by Tad Williams
"What the hell are you babbling about?" Dread whirled and struck Wells hard across the side of the head, knocking the bandaged god to the floor. "I'll give you paralyzed, you whining poof. The priests said my prisoners escaped—all my prisoners. I had two little god-botherers I was hanging onto, but they weren't going anywhere. Almost dead, they were. So what are the priests talking about?"
"They just . . . showed up here," Wells said quickly. "The ones I came to Kunohara's world with. They showed up here and I was holding them for you."
"Kunohara's world. . . ?" Dread stared at the cowering figure. "Are you telling me. . . ?"
Wells climbed to his feet. "But Paul Jonas was with them, see?"
"Who the bloody hell is that?" The name was slightly familiar, but any memory was washed away in a hot red fury that made him feel as though he might burst into flame.
"Someone Jongleur was searching for!" Wells seemed to feel he had redeemed himself with this information; he clambered back onto his feet. "The Old Man turned the network upside down trying to find him, but we never knew why—we didn't even know his name. Jonas has some kind of post-hypnotic block on his memory, so I thought a little session with one of the kheri-heb priests might loosen it up. . . ."
"Shut up!" Dread roared. "I don't give a shit about this Jonas. Who was here? What prisoners? Who escaped?"
Wells flinched back, blinking. "I told you, the . . . the ones from Kunohara's world. You remember, don't you? You sent all those mutant bugs after them. The boy with the strange hand. The woman with the bandaged head. The blind woman. . . ."
"You . . . you had Martine here. . . ?" Dread could hardly speak. His hands were shaking. "You had Martine Desroubins and her friends here and you didn't tell me?"
Wells took a step backward. He tried to stand taller. "I would have told you. I would have! But I can make some decisions on my own, you know. I ran one of the largest companies in the world—and now I'm a god, too!"
Dread was on him so fast that Robert Wells did not even have time to squeak. The jackal-god's huge hand closed around the other's throat, then he lifted his victim up until his bandaged feet dangled helplessly a meter above the ground.
"Which way did they go?"
Wells shook his head violently, eyes bulging.
"Right. I'll find out myself." He pulled Wells closer still, until he could have closed his jaws on Ptah's hairless head and cracked it like a walnut. "You goddamned Yanks think you know everything. Well, here's some information for you, mate. You may be a god now . . . but around here, I'm God Almighty."
His captive struggled in terror, but only for a moment. Dread's hand shot out, swift as a cobra's strike, and plunged into Robert Wells' gaping mouth, then his fingers curved upward, poking through the skull as though it were an eggshell as he set his grip. With the smaller god secured, he took his other hand from Wells' throat and pulled the yellow lips hideously wide, stretching them back like a latex mask until the face disappeared. Then, with a terrible twisting motion of his long arm, Dread yanked Ptah's entire skeleton out of his body and let it drop to the floor. A puppet of bone and sinew twitched like a landed fish beside the empty, rubbery folds of its own flesh. The eyes, still trapped in the orbits of the naked skull, rolled wildly even as their intelligence began to fade.
"So you're a god, eh?" Dread spat beside the slick, shiny bones. "Then heal that.'"
His mood ever so slightly improved, Anubis went in search of his prisoners.
He could think better now. The oppressive cloud that had darkened and confused his thoughts was beginning to disperse, as if baked away by the glaring Egyptian sun, but despite the improvement, Paul found himself not just uninterested in thinking but actively unwilling to try. The memory of his own helplessness was a shame and a terror.
Upon waking he had dragged himself into the shade of the boat's gilded deck awning. They seemed to have left the canal and moved out onto the Nile itself: on either side of the wide brown river stretched kilometers of empty sand. The rugged mountains, ocher-gray and indistinct in the distance, only underscored the flat, featureless desert.
Whether he wanted them or not, scraps of memory fluttered through his head—Ava, the chirping of the birds, Mudd's triumphant, subhuman face as he found them embracing.
I kissed her. Did I love her? Why can't I feel it? If you love someone, surely you can't forget that.
But it was all too dark, too heavy with misery. He didn't want to know any more—surely one of them had somehow betrayed the other. Nothing else would explain his revulsion at the idea of uncovering additional memories.
He was distracted, and was grateful for it, by Nandi Paradivash lowering himself carefully down beside him. "I see you are awake." He spoke far more slowly than Paul remembered from their first meeting. In fact, this Nandi seemed quite different from the mercurial character with whom he had sailed through Xanadu—hard and dry, as though some crucial petrifaction had occurred. "I am glad to see you again, Paul Jonas."
"And I'm glad to see you. I never got the chance to thank you for saving me."
"From the Khan's men?" Nandi showed him the phantom of a smile. "They actually caught me, but I escaped. It is much like an adventure game, this life, eh? But all too dangerous, both to the body and the soul."
"Nothing around you is true, but the things you see can hurt you or kill you," Paul quoted. "That was the message I was given—I think I told you. And you did save me, in the most important way. You told me what was really going on. Then I didn't have to be afraid I was losing my mind."
Nandi slowly eased himself into a lotus position, being careful with his burned legs. The scarred flesh brought back Paul's own last hours in the temple so strongly that for a moment he thought he might be sick.
Nandi did not seem to notice: his eyes were on the riverbank. "God will protect us from evil men. They will live to see their works cast down." He turned to Paul. "And their works have been cast down, haven't they? I have been told of what happened to the Grail Brotherhood's ceremony of immortality."
"Yes. But somehow it still doesn't feel like we're winning."
After they had sat in silence for a little while, Paul suddenly said, "You know, you were right. About the Pankies."
Nandi frowned. "Who?"
"That English couple. The man and woman who were with me when you and I first met. You told me they weren't what they seemed." He related the strange happenings in the catacombs beneath Venice, when for a moment the Twins and the Pankies had confronted each other as though looking into a mirror, and how Sefton and Undine Pankie had turned away and vanished. "But that still doesn't explain them," he said.
"Early versions, perhaps," Nandi offered. "A release that was superseded by a later, improved product. But someone forgot to delete the original version."
"But there have been others, too," Paul said, remembering Kunohara's world. "I met a pair who were insects, but they didn't care about me either. They were obsessed with something they called the Little Queen," A memory prickled him. "And the Pankies were looking for their imaginary daughter."
"A common thread in both versions, no doubt," Nandi said. "Martine told me you know the originals."
Paul was taken aback at the thought that people were discussing his ugly secrets, his imperfectly remembered life—it was his life, after all, wasn't it?
But it's everyone's mystery, he reminded himself. Everyone here is in terrible danger.
"Yes, I suppose I do, but I don't remember everything even now." It was there again, a shadow at the edge of his thoughts, a dim perception of something he did not want to know better. "But why should there be different versions doing different things? Why are some of them after me, hunting me, and others don't care?" Again the Venetian catacombs loomed in his memory, the mirrored pairs facing each other as he and poor Gally and the woman Eleanora watched.
"Perhaps they're simply programmed differently." Nandi didn't seem to see much purpose in speculating, but Paul was trying to remembe
r something else, something Eleanora had told him, or showed him. . . .
"My God," he said suddenly, "they are just copies." He sat up straight, ignoring the sharp pain across the ribs. "Eleanora—she was a real woman who lived in the Venetian simworld—she showed me her boyfriend, this Mafia fellow who had built the world for her in the first place. He was dead, but the Grail people had made a copy of him while he was still alive. I think it was an early version of the Grail process. He was real—he could answer questions—but he was also kind of an information loop, kept forgetting what had been asked, said the same things over and over. What if the Pankies and the other versions of the Twins are like that?"
"You are bleeding," Nandi said quietly.
Paul looked down. His sudden movement had opened the shallow cuts on his chest; blood was running freely, soaking through the dirty jumpsuit.
"Jonas, what are you doing?" Florimel was striding toward him. "Martine, he's bleeding again."
"She can't hear you," Nandi said. "She's at the bow of the ship."
"Help me get him cleaned up."
"I'm all right, really." But Paul did not resist as Florimel opened the front of his jumpsuit and began cursingly to fumble at the sopping strips of cloth Martine had applied.
"T4b?" she called. "Where are you? Find me something I can use to make more bandages. T4b?" There was no answer. "Damn it, Javier, where are you?"
"Javier?" asked Nandi as he helped Florimel peel Paul's jumpsuit down to his waist.
Paul was irritated—they weren't life-threatening wounds, and the idea now blazing in his head felt important. Many copies, some less perfect than others. . . .
I am a broken mirror, she had told him. A broken mirror. . . .
"You took your time, Javier," Florimel said as the boy finally approached. "Did you find some cloth?"
"Isn't any." He darted a glance at Nandi as though more fearful of him than of Florimel's anger.
"Javier . . . Javier Rogers?" Nandi asked.
"No!" said T4b harshly, then stiffened and looked down at his feet. "Yeah."
"You know each other?" Florimel looked from one to the other.
"We should," said Nandi. "It is because of the Circle that Javier is here."
Florimel turned on the youth. "Is that true?"
"Oh, fenfen," he said miserably.
The way they were all gathered around the boy, Paul thought, it was hard not to think of an inquisition. But T4b, his face damp with sweat and teenage embarrassment, did not make a very convincing martyr.
"What else have you lied to us about?" Florimel demanded.
"Didn't lie about nothing, me." T4b scowled. "Ain't duppie. Just didn't tell you, seen?"
"You don't need to justify your faith, honey," Bonnie Mae assured him.
"He kept no dangerous secrets from you," said Nandi. "We recruited many like him, promising young men and women of belief. We gave them information, some education, and we gave them equipment. This is a war we are fighting, after all, as you people should know better than anyone. Were you not recruited yourselves by someone whose motives are far less openly stated than ours?"
"Are you working for Kunohara as well?" Florimel asked T4b. Paul thought she seemed unusually upset. "Was Martine right about that too?"
"No! Don't got nothing to do with that Kuno-whatsit, me." He looked like he was about to cry. "And I never did nothing wrong to you either. Just didn't tell you . . . about the Circle."
Paul looked at Martine, but she seemed to be listening with only part of her attention. "What did you mean when you said 'men and women of belief?" he asked Nandi.
"We are a group bound together by our belief in a power greater than mere humanity," Nandi said. "I made no secret of that when you and I met."
"But Javier. . . ?"
The boy looked sullen when he realized everyone was looking at him once more. "I'm born again, me. Jesus saved me."
"There you go," said Bonnie Mae. "Don't be ashamed of the path you've chosen. 'Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness,' as Jesus said on the mountain, 'for they shall be filled.' Nothing wrong with a hunger for righteousness." She turned to the others. "This boy has found his way through Christ. Does that offend you? What about me, then? Is there something wrong with loving God?"
"Jesus helped me give up charge," T4b said earnestly. "I was, like, lost. Then He saved me."
"He just came over to your house and showed you some new tricks?" Florimel laughed bitterly. "I am sorry, but I grew up with this nonsense. It poisoned my mother's life and it poisoned mine. Forgive my reaction, but I feel betrayed to learn that he has been serving another master all this time."
"Serving another master?" Now it was Nandi who was angry. "How? We have not spoken to Javier since he entered the network. Are your goals not ours—to save the children and bring about the destruction of this devilish operating system, this terrible immortality machine that runs on blood and souls?"
I was thinking of something important when all this happened, Paul remembered, but could not tear himself away from the looks of fury and confusion on the faces of his companions. Only Martine Desroubins seemed somewhere else, listening to sounds she alone could hear. "Martine?" he asked.
"It is close," she said. "I feel it. It is like nothing else I have experienced here—like the Cavern of the Lost, but both more and less alive. And it is very powerful." She grimaced. "Close. So close."
Paul looked up. The ship, driven by its indefatigable crew of robotic galley slaves, was rounding a bend in the wide, sluggish river. As they tilted past a scattering of rocky foothills Paul saw it, nestled by itself in a wide valley of red sand.
"Good lord," he said quietly.
"It is empty." Martine was still frowning, the lines of her face tight with pain. "But not empty. There is something deep inside it that is hot and active. It is like an oven with the door closed."
The Wicked Tribe, who had been hovering over the discussion like particularly anarchic thoughts above the heads of comic-strip characters, now descended in a yellow flutter, clustering on Paul.
"Bad place," one of them said.
"Been here," said another. "Don't want to be here again. Go away now!"
Several of them flew up and began tugging at Paul's hair. "Time to go away. Back to somewhere fun. Now!"
The argument over T4b ended as one by one the combatants saw the faint brown shape of the temple in the distance, the sandstone pillars of the massive facade standing sentry between oblongs of pitch-black shadow.
"It . . . it looks like a smile," said Florimel.
"Like a dead smile," Nandi said slowly. "Like the grin of a skull."
The temple not only looked empty, but was half-covered with drifting dunes, as though it had lain long unremembered and unvisited. Swirled by a breeze none of them could feel, clouds of sparkling gray sand helped shroud the structure so that its full size and dimensions were never quite clear.
The quiet splash of the banked oars now fell silent. As the ship glided slowly to a stop beside the dock Paul and his companions stared at the looming temple, its wind-blasted front high as an office building and as wide as several city blocks. There was no noise anywhere along the riverbank.
"Don't want to go in there," T4b said at last.
"We must," Martine said, but gently: if she had heard the argument about his secret affiliation, it did not seem to have lessened her opinion of the youth. "Dread will come looking for us—it could be any time now. He will not be tricked or defeated, not like Wells, And he will be very angry."
T4b did not say anything else, but when the others began moving toward the gangplank he went with them as though being led to execution. The Wicked Tribe hung on his and Paul's and Florimel's clothes like sleeping bats, frightened for once into good behavior.
"Not so bad this time," one of them whispered in Paul's ear, but the childish voice did not sound entirely convinced. "It more asleep. Maybe doesn't know we here."
Despit
e Martine's warnings, Paul could not make himself move any faster than a foot-dragging trudge across the sun-blasted desert. The blowing sand stung his face. The looming row of columns seemed ready to swallow him down. The very air was heavy, as though they were pushing their way through something solid and sticky. Behind him Florimel let out a strangled sigh, fighting to get breath into a fear-tightened throat.
The baking heat diminished only a little as they stepped between the Cyclopean columns and into the shade. The long wall before them was covered with what had once been intricately carved panels, but which had been worn down until they were only idiot scribbles, devoid of sense or reassurance. The only doorway was a simple black square in the middle of the massive front wall, a hole into a deeper darkness.
Martine went through first, holding her hands to her ears despite the thickly expectant silence of the place—exactly as though someone stood beside her screaming, Paul thought as he and the others followed her inside.
As his eyes grew used to the darkness of the interior, illuminated only by the light from the door, Paul saw that white-clad bodies lay everywhere, perhaps two dozen in all. Not one was moving; all appeared to have suffered in dying. He turned away in dismay from the nearest corpse, its fingers red from tearing at the unyielding stone floor, eyes rolled up as though looking for a salvation that would never arrive.
"They are not Puppets," Nandi said quietly. Paul looked at him in surprise. "They are empty sims," the dark-skinned man said. "See—they have not putrefied or even changed, only stiffened. Real people died or went offline and left their sims behind."
Martine had stopped in front of an immense doorway that stretched to the ceiling along the interior wall, its double doors covered in hammered bronze. The very size of them gave his fear an extra, sickening twist.
