Mountain of Black Glass (19 page)

“You have no idea. My balls, not to put it too gently, are in a vise. Look, let's say your job, your
real
job, not just the day-today bullshit, was to make sure no one robbed a certain bank. And for years not only didn't anyone rob it, nobody even parked illegally in front of it, so that everyone thought you had the easiest job in the world. And then one day, when everything seemed just like any other day, someone not only robbed the bank, they took the whole damn building. Now, if you were that bank guard, how would
you
feel? And what do you think it would do to your career?”

“Oh, God, Mike.” Her mother sounded scared, but she also had that whispery sound when she wanted to kiss Daddy, but he was busy doing something and wouldn't let her. “I didn't realize it was that bad. That strange old man . . . ?”

“That old bastard, yeah. But I can't tell you any more, honey—I really, really can't. But this stuff with Christabel is not happening at a good time, let's put it that way.”

There was a long quiet.

“So what should we do about our little girl?”

“I don't know.” There was a clink of glass. Daddy was picking up whatever he'd broken. “But I'm scared to death, and the fact that she won't tell us anything about it makes it worse. I've never thought of her as a liar, Kaylene—never thought she would keep a secret like that.”

“It scares me too.”

“Well, that's why the house arrest. She's not going anywhere without one of us around except to school until we get to the bottom of this. In fact, I'm going to go talk to her again now.”

The last thing Christabel heard as she scrambled away from the cleaning machine's door was her mother say, “Go easy on her, Mike. She's just a little girl.”

 

As she lay on the bed with her eyes closed, pretending she was still taking her nap, she could hear her daddy's footsteps coming up the stairs,
clump, clump, clump.
Sometimes, when she was waiting for him to come up and tuck her in and kiss her good night, she felt almost like the princess in
Sleeping Beauty,
waiting for the handsome prince to get through all the scratchy thorns. Other times it was like being in a haunted house, hearing a monster get closer and closer.

He opened the door quietly, then she felt him sit down on the edge of the bed. “Christabel? Wake up, honey.”

She pretended that she was mostly asleep. She could still feel her heart beating fast, as though she had run a long way. “What?”

“You look very pink,” he said, worried. “Are you coming down with something?” He laid his big hand across her head. It felt cool and hard and very, very heavy.

“I'm okay, I guess.” She sat up. She didn't want to look at him because she knew he was giving her a Serious Look.

“Look, Christabel, honey, I want you to understand something. All of this about the Storybook Sunglasses—your mommy and I aren't angry at you because we think you're bad, we're upset because we're worried. And it makes us very unhappy when you won't tell us the truth.”

“I know, Daddy.” She still didn't want to look at him, not because she was scared, but because she knew if she saw his face she would start crying.

“So why won't you just tell us what's going on? If you have a friend your own age and you're just playing around, changing your voices or something, we won't be angry. But if it's someone grown-up—well, then we need to know about it. Do you understand?”

She nodded. His fingers touched her chin and lifted her face until she had to look at him, his big wide face, his tired eyes, the bristly whiskers. It was the whiskers—Daddy
always
shaved every morning, except on Saturday, and sometimes he shaved twice in a day if he and Mommy were going out to dinner—that made her stomach swim around and her face get hot all over again.

“Has someone touched you? Has anyone done anything to you?”

“N-no.” Christabel began to cry. “No, Daddy!”

“Just talk to me, kiddo. Just tell me what's going on with those glasses.”

She tried to answer, but at first could only make sucking noises like the vacuum. There was snot coming out of her nose, so she tried to wipe it away with her sleeve. Her daddy pulled a tissue out of the Zoomer Zizz box and gave it to her. When she could talk, she said, “I can't tell you. It's a secret, and . . .” She shook her head because she couldn't explain. Everything was so terrible, everything. Mister Sellars was with that bad, scary boy, and she couldn't get away even to explain to him that her parents had the sunglasses, and because she was lying she was making her mommy and daddy so sad, and her daddy looked so tired. . . . “I can't.”

For a moment, she thought he was going to get angry again like he had the first night—that he might yell or break some of her toys, the way he'd thrown Prince Pikapik against a wall and smashed up his insides so now the otter would only walk in little limping circles. But the red in his cheeks was very bright, as bright as when he and Captain Ron had too many drinks and said things about the cheerleader girls on the wallscreen that made Christabel feel funny and nervous.

“All right.” He stood up. “This isn't the Middle Ages, Christabel, or even thirty years ago—I'm not going to give you the kind of smacking my daddy used to give me when I wouldn't own up to the truth. But you
will
tell us where you got those, and you won't go out to play, or watch the wallscreen, or go to Seawall Center, or any of the things you like to do—we'll keep you home until high school, if we have to—until you stop playing these stupid games.”

He went out and shut the door behind him. Christabel started crying again.

 

T
HE man who stood glowering before him was so large that he blocked most of the light in a tavern room that did not have much to spare. Tattoos covered his face and most of his visible skin, and small animal bones were knotted in his bushy beard. He raised a hand like a bear's paw and set it on the table, which creaked audibly.

“I am Grognug the Unlovable,” he rumbled, “slayer of the ogre Vaxirax and several other monsters nearly as infamous. I make it my business to kill at least one man every day with my bare hands, just to stay in practice. I give preference to those who sit on my personal stool without asking.” Teeth that had clearly never undergone any process as effeminate as brushing could not be said to flash; instead, they made a brief and mossy appearance. “And who are
you,
little man?”

“My . . . my name is Ka-turr of Rhamzee,” the other stammered, “swordsman for hire. I am . . . a stranger here, and do not know . . .”

“It is good to hear your name before I yank off your head,” Grognug interrupted, “so that the bards will be able to add today's victim to the long list. The bards keep very close track of my career, you see, and they are sticklers for detail.” Grognug's breath was expertly rendered, and explained the rest of his fatalistic soubriquet: the VR scent-effect would have convinced almost anyone that they were standing downwind from sun-warmed road-kill.

“Heh.” Ka-turr slid his stool back. “Actually, I was just leaving.”

Ten seconds later Catur Ramsey was sitting splay-legged in the shadowy street outside, laughter still echoing from the door behind him. Even he had to admit that his swift exit, ending in a pratfall, had probably been worth a chuckle or two. “Jesus!” he said. “What is it with this place? That's the third bar I've been chucked out of!”

“First off,”
said the voice in his ear,
“it's a tavern, not a bar. You gotta get this stuff straight, that's part of the problem. Everyone always picks on the virgins.”

“I told you I should have been something else instead of a sword fighter—a thief, or a wizard, or something. A medieval accountant, maybe. Just because I'm pretty tall and I've got this jumbo can opener hanging off my belt, everyone keeps picking fights with me.”

“Yeah, but this way if you find a fight you can't run away from, at least you got a chance of survivin' it,”
Beezle pointed out in his thick Brooklyn dialect.
“And at the rate you're goin', you'll find one of those pretty soon. . . .”

Ramsey picked himself up and dusted off the knees and seat of his heavy wool breeks. His sword, which he had not yet dared to draw from its scabbard, thumped against his thigh. Not only had its dangling bulk already proved a problem when running away from bar fights, it had some bizarre name which he had already forgotten.

“What's this thing called again? Slamhanger or Hamslammer or something?”

Beezle sighed, a disembodied Jiminy Cricket floating in Ramsey's ear.
“It's called Slayhammer. It comes from the Temple of the Wailing God, in your home country of Rhamzee, beyond the borders of the Middle Country. How do you ever keep track of your legal stuff? You got a memory like a sieve, buddy.”

“I make notes. I sit at a desk and talk to my office system. I have paralegals. I don't usually have to crawl through the stinking gutters of the ancient city of Margarine to do my research.”

Ramsey scowled, but could not help being a tiny bit amused by what a complete and utter disaster this was turning out to be. “Nah. You might as well save your energy for finding me someplace new to get beat up.”

 

Coming here had seemed an obvious idea at first, especially when most of the initial leads, all so promising, had proved themselves to be little better than mirages, receding and then fading as he approached. Beezle had made much information available about Orlando's last few months, but trying to follow up on any of it had been surprisingly difficult. The TreeHouse people, in part because of their own tragedy—several children of network users struck down at the same time, apparently with Tandagore's Syndrome—rebuffed all of Ramsey's quiet overtures. Smelling a lawsuit, perhaps, none of the engineers at Indigo Gear would admit even talking to an Orlando Gardiner, although one of the recruiting officers admitted having given him a scholarship. Ramsey had a feeling that were it not for the possible disastrous publicity of welshing on a deal with a kid in a coma, Indigo would already have withdrawn that scholarship and wiped all records off the books.

The last and best hope for information about Orlando's recent activities had been the Middle Country, but even here dead ends abounded. After requests to examine network records had been met with a polite but unmistakable go-slow policy, such that finding what he wanted the normal way would have taken a couple of years, he was forced to begin a search from the inside. But not only had his entry into the simworld made him feel at least as stupid as he had feared it would, it had made him feel stupid in some ways he hadn't even anticipated, as his sore tailbone now attested.

Beezle had first taken him to what had once been the site of Senbar Flay's magical tower, but the building was gone now, removed from what according to Beezle had been permanent non-status on the Middle Country's books. Testimony to the speed of virtual urban renewal, another wizard's castle already stood in its place, a small, jeweled fantasy of Moorish minarets.
Attractive starter chateau for sorcerers,
Ramsey had imagined the real estate listing. There were even rumors of a sentry-djinn guarding the premises, which the lawyer had no intention of trying to prove or disprove. It was clear there was nothing to learn from this particular site. The child who had once played the wizard's character was still in the same place—on life-support in a Florida hospital—but as far as the Middle Country was concerned, Senbar Flay was now history.

A ride into the distant Catspine Mountains that used almost a week of his pathetically sparse personal time furthered Ramsey's run of disasters. Xalisa Thol's mound, the place where Beezle said the whole thing had begun, was gone, too. The local inhabitants talked nervously about the night it had disappeared, of a blizzard of ice that had kept everyone indoors and the snow wolves that had made it seem a good idea not to hurry out right after the storm ended.

So Ramsey had returned to Madrikhor, hoping to turn up something the old-fashioned way. In real life he had walked into some of the ugliest neighborhoods of Washington and Baltimore seeking information in personal injury cases, so how bad could playing gumshoe in a virtual fairy tale be?

Worse than he had expected, as it turned out. Even the most unpleasant inhabitants of the Edwin Meese Gardens housing project had never tried to shove a basilisk into Ramsey's codpiece.

He was in a small, down-at-the-heels tavern named The Reaver's Posset, finishing his cup of mead (and counting his lucky stars that he had not invested more in the taste-simulation aspects of his gear) when a figure lurched up to his carefully chosen seat in one of the darker corners. It had been a long, frequently painful day, and the Posset was in one of the dingier neighborhoods of Madrikhor, so when the stranger stopped before him and then another unfamiliar figure stepped in beside the first, Ramsey sighed and braced himself for another thrashing.