Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  As the naked old man disappeared into the light, Nandi told Orlando, "It is most strange you should be bound for Troy. I met a man who was also going there, or at least to another part of the same simulation. A very strange man indeed. Do you know someone named Paul . . . what was it?" He fingered his lip, trying to remember but clearly distracted by what was going on around him. "Brummond?"

  Orlando shook his head. He looked to Fredericks, but his friend only shrugged: it was apparently not a name Orlando had missed during one of his illnesses.

  A few seconds later Mr. Pingalap returned, bearing news of what Nandi seemed to think was the Prester John simulation he had mentioned earlier. He brightened a little. "I may have the pattern correctly now—it is a bit wider oscillation than I had guessed, that is all. The next one should be Kalevala, and then a place that I have never visited, but which my informants call the Shadow Country—apparently it is almost completely dark all the time." He frowned and shuffled his tiles full of calculations. "Even if we cycle through as fast as we can, and I am correct about everything else, it will take us almost an hour before we can open the gateway to Troy."

  As the old man ran out his lifeline and stepped through the newest gateway like a very scrawny astronaut going for a space walk, Nandi suddenly said, "No, it was not Brummond—that was the first name he gave, but not his true name. I should have remembered, but my mind is very full just now. It was Jonas—Paul Jonas."

  Orlando almost let go of Mr. Pingalap's rope. "Jonas! That's the one Sellars told us to look for!" He turned to Fredericks. "Wasn't that it? Jonas?"

  Fredericks nodded. "Sellars said Jonas was a prisoner of the Brotherhood. That he helped him escape, I think."

  Two jerks on the cloth rope reminded them of their duties; they reeled in Mr. Pingalap, who reported that he had seen acres of snowy forest and men in carts pulled by huge reindeer, which report pleased Nandi. "Kalevala, that's good." His expression darkened as he turned back to Orlando and Fredericks. "So the man I met was freed by your mysterious Sellars? Jonas told me he was being pursued by the Brotherhood, but he had no idea why. Did Sellars tell you why the Brotherhood imprisoned this man?"

  "Sellars didn't tell us fenfen, really," Orlando said. "Didn't have time—somebody killed Atasco in the real world, and we all had to run."

  Nandi's response was swallowed by a huge echoing clang that shook the floor and made them all jump. Outside the small chamber voices rose in screams and cries of fear.

  "It begins." Nandi's face was grim. "That is bad. We have even less time than I had hoped."

  Vasily bolted into the gateway room, feverish with panic and excitement. "They are breaking down the door! It is war! The Brotherhood is coming!"

  "It is not the Brotherhood." There was an edge of quiet anger in Nandi's voice. "It is something happening just in this simulation and most of the participants are Puppets. Just help find those children. You will do the Circle no good if you get yourself killed."

  Vasily did not seem to hear him. "They are coming! But the Lord has seen them, seen all the blasphemy, and there will be blood!" A series of ringing impacts filtered in from the great chamber, like someone striking a huge gong. Vasily darted back out into the main part of the temple.

  Nandi shut his eyes for a moment; when he opened them, he wore a look of studied calm. "We work with the tools we have." He turned to Mr. Pingalap. "I think we must try one more time to confirm that I have not misunderstood some larger pattern, then we will start opening and closing gateways as fast as possible."

  The old man sketched a little bow. He stepped into the newly opened gateway as a violent, grinding screech pierced the air, followed a moment later by a terrible crash that shook the very floor-stones. After a moment's silence the screaming began again.

  "It sounds like the temple doors have been thrown down," said Nandi. He saw Orlando's glance dart toward the door of the chamber. "Keep your grip," he cautioned. "We do not know for certain what is happening out there, but Mr. Pingalap needs you here."

  "But why don't we just go through one of these things?" Fredericks pleaded. "We can do all this testing somewhere else, can't we?"

  Nandi paused in his count. "It is not so simple. . . ."

  "What do you mean?" Orlando was tired of being treated like a child. "Should we just wait here until they come and kill us? All these gateways open somewhere!"

  "Yes," Nandi snapped, "and many of them to somewhere far worse than this." He stared hard at Orlando, and that momentary fierceness made him someone quite different—a warrior, a crusader. "You young people do not know what is in my heart—what I must consider. Many of the simulations are in deadly chaos and most of these gateways lead to worlds that now have only one working gate. If I take us to one of those worlds and that gateway shuts off also, then what? Even if we survive, we will have lost the fight!" He reached for some kind of equilibrium and found it. "This is what I was brought here to do," he said more softly. "I did not think I would have to solve such critical problems so fast, but it is my task and I will do it."

  He was interrupted as Mr. Pingalap hurried back through the gateway. "I do not like that place," the old man announced, "but I think it is your Shadow Country—dark, it was very dark. Some faint lights, and things moving—large things, I think." He wrapped his bony arms across his thin chest.

  "Then we must start cycling as fast as we can," Nandi declared. "You boys must go find Mrs. Simpkins and the others. Convince them to come back now. Be assured that if I can think of a place to take them all, I will. There is no point in unnecessary sacrifice—this is not our struggle anymore."

  "Convince them?" Orlando was struggling to understand, but it was hard to be patient. "Can't you just order them or something?"

  "If I could order them, our fellowship would not be a Circle." Nandi's face grew all too human for a moment, tired and frightened, but he managed a weak smile. "This is our great task, you see. Everyone has their own part to play. And this is my portion of that task." He turned and made the hand gestures to summon a new gateway.

  The temple had gone strangely quiet.

  Orlando and Fredericks moved cautiously out of Nandi's gateway chamber and across the darkened antechamber beside it until they stood in the doorway. They knew they had to find the other members of the Circle, but it was impossible to ignore what was going on at the far end of the enormous hall.

  The patch of sky visible where the bronze doors had once loomed was night-dark, but the front of the chamber was now illuminated by hundreds of torches held by soldiers who filled the temple porch, rank upon rank. They were not the only ones who had come calling. A phalanx of weird, leathery men stood just inside the ruined doors, all of them shiny bald and covered in ill-fitting gray skin. Each wore a thick piece of plated armor around his torso from neck to groin that seemed somehow part of his body; each held a ponderous mallet, a thick handle of wood with a stone head. The temple's besieged inhabitants had retreated from the front of the temple until they were squeezed in a mass against the walls opposite the shattered doorway. Only the massive sphinx Saf stood before the invaders, but by himself he had created a standoff.

  "So the fear of Osiris has proved greater than respect for Grandfather Ra," said a harsh voice near Orlando's knee. The ugly little domestic god Bes clambered up onto a ceremonial stand beside him, clearing away a lovely vase by toppling it to the floor before seating himself. In the nearly silent temple, even the sound of the clay shattering sent panic rippling through the crowd, but the besiegers and the sphinx remained as motionless as a wall painting. "See—they have brought the creatures of night into the temple of the sun." Bes pointed to the silent, leathery figures in the doorway. "Tortoise-men! I had thought them all slaughtered by Set in the red desert long ago. But now Tefy and Mewat have set them loose in the heart of Abydos—they have cast down the very doors of Ra's house." He shook his head, but the expression on his homely face seemed almost as intrigued as appalled. "What times these are!"

&
nbsp; The tableau was so charged with potential violence that Orlando could not take his eyes off it. He reached for Fredericks' arm and found his friend almost vibrating with tension. "What. . . ?" Orlando began, but never finished the question.

  The wall of soldiers parted, the torchbearers falling back into a line on either side until they had created a path of red-lit shadows leading up to the doorframe and its gigantic broken hinges. Two figures walked slowly up that path toward the temple. Something about them seized at Orlando's heart: as fearsome as were the soldiers and the stiffly silent tortoise-men, that dread was nothing compared to the sudden weight of illness and doom he felt at the sight of the two mismatched shapes. Many of the temple's defenders seemed to feel it, too, moaning and struggling to move even farther back, but they were pinned by the chamber's far wall and there was no room left for retreat. A woman lost her balance, screamed shrilly, and was sucked down into the close-packed crowd as though by quicksand. As she vanished beneath the crush of legs, the temple fell nearly silent once more.

  "Orlando," said Fredericks in the breathy voice of someone trying to wake up from a bad dream, "Orlando, we . . . we have to. . . ."

  The two figures stepped through the doorway. One was so grotesquely fat it seemed a miracle he could stand unaided, let alone move so gracefully. A hood around his head at first seemed to be a monk's cowl, but was actually part of his skin; the rest of his massive body was clothed only in a loincloth, making it easy to see the oily scales that covered him, black, blue, and gray, patchy with disease. A long swollen tail dragged behind the cobra-man like dead flesh.

  The shape beside was only slightly less horrific, a tall but stooped figure with the protruding chest of a bird, and with feet that might have been human except that the toes stretched and curled into long talons. But if the rest of the vulture-man was just ugly, it was his face that was truly ghastly: his elaborate hooked beak might have once been a human face before something had melted flesh and bone and stretched the nose and jaw outward like putty. But where either human or bird would have eyes, the creature had only malformed flesh and empty sockets.

  "Stop," the sphinx rumbled in a voice so deep that the soldiers all took a step back. Even the tortoise-men swayed a little, like reeds in a stiff breeze.

  The vulture-thing smiled slowly, showing teeth at the hinge of his beak. "Ah, yes, the guardian known as Yesterday," he said in a bizarrely sweet voice. "How appropriate, loyal Saf, since you clearly fail to understand how things have changed."

  "The Temple of Ra is the holy of holies, Tefy," the guardian replied. To Orlando at that moment, watching from the doorway, the sphinx's great bulk seemed the one thing holding the universe in place. "That does not change. That will never change. You and Mewat have overstepped your authority by assaulting the house of the Highest. Turn and flee this moment, and perhaps your master Osiris will intercede for you with his grandfather. If you stay, you will be destroyed."

  Cobra-man Mewat laughed, a hoarse wheeze, and a glint appeared in the darkness of Tefy's empty sockets. "That might be, Saf," said the vulture-man. "You and your brother are old and powerful, and we are but young godlings, however high in our Lord's favor—but we are not fools enough to pit ourselves against you," He lifted his hands, the fingers long and thin as spider's legs, and clapped them together. The sound was picked up and echoed by the tortoise-men, who beat fists against bellies to make their shells echo to a slow drumbeat.

  Saf crouched a little lower, as though preparing to spring. Muscles writhed like river current beneath his stony skin. The terrified crowd groaned and lurched backward yet again, surging against the chamber wall like a wave against a breakwater. People caught in the crush screamed for help, dull, muffled sounds that did not last long. "If you will not stand against me, carrion-eater, then who shall?" Saf growled. "I will crush your tortoise-men like Bast in a nest of rats."

  "No doubt," said Tefy calmly. "No doubt." He began to back toward the doorway. Mewat, after showing his mouthful of crooked fangs in a sneer, followed him.

  "They're going!" Fredericks exulted in a strangled half-whisper. Orlando, too, was feeling vastly relieved at the retreat of vulture and cobra until three tall figures stepped past the pair and through the temple doors.

  "Oh, this impacts," Orlando murmured. "This impacts plus."

  The three gods—and there was no doubt they were gods: larger than mere humans, they moved with the grace of dancers and the swagger of outlaw bikers—arrayed themselves before Saf, who rose to sit on his hindquarters, his head towering above everything except me temple roof. The drumming of the tortoise-men grew louder.

  "Interesting," Bes said from his seat atop the dais, as calm as if he were watching an arm-wrestling match in a corner bar. "I wonder what Tefy and Mewat gave away to bring in the war gods."

  "War gods?" But Orlando did not really need confirmation—one had only to look at the leader, a huge, bull-headed creature, to know it was true. Long and sharp as it was, the bull-man's curved sword was less frightening than were his naked arms, so thick with muscle he looked as though he could have twisted the temple doors off their hinges by himself. The other two attackers, a man and a woman, appeared no less formidable. The male god had gazelle horns jutting from his head; flickers of lightning played up and down his arms and crackled around the head of his war club. The goddess was the tallest of the three, dressed in a pantherskin and deftly balancing in one hand a spear that could skewer a dozen men at once. Orlando suddenly realized why Bes had treated their own claim of being gods of war with such droll contempt.

  "Mont I can understand," the dwarf god went on. "He's the bull fellow, and he's got problems at home—wife running around with Amon like a bitch in heat, people talking behind his back. But Anth and Reshpu? Of course, she always likes a fight, and Reshpu's a new god—perhaps he's trying to make a name for himself. The harpers would sing forever of someone mighty enough to kill one of the great sphinxes."

  "Can't anyone stop them?" Orlando demanded. The crowd was groaning like a wounded animal, trapped, terrified, mesmerized. The war gods feinted at the sphinx and the watchers exclaimed in terror. In a blinding instant, a bolt from Reshpu's hand crackled upward toward the ceiling, then dissipated with a snap of burning air. "Why don't you do something?"

  "Me?" Bes shook his oversized head. "I was going to go home, but it's too late now. What I'm going to do instead is stay out from underfoot while the bigger children play." He slipped down from the stand, then hurried away along the wall, his bandy legs carrying him deceptively quickly.

  "Where are you going?" Orlando screamed after the little god.

  "One of the excellent things about my size," Bes called over his shoulder, "is that there are many fine hiding places available to me, O godlet from beyond the Great Green. Urns are my specialty." He vanished into the shadows at a trot.

  A bellow of anger followed by another electrical flare dragged Orlando's attention back to the battle at the front door. Anth and Reshpu had attacked simultaneously; the goddess had sunk her spear into Saf's mountainous flank before dancing back, but the gazelle-horned god had not been so lucky and was caught squirming beneath the sphinx's paw. Lightning flared again; Saf pulled back his scorched claws, allowing Reshpu to crawl out of reach. Mont charged in, swinging his scimitar at the sphinx's face before dodging a swiping blow which would have hurled him against the wall. His sword bit at Saf's neck. No blood followed when Mont snatched the blade free, but the sphinx let out a rumbling cry of pain that made the air pulse. The tortoise-men beat their chests until it became a continuous thunder.

  "They're going to kill him!" Fredericks shouted over the tumult. "We have to get out of here!"

  "We have to find Bonnie Mae." Heart pounding, Orlando scanned for the others, but in the lamplight it was a nearly impossible task. The crowd at their end of the room was less tangled and compacted, but it was still a thicket of brown Egyptian faces and bodies and pale clothing, a chaotic mass of humans and petty gods struggling
not to be crushed, trying to flee somewhere in a temple with few such places left.

  Orlando grasped Fredericks by the arm and had just pulled his friend a few steps out onto the floor of the great chamber when a black cloud rushed through the demolished doorway. For a moment Orlando thought that Tefy and Mewat were pouring in poisoned smoke, and he felt his already racing heart falter.

  I'm too tired for this. . . . was all he could think.

  "Bats!" someone shrieked, but they were only half right. The cloud was full of darting black shadows, but something else flew there, too—thousands of terrible pale serpents with translucent dragonfly wings, hissing like steam.

  What had already been madness now became something else entirely. Ragged screams filled the air. The temple, already shadowy, became darker still as the cloud of flying things blocked the light from the wall torches. Shrieking people were running everywhere with no sanity or plan, as though trapped in a burning building; others had already been swarmed by bats and flying snakes and lay writhing on the floor covered with crawling, biting things.

  A shape that might have been a woman barreled into Orlando from the side and knocked him sprawling before disappearing into the chaos. As he stood up, one of the besieging soldiers appeared before him, aiming at his stomach with a short stabbing-sword; Orlando had only a moment to react. Off-balance and unable to jump back, he fell forward instead, twisting so that the thrust only sliced the skin of his chest. He had almost forgotten his own sword, clutched in his hand so long the grip was sweaty, but his hard-won fighter's reflexes led him to an unthinking backhand blow into the soldier's unprotected legs behind the knee. The man screamed and fell forward. Orlando took the soldier's head off with a two-handed swipe, then batted away the sudden attack of a winged thing with the flat of his blade.