Sea of Silver Light (93 page)

It was a covered bridge made of rickety wood, like a single small house stretched to absurdity across the dark, flat river. She could just see the spot where it touched the other bank through the mist hovering above the river, but she knew better by now than to assume that the hilly forest there, a mirror of the place where they stood, was their actual destination.

When they reached Azador, they discovered that his eyes were closed.

"I do not want to cross," he said quietly.

"Nonsense," Jongleur told him. "You want to find your people, don't you? You want to do what the One has commanded of you."

"My own end is there," Azador said miserably. "As it was foretold. I can feel it."

"You feel your own fear," Jongleur responded. "Nothing is achieved unless fear is overcome." He hesitated, then put his hand on Azador's arm—a more or less human gesture which surprised Sam almost as much as it startled the Gypsy. "Come. We all need you. I am sure your people need you, too."

"But. . . ."

"Even death can be outwitted," Jongleur said. "Did I not tell you that?"

Azador swayed. Sam could almost see him weakening. For a long moment she wondered whether she wanted him to give in or not.

"Very well," he said heavily. "I will go across."

"Good man." Jongleur squeezed his arm. The old man seemed excited, even anxious, but Sam could not imagine why. Her mistrust flared again, but he was already leading Azador onto the span.

Sam and !Xabbu followed a few steps behind. Within moments they had passed beneath the roof of the bridge. It was so dark inside that the gray twilight they had left behind now seemed bright afternoon by comparison. Sam found herself straining toward the single point of gray light hovering far in front of them, the opening at the bridge's other end. Her footsteps echoed in the small space. The bridge creaked beneath her.

"Wait a minute," she said. "If that's the light from the other end, how come we can't see Jongleur and Azador in front of us. . . ? !Xabbu?" She stopped. "!Xabbu?"

Even the point of light was wavering now, as though fog were drifting in from the river to fill the covered bridge. Sam's heart sped. She turned, but there was no longer a light behind her, either. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"

She could hear nothing but the thumping of her heart and the soft creak of timbers beneath her feet. The darkness was so close, so strong, that Sam could feel it twining around her like a living thing. She put out her hands, searching for the bridge's walls, but her fingers touched only cold air. Panicked, she began to move forward, or what she thought was forward—slowly at first, but her cautious movements quickly gave way to a trot, then a breakneck run.

Right into the grip of something as strong as pain, as cold as regret.

Living fear caught her up like a huge dark fist. In a split-instant a deathly chill burrowed into her, numbing her body into nonexistence, until there was nothing of her left but a tiny flicker—a thought, a breath, struggling against the all-conquering nothing.

I've felt this before—inside the temple in the desert. But I didn't remember how . . . how bad. . . !

She was not alone. Somehow she could feel !Xabbu, and even Jongleur, as if they were all connected to her through the dark by some sputtering, fading circuit—!Xabbu drowning in emptiness, Jongleur shrieking in the shadows, snatching at the blackness as if to pull it into some more coherent shape—but it was only a glimmer, a moment. Then the others were gone and she was left alone, a dying spark.

Let me go,
she thought, but there seemed nothing that could hear her or wanted to listen.

The force that held her squeezed, squeezed hard, and the void wrapped her and pulled her down. . . .

It was the park near her old house—a place she had not seen for years and years, but the swings and monkey bars were still as familiar as her own hands. She was sitting on the grass at the edge of the play area, in the bright sunshine, scuffing her bare feet in the sand and looking at the patterns it made, at the bits of tanbark sticking up through the pale drifts like flotsam on a frozen ocean.

Orlando was sitting beside her. Not the barbarian-hero Orlando, or even the wizened, cartoonish thing she had sometimes seen in her darker thoughts since learning about his illness, but the Orlando she had once imagined, the dark-haired boy with the thin, serious face.

"It doesn't want you," Orlando said. "It doesn't really care much about anything anymore."

Sam stared at him, trying to remember how she had come to be in such a place. All she could remember with any certainty was that Orlando was dead, which didn't seem like a very polite thing to bring up.

"I think if you can, you'd better get out," he continued, then bent to pluck a long grass stem.

"Get out. . . ?"

"Of where you are. It doesn't want you, Sam. It doesn't understand you. I think it's stopped trying."

The ground shuddered—just a little, but Sam felt it in her haunches, as though someone had struck the world a heavy blow, but far from where they sat. "I'm scared," she said.

"Of course you are." He smiled. It was just the kind of crooked smile she'd always imagined him having. "I would be, too, if I was still alive."

"Then, you know. . . ?"

He held up the stem of grass, then blew it out of his fingers. "I'm not really here, Sam. If I were, I'd be calling you 'Fredericks,' wouldn't I?" He laughed. His shirt, she could not help seeing with loving pity, was buttoned wrong. "You're just talking to yourself, pretty much."

"But how do I know about . . . about what it thinks?"

"Because you're inside it, scanmaster. You're in its mind, I guess you'd call it—way inside. In its dreams. And that's not a very good place to be right now."

The ground shuddered again, a more distinct rolling, as though something beneath them had discovered itself confined and was chafing against its restraints. The rings on the monkey bars began to sway slowly,

"But I don't know how to get out!" she said. "There's nothing I can do!"

"There's always something you can do." His smile was sad. "Even if it's not enough." He got up and dusted off knees of his pants. "I have to go now."

"Just tell me what to do!"

"I don't know anything you don't know yourself," he explained, then turned and walked away across the grass, a field of green far more immense than what she remembered. Within moments the slightly awkward figure had diminished until she felt she could have reached out and picked him up in one hand.

"But I don't know anything!" she called after him.

Orlando turned. The day had grown dark, the sun lost behind clouds, and he was hard to see. "It's scared," he called back to her. Another rumble passed through the ground, bouncing Sam where she sat, but Orlando did not waver. "It's really scared. Remember that."

Sam tried to scramble after him but the earth beneath her feet had begun to pitch and she could not get her footing. For a moment she thought she had her balance under her at last, might be able to catch him before he disappeared—she had always been a fast runner, and Orlando was crippled, wasn't he?—then a vast black something came up from beneath the surface of the world, breaching the crumbling earth like a whale heaving up out of the ocean's dark underneath, and Sam was thrown headlong into the sagging, collapsing deeps.

The swift rasp, she realized at last, was the sound of her own terrified breath sawing in and out. She could feel dirt beneath her fingers, dirt against her face. She did not want to open her eyes, frightened that if she did she would see something staring back at her, something as big as all Creation.

It was the sound of someone gasping next to her that gave her the courage to look.

She was lying on her back beneath a purple-gray bruise of a sky, grimmer even than what had stretched above the forest. The ground beneath her felt hard and real. They were on a slope, surrounded by hills that looked something like the crown of the black mountain, a bleak landscape without vegetation.

Sam sat up. !Xabbu was on his hands and knees beside her, his face pressed against the earth, his chest expanding and contracting as if he were having a heart attack, sobs hitching in his throat. She crawled to him and put her arms around him.

"!Xabbu, it's me! It's Sam. Talk to me!"

The noises quieted a little. She could feel his compact body shuddering against her. At last he calmed. He turned toward her, his face wet with tears, but for a moment did not seem to recognize her.

"I am sorry," he said. "I have failed you. I am nothing."

"What are you talking about? We're alive!"

He stared, then shook his head. "Sam?"

"Yes, Sam. We're alive! Oh, God, I didn't think . . . I didn't know . . . but I did, I just forgot about it, like it was too painful or something. When I was in the temple in the desert with Orlando, it was just the same. . . ." She realized that !Xabbu was looking at her in confusion, and that she was babbling. "Never mind. I'm just so happy you're here!" She hugged him tightly, then sat up. She was still wearing her borrowed Gypsy finery, as was he. "But where are we?"

Before he could answer, they both heard a cry from farther down the slope. They climbed to their feet and made their way down the scree of dark, crumbling soil, and found Felix Jongleur on the other side of a small hillock. He was lying on his side with his eyes squeezed shut, writhing like a salted slug.

"No," the old man gasped, "you cannot. . . ! The birds . . . the birds will. . . !"

!Xabbu reached out a tentative hand. When it touched him. Jongleur's eyes snapped open.

"She is mine!" he shrieked, flailing at them. "She is. . . ." He stopped and his face crumpled. For a moment he seemed to look at !Xabbu and Sam without defenses, his eyes those of a hunted, desperate animal. Then the mask was back in place. "Do not touch me," he snapped. "Do not ever touch me. . . ."

"I have found it!" Azador shouted.

They turned. He was making his way up the hill toward them, bent against the steepness of the climb. When he lifted his head, his face was lit in an astonishing smile. "You were right! Come see!"

Sam looked to !Xabbu, who shrugged and nodded. As Jongleur was still raising himself to his feet with chilly if unsteady determination, they followed Azador back down the slope.

In a few minutes they had reached a place where they could look out across the last of the small hills to see the bowl-shaped valley as a whole. Like the ring of hills, it bore more than a passing resemblance to the top of the black mountain, but instead of a huge, pinioned figure, the valley was dominated by a monstrous crater filled with black water and strangely muted lights. A crowd of figures too distant to make out huddled along its rim.

"What . . . what is it?" Sam asked at last.

"It is the Well," said Azador triumphantly. He turned and clapped Jongleur on the shoulder so hard he almost knocked the old man over. "You were right! You are a wise, wise man." He turned and pointed. "Do you see them all down there? All the children of the One have gathered. The Romany will be there, too. My people!"

As if he had exhausted his patience waiting to show them, Azador now went scrambling down the hillside toward the plain, leaving Sam and the others stunned and staring.

CHAPTER 32

NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Jixy Jinxing Jingle?

(visual: excerpt from Mirthday special)

VO: Creators and performers on the popular Uncle Jingle children's interactive are beginning to wonder what's going on. A series of strange happenings on the show have led some people at Obolos Entertainment, the show's producers, to suggest sabotage, with the implied suspect being WeeWin, a children's toy firm with offices in Scotland, but which is primarily owned by a subsidiary of Krittapong Electronics. In recent weeks characters on the Uncle Jingle program have disappeared mid-show, other objects not designed to be part of the environment have appeared, and some character interactions have been interrupted by unexpected noises one participant characterized as "moaning and roaring and even crying."

(visual: company spokesperson Sigurd Fallinger)

FALLINGER: "Could it be sheer coincidence that these attacks began right after we filed a large and completely justified suit for infringement on our intellectual property? We doubt it, let's just say that. We have some very strong reservations about that theory."

The Ticks were active around the base of the vegetal tower, dozens and dozens of pale shapes swarming in the evening darkness like maggots on putrefying meat. Renie, remembering how just a few of them had torn the rabbit, could not look at them for long without feeling sick.