by Tad Williams
"You saboteurs have guts, I'll give you that," the falcon god rumbled. "But I'm still going to kill you, you little shit."
Fredericks desperately struck at the thing's legs, again and again, her hands bloodied, but the monster didn't even seem to notice her. Orlando hung, helpless in the Grail monster's grip, and waited to die.
Paul shouted in fear as the universe fragmented, but there was too much noise even to hear himself. Everything was coming apart and nothing made any sense.
It had all happened so quickly—Orlando walking right into the image where they watched the Grail Brotherhood, Fredericks shoving through after him. Renie had screamed for Martine to give her the lighter, then she, too, had leaped through, but even as she vanished, the scene of the golden chamber had started to dim, and the giant shape stretched across the valley had begun tossing and moaning like a man in a nightmare, making the very stone of the mountain shake. Then everything had turned inside out, and Renie and all the others had reappeared, along with the Grail people, while reality broke down around them all.
For a moment something possessed the giant entity—some wolfish presence the Grail people seemed to recognize, and whose very voice made Martine begin to shriek and hold her hands to her ears—then that apparition had flickered out again, sending the giant into convulsions once more. Now the whole of the mountaintop seemed shattered into a thousand reflecting pieces. . . .
The thought bounced through his head like an echo: Shattered . . . glass falling . . . shattered. . . .
. . . And Orlando was fighting for his life against one of the Grail masters, who had grown to huge proportions, although still only ant-sized in comparison to the giant Other spread across the mountaintop, whose spasms of anguish washed across them all in waves of distortion. People were screaming, Renie and !Xabbu were chasing the one called T4b as he ran toward Orlando and the falcon-headed ogre, and . . . and. . . .
Paul took a step to follow them, but a thousand Pauls moved at the same time in all directions, and he stopped, dizzy and confused.
"Jonas, help me!" The woman called Florimel raised the ghosts of a thousand hands toward him, her terror multiplied across an equal number of scarred, one-eyed faces. "It is Martine—I think she is dying!" The blind woman lay rigid at her feet eyes rolled back beneath the lids.
Paul tried to go to them, but it was like trying to find someone in a hall of mirrors. As Florimel shouted again, he closed his eyes and staggered toward the sound of her voice, stopping only when he and Florimel collided.
"Give her air," Florimel directed, then dropped to her knees and began pushing on the blind woman's chest. Paul had no idea what she meant, and was still staring a few seconds later when Florimel looked up. "Air, you fool!" she shouted. "Mouth to mouth!"
Paul closed his eyes again to shut out the dizzying, kaleidoscopic view. He found Martine's face by touch, then clamped his mouth on hers and blew. He could not help wondering what good it would do to try to resuscitate an unreal body, but none of it bore thinking about much—such mundane remedies in the middle of such chaos seemed like using a whisk broom to clean up a sandstorm.
Florimel gasped. Paul opened his eyes and saw her looking not at her patient but at something above them. The giant figure of the Other had lifted one arm toward the sky; impossibly massive, it stretched above their heads and over much of the valley, like a planet coming into view. As the giant groaned, still racked with nightmares, the ground shook and the visual distortions danced like windblown flames.
His stupefied attention fixed on the massive shape of the Other, Paul only half-heard Martine's gasp. Her hand, as if in imitation of the giant shape above them, rose and clutched at him.
"Martine, don't move!" Florimel reached to check her pulse. "You've had a bad. . . ."
The blind woman struggled to sit up even as her friend tried to hold her down. "No!" Martine choked. "The children . . . they are terrified! They are all alone! We have to go to them!"
"What are you talking about?" Florimel said harshly. "You aren't going anywhere. The whole world is going mad, and you almost died."
Martine began to weep. "But you don't understand—I can hear them! I can feel them! The birds are so frightened. Something has got in with them, something hungry, and they can't escape!" She grabbed at her hair as though she would pull it out. "Make it stop! I can't stand to hear them screaming!"
As Paul crouched beside them, helpless, Florimel wrapped her arms around Martine. "We are here with you," she told the blind woman. "We are here with you." Her eyes too had filled with tears.
"But they are so f–f–frightened," Martine sobbed.
An even stronger distortion rippled across Paul's vision, so that for a moment the two women seemed to recede from him down a long corridor. He staggered to his feet, flailing for balance. The giant's arm still hung poised above their heads, but no one else seemed to notice it. The falcon-headed Grail monster had lifted the boy Orlando into the air where he hung without moving, dead or as good as dead. Paul thought he could see Fredericks at the thing's feet, and another figure running toward them, but simply trying to focus on anything for more than an instant made him vertiginously ill. A couple of other shapes that might have been Renie and !Xabbu were running toward the monster and its captive, but they were still far away, tripping and stumbling through the shifting, inconstant landscape. Everything was falling apart. Everything was going hopelessly wrong.
"Ava!" Paul shouted into the air. "Why did you bring us here? What have you done to us. . . ?"
As if he had summoned her with his desperate cry, the angel appeared out of nowhere, flickering, inconstant, replicated a millionfold on all sides, and all her hopeless voices screamed in unison.
"Stop! You are killing him!"
Paul had no idea who she was pleading with, and whether the one for whom she feared was Orlando, the giant stretched across the mountaintop, or even Paul himself.
The multiplied angel cried out once more, and her cry was echoed in the ground-shaking, hollow voice of the Other. The great arm looming above them trembled for a long moment, then the massive hand plunged downward like a moon falling from orbit and crashed into the dust on top of Renie, !Xabbu, Orlando, and the rest. The ground jumped as though a bomb had exploded, and Paul was knocked off his feet. A moment of comparative stillness followed. The angel and all her phantoms hung in the air, mouths open, eyes wide. The dust drifted down across the huge hand.
Orlando, Renie—they're . . . gone. . . . was all Paul had time to think, then everything hardened and shattered, a thousand angels flying apart, a stained-glass window smashed, shards flying, glittering, and he. . . .
Shattered . . . glass falling . . . shattered. . . .
He was in the black tower, and it was all happening again, too late to stop it. . . .
. . . The glass flying and the thousand thousand versions of Ava all crying out, and then the birds, swirling up like plumes of multicolored smoke, the birds and the glass and the voices of children crying. . . .
The glass shattered and Paul shattered with it, broken and scattering, then and now, scattering until the fragments became too small and his thoughts no longer held together.
One moment Renie and !Xabbu had been in the great golden tomb-chamber of the Grail Brotherhood. An instant later, the world had fallen in upon itself.
!Xabbu snatched at her as countless identical shadows of themselves sprang out in all directions. The tomb and the mountain-top had folded together, somehow—the Grail survivors, Orlando, Paul, even the mysterious, giant Other, all inhabited the same accordioned, rippling space.
"It's all falling apart!" Renie shouted.
A huge creature with a falcon's head and mad blue eyes was bearing down on Orlando. Somewhere nearby Martine was screaming. Everywhere Renie looked, friends and enemies had been replicated like infinite strings of paper dolls.
There was no way even to grasp what was happening, let alone try to stop it, but Orlando was in immediate dang
er from the Grail monster—that was something Renie could understand. Even as she pulled !Xabbu toward their embattled friend, the vast shape of the Other, large as a row of hills, began to convulse. Its seismic roar of pain knocked her and !Xabbu to their knees.
Something was forming in the shadowy regions of the thing's face—a beast shape, dark, contorted, and sinister. A great yellow eye opened.
'Hello, Grandfather,' it rumbled. Renie recognized the voice, and let out a shriek of despair.
"It's him! The murderer!"
Each word the thing spoke made the ground tremble. Renie reached for !Xabbu, but her friend lay stretched on the ground, face rammed against the black dust that was also somehow the golden chamber floor.
"Get up," she shouted, so close herself to the edge of despair that she almost could not remain standing. "Get up! We have to help Orlando."
"It is the All-Devourer," !Xabbu moaned. He clung to the ground as though it were the deck of a storm-wracked ship. "He has come to take us all. This is the end of things!"
Renie wanted to weep. "Get up! It's not your All-Devourer, it's the Quan Li thing—it's trying to take over the system!" She bent and grabbed at his arm to pull him upright, struggling to remember the story he had once told her. "You said Porcupine beat the All-Devourer, remember? That's what you told me. You said I was the Porcupine, didn't you? Well then, get up, damn it! I need you!" She leaned close to his ear, still tugging hard on his arm. "!Xabbu! Even Porcupine couldn't do it by herself!"
Whatever the murderous Quan Li thing had done to the Other, it had not completely overwhelmed the giant's resistance. As the immense shape struggled against its possessor, the beastlike head blurred and vanished, but reality still remained fragmented.
!Xabbu allowed himself to be drawn up into a crouch. After a moment in which he would not meet her eyes, he stood. His sim had gone deathly pale, but when he turned his face to her, a certain miserable resolution had returned.
"You shame me, Renie," he said.
"I'm sorry, but we have to. . . ."
"No!" He angrily waved his hand. "What you did was right. Let us hurry to help Orlando."
A rippling, distorted figure lurched past them toward the spot where Orlando and the falcon god had closed on each other.
"Javier!" Renie shouted after the dwindling shape. "T4b! What are you doing?"
He dug on, ignoring them, hurrying toward the unfair combat between Orlando and the huge Grail monster. "Jesus Mercy!" Renie shrieked as she began to run after him. "I am never, never, never, never going anywhere with teenage boys again!"
With !Xabbu following her, they raced across the distorted landscape, fighting waves of dizziness and confusion. Somewhere that might have been ten meters ahead or a thousand, Orlando was flung sideways by a horrendous blow from his enemy's gargantuan hand. Renie cried out, certain he had been killed. To her astonishment, Orlando and his army of phantom duplicates struggled up onto hands and knees and began to crawl, but the multiplied forms of the Grail monster snatched him up a moment later. Orlando's bleeding, broken form swayed upside down in the creature's grasp like a gutted animal. Renie was sprinting now, but even through the distortions she could tell that she and !Xabbu were still too far away. They would be too late.
A ripple of angel-shapes suddenly filled the sky and a thousand terrified female voices cried out at the same moment, "Stop! You are killing him!"
The sound was so desolate, so full of despair and the certainty of failure that Renie stumbled and almost fell. When she regained her balance, she saw that something was now climbing the falcon monster's back. For a moment, she thought it was Fredericks making a suicidal bid to save her friend.
"No—it's T4b!" Renie gasped. !Xabbu said nothing, but pelted on beside her.
The Grail creature had become aware of the thing on its back: it snapped its vast, clacking beak at the interloper, then brought up its free hand to swat T4b away like a fly, but the teenager ducked under the blow and scrambled up onto the huge head. T4b raised his altered hand—for a brief, hallucinatory instant, Renie saw it glowing a cool blue-gray—then jammed it into the falcon-god's head just behind the nictitating eye. It entered the giant skull without resistance, but the effect was startling: the Grail-thing abruptly stiffened and straightened, as though a powerful electric current ran down its spine. As it lifted trembling hands to its head, Orlando managed to grab at the creature's body and drag himself closer, then thrust the jagged remains of his sword into the falcon god's chest.
The Grail monster suddenly found its voice, roaring and choking. It knocked T4b flying, then lifted Orlando up to its staring eye as though wondering what sort of creature could cause it so much pain. The brute fell silent, swayed in place, then let Orlando drop. A moment later it collapsed on top of him like a razed building.
"Orlando!" Fredericks screamed and beat at the massive, inert form of the Grail monster. "Orlando!"
Renie and !Xabbu stumbled to a halt beside the leveled god The falcon-thing had fallen so hard it had cratered the ground. Only one of Orlando's feet could be seen protruding from beneath the monster's chest; Fredericks was struggling uselessly to shove the massive creature aside so she could reach her friend's body.
Renie had only a shocked moment to survey the scene, then she became aware of something moving above her head—a shadow, a change of air pressure. She looked up to see the titan hand of the Other dropping toward them, a shape so vast that it swallowed the sky and even the light as it fell.
"Oh, no. . . ." was all she had time to say before the roof o the world collapsed on top of them.
Orlando did not fight the darkness this time.
He could feel himself dissolving, slipping away, but there was nothing to be done about it. All that made him what he was seemed to be growing diffuse, like the scant substance of a cloud melting into hot sunlight—but it was darkness, not light, that refined and absorbed him.
For a moment he thought he saw again the hospital room and his parents. He tried to speak to them, to touch them, but he had already made that decision, and now had no more substance than an idle thought: he could only skim past them into the growing dark.
I'm just a memory now. The realization should have been terrible and sad, but it felt different than that, somehow. Still, though he had left them behind, he badly wanted to let them know he had not forgotten them. He could only hope some unimaginable wind might carry his voice back to them through the empty spaces.
I love you, Mom. I love you, Dad.
It wasn't your fault. . . . He rushed on, the voices were back, whether real or not, but now they were calling to him in welcome. He was disappearing even as he simultaneously grew wider, grew deeper, until there was almost nothing left of him, but still he could encompass whole universes.
And after all that he had done to fight it, to flee from it, to deaden his fear of it, when he was finally ushered through into that ultimate moment, Orlando Gardiner found he did not fear the darkness after all.
CHAPTER 35
The White Ocean
NETFEED/NEWS: Ambodulu's Absence Sparks West African Chaos
(visual: President-for-life Edouard Ambodulu meeting dignitaries)
VO: . . . The apparent disappearance of President Ambodulu has sent this West African nation into even greater instability. As rumors of illness, abdication, and death fly in the marketplace, his lieutenants seem to be scrambling for power. Despite repeated demands by both national political figures and international media, there has been no public statement from the presidential palace in 48 hours, fueling speculation that some kind of power seizure within Ambodulu's own tribal group may have left the nation with no ruler. . . .
Someone was tugging at her hand. Stephen, of course—he always managed to beat her pad's alarm by five minutes, always dragged her up out of those desperately-needed last few minutes of steep. Renie groaned and tried to roll over. Let him make his own breakfast for once. After all, he was eight years old. . . .
&
nbsp; But no, he wasn't eight anymore, he was . . . how old now? Ten? Eleven? Nearly a teenager, and old enough that he had become the hard one to wake, burying himself deeper in the pillow, ignoring her warnings that he would be late for school . . . lost in sleep, sleep, deep down where she could not reach him. . . .
Stephen. The memory abruptly became clear, like a card turned over. Stephen is in a coma. She had to do something. But if it wasn't Stephen pulling at her, then who. . . ?
She opened her eyes, struggling to focus. For a split instant, the face hovering over her was almost unfamiliar, but then she suddenly realized who it was, the pale brown skin and peppercorn hair. . . .
"!Xabbu. . . !" She sat up and was almost dropped again by a swirl of dizziness. "!Xabbu, it's you! I mean, the real you!"
He smiled, but there was something strange about it, something held in reserve. "It is me, Renie. Are you well?"
"But . . . but you're in your own body!" In fact, he was in his own body and nothing else, crouching beside her completely naked. "Are we . . . are we back? Home?" She sat up again, more slowly this time. The strange black mountaintop still surrounded them but its lines were different—even the texture of the rocks was different, oddly smooth and strangely angular. But the greatest difference of all was that the giant humanoid shape which had dominated the valley had disappeared, leaving only an empty crater between the peaks—a crater that had collapsed along one side, so that half the mountaintop was now open to the sky.
There was no visible sun, but a kind of morning seemed to have come to the place, the sky a strangely familiar gray. Confused, Renie looked away from the broken mountainside to examine herself, and saw that like her friend, she too was naked. She was also a woman again. "Jesus Mercy, what's going on here?" Despite !Xabbu's own careless nudity, she folded her arms over her breasts. "Am I. . . ?"
