by Tad Williams
"Enough," Martine said abruptly, although she still held Sam Fredericks' hand firmly in her own. "We do not come at a happy time, no matter how it eases our hearts to see you. Dread is behind us."
Fredericks screwed up her face in puzzlement. "Dread?"
"You have seen him only once, I think, on the top of the black mountain when he was the size of a god—an evil, angry god."
"Scanny! Yeah, I remember!"
"Well, that is the Dread who is coming—no, who is already here. The operating system fights him. There."
Only a few last flickers of lightning now blinked in the distant hills, gleaming scratches across the night sky, dim as firefly trails.
Paul and the others settled down around one of the campfires, huddled beneath the night. The Well pulsed beside them, a pit full of earthbound polar lights that turned even the few familiar faces grotesque.
Martine tried to keep some kind of order in the proceedings but curiosity and urgency made too volatile a mix: few questions were entirely answered before another volley had been launched. Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins and the little boy named Cho-Cho could only watch in amazement as the words fountained out of the others. Paul found himself almost as impressed by hearing the adventures of his own group recounted—it made a formidably strange tale—as he was by hearing what had happened to !Xabbu and Sam. But one element of their story struck him more powerfully than any other, until at last he had to interrupt Sam Fredericks in mid-flow.
"I'm sorry, but. . . ." His head was throbbing, his entire body so weak with stress and fatigue he could barely sit up, but he could not let this go. "I almost can't believe I'm hearing this. You traveled with Jongleur? With Felix Jongleur, the bastard who made this whole thing?" The bastard who stole my life away, he wanted to shout, but he could see by Sam's expression that she was not happy about it either.
"We . . . we thought we had to do it, even if it was majorly impacted." She looked to !Xabbu for support, but the little man had risen a few minutes earlier and walked off to do something, so she had to turn back to Paul. "Renie said . . . she said we might need him. Need what he knew."
Paul fought down his anger. "I'm amazed." He swallowed. "That you didn't just push him off a cliff, I mean. Or skull him with a rock." Paul sat up straight and tried to calm himself—there was much crucial information to share.
"Where did he go, finally? What happened to him?"
Sam took a moment to answer. "What . . . what do you mean?"
"When did you part ways with him, or did something eat him, I hope?"
Her age was truly apparent for the first time. She was suddenly a nervous teenager faced with an angry adult. "But . . . he's here." She looked at Paul and his companions as though they should know this already. "Right over there," she said, pointing.
Paul felt a kind of tightness around his temples, a band of pain. Only a few meters away Azador and a bald man in dark clothes stood watching them, Azador talking animatedly, his companion silent, eyes half-shut. "That's . . . that's him?" Paul's chest felt like someone was sitting on it. "That's Felix Jongleur?"
"Yes, but. . . ." Before Fredericks could get out another word, Paul was on his feet and running.
Azador looked up. "Ionas, my friend!" he said, opening his arms, but Paul was already past him. He threw his full weight onto the bald man and dragged him to the ground. Jongleur had seen him coming, but Paul's anger was such that for the first moments there was no stopping him. He seized Jongleur's head in both hands and smashed it back against the ground, then climbed up onto him and began swinging at his face. The man fought back, throwing up his arms to block Paul's wild blows, writhing in an effort to unseat him. Paul had the satisfaction of feeling some of his punches land on Jongleur's hard head, but it seemed to be happening at a distance greater than the length of his arms. Voices were shouting in his head and his exploding rage seemed to have knocked time slightly out of joint.
Stole my life! Tried to kill me!
He swung again and again.
Bastard! Murderer!
He was grunting some of the words out loud. There were other voices too—Paul could dimly hear people calling his name, pulling at his arms—but Jongleur stayed coldly silent. The older man had weathered the flurry of blows; now his hand snaked up and clutched Paul's chin, forcing his head backward until his vertebrae threatened to separate.
"Kill you!" Paul shouted, but Jongleur was slipping away from him as though Paul were on the bank of a river and his enemy on a boat in the current. Dimly, through the haze of anger and adrenaline, he realized that he was wrapped now in several arms and was being lifted from the ground and off his quarry. At least two of the men holding him were Gypsies, muscular men who smelled of wood-smoke.
"Let me go!" lie bellowed, but it was no use. He was held too firmly.
"Just stop," Florimel said in his ear. "You will do no good, Paul."
Azador had pulled Jongleur back out of Paul's reach. "Why are you doing this?" the Gypsy demanded. "You are my good friend, Ionas. But this man, too, he is my friend. Why should friends fight?"
Paul heard Azador's words but could make no sense of them. He stared at Jongleur with helpless hatred. The older man returned his look, his face a mask of placid contempt, a trickle of blood from his nose the only sign of what had happened.
"Martine?" someone asked. Paul realized for the first time that the blind woman was part of the crowd pinioning him. "Martine?"
"What is it, Sam?"
"I can't find him, Martine." Sam Fredericks looked pale even in the odd, metallic light from the great pit. "He's gone somewhere—gone!"
"Who are you talking about?" Martine asked. Some of the people holding Paul began to loosen their grips, although the two Gypsy men still held him securely. "Who's gone?"
"!Xabbu," Sam said miserably. "He got up from the campfire but he never came back. And now I can't find him anywhere."
Watching the others split up into pairs to search for !Xabbu should have made Sam feel better, but it didn't. Something in the suddenness of his disappearance made her certain that what had happened to him was much worse than simply wandering off or getting lost.
!Xabbu doesn't get lost, she told herself and was miserable again.
She knew she couldn't just stand and wait for the others to come back, but she had no idea of where else to look. She had already been all along the fringes of the Gypsy camp, calling the small man's name into the press of refugees beyond the circled wagons, and that was probably what Martine and the rest were doing right now, too, but she could think of no better way to spend her time. Anything was better than just sitting here, cooling her heels at the end of the world.
When she turned she almost tripped over the Stone Girl.
"Your name is Sam, right?" the little girl asked.
Much as she wanted to right now, she couldn't just ignore the child. "Yes, I'm Sam."
"Your friend wanted me to tell you something."
"My friend?" She squatted beside her, suddenly intent. "What friend?"
"The man with curly hair and no shirt." The Stone Girl looked worried. "Isn't he your friend?"
"What did he say? Tell me!"
"I have to remember." The little girl wrinkled her loamy forehead. The poked holes that were her eyes squinted in concentration. "He said . . . he said. . . ."
"Come on!"
The Stone Girl shot her an offended look. "I'm thinking! He said . . . that you were with friends now so he could leave and he'd know you were all right." The frown turned into a pleased smile. "That's what he said! I remembered!"
"Leave to do what? Where did he go?" Sam grabbed the little girl's arm. "Did he tell you? Did you see which direction he went?"
She shook her head. "No. He pointed to where you were and told me to hurry up and go." The Stone Girl turned and indicated a spot far down the shoreline of the great pit. "He was over there."
And then Sam remembered. "Oh, fenfen! He thinks Renie's down there—he said he was g
oing to go find her!" The Stone Girl looked at her curiously but Sam had no more time to talk. She sprinted across the long, gradual slope of the Gypsy camp, away from the wall of wagons and the campfires, down toward the uneven shore.
I should get the others, she thought. Paul and Martine—I couldn't stop him by myself. . . . But already she saw a slender figure silhouetted at the pulsing edge of the Well, familiar despite the unsteadiness of the outline. She knew she would never reach the others and get back in time.
"!Xabbu!" she shouted. "Wait!"
If he heard her he gave no sign. He stood a moment longer, poised at the edge of the glimmering ocean of blue and pale yellow and misty silver light, then took a few steps forward and jumped into the pit. It was not a dive but a suicide's staggering leap, the first graceless thing she had ever seen !Xabbu do.
"No! Noooo!"
Within seconds she had reached the spot where he had stood. There was no sign of him, only the strange ferment of light in motion.
He told me he was so scared of the water. But he jumped into . . . this. . . . She went cold from her feet to her head. He must have been so afraid. . . !
She knew that if she considered for another second her better sense would take charge—she would turn and walk back to the Gypsy camp with a hole right through the middle of herself. Lost Orlando, she thought wildly. And Renie. Not !Xabbu, too! She tottered on the edge for an instant, then flung herself after him.
It was not water that rose up to claim her but something far more strange—a vibrant, fizzing, electrical wash that seemed to flow right through her. Her eyes popped open as if yanked by strings but there was no depth or breadth, nothing at all to see but an impossible simultaneity of blackness and blinding light.
How can I find him. . . ? she wondered, but only for a second. The scintillant ocean contracted around her, squeezing her up and out like a bar of wet soap from a fist. Orlando said . . . it didn't want me. . . . Then she was lying stunned and twitching on the bank, unable to do anything but stare at the Well as lazy bubbles of light formed and burst beneath the surface. She watched them with a strange detachment, wondering if this was what it felt like to die. Voices were coming closer, Florimel's and Martine's and others, all shouting something that must be her name, but she could feel nothing except the uncommon sensation of having been tasted and then spat out again.
Paul knelt down beside Florimel. "Is Fredericks all right? What's wrong with her?"
Despite all that had happened, Florimel had not lost her distinctive bedside manner. "How in the devil's name should I know? She is breathing. She is semiconscious. God alone knows what caused this."
"Jumped," T4b said. "Just jumped in, all sayee lo. Saw it, me."
"But why?" Paul asked.
Martine was squinting out toward the pulsating lights with the expression of someone leaning into a terrible windstorm. "She was searching for !Xabbu. . . ."
"Jesus, does that mean. . . ?" Paul's stomach lurched—to find them both after all this time, then to lose one of them so quickly, maybe both of them. . . .
Martine abruptly swung around, putting her back to the unstable sea. Her face was haggard. "We have a greater problem now," she said.
"What?" Paul stared at the Well, but saw nothing different. He turned until he was facing the same direction as Martine, looking out across the plain. "Oh. Oh, damn."
It was only a distant speck and should have been invisible in the deep twilight, but the man-shape had a disturbing negative radiance of its own, as if it were not entirely part of the world through which it passed.
"He's not a giant anymore," Paul said. That startling change should have given him hope, but there was something so horridly fascinating about the thing named Dread walking toward them across the dead gray land, stride after measured stride, that it seemed to make no difference. Fear washed through Paul, a sick, paralyzing terror as powerful as the aura around the Twins, but somehow even worse: where those two were cruel and destructive, this lightless specter seemed a thing of pure, focused evil.
"He has shed what was unnecessary," Martine said. "He has been burned and battered until he has hardened like a black diamond. But it is him." Her voice was listless with horror. "The Other could not keep him out."
Their companions had seen it, too, and stood staring in drop-jawed surprise, mesmerized by the advancing figure. Voices cried out all around them, wails of despair that proved the refugees could sense what was coming. As the invisible cloud of fear swept over them the fairy-tale folk at the outer edge of the encampment turned and fled from the distant stranger, shoving their way toward the Well. Their flight set off a mass panic; hundreds more joined them, shrieking down the slope towards the edge of the great pit like a herd of deer running before a wildfire. Paul and the others had to make a wall around Sam Fredericks, linking arms to keep themselves from being swept over the edge by the crush of maddened refugees.
"Where is Nandi?" Martine shouted. "And the Simpkins woman and the little boy?"
"Somewhere in the crowd!" Paul held on to T4b's arm for dear life as a trio of weeping goats backed into them. Even when Paul smacked at the nearest with his fist, the goats paid no attention, bleating, "Troll, troll, troll!" in tones of helpless horror as they stared out at the approaching shadow.
I just hope he kills that bastard Jongleur first, was Paul's only coherent thought.
The crush of terrified creatures was shoving hard now, pushing them back despite their best efforts, until Paul could see the Well just behind them. Some of the other refugees were forced screaming over the edge of the pit; they disappeared into the silent wash of light and did not come up. T4b's elbow was locked in Paul's; the youth was murmuring what seemed to be a prayer. Florimel screamed at them all to move closer together to keep Fredericks from being stepped on. Paul felt another arm slip through his and a body push close against him. It was Martine. Something of a child's unalloyed fright was in her face. Paul hooked her arm more tightly.
Dread had reached the edge of the encampment. He stopped on ground that had been torn and churned by fleeing refugees and lifted his hands as though he would take the entire huge throng in his arms. His face was a thing of shadows, the human features plain but somehow inconstant, the eyes blank white crescents. Only the teeth were clear—a huge, avid grin. The shape radiated such triumphant, heedless, blood-smeared power that the nearest refugees, untouched, fell down shrieking and writhing.
Martine was not even looking. She had shoved her face against Paul's arm. "This must be . . . the terror the Other feels," she moaned.
Paul thought it seemed pointless to analyze anything. It was the end, after all.
"Oh, you're all so clever." Dread's laughing voice was in every ear. "But I know you're here somewhere." The dead white eyes swept across the whimpering throng.
He's looking for us. Paul's heart was skipping, staggering. He knows we're here, but he's not sure where.
The shadow-man and everything around him suddenly grew dim.
And I'm going blind like Martine. . . .
Blind?
The air was growing thick, foggy. Paul tried to blink it away but the fog was not in him but before him, a sticky density forming above the shimmering pit and around them all. At first he thought it was something of Dread's doing, the metaphorical air being sucked from an entire world, but the dark figure seemed disconcerted, lifting his hands in front of his face, fingers twitching as if to tear away a curtain.
"But I crushed you!" Dread snarled. "You can't stop me now!"
There was a curtain, Paul saw in astonishment—a wall of rapidly thickening mist forming between Dread and his victims. The gossamer-thin, translucent barrier rapidly grew thicker, a hemispherical wall of cloud coagulating all over the Well, transparent enough that the carbon-black figure of Dread could still be seen through it, thick enough to reflect some of the dull shimmer from the pit. The shadow-man lunged forward, scrabbling at the solidifying fog, and the cloud strands stretched to what se
emed the breaking point . . . but they did not break.
Dread's scream of frustration rattled in Paul's skull, made him crouch shivering on the ground. All around him refugees were running mad, knocking each other down, trying to escape something that was in their heads. The cry rose until Paul thought his brains would boil, until he felt sure there must be blood running from his nose and ears, then it trailed off like storm winds passing.
For a moment there was silence. Inside the dome of cloud it was the silence not just of pain but of astonishment, of a last-minute reprieve beyond all hope.
Martine's voice was faint with agony and shock. "I . . . I can feel such . . . oh, my God! The Other has put up a last-ditch defense, but it has . . . little strength left."
The figure behind the wall of cloud had grown very still.
This can't last, The icy words pricked at Paul's ears. He could hear children sobbing all around him, unable to escape the voice of the bogeyman. "It's only a matter of time."
The dark figure spread his hands again, pressed them against the barrier. The nearest refugees wept and tried to force themselves farther away, but Dread was making no attempt to break through this time. "I know you're there—all of you." He paused. "You, Martine. We've shared something, sweetness. You know what I mean."
She had fallen on her face. Paul put his hand on her back, felt the convulsive shudders.
"It's going to be very bad if you make me wait," Dread murmured. "Pain. And not just for you, little Martine. Screaming—oh, there will plenty of screaming. Why don't you just come to me now and save the innocent ones?"
"No," she said, but it was a hollow whisper that even Paul could barely hear.
"Come out," said the dark shape. "I'll show you those secret places again. Those places in you that you didn't think anyone could find. You know it's going to happen. Why wait? The fear will only get worse." The voice deepened, turned horribly seductive. "Just come to me now, sweet Martine. I'll release you. You won't have to be afraid any more."