by Tad Williams
"I . . . I beg your pardon?"
"Rich men are particularly susceptible to kidnapping and extortion, Mr. Jonas, and the richer they are, the more attractive to criminal minds. It goes without saying that we have taken careful precaution against such things—as you have no doubt noticed, Mr. Jongleur has gone to great lengths to ensure the security of his home and business . . . and your pupil. But just as he firmly defends his assets against overt threats, he also considers unwanted attention from the media to be a form of assault as well. Your contract was very explicit about the Jongleur family's privacy, both during and after your employment. I hope you read it carefully. The penalties for breach are . . . severe."
He knew what was expected, and said it. "I take my responsibilities very seriously, Mr. Finney."
"Good, good. Of course." Although Finney neither moved his hand nor made any other telltale sign, the door at the back of the office opened and a huge shape appeared there. "Mr. Mudd will take you up and introduce you."
"To . . . to Mr. Jongleur?" Paul was reluctant to look away from Finney, but from the corner of his eye, the newcomer seemed to be as large as a bus.
Finney laughed, a most disconcerting sound. "Oh, no! No, Mr. Jongleur is a very, very busy man. I doubt you will ever meet him. No, my associate is going to take you to your charge." He shook his head, still amused.
There was barely room for Paul to fit in the same elevator with Mudd, a vast pink man whose shaved head seemed to have grown directly out of his massive shoulders.
"Jonas. . . ." Mudd grinned, showing a row of perfect, large white teeth. His voice was surprisingly high. "Is that Greek?"
"No, I don't think so. Might have been French at one point."
"French." Mudd grinned again. He seemed to find the whole thing very funny.
The elevator stopped so smoothly that it was only when the door opened that Paul knew they had arrived. Outside the elevator was a little enclosed bay which ended in a door that might have come from a bank vault. Mudd applied his thick fingers to the code pad, then blew into a grille. The door hissed open.
"What . . . what is this?" Paul asked, startled. They seemed to have entered some kind of indoor garden, a massive place as wide as a football field, if Paul could judge from what he could see of the distant ceiling and walls. A path led away from the door, snaking through tall trees rooted in actual soil.
"Conservatory." Mudd took him by the arm, giving him the impression that he could shatter Paul's elbow with a light squeeze. "She's always in here. "
She was kneeling beside the path, partially hidden by a tree—he saw the hem of her skirt before he saw the rest of her, a fold of pale blue cotton with a froth of white petticoat peeping from beneath. "He's here, Princess." Mudd spoke with the cheerful familiarity of a sailor greeting a favorite whore. "Your new tutor."
As she rose and stepped out from behind the trunk like a dryad slipping its bark, a bright bird fluttered up from where she had been crouching, flared its wings, and shot away into the upper branches. The girl's eyes were huge, her skin pale as cream silk. She looked Paul up and down, then gave him a strange, solemn smile and turned back to watch the spot where the bird had disappeared.
Mudd extended his hand in mocking party manners. "Mr. Paul Jonas, this is Miss Avialle Jongleur."
"Ava," she said dreamily, still looking in the other direction. "Tell him to call me Ava."
". . . And . . . and that's all," Paul said after long moments had passed. "I can feel the rest of it just . . . just there. But I can't reach it." He shook his head. It had all come so quickly, so completely, like plaster sloughing off an old wall to reveal an intricate fresco hidden beneath, but the returned memories had ended just as suddenly. He looked down to where Emily lay in the darkened street, her head propped on crouching Florimel's knee, and wished he had time to give the others more than a sketchy summary of what had come back to him. Clearly this was the heart of the matter: even the smallest details might be important.
"You worked for. . . ?" Renie put her hands to her forehead as though it hurt. "And the woman who keeps appearing is Jongleur's daughter? But what's she doing here? And what did you do to make them so upset with you?"
"We can try to make sense of it later," Martine said quietly. "For now, we must get ourselves to some kind of safety—perhaps even out of this simulation."
"But it was the girl who told us to come here—or some other version of her did." Renie blinked slowly, as if trying to wake up. "What the hell is going on here? And how could it be Emily? I mean . . . Emily?"
A great shout echoed up from the street below them. A knot of armored men carrying torches swirled out from the shadows, two bands locked in deadly conflict.
"And here comes The Aeneid, right on schedule," Martine said. Paul looked at her, but if it was a joke, she wasn't smiling. "We cannot talk here—perhaps we cannot afford to talk at all, not until we have found some kind of sanctuary."
"We finally have some answers, or the beginning of some answers," Renie said stubbornly. "If we make a mistake now because we didn't think carefully, we might not live to try again."
"I'm impressed to hear you argue thought over action, Renie," said the bandaged woman called Florimel. "But Martine is right—if we stand here, we may lose our chance to do either."
Renie shrugged helplessly. "Where do you think we should go, Martine?"
"Pick up Emily—it's just as well she's passed out. She hated the place we are going." As !Xabbu and T4b lifted Emily's slender form at armpits and ankles, Martine turned back to Renie and Paul. "I cannot see that anything Paul Jonas has told us changes what I have learned. Emily is almost . . . allergic, you could call it, to a place I found called the Temple of Demeter—the same way as she reacted to the Lady of the Windows in the House simulation, which according to what we've heard seems to have been another version of herself loose in the system. Similarly, I think there is something in the temple to cause her reaction—a gateway perhaps, or some other part of the Otherland infrastructure—Kunohara told you that this was the first simulation they built. In any case, I believe there is a maze in the temple, which also jibes with what Kunohara said."
Renie sighed. "I can't make sense of it, Martine." The noise from below grew louder as some of the men who had been fighting broke away and tried to escape up the hillside. "We'll just have to trust your instincts."
"Now!" Florimel urged.
Orlando, who had been sitting dazed on the cobbled street during Paul's hurried explanation, now lurched upright and out of Fredericks' grip. "Where are we?" he said. His head wobbled as he looked up and down the dark street. "Where's Hector?"
"You killed him, Gardiner. You saved my life." Fredericks took Orlando's arm and tried to lead him after T4b and !Xabbu, who were already carrying Emily away, but he shook her off.
"No," he said slowly. "I didn't save anybody. I lost."
The noble face of Patroclus crumpled in misery, but as Paul watched, Fredericks lowered her head to hide it and shoved her friend after the others.
"He should have killed me," Orlando protested. "He beat me."
The Temple of Demeter crouched deep in shadow against the hillside, as though it waited for them half-asleep, but Paul paid it little attention—he was painfully fascinated by the slack face of the young woman he could only think of as Ava. The abrupt triggering of memories had at first promised a full, cathartic return, but they had stopped as suddenly as they had begun, a feeling even more sickeningly frustrating than the amnesia.
I worked for the man who built all this? He had—he could remember getting the job, arriving, those horrible men Finney and Mudd. . . .
Finch and Mullet . . . the Twins. . . .
There was a piece of the puzzle—or was it? If they were real people, Jongleur's right-hand men, then how had they come to be roaming the Otherland network in various incarnations, messing about in backwater places like the Oz Renie and !Xabbu had visited?
He pushed that speculatio
n aside. There were more important questions, and perhaps the most vital of all was this young woman. He watched as the shadows from !Xabbu's torch slid across her pale features. Was there a real Ava out there somewhere, perhaps still in the real world, but manipulating the network to help him? But why should she want to do that? What was Paul to her? And if she was trying to assist him, then what explained the other versions—this one called Emily, Odysseus' wife Penelope, the bird-woman Vaala—all flitting through the network like lost souls?
Paul had followed the others into the temple without realizing it. It was a surprisingly low and narrow building, scarcely twenty meters from end to end; the torchlight revealed little furniture except for a small altar and a statue of a woman with a sheaf of grain cradled in her arms.
"There's nothing here. . . ." Renie began, but her next words were drowned out by rising noise from the street outside—people shouting and screaming, pottery and other things smashing on the cobbles. The Greek pillagers had finally reached the quiet old temple district.
"There is something here," Martine said.
Paul tried to push away the obsessive thoughts about Ava. They might have only moments before the invaders came to see if Demeter was hiding any treasure in her temple. "Look for stairs," he suggested, remembering the crypt in Venice.
"Over here." Florimel had found a recessed stairwell and door behind the altar, hidden under drapery in the far wall. Emily groaned as !Xabbu and T4b brought her near it, helpless as someone in a nightmare; Paul felt a swift twinge in his heart, a lost memory or a presentiment.
"Who is that?" Martine said abruptly, turning to look back at the temple's outer door. "Is someone there?"
Renie snatched the torch from T4b, but the small temple was empty except for their own numbers. "Nobody, but there are a lot of nasty people just down the street and they're getting closer. Let's see what's down the stairs."
Martine tugged at the stairwell door, but it did not budge. They could hear the shouts and laughter of drunken men just outside now, and the whooping sobs of some female captive. Renie kicked the heavy wood, cursing, but the door barely shuddered.
If only that big lad Ajax was here, Paul thought miserably. He'd pull that bastard off its hinges in a second.
"Wait," he said, hurrying forward. "I keep forgetting we're in a bloody simulation. Fredericks, come here. T4b, you, too." Paul waved his hand impatiently as T4b relinquished Emily's ankles to Florimel. "We're heroes, remember? Practically gods, stronger than ten men. You're Patroclus and Glaucus, stars of me Trojan War. If Orlando wasn't so woozy, he could probably kick it in by himself, but we'll have to do. Come on, give it some shoulder." He crouched as Fredericks and T4b crowded into the alcove at the base of the stairs beside him, then counted to three. They sprang forward. The door shattered beneath their combined force as though built of matchsticks and they tumbled through into the darkness on the far side.
"Chizz." T4b clambered back onto his feet. "Chizz the biz. Did you op that?"
"I wish you had left us a way to close it behind us," Renie said.
!Xabbu came forward with the torch, revealing walls much older than those of the temple above, so age-worn and slick with damp that they seemed organic, almost intestinal. Remnants of faint carvings held only vague hints of human and animal shapes.
"Follow me, now," said Martine, moving past !Xabbu. "If it is a maze, I will be best able to lead us through."
"What is she talking about?" Paul asked Renie. "Doesn't she want the torch. . . ?"
"It's hard to explain—I forget sometimes myself—but she's blind."
Paul stared at her, then at Martine's back, but no matter how he tried, he could not think her explanation into sensible shape. And it did not matter. There were too many questions; this was only one more.
The apparently blind woman had already disappeared around the first turning. !Xabbu hung back with the torch until the others were all in line, then strode off after her. Near the back, with only Renie behind him, Paul was walking in nearly total darkness, following the Florimel-shape in front of him rather than the dimly reflected gleam of the torch off the carved walls ahead. His feet splashed through puddles he could not see as they turned left, then turned left again, seemingly spiraling back onto their own path, but after several more leftward twists the corridors grew even narrower, so that it was all Paul could do to walk without bumping the walls.
People's voices floated to him, murmuring sounds that he first thought were the companions in front of him talking among themselves, but the bits he could make out did not seem to be voices he recognized, nor did the words make any sense. It was not madness, or not his alone, for the others heard it too.
"Martine, is it the same as the voices in the Place of the Lost?" Florimel called softly. She sounded frightened, but trying to keep it in check.
Martine's words drifted back, almost as faint as the ghost-voices. "It does not feel the same."
"I think there are people behind us," Renie said grimly. "Nothing tricky, just men with swords and spears. Keep going."
Paul was not so certain—why would men with a whole city to plunder risk a maze in a small temple?—but he kept his doubts to himself.
They quickened their pace, but it was not easy to navigate the dark, confined spaces with a long row of jostling people, especially with Emily being laboriously carried and Orlando still hobbling like a stroke victim. They passed through some places where the way seemed to widen and the torchlight revealed statues and bits of strange, crude furniture, slab tables topped with empty bowls, but Martine did not let them stop to examine any of them, nor did anyone argue that they should—the sense of being pursued, perhaps even driven into a corner, was very strong. Paul began to see something like flame glinting high on the walls, and at first thought they were reaching an area where the maze was lit, but after a while it became apparent that the light was either some strange multiple mirroring of their own torch through the complex underground warren or there were indeed others in the maze, and they were bearing fire. Whatever the case, the sounds still followed them, sometimes snatches of whispering speech, occasionally just the amplified patter of footfalls.
As they hurried on, Paul was astonished to see starlight appear for a moment high over their heads, a single clear window of midnight blue flecked with blazing white; when they turned another corner, it vanished. The fleeting vision made Paul realize how deceptively the slope had descended: the walls of the maze now stretched upward perhaps twenty meters or more above them.
Two more gaps to the star-riddled sky had passed overhead when Paul followed Florimel's almost invisible form through into a larger space, the wide, outward-curving walls only partially illuminated by !Xabbu's torch. The sides of the large circular room stretched up as though toward the sky, but only starless blackness was visible above. They might have been standing at the base of a huge well, but if so, someone had left the cover on.
In the middle stood the only thing on the bumpy stone floor beside themselves, a small, pyramid-shaped altar of stone blocks, a crude ziggurat of damp stone less than two meters high. Half a pomegranate sat on the top slab, as though it had been set down only a moment before. As !Xabbu leaned closer with the torch, they could all see a few seeds couched like rubies in the dry white pith.
A moment of almost reverent silence ended as a flurry of echoes drifted down the passageway behind them, louder and closer than before.
"What do we do, then?" Fredericks said desperately. "They're after us. It's probably Hector's friends—they'll kill us!"
The woman Paul could not help thinking of as Ava, whose head T4b was tenderly supporting where she lay on the stone floor, stirred and let out a murmur of pain. Paul felt curiously separate from her, but it did not seem like a healthy separation. He could sense that something had been set in train, and that no matter what he did, it would take its course, but past experience also told him that he should not allow himself to go numb.
"The lighter, Mar
tine," Renie said. "Open a gate."
The woman took it from a pouch on her belt. Although Renie and the others had talked about the access device at length, this was the first time Paul had seen it. He was faintly disappointed by how much it looked like an ordinary lighter.
"Emily! Come back!" T4b said suddenly. The girl had twisted out from under his arm and was crawling across the stone floor, moaning. She threw herself at Martine's feet and pressed her face against the woman's ankles like a cat begging to be fed. But cats did not sob.
"Oh, please, take us away from here!" she whimpered. It stabbed at Paul's heart to see the familiar face in such pain, but he still felt curiously unable to act. "Make a gate, yes, make a gate! I have to get away!" She wrapped her arms around the blind woman's legs. "They want to take my baby! It hurts!"
Martine tottered, shaking her head in fear and frustration. "I cannot make anything happen if she knocks me over. Please, someone. . . !"
T4b hurried forward and gathered up the weeping girl. Martine held the lighter before her, frowning with such concentration that Paul half-expected a nimbus of sparks to form around her, but nothing so dramatic happened. Nothing happened at all.
"I . . . I can't make it work," Martine said shakily after a long minute had passed. "Even the simplest commands. The device won't respond."
Noises of pursuit were whispering all around them now, accompanied by the rippling smack and patter of echoing footfalls. Paul noted them, but only just: a cold certainly was growing inside him, stronger every second.
"How could it break now?" Renie said. "Just when we really need it the most? Someone must be doing this to us!"
