by Tad Williams
"Maybe we aren't supposed to leave," Florimel said suddenly, heavily. "Have we done what we were meant to do here in Troy?"
"Meant to by who?" Renie almost shouted her frustration.
"Perhaps if I try the lighter. . . ." !Xabbu offered.
"No."
They all turned. Paul felt their eyes on him, but he was looking only at the strange, sparse altar. "I know why we're here, down here in this place . . . or at least I think I do. I don't really understand everything, but. . . ." He stepped forward. The others shrank back, as though he were carrying some extremely reactive explosive, but he held only a wisp of cloth, a scarf with an embroidered feather. When he reached the altar, he set it gently on the cold stone.
"Ava!" he called. The girl restrained by T4b stirred and whimpered, but Paul ignored her. "Ava . . . Avialle. You came to me on the beach, when I prayed to the Earthbound, but of all the places in this world, this is your place." He struggled to think of the simple, incantatory way !Xabbu had spoken earlier. "I need you to come back to me again, Ava, one more time. Come to me!"
He could feel the others holding their breath, waiting, wondering if he had some actual plan or had just snapped under the pressure, but although the room was tense with expectancy, nothing else was happening. A laugh floated in from the corridor, so close that several of the others flinched.
"God damn it, Ava! I've crossed world after world, looking for you. You told me to come, and I've come. Now I need you—we all need you. Come to us! Whatever you need me for, whatever it costs me, make it now! Now!"
The air began to thicken and bend above the ancient altar like heat shimmer over a desert road. For a moment it seemed that a female figure would appear there, unfolding like a butterfly—the torchlight revealed gleams of eye and shoulder and spread fingers—but some elementary circuit would not close. The shape remained amorphous, twisting in the air like smoke.
If the voices from the maze behind them had seemed almost at their elbows, this seemed to float to them down a million miles of hollow space,
". . . I . . . cannot . . . again . . . too late. . . ."
The one called Emily writhed on the floor at Martine's feet, her groans muffled by her own hands, feet drumming on the stone floor. T4h hurried to comfort her, but she was gripped by a kind of seizure.
"You must," Paul said. "We are trapped here. Whatever you wanted of us will not happen otherwise. Come to us, Ava. Come to me."
"Then . . . must take back . . . pieces . . . mirror. . . ."
He could not imagine balking at anything at this crucial juncture. "Take it. Whatever you need, take it—or tell us how to get it. Do whatever you have to do, but hurry!"
Suddenly Emily's muffled scream jumped an octave, a shrill sound of terror and agony so fierce it cut through Paul's concentration like a jagged blade. The girl's jittering body suddenly went rigid. Her eyes widened and bulged as though they would burst from her head, and her face turned slowly, lurchingly toward Paul.
"You. . . ." Emily choked out each word through purpling lips. ". . . My baby. . . !" And then the girl heaved once, like a hooked fish dragged into the smothering air, and a wave of distortion passed from her to the shimmering half-presence above the altar. A moment later she fell face-forward onto the stone, gray and limp.
"Emily!" T4b screeched, and jerked her up into his arms where she dangled lifelessly.
The shape above the altar took on dimension now, rounding into the dream-shape Paul had seen before, but he felt no joy. It was clear what he had unwittingly given her permission to take, and although there was much he could not grasp, what he did understand sickened him.
She was beautiful as a goddess, this Ava, a perfect angel. She raised her arms above her head and shimmering trails of light followed them through the air, like wings. "It is late," she said—her voice now seemed intimately close. "You were meant to climb—you were meant to find your own way. . . ."
Even as she spoke those cryptic words, the place above her head began to glow, a glaring red radiance framed between her uplifted arms. Slowly she brought them down and the glow spread outward, until it seemed that the chamber walls, the maze, even great Troy itself had dissolved away behind her, revealing a sky of ultimate black and stars that made even the bright constellations of the Age of Heroes seem guttering candles. As Paul and his companions stared, a shape coalesced, jutting up into the night, stretching beyond vision. It was a tortured shape surrounded by clouds, its twisted subsidiary peaks gleaming a glassy scarlet where lightning flickered around the heights, but the mass of it was black, black, black.
"The black mountain. . . ." Paul whispered. Beside him, Orlando was also murmuring to himself.
"It is late." The angel's voice spoke with exhaustion and regret. "Perhaps it is too late." She raised her arms again. The view of the impossible black peak remained, but where her palely glittering hands moved, lines of molten gold throbbed in the air. In a moment, the woman herself was gone; where she had stood, a narrow oval of golden fire billowed in an unfelt wind.
Renie took a hesitant step toward the light. "It's . . . it's a gate."
"It is, but it is not." Martine sounded equally overwhelmed. "It does not feel like the other gateways, but it is clearly a passage."
"You must hurry." The voice came from everywhere now. "This is all I have left here . . . but it will take you . . . to the heart of.
Her crystalline tones died away; Paul could not tell if the last word had been "his" or "him".
He forced himself to take a step toward the pulsing light. The vision of the black mountain still lay beyond it, but it was growing noticeably dimmer. "We had better. . . ." he began, then something struck him hard in the back and flung him into the golden fire.
Paul had passed through several gateways, both on land and water, but even without the suddenness of his entrance, this was the strangest. For the first moments it seemed as though he were in an endless corridor of shining amber flames, but at the same moment, he felt himself to be flame—the dance of unbridled energy passed right through him, threatening at any moment to dissolve him into some larger and completely mindless chaos of creation. As he struggled to maintain the pattern that was Paul Jonas, unaware of the nature of the binding force, but desperate to cling to it nevertheless, bits of thought whirled through him.
They might have been memories, scraps caught in some inner wind, but they were not quite familiar. . . .
Birds . . . bursting out like a cloud of smoke . . . wheeling against the sky.
Showers of sparkling ice, sun glinting, a shattered kaleidoscope. . . .
A shadow in a cold, empty room, waiting . . . waiting . . . and singing. . . .
More birds, shadow-birds flocking, calling to each other across the darkness with the voices of children, keening together in a desolate place. . . .
And then, as though the flames had taken all of him they could consume and then begun to die, the endlessly seething glow began to lessen. Bits of darkness appeared, shapes with notional solidity, a sense of up and down. The golden flames licked at Paul and then withdrew, cool as melting snow, and for a moment he was conscious that he stood on something hard and flat, with a great black wall on his left side and a sense of open space to his right. Then something struck him again, smashed him down and clung to him, and he was rolling over and over with hands closing around his neck.
"Killed her!" someone was shouting at him. "Killed her all total!" Paul's face was pressed hard against smooth cold stone; he could not see his attacker. He tried desperately to get his legs under him and failed, but managed to shift his weight enough to pull one arm under his chest, making space to bring his other hand up to pry at the fingers on his throat.
His head was being pulled back, and his awkward position gave him little leverage to resist. Worse than the pain, though, was the view: he was crouching on the edge of a nearly vertical drop, swaying in place as his assailant straddled him like a hobbyhorse. Just beyond his bracing hand the
sheer, glossy black side of the mountain fell away into nothingness, the bottom hidden either by distance or the midnight hue of the stone.
Paul tried to scrabble away from the rim, but his weeping attacker was either oblivious to the danger or did not care. The legs around his rib cage tightened—he braced himself for either a jerk backward to snap his neck or a shove forward that would take them both over the edge—but instead the weight on his back was suddenly partially lifted, and the legs still hooked around his torso even dragged him back a few inches from the precipice.
"Let him go!" someone was shouting from a long distance away.
"You're impacted!" someone else screamed faintly as his assailant was pulled completely off him. Paul turned and crawled a short distance back from that soul-freezing drop, then collapsed, struggling to get oxygen back into his lungs. He could hear nothing now except a single thin, continuous tone, nor did he care.
The first voice he could identify as his hearing came back was Renie's.
"He didn't kill her, you idiot! She wasn't really alive, not the way you're thinking."
"He gave her to that . . . that. . . ." The voice was sullen, miserable.
"That angel thing was another version of Emily." This was another woman, perhaps the one called Florimel. "It just . . . took her back."
Paul sat up, rubbing his neck. They were crouched against a sheer face of shiny black rock, in the widest part of a path along the mountainside, but the drop and the limitless sky were still uncomfortably close. Paul, who had been so close to falling, could not look out at that gulf for more than a second without shuddering. The sky had the sullen gray-blue tone of an approaching storm, but it seemed to extend outward with limitless clarity, and although the sun was not visible, stars glimmered faintly in the firmament.
The young man was not fighting anymore, but several of the others crouched around him, touching him with their hands as though ready to restrain him again. "I don't blame him," Paul said hoarsely. "I know what it looked like." He tried to meet the youth's eyes but the other would not cooperate. "Javier . . . T4b . . . I didn't know what she meant when she said she needed something. But I think the others are right—Emily was a part of her somehow. I think she had to take that part back before she had the strength to bring us through." He stopped and looked up, then down the featureless black trail. Because of the sheerness of the rock face, it was hard to tell how much of the mountain still lay above them, but it was clear a great deal lay below. "But. . . ." Paul finished, suddenly overwhelmed, "but brought us where?"
"Orlando, don't," Fredericks said suddenly as her friend staggered to his feet. "Just rest. You need to save your strength!" She rose along with him, trying to pull him back, but the boy in the blond, heroic body of Achilles began trudging unsteadily up the trail.
"Well, there you go." Renie's voice was flat and weary. "Might as well follow him, I suppose. !Xabbu, what do you think? Martine?" She looked to !Xabbu, but he had joined Florimel, crouching at Martine's side. "Martine, are you all right?"
"She is shaking," !Xabbu reported.
"It's . . . it's much like it was . . . when I first came into the system." Martine's eyes were squeezed shut, her hands pushing at either side of her face as though to keep her skull from flying apart. "So much noise . . . so much. . . ." She grimaced.
"Don't move." Florimel tried to find the pulse at the corner of her jaw, but Martine shook her off.
"No. Follow Orlando. I'll . . . I'll be moving in a moment. There's something at the top—something big. It feels like . . . like a volcano." She levered herself to her feet, eyes still closed. She stumbled, but !Xabbu caught her before she could veer toward the far side of the path and the endless nothing beyond. "It would be good . . . if someone walked with me," she conceded. "I am having trouble."
"Paul, can you go with Orlando and Fredericks while we get the rest moving?" Renie asked. Paul nodded and stood, swiveling his head to try to remove the unpleasant physical memory of T4b's fingers around his throat. The young man still watched him. dark hair sweat-curled across his forehead, his face a mask that revealed nothing.
Paul caught up with Orlando and Fredericks within moments, since Orlando's stride, though determined, was slow and awkward; he also seemed to be having trouble breathing. The others soon caught up as well, and they made their deliberate way up the curving mountain path together.
The trail was no natural feature, Paul realized, although it might have been more surprising if it had been. Instead, it was simply a crudely functional walkway etched in the side of the mountain, a spiraling vertical slice that shaved the mountain's edge and a perpendicular horizontal one on which to walk. The path was rougher than the rest of the stone, scored as though the titan blade which had carved it had a serrated edge, which was a very good thing: Paul did not want to think what it would be like to climb this precarious track if its surface had been the same glaze-smooth black volcanic stone as the mountain itself. As it was, and especially when the way narrowed, he was pathetically grateful that there was no wind: it was already hard enough just to keep Orlando and Martine to the middle of the path. Paradoxically for someone who had been so cavalier about the edge while strangling Paul, T4b seemed nervous about being in such a high place, and insisted on walking as far to the inside as possible.
As it turned out, they did not have far to go. Before an hour had passed, they made their slow way around the edge of an outcropping and found that the path now curved sharply inward toward the mountain itself, passing between the outcropping beside them and another huge peak rather than continuing along the perimeter.
Paul was glad to leave the limitless drop behind them, but it was only when they finally reached safer ground, the path now walled by stone on both sides, that he became aware of how hard his heart had been beating, and for how long.
Although the farthest heights of the mountain still stretched above them, they passed quickly between the two peaks to find more crowded beyond, a forest of high pinnacles. Although they could not see its source past the intervening spires, a soft vermilion light bathed the sides of these black peaks, as though somewhere ahead of them lay a lake of fire. Paul could not help remembering Martine's comment about a volcano, and wondered if she might have a clearer idea now about what was before them, but the blind woman was spending all her energy on dogged forward motion; it seemed cruel to make her speak.
At last the path led them up a steeply rising slope between another pair of sentinel peaks. The warm light spread widely just beyond, as though the straggling company had discovered the ultimate source of sunrise, and the next set of peaks were very distant—on the far side of the glow, Paul guessed, since their facing slopes shimmered with its radiance. Orlando and Fredericks were in the lead, and thus were the first to be able to see what lay beyond the rise; Paul saw them stop at the top of the path, frozen in silhouette against the persimmon-colored light.
"What is it?" he called, but neither of them turned. When he had struggled up the last few meters to stand beside them, he understood why.
As the others jostled in behind, most asking the same question, Paul Jonas could only stand and gape. The rest of the company pushed their way up onto the rise one by one, and one by one they fell silent, too.
In the center of the crown of peaks, in a wide shallow valley as barren as the lunar surface but large enough to hold a small city, lay a body. It was human in shape, or seemed to be, but it was oddly out of focus—at moments it seemed about to become clearly visible, but it never quite did. It lay stretched on its back, arms tight to its sides as though bound there, and seemed to be the source of the glow that illuminated the mountaintop and flickered gently beneath the black skies. The titanic figure filled the entire valley.
"Jesus Mercy," Renie whispered at Paul's shoulder, the first one to speak in half a minute.
Tiny figures swarmed across the monstrous thing; the nearest of them, clambering across feet which were almost as tall as the surrounding peaks, seemed
as oddly formless as the giant itself. They, too, had a vaguely human shape, but seemed to be wrapped in garments of fluttering white, like shrouds.
Or laboratory coats, Paul thought, his brain snatching at minuscule details in the midst of such overwhelming madness. The only comparable thing he had ever seen swam up from childhood memory, a picture in an old book of Gulliver made prisoner by the Lilliputians, but that had possessed nothing of the blasted, ultimate strangeness of this place, this spectacle. For a moment he felt again as he had on the Ithacan beach, as the sky had folded down close around him and every molecule of the air had seemed feverishly charged.
"Oh. . . ." someone breathed—Paul dimly thought it might be Fredericks, but his mind could clutch at nothing so prosaic: the overwhelming vision that lay before him kept smashing his collecting thoughts back into pieces again. "Oh, they've killed God."
A sigh vast as a gale wind echoed around the great bowl, most of the sound so low that they could only feel it in their bones and in the reverberation of the mountain beneath their feet. It came again, but this time the portion they could hear had a distinct rhythm to it, mournful and completely, utterly strange.
"I don't think He's dead." Paul marveled to hear coherent words come out of his own mouth. "He's singing."
Martine suddenly let out a muffled little gasp and sank to her knees. Florimel bent to help her, slow as someone moving in hardening ice, never taking her eyes from the immense shape that lay before them.
"God help me," Martine murmured, her voice choked by tears. "I know that song."
CHAPTER 34
To Eternity
NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Robinette Murphy Still Waiting
(visual: FRM appearing on "You'll Never Guess!" game)
VO: Celebrity psychic Fawv Robinette Murphy, who said she was retiring because she has foreseen "the end of the world," does not seem discouraged by the fact that the world is still very much with us.
