Sea of Silver Light

by Tad Williams

  And for them it is, Paul thought. But when they're all dead, will they rise again and start over like the Looking Glass people? Or has Dread frozen this simulation in permanent decay?

  Titus was right—the mountains had simply sprouted from the ground like weeds. As they neared the valley floor they found no foothills, no gentling of the slope, only a jumble of boulders and scree around the mountains' roots. This was the most difficult part of the journey so far, every step threatening to set off a landslide, so although he was aware of the glow for some time, it wasn't until they were actually standing on the muddy fiats beside the river that Paul saw the fires of Dodge City.

  "Great God," Florimel said quietly. "What have they done?"

  "What they'll do to you," Titus whispered. "And to me, too, so shut up!"

  He beckoned them into a hollow where a cluster of boulders had tumbled free of the mountainside and stood piled like a giant pawnbroker's sign. From this pathetic hiding place they could look out across the river and the narrow valley to a huge bonfire in the main street that blotted the stars with its massive plume of smoke, as well as countless lesser blazes running along the roofs of Dodge City like Christmas tinsel. Shadows leaped and twirled through the stark, red-lighted streets; even from the far side of the river, they could hear screams.

  "It's burning down," Paul whispered.

  "Naw. Been like that since those devil-men took it," said.

  Titus. "Burns and burns, but it doesn't never burn down." He shook his head slowly. "The End of Days."

  "So where are we going, exactly?" Paul quietly asked Martine. He could feel his own heart hammering, and could see that Florimel and T4b were no less disturbed at the idea of walking into such a terrible place.

  "I don't know. Let me have a quiet moment to think." She got up and crawled a few meters away, putting one of the massive boulders between herself and her companions.

  "Hate to spoil things," Titus said, "but it's time for this mother's son to be moving on."

  "Just wait a moment longer," Paul begged him. "We may have more questions to ask you. . . ."

  The moment stretched into something longer, while Paul and the others watched the proof of Titus' words not a half-kilometer away, flames that burned and burned along the housetops and high false fronts but never consumed them, despite the apparent flimsiness of the buildings.

  "It is no use," Martine said, crawling back. "I can make nothing of it—too many distractions, too much disruption. If Dread had set out deliberately to make things difficult for my senses, he could not have done better."

  "So where then?" Florimel demanded. "Simply walk into that? It would be madness."

  "Just follow the river, us," T4b suggested. "Make a raft. Sail on out of this scan-palace."

  "Were you not listening?" Although her voice was low, Martine sounded as angry as Paul had ever heard her. "There is no other way to the place we seek. If we follow the river to the far gateway, and we are not killed by something on the way, there is little chance the gate will be open and no guarantee it will not dump us somewhere worse. If we wish to reach Egypt we must find this nearer gateway."

  "Find we get sixed up true, ask me," T4b muttered, but fell silent.

  "Where are the places we have encountered these things before," she said to Paul and Florimel. "Mazes? Catacombs?"

  "The mines?" Florimel suggested. "There were mines on the mountainside." She groaned. "Great God, I do not think I can climb back up."

  "Cemeteries," Paul said. "Places of the dead. The Brotherhood's little joke." He allowed himself a grim smile. "Came back and bit them in the arse, too, didn't it?" He turned to Titus, who had been watching them with puzzled fascination. "Is there a cemetery in the town?"

  "Oh, yeah, just outside to the northwest. Over that way." He pointed across the river, out toward the darkness to the left of the blazing town. "Got some silly-ass name. Boot Hill, something like that."

  "Boot Hill," Paul breathed. "I've heard of it. Can we just cross the river and walk to it?" He looked at his companions. "We won't even have to go into the town at all."

  "I got no idea what kind of nonsense you all plan to get up to, but I can tell you this—you're not getting to Boot Hill by going around Dodge that direction. When the mountains came up, the riverbanks broke up over there. It's a swamp now, and there are snakes as big around as a bedroll and long as a twenty-mule team, not to mention mosquitoes the size of hawks." He shrugged. "I know it doesn't make no earthly sense, snakes and jackalos and whatnot just coming up out of the ground like that—why didn't anyone see one before? That's why I think it's Judgment."

  "We know about the snakes here," said Paul. "We met one. What about the other way around, east of the town?"

  "Not too good of an idea. Just beyond town that way the Arkansas drops off just like that," he tilted his long fingers steeply downward, "—a waterfall—and there's a canyon goes down so deep it's dark at the bottom even at high noon. Canyon stretches for miles that direction. Why do you think we're all living on that mountainside instead of getting the blazes away from here?" He stood up. "You should have listened to Masterson when he told you to stay put. He's a good man, and has a lot more sense than most. Now I'm going to get moving. I don't like being this close to Dodge."

  "But wait," Florimel said, a hint of panic in her voice. "Do we just . . . walk across the bridge?"

  "If you can't wait to lose your scalps, sure enough. There's a dozen or so of them devil-men sitting on it night and day. But if you'd like to draw the whole thing out a little longer, I suggest you wade across the river a few hundred feet this side of the bridge. The Arkansas is good and shallow this time of year, even with all this topsy-turvy."

  He threw them a mocking salute and then was gone into the darkness, silent as a bird flying.

  "Everyone seems pretty damned certain we're going to be killed," Paul said quietly.

  "Everyone is probably right," growled Florimel.

  The Arkansas waters, though never more than waist-deep, had a distinctly sinister feel, warm and oily. The river even had a strange undertow which tugged steadily at the travelers despite the sluggishness of the current, like a street urchin who had found his intended mark and would not turn loose.

  Paul found he did not want to think about the water much, not just because of the unpleasant feel, but because he found himself imagining the many different things that might be swimming toward them from the swamp Titus had described.

  Far on their right along the riverbank, illuminated by another group of huge bonfires, stood a massive fenced enclosure that Paul guessed was some kind of yard for shipping cattle. Despite the late hour it seemed that branding was going on, although wordless but still distinctive shrieks made it clear the victims were not cows.

  Not all the voices were raised in pain. As a chorus of shouts and laughs rolled out from the stockyard Paul saw Martine falter and almost fall into the water. He grabbed her arm to brace her.

  "To hear his voice again," she whispered, eyes squeezed tightly shut as if she could somehow make herself deaf by increasing her blindness. "To hear it multiplied, echoed over and over on all sides. . . ."

  "It's just a trick. Like you said, they're just crude copies. He's not really here." But was that true, he wondered, or wishful thinking? Perhaps Dodge had a new sheriff.

  A dozen meters from the bank, Martine grabbed Paul's arm again. For a moment he thought that the situation had finally become too much for her, but though her face showed strain, she was alert, listening, scanning.

  "Titus was right," she hissed. "There are men on the bridge."

  "That's why we're here," Paul said, but he waved for T4b and Florimel to stop.

  "But there are men on the other side of the river, too," she said. "Not close enough for us to hear them, but I can sense them. If we come up out of the river we'll be right in their laps."

  "So what should we do?" Paul was fighting to keep a handle on his own desperation. Cries of misery and terro
r floated through the valley, echoing dimly in the mountainsides. "We can't go back!"

  "Turn west," Martine said decisively. "Stay in the river. Go under the bridge. We'll be closer to the side of town we want—we will not have to cross so much open ground."

  "You said there are men on the bridge!" Florimel whispered, leaning in close. "What if they hear us?"

  "We have no other choice," Martine told her, but still no one moved. Paul could feel the moment hanging and knew that, surprisingly, the others were waiting for him to decide. He turned and began wading toward the bridge.

  As they drew closer he could see shadowy human shapes atop the span, silhouetted by the numerous fires, but to Paul's relief they were down at the end nearer the town. He moved out toward midstream and into a deep spot where the oily water again streamed just beneath his chest and even higher on the two women. The wooden bridge was wide and low, but there was plenty of room beneath for them to pass. As Paul moved under it the darkness enfolded him like a fist.

  Before he had gone halfway he heard loud footsteps above him. He froze, hoping the others would do the same even though they couldn't see him. The bridge creaked as more men joined the first. Paul cursed silently: the footsteps seemed to be right overhead. Had they been spotted? Maybe the Dread-replicas were just waiting until they emerged from the bridge's shadow to shoot them like fish in a shallow pond.

  Even as he stood, his pulse beating so hard in his temple it felt like someone was tapping his head, he heard a muffled splash a few meters away, then a wash of current. An invisible something was in the water with them—one of the men climbing down from the bridge to investigate? Paul pulled the gun out of the inner pocket of his jumpsuit and held it high above the level of the water, afraid to shoot but terrified at the thought of a wrestling match with anyone as wiry and strong as the man they had seen in the cave.

  "What. . . ?" Florimel whispered, but never finished her question. Something thundered from above, an explosion so sudden and loud that for a moment Paul thought he had pulled his own gun's trigger by accident. The shot was still echoing in his ears when something big and solid smashed into him. He was thrown sideways off his feet; if he had not been flung into one of his companions, he would have gone under the water, gun and all. The men above were shouting and laughing, which covered the noises of terror from Paul's friends as they realized that something huge was in the water with them, thrashing violently.

  "Snake!" Martine hissed, sounding serpentine herself in her fright. T4b let out a muffled screech as a flailing, muscular tail knocked him over. Paul flailed through the water until he found the struggling youth, then got a grip on his arm. Florimel grabbed him, too, and together they yanked him back to the surface, bubbling and sobbing.

  "Don't move!" Martine whispered. "Quiet!"

  T4b might have wanted to argue, but he was too busy spewing river water. Florimel held him. The serpent was still thrashing the waters near them, but was moving away, as though it had struck them in a panic rather than by intent. When it fought its way out into the light on the east side of the bridge, Paul's skin crawled. The thing which had scraped against him was almost the size of the ore-train monster that had chased them down the mountain.

  A dozen more shots thundered down, making the water hiss all around the huge tube of the snake's body. The men on the bridge were shrieking with joyful bloodlust.

  "For God's sake," Martine said, "now, now!"

  As she sloshed away, Paul grabbed T4b again and helped Florimel drag him toward the west side of the bridge. Behind them the wounded snake had beaten the waters to a firelit froth. The men jumped around on the bridge overhead as though they were dancing, firing shot after shot into the river and the dying reptile.

  Despite a midnight hot as an oven Paul was shivering when they dragged themselves up onto me riverbank, deep in the shadows a hundred meters west of the bridge. He and his companions lay in the mud for several minutes, panting. They could still hear the party on the bridge, although the gunshots now came infrequently.

  As they forced themselves to rise and move up the bank the other noises of the town reasserted themselves, screams and cries that sounded barely human, tearful pleading, more of the shouting and devilish laughter of the town's destroyers. But to Paul's amazement there was also music, something he knew he should recognize, a classical melody played on a tinny piano that yawed in and out of rhythm, as though someone were staging the torture and slaughter like a pageant and had commissioned the most incongruous soundtrack they could imagine.

  Wanting to know as little as possible about what was going on in Dodge City, Paul led the company farther to the west, despite Martine's headshake of warning, but he quickly discovered that Titus had been right: within moments they stumbled onto swampy ground, and into sucking mud up to their knees.

  Florimel found herself in something even more treacherous. If T4b had not been just behind her, still making quiet hawking and spitting sounds from his own immersion, she would have been gone beneath the surface of the quicksand before Paul or Martine had noticed her absence. While Tb4 clutched her, Martine—who despite her blindness could clearly see in the dark better than the rest of them—found a stick to hold out to her. When they dragged her free, Florimel too was weeping.

  "It is too much," she said. "I am not strong enough—I can barely walk on level ground."

  Paul turned to Martine. "Okay. You were right, I was wrong. So where do we go?"

  "I cannot say for certain—this place is very distorted to my senses—but the swamp comes right up next to this side of the town. We must stay among the buildings if we wish to avoid stumbling into more quicksand."

  Paul closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. "Right. Here we go."

  They cautiously retraced their steps to the place they had come out of the river. Front Street lay in front of them again, its buildings all in perpetual flame. A quarter of a mile away to the east a huge bonfire blazed in the middle of the street, between the main railroad line and its spur, and countless dark shapes reeled and whirled around it, celebrating a festival of destruction that had apparently been going on for days. But although most of those who had devastated the city seemed to be gathered there, dozens more staggered back and forth across the street at the end where Paul and his companions waited in the shadows, desperately hoping for some miracle that would allow them to make their way across the wide street unobserved.

  Although all of Front Street's blazing buildings still stood, some of the facades had collapsed, leaving the interiors open to the companions' horrified eyes like museum dioramas—and a strange, terrible museum it was. In the saloons, blank-eyed women with scorched legs danced on burning stages, wearily ducking the bottles and sharp objects being flung by whooping audiences of replicated Dreads. Men hung upside down from chandeliers with their throats cut, blood-drained like deer being readied for the smokehouse. Other bodies lay piled in the streets, although some had been propped against buildings or on benches in ghastly tableaux. The Dread-men reeled back and forth, drinking busthead whiskey out of jugs, some so drunk they crawled in the gutter barking like dogs or danced with vomit still streaking their mouths and chests.

  It's not real, Paul tried to tell himself. It's just like a netshow—not even that. These aren't even actors, just puppets. But it was hard to make himself believe it when every smell and sound was so horrifyingly real, and especially when he knew the things around him could hurt him or even kill him.

  Up the street, one of the Dreads rolled a barrel into the huge bonfire, then stood gaping as the ammunition inside began to explode. Within seconds the instigator was cut into bloody ribbons by flying lead, but others of his kind came running toward the fire, excited by the noise. Some went down in the hail of random bullets, but the others seemed to find the spectacle vastly amusing and formed a whooping circle around the fire.

  Taking advantage of the distraction, Paul signaled the others forward, out into the open street. They loped
silently to the railroad tracks that ran down the middle of Front Street, trying not to look too long at the mostly female corpses tied to the tracks. There was not in any case much left to see, since someone had run a locomotive back and forth over them several times before apparently tiring of the game and setting the locomotive itself on fire. The remains of the engine still stood on the tracks like the blackened skeleton of some huge sea creature, affording them a moment's shelter from any eyes which might look their way, but the stench of the mutilated bodies quickly drove them on.

  They had almost crossed into the safety of the shadows beyond the end of the street when Martine suddenly slowed and clutched at Paul's arm. Although most of the Dread-men were now capering around the bonfire at the far end of the street, Paul and his companions were still in the open, exposed to any chance gaze, and his nerves were screaming, but Martine pushed at him insistently.

  "Can't go this way," she gasped. "Head toward the cross street."

  He had learned his lesson. Without argument, even though it went against all his instincts, he turned and trotted a short way back up Front toward the center of the town before turning north into a side street beside a two-story building whose smoldering front still proudly proclaimed it "Wright, Beverley and Co." They had only just stepped off the main avenue when a group of riders came thundering around the corner from the direction where they had just been heading, a small troop of drunken Dread-men riding mutant horses, bellowing as they went past the shadowed cross street where Paul and the others pressed themselves back against the side of the building.

  The music was louder in the side street, as though they stood near the speakers in a hellish amusement park, but there was something in the wobbly sound of it that made Paul want to turn away from it and brave the main thoroughfare again. His more logical side won out: he waved for the others and they headed away from Front while the noise of the piano rose and fell.