Sea of Silver Light (95 page)

"Just try. If you can't make it, I'll carry you again. Let's hurry. We don't know how long this will distract them."

They quickly stumbled out of the vicinity of the fire. Renie's feet were achingly sore, her legs scratched and cut so many times she had stopped paying attention, but there was nothing to be done.
Run or die,
she thought.
It's been like that since we first got onto this damn network.
"Are we almost there?" she asked the little girl. "Are we still going in the right direction? Can you tell?"

The Stone Girl only plodded forward. Renie surrendered to trust.

A quick glance back sent a wave of terror through her: this time she definitely saw pale shapes behind them. She had no idea if the Ticks could follow a trail, or even if these were some of the same creatures who had surrounded the tower, but it wouldn't matter much if they got close enough to see her and the girl. She had no illusion they could outrun the pallid monsters for more than a few steps—she had seen their terrible, darting speed.

Something rose out of the dark shrubbery before them. Renie gasped in alarm and tripped, slamming down onto one knee and dragging the Stone Girl face-first into the undergrowth. She scrabbled desperately for something to use as a weapon—a weapon she already knew would be useless—but the expected attack did not come.

The thing in front of her had a face.

"Klement! How did you . . . you're not. . . !" The Grail master was still holding the strange blue infant, although it was almost invisible in the dark night. "They're behind us," Renie said. "I've just seen them. You'd better run, too."

"I am . . . waiting."

"Waiting for what? To get eaten?"

Klement shook his head. "I do not know if this is the right . . . place. I . . . we . . . cannot feel. . . ."

Renie scrambled to her feet and pulled the quietly weeping Stone Girl up as well. "No time for this. You do whatever the hell you want." She swept the little girl into her arms, a weird mirror of Klement and his malformed charge, and sprinted ahead.

Once Renie looked back and was sure she saw maggoty-white shapes pursuing them, another time there seemed nothing behind her but endless vegetation. She no longer trusted her own eyes. Her lungs were burning. It seemed almost impossible to believe she had ever done anything but run through this endless, tangled nightmare world.

She was tripping and crawling her way up a long slope, the wildfire in the town now a small coin of flame in the black night behind her, when the Stone Girl's arm tightened around her neck.

"I feel it," the girl said. "We're almost there."

A high wall ran along the top of the hill, as leafy as everything else in More Very Bush. Renie stopped to lean against it, desperate to suck some new air into her chest before attempting the climb. She looked back and saw Klement walking stolidly up the hill, still a couple of hundred meters back. Behind him, but closing fast, half a dozen Ticks were sliding through the undergrowth like sharks. From this angle there was no question. They were moving rapidly and in concert. Whether it was Klement or Renie and her companion they were trailing, they were actively in pursuit!

Renie cursed bitterly. She lifted the little girl, who seemed to have tripled in weight, up onto the top of the fence, then left her clinging there while she began her own climb. Pulling herself up a vertical nearly defeated her, but somehow she found the strength.

From the top she could see the blessed river only a short distance away down the hill, its waters a meandering black stripe through the endless bramble. She turned again and saw that the Ticks had broken out of the deeper growth at the base of the hill and had almost caught up with Ricardo Klement. They boiled up the slope like hunting hounds, swiftly overtook him, then parted around him as though he were a tree in the middle of their path, leaving him untouched and seemingly unnoticed. Without a moment's hesitation they continued up the slope toward the spot where Renie still hung at the top of the wall, dumbfounded.

She had only enough time for a single startled and horrified curse, then she grabbed the Stone Girl and lowered her far enough to let her drop to the ground, then swung her own legs over and slid down the scraping branches.

"Where's the bridge?" she shouted to the Stone Girl. "They're right behind us!"

The little girl took her hand and pulled her on an angled course down the slope. The Ticks were flowing over the wall behind them like fingers of cloud coming down a mountainside. Renie snatched up the little girl and sprinted.

By the time they reached the thick brush that lined the river, Renie could hear the crackling slither of their pursuers.

"There!" squealed the Stone Girl.

The bridge had been almost invisible. Like everything else in More Very Bush, it was made of living branches and leaves, an arch leaping out from the center of the thicket across the water. Renie ran the last few steps and sprang up onto the end of the bridge with the girl in her arms. When the water was beneath her, she finally risked a look back.

The Ticks had stopped at the edge of the river, but clearly knew she was there. They made a few tentative movements toward the bridge, but something seemed to hold them at bay.

"I think we're safe," Renie gasped. "Don't we . . . need to say something now . . . before we cross? About a . . . a gray goose?

"I don't want to cross."

"We have to. We can't go back—look at those things! They're waiting for us."
But why didn't they want Klement?
"Let's cross," she said to the child. "We'll be all right."

"No, we won't," the Stone Girl murmured, but spoke the nursery rhyme in a tone of flat resignation. "It's the Bad House," she said when she had finished. "This goes to the Bad House."

"It can't get any worse than this." Renie turned back toward the center of the river.

"It can," the little girl said. "It really can."

She had been prepared for the mists that rose as they neared the center of the span, prepared for the way the river vanished beneath them, even its noise becoming so muted as to be little more than a constant, indrawn breath, but the sudden dark surprised her. The few distant stars of More Very Bush abruptly winked out and the black sky oozed down and covered everything like paint. And when the first faint lines of the place the little girl had called Jinnear Bad House appeared out of that darkness, Renie realized she had not been prepared for it at all.

She had half-expected something in the nursery rhyme vein, a quaint cottage of gingerbread—overblown perhaps, even a sprawling edifice like the House world, acre upon acre of crenellated marzipan trim—but she had not expected the utter, utter strangeness of the Bad House.

It had no shape. She could see it only in strange, silver gleams, as though its curves and angles caught light that came from some invisible source—thin crescents and flat surfaces that came and went, as though the thing itself revolved. But it also seemed . . . inside out, somehow, as if the momentary illusions of an exterior shape were immediately succeeded by—or were perhaps simultaneously manifesting—almost incomprehensible inversions, an outfolding into imaginary space of every boundary wall. There was even something rounded about the glimmering, elusive shape, something paradoxically sealed and secretive.

She could no longer see the bridge beneath her feet, but it certainly did not feel like the uneven vegetal construct that had been there before. There was only the feeling of a bridge now, an idea of a span between her and . . . the place. The Bad House. And the mists were rising.

She realized she could no longer feel the Stone Girl's hand in her own. "Where are you?" she asked, then called again, louder. "Stone Girl?" No one answered. Renie stopped, even retreated a few steps, swiping her hand from side to side, but found nothing. She paused, her heart rattling, and thought she heard a thin sound like a child crying in a distant room—but it was in front of her, not behind her.

Horrified, shamed, Renie could hardly think. She had brought the girl here, against all the child's wishes, and now she had lost her. She could not retreat, no matter how powerfully her instincts told her to do so.

She walked forward into the darkness. The Bad House opened to her and then closed around her. She joined it.

This, too, she had experienced before, but it was something for which she could never, never be prepared, a clutching void so terrifying that in the first moments she nearly surrendered everything. This remorselessly freezing grip must have been what killed the old man Singh, she thought, clinging to rationality. Even though she had felt it before, felt it and survived it, it seemed to be only a breath away from extinguishing her entirely, too.

I'm inside it now,
she realized.
The operating system. Not just in something it made—I'm inside it!

That glimmer of perception brought something else with it, a thought so terrible it almost blasted her from her ragged grip on sanity.
Is this what it feels like all the time? Is this what it feels like . . . to be the Other?

As if this revelation had fractured a perfect black crystal, the darkness shattered and flew apart. Flashes of imagery ran through her, some so swift they seemed to laser through her brain in a continuous stream, others substantial enough to register, but only briefly, as though she fell through a universe of broken mirrors, catching glimpses of a thousand disparate scenes.

There were voices in hundreds of languages, children's voices raised in fear and pain, adult voices yowling in terror and anger, agonized faces, searing bursts of cold and intense heat. Then the oscillations slowed and became more regular, resolved into something like time and space in their normal ratios. There was a white room. There were bright lights. Deep voices roared, loud and incomprehensible as the rush of a mighty river, and faces pressed in on her, gigantic and distorted. Then there was a huge convulsion, the universe itself seeming to choke and vomit, and the faces exploded away from her, bloodstained and howling.

The voices shrieked. White and red. White walls, splattered with red. The deep barking adult voices wrenched into a higher pitch. Blood became a fine mist in the air. Dark shapes fell down and lay writhing.

Renie was inside the horror, drowning in it, but it wasn't directed at her. It simply was, and she was in it, like a weakening swimmer flailing in the ocean.

Hang onto something,
she thought.
Grab something. A stick, anything. Drowning.

Stephen.

But for a dizzy moment she could not even remember who Stephen was, what he was to her. Was he one of these torn faces shrieking at her? Was she?

My brother. Little brother.

She snatched at that thought, threw her weight onto it as the fear battered her, as the darkness and the screaming madness strobed through her. She struggled to build something—Stephen, with his bright eyes and his close-cropped hair, his ears that stuck out just a little too far, his slouchy walk that imitated a teenage strut while making him look more of a child than ever. She had lost him. This thing, this frozen storm of horror, had taken him. She would not forget that. She could not forget that.

I want him back!
If she had a mouth, she would have screamed it.
I won't give up looking for him. You'll have to kill me like you killed the others.

The blackness collapsed in on her like an avalanche of ice, the pictures gone now, the spikes of madness freezing into something far more deadly, far more implacable.

Stephen,
she thought.
I came here for him. He's not yours. I don't care what you are, what they did to you, how they built you, how they used you. He's not yours. None of the children belong to you.

The blackness crushed her, trying to silence her. Renie felt herself vanishing, being absorbed into a cold despair as endless as a journey across the universe.

I won't stop.
It was a last thought—a lie, a pathetic boast, because everything that she was . . .
was
stopping. . . .

And then the blackness became something else.

There was so little left of her, it seemed, that for a long time she could only lie with her eyes closed, stretched full length on her back, trying to remember not who she was, or where, but why she should care about either question. It was only the sound of distant crying which finally forced her to live again.

Renie opened her eyes to a gray world. At first all she could make of it was vertical shadow, darker on one side of her than the other. Only after a few searching, puzzled moments could she begin to make sense of it.

She lay on a path, a bit of rough stone running along the edge of a wall of stone, a little like the corkscrew trail that had led them up and down the black mountain. But as if to prove that every version of reality here had its inversion, this path seemed to curve around the inner rim of a great, circular hole: a great and empty blackness lay beside the path, but she thought she could just make out an opposite wall beyond it.

A pit,
she thought.
I'm stuck on a trail down the side of some huge pit.

The Well,
she remembered a moment later.
That's where the Stone Girl said we were going.

Where did the light come from? Renie looked up and saw something like stars in the murk far above her, a circular field that, she reasoned, must be the top of the hole. It was a vast, wide circle, but a momentary hope that this signified she was close to it disappeared when she tracked the far side of the pit upward. It would be hours of climbing to reach that opening, even if this massive hole was something closer in scale to the real world than the impossibly tall black mountain had been.

That's it—this thing is like the mountain turned upside down . . . inside out. . . .
was the beginning of a thought, then the muted sound of a child sobbing snapped her attention back again.