by Tad Williams
"Of course, I cannot see anything. What a fool I was, to think that these new senses, my new adaptation, made me any less blind. I am lost in the dark.
"No. Order, I must have some order. I do not know how long before something momentous happens—the Trojans parading back in victory or hurrying toward the gates in defeat. My own friends may need help when they return. If they return. No. I will make some order.
"I could sleep only a little after I last made a journal entry. As dawn approached, I woke from an unsettling dream where I was again lost in the blackness of the Pestalozzi Institute with the voices of lost children moaning down the hallways. I could not get back to sleep, nor did I try to for long. There is little enough I can do now, since I have cast the dice and sent my friends off to war, but there are things I can accomplish that are certainly better than lying on my back in the last hours of night, sleepless and brooding.
"Emily awoke when I got up. She was fractious, like a very young child, but perhaps some of the dream was still with me, because for the first time my heart truly went out to her. Whatever she is, she clearly did not ask to be drawn into our troubles and she is suffering because of it. In fact, she is suffering in ways that perhaps mean something important . . . but I am ahead of myself again. Order, Martine.
"Florimel was still sleeping, thank God—she needs rest badly—and the girl was afraid to stay by herself in the women's quarters, so I took her with me. I had no idea where I was going, but was determined to learn something of this famous city. We are here for a reason, I must believe that. The manifestation—the Lady of the Windows, as the monk named her—could not have been just a part of the House world, since she spoke of this simulation. Someone communicated with us, or tried to. Someone wanted us here. But who . . . and why? And where in this vast place, exactly, are we meant to go?
"As we went out from the women's quarters and through the palace, I heard voices in many of the rooms—prayers, quiet arguments, even weeping. Emily and I were not the only ones waiting uncomfortably for the dawn. Several times we were stopped by men of the palace, some armed, some apparently hurrying to King Priam's chambers with messages, but they were all distracted and seemed to want little more than to make certain we knew to stay away from the gates where the men were mustering. I had wondered if Priam himself might somehow be the focal point of our assignation from the Lady of the Windows, but could not see why. In any case, I had decided to wait to explore the king's quarters until daylight, when he and his advisers would be distracted by the battle on the plain, since this night it would be full of Troy's male leadership.
"Outside, all of the fabled city seemed to lie still but rigid with tension, like someone feigning sleep. As we went out across the great square, with even my expanded senses blurred by the mists that would disappear with dawn, the palace behind us seemed a dream-object, something that would not be as easy to return to as it had been to leave.
"Emily was quiet but watchful beside me, anxious as a cat stepping into an unfamiliar room. 'Do you feel something?' I asked her.
"She nodded, but almost reluctantly. I could . . . there is no word—smell, hear, see, all are misleading . . . I could sense a certain contraction of her attention, as though circumstance forced her to retreat into herself. 'Something . . . I feel . . . something.'
"Leading her like a horse that might bolt at any moment, I tried to distract her with small talk and little touches while slowly heading in the very direction which seemed to trouble her most. I have an idea, one that I cannot explain any more than I can name the senses that have been given to me in place of my sight, that Emily might somehow be sensitive to anomalies in the system, or at least to the particular anomaly which led us here. Renie has told me that the appearance of the Lady of the Windows struck Emily almost like a physical shock. I hoped that her discomfort was more than general, that perhaps now it meant we were near some similar locus.
"It was cruel. I do not like what I have had to do, and I fear that I will have worse things on my conscience before the end of all this, but I also know that we are desperate—that our ignorance has wasted time and lives.
"Long before we left the center of Troy, Emily's discomfort was so strong that I felt certain we were near something significant. We crossed through the market, the empty stalls like eye sockets, a few cloth banners still flapping, forgotten in the confusion of war. At one point, when she was shaking like a palsy victim and crying to go back to the palace, I perceived that a large building of some sort lay at the end of the street where we had stopped. I urged her forward, promising that soon we would turn back, and although her fear had almost overwhelmed her, managed to lead her to the steps of the huge, columned box. I had an idea what it was, but I wanted to be certain.
" 'I know you're afraid, Emily,' I said. 'Let me go and see what this is, then I'll come back to you.' But to my astonishment, she insisted on going with me, more afraid of being alone than of her own internal agonies,
"Robed men stepped up to meet me as I entered through the great bronze doors. They were priests, and as I had suspected, this was the famous Temple of Athena. When they recognized me—I have not chosen to be Priam's daughter Cassandra out of pride or a desire for luxury, but for relative freedom—they stepped aside and let me enter.
"Despite the curtains that hid it, my senses told me that the shape at the back of the tall-roofed chamber was the huge wooden statue of Athena known as the Palladium. Recollections of the role of Athena in The Iliad, coupled with my guess at Emily's sensitivities, suggested that this might be the place for a nexus, or at least where a presence like the Lady of the Windows might make an appearance—there is a strong sense of the metaphorical in this Otherland network, perhaps part of the original design, perhaps what Kunohara referred to as our 'story.' But to my surprise, even when we neared the shrouded altar, Emily did not experience any greater degree of unease—if anything, the solid stone walls of the temple seemed to reassure her. She stood and waited almost patiently as I surveyed the room, trying to detect any sign of a hidden entrance that might lead to the maze Kunohara had mentioned, but without success.
"I led her out again, deciding that I must come back again in the daytime, when I could explore at leisure without inflicting pain on Emily and thus distracting myself. But to my further astonishment, her discomfort appeared again after we left the Temple of Athena, until by the time our circuitous route had almost brought us back to the palace she was not only shaking again, but weeping quietly. At last it got so bad that I had to let her sit on a low stone wall to try to compose herself. We were in what must have been, in Trojan terms, a relatively old and undesirable part of the acropolis. The temples and other buildings were small and, as best I could tell, in poor repair. The trees that lined the little street had grown until they almost completely blocked the sky. Water dripped somewhere onto stone, making a solemn, lonely sound.
" 'Is she ill?' someone asked me—a sound so unexpected in the last hour before dawn that I jumped. 'I can offer you shelter. Or did you wish to make an offering?'
"The stranger seemed to be a man bent with age, leaning on a staff, wrapped in a heavy if threadbare wool cloak. I could not see his face, of course, not as a sighted person would, but the information it gave me suggested he was not just old but very old, with no hair but a wisp of beard on his chin, and the way he held his head suggested he might be blind. The irony was not lost on me as I thanked him and told him we were almost home.
"He nodded. 'You will be from the palace, then,' he said. 'I can hear it in your voice. A few others have wandered down from there in the last weeks, seeking otherwise forgotten gods and goddesses.'
" 'Are you a priest?' I asked.
" 'Yes. And my patroness, Demeter, puts a special burden on her priests for the care of women and their misfortunes. Still, considering the terrible flowering of widowhood, you would think my lady's temple would not be so deserted, the altars empty of offerings. But since her daughter Persephone is the unw
illing wife of Death himself, perhaps it is not so surprising after all.'
"Something in his words set me tingling. 'May I see Demeter's temple?'
"He pointed to a place away from the road, even deeper in the trees, where a small and unprepossessing facade was backed against a hilly prominence. 'Come with me. I fear that with my eyes useless, it is not so clean as it used to be. I will have help when it is time for the Mysteries, but the rest of the year. . . .'
"Emily suddenly leaped up. 'No!' she cried, "no, don't go, don't go in there!' She seemed hysterical, but would not take a step closer to the tiny temple, even to drag me away. 'Don't—oh, take me back! I want to go away!'
"My heart was beating fast as I made my apologies to the priest and pressed an obolos—a small coin—into his hand. Emily was so relieved that she almost ran the rest of the way back to the palace, every step increasing her happiness. As for me, I was—and still am—full of thoughts, full of frustration at my dim memories of Classical mythology, but also full of hope.
"Demeter, the goddess to whom that neglected temple on that lonely road is dedicated, was the Earth Mother, but she was also the mother of Persephone, a girl kidnapped by Hades, Lord of the Dead, and Demeter herself went down into Hades' kingdom to bring her daughter back. There is much I do not recall—I seem to remember that Persephone ate pomegranate seeds while a prisoner underground, and thus her mother could not bring her back to the sunlight again—but I believe I can remember one important thing. The Elysian Mysteries—the Mysteries to which I am sure the ancient priest referred—were a ritual journey through death and into life, a religious ceremony of the highest order. And, if I remember correctly, the participants are led through a maze. Yes, I am certain . . . a maze.
"There is much to consider, but perhaps we have at last received a piece of luck in our favor. If so, then we also owe something to Emily—perhaps our lives. Already I feel sorry for the times I have been able to feel only annoyance toward her.
"Much to consider. Order is still out of reach, but I think I perceive the first suggestions of something like it taking shape. My God, but I hope that is true.
"Code Delphi. Hmmm. My choice of a code phrase to mark out these entries begins to seem . . . rather Delphic. In any case. . . .
"Code Delphi. End here."
Even in the depths of one of the weariest, most bone-sick slumbers of his life, Paul could not escape his dreams.
The vision coalesced out of darker and more indeterminate dream stuff like bright coral growing on the blackened, decaying timbers of a mud-bound shipwreck. The shadows in his mind began to glimmer with red light, which quickly became vertical streaks stretching up, up, up, until they described a vertex lost from sight, the outline of a great scarlet-splashed, black arrow pointing upward and away into infinity—a mountain, unimaginably large, incomprehensibly high. The uppermost part of the cone that he could see bulked cold and dark—lifted out from the blackness of vacuum space into visibility only by those few blood-colored reflections skittering along its convoluted surface—but the base of the impossible mountain, set continent-wide on the endless plain where Paul stood, was awash in fire.
He watched the flames licking along the base of that great black mass and knew that he had seen it before in another dream. It was no real surprise when he heard her voice.
"Paul, the time is growing ever shorter. You must come to us."
He could not see her, could not see anything but the tall endlessness of the mountain sitting in its nest of flames. His eyes were drawn back to the place where the black of the mountain became inseparable from the black of space. A point of light hovered there, where before there had been nothing, as if the mountain's uttermost peak had scraped a star loose from the firmament.
Slowly, as gradually as a feather falling off the wind on a mild spring day, it was drifting down toward him.
"How do you come to me like this—in dreams?" he asked. "How is it that I can talk to you, but I know I'm dreaming?"
The voice grew closer and more intimate, even as the sparkle of light spun slowly down toward him. "Dreaming—that is a word that means little," she said in his ear. "You are not a thing, separate from everything else. Not here. You are like a shoal of fish in the ocean—you are a concentration, a congregation, but still the sea flows through you, around you, over you. There are times when you are at rest, and the current of the ocean in which we all swim flows well from me to you." The gleaming point seemed larger and more diffuse now, a shining, diaphanous shape, an "x" made of watery light, as though she did indeed come to him through the pressures and refractions of some liquid medium.
At last he could see her face. Despite all the confusion and misery, the familiar features warmed him. "Whatever you call it, a dream, not a dream, I'm glad you've come to me again."
Her expression was more troubled than tender. "I am strained to the utmost, Paul. I do not think that I can force myself across this distance again, even through what you call dream. You must understand that time is short now."
"What can I do? I can't come to you if I don't know where you are." He laughed, an angry, sad sound that he had never heard in a dream before. "I don't even know what you are."
"What I am is not important now, because if you do not come to us, I think that soon I will be nothing."
"But what can I do?" he demanded.
"The others you seek—they are close to you. You must find them."
"That boy Orlando and his friend? I found them already. . . ?"
"No." He could hear her frustration, although her face was still little more than a tissue of light, a will-o'-the-wisp faint against the silhouette of the black mountain. "No, there are others, and they are waiting between the old wall and the new. All are needed. I will try to lead you to them, but you must search carefully—my strength is limited. I have forced the mirror too many times."
"Forced . . . What does that mean? And even if I find them, where are you? Where can I find you?"
She waved a hand, her light beginning to fade. At first he thought it was a gesture of farewell, and he shouted in frustration—he could dimly feel his body, a distant thing, twitch in weak response—but then he realized she was pointing, even as she flickered and vanished.
"The . . . mountain. . . ." Her voice came to him from far away, then followed her shining form into oblivion.
The black mountain had changed. The endless, razor blade vertices had twisted and wrinkled, the shape transformed as though some galaxy-wide hand had twisted its proud rigidity like paper. It still loomed, still stretched to the sky, but it was crooked along its length now, the flame-lights painting texture up its broad reach, to the place where it spread wide across the sky like a black mushroom cloud, like . . . like a tree.
Paul yearned toward it, desperate to make sense of what he was seeing, intent on memorizing everything, but already the fires were beginning to burn low and the black tree to disappear into the background of night. As it finally merged with the blackness, his perspective changed, as though he grew or the god-tree shrank. Something that had not been there before gleamed in the uppermost branches.
He squinted. It seemed shiny, curiously cylindrical, a silvery shape perched in the boughs. It was only in the last moments before it disappeared entirely that he recognized it for what it was.
A cradle.
Paul dragged himself to his feet, groaning. All around him, the Ithacans who had survived the day slept where they had sat down at battle's end, lying at odd angles with slack mouths or contorted brows, as though mimicking the unhappy dead.
The Trojans had only retreated a short way back from the Greek settlement, and although the setting of the sun had brought the battle to an end, for the first time in a long time the Trojans were camped on the plain instead of hidden behind the walls of their great city. There was no doubt they would press hard when dawn came, trying to recapture the momentum from the day before and push the Greeks into the sea.
How can a virtu
al body hurt this much? Paul wondered. Or if it's my real body hurting, why did these bastards code the thing so I could absorb so much punishment through the system? Was it really that important for a battle to feel realistic?
He shuffled toward the wall and climbed to where he could see the lights of the Trojan fires, and beyond them the slumbering bulk of the distant city. The dream was still so much with him that he half-expected to see a vast black peak blocking the stars, but nothing disturbed the line of low hills behind Troy.
What did it mean? A cradle? In the treetop, like "Rock-a-bye Baby"? He massaged his throbbing arm and looked out across the Trojan encampment, a thousand fires gleaming like cracks in a cooling lava flow. And who is out there? He had to assume that "between an old wall and a new" meant on the plain. Why did the woman, whoever she was, have to speak so cryptically? It was like being dragged through one of the Greek myths, all prophecies and tragedy.
There's a reason, he told himself. There must be. I just haven't figured it out yet. Something about the system, maybe—or about her.
Paul wrapped his cloak more tightly, then made his way down from the wall and headed across the sleeping camp toward the gate, amazed to find so much stillness in a world that only hours earlier had been as mad as a Bosch painting. He would tell the guards that he was going out to spy on the Trojans—hadn't Odysseus done something like that? He would much rather have slept and nursed his wounds, but he knew this might be his last chance to find those unspecified others waiting between the walls. After all, if things went the same way tomorrow, there might no longer be a new wall, and he himself might not be around to care.
Salome Melissa Fredericks was not an average girl.
Her mother had found that out early, when her daughter had rejected not only her given name, but "Sally," "Sal," "Melissa"—a failed flanking exercise—and even (and perhaps least surprisingly) "Lomey," her mother's last desperate attempt to avoid "Sam." But Sam she was, from the time she was first old enough to make it stick, which she achieved by the civilly disobedient means of refusing to answer to anything else.
