River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “You left me!” Paul shouted. “You left me to those . . . things!”

  “I came to save the boy,” the small woman snapped. “He means something to me.”

  “You think piling . . . furniture against the door is going to . . . to keep them out?” He was breathing so hard he could hardly talk, and already the sense of imminent attack was growing again. “We have to get out of here. If you can’t get me offline, can you at least get us to another simulation? Make a . . . a gateway, whatever those things are called.”

  “No.” She shook her head, her wizened face tight. “If I summon an emergency gateway to interfere with Jongleur’s agents, the Brotherhood will know. This is not my fight. This Venice is all I have left. I will not risk it all for you, a stranger.”

  Paul could not believe he was standing there arguing, while Death and Destruction breathed down his neck. “But what about the boy? What about Gally? They’ll take him, too!”

  She stared at him, then at the child. “Take him and run, then,” she replied. “There is a hidden doorway that will let you out to the square. Tinto said the nearest gateways were with the Jews or the Crusaders. The Ghetto is a long distance—all the way to the middle of Cannaregio. Better to go to the Crusader hospital. If you are lucky, you can outrun those things long enough to get there and find the gate.”

  “And how am I supposed to find this Crusader place?”

  “The boy will show you.” She leaned down and kissed Gally on top of his head, mussed his hair with an almost fierce affection, then shoved him toward Paul. “Through my bedchamber. I will make it look as though you forced your way in.”

  “But you own this place!” Paul grabbed the boy’s arm and pulled him toward the chamber door. “You sound as though you’re afraid of them.”

  “Everyone is afraid of them. Hurry now.”

  They came out of the constricted passageway bent almost double, running so low that Paul was practically on all fours. As they burst out into the lampbright confusion of St. Mark’s Square, Gally careened into a crowd of revelers, which caused much staggering, cursing, and spilling of drink. Following close behind, Paul ran into one of the reeling strangers, tumbling both the man and himself to the ground.

  “Gally!” he shouted, struggling to rise. “Gally, wait!”

  He and the stranger were entangled in each other’s cloaks. As Paul tried to fight free, the other man clipped him on the ear, crying, “Damn you, leave off!” He shoved the man back to the ground, then bounded over him, but the man grabbed at his foot and tripped him. He did not regain his balance for a dozen steps; by the time he did, the crowd had closed in around him once more and he could see no sign of the boy.

  “Gally! Gypsy!”

  As he shouted, an invisible something touched him, raising his hackles like a cold hand on the back of his neck. He whirled to see movement in the dark arches along the side of St. Mark’s church—two white faces swiveling in the shadows. The masks seemed to float bodiless above the dark robes, like will-o-the-wisps.

  A hand closed on his wrist, real flesh this time, and Paul gasped. “What are you doing?” Gally demanded. “You can’t fight. We have to run!”

  It was only as he clamped shut his sagging jaw and followed the boy into the festival night that Paul realized how true the boy’s words were: he had left his sword behind in Eleanora’s apartments.

  Gally led them north across the square, around or sometimes straight through knots of merrymakers. Where the boy could force his way through to no more reaction than a curse or a half-hearted kick, Paul was not so lucky; by the time he reached the edge of the square he had been forced to flee several offers of violence, and had lost track of his small guide once more. Also, a look back for their pursuers provided new worries: a group of armed pikemen were spilling out of the Doge’s palace at a swift trot, and had already begun to fan out across St. Mark’s Square with a very purposeful air. It seemed the dreadful two were not going to rely solely on their own stalking skills.

  “Paul!” the boy called from a colonnade near the great clock tower at the edge of the square. “This way.” As Paul followed, he slipped down a narrow passage, through a courtyard, and then out onto a winding street where rows of market stalls were still lively with custom despite the hour. Several hundred meters from the square, Gally at last ducked into an even smaller alley. On the far side, he crossed the dark street and clambered down to a path along the bank of a canal.

  “They’ve sent soldiers after us, too,” Paul panted as he scrambled down a stone staircase and joined him. He dropped his voice as a group of shadowy figures floated past in an unsteady boat, singing. “It’s a good thing there are so many people out.” He paused. “You called me by my name, didn’t you? Do you remember me now?”

  “A bit.” The boy made a fretful noise. “Don’t know. I suppose so. Come on, we have to hurry. We can double back to the Grand Canal, find a boat no one’s using . . .”

  Paul put a hand on his shoulder. “Hang on a bit. That’s the main route through this place, and it’s also the one certain way out. They’ll be looking for us all along that canal. Is there another route we can take to this Crusader hospital?”

  Gally shrugged. “We can go more or less straight across the city—cut through the corner of Castello district and into Cannaregio.”

  “Good. Let’s do it.”

  “It’s pretty dark through there,” Gally said dubiously. “Rough, too, you know? If we get killed in Castello, it probably won’t be the duke’s soldiers who do it.”

  “We’ll take the chance—anything’s better than getting caught by those two . . . things.”

  Gally set out at a near-sprint, with Paul just behind him. The boy turned east along the small canal, and followed it until it curved away north again, then led them across a bridge over the river that flowed behind the ducal palace and St. Mark’s. A few people were still making their way in toward the heart of Carnival, the square and the Grand Canal, but the boy had been right—the streets in this part of the city were emptier and darker, with only an occasional lamp to be seen burning in a window. The narrow, cobbled byways seemed too tight here for a deep breath, the buildings looming close on both sides as though threatening to tumble in and crush them. Only occasional faint voices and the smells of food cooking spoke of life hidden behind the walls, but the fronts of the houses were as secretive as masks.

  As Paul struggled to stay close to the boy, who moved through the alleys and along the canals with the surefootedness of a cat, he fought to make sense out of what was happening. Those two creatures, Finch and Mullet, as something in him still wanted to call them, although his memory of those incarnations was dim, had followed him from one world to another—no, from one simulation to the next. But they clearly did not know where he was within any given simulation, nor was merely locating him—making visual contact—enough for them to capture him.

  So what did that mean? For one thing, their powers, even as servants of the Grail Brotherhood, were not limitless. That much was clear.

  In fact, the Grail people don’t seem to have much of an advantage over anyone else in these simulations, he reflected. Otherwise, they could have just found me a long time ago, done some kind of search through their network and pinpointed me, like a lost file.

  There was something there, something to give hope. The lords of the Brotherhood might be terrifyingly rich and ruthless—gods, in a way—but even within their own creation, they were not all-powerful. They could be fooled or eluded. That was more than merely something, he realized: if true, it was a very important idea.

  He was jogging along on autopilot, hardly aware of his surroundings, when Gally stopped so suddenly that Paul almost knocked them both down. The boy waved his hands violently, demanding quiet. At first he could not understand why they had stopped. They were a few hundred meters east of the Palace R
iver and had just turned into what by Venetian terms was a fairly wide street, but silent and with only a single lantern hanging above a door at the far end to ease the darkness. A thick, ground-level mist made the buildings seem to float, as though Paul and the boy stood in the middle of one of the canals instead of a cobbled street.

  “What. . . ?”

  Gally slapped at his arm to silence him. A moment later Paul heard a slurry murmur of voices, then an array of distorted shadows suddenly appeared between them and the lantern, several figures walking abreast, moving with a certain unhurried precision.

  “Soldiers!” Paul hissed. “There must be a side street in the middle.”

  Gally tugged at his arm, pulling him back the direction they had come. When they reached the end of the street, the boy hesitated for a moment, then drew them down another alley to let the soldiers pass, but instead of continuing on toward St. Mark’s, the small troop swung into the alley as though magnetized to the fugitives. Paul cursed silently. The odds were quite hopeless—at least a dozen soldiers in helmets and breastplates filled the passage, pikes on shoulders, boots kicking eddies in the mist.

  Gally darted ahead, but the alley ended on the bank of one of the canals, the only way forward a stone bridge arched like a cat’s backbone, hung with lanterns at each end. If they tried to cross, the soldiers would certainly spot them, but there was no place to hide in the narrow alley—the armored troop filled it wall to wall. Gally hesitated for only a moment, then swung down over the wall beside the bridge. Paul was glad he had been watching—if he had blinked, the boy would have simply vanished. He scrambled over the low parapet behind him. The tramp of booted feet and the men’s voices were so loud that it seemed a miracle they had not yet been spotted.

  They found perhaps a meter of vertical space beneath the bridge, and half that distance in front of them before the ground fell away in a straight drop, too far down to the canal for them to go in without a splash. Repository of many of the wastes of the Most Serene Republic, the water stank, but that was the least of their worries. They crouched, Paul with his head pressed painfully against the underside of the stone bridge, and listened to the soldiers trudge up the span. Then, maddeningly, the footsteps stopped. Paul held his breath. He could barely see the boy in the shadows, but he could tell by the tense stillness that Gally was holding his breath, too.

  Something splashed into the water an arm’s length away from them. Paul held himself firmly, resisting a violent flinch. Whatever it was continued to patter the canal, and then another splashing began beside it. The smell of urine wafted to them.

  “. . . Tried to kill a senator,” someone said above them. His companion mumbled something and they both laughed; the arcs of the streams jiggled and the pattering changed rhythm for a moment. “No, I would, too,” the first one said, “but you don’t want anyone to hear you say that, do you? Wouldn’t want to wind up in the Room of the Cord.”

  “Mother of God,” a voice shouted from further up the bridge, “what, are you two sweet on each other? Hurry it up—we’ve got two assassins to find.”

  “Did you hear?” the first man said. “One of them’s a boy, a street urchin.” His stream dwindled and then stopped. “They should round up those little dockside crabs and boil the lot of ‘em, that’s what I say.” His companion was also finishing, but his words were still inaudible. “Yes,” the first added, “but at least we’ll get to have some fun with this one when we find him.”

  Paul could not believe these soldiers could have heard so quickly by any normal means—it was only a quarter of an hour since he and Gally had fled the cathedral. Somehow, Finch and Mullet had manipulated the simworld, moved information across the city at greater-than-Renaissance speed. As ridiculous as he knew it to be, Paul was outraged at the unfairness of it.

  The soldiers tramped down the far side of the bridge. Gally put his hand on Paul’s arm to keep him in place and still. The soldiers’ voices and footfalls grew faint, then were gone. The seconds stretched. Everything was silent except for the almost inaudible lapping of the canal against the bank.

  “I . . . I don’t remember anything before the Black Ocean,” Gally whispered at last, invisible in the shadows.

  Paul, thinking only of escape, could not immediately make sense of the words. “Before. . . ?”

  The boy spoke clumsily, as though something squeezed his throat. “Corfu, all that—I don’t remember it, not really. I just know it. But I’m starting to remember other things—the Oysterhouse, like you said, and traveling with Bay and Blue and the others. I . . . I think I even had another name at first, before I was Gally. But I don’t remember anything from before we came out of the Black Ocean.” His voice hitched. He was weeping. “I don’t remember my mother or my father . . . or . . . anything.”

  Even in the midst of danger, Paul could not help wondering who Gally and the other Oysterhouse children really were, what their place in all this might be. Were they escaped prisoners, as he was? “You’ve talked about this Black Ocean several times, but I don’t know what it is,” he told the boy. “Was it a place like this. . . ?” He realized that the concept of a simulation would probably mean nothing. “Was it a country, like the Eight Squared or here—like Venice?”

  There was a pause. “Not really.” Gally had stopped crying, but still spoke haltingly. Paul suddenly remembered being startled to discover that the sleeping boy did not breathe. He touched his own chest now, felt its slow, regular motion. Even taking simulation into account, why should he breathe, as though he were in his real body, and Gally not? “It’s hard for me to remember good,” the boy went on, “but it was just . . . just dark. Not like this, but dark forever. And for a long time there was nothing except me and God.”

  “You and . . . God?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody was there in the dark, but all around me, sort of, and I heard the voice talking in my head. One voice. It told me who I was. It told me I was going to live in a new place, and . . . and . . . that’s all I can remember.” Gally’s wistful tone vanished. “We should get moving.”

  “Christ, you’re right.” Paul crawled out from beneath the bridge and almost slipped down the muddy bank into the canal. The night sky seemed strikingly close, the stars bright as frozen fireworks. “I almost forgot,” he muttered, astonished at himself. All these mysteries, however fascinating, could wait until they were safe. Gally clambered out past him and jogged back up the alley. Paul fell into step behind him.

  But safe where? he thought. The bird-woman told me to find the Weaver. And where did Nandi say that would be—Ithaca? Which would be Greece, I guess, some Greek myth or other. But isn’t there an Ithaca in America, too? Little town in New York or somewhere?

  They hurried through the streets. The few people they passed here were uncostumed, and seemed to have little to do with the festivities, except that a few of them were the worse for drink. Twice more they had to hide from soldiers, but their pursuers never came as close as they had the first time. Even the Doge’s troops seemed to have decided there was little chance of capturing fugitives in the confusion of Carnival night.

  “We’re in Cannaregio now,” Gally whispered after another long jog, barely audible over the sound of their feet on the stones. “Not too much farther.”

  The boy led him through back alleys and across empty squares with the nimble certainty of a fox trotting home to its den. Paul could not help thinking how lucky he was to have Gally here to guide him. In fact, he had been lucky in all the simulations, and that was another important thing to remember. Like the real world, this network could surprise you—there was good to be found, real kindness. It seemed the Brotherhood couldn’t make their VR worlds truly realistic without bringing along at least a few of reality’s happier chances. That would be something to cling to when despair gripped him again, as he had a feeling it almost inevitably would.

  The fog gre
w thicker as the night stretched into the last dead hours before morning. Paul waved at it but it did not disperse, and when he stopped waving it flowed back in to fill the same spaces again.

  “Brine mist,” Gally explained, barely visible through the murk. “From the sea. They call it ‘Bride’s Veil,’ too.”

  Only a people who considered themselves wedded to the ocean, Paul decided, could give such a romantic name to such dire, dank stuff.

  In fact, the brine mist turned midnight Venice into something even more surreal than before, which hardly seemed possible. With a church seemingly on every corner, the faces of monsters and saints loomed out of the fog without warning; the statues, whether pious or grotesque, all seemed to stare out and up, gazing eternally at something beyond even Venice’s grandeur.

  “That’s the Zen Palace over there,” Gally whispered as they passed a building which stood high above the swirling mists. Their pace had slowed with fatigue, or at least Paul’s had, to something scarcely more than a swift walk. “You know, where the Cardinal’s family lives.”

  Paul shook his head, too exhausted and frightened to care, but Gally took it as a sign that he didn’t understand. “You know, the one whose tomb the lady takes care of. Cardinal Zen.”

  Beside feeling profoundly uninterested in tourist information at the moment, Paul was still feeling bitter toward Eleanora for deserting them, however sensible her reasons. He slowed and then stopped in order to suck in a larger amount of the sea-scented air than he had been getting. “Where’s this hospital?” he wheezed.

  “Just ahead. Past the Jesuits.” Gally gently took his arm and got him moving again.

  Paul’s legs were rubbery and his lungs were burning. It was very difficult to run for half an hour without stopping, another piece of information left out of the adventure stories and flicks he had seen. In fact, adventuring in general was ridiculously hard work.

  If I’d known I was going to be doing so much of this running for my life, he thought miserably, I’d have gotten myself in better shape first. . . .