by Tad Williams
The pit expanded, deeper, darker, the walls retreating so swiftly they seemed to be collapsing out into empty space. The river and the tiny shape beside it were retreating too, falling away down an endless tunnel, plummeting into a bottomless well.
"Who?" she gasped. "Who's coming?"
Faint, vanishingly faint, the voice in her head was only a whisper now.
"The devil,"
Then the stars fell down from above and Renie was engulfed by the distorted night sky, which seemed to pour over her like an upended ocean. She slipped like a trapped bubble between freezing black nothingness and the white brilliance of the burning stars all around her. She was churned and rolled and crushed by monstrous pressures.
I'm drowning, she thought, a bemused spark of consciousness lost in the silent roaring of the big lights. Drowning in the universe.
CHAPTER 39
Broken Angel
NETFEED/NEWS: Widow Sues Nanotech Firm Over Honeymoon Holocaust
(visual: Sabine Wendel at husband's funeral)
VO: Capping a tragedy that has already become fodder for comedians all over the world, Sabine Wendel of Bonn, Germany, has filed suit against the distributors of Masterman, a nanotech-based product advertised to cure erectile dysfunction. Although the manufacturers Borchardt-Schliemer insist their product is to be used only under a doctor's care, many distributors sell the product without prescription, and that is apparently how Jorg Wendel purchased the microscopic Masterman trigger-mites that led to the fatal accident dubbed "the Sexplosion" by many tabnets. . . ."
They stumbled down out of the hills and onto the desolate plain, lightning flickering through the sky behind them as they raced toward what looked like an ocean full of stars. A cluster of strange shapes lined its shores, waiting. Night was falling, the constellations overhead dimmer than those swimming in the pit.
It's like the end of H.G. Wells' Time Machine, Paul thought. The horrible last moments of Earth the time traveler sees—gray skies, gray soil, a dying crab-thing on an empty beach.
Bonita Mae Simpkins tripped and fell heavily, unable to use her crippled hands to stop herself. Paul leaned close to help her up. The roaring of the thing that had followed them from Egypt was muffled now by the intervening hills and the electrical storm still hugged the distant spot where the monstrous form had appeared, but Paul had no doubt that Martine was right—no matter how strenuously the operating system fought back, Dread would be after them soon. He was hunting them.
Mrs. Simpkins was whispering as he dragged her onto her feet. ". . . He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. . . ."
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Paul thought. I will fear no evil. But he did fear—he did. They had been swallowed by a nightmare.
The others were far ahead now, although Nandi Paradivash had stopped to wait. Paul put his arm around Mrs. Simpkins and hurried her forward.
"Thank you," she whispered. "God bless you."
Nandi silently pulled the woman's other arm around his shoulders so he and Paul could keep her upright. The pool of surging, flaring radiance seemed very close now. Some of the throng that surrounded it came swarming toward Martine and the others. For a moment, as his companions disappeared in the tide of bodies, Paul fought panic, then he saw that Martine and Florimel and the rest—that tall one was certainly T4b—were being surrounded but not openly menaced. In fact, the crowd that enveloped them acted more like the beggar children he had seen in Rome and Madrid than like an overt threat.
"Those people are . . . they are. . . ." Nandi was watching, too. "I have no idea what they are!"
Neither did Paul. As they reached the outskirts of the crowd he was astounded by the wild, seemingly pointless diversity of its parts—upright animals and creatures with human faces and the bodies of beasts, as well as others made of things from which no living being could ever be composed. The variety was amazing, but what was most astonishing about them was the apparent whimsy. It was an army of purely make-believe creatures that swarmed out to meet them, a population decanted from children's storybooks.
The nearest, a collection of anthropomorphic bears and goats, fish with legs—even a skinny and fat couple who Paul guessed must be Jack Sprat from the nursery rhyme and his huge wife, but whose silhouettes gave him a moment's nasty turn—now came running toward Paul and his two companions, even the most inhuman faces full of unmistakable fear, the childish voices shrill.
"What is it?" scrawny Jack Sprat cried. "Who are you? Did the One send you?"
"Who took the stars?" shrieked his wobbling spouse. "Have you seen the Lady?"
"Why won't she come to the Well? Why won't she tell us what to do?"
Caught up in the swirl of pleading creatures, Paul was rushed along toward the shore of the pulsing sea like a leaf going over the rapids. "Martine!" he shouted, struggling to hold onto Bonnie Mae and Nandi even as furry fingers and graspingly prehensile wings tugged at him. "Florimel! Where are you?" Someone yanked at Bonnie Mae so hard that Paul, still trying to keep her upright, lost his grip on her and was pulled off his feet. For a moment he was certain he would be trampled to death.
After all this, I'm killed by cartoons, he thought, choking in the dust. There's irony in that, isn't there?
Suddenly people around him began to shout in alarm; the bizarrely diverse collection of legs and feet hemming him in began to back away. Paul struggled to his feet and discovered Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins only a few meters away, staring. He turned to see what they were looking at.
It was not the most unusual sight of the day, but it was still a bit of a surprise.
Rolling toward them through the crowd, moving slowly to give the fairy-tale creatures a chance to get out of his way—but helping them along with occasional light flicks of his riding whip—was Azador, smiling hugely. He was perched on the driver's bench of a fantastically colorful coach pulled by two white horses.
"Ionas, my friend!" he shouted, teeth gleaming beneath the luxuriant mustache. "There you are! Come, you and your other friends—climb up or these idiots will step on your toes."
Paul could not help staring, and not just at the unexpected rescue. In all the time he had traveled with Azador, even in the toils of the Lotos-dream, the man had never seemed a fraction this cheerful. Paul looked up at the sky, which was almost pitch-black now, the stars dwindled to tiny points. How could anyone be in a good mood with this going on? Unless he's daft as a brush.
Still, it was better than being trampled by teddy bears.
Paul clambered onto the side of the wagon and helped Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins up onto the step beside him, then Azador clicked his tongue at the horses, cracked his whip, and turned the carriage back toward the flickering sea.
"There are people waiting to see you, my friend!" Azador cried. "You will be so happy. We will sing and dance and celebrate!"
Not just a little daft, thought Paul as they rolled along beneath the dying sky. Utterly, utterly mad.
Azador's tribe of Gypsies had arranged the dozens of wagons they had retained into a semicircle along the shore of the strange crater, walling themselves off from the rest of the refugees and making a little city with wheels, the lacquered coaches shining both from the light of many campfires and the silver-and-blue glimmer of the great pit. Paul was grateful for the respite, however temporary, but he could not help looking back at the hills. Lightning still leaped above the hilltops, swift as swordplay, but the display seemed to have diminished, as if the contest being fought there was coming to an end.
Paul did not feel good about what that ending might be.
He was immediately distracted by people hurrying toward him, calling his name as they forced their way through the crowd of curious Gypsies. If they had not introduced themselves he would never have recognized Sam Fredericks and the Bushman !Xabbu, He might have guessed who the small, almond-eyed man was, given a slightly less confusing situation in which to consider it, but he had all bu
t forgotten Fredericks' confession back in Troy about being a girl.
"It's . . . I'm astonished to see you both," he said. "And delighted." He hesitated. "Where . . . Where is Renie?"
!Xabbu's face fell. He shook his head.
"We don't know," Sam Fredericks explained. "We got separated."
!Xabbu seemed about to say something else, but Martine Desroubins, who it seemed had also survived the attentions of the fairy-tale crowd, was standing beside one of the wagons clapping her hands loudly. "Florimel, Paul, Javier—all of you," she called. "We must talk. Now." Suddenly distracted, she turned slowly toward the spot where Paul stood. Unlike him, she seemed to have no trouble seeing past the unfamiliar faces and forms. "Fredericks . . . !Xabbu?" She climbed down and fought her way through the crowd of refugees until she could put her arms around both of them.
Within moments Florimel had joined the group, laughing, seizing !Xabbu so hard Paul worried she would crack the little man's ribs. The Bushman seemed oddly reserved, but Paul thought it might be his own unfamiliarity with !Xabbu's human face. Even T4b allowed himself to be drawn into reunion embraces and the babble of half-articulated questions and answers.
"Enough," Martine said abruptly, although she still held Sam Fredericks' hand firmly in her own. "We do not come at a happy time, no matter how it eases our hearts to see you. Dread is behind us."
Fredericks screwed up her face in puzzlement. "Dread?"
"You have seen him only once, I think, on the top of the black mountain when he was the size of a god—an evil, angry god."
"Scanny! Yeah, I remember!"
"Well, that is the Dread who is coming—no, who is already here. The operating system fights him. There."
Only a few last flickers of lightning now blinked in the distant hills, gleaming scratches across the night sky, dim as firefly trails.
Paul and the others settled down around one of the campfires, huddled beneath the night. The Well pulsed beside them, a pit full of earthbound polar lights that turned even the few familiar faces grotesque.
Martine tried to keep some kind of order in the proceedings but curiosity and urgency made too volatile a mix: few questions were entirely answered before another volley had been launched. Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins and the little boy named Cho-Cho could only watch in amazement as the words fountained out of the others. Paul found himself almost as impressed by hearing the adventures of his own group recounted—it made a formidably strange tale—as he was by hearing what had happened to !Xabbu and Sam. But one element of their story struck him more powerfully than any other, until at last he had to interrupt Sam Fredericks in mid-flow.
"I'm sorry, but. . . ." His head was throbbing, his entire body so weak with stress and fatigue he could barely sit up, but he could not let this go. "I almost can't believe I'm hearing this. You traveled with Jongleur? With Felix Jongleur, the bastard who made this whole thing?" The bastard who stole my life away, he wanted to shout, but he could see by Sam's expression that she was not happy about it either.
"We . . . we thought we had to do it, even if it was majorly impacted." She looked to !Xabbu for support, but the little man had risen a few minutes earlier and walked off to do something, so she had to turn back to Paul. "Renie said . . . she said we might need him. Need what he knew."
Paul fought down his anger. "I'm amazed." He swallowed. "That you didn't just push him off a cliff, I mean. Or skull him with a rock." Paul sat up straight and tried to calm himself—there was much crucial information to share.
"Where did he go, finally? What happened to him?"
Sam took a moment to answer. "What . . . what do you mean?"
"When did you part ways with him, or did something eat him, I hope?"
Her age was truly apparent for the first time. She was suddenly a nervous teenager faced with an angry adult. "But . . . he's here." She looked at Paul and his companions as though they should know this already. "Right over there," she said, pointing.
Paul felt a kind of tightness around his temples, a band of pain. Only a few meters away Azador and a bald man in dark clothes stood watching them, Azador talking animatedly, his companion silent, eyes half-shut. "That's . . . that's him?" Paul's chest felt like someone was sitting on it. "That's Felix Jongleur?"
"Yes, but. . . ." Before Fredericks could get out another word, Paul was on his feet and running.
Azador looked up. "Ionas, my friend!" he said, opening his arms, but Paul was already past him. He threw his full weight onto the bald man and dragged him to the ground. Jongleur had seen him coming, but Paul's anger was such that for the first moments there was no stopping him. He seized Jongleur's head in both hands and smashed it back against the ground, then climbed up onto him and began swinging at his face. The man fought back, throwing up his arms to block Paul's wild blows, writhing in an effort to unseat him. Paul had the satisfaction of feeling some of his punches land on Jongleur's hard head, but it seemed to be happening at a distance greater than the length of his arms. Voices were shouting in his head and his exploding rage seemed to have knocked time slightly out of joint.
Stole my life! Tried to kill me!
He swung again and again.
Bastard! Murderer!
He was grunting some of the words out loud. There were other voices too—Paul could dimly hear people calling his name, pulling at his arms—but Jongleur stayed coldly silent. The older man had weathered the flurry of blows; now his hand snaked up and clutched Paul's chin, forcing his head backward until his vertebrae threatened to separate.
"Kill you!" Paul shouted, but Jongleur was slipping away from him as though Paul were on the bank of a river and his enemy on a boat in the current. Dimly, through the haze of anger and adrenaline, he realized that he was wrapped now in several arms and was being lifted from the ground and off his quarry. At least two of the men holding him were Gypsies, muscular men who smelled of wood-smoke.
"Let me go!" lie bellowed, but it was no use. He was held too firmly.
"Just stop," Florimel said in his ear. "You will do no good, Paul."
Azador had pulled Jongleur back out of Paul's reach. "Why are you doing this?" the Gypsy demanded. "You are my good friend, Ionas. But this man, too, he is my friend. Why should friends fight?"
Paul heard Azador's words but could make no sense of them. He stared at Jongleur with helpless hatred. The older man returned his look, his face a mask of placid contempt, a trickle of blood from his nose the only sign of what had happened.
"Martine?" someone asked. Paul realized for the first time that the blind woman was part of the crowd pinioning him. "Martine?"
"What is it, Sam?"
"I can't find him, Martine." Sam Fredericks looked pale even in the odd, metallic light from the great pit. "He's gone somewhere—gone!"
"Who are you talking about?" Martine asked. Some of the people holding Paul began to loosen their grips, although the two Gypsy men still held him securely. "Who's gone?"
"!Xabbu," Sam said miserably. "He got up from the campfire but he never came back. And now I can't find him anywhere."
Watching the others split up into pairs to search for !Xabbu should have made Sam feel better, but it didn't. Something in the suddenness of his disappearance made her certain that what had happened to him was much worse than simply wandering off or getting lost.
!Xabbu doesn't get lost, she told herself and was miserable again.
She knew she couldn't just stand and wait for the others to come back, but she had no idea of where else to look. She had already been all along the fringes of the Gypsy camp, calling the small man's name into the press of refugees beyond the circled wagons, and that was probably what Martine and the rest were doing right now, too, but she could think of no better way to spend her time. Anything was better than just sitting here, cooling her heels at the end of the world.
When she turned she almost tripped over the Stone Girl.
"Your name is Sam, right?" the little girl asked.
Much
as she wanted to right now, she couldn't just ignore the child. "Yes, I'm Sam."
"Your friend wanted me to tell you something."
"My friend?" She squatted beside her, suddenly intent. "What friend?"
"The man with curly hair and no shirt." The Stone Girl looked worried. "Isn't he your friend?"
"What did he say? Tell me!"
"I have to remember." The little girl wrinkled her loamy forehead. The poked holes that were her eyes squinted in concentration. "He said . . . he said. . . ."
"Come on!"
The Stone Girl shot her an offended look. "I'm thinking! He said . . . that you were with friends now so he could leave and he'd know you were all right." The frown turned into a pleased smile. "That's what he said! I remembered!"
"Leave to do what? Where did he go?" Sam grabbed the little girl's arm. "Did he tell you? Did you see which direction he went?"
She shook her head. "No. He pointed to where you were and told me to hurry up and go." The Stone Girl turned and indicated a spot far down the shoreline of the great pit. "He was over there."
And then Sam remembered. "Oh, fenfen! He thinks Renie's down there—he said he was going to go find her!" The Stone Girl looked at her curiously but Sam had no more time to talk. She sprinted across the long, gradual slope of the Gypsy camp, away from the wall of wagons and the campfires, down toward the uneven shore.
I should get the others, she thought. Paul and Martine—I couldn't stop him by myself. . . . But already she saw a slender figure silhouetted at the pulsing edge of the Well, familiar despite the unsteadiness of the outline. She knew she would never reach the others and get back in time.
"!Xabbu!" she shouted. "Wait!"
If he heard her he gave no sign. He stood a moment longer, poised at the edge of the glimmering ocean of blue and pale yellow and misty silver light, then took a few steps forward and jumped into the pit. It was not a dive but a suicide's staggering leap, the first graceless thing she had ever seen !Xabbu do.
