by Tad Williams
To her immense relief he appeared from around the corner of the wagon. "Sam, are you all right?"
"Chizz. I just didn't know where you were. What time is it?"
He shrugged. "Who can say here? A night has passed, and this is as much morning as we are going to get, it seems."
She looked out at the wet grass, the white tendrils of mist between the trees, and felt a thrill of fear. "It's all shutting down, isn't it?"
"I don't know, Sam. It seems a strange way for a simulation to behave. But it does not make me happy, no."
"Where are the others?"
"Azador went away early this morning, but came back. Now he is sitting in the center of the meadow and will not talk to me. Jongleur has gone out walking too." !Xabbu looked tired. Sam wondered if he'd had any sleep at all, but before she could ask him, a tall, gaunt, and mostly naked shape appeared out of the gray murk at the edge of the clearing.
"We can wait here no longer," Jongleur announced before he had even reached them. "We will leave this place now."
In the real world, Sam thought sourly, you got breakfast. In this world, you got a two-hundred-year-old mass murderer spouting orders at you before your eyes were all the way open. "Yeah? How are we going to do that?"
Jongleur barely glanced at her. "Azador can take us to the operating system," he told !Xabbu. "You said that."
!Xabbu shook his head. "Not me. The . . . the stepmother told him he could. But he did not believe it."
"We will make him believe it."
"Are you going to torture him or something?" Sam demanded. "Trick him?"
"I think I can help him find the way," Jongleur said coolly. "Torture is unnecessary."
"Oh, you're going to show him how to do it?"
"Sam," !Xabbu said quietly.
"Your manners are typical of your generation. That is to say, nonexistent." Jongleur glanced at Azador, sitting a few dozen meters away, looking bleakly out at the forest. He lowered his voice. "Yes, I will do it. I built this system in the first place, and I have learned a few things now about this backwater section of it." He turned to !Xabbu. "Azador is a construct, a pet of the operating system, as is all this world. You proved that, to your credit." Disturbingly, he tried to smile. Sam thought of crocodiles. "He will have within him a direct connection of some sort, even if he is not aware of it. 'To the place where you touch the One, as we all do,' the stepmother-program said. Am I right?"
!Xabbu looked at him carefully for a moment, then shrugged. "So how will we do this?"
"We must find the next river. Those are the crossing points, the connections, like the gateways we built into the Grail system. The rest you must leave to me."
"How did you know what the stepmother said, anyway?" Sam asked suddenly. "You didn't listen to her. You went off by yourself."
Jongleur's face was a mask.
"You've been talking to Azador already, haven't you?" she said, answering her own question. "Just utterly whispering In his ear."
"He does not trust you," Jongleur said calmly. "He is unhappy, and feels you forced him to come here."
"Oh, and you're his friend now? He wants to kill all the Grail people. Did you mention that you had a little something to do with that?"
!Xabbu laid a hand on her arm. Across the foggy expanse of grass, Azador had turned to look at them. "Quietly, Sam, please."
For a brief moment Jongleur seemed about to respond with an equal measure of fury, then the storm building inside him calmed, or was suppressed. "Does it matter what he would really think of me? We need him. This part of the network—perhaps the whole thing—is dying. You said yourself that I was useless, girl. Perhaps I have been that so far, although I think your absent friend might remember that I saved her life on the mountain. Can I not contribute something now?" He fixed her with his cold, clear stare. "What will it hurt if I try, other than your pride?"
Sam could not help staring back. There was something odd in Jongleur's stiff manner, something off-kilter and discomforted. He's been funny ever since we followed Azador here, she thought. Could he actually be, like, turning into a human being a little bit?
She doubted it, but despite her dislike and distrust of the man, could not really argue with what he said. "I guess we have to do . . . something." She looked at !Xabbu, but the small man showed little reaction except to nod briefly.
"Good." Jongleur clapped his hands together. The crack echoed through the gloomy clearing. "Then it is time to set off."
"Just one thing," Sam said. "There were some clothes left in the wagon I slept in. If it's going to stay dark around here, it's going to be cold, so I'm going to find something to wear."
Jongleur did not smile again, for which Sam was grateful, but he nodded his approval. "As long as we do it swiftly, that is a good idea." He glanced down briefly at his own sarong of reeds and leaves. "The novelty of simply having a body has worn off. I grow weary of being scratched by branches and thorns. I will find some clothes as well."
Although the garments in Sam's wagon had been colorful, even gaudy, Felix Jongleur managed to find an old and somewhat threadbare black suit and collarless white shirt in one of the other wagons. Sam thought he looked like a preacher or an undertaker out of a net Western,
Bowing to the trend, !Xabbu had discarded his own brief kilt of woven leaves for a pair of pants only a few shades darker than his own golden skin, but had stopped there.
Sam inspected the blue satin pants and ruffled shirt she had selected—the best she could find, but nothing she would have been caught dead in at home. Like the back end of the world's saddest, most impacted parade, that's what we look like.
A quiet conversation with Jongleur had apparently reconciled Azador to the old man's plan. Whatever emotions the place had provoked in him, he did not look back as he led them out of the clearing and away from the circle of brightly painted wagons. Sam could not help taking a final, yearning glance at the ghostly vehicles, which seemed almost to float above the misty grass. It had been nice to sleep in a bed, however small and confined. She wondered if she would ever get the chance again.
Azador led them on a long winding trek through the forest, a journey that would have lasted until long past noon if anything like noon had ever come. The light remained minimal and diffuse, the forest a twilit haze. A few weak little lights like dying fireflies pulsed in the treetops but added nothing to the cold gray world.
Sam had grown so weary of stumbling through the damp, dark woods that she was about to scream, if only to hear a sound that wasn't dripping water or their own scuffing feet, when Azador stopped them.
"There is the river," he said dully, pointing downhill through a break in the trees. The gray water did not shine, and looked more like the mark of a broad pencil than the lively stream they had seen elsewhere. "But even if I find the bridge, it will only lead us to the next country, far from the center where the Well is."
"I suspect we were far from Romany Fair when you found the last bridge," Jongleur said. "Not in the country beside it. Am I right?"
Azador seemed tired and confused. "I suppose. I do not know."
"You found Romany Fair because it was where you wanted to go. Just as you found your way out of these worlds in the first place. Am I right?"
Azador swayed. He lifted his hands to cover his face. "It is too hard for me to remember. I have lost everything."
Jongleur took his arm. "I will speak to him alone," he told Sam and !Xabbu. The old man dragged Azador along the hill, out of earshot, then leaned close to his face as though forcing the attention of an unwilling child; Sam almost thought Jongleur would take the Gypsy's chin in his hand to keep him from looking away.
"Why can't he talk in front of us? I don't trust him, do you?"
"Of course I do not trust," !Xabbu said. "But there is something different in him. Have you seen that?"
Sam admitted she had. They watched as Jongleur finished his harangue and led Azador back toward them.
"We are going to find the bridge n
ow," Jongleur said flatly. Azador looked stunned and exhausted, like someone who had given up arguing because he knew he could not win. He glanced at Sam and !Xabbu as though he had never seen them before, then turned and began to make his way down the steep, forested slope.
"What did you tell him?" Sam demanded between breaths.
"A way to think." Jongleur did not elaborate.
They came out of the trees onto a slope just above the river. Azador stood with his arms limp at his sides, staring at a bridge.
"Lock me sideways," Sam said, panting. "He did it."
It was a covered bridge made of rickety wood, like a single small house stretched to absurdity across the dark, flat river. She could just see the spot where it touched the other bank through the mist hovering above the river, but she knew better by now than to assume that the hilly forest there, a mirror of the place where they stood, was their actual destination.
When they reached Azador, they discovered that his eyes were closed.
"I do not want to cross," he said quietly.
"Nonsense," Jongleur told him. "You want to find your people, don't you? You want to do what the One has commanded of you."
"My own end is there," Azador said miserably. "As it was foretold. I can feel it."
"You feel your own fear," Jongleur responded. "Nothing is achieved unless fear is overcome." He hesitated, then put his hand on Azador's arm—a more or less human gesture which surprised Sam almost as much as it startled the Gypsy. "Come. We all need you. I am sure your people need you, too."
"But. . . ."
"Even death can be outwitted," Jongleur said. "Did I not tell you that?"
Azador swayed. Sam could almost see him weakening. For a long moment she wondered whether she wanted him to give in or not.
"Very well," he said heavily. "I will go across."
"Good man." Jongleur squeezed his arm. The old man seemed excited, even anxious, but Sam could not imagine why. Her mistrust flared again, but he was already leading Azador onto the span.
Sam and !Xabbu followed a few steps behind. Within moments they had passed beneath the roof of the bridge. It was so dark inside that the gray twilight they had left behind now seemed bright afternoon by comparison. Sam found herself straining toward the single point of gray light hovering far in front of them, the opening at the bridge's other end. Her footsteps echoed in the small space. The bridge creaked beneath her.
"Wait a minute," she said. "If that's the light from the other end, how come we can't see Jongleur and Azador in front of us. . . ? !Xabbu?" She stopped. "!Xabbu?"
Even the point of light was wavering now, as though fog were drifting in from the river to fill the covered bridge. Sam's heart sped. She turned, but there was no longer a light behind her, either. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"
She could hear nothing but the thumping of her heart and the soft creak of timbers beneath her feet. The darkness was so close, so strong, that Sam could feel it twining around her like a living thing. She put out her hands, searching for the bridge's walls, but her fingers touched only cold air. Panicked, she began to move forward, or what she thought was forward—slowly at first, but her cautious movements quickly gave way to a trot, then a breakneck run.
Right into the grip of something as strong as pain, as cold as regret.
Living fear caught her up like a huge dark fist. In a split-instant a deathly chill burrowed into her, numbing her body into nonexistence, until there was nothing of her left but a tiny flicker—a thought, a breath, struggling against the all-conquering nothing.
I've felt this before—inside the temple in the desert. But I didn't remember how . . . how bad. . . !
She was not alone. Somehow she could feel !Xabbu, and even Jongleur, as if they were all connected to her through the dark by some sputtering, fading circuit—!Xabbu drowning in emptiness, Jongleur shrieking in the shadows, snatching at the blackness as if to pull it into some more coherent shape—but it was only a glimmer, a moment. Then the others were gone and she was left alone, a dying spark.
Let me go, she thought, but there seemed nothing that could hear her or wanted to listen.
The force that held her squeezed, squeezed hard, and the void wrapped her and pulled her down. . . .
It was the park near her old house—a place she had not seen for years and years, but the swings and monkey bars were still as familiar as her own hands. She was sitting on the grass at the edge of the play area, in the bright sunshine, scuffing her bare feet in the sand and looking at the patterns it made, at the bits of tanbark sticking up through the pale drifts like flotsam on a frozen ocean.
Orlando was sitting beside her. Not the barbarian-hero Orlando, or even the wizened, cartoonish thing she had sometimes seen in her darker thoughts since learning about his illness, but the Orlando she had once imagined, the dark-haired boy with the thin, serious face.
"It doesn't want you," Orlando said. "It doesn't really care much about anything anymore."
Sam stared at him, trying to remember how she had come to be in such a place. All she could remember with any certainty was that Orlando was dead, which didn't seem like a very polite thing to bring up.
"I think if you can, you'd better get out," he continued, then bent to pluck a long grass stem.
"Get out. . . ?"
"Of where you are. It doesn't want you, Sam. It doesn't understand you. I think it's stopped trying."
The ground shuddered—just a little, but Sam felt it in her haunches, as though someone had struck the world a heavy blow, but far from where they sat. "I'm scared," she said.
"Of course you are." He smiled. It was just the kind of crooked smile she'd always imagined him having. "I would be, too, if I was still alive."
"Then, you know. . . ?"
He held up the stem of grass, then blew it out of his fingers. "I'm not really here, Sam. If I were, I'd be calling you 'Fredericks,' wouldn't I?" He laughed. His shirt, she could not help seeing with loving pity, was buttoned wrong. "You're just talking to yourself, pretty much."
"But how do I know about . . . about what it thinks?"
"Because you're inside it, scanmaster. You're in its mind, I guess you'd call it—way inside. In its dreams. And that's not a very good place to be right now."
The ground shuddered again, a more distinct rolling, as though something beneath them had discovered itself confined and was chafing against its restraints. The rings on the monkey bars began to sway slowly,
"But I don't know how to get out!" she said. "There's nothing I can do!"
"There's always something you can do." His smile was sad. "Even if it's not enough." He got up and dusted off knees of his pants. "I have to go now."
"Just tell me what to do!"
"I don't know anything you don't know yourself," he explained, then turned and walked away across the grass, a field of green far more immense than what she remembered. Within moments the slightly awkward figure had diminished until she felt she could have reached out and picked him up in one hand.
"But I don't know anything!" she called after him.
Orlando turned. The day had grown dark, the sun lost behind clouds, and he was hard to see. "It's scared," he called back to her. Another rumble passed through the ground, bouncing Sam where she sat, but Orlando did not waver. "It's really scared. Remember that."
Sam tried to scramble after him but the earth beneath her feet had begun to pitch and she could not get her footing. For a moment she thought she had her balance under her at last, might be able to catch him before he disappeared—she had always been a fast runner, and Orlando was crippled, wasn't he?—then a vast black something came up from beneath the surface of the world, breaching the crumbling earth like a whale heaving up out of the ocean's dark underneath, and Sam was thrown headlong into the sagging, collapsing deeps.
The swift rasp, she realized at last, was the sound of her own terrified breath sawing in and out. She could feel dirt beneath her fingers, dirt against her face. She did not want
to open her eyes, frightened that if she did she would see something staring back at her, something as big as all Creation.
It was the sound of someone gasping next to her that gave her the courage to look.
She was lying on her back beneath a purple-gray bruise of a sky, grimmer even than what had stretched above the forest. The ground beneath her felt hard and real. They were on a slope, surrounded by hills that looked something like the crown of the black mountain, a bleak landscape without vegetation.
Sam sat up. !Xabbu was on his hands and knees beside her, his face pressed against the earth, his chest expanding and contracting as if he were having a heart attack, sobs hitching in his throat. She crawled to him and put her arms around him.
"!Xabbu, it's me! It's Sam. Talk to me!"
The noises quieted a little. She could feel his compact body shuddering against her. At last he calmed. He turned toward her, his face wet with tears, but for a moment did not seem to recognize her.
"I am sorry," he said. "I have failed you. I am nothing."
"What are you talking about? We're alive!"
He stared, then shook his head. "Sam?"
"Yes, Sam. We're alive! Oh, God, I didn't think . . . I didn't know . . . but I did, I just forgot about it, like it was too painful or something. When I was in the temple in the desert with Orlando, it was just the same. . . ." She realized that !Xabbu was looking at her in confusion, and that she was babbling. "Never mind. I'm just so happy you're here!" She hugged him tightly, then sat up. She was still wearing her borrowed Gypsy finery, as was he. "But where are we?"
Before he could answer, they both heard a cry from farther down the slope. They climbed to their feet and made their way down the scree of dark, crumbling soil, and found Felix Jongleur on the other side of a small hillock. He was lying on his side with his eyes squeezed shut, writhing like a salted slug.
"No," the old man gasped, "you cannot. . . ! The birds . . . the birds will. . . !"
!Xabbu reached out a tentative hand. When it touched him. Jongleur's eyes snapped open.
"She is mine!" he shrieked, flailing at them. "She is. . . ." He stopped and his face crumpled. For a moment he seemed to look at !Xabbu and Sam without defenses, his eyes those of a hunted, desperate animal. Then the mask was back in place. "Do not touch me," he snapped. "Do not ever touch me. . . ."