Everyone turned at the sound; Pel saw that Raven was rubbing his eyes and waving his head, as if still blind from the flash, while Singer and Amy were blinking. The others seemed to be okay as they turned to look up at the dragon.
It stretched its neck out over the edge of its ledge and peered down at the humans below; Pel could look directly into its greenish-gold eyes, could see the odd frill, or tendrils, or whatever it was that dangled from the monster’s chin, and the hard ridges above the eyes.
Then it slithered down from the ledge.
Singer made a dash for the doorway, but the dragon was faster; the soldier stopped dead only a foot or so from its flank as it interposed itself between the humans and their only exit.
“Damn,” Singer said, as he backed away. It was the first word any of them had spoken since the flash.
“Now what?” Prossie asked.
The dragon hissed, but made no threatening moves; it simply sat there, between the humans and the door.
“I think,” Pel said slowly, “that this is just another version of those slug things—making sure we can’t turn back.”
“But Sawyer’s outside,” Singer objected.
“I suppose he was right,” Pel said. “Shadow didn’t care about him—but it wants the rest of us.”
“So what do we do?” Amy asked.
Pel shrugged. “We go on,” he said. “At least now we can see where we’re going.”
* * * *
Amy’s feet hurt—but then, they had hurt for days now. A year ago, she would have said she could never walk two hundred miles, not if she had all the time in the world and her life depended on it, and especially not when she felt so heavy and tired all the time, whether it was from the gravity here or because she was pregnant. She would have said she could never walk so far.
But now she had done it, and as a direct result, her feet ached. It seemed unfair that even after reaching this stupid fortress, she still had to walk farther. Why wasn’t Shadow right there at the front door, waiting for them?
It was probably trying to impress or intimidate them, making them walk down this ridiculous huge room lined with monsters; she didn’t see what other possible use such a place could have.
Amy had no intention of being impressed or intimidated, though; she thought the room was ugly, was nothing in comparison to, say, the main hall at Union Station in Washington, even if it was a lot longer. And they’d seen plenty of monsters already—the stovepipe things, and the giant bat, and the others they had fought at the spaceship, and the ones that had attacked them back at Stormcrack the first time they saw Faerie. She wasn’t particularly surprised by more of them.
At least this time they weren’t trying to kill her.
That dragon, though, was crowding them.
It didn’t actually push anyone, but as they moved forward, it moved along with them, its talons scratching on the stone floor like fingernails on a blackboard, and it wouldn’t retreat—if they tried to turn back it stopped and stood there watching them, lashing its tail like an angry cat’s, or like a snake squirming, blocking them. If someone tried to go around it it would lunge, and scamper, and cut off whoever it was that had tried to escape.
Singer and Raven had tried to split up and go around both ends, which was when the party had learned that the dragon’s tail was prehensile, capable of tripping a man and then picking him up, and also when they had discovered that the dragon’s full, extended length was at least fifty feet—it could stretch itself across the entire width of the hall.
It was also amazingly fast.
Amy hadn’t tried to turn back; for one thing, that would mean abandoning Ted, who had vanished up the stairs. She trudged on.
At the foot of the steps, however, she stopped and stared upward, dismayed.
The climb had to be a hundred feet—a ten-story building and then some. That bar of light ran right through the center, though she couldn’t see any sort of projector. Someone was sitting at the top, with the ragged remains of a bandage on his head—Ted, waiting for them.
It looked as if he had to wait; the stairs seemed to end at a wall.
It didn’t make any sense; this was a completely stupid way to arrange a building, she thought. Why weren’t there any side-passages? Why did everyone have to go up these stairs? How did anyone get into the rest of the fortress?
It was absurd—but it was here, and very solid and real, and she didn’t seem to have much of a choice. She sighed, and started climbing.
* * * *
The dragon was asleep at the foot of the stairs, curled up like a gigantic cat; as Pel mounted the last few steps he looked down past the light-beam at it, bitterly certain that if any of them tried to go back down the creature would awaken instantly.
He wondered what had happened to Sawyer; had the slug-things gotten him, or had he found a way past, or was he still standing out there, waiting, slowly starving to death?
Of course, Pel felt as if he wasn’t all that far from starvation himself. Singer’s canteen and Raven’s waterbag, stolen three days before from a farmhouse on the road, kept thirst under control, but none of them had eaten a bite since their rather meager breakfast of assorted berries that morning.
Less than a day without food, that was nothing, he tried to tell himself, but his stomach disagreed.
You’d think, he told himself, that he’d be used to it by now. He hadn’t eaten properly for weeks. Back home he’d always taken food for granted—oh, let’s eat Chinese tonight, let’s grab a burger, what about a pizza.
He thought that right now he would be ready to strangle a man with his bare hands if it would get him a decent meal.
Maybe Shadow would feed them eventually—or maybe it would starve them all to death here atop the stairs.
Pel had no intention of starving—if that began to look like a real possibility, he’d go back down and let the dragon make a meal of him, or maybe jump into the light-beam—Valadrakul had warned them all, in his archaic phrasing and barbaric accent, that it would fry anyone who touched it, cook them instantly, that it was basically the same sort of magical zap that he had used against the monsters back at the spaceship, but, in the wizard’s phrase, writ large.
No one had cared to test the wizard’s claim; they had all stayed well clear as they passed it.
Being above the light made everything on this upper part of the climb look strange—faces were lit from below, so the nostrils stood out, as if they were all in a low-budget horror film. The stairs were shadowed, making it harder to climb if one looked down. And the space at the top of the stairs was almost dark.
Pel mounted the final step and stopped.
It wasn’t completely dark here, by any means; they could all see the wall, with its ornate door, just a few feet away, on the other side of the landing at the top.
The door wasn’t anything like the gate below, which was easily at least fifteen feet high and ten feet wide, but this door was still big—maybe ten feet high and five feet wide, Pel guessed. It was red decorated with gold, rather like decor in a Chinese restaurant—Pel wished he could stop associating things with food.
Ted was sitting cross-legged on the bare stone floor in front of the door, waiting; the others were standing along the top of the stair, or just now coming up. Poor Amy was the last; she was panting. This was nothing a woman in her condition should be doing, Pel thought angrily.
He was panting, too, he realized.
Tired, hungry, thirsty, virtually unarmed—they were in great shape to confront the all-powerful Shadow.
If, of course, they were going to. If they weren’t going to just sit here and starve. If they weren’t going to wander on through some interminable maze. If they weren’t all going to be killed instantly—after all, if Shadow could create that light-beam…
How had he ever got into this? Pel reached down to give Amy a hand up the last three steps, and tried to figure that out.
He hadn’t gone anywhere or done anything stupid. He
’d just been down in his own basement, minding his own business, when this all began happening around him.
And now his wife was dead, his daughter was dead, Elani and Grummetty and Alella were dead, all those Imperials had died for nothing.
When this was over, they’d probably all be dead.
Why was he still going on? What good did it do? Why had he bothered to come this far?
Heroes did this sort of thing in the books he read and in the movies he watched, they fought on against impossible odds as their friends died around them, until at last they defeated evil and saved the world—but he was no hero. He wasn’t going to save any worlds. He was just going to die.
Well, everybody dies eventually. He might as well get it over with.
He turned to face the door just as it opened.
Chapter Twenty
Amy closed her eyes to catch her breath as she mounted the final step and let go of Pel’s hand. She wondered whether that light bar might be radioactive, whether it would do anything to her unborn baby—though even if it did, she really hoped that wouldn’t matter, that she’d be able to abort the thing soon.
Although right now it seemed more likely that she would die and take the baby with her.
Suddenly it seemed as if everyone was shouting, and reluctantly, wearily, she opened her eyes.
The doors were opening, and light was spilling out, bright moving multicolored lights that flashed and sparkled every which way—and which seemed to create shadows between them, as if the differing lights canceled each other out in places, creating darkness. The glare blazed in every color she had ever heard of and several she hadn’t, painfully bright; she closed her eyes again and raised a guarding hand. If the light bar wasn’t dangerous to be near, something here probably was—in all that chaos there had to be some kind of nasty radiation. If it wasn’t radioactivity maybe it was ultraviolet or lasers or something, and she’d get skin cancer or cataracts or her hair would fall out.
And there were sounds—rushings and rustlings, like storm winds, or like some sort of machinery warming up. The dead air of the landing stirred to life. She smelled the electric bristle of ozone, and other scents, metallic and harsh, that she couldn’t place.
“I’m not going in there,” she said, more to herself than anyone else.
“Ted is,” Pel told her.
She opened her eyes slightly and squinted, trying to see through the glare, and sure enough, with one arm shading his eyes, Ted was staggering through the big door right into the lights.
“Oh, damn,” she said. She hesitated. “All right,” she said, after a second or two, “I guess I am going in there.” She couldn’t have explained her decision very coherently to anyone else, but she knew it had something to do with Bill Marks, torn apart on the road; with Tom Sawyer back there with the stovepipe monsters, with Elani who had died protecting her, and with dead Beth on the gallows because Amy had said she deserved it. Amy had reached the point where she thought she was less afraid of her own death than of feeling responsible for any more of the stupid, pointless deaths of others.
She wondered if Pel felt any of the same thing; he was right there beside her as she walked the few steps toward the door. Was he, too, thinking of Marks and Sawyer and Elani? Or was he remembering his poor wife and their little girl, horribly murdered by people who might have been sent by Shadow? Was he thinking about revenge, or was he just getting ready to die, to be with his family? Amy had no way of knowing; it was hardly something she could ask him, as even after the weeks of traveling and waiting and traveling together he wasn’t much more than a friendly stranger.
And what about Raven, or Valadrakul, or Al Singer? What about Prossie and Susan? Ted still thought it was a dream, he wasn’t worried, but what about the others? Was it courage that drove them forward? All of them were moving, all of them were approaching the door, and Amy wondered why. Weren’t any of them scared?
She had to stop in the doorway; the flickering glare was too intense to continue. The moving air brushed across her face like fingers, like wings, like blowing leaves, sometimes warm, sometimes cool, sometimes gentle, sometimes sharp as wire. Shadow and color shifted too fast for her to see anything clearly.
Ted had gone through the door, and Pel, and Raven, though Amy didn’t know how they could stand to do it. Prossie and Susan and Singer were just behind her, still outside; Valadrakul was at her side.
“What is all that, anyway?” Amy asked.
“Magic,” Valadrakul said. “The raw energies of Shadow made manifest.”
“If it’s Shadow, shouldn’t it all be dark?” Amy asked. She inched forward, took her first step into the chamber beyond the door; her arm was across her face, and colors seemed to ripple and flare on all sides. Pink and orange and electric blue swept across her arm, coloring everything she saw. The air felt oddly stuffy now, as it pressed against her, and she couldn’t decide if it was warm or cold.
“It could be dark, if Shadow so chose,” Valadrakul told her. His voice sounded unsteady.
Startled, Amy glanced at the wizard.
He was trembling.
* * * *
The air of the room seemed somehow compressed, Prossie thought as she lingered in the doorway.
She didn’t like the look of the place at all; the shifting, glaring colors made her think of alarms and beacons and a dozen other sorts of warning, all going off at once, or of some sort of huge machinery going berserk. If the warp generator back at Base One had run wild, she thought it might have looked something like this.
No warp generator had ever run wild, though. Prossie knew what various other kinds of machinery would do when they failed—she had scanned through the memories of engineers any number of times, either directly or second-hand, and had seen what happened when anti-gravity drives imploded, when blasters melted down, when everything went wrong. It was a standard part of the follow-up to any disaster in the Galactic Empire to let the telepaths loose on everyone involved so as to find out what went wrong and who was responsible.
And none of those disasters had ever looked anything like this.
A warp generator malfunction probably wouldn’t either, she told herself. No warp generator had ever run amok, but Prossie had read the memories of scientists who thought they knew what it would do, and none of them had seen it being this varied and colorful.
Of course, scientists tended to think of such things in terms of numbers and schematics, not light and color.
Whatever was happening here, she didn’t like it, and didn’t understand it, and she didn’t want to face it alone.
“Carrie!” she thought, trying desperately to project, knowing as she tried that in this unnatural continuum, in Faerie, she couldn’t.
She could only hope that Carrie was listening.
* * * *
Light shows, Pel thought, it was all a light show. Like the trip sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or when the ark is opened in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” or any number of scenes in various other special-effects spectaculars.
Except that this one was different because it was all around, not confined to a screen; he wasn’t sitting in a dark theater, he was walking through the lights and colors, he thought he could actually feel them, and whether he could or not, he could certainly feel the air, and smell and taste it, and it had a weird, static-electric, closed-in feeling even though it was moving.
And the lights weren’t flashing in some ill-defined soundstage void; as his eyes adjusted he could catch glimpses of a solid room behind the glare, a colonnaded chamber with gilded decoration on white walls—he couldn’t see whether the walls were stone or plaster or what, the light was too bright.
No movie was ever so bright, so intense.
The lights moved and shifted, but there were patterns to them, and they seemed to focus on the far end of the room. He couldn’t look directly at whatever occupied that space.
Was that Shadow? If so, it seemed horribly misnamed.
It
ought to be Shadow, though; they had gone through the whole stupid quest, they had fought monsters and thirst and hunger, trudged hundreds of miles, seen half their companions dead, and finally reached and entered the fortress of the enemy. In all the stories, that meant it was time to confront the Evil Power.
Was this it, then?
All that light and color—was Shadow misnamed? Was this some other being or force entirely, one that would send them home? One that could bring Nancy and Rachel back to life? One that would make this whole thing just the dream Ted still said it was?
For all Pel knew, this wasn’t Shadow, but God. The blinding light seemed more appropriate to God’s glory than to a being called Shadow.
Whatever it might be, this was definitely the pay-off, the climax of the whole horrible adventure.
Behind him, he heard Amy and Valadrakul talking, but he didn’t pay much attention. His ears were starting to ring, though he didn’t know why; the whooshings and rumblings and flappings that had accompanied the colors died away suddenly, so that besides the two voices, neither of them speaking loudly, the only sounds were the tapping of boots on marble, the shuffle of feet and rustle of clothing, and labored breathing from someone nearby—maybe Ted.
“Are you all right?” Amy asked, her voice concerned; startled out of his thoughts about Shadow, Pel turned to see who she was asking.
* * * *
Valadrakul was trembling violently; Amy could see his beard quivering, and his now-ragged embroidered vest was almost slapping the frayed knees of his purple Imperial pants.
“What is it?” she demanded, on the verge of panic. She had never seen Valadrakul visibly frightened or upset before.
“’Tis Shadow,” the wizard said, almost gasping. “’Tis the matrix. Look you, how ’tis composed—ah, so splendid! Look you, how majestical! What glory is here before us!”
“It’s a lot of bright lights,” Amy said uneasily. Perhaps the wizard wasn’t scared after all, she realized; perhaps it was something else.
“Nay, you look, but you do not see! You’ve not the eyes, you who know nothing of the arcane arts!”
In the Empire of Shadow Page 24