by Tad Williams
As if the remark had been directed at him, Azador abruptly shut his own gaping jaw. "What are you saying?" he demanded after a moment. "That I am mad? That I don't know what the truth is? Or have you decided I am a simple liar after all?"
"How is it that you came through a gate that had closed, unless it opened again for you? How is it that you found your way off the mountain through all that gray nothing—something that for me needed all the tracking skill that my hunting people have learned in thousands of generations? How is it that you managed to push your raft upstream against the current to catch us? Most strange of all, why do you have clothes when the rest of us came here naked? What are the answers to any of these things if you have not been to this place before?" !Xabbu paused. "Whether you remember being here or not, that is another question."
"Yeah!" Sam said with dawning realization. "Scanbark! I didn't even think about that. He has clothes!"
"That is ridiculous!" Azador sputtered, but the haunted something was in his eyes again. "More sensible to call me a liar."
"If you like," !Xabbu said simply. "But there are other questions, too. Tell me of the Romany, Mr. Azador. Explain how you do not tell secrets to gorgios, as you told me before. How you and your Gypsy friends meet at Romany Fair, to pass stories and share information."
Now Azador truly did look befuddled, staring at the smaller man as though !Xabbu had started speaking in tongues. "What do you mean? I have never said any of those things to you—it was the girl who began this Gypsy nonsense."
Watching, Sam realized that her heart was beating painfully fast. Even Jongleur seemed stunned by what was going on.
!Xabbu shook his head. "No, Azador. You began it. In a prison cell, when I first met you. Then on a boat in a river in Kansas. Do you remember? You called me monkey-man, because I wore a baboon's body. . . ."
"You!" Azador leaped to his feet, sending the last embers of the fire in all directions. "You and your bitch of a friend—you stole my gold!" He lunged toward !Xabbu, who only took a step back.
"Stop!" Sam shrieked. She regretted the shrill, panicked sound, but not much. She yanked the haft and broken blade of Orlando's sword out of her waistband. "You touch him and I'll rip your guts out!"
"I will break your neck, girl," Azador snarled, but did not force the issue. Jongleur was on his feet now too, and for a moment they all stood frozen, a four-sided shape of mistrust.
"Before you do anything else," !Xabbu said, "tell me what we stole from you."
"My gold!" Azador shouted, but his face looked troubled, almost fearful. "My . . . gold."
"You do not remember what it was, do you?"
"I know you stole from me!"
!Xabbu shook his head. "We did not. We were separated by a failure of the system," he said as calmly as though Azador had not been glaring bloody murder at him, as though Sam were not standing with a broken sword in her hand leveled at the man's belly. "What do you truly remember? I think you have been here before, inside the so-called White Ocean. Can you not try to think? We are all in terrible danger."
Azador staggered back as though struck. His eyes wild, he waved his arms, then pointed at !Xabbu. "It is you—you are crazy! Azador is not crazy." He glared at Sam and her weapon, then at Jongleur. "All of you crazy!" A sob choked his words, "Not Azador!" He turned and ran limping out of the campsite, staggering across the meadow and up the slope of a low hill until he collapsed into the grass and lay there as if he had been shot.
"What have you done?" Jongleur demanded, but with little of his usual commanding tone.
"Saved us, perhaps. Go to him—I think he will not want either Sam or me to come near, but we need him."
Jongleur gaped as though !Xabbu, too, had thrown his arms in the air and begun to gibber. "Go to him. . . ?"
"Damn you, just go!" Sam shouted, waving the broken blade. "We were ready to leave you behind two days ago. Do something useful for a change!"
Jongleur appeared to consider several responses, but only turned his back on them and stalked off toward the fallen figure of Azador.
"That felt good!" said Sam. Her heart was still speeding.
"But Jongleur is an enemy that must be managed carefully," !Xabbu told her. "It is like handling a very poisonous snake—we should not tempt bad luck."
"How did you know? About Azador? And who is he? What is he?"
The confrontation over, !Xabbu seemed to shrink a little. "What Azador is, I cannot say for certain—not in a place as confusing as this network. But perhaps he is like the woman Ava we have all seen, or that boy that Jonas met—someone who drifts from world to world in this network, uncertain of his identity. Certainly he is not acting like the Azador I met before, who was very full of himself, too, but mostly cold and superior. And Jonas described an Azador who hardly spoke at all."
"You mean they're all different people?"
"I don't think so. But as I said, in this place, who knows?" !Xabbu seated himself beside the fire. "However, it is not who he is that is important now. Rather, it is where he has been."
"I don't understand."
!Xabbu gave her a weary grin. "Wait and see. Perhaps I will be correct again in my guesses and you will think me a very clever man. But if I am wrong, it will be less shameful if I have not bragged about what I think I can do. What comes next will be difficult."
"You seem different, too," Sam said suddenly. "I don't mean like a different person, but . . . but more confident."
"I have had time to listen to the ringing of the sun," he said. "Even though there is no sun here. To speak to the grandparent stars."
Sam shrugged. "I don't know what any of that means."
!Xabbu reached up and patted her arm. "It does not matter, Sam Fredericks. Now, let us see if we can work some magic on Mr. Azador."
"And what will you do if I don't cooperate?" Azador demanded. "Stab me with that sword?" He spoke with such an exaggerated tone of outrage that for a moment Sam could not help wondering if he might not be another stolen child hidden inside the shape of a grown man.
"It's tempting," she said quietly, but was quelled by !Xabbu's stern look.
"We will do nothing to you," the small man said. "We will simply go back to waiting for this world to disappear around us."
Jongleur stood a little apart, watching. He had regained his usual lizardlike reserve. Sam did not know what he had told the mustached man to bring him back, but she supposed she was grateful for it.
"I am in the hands of madmen," Azador said.
"That could be," !Xabbu replied. "But I promise no harm will come to you." He lifted his hand. "Give me your shirt."
Azador scowled, but stripped it off. !Xabbu took it and stood behind him, then rolled it and tied it around his eyes like a blindfold. "Can you see?"
"No, damn you, of course I can't!"
"It is important. Do not lie to me."
Azador waggled his head from side to side. "I can see nothing. If I break my leg, I will see the same happens to you, even if you gut me."
!Xabbu made a noise of irritation. "Nothing will happen. See, I will walk beside you, Sam on the other side. Come, Mr. Azador, you have said often enough that you are brave, resourceful. Why are you afraid to walk with your eyes covered?"
"I am not afraid. But the whole thing is stupid."
"Perhaps. Now the rest of us will be silent. We will walk beside the river. You will continue, please, until you feel it is a good place to cross."
Sam was puzzled but kept her peace. Even Jongleur appeared to be grudgingly interested in the experiment. They led Azador down to the last firm ground before the river-bank, then turned upstream.
They walked for a long time without talking, the quiet broken only by Azador's frustrated curses when he tripped on some unseen obstacle. In places the reed thickets grew so dense that they almost stumbled into the river; in other places the meadowlands stretched before them so openly that Sam felt her trust in !Xabbu's insights diminish. There was nothing but river and g
rass for as far as she could see. What difference would a man in a blindfold make?
After a while, Azador's reflexive grumbling began to die away. He moved like a sleepwalker now, walking stolidly forward, resting when the others rested, not even complaining when they wandered into mud. She heard him murmuring, but could not hear the words themselves.
Even the quality of his attention began to change as the first hour rolled into a second; a stillness came over him, and from time to time he stopped and tilted his head as though listening to something the others could not hear.
But by the time the light began to change, darkening just perceptibly as the middle of the day passed, they still had not found anything.
Look at us! Sam thought. Her feet hurt. She was hot and sticky. She felt a strong urge to lie down and let whatever was going to happen just happen, and had only kept herself moving during the last hour out of loyalty to !Xabbu. Azador's right—this is stupid. Four people stumbling along the river, looking for something when we already know its not here.
They were just making their way out of another whispering crowd of rushes when they saw the bridge.
Sam gasped. "But how. . . ? We've been here before! There wasn't . . . we didn't see. . . . Dzang!"
It was narrow, little more than a wall of piled stones with arch-shaped holes to let the river flow through, but it was wide enough for them all to walk across side by side. Most importantly of all, it stretched all the way to the meadows on the river's far bank—or seemed to, in any case: the other end of the bridge was obscured by low mists.
"You may uncover your eyes," !Xabbu told Azador.
Alone of them all, Azador showed no surprise, as though he had in some way seen the bridge already. Nevertheless, there was a frightened glint to his stare, and after a moment, he turned away. "I . . . I do not want to go there."
"We have no choice," !Xabbu said firmly. "Come. Lead us over."
Azador shook his head, but reluctantly moved toward the near end of the span. He hesitated for a moment before stepping up. !Xabbu followed him, then Sam and Jongleur. Sam marveled at the stony solidity of the thing—she knew they had passed this very spot only a day or so before, but no bridge had stood here.
Azador took a few steps, then stopped. "No," he said, his voice oddly distant. "First we . . . we must say something."
They all waited expectantly.
"Gray goose and gander,"
Azador murmured at last, his voice heavy with some emotion Sam could not decipher,
"Waft your wings together,
And carry the good king's daughter
Over the one-strand river."
After a moment he looked back at them, then stepped out onto the stone path above the glinting, slow-moving waters. Sam was disturbed to see that the man's eyes, hidden for so long, were now wet with tears.
CHAPTER 26
Flies and Spiders
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Smell-The Final Frontier
(visual: WeeWin's olfactory testing lab)
VO: The Euro-Asian toy company WeeWin has announced what it calls "the first genuine scent delivery system" for net users without neurocannular capabilities. WeeWin says the NozKnoz (pronounced "noseknows") system uses a scent palette of basic olfactory stimuli to create millions of different odors,
(visual: Dougal Craigie, WeeWin VPPR)
CRAIGIE: "Many people don't use neurocannulas-not just because they can't afford them, but also for medical and religious reasons. So we are not just excited, but deeply proud to announce that you no longer need to have your brain wired to enjoy the many smells of the net. This is not one of those cheap chocolate-and-cheese pastiche systems-NozKnoz nasal delivery plugs give results that cannot be distinguished from neurocannular stimulation."
* * *
Dulcie snuck another look at her silent employer, certain at some irrational level of her being that even in his deathlike sleep he must be able to sense her guilt, but if he did, his still form gave no indication. She turned back to the small screen on her pad, which she had chosen because it seemed more discreet than the wide wallscreen.
Dread's hidden storage had remained adamantly inaccessible. She had thrown every sort of decryption and security-breaking gear at it, had found it protected by nothing more advanced than a password, no quantum cryptography or anything special, but her gear had run an almost uncountable amount of number and letter combinations past it without success.
For God's sake! It's just a goddamn password! Why can't I break this?
Of course, when it came to passwords, it always helped if you knew something about the person whose account you were trying to crack.
Reluctantly, she gave up on penetrating her employer's mysteries, closed off her access to Dread's system and then ran some cleanup gear. She doubted that either Dread or his security program were sophisticated enough to spot her incursion, but there was no sense taking chances.
Irritated with herself, her earlier bold mood dissolving into worry and second thoughts, she opened up the Jongleur files—her legitimate work, if you could use such a term to describe felonious data theft—and got back down to business. As the signifiers filled her tiny screen she swore, then transferred operations up to the wallscreen—it was hard enough trying to make sense of things in two dimensions, let alone on a screen measured in centimeters. She left it at that, though: for some reason she felt reluctant to submerge herself in a 3D environment, even though she could do some things more efficiently in wraparound.
I'm scared to be helpless in a VR setup while I'm in the same room with Dread, she realized. It's not street hoodlums, not burglars I'm frightened of . . . but him. That's great, Anwin—two weeks into the thing is a bit late to realize it.
She looked at the dark ridgeline of his profile, moving up and down gently now as the bed massaged him, and a sudden image from her childhood reading leaped into her brain. She almost dropped her coffee.
Jesus, I'm Renfield. That guy who ate the flies and spiders. And it's my job to watch over Count Dracula.
She felt a little better after a quick shower, although she had decided on a caffeine moratorium for the rest of the day.
Dracula? Let's not get too morbid, Anwin, she told herself as she sat back down to stare at the Jongleur files. Still, she thought, if her boss popped up out of his humming coffin just now, even full of kind words and barely-veiled sexual interest as he sometimes was, she didn't think she was going to be very receptive.
She did her best to narrow her attention, sifting through the Jongleur information that had not made the first cut, yet which somehow might still hide useful data about the Grail network. An hour passed and she began to feel more like herself, even taking a few minutes to try to reopen Jongleur's weird Ushabti file, but her failure to provide the proper code or password the first time had left it as mute and secretive as an oyster.
They're just the goddamn same, the two of them. No wonder Jongleur hired him. . . . She froze, stunned by her own stupidity in not having thought of it sooner. My God, of course. His employer! If anybody's going to have any information on our boy Dread it's going to be Jongleur!
Within moments she had moved the display of Jongleur files back to the pad and had started to search. A request for "Dread" turned up nothing useful, which didn't entirely surprise her, and neither did "Sydney" or "Cartagena" "Isla de Santuario" or anything else that came to mind. How could you search for information on someone when you had almost no information with which to begin a search?
Jaws clamped so hard in concentration that she would have a headache later, Dulcie pulled up the immense bank of J Corporation accounting records and sent dozens of different bits of specialized gear looking for anomalies while performing the same search on Jongleur's personal files. The guy has to be paid, she thought. No matter what they call it, there has to be a connection. She also pulled up Dread's own system, all of which she had already explored except for the hidden storage—"the locked room," as she had begu
n to think of it, a phrase out of memory that rang a faint bell she was too busy to heed. It was boring, mundane stuff, but she wasn't looking for a revelation there, not in data she'd already examined. She was looking for a match, however obscure, a place where an open end on the Jongleur side lined up with something similar on Dread's side.
It took almost two hours, but she found it at last. A short string of numbers on a single disbursement out of the J Corporation's staggeringly large operating budget, routed through several smaller companies with no obvious connection to the corporation, one in North Africa, the others in the Caribbean, matched another string of numbers in an account which, although it belonged to an apparently fictitious company, was nevertheless listed on Dread's own system. Based on the dates, she suspected she was looking at some of the expenses for setting up the Colombian assault. It seemed to be an emergency replacement for some funds that had been misrouted, which was the only reason she had found the connection.
It's the little mistakes that kill you every time, she thought gleefully.
With this single small thread in her fingers she began to pick her way backward, following the chain of authority, sometimes by easy steps, sometimes only by leaps of practiced intuition, until at last she found herself moving slowly back up the connection she had discovered between the J Corporation and Jongleur's own personal system. Her palms were sweating, her heart fluttering.
The strands led to a group of files in Jongleur's system labeled "disposal"—which she at first thought was a little joke on the old man's part, but when she began to examine them she found that they were indeed contracts, reports, and other information about the hugely complex waste removal systems of the artificial island, thousands and thousands of nested files, all perfectly, boringly normal. She sat back, stunned and disappointed. How could she have been so wrong? Had she missed a stitch back there somewhere, then followed the wrong thread all the way back across the tapestry? It would take her at least another few hours to go back over it and find her mistake.