by Tad Williams
"Yes." His sad smile returned. "You appear to be the Renie I first met."
"Except with fewer clothes. What's happened? Where are the others?"
"Most are gone, I do not know where. Only. . . ." He pointed.
Renie twisted around. Behind her, a few meters distant, sharing the same rocky outcrop but somehow as separated as if they were behind glass, lay two still figures. One of them was the golden-haired Achilles sim of Orlando Gardiner, still wearing its tattered Greek clothes. The other, lying curled across his chest as though she were a castaway and he were the piece of flotsam that had saved her life, was a naked girl Renie had never seen before.
"Oh, my God." Renie levered herself upright, ignoring the wash of vertigo, and hurried to them. She kneeled and touched Orlando's arm, then his face; both were cold and hard as stone. Renie's eyes filled with tears, but she wiped them away, forcing herself to focus on what would come next. The girl was still alive, clinging to the empty sim and sobbing almost noiselessly, a quiet hitch of sound that Renie could tell had been going on for a long time. Renie reached out to her. "Are you . . . are you Fredericks?"
The girl only clutched the deserted sim tighter. Tears spilled from her tight-shut eyes and rolled down her cheeks onto Orlando's chest. Seeing this, something Renie had held tightly inside finally slipped from her grasp and she began to cry as well, deeply and helplessly. She felt !Xabbu's hand come to rest on her shoulder, but he did not try in any other way to console her. Renie cried for a long, long time.
When she had some control of herself again she sat up, drained and exhausted. Fredericks would not be pulled from Orlando's empty sim, and Renie could see no reason to force the issue. They were in an empty place and seemed to be the only people there. The giant shape of the Other, the surviving Grail Brotherhood, and their other companions had all vanished.
"What happened?" she asked !Xabbu. "At the end, everything . . . everything went completely mad."
"I do not know. I am full of shame that I was so frightened." His look was dark, troubled. "I thought I was afraid when I first saw the giant here on this mountain, but what came after was worse. I am embarrassed for my fear at a time when you needed me, but that does not change what I believe. I think we have truly met the All-Devourer."
"Don't say things like that." Renie shuddered. "We can't think that way. Everything has an explanation, even if it's an unpleasant one. That giant was the operating system—Martine said it was—and the Quan Li thing was trying to take it over."
"I understand," !Xabbu said. "And I agree. But I also know what I know."
"It's so frightening, to think of a monster like him with so much power. What did Martine say his name was? Dread." She shook her head, feeling like she wanted to cry again. "I wish Martine was with us."
!Xabbu sat back on his heels. "Perhaps I should build a fire. It is not too cold here, but it might bring some warmth to our hearts, at least."
"Do you think you can?"
He shrugged. "I did in that other place—the one you called the Patchwork World. And this seems much like it."
"It does, doesn't it?" Renie flicked a glance over to Fredericks. The girl had slid off Orlando's unresponsive form and now lay curled against him on the ground. Renie turned her attention back to the strange crumbled mountaintop. "This place has changed, somehow. It looks a lot like that unfinished place now—like nothing's quite ready. I wonder what that means. More important, how do we get out of here so we can find the others?" A sudden thought ran through her like a lightning strike. "My God! The lighter!" She had actually run her hands down her own skin before she realized that without clothes she would have no pockets. "It's gone."
!Xabbu shook his head. "I found it beside you." He opened his palm. The shiny object looked quite out of place in their desolate surroundings.
"Does it work?" Renie asked eagerly. "Did you try it?"
"I did. I could make nothing happen."
"Let me see what I can do." She reached out and took it from him. She weighed it briefly in her hand, reassured by its familiar heft, then let her fingers travel over one of the sequences she and Martine had discovered. The object remained inert. No gateway shimmered into existence. Renie cursed quietly and tried a different sequence.
"What you are doing is useless," a new voice said.
Renie was so startled that she dropped the lighter. The stranger who had appeared from behind the outcropping of stone and now stood only a few meters away was a tall slender Caucasian, muscular in a sinuous way, stamped as at least middle-aged only by his white hair and the wrinkles on his long, sharp-nosed face. Renie tried to imagine which of her companions this could be, but failed. She snatched the lighter from the ground. "Who . . . who the hell are you?"
The man blinked slowly. His stare had a cold, almost reptilian quality. "I suppose I could make up something, but I see no reason to lie." His speech was careful, precise, and as emotionless as his gaze, with just the faint hint of some accent Renie could not place. "My name is Felix Jongleur. To save you your second and third questions—yes, I am the leader of the Grail Brotherhood, and no, I have no idea where we are." He allowed himself a tight, mirthless smile. "I am not ungrateful to have been given a healthy body—I have not been this young in over a century—but I would have preferred to remain a god."
Renie stared at him, aghast. This was one of the men she had been hunting for so long that she almost could not remember the beginning of it—one of the bastards who had destroyed Stephen's life, who had ordered Susan Van Bleeck beaten to death. She found her fingers curling into fists as she drew her legs beneath her.
He raised an eyebrow, coolly amused. "You can attack me, but it will do you no good—presuming that you could actually overpower me, which might be more difficult than you think. If you wish, you may ease your conscience with the knowledge that I find you just as unpleasant as you find me. But it seems we will need each other, at least for a while."
"Need each other?" she asked. "!Xabbu?" She turned, keeping Jongleur in the corner of her vision, although the man had not made even the smallest movement toward them. "Is there any reason we shouldn't just throw this evil bastard off the mountain?"
Her friend was also tense—she could feel him like a coiled spring beside her. "What do you mean, we need each other?" he demanded of the stranger.
"Because we are trapped here together. Your stolen access device—I take it you pilfered it from that idiot Yacoubian—will not function. Neither will any of my own codes or commands. I have my own reasons to need your help, but my value to you should be obvious."
"Because you built the whole network."
"More or less, yes. Come—I want to show you something." He gestured to the place where the peaks had fallen and only a naked rim of black stone remained. "If you still distrust me, I will step away." He backed off, looking briefly and without curiosity at Fredericks, who still huddled beside Orlando's vacated body. "Go on, look."
She and !Xabbu walked forward, moving with increasing caution as they reached the sheer edge of the mountain. Renie guessed they were standing where the giant's shoulder had once lain. Something as smoothly effective as a hot knife had sliced the shiny black stone away, but that was not what caught her eye. She and !Xabbu took another few steps forward until they had a good angle to look down.
The great black mountain dropped away beneath them for a long distance. It would have been hard enough to judge their height even if they could have seen the ground, but there was no ground to see. Instead, the mountain was entirely surrounded by what Renie at first thought was a blank of fog, a sea of flat white cloud that stretched away in all directions until it disappeared into the gray horizon. As she stared, she saw odd glints of light in the formless stuff, sparkles that gave the endless cloud bank a faintly silvery sheen, but somehow did not detract from its white uniformity.
It's like being in that old story, "Jack and the Beanstalk," she thought. Like we've climbed up into the sky. Another though
t came to her, one that was far less pleasant. We're going to have to climb down from here. That's why he needs us. Nobody sane would try to climb down that far on his own.
"Do you see it?" Jongleur called, an edge of impatience in his voice.
"Yes. What is all this white stuff?"
"I don't know." He watched them as they returned. He seemed even less bothered by nakedness than !Xabbu, if such a thing were possible. "I thought I knew everything I needed to know, but clearly I was wrong. I mistrusted one servant, but it was another one who betrayed me."
"Dread . . . he works for you." Renie again found herself nauseated even to be talking to this man.
"Worked." Jongleur flicked his hand—it was not important. "I knew he was ambitious, but I admit he surprised me."
"Surprised you?" Renie fought hard against the rising, molten surge of anger. "Surprised you? He killed our friends! He tortured people! You killed friends of ours, too, you bastard! You're a selfish, vicious old man, and you want us to help you get away from here?"
Jongleur watched as !Xabbu put an arm around her. Renie fell silent, shivering with fury and revulsion.
"Yes, the world is indeed full of sad things," Jongleur said flatly. "I don't care if you wish to murder me—the fact is, you do not dare. I built this system, and if you want to get out of here, you'll need me. As far as I know, there may only be five of us alive in this entire world, whatever it is."
"Four," Renie said bitterly. She gestured at the spot where Fredericks lay curled against the body of her friend. "Your friend with the falcon's head murdered Orlando."
"I was not referring to your fallen comrade." Jongleur smirked. "I was referring to my companion."
Renie looked up to see a newcomer standing beside the rock, handsome face blank, staring out at nothing. "That's . . . that's the first one who went through your ceremony."
"Yes," Jongleur said as the empty-eyed man turned and wandered away again. "Ricardo is our only success story so far—a limited success, of course, since he seems to have suffered a bit of brain damage during the transition. That and the larger failure of the Grail Ceremony are all thanks to my unfaithful servant, I would guess." He shook his head. "I imagine now that young Dread has gotten at least partial control of the network, he's busy enjoying his newfound godhood, handing out plagues and destroying cities. I imagine it's going to be rather like the Old Testament—except with no Chosen People." He chuckled, a quiet dry scrape like a lizard's belly on stone. "You think I'm vicious? You haven't seen anything yet."
Renie struggled to calm herself. "Then if this Dread's got control of the network and he hates you so much, why are you still alive? Why. . . ." she waved her hands, ". . . why doesn't the sky just open up and a bolt of lightning come down and burn you to ashes?"
Jongleur surveyed her for a silent, impassive moment. "I'll answer your question, and give you the only piece of information you will receive from me for nothing. Little Johnny Dread may be god of the network now, but I constructed much of the thing myself, and nothing was done without my approval. This place where we stand now?" He lifted his hand to indicate the colorless sky, the curiously textured stone. "This is not part of what the Grail Brotherhood built. I have no idea where we are or what is happening to us—but this isn't part of the network."
The white-haired man's smile returned, twisting the thin lips while his eyes remained cold and dead. "So . . . do we have a bargain?"
Afterword
Her rap on the spare tire compartment had been hard and sudden enough to startle him badly. What she had said had been worse. "Some MPs just came and took Mike and my little girl." She had kept her voice so quiet that he could barely hear her through the metal compartment lid and the carpeting, but she was clearly frightened. "I don't know what to do. I'm going to drive." He had tried to call her back, but a moment later the back door of the van had thumped shut.
Sellars was accustomed to darkness, to waiting. He did not mind confined spaces. Still, this was torture. The van was still moving—he could feel every small bump of the road through the shock absorbers and the undercarriage—so that was something, but after two hours, it was very little solace.
He had already tried the Sorensens' private line several times, which should have connected him to the inside of the van, but Kaylene Sorensen was not answering. She was the wife of a security officer; she was probably worried about calls being monitored. Sellars had also tried to contact Ramsey, but he wasn't taking calls either. The answer to what was going on must only be a few meters from the dark hole in which he was prisoned, but he could not reach the bolts holding down the compartment lid, and until he was certain who was in the van—Mrs. Sorensen's message to him might have been the product of a moment's freedom before she was joined by an armed escort—he dared not make his presence known by banging to be let out. The answers might be inches away, but they might as well have been on the other side of the universe.
Sellars dropped back into his system and called up his metaphorical Garden for the third time since Christabel's mother had made her cryptic announcement. His information model remained in complete and shocking disarray, and although several of the new patterns had continued to change and to grow, he still could make little sense of any of it. A strange blight had overtaken the Garden. Whole plants were gone, entire sections of stored information corrupted or interdicted. Other information sources had taken on strange new shapes. The saprophytic growth that represented the mysterious operating system had mutated out of all recognition, as though it had received some murderous dose of radiation, contorting its points of connection with the rest of the Otherland model and changing the exposed areas of its contact with the metaphorical air of the Garden—those few places in which his information about the operating system had been sufficient that he could actually study its actions—into unrecognizable, nightmarish growths, eruptions of discolored tendrils, smears of escaping spores.
It was enormously frustrating. Something crucial had happened—was happening right now—that he could not understand. The terrifying vitality of the Otherland ecology, which had come to dominate everything else, had in the space of a few hours been turned into something even more disturbing . . . something that would not just dominate his information Garden, but would poison it. Already growths representing his various interests, the people he had sent into the system and those he was tracking outside of it, were beginning either to wither away or to be absorbed into the accelerating rot at the Garden's center.
Sellars had to look squarely at the likelihood that he had failed. He had done all that he could—in the last few days, as his apprehension had mounted, he had even reached out to several new sources, hoping to strengthen the frail web of resistance—but it appeared now that even in his deepest despair he had underestimated the extent of the danger.
There was nothing else he could do but wait. Wait for the van to stop, wait for someone to tell him what was happening, wait for the nightmare changes in his Garden to present some kind of sense, some answers that would allow him to go forward.
It was almost certainly too late, of course. He knew that, but it did not really matter; he had no other options.
Sellars watched his blighted garden. Sellars waited.
A continent away, for two people in a hospital room in California, the waiting had finally ended.
The equipment in the white room had been disconnected. Machines which had purred or ticked or gently pinged were now silent. In a few minutes, after the two people who still remained in the room had left, orderlies would come to take the expensive machines away and put them to use again somewhere else.
Two people who had no tears left leaned over a silent form in a hospital bed, side by side but not touching each other, together in silence like lost explorers. Their waiting had ended. Tomorrow was unimaginable. They stood in the still, arid center of time, dry-eyed and desolated.
For the woman on the Louisiana motel balcony, the waiting had just begun.
She leaned on the railing and looked out across a flat, fog-shrouded expanse of water. In the middle of the vast lake a vertical black line floated above the mist like the mast of a ghostly ship.
She had come far to find this place, this tower. The voices in her head had led her through nights and days, across pine-forested mountains and a rain-battered coast where the orange lights of oil derricks gleamed out beyond the tide flats like spaceships searching for a dry spot to land. The voices had led her to this spot. Then, without warning, they had deserted her.
They were gone now, all those voices, utterly gone. The nights were suddenly empty. In all the years of her mostly solitary life, the woman had never felt so alone.
She leaned on the balcony railing, waiting for the end of the world.