Mountain of Black Glass (117 page)

!Xabbu allowed himself to be drawn up into a crouch. After a moment in which he would not meet her eyes, he stood. His sim had gone deathly pale, but when he turned his face to her, a certain miserable resolution had returned.

“You shame me, Renie,” he said.

“I'm sorry, but we have to . . .”

“No!” He angrily waved his hand. “What you did was right. Let us hurry to help Orlando.”

A rippling, distorted figure lurched past them toward the spot where Orlando and the falcon god had closed on each other.

“Javier!” Renie shouted after the dwindling shape. “T4b! What are you
doing
?”

He dug on, ignoring them, hurrying toward the unfair combat between Orlando and the huge Grail monster.

“Jesus Mercy!” Renie shrieked as she began to run after him. “I am never, never, never,
never
going anywhere with teenage boys again!”

With !Xabbu following her, they raced across the distorted landscape, fighting waves of dizziness and confusion. Somewhere that might have been ten meters ahead or a thousand, Orlando was flung sideways by a horrendous blow from his enemy's gargantuan hand. Renie cried out, certain he had been killed. To her astonishment, Orlando and his army of phantom duplicates struggled up onto hands and knees and began to crawl, but the multiplied forms of the Grail monster snatched him up a moment later. Orlando's bleeding, broken form swayed upside down in the creature's grasp like a gutted animal. Renie was sprinting now, but even through the distortions she could tell that she and !Xabbu were still too far away. They would be too late.

A ripple of angel-shapes suddenly filled the sky and a thousand terrified female voices cried out at the same moment,
“Stop! You are killing him!”

The sound was so desolate, so full of despair and the certainty of failure that Renie stumbled and almost fell. When she regained her balance, she saw that something was now climbing the falcon monster's back. For a moment, she thought it was Fredericks making a suicidal bid to save her friend.

“No—it's T4b!” Renie gasped. !Xabbu said nothing, but pelted on beside her.

The Grail creature had become aware of the thing on its back: it snapped its vast, clacking beak at the interloper, then brought up its free hand to swat T4b away like a fly, but the teenager ducked under the blow and scrambled up onto the huge head. T4b raised his altered hand—for a brief, hallucinatory instant, Renie saw it glowing a cool blue-gray—then jammed it into the falcongod's head just behind the nictitating eye. It entered the giant skull without resistance, but the effect was startling: the Grail-thing abruptly stiffened and straightened, as though a powerful electric current ran down its spine. As it lifted trembling hands to its head, Orlando managed to grab at the creature's body and drag himself closer, then thrust the jagged remains of his sword into the falcon god's chest.

The Grail monster suddenly found its voice, roaring and choking. It knocked T4b flying, then lifted Orlando up to its staring eye as though wondering what sort of creature could cause it so much pain. The brute fell silent, swayed in place, then let Orlando drop. A moment later it collapsed on top of him like a razed building.

“Orlando!”
Fredericks screamed and beat at the massive, inert form of the Grail monster. “Orlando!”

Renie and !Xabbu stumbled to a halt beside the leveled god. The falcon-thing had fallen so hard it had cratered the ground. Only one of Orlando's feet could be seen protruding from beneath the monster's chest; Fredericks was struggling uselessly to shove the massive creature aside so she could reach her friend's body.

Renie had only a shocked moment to survey the scene, then she became aware of something moving above her head—a shadow, a change of air pressure. She looked up to see the titan hand of the Other dropping toward them, a shape so vast that it swallowed the sky and even the light as it fell.

“Oh, no . . .” was all she had time to say before the roof of the world collapsed on top of them.

 

O
RLANDO did not fight the darkness this time.

He could feel himself dissolving, slipping away, but there was nothing to be done about it. All that made him what he was seemed to be growing diffuse, like the scant substance of a cloud melting into hot sunlight—but it was darkness, not light, that refined and absorbed him.

For a moment he thought he saw again the hospital room and his parents. He tried to speak to them, to touch them, but he had already made that decision, and now had no more substance than an idle thought: he could only skim past them into the growing dark.

I'm just a memory now.
The realization should have been terrible and sad, but it felt different than that, somehow. Still, though he had left them behind, he badly wanted to let them know he had not forgotten them. He could only hope some unimaginable wind might carry his voice back to them through the empty spaces.

He rushed on. The voices were back, whether real or not, but now they were calling to him in welcome. He was disappearing even as he simultaneously grew wider, grew deeper, until there was almost nothing left of him, but still he could encompass whole universes.

And after all that he had done to fight it, to flee from it, to deaden his fear of it, when he was finally ushered through into that ultimate moment, Orlando Gardiner found he did not fear the darkness after all.

S
OMEONE was tugging at her hand. Stephen, of course—he always managed to beat her pad's alarm by five minutes, always dragged her up out of those desperately-needed last few minutes of sleep. Renie groaned and tried to roll over. Let him make his own breakfast for once. After all, he was eight years old . . .

But no, he wasn't anymore, he was . . . how old now? Ten? Eleven? Nearly a teenager, and old enough that he had become the hard one to wake, burying himself deeper in the pillow, ignoring her warnings that he would be late for school . . . lost in sleep, sleep, deep down where she could not reach him . . .

Stephen.
The memory abruptly became clear, like a card turned over.
Stephen is in a coma.
She had to do something. But if it wasn't Stephen pulling at her, then who . . . ?

She opened her eyes, struggling to focus. For a split instant, the face hovering over her was almost unfamiliar, but then she suddenly realized who it was, the pale brown skin and peppercorn hair . . .

“!Xabbu . . . !” She sat up and was almost dropped again by a swirl of dizziness. “!Xabbu, it's you! I mean, the real you!”

He smiled, but there was something strange about it, something held in reserve. “It is me, Renie. Are you well?”

“But . . . but you're in your own body!” In fact, he was in his own body and nothing else, crouching beside her completely naked. “Are we . . . are we back? Home?” She sat up again, more slowly this time. The strange black mountaintop still surrounded them but its lines were different—even the texture of the rocks was different, oddly smooth and strangely angular. But the greatest difference of all was that the giant humanoid shape which had dominated the valley had disappeared, leaving only an empty crater between the peaks—a crater that had collapsed along one side, so that half the mountaintop was now open to the sky.

There was no visible sun, but a kind of morning seemed to have come to the place, the sky a strangely familiar gray. Confused, Renie looked away from the broken mountainside to examine herself, and saw that like her friend, she too was naked. She was also a woman again. “Jesus Mercy, what's going on here?” Despite !Xabbu's own careless nudity, she folded her arms over her breasts. “Am I . . . ?”

“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 shadow from 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.”