by Tad Williams
If I don't die. Gradually, through the dust and the sound of crippled beams creaking like the timbers of a storm-strained ship, he realized that if he was going to die it might not be for many minutes, or even longer. It was not his own floor that had been incinerated by that terrible winged shadow but one farther up in the building. He was half-flattened by bits of ceiling but not crushed; he could feel his feet moving, his toes flexing when he tried them. But he could not expect things to stay this way very long. Smoke was already beginning to creep down from whatever hell had been created above his head — he could smell it, the weird odor of things burning that he could not identify, combustion without familiarity. Already he was having trouble taking deep breaths. If he stayed here he wouldn't survive, but all else was vague and difficult.
Theo reached out in his dust-blindness and scrabbled at what was restraining him, but could make no sense of it by touch alone. He mopped at his eyes, turned the loose grit into a more general, stinging slime of sweat and dust. There was dust everywhere, clouds of the stuff mixed in with the smoke. Something crawled across his hand and he snatched it back with a shout, knowing even as he did so that it was ludicrous — as if any living thing could come close to the horror he'd just witnessed, a thousand square feet of glass turned to liquid in an instant, flame like glowing acid. His shout turned into a helpless, heaving cough. Little dusty bugs were crawling all over him, or at least they looked like bugs, though they were almost perfectly round. Their legs stuck out in all directions; none was bigger than a silver dollar, but some were small as confetti circles. One scrabbled across another a few inches from his hand and he saw gold gleam where the dust was scraped away.
Sitting on the floor, as helpless as an infant, Theo suddenly realized that Hellebore's pale, calm face had been talking soundlessly in the back of his mind all this time, a sort of horror tape-loop that didn't end, featuring the fairy lord's smile of infinite cruelty in the moments before the world caught fire. Hellebore was as empty as a ghost — was that what a ghost was, something that looked like a person but had lost all its kindness? — but he was also powerful, more powerful than even poor dead Hollyhock had dreamed. Lord Hellebore and his allies had sent a reptilian monster to deliberately and cold-bloodedly kill everyone in that conference room, along with God knew how many other hundreds or even thousands in Daffodil House as well. And the destruction might not be finished. If he was to have a chance of living, Theo had to get out.
What was pinning his lower body, he finally realized, was not part of the roof but the dust-caked length of the conference table on which the mirror had sat, its legs gone, one end propped by debris. It was far too heavy for him to push it off, but by shoving at it until he was breathing in ragged gasps, Theo managed to get one of his legs loose. The whole limb throbbed and he had to wait some time in the increasingly smoky dimness until he could use it to help shift the conference table a bit off the other leg, make enough space that he could turn his foot sideways where it was hooked under the table's far edge. He rolled completely onto his side and wriggled until that foot was also free, then he lay panting for a moment until a coughing fit got him up onto his knees, retching and spitting bits of gray-white mud. He shrugged off his leather jacket and his thin fairy-shirt and tied the shirt across his mouth and nose like an outlaw's bandanna. It seemed to keep out a little of the smoke. He was going to leave the heavy jacket behind and let sentiment be damned, but a piece of flaming debris dropping down from above made him think again. Despite his exhaustion, he pulled the jacket back on.
Where's the door? The room was getting extremely hot now, like an oven just starting to work. He had a brief vision of himself baked as dry and powdery as the ash that covered him. You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man . . . Finding the door seemed an impossible task. Debris lay everywhere, mountains of the stuff piled jaggedly to the collapsed roof. He couldn't make out where the walls were and which one was closest.
Groaning, coughing, Theo started to crawl. Within moments he put his hand down on someone else's hand. Numbly, he scraped away at the dust and fragments of ceiling, working his way up the arm to the face. He had enough time for a dull shock of recognition before Tansy opened his eyes behind his shattered spectacles. "Help me . . ." the fairy whispered.
Theo looked at him for a moment. Hellebore didn't want me dead, he realized. He sent Tansy to get me out first, but it went wrong. Knowing that he was to have been spared was no comfort. The Excisors wanted him alive, but probably only so they could torture him for some information they thought he had.
"Who is . . . ?" Tansy blinked away blood. "Help . . . !"
"Danger," murmured the hob from everywhere and nowhere. "Attack."
Theo just shook his head and crawled on. ————— The idiot voice of the hob grew fainter and fainter and then stopped at last as he made a painfully slow progress across the room. Collapsed structural elements were what made it difficult, the fallen beams and large pieces of wall and ceiling which hung down or were piled in front of him like abstract sculpture, but Theo dimly recognized that it could all have been much worse — although that wasn't much solace. The interior of a modern fairy building seemed mostly built of very light materials, which meant he was digging his way through piles of shaped, very strong glass, strips of wood, and metal hammered almost as thin as gold leaf, all covered with a sifting snow of dust, instead of through concrete and cast iron. Still, by the time he had reached the door he felt as though he'd moved several hundred cubic feet of rubbish. He was sweating from the heat beating down from the burning floors above, but periodic showers of smoldering fragments from the dark spaces above made him glad he'd put the jacket back on.
Once or twice he thought he heard Tansy moaning in the rubble behind him, but it wasn't as hard to ignore as he had thought it might be: even with the hob silent, Theo's head was still full of yammering voices.
It took him a few minutes to get the office door open when he finally reached it — the whole floor seemed to have gone slightly out of true. The corridor ceiling had also collapsed. As he made his way out on his hands and knees into the wreckage and smoke he found bodies, all motionless and pretty clearly dead — half a dozen fairies, all full-size, who had been caught in the corridor when the ceiling had come down. He paused to peer through the floating dust, trying to decide which end of the hall was closer, but it was useless. He could only pick a direction and start crawling over and around the obstacles and past the silent victims, some of which were no more than feet or hands sticking out from under heavy wooden beams.
The smoke was getting thicker and the voices inside him were growing strong again, too, nattering away without much regard to what was really going on, like a bus full of querulous old people stopped by the roadside. He heard Cat talking about his many failures, Applecore calling him shallow. He heard Tansy's contempt and Lord Daffodil's scorn.
They all want me to die. A waste of space. He felt sorry for himself, because they were probably going to get their wish. But it hadn't always been that way. Everyone had always known he could make something out of his music. He had sung, and people had sat and listened, or stood and cheered. Even when he was back in elementary school the teachers had sent home notes, put it on report cards, "Theo sings like an angel . . ."
Or like a fairy. So was even that to be taken away from him? It turned out he wasn't special, he was just from another species. But Poppy liked my voice . . . She said so, and she's never heard anyone else but fairies . . .
The smoke was getting so thick that he kept forgetting where he was, kept thinking it was fog, that he was on one of the hills back home in San Francisco watching it roll down out of the west. Or back in his cabin with the trees turning misty and ghostlike outside . . .
Simply to make some homely noise, he coughed dust out of his mouth and throat and began to sing the first thing that came into his mind:
". . . But . . . I'll sing no more now . . . 'til I get a drink. For I'm drunk today . .
. and I'm rarely sober . . ." He barely made a sound at first, just a hiss of air with words, muffled by the shirt tied across his face. He found a bit of strength, coughed, and went on a little louder.
". . . A handsome rover from town to town. Ah, but I'm sick now, and my days are numbered. So come all ye young men and lay me down."
It was the old tune he'd sung to his mother as she lay dying. It didn't make a very brave sound — his voice was an unintelligible muddy croak and every syllable scraped his throat like steel wool — but it was a sound, something other than the internal drone of horror. He dug away at the wreckage and sang in a voice not much above a whisper.
"I wish I was in Carrickfergus, Only for nights in Ballygrand.
I would swim over the deepest ocean, The deepest ocean, my love to find . . ."
An ocean. It would definitely be worth drowning if he could do it in blessed, cool water, just open his mouth and swallow it down . . . He looked up, blearily aware something had changed. He was having so much trouble clearing the four-foot section of collapsed ceiling in front of him that he had failed to realize that what it was snagged on was a door handle.
Door handle. Like Saul's revelation on the road to Damascus, it seemed blinding. Door handle. Which meant . . . door. A door. He had reached the end of the corridor.
He managed to slide the sheet of ceiling material to one side before lifting it again and this time he was able to get it upright then push it away so that it toppled onto some of the other rubbish that had accumulated at the end of the hall. Now he could see the actual handle, covered with dust like a tomb-artifact. His fingers curled around it. Opens in, that's what I need. Please, God, make it open in. If it opens in toward me, that means . . . what does it mean, again? He fought to keep his mind from wandering away and leaving him alone. Right. That will mean it's an exit — the stairwell, probably. But if it opens away from me, it's another office.
He couldn't bear to think about that much. He twisted the handle and pulled. It didn't open. For long moments he sat in the dust, completely devastated, his eyes blurring with gritty tears. He turned and pushed but when that didn't work either he succumbed to a twinge of hope.
Maybe it's an out door and it just jammed. He set his legs, grabbed the handle in both hands, and pulled hard. It didn't open, but he thought he felt the smallest little tremor, something wanting to budge that couldn't quite. Delusion — a dying man's self-delusion, that was what it had to be. But he squatted again, got a grip on the handle, and then set one foot against the doorframe. He pulled, straining for breath, almost screaming with the effort. The door popped open with one swift crunch like a bone breaking and in that moment he felt he could hear a sudden choir of angels drowning out all other voices in his head.
The stairway was nearly as full of rubble, dust, and smoke as the hallway, but he could see a way down through the leaning timbers. Hundreds or even thousands of the little golden beetles were on the stairs already, pouring out of broken pipes and then forming themselves into semiorderly lines that went nowhere, pooling against obstacles, driven by some instinct he could not understand. In fact, their headless determination reminded Theo of himself. He would have laughed but his throat and lungs felt like they were full of singed wool.
Only a couple of floors to the ground, he told himself. Don't lose it yet, man. He was halfway down the first set of stairs when something above him collapsed with a sound like a bomb going off, an impact that knocked him to the floor. The dust clouds billowed with the pressure change and his ears buzzed, a high foul tone that didn't go away again and made him feel sick to his stomach. He sucked air through his improvised mask and waited to be crushed into jelly, but again, Death seemed to be holding back — a giant skeletal fist trembling over his head. He clambered to his feet and began staggering down the stairs again.
What am I doing in the middle of all this? I'm a singer — a goddamn singer! I'm not even one of the guys that plays the guitar . . . As the ringing in his skull finally began to die down new voices surrounded him, disembodied like the hob but not utilitarian, humming, chanting, even singing, a hundred different keys, a cacophony. He couldn't help wondering if something had fallen on his head and this was a symptom of brain damage or just some broken magic of Daffodil House spewing like a plumbing leak.
At the bottom of four flights of stairs that each seemed a mile long, he found himself in front of another door. Now, to his slow astonishment, he realized he was hearing voices that originated outside his head — real voices, loud and rough and fearful. He slipped and fell on the landing, then got up and pulled the door open, only to be nearly trampled by three dustcovered figures in the gray body-armor of police constables, their hooded silhouettes so bulky and distorted beneath their dusty cloaks that for a moment he took them for ogres.
One of them grabbed him, a hard clutch on his upper arm that made Theo cry out even as he marveled at the existence of other living people. Beneath the hood and the dust the constable was wearing prismed goggles like the compound eyes of a fly. A small shape holding a tiny glowing sphere hovered just above the constable's shoulder, dressed in a bubblemask and blast suit like a toy space alien. Theo guessed it was some kind of rescue-sprite. One of Applecore's kin.
"Is there anyone else up there?" the constable shouted. "Anyone alive?"
"I don't know." The shirt over his face muffled his words and he had to say it again, louder. Applecore, he thought suddenly. My God, where is she? "Right. Get out." His interrogator steered Theo roughly through the doorway. "Go on! Straight down that hall and then up into the lobby!" The constables pushed past him and started up the stairs.
Tingling, almost hyperventilating with relief, Theo hurried along the hallway. He would live. Much of the rubble had been pushed against the walls, leaving the way clear. He would escape out into the air. He would escape the dust and smoke and the moaning phantom voices and the horror, run away from this ruined place and keep running, didn't matter where, until he could breathe. Until he could sleep . . .
The hallway branched. There was a sign in the illegible fairy-script that he somehow could always read: Lobby, it proclaimed, with an arrow pointing the way to life and freedom like the kindly hand of a guardian angel. The cross-corridor sign read: Daffodil House Tower. It also had an arrow.
He paused without at first knowing why. Where had Applecore been when that . . . that horror had happened? Outside — or at least that was what he wanted to believe. She must have gone outside, she must have — that was the message she had left for him before he went to the conference center. The sprite was no idiot, either: if she had been anywhere out of the building she would have seen that thing coming through the air, that terrible winged shadow, and she would have gotten the hell out of Dodge City. Of course she would have.
But as Theo started into the corridor leading to the lobby, another thought struck him. Even if she did spot Tansy, she didn't follow him into the conference center where I was. What if she went upstairs to the big meeting, instead?
He stood at the place where the corridors crossed. If she went up there, she's dead and there's nothing I can do. If she's outside, she may have lived, but there's nothing I can do until I get out there. Where else could she be?
The comb. He didn't want to think about it, but he couldn't push it away. The comb underneath Daffodil House. He had no idea what had happened to the main tower, but he found it hard to believe that Hellebore and his allies would leave that proud, tall symbol alone. What if she had gone back to the comb? What if she needed help?
No, it was foolish even to think about it. Go into another damaged building to look for a person who probably wasn't even there, and would be almost impossible to find if she was? But even with his head buzzing and all his limbs achingly exhausted, Theo could not forget how she had flown against that undead thing like the world's bravest hummingbird, trying to save his miserable life with nothing but a corkscrew. And he could not forget her on the train, staying with him to the bitte
r end, huddled under his shirt even as the constables and the horrid, sluglike hollow-men approached. What had she owed him? Nothing. What did he owe her? Everything.
Just head up that corridor to the lobby, you idiot, the sensible part of his brain told him. She's probably outside, and if she isn't, what could you do anyway?
Shallow. The word jumped up like the blackest curse. Shallow. He could feel himself, all surface, empty as a plaster statue. Heartless. Gutless.
Better to be shallow than dead.
What else do I have, though? What am I holding onto? I'm not even human, I'm some kind of unwanted, rummage-sale fairy. She's my friend. He turned around again and stepped into the corridor with the Daffodil House Tower sign. Maybe the main tower had escaped the worst damage, he told himself without quite believing it. It would have been the conference center Hellebore and those other sons of bitches really wanted, wouldn't it? All their enemies gathered in one place. Theo was shaken to dizziness by a sudden flashback of the meeting room collapsing in a gush of molten glass and billowing flames, of what must have happened to Lady Aemilia Jonquil and Hollyhock and even Spunkie Walter, working on a holiday. . . .
Because it was mostly empty of rubble, anyone who had been in the offices along the corridor between the conference center and the main tower had not lingered: the doors gaped open on either side and the long hall was empty except for a fine haze of dust. After he had gone perhaps a hundred paces he reached a wider place where four other corridors radiated out, making a five-pointed star of hallways, not counting the smooth-sided vertical shaft that led upward from the crossing-point to some kind of skylight window at the surface a dozen yards away. Theo could see that it was dark outside now, a deep gloom pierced by beams of greenish-gold light filtering through the dusty murk. He didn't know whether the sun had actually set or the air outside was simply black with smoke. Either way it was depressing and disorienting: he had no idea what time or even day it was, could not guess how long he had been struggling to escape.