Mountain of Black Glass (28 page)

Embarrassed, but still amused, Orlando could only shake his head.

“By the swinging udders of Hathor, do you not recognize our lord Osiris? Who else could be dead and yet still lust?” The disgust in his voice made Orlando realize suddenly that this riddlegame was in deadly earnest—that their salvation might hinge on it. Before he could ponder the meaning of the dwarf's riddle about Osiris, the tiny man had bounced up onto his feet. “I will give you one last chance. Tell me who I am.”

He lifted his hands to his curly hair and spread the fingers like ragged ears, then screwed up his face into a broad, toothy gape before throwing back his head to bay like a sick dog. The Wicked Tribe, vastly amused, began to do the same, so that the room echoed with shrill yips. “Ah, me!” the dwarf moaned. “Although it is daylight, my head is muddled, so I will howl at the sun instead of the moon!”

Fredericks suddenly laughed. “It's Oompa-Loompa!”

“Upaut,” said Orlando gratefully. “That's Upaut.”

“Well,” Mrs. Simpkins began, “if we've had enough of these games . . .”

Bes raised a bushy eyebrow. “That one was too easy, I think. Let us try one more.” He paused for a moment, waiting for the Tribe to fall silent, which they at last reluctantly did, then lifted his hands and covered both eyes. Through some ventriloquial trick, his voice seemed to come from everywhere in the room except his own broad mouth.

“I am lost in darkness,” he sighed. “I am sealed in a coffin, wandering in darkness and cold forever . . .”

“I know that one, too,” Orlando said. “And it's not funny.”

The dwarf dropped his hands. “Ah, so you were correct, little mother. They
do
know something.” He turned back to Orlando. “You speak the truth. It is not much of a joke.” He spread his arms as if in a gesture of welcome, then abruptly did a backward flip, landing solidly on his bandy legs near the doorway of the chamber. “Let us go, then. The temple of Grandfather Ra awaits us.”

“Just a minute,” Orlando growled. The energy which had allowed him to get out of bed and walk to the roof was beginning to flag, and he was having trouble keeping his temper. “How are we going to get through all those soldiers? And why do we want to go there in the first place?”

“You have to get out of here,” Mrs. Simpkins said in the sudden quiet. “I told you—this place isn't safe for you or anyone who's helping you.”

“But why don't we just go down the river to the next gateway, or whatever they're called. Why won't anyone tell us anything? We still don't know what
you're
doing here, let alone why we have to go join some stupid revolution.”

She nodded her head. “You're right, boy. I owe you the rest of my story. I'll tell you what I can when we're on the way. But Tefy and Mewat have boats full of soldiers all over the Nile during the daytime, and at night you'd never be able to get down there in the first place before something ate you—if you were lucky.”

Fredericks spoke up. “But why go
there?
”

“Because it's the only gateway you can reach,” she said quietly. “And Bes is the only one who can get you there.”

“Not if we stand here all day like old, constipated Taueret, waiting in the water lilies for her bowels to move,” observed Bes.

Mrs. Simpkins fetched a thick white robe which she threw over Orlando's shoulders. “That'll keep the sun off you, boy. You're still not well.” At her direction, but not without a few muffled squeals of protest, the squadron of monkeys climbed underneath the robe. “Let's not turn this into any more of a circus than we have to,” she said.

But that, Orlando reflected sourly as he followed the surprisingly nimble dwarf out the door and across the villa garden, was exactly what they most resembled.

“Hey, if we have to go to this temple and see Wolf Boy,” Fredericks said brightly, “maybe we can at least get your sword back, huh?”

Orlando was already feeling tired as he watched Bes climbing the garden wall, apparently with the idea of taking them out some less obvious way. “I can hardly wait,” he said.

I
T was at times like this, reflected the man who was both Felix Jongleur and Osiris, Lord of Life and Death, that the life of a supreme being felt more than a little lonely.

The meeting with Jiun Bhao had been heartening, but the effects had not lasted long. Now, as he lay in the eternal blue nothing of his system's base level, he was already beginning to wonder what kind of Mephistophelian bargain the Chinese financier had secured. Jongleur was not used to making deals whose fine print he had not read.

More worrisome, though, was the latest news on the Other, which continued to run deep in K-cycle and showed no signs of changing any time soon. No one else in the Brotherhood had any idea how unstable the system beneath the Grail Network truly was, and as the days approaching the Ceremony dwindled away, Jongleur was coming to feel he might have made a terrible mistake.

Was there a way to detach the network from the Other and substitute another system, even at this late date? There were things Robert Wells and his Jericho people at Telemorphix had developed that might work, although some functionality would certainly be lost in the changeover—slower response times, at the very least, and perhaps a price to pay in the dumping of some of the less important bits of memory as well, not to mention that the Ceremony itself would have to be postponed still further—but the essential functions of the network would surely be saved and the completion of the Grail Project could go forward. But did he dare? Wells was as desperate for the Grail's success as Jongleur was himself, but that still did not mean he would sit back and allow the chairman of the Brotherhood to admit defeat quietly. No, the American would rescue the project then make all the political capital of it he could. The prospect was galling. But not to do so would be to risk everything, absolutely everything, on a system that was daily proving itself to be unpredictably, unknowably strange.

He moved uneasily, or would have, had his body not been restrained in a porous microfilament webbing, drifting in the viscous fluids of his life-preserving chamber. For well over a hundred years he had kept his own counsel, but it was hard at times like this not to wish that things were different.

Jongleur's brain again sent a signal for movement to dispel nervous energy, and again the signal arced into nothingness. He longed for bodily freedom, but more specifically, he longed for the soothing environs of his favorite simulation. Still, there was business to take care of first.

With a thought, he opened a communication window. It was only short moments until Finney's face appeared in it, or rather the vulture head of its Egyptian incarnation, Tefy. “Yes, O Lord?”

Jongleur paused, taken aback. “Where is the priest? What are you doing there?”

“Seeing to your interests, O Lord of Life and Death.”

“You have interests of mine to see to, certainly, but I don't . . .” A sudden suspicion clutched him, and with it a shiver of anticipation. “Is it Jonas? Have you got him?” A more reasonable, but still hopeful interpretation occurred to him. “Or have you simply tracked him into my Egypt?”

The vulture head dipped. “I regret to say that we do not know his present whereabouts at all, master.”

“Damnation! Then why aren't you out looking for him? Have you forgotten what I can do to you any time I wish?”

A vigorous shake of the beak. “We forget nothing, Lord. We are just . . . seeing to some details, then we will be on the trail again. Will you grace us with your presence soon?”

Jongleur shook his head. “Later. Perhaps . . .” he consulted the time readout, the numbers showing GMT, still the marker of global imperium long after the English sea empire had shrunk to a single dreaming island, “. . . perhaps not today, though. It would be too distracting with all these meetings.”

“Very good, Lord.”

Felix Jongleur hesitated. Was that relief he saw in his servant's inhuman expression? But such concerns could not be as significant as the decision he had to make, and time for that decision was running short. He cut the connection.

So . . . was it time to give up on the Other? Time to trigger the Apep Sequence? He could do nothing, of course, unless he received assurances from Wells, and that would mean throwing his entire system open to the Telemorphix engineers. Jongleur shuddered at the thought. Tomb robbers. Desecrators. But was there an alternative?

Again he found himself wishing for one person, just one, whose counsel he trusted. Long ago he had held a hope that the half-Aboriginal boy Johnny Wulgaru might become such—his intelligence and complete lack of sentiment had been obvious from the first time Jongleur had seen him in the so-called Private Youth Authority in Sydney, a warehouse for damaged children. But young Dread had proved too wild to be completely tamed, and too much a creature of his own predatory appetites ever truly to be trusted. He was a useful tool, and at times like now, when he seemed to be behaving himself, Jongleur even considered that he might be given a little more responsibility. Except for the worrisome matter of the air hostess, a homicide which Jongleur's agents suggested had been filed by the Colombian police and Interpol as unsolved and unlikely to change, there had been no signs of bad behavior. But an attack dog, it was now clear to him, could never become a trusted companion.

He had also once thought Finney might be someone worthy of the gift of Jongleur's confidence, despite his strange relationship with the nearly subhuman Mudd. But the night of broken glass had changed that—had changed everything.

Jongleur sighed. In the tower stronghold high above Lake Borgne the web of systems adjusted, flashing messages of imaginary muscular movement to his brain, gently shifting the O
₂
/CO
₂
ratios, imitating to near perfection the experience of embodiment, but still, somehow, falling just ineffably short.

T
HE gateway did not stay open long. Within seconds after Renie had stepped through with !Xabbu's hand still clutched tightly in her own, the pane of light flared and then vanished, leaving them dazzled into darkness.

Emily cried, “I can't see!”

“We are in a large room.” Martine sounded exhausted—Renie could only guess what the effort of opening the passage had done to her and !Xabbu. “It is very high and very long, and I sense many obstacles on the floor at our level, so I suggest none of you move until I have time to map things out.”

“There's a little light,” Renie said, “but not much.” The initial dazzle was fading. She could make out the edges of otherwise formless things and vague gray splotches high overhead. “There are windows up there, I think, but it's hard to tell. They're either partially curtained or they're just a really strange shape.”

“Martine, is there anything else we need to know about?” Florimel asked sharply. It seemed she was taking Renie's half-in-jest commissioning of her as security officer seriously.

“Not that I can tell. I cannot sense whether the floor is solid all the way to the walls, so I suggest we stay in one place.” The French woman was obviously thinking of her own recent fall, and Renie heartily agreed.