by Tad Williams
"The very poor suspension of this wagon, perhaps," said Florimel sourly. "By the way, this thing pulling us is not what I think of as a native American animal either, when you come to it. In fact, I am reminded of. . . ."
"Fenfen!" T4b shouted suddenly, pointing back up the slope. "Op it! Look!"
Paul turned to see a huge, glittering shape slide out of the mine shaft. For a moment it was only multiple starbursts of bouncing light, then the great head heaved around toward them, and with the bright reflections gone, Paul could suddenly see it clearly.
"Sweet Jesus," he said. "It's some kind of snake!"
But it was more than that—it was another thing like their horse, familiar yet strange. As the monstrous creature heaved more of its bulk out of the shaft, he saw that its body was studded with great chunks of copper and silver, as though its bones were metal and protruded through the horny, patterned skin. Instead of a smooth tube, it was segmented like a child's toy, but weirdest of all were the wheels at the bottom of each segment, great round buttons of bone.
"It's a. . . ." Absurdly, even in heart-pounding fright he found himself grasping for the proper term. "A mine train—ore cars!"
The thing writhed, squeaking and scraping, out onto the road. For a moment it tried to draw itself into a circle, but there was not enough room for its massive coils in the flat space along the edge of the cliffs. It rose up swaying, just its front two sections looming several meters high, and for a moment its huge, faceted rose-quartz eyes seemed to consider their wagon, halted and helpless as Florimel tried to calm the terrified horse-creature. A tongue like a hardened stream of quicksilver flicked out, then flicked out again, then with terrifying speed the serpent dropped its head and slid down the road toward them.
"Get out," Paul shouted. "It's corning! We'll have to run!"
"Chance not!" T4b slithered out of the wagon and onto the front bench and snatched the reins from Florimel. "Done this one before, me—just like Baja Hades!"
He whipped the horse-creature's flank with the end of the reins until it gave a shrill whistle of pain and surprise, then leaped away down the road so suddenly that the wagon almost tipped over. It was all Paul could do to cling to the side. As soon as he regained his balance, the wagon wheeled around a bend and he spun sideways again to crash into Martine and almost knock her over the low railing. The snake-thing had fallen out of sight behind them.
"Flyin' now!" T4b whooped. "Told you, done this before!"
"This isn't a game!" Paul shouted at him. "This is bloody real!"
Florimel took advantage of a section of straightaway to fling herself into the back of the wagon with the others. She grabbed fiercely at the board railing beside Paul.
"If we survive," she gasped, "I will kill him."
The odds on that outcome rapidly became worse; as the careening wagon picked up speed on an increasing slope, the vast head of the serpentine creature came around the corner behind them, followed by its juddering body. It had wheels, as well as the great muscular power of its ore-knobbed body to push it along. It was gaining on them.
They thundered over rocks in the road and for a moment Paul felt himself rise weightlessly off the wagon bed, then gravity reasserted itself, slamming him down hard on his back on the boards. A body, either Florimel's or Martine's, thumped on top of him and drove out the air, so that for a moment the sky exploded with daytime stars.
A second later the wagon tipped up at an alarming angle as the terrified horse dragged it around another bend on two wheels. From his position, it seemed certain to Paul that they had run off the side of the road and were hanging over pure nothing.
When all four wheels were touching ground again, Paul clambered up onto his hands and knees with the idea of putting Florimel's plan into action now, on the chance that they would not live to kill T4b later on. Instead, as he lifted his head up above the wagon floor, he saw the terrible face of their pursuer only meters behind them. The creature saw him, too. A mouth full of draggled iron fangs opened wide, displaying black depths as impenetrable as the pit out of which it had crawled.
Paul decided not to strangle the teenager just yet.
"It's catching up!" he shouted.
T4b crouched lower on the bench, snapping the reins against the horse-creature's back, but the animal had no greater speed to give them. Another bump and Paul felt himself flung up in the air again, and for a moment was heart-stoppingly certain he would be flung out the back of the wagon and into those waiting jaws. Instead he tangled with Florimel and the two of them slid and crashed into the back railing of the wagon.
"Grab her!" Florimel shouted as he struggled to extricate himself. For a moment Paul had no idea what she meant, but then saw that Martine also had hit the back of the wagon at such an angle that she had nearly flown out. She was clinging with one leg and one arm, her left leg dangling only a few inches above the dirt, too stunned even to cry out.
Paul scrambled along the railing, but could not get a firm hold on Martine's flailing limbs as he fought against the wagon's ceaseless jouncing. Florimel grabbed him, helping to anchor him as he worked to better his grip. T4b was staring back in alarm, and as if sensing his inattention the horse-creature had slowed a little. The pursuing serpent gave a creaking hiss and rose up behind them, looming over the wagon like the terrifying figurehead of a Viking ship.
The wagon abruptly swung to the right as the horse followed a tight curve in the hillside. Paul, Florimel, and Martine were all flung to the outside rail of the wagon; for an instant, Martine lifted off the railing and was in open air with nothing below her but the painted strata of the canyon. Paul felt her sleeve begin to rip under his fingers, the material pulling apart at the seams, even as the dragon head darted down at them and the giant stony jaws clacked a hand's breadth from Paul's head.
Paul yanked Martine back down into the wagon, banging her skull against the rail in the process. The serpent reared again, then paused and abruptly rolled sideways, its hiss a shriek of surprise, and fell away behind them.
Paul clambered to his knees, staring. The tail of the serpent had failed to make the last sharp bend, even as the head had driven in for the kill. Much of the creature's bulk had already skidded down the steep slope in a billow of dust. As Paul watched, the great head whipped back and forth as it tried to gain purchase with the part of its body still on the mountain road, but too much of its back end was sliding downward. With a screech like failing brakes, the head thrashed toward them once, sun glinting from the copper nodes, then it was gone over the side like a yanked rope.
Moments later a grinding crash echoed up to them, the sound of a vertical train wreck.
Paul slumped back to the wagon bed. Martine and Florimel lay beside him, breathing in shallow, rapid gasps. The wagon was still jolting swiftly down the winding road, swaying dangerously at every turn.
"It's gone!" he shouted. "Javier, it's gone! Slow down!"
"This thing's locked up! Won't go slow!"
Exhausted, Paul sat up. The boy was pulling back as hard on the reins as he could, but although the horse had modified its pace a little, it was still moving down the hill road at a near gallop.
"It can't slow down," Florimel groaned from the boards beside him. "The wagon will run over it. Find the brake!"
"Brakes? On a wagon?"
"Great God, of course there is!" She clambered past Paul and leaned across T4b's lap. She grabbed something there and pulled up. There was a groaning noise and for a moment the wheels dug, then rolled again, but this time a little more slowly.
"Damn," said Paul. "I can't tell you how happy I am you knew that."
They were still rolling downhill at a whistling pace, but all four wheels now remained in contact with the ground. Paul, Martine, and Florimel dragged themselves back into the center of the wagon bed as the rocky hillside rushed past.
"Everybody all right?" Paul asked.
Martine groaned. "I have scraped most of the skin off my hands. Otherwise, I will live."
"Hey!" shouted T4b. "What about some charge for the driver?"
"What?" Florimel rubbed bruised knees. "Is he asking for drugs?"
"Charge!" T4b said, and laughed. "You know, rep!"
Paul, who was at least glancingly conversant with street slang, was the first to figure it out. "Thanks. He wants us to thank him,"
"Thank him?" Florimel growled. '"I would give him a painful spanking if I didn't worry we'd go over the cliff."
T4b scowled. "Didn't get eat by no snake, you. What's your boohoo?"
"You did a good job, Javier," Martine said. "Just keep your eyes on the road, please."
Paul spread his legs to brace himself, then leaned against the front of the wagon bed, watching the hill road wind away behind them. The sun was dazzlingly bright, only an eyelash short of noon. Raw metal glinted here and there in the ragged landscape.
"I doubt that either that snake or the horse pulling us were part of the original package for this place," he said. "Does that remind you of anything?" He was startled by a line of black appearing on the ridge beside them. It took a moment before he realized it was some kind of cable. He raised himself on his elbows and turned to look ahead. The cable paralleled the road, stretched along sentinel tree trunks.
Telephones? Not in Dodge City. Telegraph, must be. He eased himself back and watched the hill road and the line of black sliding away behind them.
"It is like Kunohara's world," Florimel said. "Those mutations he said had just begun there. Perhaps Dread has done something like that here as well."
"That would be a quick and perhaps amusing way to spoil things," Martine said. She spoke slowly, obviously still tired and sore. "And he has so many worlds to ruin. Just turn up a few randomizing factors, perhaps, then sit and watch someone's carefully-crafted simulation turn into something bizarre."
Another telegraph line now hung below the first, twin black streaks along the left side of Paul's vision. The wagon rattled and lurched down the stony road. Paul groaned. It was hard to imagine a less comfortable way to travel—he was surprised he hadn't broken any teeth with all the jaw-snapping bounces. "Can't we go any slower?"
"Not if you want Mister Horse in front of this ride," T4b said crossly.
Now there were telegraph lines along the canyon rim as well, so that the wagon rolled between two high, sparse fences of black cables. Paul wondered if this was another misshaping of the original simulation, and if so, what weird communication ran along these extra cables. Or were they merely empty copies?
"I think I see a town," Florimel said. "See, down at the bottom of the canyon."
Paul clambered to the edge of the wagon and squinted. The sun's glare off the canyon walls was fierce, making the river at the bottom a twisting line of silvery fire, but there was certainly something along the river's edge just before the canyon bent and blocked the rest of the river valley from view, something that seemed too regular to be stone on the canyon floor.
"Martine, can you tell if that's really a town—Dodge City, or whatever this is? I can't see it very well."
"We will reach it soon enough." She reached up and rubbed listlessly at her temples. "Forgive me."
"What in hell is going on?" Florimel said.
For a moment Paul thought she was talking about Martine's unwillingness to come look; then he saw that just ahead another half-dozen cables ran in from the hillside and then bent off a leaning pole and stretched over the top of the roadway like a musical staff with no notes. An instant later they were bouncing along beneath the awning of black lines, and Paul could not help seeing that the cables now surrounded them on all sides. They hung loosely, a meter or two of empty space between each pair, so they were not in any way trapped, but it was still an unsettling sight.
"I don't know," Paul belatedly answered Florimel. "But I don't like it very much. . . ." He looked up past T4b just as the wagon rounded a bend, still traveling in a tube of telegraph cables. The young man swore and jerked back hard on the reins. Their horse was already trying to slow up, but the weight of the wagon behind it was too much and the creature's knob-knuckled feet were furrowing the roadway.
Just a few dozen meters ahead the cables all ran together, knotted in a crooked black mandala across the middle of the wide road. It looked like. . . .
"Christ!" shouted Florimel, tumbling as the horse tangled in the traces and the wagon began to sway alarmingly. "What. . . ?"
It looked like a huge spiderweb.
"Get out!" Paul shouted. The horse had bolted to the inner side of the roadway and the wagon could not make a sharp enough turn to follow. The wheels dug and skidded. The whole wagon began to tip even as it plunged swiftly forward into the swaying net of cables, now only a stone's throw away. "Jump—now!"
Martine was wrapped around his legs. The wagon bed was tilting up sideways, lifting them inexorably toward the canyon side of the road. Paul bent down and grabbed the blind woman, then did his best to climb to the rising side of the wagon, hoping to leap out toward the hillside, but Martine's weight was too much for him.
One of the wagon wheels snapped with a noise like a gunshot. A splintered piece of spoke arrowed past his face and the whole wagon groaned like a wounded animal as it tumbled onto its side.
Paul had no chance to pick spots. He grabbed Martine and flung himself off the wagon bed. Something sticky caught at him, sagging beneath his weight, and for a moment he had the alarming sight of nothing but empty air beneath him, of the full vertiginous drop down the crazy-banded side of the canyon. He half-slid, half-fell down the row of cables until he was sitting in a painful, twisted position in the roadway, stuck at the nexus point of two of the black bands, with Martine lying motionless across his lap.
Before he could even look for the others, the wagon and the trapped, tethered horse rolled into the web of cable blocking the roadway, flinging up a dense cloud of dust. One of the horse's legs was obviously broken; it writhed helplessly in the wreckage of the wagon, a mess of kicking black fur and splintered wood dangling from the sticky web.
Then the web's builders appeared—hairy gray-and-brown shapes climbing up from the canyon or down the hillside, scuttling along the strands like spiders.
Spiders would have been bad enough. These things had the faces of dead buffalo, with hanging tongues and rolling eyes, atop their malformed, many-limbed bodies. Worst of all, they were even more clearly part-human than the insect-monsters of Kunohara's world. They hissed with hungry pleasure as they advanced down the swaying cables. The first of them to reach the middle of the web began to pull the living horse apart, bickering in wet, piping voices over the best bits, ignoring the creature's agonized squeals as they began to feed.
Paul tried to drag himself upright, but the sticky cables held him like a strong hand.
"CODE Delphi. Start here.
"It seems pointless to me even to record these thoughts, since I cannot believe we will ever leave this place, but the habit dies hard.
"It is dark here, the others tell me—some kind of underground nest, filthy to smell and unpleasant to hear. I wish I could limit myself to those two senses, but in my own way I can even see the things moving, eating, coupling. They are horrible. I am running out of hope. My strength is all but gone.
"I suppose we are alive only because they feasted on the horse first. The sounds it made dying were. . . . No. What is the point? Is there something we can do? I can think of nothing. There are dozens of the monsters. We should have tried to escape when we were first seized. Now we are in their nest. Any hope that they eat only animals has been destroyed by the human bones that lie everywhere, in careless piles. Those I touched have been picked clean of flesh and broken for marrow.
"Horrible things. T4b, who has spent most of the time praying, called them 'rotten-cow spiders.' I have not had a clear impression of them. What I perceive is the mass of them, the limbs, the voices—almost human, but my God, that word 'almost'. . . !
"Stop, Martine. We have faced situation
s as bad as this and survived. Why is it that I am so weak, so weary, so miserable? Why have the past days felt like work too hard for me to do?
"It is. . . .
"Good God. One of the things came to sniff at us. Florimel drove it away by kicking at it, but it did not seem frightened. They do smell of rotted meat, but they also have another scent, something strange I cannot define, something nonliving. This whole place, this simworld, seems to be in a paroxysm of change. The others can see only what is at this moment, but I can perceive the changes that have happened and those that are about to happen. Dread has grabbed the place and squeezed hard. This world has not resisted him any better than would a fistful of butter. Heaven only knows what these poor creatures were. People, perhaps. Ordinary people with ordinary lives. Now they live in holes in the ground and squeak like rats and eat things that are still screaming.
"Where is Paul? I cannot sense him near me anymore. But the noise and heat and confusion make it difficult. . . .
"Florimel says he is just a few meters away, on his hands and knees. Poor man. To have gone through so much, only to end here.
"I cannot stand this anymore—any of it. Ever since the Trojan simulation I have been dazed as an electroshock victim. In between the terrors and lesser distractions I have tried to find myself, the Martine I know, but it is as if I have been hollowed. The memory of the last hours of Troy haunts me. How could I do such a thing? Even to save these friends, how could I bring death to so many? Rape and torture and destruction? And after watching the pitiable humanity of Hector and his family, too.
"I tell myself over and over that they were only Simulaera, not real, only bits of gear. Sometimes I believe it, for hours at a stretch. Maybe it truly is so, but I know that I cannot stop seeing the spear plunging into that Trojan soldier's stomach, the horror on his face. How can I know that was not someone like us, still trapped in the system, forced to play out his part in a famous war? Not likely, perhaps, but still . . . still.
