Mountain of Black Glass (25 page)

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed when he first felt the whirlpool's grip begin to lessen.

Exhausted and so weak in the knees he could barely stand, he opened his eyes to see the battlement cliffs of the mountain-island leaning out above his head, so near he could almost have touched them from the edge of the raft. He barely had time to make sure that his course would keep him off its rugged flank when something swung down from above—impossibly long, with fangs flashing in its business end. Paul did not even have time to shriek as the serpentine shape struck at him, but his legs buckled and dropped him to the deck so that the attack missed him, but the thing—a sort of tentacle made of rough, cracked leather—hit the mast and snapped the stout log as though it were a piece of uncooked spaghetti. The mouth at the tentacle's end snatched up the sail from the flinders of the mast and shook it viciously; in a second little bits of cloth were filtering down all around, swirling in the wind; Paul might have been fighting to keep his balance in a particularly unpleasant snow-globe.

He barely had time to reach down for his ax before the great snaky thing was grabbing for him again. If it was a tentacle, the rest of the body was somewhere high above on the rock face, in the dark cavern from which this limb extended; if it was not a leg but a neck, the face at the end of it was eyeless and noseless. Whatever it was, dripping jaws large and toothy as a great white shark's clacked at the end of that huge rope of scaly muscle. Paul stumbled back and swung the ax as hard as he could. A brief moment of joy as it sunk deep into flesh was shattered as the thing jerked back, the ax still lodged in its hide, and lifted him three meters off the deck. Pinkish slime frothed from the deep wound and spattered his face. For an instant he was paralyzed, trying to decide whether to cling to his only weapon or drop away from the snapping teeth, then the ax-blade ripped free and he fell hard onto the logs he had so carefully cut and shaped.

The thing twisted away, whipping from side to side in obvious pain, banging against the rocky cliffs and spraying froth everywhere, its jawed end half-severed from its long stem. Through the burning pain of his injuries he felt a fierce, mindless joy at seeing it crippled and suffering. Then five more identical mouths, each on its own serpentine neck, slithered down from the cavern above.

The next moments passed in a kind of roaring, turbulent dream. The eyeless heads darted at him. He managed to duck the first, then the second stabbing strike. He sliced scaly hide from one of them, but a third snapped at him from behind and almost caught him. The sail was gone and the broken mast offered little shelter, but he slid across the froth-slicked deck and planted his back against it anyway, swiping continuously back and forth with the ax as the heads paused and then lunged, searching for a way through the whirl of razor-sharp bronze. He chopped into a jaw and the mouth drew away, hissing through the sudden fount of bubbling pink, but it did not retreat very far.

He was growing tired rapidly, despite the magical lightness of his weapon, and the heads were no longer striking rashly. They swayed like cobras, waiting for a chink in his defense.

The roar of Charybdis had been growing louder for some time. Paul's only fleeting thought had been that he was probably now being drawn into the whirlpool, too, just so the gods could make certain that he was doomed, but he could not help noticing that the sound had changed to a deep, gurgling bellow, like nothing so much as the world's biggest ogre slurping soup. Then, as Scylla's heads bobbed, waiting for the ax in his weary hands to slow just a little, the crashing noise of the whirlpool abruptly stopped and the seas became still.

Paul had only a few heartbeats to experience the immense, eerie silence—he could actually hear the wet wheeze of Scylla's multiplied breath and the splash of waves against the rocks—then with a roar easily as loud as before, Charybdis suddenly vomited up the ocean she had been swallowing, a great geyser of seawater that burst through the surface and fountained hundreds of meters in the air. The blind, fanged heads hesitated as the first sheets of white-and-green water began to splash down, then the underwater force of the whirlpool's reversal heaved Paul's raft up into the air as violently as if it had been flung from a catapult. Scylla's mouths snapped in vain before the waters covered them, but he was already gone. The great wave carried the raft rushing down the strait; as the little craft spun, Paul had only an instant to grasp for the tiller. His hand closed on the veil.

Black rocks appeared to whirl around him, and the sea was first above, then below, then above him again. White foam flew past as he rose into the air above even the cliffs of the strait, so that for a long moment he could see the ocean and islands twirling below him as he floated at the end of the veil, no longer tethered by gravity. Then the wave threw him down again and he smashed against the ocean's back once, twice, skipping like a stone before a last impact dashed all the thoughts out of his head.

I
T had been a while since Orlando had spoken for such a long time, and he was not in very good condition. By the time he had reached the part of his recent history where he and Fredericks had first entered the harbor at Temilún, he was feeling much as he had been feeling then—tired and sick.

Bonita Mae Simpkins said very little, interrupting only to get an occasional clarification on some piece of netboy slang or to grouse at him for spending too much time on details interesting only to teenagers. She had offered nothing yet of her own, but her very reticence was making Orlando feel more trusting. Whoever she was, she was certainly not trying to sweet-talk him into betraying confidences.

A flaming wick in a bowl of oil colored the room with flickering yellow light and long shadows. Outside, the imaginary Egypt had grown dark, and from time to time strange sounds drifted to them through the hot desert night. As Orlando told of the Atascos' death and the flight from their throne room, a terrible, sobbing wail from somewhere nearby made him stop and fall silent, heart beating. Fredericks, sitting on the foot of the bed, was also pale and nervous.

“Don't worry, boy,” Mrs. Simpkins told him. “Before he went, Mr. Al-Sayyid made sure that this house was protected. You could say it has charms on it, but that's heathenish, and what he did's more scientific. But nothing's coming in—not tonight, anyway.”

“Who's Mr. Al-Sayyid?”

“You're not done talkin' yet, and I haven't started. Keep going.”

Orlando shrugged and tried to pick up the tale. He moved quickly through the escape from Temilún and their travels in the miniature world, grimacing when Fredericks insisted he explain how he had fought with a giant, homicidal millipede. It wasn't so much that Orlando was embarrassed—he had acquitted himself fairly well, he thought—but it was clearly the sort of swashbuckling detail this stern woman did not want to hear. He hurried on to their sojourn in the cartoon world, then was forced to repeat the tale of what had happened to them in the Freezer several times while Mrs. Simpkins asked a number of shrewd questions.

“So that was her, too—the feather-goddess? You're sure?”

Orlando nodded. “It . . . it feels like the same person. Looked like her, too, sort of. Who is she?”

His questioner only shook her head. “And the other thing, the thing you only felt—what your friend here called ‘the actual factual Devil'? Tell me about that again.”

He did, or tried to, but it was hard to put the experience into words, as difficult as describing really intense pain—something he had done enough times for people who wanted to understand but couldn't to know it never really worked. “So, was it the devil?” he asked when he had finished, although he felt pretty sure he knew what this woman with her frequent talk of the Lord and Jesus would say.

She surprised him. “No, I don't think it was. But it may be something almost worse. I think it's a kind of devil that mortal men have made, men so full of pride they think they are God Himself.”

“What do you mean?”

Again she would only shake her head. “It's too much to talk about all at once. Anyway, you're tired, boy—just look at the state of you. You need some sleep.”

Orlando and Fredericks both flinched as something that was not a dog whined and barked in the street just outside the window. “I'm not going to sleep for a while,” Orlando said truthfully. “Tell us where you're from. You promised.”

“I did no such thing.” She stared at him hard, but he had seen enough of her to know she was not angry, only considering. She turned to Fredericks. “I suppose you want to hear, too.”

Orlando's friend nodded his head. “It would be nice to know
something
for a change.”

“All right. But I don't want any questions until I'm done, and if you open your yaps before then, you can just watch me walk away.” She scowled to show she meant business. “And I'm not going to say anything twice.

“My husband Terence and I belong to the Revelation Church of Christ, down in Porterville, Mississippi, and we are proud to do the Lord's work. You have to understand that first of all. We're what you might call muscular Christians—that's what our pastor says, anyway. We work hard for Jesus and we're not much on that airy-fairy nonsense like church picnics and car washes. We come to church and we sing and we pray, and sometimes we do get loud. Some people call us holy rollers, 'cause when the Lord lays His hand on one of us, we start to shout and talk about it a little.”

Orlando found himself nodding, almost mesmerized by the rhythm of her voice, even though he had only the faintest idea what she was talking about. His parents had only taken him to church once, to a cousin's wedding, and didn't go much themselves except for chamber music, when one of the local places of worship was used as a concert hall.

“And we don't hold with judging people all the time either,” she said in a tone that suggested Orlando might have been just about to suggest they did. “Our God is all-powerful, and He will show people the truth. What might be in their heart afterward is between them and the Lord. You understand me, you boys?”

Both Orlando and Fredericks hastened to indicate that they did.

“Now, the Lord never gifted me or Terence with children—it just wasn't His plan for us, but I'd be lyin' if I told you I never wondered or questioned why. But we both had a chance to work with plenty of 'em, Terence teaching shop at the local middle school, me working in the emergency room at the hospital in De Kalb. It's sad, but a whole lot of the children I saw were in bad shape. If you don't think you need the Lord in your heart and your life, you never saw a bunch of children been in a school bus crash start coming into the ER by twos and threes. That'll test you.

“Anyway, that's none of it to the point. What I'm trying to say is that we had plenty of things in our lives. God had already given us our work to do, and we had nieces and nephews, too, so if we wondered sometimes why the Lord never gave us our own baby to raise, we didn't wonder long. Then Mr. Al-Sayyid came to First Revelation.

“He was this little dark-colored man, and when Pastor Winsallen first brought him up to introduce him, I thought he might be collecting for one of those backward foreign countries you only hear about when they have an earthquake or something. He had a nice voice, though—very proper, like that English gentleman you see on the net in all those imitation beef commercials, you know the one? Anyway, this Mr. Al-Sayyid told us that he was a Copt. I didn't know what that was—at first, I thought he meant he was a policeman, which was kind of funny because he wasn't much higher than my shoulder and I'm not all that big. But he explained that he was from Egypt, and the Copts were a Christian religion, even if we hadn't heard of 'em. He gave a little talk about the group he belonged to, called Circle of Fellowship, which did all kinds of charitable work in poor countries, and then Pastor Winsallen collected some money, just like I figured.