Mountain of Black Glass (64 page)

Paul clambered to his feet, knees trembling. It was hard to hold up his own weight—how long since he had stood? Where was he?

Distortion,
the bird-woman had said. The meaning came slowly, horribly.

For a moment he thought he would be sick. He choked back the burning liquid that had risen in his throat and began to stagger blindly downhill, searching for the sea. She had told him to take the other with him—what had she said? The other orphan? She must mean Azador, but where was he? Paul could hardly stand to look at the mewling, whispering human shapes that lolled among the crude shelters. And he had thought them beautiful. How could such a madness happen?

Lotus-Eaters.
It floated to the surface of his memory and popped, like a bubble.
The flowers. I should have realized . . . !

But even as he slid through the muddy wreck of a village the wind changed direction and the scent of the white blossoms came down the hillside. The breeze that carried their sweet, pungent odor was warm—everything was growing warmer. The sun appeared, and the clouds instantly evaporated above him, revealing the great seamless blue sky beyond.

Paul stopped, arrested by the bright, whitewashed stone of the village, the orderly paths and walled gardens, the bright-eyed people gathered in the shadows of the olive grove, sharing talk and song. Had it simply been a nightmare, then—the decay, the mud? There was no other answer, surely. The heady, perfumed air from the meadows had simply woken him to the truth again. It was impossible to see such beauty surrounding him again and regret the loss of such a dreadful vision, even as its last cold strands still troubled his thoughts.

Azador,
he thought.
I was looking for Azador. But surely I can find him later at the evening meal, or even tomorrow. . . .

Paul realized he was clutching something in his hand. He stared at the veil, once pristine, now so spattered and smeared with gray mud that the embroidered feather was almost hidden. He suddenly heard the woman's voice again as clearly as if she stood at his shoulder.

He did not want to lose the safety of the stately village and the warm sun, but he could not forget her voice—how apprehension had made her words harsh and jagged. She had been pleading . . . begging him to think, to
see.
The muddied feather was in the palm of his hand, the fabric creased where he had clutched it.

The sky began to darken, the village to dissolve back into ruination, as though some evolutionary wheel had been sped forward to the end of time or back to the pathetic precursors of civilization. Paul pulled the veil tight against his chest, terrified that the magic of false beauty would overcome him again, leaving him trapped and blind forever, a prisoner of the mire.

“Azador!” he screamed, struggling to keep his footing on the foul, muddy hillside. “Azador!”

He found his companion in a tangle of bodies, the wet, naked forms intertwined like mating snails. He leaned down and grabbed the gypsy by a slippery arm and dragged him loose from the pile. As thin, bruised arms reached up to pull them both back down, Paul gave a shout of disgust and kicked at the nearest muddy figure. The arms all jerked in unison, like the polyps of a startled anemone.

At first Azador hardly seemed to understand, and allowed himself to be propelled down the hill toward the beach and their raft, but as Paul coaxed the raft out past the first set of breakers and the scent of the lotos-flowers grew less, the other man tried to fling himself into the surf and swim back to shore. Paul grabbed him and held on. Only the fact that Azador was still in the grip of the flower-spell, frail and trembling, allowed Paul to withstand the man's increasingly manic struggles.

At last, as the island dropped out of sight below the horizon and the winds washed the air clean of anything but sea tang, Azador stopped fighting. He dragged himself away from Paul and lay sprawled on the deck of the raft, dry-eyed but sobbing, as though his heart had been yanked from his body.

O
RLANDO was so tired he could barely stand. One arm dangled at his side, almost broken by a blow from a tortoiseman's club. Except for the rumbling, growling breath of the sphinx fighting for its life, the shadowy temple was almost silent: the few survivors of the siege were whimpering in dark corners or hiding behind statues, but to little avail. The air was nearly empty of flying creatures now, but only because most of them had settled down to feed—the temple floor was dotted with writhing piles of bats and serpents clumped in the rough shapes of human beings.

But dying sphinxes and winged serpents were the least of Orlando's problems.

The larger of the two grotesqueries before him was dangling his unconscious friend Fredericks like a gutted fish. Mewat's snaggletoothed smile showed how much the bloated cobra-man was enjoying himself, reveling in the power he and eyeless Tefy wielded. Despite all the fearful things Orlando had seen and survived, these two filled him with a terror he could barely resist, a chest-squeezing panic that made his heart stumble. He dredged up what felt like his final reserves of strength and lifted his sword, hoping that in the guttering torchlight his enemies could not see how it trembled. “Let her go,” he said. “Just let me take her away. We don't have any argument with you.”

Tefy's vulture-beaked grin pulled wider still. “Her?” He peered at Fredericks' male Pithlit-the-Thief sim. “So it is masks and costumes, is it? But—let her go? I think not. No, it is you who will come with us, or we will peel her apart in front of you. Do you want that? You and the rest of your people must have noticed by now that there is no escape from the network—that what happens to you here will be all too real.”

Orlando took a step closer. “I don't care. If you hurt her I'll take at least one of you with me. I've already sixed one of your turtle-boys.” He felt no need to add it had almost drained his last strength to do so.

Fat Mewat goggled his eyes in enjoyment and let out a loud, rolling belch. “Ooh, aren't you a wicked lad?” he hissed at Orlando. “Aren't you, now?”

A loud impact from just behind him made Orlando jump. He whirled to see the door sphinx Saf being dragged to the ground by the bull-headed war god Mont, who clung to the sphinx's neck like a terrier. Antlered Reshpu drove his prongs into Saf's side again and the great sphinx let out a long, low moan like wind rushing down a deserted street. The massive guardian struggled back onto his lion's legs once more, but he was clearly losing strength.

“It is nearly finished here.” Tefy stilted a step closer to Orlando. “You and your people have lost. If you come along without struggling, we will release your friend—we will need only one of you, after all. You see, when we take you to our hidden place you will tell us all that you know and wish you had more to tell.”

My people? Do they know about Renie and the others?
Orlando could make no other sense of Tefy's words. The vulture-man knew Orlando was a Citizen, a real person—he couldn't think he was anything to do with this local insurrection in the Egyptian simworld.

No,
he realized suddenly,
they think we're part of the Circle.
A group that actually
was
a threat to the Grail people, or meant to be. Was there some way he could use this to his advantage? The fear made it almost impossible to think, and he was so tired.

“Right,” he said out loud. It was easiest this way—if they took him, they would be trading Fredericks for damaged goods. There was little chance he would live through an interrogation, and he had nothing much to give them in any case: he knew little of the Circle, and could not even be sure Renie and the others were still alive. “All right. Let her go. Take me.”

Mewat extended a scaly hand. “Come here, then, my lad. Don't be afraid . . . you may even enjoy parts of it. . . .”

Allowed to sag until her feet touched the floor, Fredericks' eyes flickered open and surveyed Orlando blearily for a moment, then caught sight of Tefy's angular form.

“Run, Orlando!” Fredericks struggled uselessly, then was heaved up into the air again, hanging from Mewat's meat hook paw. “Just run!”

“They're going to let you go,” said Orlando, trying to keep his friend calm. If there was any hope of getting out of this, they could make no mistakes. “Just don't do anything sudden, Frederico.”

Fredericks thrashed helplessly. “They won't let me go! You're scanning major if you think they will!”

Orlando edged closer. “They said they would.” He eyed Tefy, who was rubbing his impossibly long and bony fingers together, cheerful as a child at a birthday party. “Right?”

“Goodness, yes.” The distorted beak pulled down in a look of wounded solemnity. “In our way, we are . . . men of honor.”

Orlando took another step forward. The aura of terror around the pair beat at him like a stiff cold wind; it took all his courage not to turn and run. How could Fredericks stand it without shrieking?

“Now,” he said as he came within just a few meters of Mewat, “let her go.” He lowered the sword until it pointed at the thing's immense, pale, oily stomach.

“When I can touch you,” the cobra-man said.

Fighting his terror, Orlando gave Fredericks the most significant glance he could muster. This would be delicate—how much pain could he cause this monster if he struck at that flabby hand?

A sudden impact made the floor vibrate and drew the cobra-man's gaze to the side. The great sphinx had tumbled again, and this time was writhing on the floor with the two war gods atop its chest.

“Dua!”
The sphinx's bellow threatened to crumble the temple's walls.
“Dua, my brother, I have fallen! Come to my aid!”

Orlando seized the moment, lashing at the hand that held Fredericks suspended. “Run!” he shouted. As Mewat jerked in startlement, Fredericks managed to twist free. Orlando leaped in with his blade to cover her escape, slapping at the snarling, jaggedtoothed face, but Mewat deflected the blow with his wounded hand, then struck with terrible, unlikely speed, dashing the hilt from Orlando's grip. His partner Tefy stilted after Fredericks and snagged her in his long fingers before she had taken two steps.

A huge arm coiled around Orlando and pulled him suffocatingly close. He struggled, but there was no breaking that grip. Mewat's mouth brushed his ear.

“After you talk, and talk, and talk about what we want to know . . . I think I will eat you up.” The thing belched again, engulfing Orlando in a fog of decay. Bright spots shimmered before his eyes, but they were only sparks against the rapidly encroaching blackness.

A booming voice echoed from the temple's stone walls.
“I come, my brother!”

Orlando's captor paused. Out of the shadows at the back of the temple another huge shape was pulling itself across the floor. The second sphinx's back legs dragged uselessly, and a gush of desert sand leaked from its wounds in a dully sparkling trail.

“I have deserted my post, O my brother,”
it moaned,
“for the first time since Time itself was born.”
The skin that had been a faint sunrise lavender was now pale gray.
“But I come to you.”

Orlando's captor looked to Tefy, who held Fredericks entangled in his long pinions. They appeared to be communicating soundlessly, perhaps considering how safe this spot might be with two massive sphinxes about to join forces in a death struggle. Dua crawled through a phalanx of attacking tortoise-men toward his brother, almost oblivious to their blows. Several vanished beneath Dua's bulk with their mouths stretched wide, still voiceless in their death agonies. Screams and even stranger noises began to fill the shadowed temple again as the bats and serpents, disturbed at their feeding, whirled up like a storm of black snow.