Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  She swayed above the pitched roof and forced herself to concentrate on finding a grip. T4b had only the low windowsill to lean against so she could not expect him to lean very far.

  "I'm . . . I'm. . . ." T4b sounded like he might be sick.

  "Just hold on." Even now the Quan Li thing might have knocked !Xabbu off the parapet and moved beneath her with that sharp knife, waiting, grinning. . . .

  Don't think about it!

  There were cracks in the plastered facade of Weeping Baron's Tower but nothing that would support her weight. She stared between her dangling feet at the steeply sloping roof, careful to look no farther than just beneath her. It wasn't that far down, really, and the spot where the tower joined the roof was covered with ornamental moldings. If she dropped carefully and caught at those moldings, she should be all right. If there hadn't been a fatal drop just a few meters downslope, she knew she wouldn't even be hesitating.

  "I'm going to grab your wrist and then let myself fall," she said breathlessly to T4b. "It's not so far. Just let me do it myself."

  "This . . . this is bad, Renie."

  "I know." She fought panicky anger—she had no time to reassure the young man, fear of heights or no fear of heights, and in any case, who was the one jumping? She held tight to T4b's gauntleted wrist and spread her feet wide for better balance, then let go. The tower wall had a slight outward slope of its own which could have spun her away down the pitched roof, but she was able to get one foot behind her; when she thumped down onto the tiles she snatched at the moldings. To her incalculable relief, they held.

  She looked over her shoulder. The murderer was watching her even as he lazily swung at !Xabbu, but he made no move to stop her. His casualness was baffling, but Renie was not going to waste time wondering about it. "Throw me down that spear," she shouted at T4b. She caught the curtain rod and then turned to move carefully down the steep slope, mindful of every step. Two chimney pots stood in the center of the slanting roof like lonely trees on a mountainside, but other than that nothing but the half-meter parapet would keep her from falling to her death should she slip.

  She tried to angle her move toward the Quan Li thing to force him away from !Xabbu, but the enemy kept moving, stopping occasionally to lunge at !Xabbu with the pole, forcing the man in the baboon sim into another heart-clenching drop over the edge. The Quan Li thing was calmly playing a game, keeping himself between Renie and her friend. The monster began to laugh.

  He's enjoying this! she realized. But even if he falls, he won't die—he'll just drop offline. We won't be so lucky.

  She risked a cautious attack, plunging the sharpened curtain rod toward the Quan Li face, but the monster was terribly quick; he twisted away and snatched at the makeshift spear, almost pulling it from Renie's grasp. Even though she managed to yank it away again, she slipped to her knees and had to clutch at the tiles to keep her balance. She scrabbled back just in time to avoid a swinging return blow from the hooked staff.

  T4b shouted down to her, "I'm . . . I'm coming, Renie!" His voice was an adolescent honk, squeaky with panic.

  "No!" she shouted. "Don't!" She could think of nothing more disastrous than having a blundering, terrified T4b on the roof with her. "Don't do it, Javier! Go back and help Emily and the others!"

  T4b was not listening. He had already draped his armored form over the windowsill, and was trying to get both his legs beneath him while hanging on.

  The murderer was distracted for a moment by the spectacle. !Xabbu leaped down from the parapet and bounded up the roof toward Renie. He was bleeding on his hands and legs, but his only concern was for her. "You cannot fight him," he gasped. "He is very fast, very strong."

  "We'll never get off this roof if he's alive," said Renie, then disaster struck.

  T4b had swung down from the window and was dangling, kicking his legs as though that might somehow bring the roof closer to him, but the ancient wooden sill had taken all it was going to take and now tore loose in a shower of plaster, dropping T4b to the sloping roof.

  For a moment, as the youth windmilled his arms, she thought he might catch his balance; but as his pale face swung up and he saw the forest of towers around him and the yawning spaces between them he panicked and threw his hands out, yearning toward the window far out of his reach. His legs went out from under him. An instant later he was rolling down the pitched roof like a cannonball.

  Before Renie could even take in breath to scream, T4b hit the parapet. It was no more strongly made than the rest of the tower, only plaster and timber in the semblance of stone. As it snapped and splintered outward, T4b snatched at it desperately and managed to stop himself before he rolled out, but only his belly and upper body were still on the roof. As he clung to the sagging timbers, he began to shriek, his legs dangling in emptiness.

  !Xabbu was already hurrying down the roof toward him, a golden streak on all fours. Renie wanted to shout at her friend to stay away, that there was nothing he could do but be pulled down himself in T4b's wild terror, but she knew the little man wouldn't listen to her.

  !Xabbu threw himself onto the parapet and wrapped an arm around T4b's head like a lifeguard with a drowning swimmer. He grabbed at the shattered parapet with his other long arm even as the wreckage shifted and T4b slid a little farther over the edge. !Xabbu was now stretched as though on a medieval torture device between T4b and the remains of the parapet. There was another squeal as the timbers moved again; ancient nails popped and plaster dust rose like smoke. Renie opened her mouth to call a warning.

  She saw the shadow in the corner of her eye too late to duck. She managed to get her hand up and deflect the worst of the blow, but the rod still knocked her reeling sideways. She scrabbled blindly up the slope, away from her attacker, but an even harder blow caught her low in the back, an explosion of pain as though she had fallen on a hand grenade. She screeched and collapsed.

  Something grabbed her and roughly turned her over; a weight immediately dropped onto her chest. The leer was gone from the Quan Li thing's face, replaced by a curious masklike slackness, but the eyes seemed alive in a completely inhuman way—the burning, dilated stare of some transcendent biological urge. Fingers as remorseless as surgical restraints clamped Renie's hair and twisted her head back, baring her neck. She heard !Xabbu calling her name, but he was hopelessly far away. The knife curved above her, the blade as dimly gray as the lead roof, as gray as the sky.

  There was a crack like a dropped plate and a simultaneous smack of movement—surprisingly light, like a slap on her belly. Renie felt herself showered with sticky fluid.

  My throat is slit. . . . she thought in bleak wonderment, then the Quan Li thing dropped heavily onto her face. Renie struggled in reflexive panic, expecting to feel her own failing strength leak away, but instead she was able to shove back the clinging weight and crawl out from under, dizzy and nauseated.

  The Quan Li thing had already stiffened like hot wax poured into water. The eyes were open, but the look of animal exultation was gone. The neck and throat were a ribboned mess of blood and tissue.

  Renie could barely understand what had happened, let alone why. She turned her head and was lashed by dizziness and nausea. !Xabbu and T4b were still clinging to the parapet a few meters down the roof. She crawled toward them, then stopped, afraid that even at a distance her added weight might hasten the parapet's collapse. She caught at one of the chimney pots, wrapped both her arms around it in an embrace that shoved her cheek against the cold brick, and then inched the lower half of her body down the roof until she was stretched full length. She was so battered and exhausted it was difficult to speak; the words came in panting increments.

  "Grab . . . my legs . . . if you can."

  She could not look back, and in fact would not have watched if it were possible. She stared back up the roof slope instead, waiting to feel a grip on her ankle and praying to hear no more cracking of timbers. A shape was draped across the windowsill up above, like a handpuppet discarded on its st
age. Blood drooled down the wall beneath it, slow drips that had become long red lines. Renie could not see who it was, and at the moment did not care.

  A small hand grabbed her foot.

  She grunted in pain as !Xabbu first got a solid grip, then gradually let her help him take T4b's weight. It took only a minute, but it felt like days. Renie's joints burned. Her head felt like something had reached into her skull and harshly stirred her brains with a spoon.

  At last she felt the burden lessen as T4b, with !Xabbu's help, was able to pull his body up onto the roof. She heard the youth collapse onto the tiles, gulping in air and letting it out again in a sobbing wheeze. !Xabbu did not rush up the roof to her side immediately; she could hear him talking quietly to T4b. Renie could only guess at how much pain her friend must be suffering himself after having held the battle-suited T4b's weight for all that time.

  At last they all summoned enough strength to crawl up the slope toward the wall below the window. As they reached the base of the wall, the huddled shape on the sill above them lifted a bloodied face. Florimel looked down at them for a long moment in which there seemed to be no recognition, then nodded in dull satisfaction. The left side of her face was almost completely obscured by blood, and her hair on that side jutted stiff and black, scorched like grass in a prairie fire. She raised the flintlock pistol in a trembling, red-slicked hand.

  "Got that bastard," she grunted. "Got him."

  Although she took charge immediately, shouting for Emily to come help Florimel while she herself checked !Xabbu and T4b for serious injuries, it was a while before the numbness lifted and Renie could begin to think properly again. Twice in a few minutes she had been so close to death that she had given herself up to it. Being alive felt almost like a burden.

  She left her two companions squatting below the window and made her way carefully back down the roof to the spot where the Quan Li thing lay sprawled in an odd pose, a three-dimensional photograph of its dying moment. The sim had stiffened in a sort of arch, as though Renie's own form still lay beneath it.

  But he's not dead. He's just been pushed offline. The thoughts bobbed through her mind like untethered balloons. He almost killed me. He was going to do it. It was like sex for him. But I'm the one who's still here.

  She shook herself, trying in vain to dislodge the coldness that seemed to have soaked into her spirit, then bent and began searching.

  Although the body was as rigid as something cast in bronze, Renie's earlier presence beneath the dying sim proved a stroke of luck. The peasant tunic had bunched up when the monster fell forward, leaving the inside pocket open even after the sim and its clothing had turned solid. She flattened her hand and reached in, wondering a little at how disturbing it was to touch even a simulated dead thing. Her fingers closed around a heavy, smooth shape.

  "Thank God." She lifted the lighter. The bulky little metal shape was almost invisible against the gray sky: the daylight was vanishing quickly. "Thank God."

  What if the pocket hadn't been open? she wondered. Can you cut through the virtual cloth on a sim after it's gone terminal like this? Is it just impossible, or could you do it with a blowtorch or whatever those things are, a filament saw? Not that we'd have found either of those things in this world.

  She stood and crawled back up the roof, grateful at least for this one stroke of luck. The idea of dragging the Quan Li corpse all over the House in search of something capable of cutting into the clothing was a very unpleasant one.

  Emily's mostly ineffectual attempts to lend first aid were being further undercut by her desire to gaze down from the splintered window like some crop-haired Juliet at her hero T4b, so !Xabbu climbed up to help tend Florimel. Watching him make his way nimbly up the wall, Renie paused.

  "How do we get the rest of us back inside?" she wondered aloud.

  !Xabbu looked over his shoulder. "Brother Factum Quintus is coming up the stairs," he said. "He can help us. We can use one of these cloth hangings to pull you up."

  The monk appeared at the windowsill, squinting and holding his hands to his head.

  "I am sorry I was no help," he said, "but I am glad to see you are alive. Was that your enemy? He was a rare and dangerous creature. He looks amazingly like a woman, though." He leaned on the sill and groaned. "I believe I have struck my head on every stair on the staircase."

  "Florimel needs more help, Renie," !Xabbu announced. "She is very cut and bloody, and one of her ears is gone. We need to find a place that is warm and protected."

  "I . . . never liked the ears . . . on this sim . . . anyway," Florimel said wanly.

  "Somebody has to shoot you before you make a joke?" Renie asked. She tried to keep her voice light, but it felt as much of an effort as dragging !Xabbu and T4b back off the parapet, "Okay, let's go. But before you start pulling us up, can you throw down one of those tapestries?"

  !Xabbu dropped to the floor inside. A moment later he returned, dragging the heavy piece of fabric. "It is a little torn where I pulled it from the wall," he explained as he slid it over the silt to Renie.

  "Doesn't matter," Renie said. "I just . . . I just want to cover Quan Li,"

  "That was not Quan Li, that was a monster," snarled Florimel, grimacing with pain as !Xabbu returned to examining her lacerated face. "The one who killed William, and maybe Martine."

  "Jesus Mercy," Renie said. "Martine—has anyone looked for her? !Xabbu?"

  But the little man was already gone, scampering toward the room from which the monster's ambush had begun.

  "She is here!" he shouted. "She is . . . I think she is all right, but she is . . . not awake." A moment later he remembered the word. "Unconscious! She is unconscious."

  "Thank God." Renie swayed a little. "Just . . . just give me a moment to do this," she said. "There may have been a monster wearing this sim, but it was Quan Li's once—the real Quan Li—and she was one of our companions, if only for the first hours." She moved back down the roof and carefully draped the fabric over the hardened form. "I think that . . . monster told the truth about one thing anyway," she said, looking back to the others. "I think the real Quan Li must be dead. I wish we could bury her properly. It feels so terrible, leaving her here." She dipped her head.

  "The people," T4b said suddenly, "the Indian people . . . some of them do this."

  Renie and the others turned to look at him. The young man fell silent, suddenly shy. His pale face plastered with lank black hair looked even more vulnerable protruding from the outsized, cracked shell of his armor.

  "Go on, T4b," Renie said gently. "Javier. What do you mean?"

  "Some of the Indian tribes, they put the dead ones on platforms up in the tree branches. Sky burial, they call it. Leave 'em for, like, the birds and the wind." He was serious and solemn; much of his street persona seemed to have dropped away. "This is kind of like that, seen? 'Cause we couldn't carry her all the way to some ground or nothing anyway, could we?"

  "No, you're right." Renie nodded. "I like that. We'll just leave her here . . . buried in the sky." Renie pulled back the top of the tapestry until Quan Li's head was exposed, then left the empty sim and climbed back toward her companions. Behind her, the small dark shape lay on its side facing the edge of the roof, like a child who had fallen asleep watching the first stars begin to gleam above the needle-shadows of the Spire Forest.

  As !Xabbu had reported, Martine was alive. Except for a knot on the back of her head behind her ear, she also seemed to be unharmed, although she was still unconscious: she scarcely stirred as they cut her loose from the pipe to which she had been bound.

  Florimel had not been so lucky. When the group finally made their way down Weeping Baron's Tower to a carpeted, window-less room on the lower floor—T4b had insisted there be no view of the Spire Forest and its precipitous angles—Renie continued their companion's medical care while !Xabbu stacked broken furniture in a fireplace that looked to have been unused for decades, if not longer.

  "Your ear is gone," she told Florimel
, who seemed as stunned and disassociated by her experiences as Renie was by her own brushes with death. "And I can't tell for certain until I get the blood cleared away, but your left eye doesn't look very good either. It's swollen closed right now." Renie winced as strips of facial tissue shifted like sea kelp under her careful cleaning. Knowing that the body, and hence the damage, was purely virtual did not make the task less disturbing. "It looks like the bullet missed you, though—except for maybe the ear, I think the damage is all from the gunpowder. I guess we got lucky."

  "Just clean it and bind it," Florimel said faintly. "And find something else to wrap around me—I am cold. I am afraid of shock."

  They draped a velvet wall hanging around her shoulders, but Florimel continued to shiver. When !Xabbu got the fire lit, she moved closer to it. Brother Factum Quintus found some ancient linen napkins packed in an old chest in one of the other rooms; torn into strips and tied together, they made decent bandages. When Renie had finished Florimel looked like something out of a horror movie, her head bumpy and misshapen with knotted bandages, but the worst of the bleeding had finally been staunched.

  Florimel's one good eye peered fiercely out from the strips of linen. "That is enough," she told Renie. "Rest and warmth are what will help me most now. See to the others."

  The rest of the damage was surprisingly light. T4b's armor had protected him from almost everything except cuts and scrapes on his face and his natural hand—the other still glowed faintly, and showed no change—but Renie felt sure that underneath his ruptured chestplate his torso must be a bloody, bruised mess.