Mountain of Black Glass (93 page)

“ ‘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 unwilling 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.”

 

E
VEN 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 bloodcolored 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.

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.”

“But what can I do?” he demanded.

“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 virtual 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.

 

S
ALOME 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.

Her father, who had never liked the name Salome, had acted as a fifth column, constantly “forgetting” his promise to his wife not to call Salome by that terrible, masculine name, and so Enrica Fredericks had finally given in.

This early experience had confirmed Sam in the value of quiet noncompliance. She was known to her teachers as a good, if not deeply motivated, student, and to her friends as a quiet but surprisingly self-confident companion. Many of her schoolmates had been experimenting with sex since before the official dawn of their teenagerhood. Sam Fredericks did not know exactly what she
did
want in the way of romance—she had a lot of thoughts and imaginings, none of them quite clear—but she knew much better what she
didn't
want, and that definitely included being groped by any of the boys with whom she went to school. Drugs hadn't made much of a blip on her radar either. What Sam really wanted more than anything else, more than good grades, acceptance by her peer group, or the startling array of sensations, real and virtual, that were available to a young person of her age, was to be more or less free from the pressures of her parents and her classmates until she was grown up and could make up her mind about what she wanted out of life. She saw this watershed as coming in the distant but not impossible future, perhaps by the time she was sixteen or so.

Meeting Orlando Gardiner had confused her in a number of ways, none of them immediately obvious to a girl as self-assured as Sam, who made friends easily even if she didn't connect deeply, who played soccer so well she had been elected team captain twice (and refused the honor both times), and who convinced teachers by the serenity of her countenance that she probably knew answers that she in fact didn't, causing them to turn and expend their vital teacher-charisma on some more needy student. Even in the world of role-playing Sam had always been a good-natured individualist, never a leader, never a follower, until Pithlit the Thief had encountered a young barbarian named Thargor in The Quirt, a seedy little tavern which was one of the nicer spots in Madrikhor's Thieves' Quarter. Thargor, already a semilegendary figure in the Middle Country, knew Pithlit by reputation as well, having heard that the slender man was unusually trustworthy for a thief, and since Thargor was in need of a lock-picking specialist on his quest to liberate some objects from a rich warrior baron, he had offered Sam's alter ego a reasonable percentage.

The theft had gone well, once the barbarian had dealt with an unexpected trio of mastiff-headed, human-bodied sentries, and the casual partnership had rolled over into other ventures.

A year later, Sam Fredericks had been astonished to realize that Orlando Gardiner, a boy she had never seen, had somehow become her best friend in the world, and the only person besides her parents (not counting a previous obsession with Pain Sister, one of the musician/heroines from the
PsychiActress
show, which despite all the allowance money she had spent on posters, holographs, and interactives, was now relegated in Sam's mind to the status of stupid kid stuff) that Sam could honestly say she loved.