with soot.

  "O Lord of All!" the priest said, stuttering in his haste and panic. "Woe is come upon us, O Great House. Your servants are full of despair—all the Black Land is in terror!"

  Dread frowned. It was one of the Old Man's virtual priests. The call had been routed directly to him through Jongleur's connection to the Grail network, just as though the servitor were calling from the real world instead of an imaginary Egypt.

  "What do you want?"

  "O blessed Anubis, master of the final journey, there is fire in great Abydos! Many priests are dead, many more lie burned and dying!"

  Which was a pretty funny thing to call him about, Dread reflected, since he had been torturing and murdering priests himself in the temple complex of Abydos-That-Was not twenty-four hours ago. "So?"

  The ash-smeared face went paler still. The man's mouth worked without noise for a moment. "And the prisoners of the great god have escaped."

  "What?" He narrowed his eyes. "You let those two idiots from the Circle get away? Both of them?"

  The priest swallowed. When he spoke, it was almost a whisper. "All of them. All of the great god's prisoners."

  "What are you talking about?" He heard his voice rise to an angry howl, as though he truly were the god the priest must be seeing. "Don't move!"

  With a flick of thought, he threw himself into Egypt.

  Wells cowered on the floor of the cell, his mummy wrappings smeared with dirt, his banana-yellow face tight with fear and resentment as he stared up at the huge, jackal-headed figure of Anubis.

  "How was I to know?" Wells was slurring his words as though something had damaged his brain. "It was just some kid—he must have been the same one who got Yacoubian. He just . . . stuck his hand in me. I was paralyzed—almost felt like I was thrown offline, except I was still locked inside this virtual body."