Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  "No!" the woman screamed. "Stop it, you devil! Stop it!"

  "But that's just the point, sweetness." Dread lifted his smoking fingers in a gesture of mock helplessness. "It's not up to me to stop it—it's up to you."

  "Don't . . . don't tell him anything, Mrs. Simpkins!" Nandi Paradivash was shivering with agony, but struggling to remain upright. "I am no less bound than you. My life is nothing. My pain is nothing."

  "Oh, on the contrary," said Dread. "It's quite a bit. And if she won't talk to save you, I think you will when I start on her." He grinned, displaying a line of teeth like an ivory chess set. "Because I do even better work on women."

  CHAPTER 14

  The Stone Girl

  NETFEED/NEWS: Net Has Its Own Folklore

  (visual: artist's rendering of TreeHouse node)

  VO: Net historian Gwenafra Glass says that, like all new countries, the net has its own folktales, mythical beasts, and ghosts.

  GLASS: "You go back to the earliest days and you hear about things like cable lice. TreeHouse is another sort of example. It's a real node, but it's been embroidered over the years into something that's mostly fantasy. And more recently we have things like the Weeper, which is a strange sobbing voice people hear sometimes in unoccupied chat nodes and unfinished VR nodes. And of course an old folktale from the twentieth century, the gremlins that used to lock up fighter airplanes, has carried over into the Glowbugs and Lightsnakes that people these days claim to have seen in VR environments, but no one ever finds in the code. . . ."

  Renie looked wildly from side to side, but could see no sign of whatever had made the sound. The nearest of the ghostly shapes pursuing her was a pale smear in the twilight murk, frighteningly close, but still several dozen meters away. She took a step to steady herself and to her horror felt something clutch at her ankle. She leaped away with a muffled shriek.

  "Down here," a small voice said. "You can hide!"

  Something rustled near Renie's feet. "I . . . I can't see you." Wind carried the pursuing creature's liquid groan down the slope. "Where are you?"

  "Down. Get down!"

  Renie dropped to her hands and knees amid the undergrowth, baffled by the shadows. One of the patches of darkness widened a little and a small hand reached out, closed on her wrist, and tugged. Renie crawled forward and found herself in a recess scarcely larger than her own huddled form, a space where a tangle of fallen branches had been silted over with crushed leaves and dirt. Pushing in headfirst, she could see nothing of the pocket's other inhabitant, and could feel only a childlike form pressed the length of her side. "Who are you?" she asked quietly.

  "Sssshhh." The shape next to her stiffened. "It's close."

  Renie's heart was still beating uncomfortably fast. "But won't it smell us?" she whispered.

  "It doesn't smell things—it hears them."

  Renie shut her mouth. She huddled, the smell of damp earth in her nostrils, and tried not to think about being buried alive.

  She felt the hunter's approach before she heard it, a gradually growing sense of panic that made her skin tighten and her already speeding heart threaten to rattle right out of her chest. Was this the helpless, paralyzing horror that Paul Jonas felt each time the Twins came near him? Her respect for the man went up another notch, even as she fought down shrieking panic.

  The terrifying thing had moved above them now; she could sense it as clearly as if a cloud had swung in front of the sun. Her throat tightened until the urge to scream was gone. She could not have made a noise if she wanted.

  But the thing itself was not silent. It moaned again, the sound so pulsingly near that it seemed to turn Renie's bones to sand in their sockets, in the wake of that awful noise she could hear other sounds, a sighing murmur, as though the phantom whispered to itself in a voice of wind, meaningless sounds just on the edge of speech. The breathy gibberish was as unbearable as the scream. It was the sound of a dying or even dead intelligence, an empty madness. Renie, already in darkness, squeezed her eyes shut until her face ached, clenched her teeth together, and prayed directionlessly for strength.

  The sounds gradually grew more faint. The sensation of hungry, brainless malevolence also lessened. Renie cautiously let out her breath. The shape beside her touched her arm with cool fingers, as though to warn her against premature celebration, but Renie had no urge at all to move or make a sound.

  Several minutes passed before the small voice said, "I think they're all gone now."

  Renie wasted no time backing out of the tiny cavern of twigs and leaf-scatter. Afternoon, or what passed for it in this sunless place, was almost entirely gone. The world was gray, but seemed still a bit too bright for this shank of twilight, as though the stones and even the trees gave off a faint light of their own.

  The foliage rustled at her feet. The little figure that crawled out was mottled gray and brown, human-shaped but not very exactly so, as though it had been cut out of raw soil with a cookie cutter.

  Renie took a step backward, "Who are you?"

  The newcomer looked at her, surprise evident on its face—a face mostly suggested by the arrangement of dark and light spots and bumps and holes in the dun-colored surface. "You don't know me?" The voice was soft but surprisingly clear. "I'm the Stone Girl. I thought everyone knew me. But you didn't know enough to hide, so I guess that makes sense."

  "I'm sorry. Thank you for helping me." She stared out along the empty hillside. "What . . . what were those things?"

  "Those?" The Stone Girl gave her a look of mild surprise. "Just some Jinnears. They come out at night. I shouldn't have stayed out so late, but. . . ." The Stone Girl's expression suddenly became morose, in its simple way. She bent and brushed herself free of clinging leaves, quite deftly considering the thickness of her limbs and the clumsy shape of her blunt fingers and toes.

  "So who are you?" the little girl asked when she had straightened up. "Why don't you know about Jinnears?"

  "Just a stranger," Renie said. "A traveler, I guess." The Stone Girl might look as though she had been quickly molded from raw soil, but there was an odd suppleness to her movements, as though she could bend in places other than just the normal joints. "Do you live here?" Renie asked her. "Can you tell me anything about it?" A sudden thought struck her. "I'm looking for some friends—one is a small man, almost as dark as me, the other is a girl with curly hair and paler skin. Have you seen them?"

  The indentations that were the Stone Girl's eyes widened, "You sure ask a lot of questions."

  "I'm sorry. I'm . . . I'm lost. Have you seen them?"

  The little head tilted slowly from side to side. "No. Were you out in the Ending?"

  "If you mean that place over there where things get . . . kind of strange, hard to see. . . . Yes, I guess so." Renie suddenly realized how tired she was. "I really need to find my friends."

  "You need to get out of here, that's for sure. I do, too—I should never have been out so late, but I was trying to get to the Witching Tree to ask about the Ending." The Stone Girl followed this unedifying explanation with a moment of silent thought. "You'd better come with me to see the stepmother," she said at last.

  "The stepmother? Who's that?"

  "Don't you have one? Don't you have a family at all?"

  Renie sighed. This had become another one of those incomprehensible Otherland conversations. "Never mind. Sure, take me to this stepmother. Is it far?"

  "Shoes. Down by the bottom of the Pants," the Stone Girl added, equally cryptically, and waddled past Renie to begin clambering down the hillside.

  It didn't take long for Renie to understand the geographical reference, although it was not the kind of understanding that really explained anything.

  As they made their way down the hillside in the dying light, following the course of the river, which emerged through a gash in the hillside and splashed energetically down toward the misty valley below, Renie began to see that her earlier observations had been disturbingly true. The shapes of the distant hil
ls mimicked that of human forms, although they were still true hills, made at least on the surface from soil and covered in vegetation, as though earth had covered over the carcasses of titan forms. But where the giant on the black mountaintop had been singular and unquestionably alive, these smaller and more numerous forms buried in the earth seemed the remnants of some impossibly earlier time.

  "What is this place?" she asked her guide when she caught up with her again.

  The Stone Girl tried to look back over her shoulder, but it was hard without a neck. "Haven't you been here? It's Where The Beans Talk. You can see all the giants that fell. They're big," she added somewhat unnecessarily.

  "Real giants?" Renie asked, then immediately felt stupid. As if such a question could mean anything in a world like this.

  The Stone Girl seemed to take it at face value, however. "They were. They fell. I don't remember why. Maybe you could ask the stepmother."

  As they followed the line of the cataracts down, Renie began to understand the rest of the girl's strange description. When she had seen them through the mist, the land's unusual features had seemed only the effect of odd hills and shadowy copses of trees, but now that she could see better she began to make out a strange order. One great fold of hillside, a ridge with a line of trees stark along its spine, was now revealed to be a single huge. . . .

  ". . . Sleeve?" Renie said. "It's a sleeve? Do you mean we're walking down a . . . a shirt?"

  The Stone Girl again twitched her head in the negative. "Jacket. We're in the Jackets now. The Shirts are over there." She pointed a stubby finger. "Do you want to go to the Shirts?"

  Renie shook her head violently. "No. No, I was just . . . surprised. Why is this country . . . why is it all made of clothes?"

  The Stone Girl stopped and turned, apparently tired of trying to talk over her shoulder without the proper anatomical equipment. She looked as though she suspected Renie of making sport of her. "Why, they came off the giants, didn't they? When they fell."

  "Ah," said Renie, who could think of nothing else to say. "Of course."

  As they descended through river mist down a long fold of one of the Jackets, picking their way between the small but stubborn pines that seemed to cluster on all the most narrow and difficult bits of the path, Renie asked her small guide, "Do you know anything about birds that talk?"

  The Stone Girl shrugged. "Sure. Lots of birds talk."

  "This one kept repeating the same thing again and again, no matter what I asked it."

  "You can't really talk to the ones that are asleep," the girl told her.

  "What does that mean? That bird was flying—it wasn't sleeping."

  "No, that's just how they are when they first get here, all sleepy, doesn't matter if they're flying or nothing. Used to be, anyway—there aren't many that come anymore. But the new ones never understand much at first. Just say the same things, over and over. I used to try to talk to them when I was little." She darted Renie a quick look, just as any real girl would, to make sure that Renie realized she was very grown-up now, not just a kid. "The stepmother said it wasn't our business—we should let them sleep, let them dream."

  Renie pondered this with a growing sense of excitement. "So the birds . . . are sleeping? Dreaming?"

  The Stone Girl nodded, then swung herself down to a lower section of the path and waited for Renie to follow. "Yeah. Watch out for that part—it's pretty slippery."

  Renie balanced, then let herself slide down beside her. "But . . . but what do you call this place, anyway? Not the . . . the Jackets, here, but all of this." She lifted her hands. "Everything."

  Before the girl could answer, a terrible choking sob came echoing up the furrowed hillside. Renie flinched so badly she almost lost her footing and fell. "Oh my God, it's another one of those things!"

  Her guide was calmer than she was, holding up her blunt fingers for quiet. For a moment, as they stood in the mists, Renie heard nothing but the soft rush and splash of the nearby river. Then another ragged cry rose from the valley below.

  "It's farther away now," the Stone Girl pronounced. "Going the other direction. Come on."

  Renie, only slightly heartened, hurried after her.

  It was easier going as they neared the valley floor, but the mist was thicker, too, and the slow twilight seemed finally to have made the turn into night. In deepening shadow the strange shapes of the clothing, the mountainous shirts and pants only partially concealed by a cloak of earth and vegetation, seemed even more disturbing. Here and there Renie thought she could see smaller shapes moving in the mist, as though people watched her and the Stone Girl—people who did not particularly want to be seen in return. Renie was grateful to have a guide. Fumbling her way alone through these strange hills in growing darkness, especially with those screaming somethings on the loose, was not a pleasant idea.

  From the fires she saw flickering through the mist, it seemed certain that many people, or many somethings, in any case, made their homes among the folds of Pants and Shirts. As the Stone Girl took them along the seam of a small canyon between a row of cookfires on the heights, a few voices called down greetings. Her guide lifted her stubby arm in reply, and Renie felt reassured enough to wish that !Xabbu and Sam could share this with her. There was something deeply, primitively satisfying about coming into a lighted settlement at night, especially after being in the wilderness, and she had been in something much more bleak than any ordinary wilderness for days.

  As they moved out of the Pants into another dark crease between hills, the Stone Girl said, "We're almost there. Maybe the stepmother will be able to tell you where your friends are. And I have to tell her about the Witching Tree, and how the Ending's getting so much closer."

  They came around an outcropping of stone into another vale of cheery light. The buildings were ramshackle but the shapes were unmistakable, some of them so much a part of the landscape that they were indistinguishable from natural features, but others actually sticking most of the way out of the ground so that cookfires gleamed in the eyelets or through gaps in the soles. There were dozens of them, perhaps hundreds—an entire town.

  "They're shoes! Big shoes!"

  "I told you, didn't I?"

  As she got used to the light, Renie saw that the spaces between the shoes were occupied too, dozens and dozens of figures huddled beside fires, shadowy shapes that watched almost silently as Renie and the Stone Girl passed. Despite their silence, she felt little menace. The eyes that stared at them, the voices that whispered, seemed dulled with weariness and despair.

  It's like a shantytown, she thought.

  "There aren't usually people living out here," the Stone Girl explained. "It's because they lost their homes when the Ending came. There are so many of them now, and they're hungry and scared. . . ."

  She was interrupted by a dozen shrieking shapes running toward them from out of a dark clutter of gigantic footwear. Renie's moment of panic ended quickly when she realized they were only children. Most of them were even smaller than the Stone Girl, and their energy was unmistakable.

  "Where you been?" one of the nearest shouted. "The stepmother is in a state."

  "I found someone." The Stone Girl gestured toward Renie. "Took a while to get back."

  The children surrounded them, chattering and jostling, Renie had assumed they were the Stone Girl's siblings, but in the growing light that spilled from the mouth of the nearest shoe she saw that none of them looked anything like her guide. Most of them appeared more ordinarily human, although their clothing (for those who wore any) was of a style she could not identify. But some of the swarm of laughing children were even stranger than the Stone Girl, their shapes distorted and fantastical—one plumply furred in yellow and black like a bumblebee, another with feet like a duck's, and even one child, Renie was startled to see, who had a huge hole right through her middle, so that she had almost no torso at all.

  "Are these . . . your brothers and sisters?" she asked.

  The Stone Girl
shrugged. "Sort of. There are a lot of us. So many that sometimes I think the stepmother just doesn't know what to do."

  The shape of a vast shoe loomed before them, and Renie suddenly drew up and stopped. "Jesus Mercy," she said. "I get it."

  "Come on," said the Stone Girl, and for the first time took Renie's hand. Her fingers were rough, with the cool dampness of forest loam. A little boy with the head of a deer looked up at Renie with shy, liquid brown eyes, as though he wished he could take the other hand, but Renie was busy wrestling with this new realization. "Of course—it's that damn nursery rhyme, 'The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.' " Something else was tugging at her, too, some distant memory, but it was hard enough to deal with finding herself in a Mother Goose book.

  "We all live in shoes," her guide said, drawing her through a door at the back of the ancient, moss-covered boot. "Well, everybody around here. . . ."

  It was a very, very old shoe. To Renie's relief, no olfactory traces of its previous giant owner remained. Two or three times as many children waited in the smoky firelight as had come out to meet them, but the stay-at-homes seemed just as weirdly diverse. Those who had eyes watched Renie with fascination as the Stone Girl led her through the great boot toward the toe. Although there were far too many for introductions, the Stone Girl called a few by name, mostly while instructing them to get out of the way—"Polly," "Little Seed," "Hans," and "Big Ears" were a few Renie heard. She had to step over many of them, and a few times she trod on someone by accident, but no one objected. She guessed that the crowded way they lived had accustomed them to it.