River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  As the boy led him past the Baroque facade of the church he had called “the Jesuits,” and out into a public square, Paul felt a sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach: the unreasoning fear, the chill that the Finch and Mullet creatures induced in him, had returned. He looked around, wide-eyed. Perhaps a dozen people bundled against the cold were finishing out Carnival night in the small square. None of them bore any resemblance to their pursuers, but although Paul’s sensation of dread was fainter than it had been back in the cathedral, it was undeniably the same.

  “Oh, God,” he gasped. “They’re here—or they’re close.”

  Gally’s eyes were wide. “I can feel them, too. Ever since they touched me when we were in that . . . that dream-place, I can feel them.”

  “Dream-place?” Paul frowned, trying to remember. He and the boy crept across the square like soldiers on patrol, watching every shadow. The Venetians loitering near the steps of the Jesuits called after them—slurred, incomprehensible jests.

  “In that castle in the sky,” Gally explained quietly.

  “You remember that?” Paul had half-believed the castle was a dream, that and the machine-giant he had met there the first time—it had been so palpably different from his other experiences.

  Gally shuddered. “They touched me. It . . . it hurt.”

  Like a ghost ship sliding out of the fog, a small dark building with four tall chimneys sprouting from its roof was becoming visible on the far side of the square. Gally took his hand to hurry him forward, letting him know that this was the place they sought, but Paul found himself suddenly unwilling to enter. There was something about its brooding shape that unnerved him, and the sense that their pursuers were near had grown stronger. Perhaps they were even waiting inside. . . .

  A tall shape materialized out of the mist. Gally squeaked.

  “What good wind?” asked a deep, quavering voice.

  The unsteady figure was shrouded in a threadbare cape that flapped like ragged wings. With his long-nosed, almost chinless face and bright eye, the old man resembled nothing so much as a dirty harbor bird. “What good wind?” he demanded again, then squinted at Paul and the boy. “Strangers!” he said loudly, making Paul extremely uncomfortable. “Do you bring wine? It is hard times at the Oratory. We guests of the Crusaders are forgotten—and on Carnival night, of all nights!”

  Paul nodded in what he hoped was a pleasant fashion and tried to step past the stranger, but the ancient creature caught his cloak with a surprisingly firm grip. Gally was almost dancing in his hurry to move on.

  “Come,” said the old man, tainting the mist with his sour breath. “Just because we are old does not mean we should be forgotten. Do we not fast, just as other Christians do? Should we not then celebrate, too?”

  “I have no wine.” Paul could feel the shadow of their pursuers moving over them, darker and darker, wider and wider. An idea came to him. “If you take us into the hospital, help us find what we’re looking for, I’ll give you some money and you can buy yourself wine.”

  The old man swayed as if amazed by such good fortune. “Into the hospital? That is all? You want to go into the Crusaders?”

  “We want to visit someone.”

  “No one comes to visit us,” their new guide said, lurching back toward the four-chimneyed building. He was not contradicting Paul, but stating a mournful fact of life. “We are old. Our children are gone away or dead. No one cares what happens to us, even during Carnival.” He spread his arms like an albatross banking on the breeze as he led them around the side of the building, then through a door that Paul would have never seen in the mist and on into the dark, echoing interior. “The front is barred tonight, to keep us out of trouble,” their guide said, then tapped with his finger on the side of his nose. “But they cannot keep old Nicoló inside. And now I will have wine, and drink until my head is full of songs.”

  Paul’s first impression was that the Crusader hospital was rather lavishly haunted. A dozen silent forms, wrapped in blankets and sheets, shuffled across landings and up and down the stairs; others stood in doorways, staring at nothing as fixedly as the statues on the churches outside, mumbling or crooning wordlessly. The Oratory was a refuge for the old, Gally whispered, clarifying Nicoló’s complaints—especially for those who had no family to take them in. Not all were senile; many turned sharp eyes on the newcomers, or questioned Nicoló about them, but their guide only waved his arms grandly and led Paul and the boy deeper into the building, until they stood at last before the candlelit chapel. A relief of the Madonna and her child stared down at them from above the doorway.

  Paul stared at the Savior’s infant face, suddenly at a loss. They had no idea where in the hospital the gateway might be, and it seemed unlikely Nicoló or any of the other residents would know—why should the sims know anything about the network’s infrastructure? So it was up to him to decide what would be the most likely spot. He thought desperately, but could only think of the river crossings he had made. What about when there was no river? Was there some other way to recognize an exit door, or were the indicators visible only to the people who had built these worlds?

  He turned to Gally, but before he could speak the boy went rigid, his face white with fear. Then Paul felt it, too: the terror reached out and closed on him, making his heart hammer and his skin go cold and damp. Their two pursuers were close—very close.

  Adding to his dread, at that instant a disembodied voice spoke in his ear. In his confusion and fright, he did not at first recognize it. “The catacombs,” it told him. “You must go down.”

  Gally had gone even more wide-eyed. “The lady!” he said.

  Paul nodded, a little dazed. She had spoken to them from out of the air, invisibly, but it had been Eleanora.

  Old Nicoló watched this exchange with distrust written clearly on his seamed face. Vulture-like, he leaned forward. “You said you’d give me money.”

  “Show us where the catacombs are.” Paul struggled to sound normal, but his insides were turning to ice, and every instinct screamed at him to climb into the nearest crevice and hide. “The catacombs? The underground bits?”

  “There’s no one down there but dead Crusaders,” Nicoló whined. “You said you wanted to visit someone.”

  Paul tugged his purse free of his belt and held it out. “We didn’t say it was anyone alive.”

  Nicoló licked his lips, then turned and tottered into the chapel. “This way.”

  The old man led them to a spot behind the altar, to the first steps of a stairwell that, in the dimly lit chapel, seemed little more than a square black hole in the floor. Paul tossed him the purse; Nicoló’s expression softened into stupefied glee as he poured the ducats into his trembling palm. A moment later he was hurrying away across the chapel, presumably to spend his earnings while Carnival still lived its final moments. At any other time, Paul would have found the sight of all that creaking avarice funny; now he could barely keep himself standing upright, so powerful was the feeling of a closing trap. He sprinted to a wall sconce, but could not reach the candle. He lifted Gally so the boy could pluck one free.

  Even with the candle clenched in Paul’s fist, spreading thin light before them, the stairwell was treacherous. The steps were narrow, and worn into a smooth hollow in the middle by generations of monkish feet, all those who had descended to bless the remains of Christendom’s protectors and then ascended once more, holy day after holy day, year after year, for centuries. They wound down to the bottom of the stairs, where the catacombs opened out, and there was suddenly far more shadow than candlelight. The flickering glow revealed a row of dark openings in an ancient stone wall, with no sign of which to choose. Paul wiped chill sweat from his forehead and cursed to himself. It was like some horrible role-playing game. He’d never liked those at all.

  “Eleanora?” he asked quietly. The sense of menace hung so c
lose now that it seemed even a whisper might reveal them to their enemies. “Are you listening? Which way do we go?” But there was no response. The holes in the walls gaped like idiot mouths.

  Gally was pulling at his sleeve, desperate to move on. Paul turned his attention to the floor. Generations of footsteps had also rubbed away at the stone flags in front of each opening, but the section on the far right had the most polished approach, as though most started their pilgrimage there, while the tunnel nearest the far left wall seemed by far the least-trafficked. Paul hesitated only a moment, then chose the left.

  The niches in the tunnel walls held sleeping shapes, cold marble hands clasped in prayer on chests, marble faces gazing up through the layers of stone toward a sky they would never see again. As the tunnel wound inward and down, marble gave way to less costly stone, the effigies grew more crude, and even the niches shrank. At last, when they must have long left the underground confines of the Oratory and have covered in mazey wandering much of the area underneath the square, the images of the dead and their individual burials came to an end, replaced by tall stacks of undifferentiated skeletal remains. Paul felt Gally’s hand clench his own as the boy shuddered.

  The ossuary walls grew higher, until the tunnel was completely banked by bones. Here and there, at turnings of the corridor, skulls were piled like cannonballs, or built into the bone stacks as decorative elements, zigzag lines of unfleshed faces. Hundreds of empty eyesockets stared at them as they passed, near-endless pockets of shadow.

  For a moment, even in the midst of despair and great dread, as he stared at the skeletal walls and the ultimate futility of human action they represented, Paul found himself almost admiring the Grail Brotherhood. Cruel, criminal bastards they might be, but there was something almost noble about any human beings who were willing to thumb their noses at the Great Eraser himself—Death, the black vacuum into which all life was inevitably sucked.

  His thoughts slid from the general back to the specific, and he was just realizing that there was something profoundly unreal about a Venice in which one could travel so deep beneath the ground and not be up to the nostrils in seawater, when the tunnel abruptly opened out into a wide underground chamber. The roof and floor were held apart by a thousand pillars, great batons of stone carved into the shapes of even more bones, a forest of tibia and femur. The candle could illumine only a part of the chamber—its shadowy recesses fell away without visible ending on all sides—but straight ahead of them was an open place where no pillars stood, a piece of empty floor covered with dusty mosaic tiles. As Paul took a few steps forward, the candle now burning hot and low in his fist showed that the tiles made a picture of a vast cauldron carried by angels and demons, out of which streamed rays of shining light.

  The faint sound of shuffling feet whispered from the tunnel they had just left. A jolt of dread went through Paul as though he had stepped on a live wire; beside him, Gally made a weak sound of desperation.

  Without warning, a smear of pale golden fire appeared before them in the center of the open space. The glow deepened until the gateway burned so brightly stripes of black shadow leaped out from the bone pillars, and the mosaic on the floor became invisible in the glare. Paul felt a moment of hope, but as he pulled Gally toward the shimmering rectangle two shapes stepped out of it, one mountainously fat, the other starvation-slender. Choking, Paul staggered back in stunned horror, yanking the boy with him.

  Tricked! We’ve been tricked!

  As they turned and took a few wobbling steps back in the direction they had come, something new flickered into existence between the pillars. Eleanora’s small form hung just above the floor, her wizened face alarmed.

  “Do not go back!” Her voice seemed to come not from her mouth, but from somewhere near Paul’s head. “It is not what you think—the greatest danger is still following you!”

  Paul ignored her. There could be no greater danger than the shapes that had just stepped from the gateway. He pulled Gally with him, back toward the tunnel. Eleanora’s hands stretched toward them, beseeching, and the boy hesitated, but Paul would not let him go. Then, even as they had almost reached the door back into the catacombs, two shapes identical to those behind them stepped out of the tunnel and into the pillared room. Reflecting the spreading light of the gateway, the masks of Comedy and Tragedy seemed made of molten gold. A wave of dread rolled off the two figures, paralyzing Paul.

  For a moment he thought his brain would stop, jammed like a broken machine. Finch and Mullet were in front of them. Finch and Mullet were behind them. The burrow was stopped at both ends, and they would die like poisoned rabbits. The bird-woman had deserted him, all of her words meaningless now. There was no feather to clutch.

  “Turn around!” Eleanora cried. “Run to the gateway! That is your only hope!”

  Paul stared at her, speechless. Didn’t she understand their enemies were on both sides? To turn to the gateway would be to meet them there as well. . . .

  He backed away from the oncoming masks, dragging the boy with him, but as he did he became more and more concerned with what he knew lurked behind him. At almost the point where Eleanora’s image hung in the shadowy crypt, still trying to convince him to flee toward the gateway, he turned again. The two disparate shapes were still advancing out of the golden light. For a moment his legs threatened to buckle and drop him and the boy to the floor, to be fallen upon from both sides by mirrored sets of enemies.

  The gateway figures were so close now that he could see eyes gleaming in what had only been black silhouettes. He stood helplessly as one of them extended a massive arm toward him.

  “Mr. Johnson? Is that you?” Undine Pankie took a few heavy-footed steps forward into the candlelight, holding the hem of her tent-like gray dress so that it did not trail in the dust of the crypt. “Oh, goodness, it is. Sefton!” she called over her shoulder, “didn’t I tell you we’d find that lovely Mr. Johnson here?”

  Paul was certain he had gone mad.

  Her matchstick husband came up beside her, blinking like an owl in daylight. “So it is, my dear. A very good day to you, Mr. Johnson!” They might have been meeting him at a church tea.

  “Perhaps he’s seen something of our Viola,” Mrs. Pankie suggested, and gave Paul a winsome smile that under any other circumstances would have been monstrous and alarming, but at this moment was merely incomprehensible. “And who is that little angel with you? Such a charming lad! Surely you will introduce us. . . .”

  All Paul could do was cling tightly to Gally’s hand despite the boy’s efforts to break free—God only knew what was going through the child’s head—and stare. The Pankies looked him up and down, apparently bemused by his attitude, then the cowlike gaze of Undine Pankie moved past him to the pair of approaching shapes, the mirrored image of large and small. She trailed off in mid-platitude, blanching across her entire huge, doughy face. She turned to exchange a swift look with her bespectacled husband, an expression on both their faces that Paul could not begin to make sense of; then, as if in silent agreement, they turned their backs on each other and disappeared into the shadows on either side, leaving Paul with a clear path to the gateway.

  “Hurry!” Eleanora cried behind him. “The way is open. Where do you want to go?”

  Paul tugged at Gally, who would not move.

  “Come, Jonas,” hissed Finch from behind him. “Do not prolong this game—it has gone on far beyond amusement.”

  Paul continued to struggle with Gally, who was resisting him in some paroxysm of unreasoning fear, eyes half-shut, as though he were on the verge of a seizure.

  “Where?” demanded Eleanora.

  He could barely think. American place-names careened maddeningly through his mind, exotic, foreign names which he had dreamed over in his youth, but which now might, in their clutter, kill him—Idaho, Illinois, Keokuk, Attica . . .

  “Ithaca!”
>
  She nodded, then raised a hand to clasp the emerald dangling at her throat. The gateway’s energies rippled like a wind-raked campfire. Just beyond her, Finch and Mullet had doffed their masks: their true faces remained hidden by the shadowed hoods, but Paul could see the glint of Finch’s stare and the lopsided sheen that was Mullet’s toothy grin. The force that washed out from them turned his bones to paper.

  As the two figures approached to within an arm’s length of Eleanora, Gally abruptly regained his wits. “They’ll hurt the lady!” he shouted, and began to thrash with renewed, frenzied strength, this time not to resist being carried, but to run to the woman he considered his friend. “They’ll kill her!”

  “Gally, no!” Paul tried to gain a better grip—it felt like his fingernails were being torn loose—but in the demi-instant he relaxed his clutch, the boy broke free and bolted back toward Eleanora’s hovering image.

  “No, Gypsy!” she cried, “they cannot even . . .”

  The pair stepped through her.

  “. . . Touch me,” she finished, full of hopeless misery. “Oh, Gypsy . . .”

  Mullet reached out a broad, shapeless hand and snatched the boy up into the air. Gally dangled helplessly from the fat creature’s fist, wriggling like a fly in a web.

  Paul stopped. The warmthless golden radiance of the gateway was only a few steps away, but it suddenly seemed miles distant. “Let him go!”

  Finch chuckled. “Of course we will. He is not the child we truly seek, only one of the vermin of the network. But it’s you we want now, Jonas. So step away from there and come with us.”

  Paul could not fight any longer. Everything had come to the end he had always feared. They would take him down into darkness, down to worse things than death. He looked at Eleanora, but she still hovered in the same spot, a helpless ghost, her face sagging. “Do you promise to let him go?” he asked. “You can have me if you do.”