Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  Azador stopped in front of the figure and sank into a crouch before her. "Where have they gone?"

  The woman looked up. Sam felt a chill. What she could see of the woman's face looked as smoky as the gray plumes curling above the fire, the eyes only points of light, small but bright as the coals at the edge of the fire pit.

  "You come back to us, Azador." Her voice was strangely resonant, not at all as insubstantial as the rest of her. "Out of time, my chabo, my ill-omened one. Your name proves a true name. They all are gone."

  "Gone?" The misery in his voice was palpable. "All?"

  "All. The morts and their mards, all the children. They have run ahead of the Ending. As you see, some were so fearful they even left their vardoni behind." She looked to the wagons and shook her head in disapproval. Azador seemed stunned. Clearly leaving without these bright, beloved vehicles was a sign of something very dire. "And at the last, here you are. It was an unlucky day when you left. Now it is an equally unlucky day when you return."

  "Where . . . where have they gone, Stepmother?"

  "The Ending is coming. All the Romany have gone to the Well. The One has commanded it. They hope when they get there, the Black Lady will speak to them, tell them some way to save themselves."

  "But why are you still here, Stepmother?"

  "I could not rest until all my chabos had been told. It was my task. Now that you are back, after all these years, my task is ended." She stood up and mounted slowly to the door of her wagon. "Now at last I can go."

  "But how do I get to the Well?" Azador was on the verge of tears. "I can remember so little. Will you take me with you?"

  She shook her head; for a moment the light of her eyes was shrouded. "I am not going there. My task is ended." She began to turn away, then hesitated. "Always I knew your destiny was a strange one, an unhappy one, my lost chabo. When you were born, I read the leaves—oh, what sadness! He will die by his own hand, but unwillingly, that is what they told me. But perhaps it can be different. Now, when all is coming to an end, when even the One himself is dying, who can say what will happen?"

  "How do I reach the Well?" Azador asked again. "I cannot remember."

  "You of all the Romany, who left the world of his forefathers to go who knows where—you can find your way. Not across the world but through it. Inward. To the place where you touch the One, as we all do." It was impossible to read expressions in the smoky countenance, but Sam thought the next words might almost be spoken with a smile. "Perhaps you will even reach the place before the rest of your people. Just like the Unlucky One that would be, eh? To leave after the others, but to reach the Ending first?" She nodded, then stepped into the darkness of her wagon. Azador dragged himself to his feet, one hand stretched toward the place where the thing he called his stepmother had, stood, but the firelight flickered and the wagon faded until all that could be seen were the pale painted stars that had decorated its side, hanging in the air like the dying image of a pyrotechnic display. Then even the stars were gone.

  Azador fell down into the dirt and sobbed. Sam reached for !Xabbu's hand and held it. She did not understand what had happened, but she knew what a broken heart looked like.

  Azador was clearly not going to be much use for a while. Sam was helping !Xabbu gather more wood—the stepmother's campfire at least had remained—when she noticed Jongleur was gone.

  "That's impacted!" she said. "He waited till we were distracted, then ditched us!"

  "Perhaps." !Xabbu did not seem convinced. "Let us look."

  They found the old man sitting against a tree at the edge of the clearing, as coldly serene as a statue. He was so still that for a moment, until he flicked them with an expressionless glance, Sam thought he might have had a stroke. She was mildly disappointed to discover it was not true, but could not help thinking there had been something odd about his behavior all day.

  "What are you doing?" she demanded. "You could at least come help us set up camp."

  "No one asked me." Jongleur rose stiffly and began to walk toward where the firelight flickered along the trunks of the trees. "Is that thing gone?"

  "What Azador called the stepmother? Yes, it is gone," !Xabbu said. "Do you know what it was?"

  "No. But I can guess. A function of the operating system, meant to instruct and assist. A cracked version of the things we built into many of our simulation worlds."

  "Like Orlando's Trojan tortoise," said Sam, remembering. She started to explain to !Xabbu, but realized suddenly that she did not want to talk about her dead friend in front of the old man.

  Just because I'm feeling a little sorry for Azador, I don't have to let it spread over to the old murderer, too.

  "Do you think it spoke with the voice of the One, then?" !Xabbu asked. When he saw the sour look on Jongleur's face, he amended it to, "With the voice of the operating system?"

  "Perhaps." Despite his scowl, the old man had only a little of his usual fierceness, and in fact seemed troubled. Had something in Azador's misery touched even Jongleur's heart, which Sam imagined to be as small, dark, and hard as a charcoal briquette? It seemed difficult to believe.

  Azador did not look up at them when they joined him at the fire, nor would he respond to any of Sam's or !Xabbu's questions. The moon had risen into the sky and now stood framed between the black hands of the trees, the stars small but bright behind it.

  Sam was nodding with fatigue, and wondering if it would be too utterly creepy to sleep in one of the empty wagons, when Azador suddenly began to talk.

  "I . . . I do not remember everything," he said slowly. "But when I found the bridge, much began to come back to me, as though I saw the cover of a book I had read as a child but had forgotten.

  "I remember that I grew up here, in these woods. But also I roamed with my family through all the countries. We crossed the rivers, took our wagons to villages and towns in search of work. We did what needed doing. We had enough to live. And when we came together here, at Romany Fair, all was music and laughing—all the Romany together." For a moment there was light in his face, a memory of better things, but it faded. "But I never felt that I belonged—never could I accept that this was my life, the whole of it. I was unhappy even when I was happy. 'Azador,' all the Romany called me. It is an old Spanish Gypsy word, I think. It means to make ill luck, to bring mischance. But still they were kind to me, my family, my people. They knew it was destiny that made me so, not my choice."

  "What is your real name?" !Xabbu asked gently.

  "I . . . I do not know. I do not remember."

  Even Jongleur was listening intently, an avid look on his hawklike features.

  Azador abruptly sat up straight and his face darkened with anger. "That is all I can tell you. Why do you do this to me? I did not wish to come back here. Now I have again lost all the things that I lost once before."

  "She said you could follow them," Sam reminded him. "Your stepmother. She said you could follow them to . . . what was it? A well?"

  "They are making a pilgrimage to Kali the Black," Azador said with a scornful laugh. "But they might as well have flown to the stars. I do not know how to get there, except to walk. We are far from the center, where the Well is—we would have to cross river after river. The world would be gone before we were halfway there."

  "Do you remember nothing else?" !Xabbu leaned forward. "I met you far away, in another part of the network. You must have crossed great distances to get there. How did you do it?"

  Azador shook his head. "I remember nothing. I lived here. Then I wandered in other lands. Now I am back . . . and my people are gone." He scrambled to his feet so violently that he kicked leaves into the fire, which jumped and sputtered. "I am going to sleep. If the One is merciful, I will not wake up."

  He strode away. They heard the creak of leather springs as he climbed into one of the wagons.

  "Didn't . . . didn't his stepmother say he might kill himself?" Sam asked worriedly. "I mean should we leave him alone?"

  "Azador
will not commit suicide," Jongleur said in a flat voice. "I know his type." He too rose and walked off between the wagons.

  Sam and !Xabbu looked at each other across the camp-fire. "Is it my imagination," Sam asked, "or is the scan factor just, like, rocketing upward every minute?"

  "I do not understand you, Sam."

  "I mean, are things getting crazier and crazier?"

  "No, I do not think you are imagining it." !Xabbu shook his head. "I am puzzled myself, and worried, but I am also hopeful. If all are being drawn to some place called the Well, then perhaps Renie will be going there, too."

  "But we don't know how to get there. Azador said by the time we walked there, the world is going to have ended."

  !Xabbu nodded sadly, but then manufactured a smile, even more admirable for the effort behind it. "But it has not happened yet, Sam Fredericks. So there is hope." He patted her. "You go sleep now—if you choose that wagon, I can see it from the fire. I wish to think."

  "But. . . ."

  "Sleep now. There is always hope."

  Sam woke from a troubled sleep into a world of mist and shadow.

  In the dream, her parents had been explaining that Orlando couldn't come with them on the camping trip because he was dead, and even though he was standing right there looking sad, he still wouldn't fit in the car because his Thargor body was too big. Sam had been angry and embarrassed, but Orlando had only smiled and rolled his eyes, sharing a silent joke with her about parents, then faded away.

  When she sat up, rubbing tears from her eyes, and stumbled out of the wagon, it was into a world without daylight.

  "!Xabbu!" Her voice echoed back to her. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"

  To her immense relief he appeared from around the corner of the wagon. "Sam, are you all right?"

  "Chizz. I just didn't know where you were. What time is it?"

  He shrugged. "Who can say here? A night has passed, and this is as much morning as we are going to get, it seems."

  She looked out at the wet grass, the white tendrils of mist between the trees, and felt a thrill of fear. "It's all shutting down, isn't it?"

  "I don't know, Sam. It seems a strange way for a simulation to behave. But it does not make me happy, no."

  "Where are the others?"

  "Azador went away early this morning, but came back. Now he is sitting in the center of the meadow and will not talk to me. Jongleur has gone out walking too." !Xabbu looked tired. Sam wondered if he'd had any sleep at all, but before she could ask him, a tall, gaunt, and mostly naked shape appeared out of the gray murk at the edge of the clearing.

  "We can wait here no longer," Jongleur announced before he had even reached them. "We will leave this place now."

  In the real world, Sam thought sourly, you got breakfast. In this world, you got a two-hundred-year-old mass murderer spouting orders at you before your eyes were all the way open. "Yeah? How are we going to do that?"

  Jongleur barely glanced at her. "Azador can take us to the operating system," he told !Xabbu. "You said that."

  !Xabbu shook his head. "Not me. The . . . the stepmother told him he could. But he did not believe it."

  "We will make him believe it."

  "Are you going to torture him or something?" Sam demanded. "Trick him?"

  "I think I can help him find the way," Jongleur said coolly. "Torture is unnecessary."

  "Oh, you're going to show him how to do it?"

  "Sam," !Xabbu said quietly.

  "Your manners are typical of your generation. That is to say, nonexistent." Jongleur glanced at Azador, sitting a few dozen meters away, looking bleakly out at the forest. He lowered his voice. "Yes, I will do it. I built this system in the first place, and I have learned a few things now about this backwater section of it." He turned to !Xabbu. "Azador is a construct, a pet of the operating system, as is all this world. You proved that, to your credit." Disturbingly, he tried to smile. Sam thought of crocodiles. "He will have within him a direct connection of some sort, even if he is not aware of it. 'To the place where you touch the One, as we all do,' the stepmother-program said. Am I right?"

  !Xabbu looked at him carefully for a moment, then shrugged. "So how will we do this?"

  "We must find the next river. Those are the crossing points, the connections, like the gateways we built into the Grail system. The rest you must leave to me."

  "How did you know what the stepmother said, anyway?" Sam asked suddenly. "You didn't listen to her. You went off by yourself."

  Jongleur's face was a mask.

  "You've been talking to Azador already, haven't you?" she said, answering her own question. "Just utterly whispering In his ear."

  "He does not trust you," Jongleur said calmly. "He is unhappy, and feels you forced him to come here."

  "Oh, and you're his friend now? He wants to kill all the Grail people. Did you mention that you had a little something to do with that?"

  !Xabbu laid a hand on her arm. Across the foggy expanse of grass, Azador had turned to look at them. "Quietly, Sam, please."

  For a brief moment Jongleur seemed about to respond with an equal measure of fury, then the storm building inside him calmed, or was suppressed. "Does it matter what he would really think of me? We need him. This part of the network—perhaps the whole thing—is dying. You said yourself that I was useless, girl. Perhaps I have been that so far, although I think your absent friend might remember that I saved her life on the mountain. Can I not contribute something now?" He fixed her with his cold, clear stare. "What will it hurt if I try, other than your pride?"

  Sam could not help staring back. There was something odd in Jongleur's stiff manner, something off-kilter and discomforted. He's been funny ever since we followed Azador here, she thought. Could he actually be, like, turning into a human being a little bit?

  She doubted it, but despite her dislike and distrust of the man, could not really argue with what he said. "I guess we have to do . . . something." She looked at !Xabbu, but the small man showed little reaction except to nod briefly.

  "Good." Jongleur clapped his hands together. The crack echoed through the gloomy clearing. "Then it is time to set off."

  "Just one thing," Sam said. "There were some clothes left in the wagon I slept in. If it's going to stay dark around here, it's going to be cold, so I'm going to find something to wear."

  Jongleur did not smile again, for which Sam was grateful, but he nodded his approval. "As long as we do it swiftly, that is a good idea." He glanced down briefly at his own sarong of reeds and leaves. "The novelty of simply having a body has worn off. I grow weary of being scratched by branches and thorns. I will find some clothes as well."

  Although the garments in Sam's wagon had been colorful, even gaudy, Felix Jongleur managed to find an old and somewhat threadbare black suit and collarless white shirt in one of the other wagons. Sam thought he looked like a preacher or an undertaker out of a net Western,

  Bowing to the trend, !Xabbu had discarded his own brief kilt of woven leaves for a pair of pants only a few shades darker than his own golden skin, but had stopped there.

  Sam inspected the blue satin pants and ruffled shirt she had selected—the best she could find, but nothing she would have been caught dead in at home. Like the back end of the world's saddest, most impacted parade, that's what we look like.

  A quiet conversation with Jongleur had apparently reconciled Azador to the old man's plan. Whatever emotions the place had provoked in him, he did not look back as he led them out of the clearing and away from the circle of brightly painted wagons. Sam could not help taking a final, yearning glance at the ghostly vehicles, which seemed almost to float above the misty grass. It had been nice to sleep in a bed, however small and confined. She wondered if she would ever get the chance again.

  Azador led them on a long winding trek through the forest, a journey that would have lasted until long past noon if anything like noon had ever come. The light remained minimal and diffuse, the forest a twilit haze. A few
weak little lights like dying fireflies pulsed in the treetops but added nothing to the cold gray world.

  Sam had grown so weary of stumbling through the damp, dark woods that she was about to scream, if only to hear a sound that wasn't dripping water or their own scuffing feet, when Azador stopped them.

  "There is the river," he said dully, pointing downhill through a break in the trees. The gray water did not shine, and looked more like the mark of a broad pencil than the lively stream they had seen elsewhere. "But even if I find the bridge, it will only lead us to the next country, far from the center where the Well is."

  "I suspect we were far from Romany Fair when you found the last bridge," Jongleur said. "Not in the country beside it. Am I right?"

  Azador seemed tired and confused. "I suppose. I do not know."

  "You found Romany Fair because it was where you wanted to go. Just as you found your way out of these worlds in the first place. Am I right?"

  Azador swayed. He lifted his hands to cover his face. "It is too hard for me to remember. I have lost everything."

  Jongleur took his arm. "I will speak to him alone," he told Sam and !Xabbu. The old man dragged Azador along the hill, out of earshot, then leaned close to his face as though forcing the attention of an unwilling child; Sam almost thought Jongleur would take the Gypsy's chin in his hand to keep him from looking away.

  "Why can't he talk in front of us? I don't trust him, do you?"

  "Of course I do not trust," !Xabbu said. "But there is something different in him. Have you seen that?"

  Sam admitted she had. They watched as Jongleur finished his harangue and led Azador back toward them.

  "We are going to find the bridge now," Jongleur said flatly. Azador looked stunned and exhausted, like someone who had given up arguing because he knew he could not win. He glanced at Sam and !Xabbu as though he had never seen them before, then turned and began to make his way down the steep, forested slope.