Mountain of Black Glass

  Fredericks spoke up. "But why go there?"

  "Because it's the only gateway you can reach," she said quietly. "And Bes is the only one who can get you there."

  "Not if we stand here all day like old, constipated Taueret, waiting in the water lilies for her bowels to move," observed Bes.

  Mrs. Simpkins fetched a thick white robe which she threw over Orlando's shoulders. "That'll keep the sun off you, boy. You're still not well." At her direction, but not without a few muffled squeals of protest, the squadron of monkeys climbed underneath the robe. "Let's not turn this into any more of a circus than we have to," she said.

  But that, Orlando reflected sourly as he followed the surprisingly nimble dwarf out the door and across the villa garden, was exactly what they most resembled.

  "Hey, if we have to go to this temple and see Wolf Boy," Fredericks said brightly, "maybe we can at least get your sword back, huh?"

  Orlando was already feeling tired as he watched Bes climbing the garden wall, apparently with the idea of taking them out some less obvious way. "I can hardly wait," he said.

  It was at times like this, reflected the man who was both Felix Jongleur and Osiris, Lord of Life and Death, that the life of a supreme being felt more than a little lonely.

  The meeting with Jiun Bhao had been heartening, but the effects had not lasted long. Now, as he lay in the eternal blue nothing of his system's base level, he was already beginning to wonder what kind of Mephistophelian bargain the Chinese financier had secured. Jongleur was not used to making deals whose fine print he had not read.

  More worrisome, though, was the latest news on the Other, which continued to run deep in K-cycIe and showed no signs of changing any time soon. No one else in the Brotherhood had any idea how unstable the system beneath the Grail Network truly was, and as the days approaching the Ceremony dwindled away, Jongleur was coming to feel he might have made a terrible mistake.

  Was there a way to detach the network from the Other and substitute another system, even at this late date? There were things Robert Wells and his Jericho people at Telemorphix had developed that might work, although some functionality would certainly be lost in the changeover—slower response times, at the very least, and perhaps a price to pay in the dumping of some of the less important bits of memory as well, not to mention that the Ceremony itself would have to be postponed still further—but the essential functions of the network would surely be saved and the completion of the Grail Project could go forward. But did he dare? Wells was as desperate for the Grail's success as Jongleur was himself, but that still did not mean he would sit back and allow the chairman of the Brotherhood to admit defeat quietly. No, the American would rescue the project then make all the political capital of it he could. The prospect was galling. But not to do so would be to risk everything, absolutely everything, on a system that was daily proving itself to be unpredictably, unknowably strange.

  He moved uneasily, or would have, had his body not been restrained in a porous microfilament webbing, drifting in the viscous fluids of his life-preserving chamber. For well over a hundred years he had kept his own counsel, but it was hard at times like this not to wish that things were different.

  Jongleur's brain again sent a signal for movement to dispel nervous energy, and again the signal arced into nothingness. He longed for bodily freedom, but more specifically, he longed for the soothing environs of his favorite simulation. Still, there was business to take care of first.

  With a thought, he opened a communication window. It was only short moments until Finney's face appeared in it, or rather the vulture head of its Egyptian incarnation, Tefy. "Yes, O Lord?"

  Jongleur paused, taken aback. "Where is the priest? What are you doing there?"

  "Seeing to your interests, O Lord of Life and Death."

  "You have interests of mine to see to, certainly, but I don't. . . ." A sudden suspicion clutched him, and with it a shiver of anticipation. "Is it Jonas? Have you got him?" A more reasonable, but still hopeful interpretation occurred to him. "Or have you simply tracked him into my Egypt?"

  The vulture head dipped. "I regret to say that we do not know his present whereabouts at all, master."

  "Damnation! Then why aren't you out looking for him? Have you forgotten what I can do to you any time I wish?"

  A vigorous shake of the beak. "We forget nothing, Lord. We are just . . . seeing to some details, then we will be on the trail again. Will you grace us with your presence soon?"

  Jongleur shook his head. "Later. Perhaps. . . ." he consulted the time readout, the numbers showing GMT, still the marker of global imperium long after the English sea empire had shrunk to a single dreaming island, ". . . perhaps not today, though. It would be too distracting with all these meetings."

  "Very good, Lord."

  Felix Jongleur hesitated. Was that relief he saw in his servant's inhuman expression? But such concerns could not be as significant as the decision he had to make, and time for that decision was running short. He cut the connection.

  So . . . was it time to give up on the Other? Time to trigger the Apep Sequence? He could do nothing, of course, unless he received assurances from Wells, and that would mean throwing his entire system open to the Telemorphix engineers. Jongleur shuddered at the thought. Tomb robbers. Desecrators. But was there an alternative?

  Again he found himself wishing for one person, just one, whose counsel he trusted. Long ago he had held a hope that the half-Aboriginal boy Johnny Wulgaru might become such—his intelligence and complete lack of sentiment had been obvious from the first time Jongleur had seen him in the so-called Private Youth Authority in Sydney, a warehouse for damaged children. But young Dread had proved too wild to be completely tamed, and too much a creature of his own predatory appetites ever truly to be trusted. He was a useful tool, and at times like now, when he seemed to be behaving himself, Jongleur even considered that he might be given a little more responsibility. Except for the worrisome matter of the air hostess, a homicide which Jongleur's agents suggested had been filed by the Colombian police and Interpol as unsolved and unlikely to change, there had been no signs of bad behavior. But an attack dog, it was now clear to him, could never become a trusted companion.

  He had also once thought Finney might be someone worthy of the gift of Jongleur's confidence, despite his strange relationship with the nearly subhuman Mudd. But the night of broken glass had changed that—had changed everything.

  Jongleur sighed. In the tower stronghold high above Lake Borgne the web of systems adjusted, flashing messages of imaginary muscular movement to his brain, gently shifting the O2/CO2, ratios, imitating to near perfection the experience of embodiment, but still, somehow, falling just ineffably short.

  CHAPTER 8

  House

  NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Sepp Oswalt Killed in Accident

  (visual: smiling Oswalt in front of DP audience)

  VO: Sepp Oswalt, the genial host of "Death Parade," died while shooting an episode of the show when a distraught construction worker who had been threatening to destroy a building accidentally tipped a crane-load of steel beams onto Oswalt and his camera crew. Although Oswalt and his crew were killed, the building's drone security cameras caught the bizarre accident, and the footage will appear as part of the Sepp Oswalt tribute on his last completed "Parade" episode.

  The gateway did not stay open long. Within seconds after Renie had stepped through with !Xabbu's hand still clutched tightly in her own, the pane of light flared and then vanished, leaving them dazzled into darkness. Emily cried, "I can't see!"

  "We are in a large room." Martine sounded exhausted—Renie could only guess what the effort of opening the passage had done to her and !Xabbu. "It is very high and very long, and I sense many obstacles on the floor at our level, so I suggest none of you move until I have time to map things out."

  "There's a little light," Renie said, "but not much." The initial dazzle was fading. She could make out the edges of otherwise formless things
and vague gray splotches high overhead. "There are windows up there, I think, but it's hard to tell. They're either partially curtained or they're just a really strange shape."

  "Martine, is there anything else we need to know about?" Florimel asked sharply. It seemed she was taking Renie's half-in-jest commissioning of her as security officer seriously.

  "Not that I can tell. I cannot sense whether the floor is solid all the way to the walls, so I suggest we stay in one place." The French woman was obviously thinking of her own recent fall, and Renie heartily agreed.

  "Let's just sit down, then. Are we all here? T4b?" When he responded with a preoccupied grunt, she lowered herself onto what felt like a carpet. "Well, it's certainly something different than the last place, but it would be nice to know more."

  "I am going to break something," !Xabbu suddenly announced from a short distance away.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "There is furniture here—many of the shapes are chairs and tables. I am going to break up one of them and see if I can make a fire." The little man seemed to take a long time, perhaps looking for the right sort of wood, but at last everyone heard splintering. !Xabbu returned, saying, "Much of it is broken already, it seems." He set at the lengthy task of spinning one piece against another.

  Mindful of the fact that she had more or less accepted—or perhaps demanded—the responsibilities of leadership, Renie made a quick, crawling tour around her troop. Martine was busy trying to make sense of the new environment. Florimel was waiting for something unpleasant to happen and did not want her concentration disturbed. Renie thought of something she wanted to ask Emily, but before she went to the girl, she stopped to exchange quiet words with T4b.

  "It's back," he said wonderingly, and held up his left hand so she could see it silhouetted against one of the gray windows. It seemed a little translucent, although it was hard to be sure in such dim light, but he was right: it was undeniably back. She reached out to touch it, then snatched her fingers back.

  "It . . . tingles. Like electricity."

  "Pure tasty, huh?"

  "I guess." She left him admiring his restored digits and crawled to where the girl sat by herself. "Emily?" The girl did not reply. "Emily? Are you all right?"

  She turned slowly. "It's funny," she said at last. "For a moment, I didn't think that was my name."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know. It just didn't seem like my name. It didn't . . . feel right."

  Renie had no idea where to go with that, so she left it. "I wanted to ask you if you still have the gem Azador gave you."

  Emily hesitated. "My pretty thing? That my sweet pudding gave me?"

  It was hard to hear that self-absorbed bastard Azador described as a "sweet pudding" and not laugh out loud, but Renie managed. "Yes. I'd like to look at it, if I could."

  "Too dark."

  "Well, I'd like to hold it, then. I promise I'll give it back."

  The girl reluctantly passed her the stone. Emily was right—it was indeed too dark to see much. Renie rolled it in her fingers, feeling the hard, many-faceted weight of it. "Did it ever do anything?"

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know—change. Talk to you. Show you pictures."

  Emily giggled. "That's silly! How would it do that?"

  "I don't know." She handed it back. "Can I look at it again when we have some light?"

  "Okay." Emily was still amused by the idea of a talking gem. Renie crawled back toward the others just as a small flame began to grow beneath !Xabbu's ministering hands.

  The Bushman took three broken table legs and held their splintered ends in the fire until they caught, then handed one to Renie and one to Florimel, keeping one for himself. As the flames multiplied, yellow light reached out to the walls, revealing the room around them. It was as large as Martine had suggested, a huge, high-ceilinged hall like something from a manor house—Renie could almost picture the bejeweled nobility from some costumed net extravaganza waving their fans and gossiping beneath the now-dusty candelabra. Large pictures hung on the walls, but either the torchlight was too dim or the pictures too old: only vague shapes were visible within the cumbersome frames. Bits of furniture stood here and there around the carpeted floor, as though the place had once been a reading room, or an oversized salon, but as !Xabbu had reported, much of the furniture was broken, although the villains seemed to be extreme age and neglect rather than violence.

  Florimel stared up at the distant ceiling. "It is monstrously big. Like a train station! I do not think I have ever been in a room so large. What sort of palace must this be?"

  "Some kinda scan-ass Dracula house," opined T4b. "Saw this in Vampire Sorority: Utter Suction, me."

  "T4b's right about one thing," Renie said. "It's not the cheeriest place I've ever seen. Do you think the whole thing's a ruin? More important, is it deserted?"

  Emily suddenly got up and moved closer to the rest of the group. "I know what kind of place this is." Her voice was tight. "There are eyes in the walls."

  "Martine, is there anyone around?" Renie asked. "Someone watching us?'

  "Not that I can tell." The blind woman shook her head. "The information is very static here. It seems to have been deserted for a while, just as it appears."

  "Right." Renie stood up, holding her torch high. "Then I think we might as well start exploring. We're never going to find Quan Li—the spy, I mean—if we just sit here."

  No one was thrilled by the idea, but no one raised any useful objections either. !Xabbu broke legs off a few more collapsed chairs to use as spare torches, then put out the campfire, leaving a small burned spot in the ancient carpet that made Renie feel obscurely shamed. They headed out across the shadowy room.

  "Stay close together," Renie warned. "We have no idea what this simulation's supposed to be—T4b could be right. There could be vampires or anything."

  "Eyes," Emily repeated quietly. Renie asked her what she meant, but the girl only shook her head.

  It took them perhaps a quarter of an hour of cautious exploration to cross the great hall. They stopped to examine many of the crumbling artifacts on the way without adding much to their understanding. The furniture and ornamentation seemed like something out of the Baroque era in Europe, but there were other elements that seemed likely to be of an earlier time, and some—like a plaque bearing an unconvincingly-rendered carving of a railroad train—definitely from later. Renie also spotted what looked like a row of dusty electric lights along the top of one of the walls, but it was too dark to be sure.

  They stepped through the tall, wide doors at the room's far end, Florimel walking point with T4b flexing his new hand at her side, Martine and Emily behind them. Renie and !Xabbu brought up the rear, and so were the last to learn that the room on the far side, except for the shapes of its high windows—more and smaller—and its furniture—less of it, and with a vast wooden floor instead of the thick carpeting—was much like the first.

  "Whoever used to live here," Renie noted, "must not have liked being crowded."

  The three pictures in this room were hung closer to the floor, only a few meters above the parquet, and Renie paused to examine them. Two of them contained what looked like hunting scenes, highly stylized. The hunters appeared human, if oddly archaic, but the animals they were riding did not quite look like horses, as though painted from hearsay by someone who had never actually seen one.

  The picture in the middle was a vast portrait study of a person who might have been either male or female: it was hard to tell because the subject was wrapped head to foot in a dark robe which blended into the blackening background. The hood was pulled so low over the sitter's face that only a pair of sharp, glittering eyes, a prominent nose, and an unsmiling mouth were visible in its shadowy folds.

  Renie wished she had not stopped to look.

  This second vast room had doors on all four sides. After walking all the way across to the farthest door and finding what appeared to be another hangar-s
ized chamber beyond it, Renie and the others trooped back across to one of the side entrances. The corridor outside ran parallel to the great halls, and although it. too, was lined with pictures and busts in shadowy niches, it was of more human dimensions, only a few meters wide and the same distance high; no vote was needed to settle which route the company preferred.

  "Any suggestions on a direction?" Renie asked Martine.

  The blind woman shrugged. "No difference that I can perceive."

  "Then let's follow this hallway back in the direction we came from. That way, if we don't find anything, we'll at least be staying in the general area of the first room, since we know a gateway can manifest there."

  It was a good plan, but after half an hour or so of tramping down the corridor, past locked door after locked door, and after a few entrances into and depressed exits from more huge, deserted rooms, Renie had begun to wonder if they would be able to remember which of these chambers had been their starting point. The decorations were no real help; most of the pictures were so faded and encrusted with dirt that they could have been anything. The busts uniformly portrayed old men, vaguely Caucasian, but with enough small variety in their features and enough dust caked in the crevices of the old dark stone that she would not even have sworn to that distinguishing fact.

  After perhaps an hour, the monotonous trek was finally alleviated by Martine's announcement that she sensed a change in the information.

  "What sort of change?" Renie asked. "People?"

  "No. Just . . . force being applied. It is hard to explain, and anyway it is too far away to tell for certain. I will let you know when we get closer."

  A few minutes later the blind woman stopped them and pointed to the corridor wall on the opposite side from the gigantic rooms they had first explored. "There. In that direction. I think it is the river."