Mountain of Black Glass (71 page)

But what if it was temporary? Or what if the same thing was not happening to !Xabbu, and he would be left behind in the network? It was hard to think—the excitement of the world that had seemed so far away now being so near was making her claustrophobic. How could she float here, deep in the unlit depths of the tank, while real air and real light were only a few movements away? Even seeing her father, the miserable old bastard, would be such a joy . . . !

The thought of Long Joseph brought with it the memory of Stephen and her excitement suddenly turned cold and heavy. How could she leave when she had done nothing for him? She would be free, yes, but he would still be stretched like a corpse in that horrible tent, wasting away.

Adrenaline sped through her like a brushfire. Whatever she was going to do, she might have only minutes or even seconds before this ended. She pushed at the inconstant gel, forcing herself toward one of the sides of the tank. Her hands encountered something hard and unevenly smooth—the tank's interior wall and its millions of pressure-jets. She curled her fingers into a fist and tried to find an area where the counterpressure was weaker, then rapped at the wall. A dull sound like a gong wrapped in a blanket came back to her, so quiet that she despaired anyone would ever hear it until she remembered that she was wearing not just a mask but hearplugs. She knocked again, over and over, and the more she did so without result, the stronger grew the urge to throw aside all responsibilities and simply open the tank. Escape. Escape would be so wonderful. . . .

“H-hello?”
It was very hesitant but very close.

“Jeremiah? Is that you?” His voice in her ear brought his face with it, a pure spark of memory, as though he had suddenly appeared in the darkness beside her. “Oh, God, Jeremiah?”

“Renie?”
He sounded even more surprised than she was, his voice shaking.
“I'll . . . I'll let you out . . .”

“Don't open the tank! I can't explain, but I don't want the tank opened. I don't know how much time I have.”

“What's . . .”
He stopped, clearly overwhelmed.
“What's happening with you, Renie? We weren't able to talk to you after the first few minutes you went in. It's been weeks! We had no idea what . . .”

“I know, I know. Just listen. I don't know if this will do you any good, but we're still in the network. It's huge, Jeremiah. It's . . . I can't even explain. But it's strange, too. We're still trying to understand everything.” And yet they understood almost nothing—how could she possibly relate what they had experienced? And how would any of it be of any use? “I don't know what I can say. There's something keeping us online—this is the first time I've been off the network or whatever it is since we first hacked our way in. There are other people involved, too. Damn, how can I explain? Somebody just told us we're supposed to go to Priam's Walls, which I think is some kind of simulation of the Trojan War, but we don't know why, or who wants us to go, or . . . or anything . . .” She took a breath, floating in darkness, separated from life by a thin wall of fibramic crammed with micromachinery. “Jesus Mercy, I haven't even asked about you, about my father! How are you? Is everything okay?”

Jeremiah hesitated.
“Your father . . . your father is fine.”
There was a pause. Despite her racing heart, Renie almost smiled. Clearly, he was driving Jeremiah crazy.
“But . . . but . . .”

She felt a sour tug of fear. “But what?”

“The phone.”
He seemed to be struggling for words.
“The phone here has been ringing.”

Renie could make no sense of this. “So? It's old technology—that's what phones used to do.”

“No, it's been ringing, and ringing, and ringing.”
A burst of static swept through her hearplugs, almost obliterating the last repetition. His words jumped back, very clear.
“So I answered it.”

“You did what? Why in the name of God did you do that?”

“Renie, don't yell at . . .”
Another blizzard of noise swept through.
“. . . Until I was going crazy. I mean, after your . . .”
Jeremiah's pause was his own this time, although more distortion soon followed.
“Anyway, I . . . up . . . other end . . . said . . .”

“I can't hear you! Say that again.”

“Jeremiah!”

But his voice had grown distant, like a bee buzzing in a paper cup several meters away. Renie shouted to him again, but it was too late: the connection was gone. Within moments she felt her sense of her surroundings diminishing as well, as though something had reached down and grasped her mind in powerful yet velvet-soft fingers and was drawing it right out of her body. She had time only to wonder what would have happened if she had actually left the tank, then she was sucked back into the void again. Darkness lasted only another instant, then the world—the virtual world—reassembled itself around her in a fluttering explosion of particulate color, like a tumbled card-tower flocking back together, until the stairs were beneath her feet once more and Brother Factum Quintus' face was before her, lips still parted in preparation for speech.

“In fact . . .” was all he had time to say before Renie astonished him by sagging and then collapsing onto the stairs.

 

“So Factum Quintus didn't feel anything,” Renie said quietly. She had passed off her collapse as a dizzy spell, and the monk had already begun to mount the stairs again. “For him, it was like it didn't happen. He just turned off and then turned on again.”

“That is no doubt because he is a Puppet,” Florimel whispered—caught up as Renie was in the strange courtesy of not letting Factum Quintus suspect he might be artificial. “My experience was more like yours. Of all these . . . spasmic occurrences I have been through in this network, this was the strangest. I felt myself back in my own body. I . . . I felt my daughter beside me.” She hesitated, then abruptly turned to follow the monk.

“What happened to me was different,” !Xabbu said, padding along at Renie's side. “But I would like to think about it for a little while before I tell you.”

Renie nodded. She was still too shaken by the brief moment of return to want to talk much at all. “I don't know that we can make any sense of it anyway.
Something's
happening—I can't believe it's normal when everything goes crazy like that. But what it all means . . .”

Renie fell silent as they stepped up onto the landing, which turned out to be the entrance to the top of the tower. The room was only a few meters wide, an octagon with a window of thick, old-fashioned leaded panes in each wall. The sky outside was cobalt blue, but already at the edges night was beginning to burn away; a faint glow of dawn outlined the strange horizon.

But horizon, Renie decided, could not really be the right word. What horizon they could see was only the most distant parts of the House still visible—she could not help wondering for a moment whether the House-world curved like the natural globe, or was as flat as it was apparently infinite—but all around them stood the much more absorbing vista of the Spire Forest.

It was obvious what had occasioned the name. Unlike Renie's other view of the House, which had been mostly flat rooftops, cupolas, and domes, what surrounded their tower windows was a profusion of vertical shapes in astounding variety—windowed obelisks, clock towers, attenuated pyramids and needle-thin spikes, Gothic protrusions clotted with dark carvings, even vast crenellated belvederes so ornate they looked like entire castles perched in the sky. Even in the dim light, Renie could count hundreds of the spires looming far above the House's sea of roofs.

“I know the names of some, but not all,” Factum Quintus said. “Many of the older names are lost forever, unless we find them perhaps in the translation of old books. That tall thin one is Cupboard's Dagger. Nearer is Weeping Baron's Tower, and closer still is one called Jelliver's Heart, for reasons no one knows. I think that more elaborate shape in the distance might be the Pinnacle of the Garden Kings—yes, it seems to have the famous carbuncles, much argued about in their day—although it is too dark to be sure.”

“And . . . and our friend is in one of these?” she said at last.

“It seems likely. And her abductor as well, which is why we want to see rather than be seen, and thus needed to arrive here while darkness remained. But there is another serious problem, I'm afraid.” Brother Factum Quintus' worried look, though sincere, did not entirely overshadow the fascinated gleam in his eyes as he surveyed the garden of spikes just warming into three-dimensionality with the sun's first rays. “The piece of figured plaster that began this search tells me your friend's captor has likely passed through the long corridors built during the Alliance of Chambers era, which link most of these towers. It stands to reason that a criminal would pick one of these high spots as a lair—an ‘eyrie' would be a better term, perhaps—since they are remote and yet still close to the Library. But as to
which
of all these actually contains your friend . . . I'm afraid I have no idea at all.”

 

“That's ridiculous,” Renie told them flatly. “It's too risky.” She was exhausted, desperate for sleep, but this had to be dealt with now. “We can't afford to search with anything less than our full numbers. That's how that monster got Martine in the first place, when she fell behind us—culled her from the herd like a lion taking an antelope.”

“But what he says makes sense, Renie . . . ” Florimel began.

“No! I can't accept it.”

!Xabbu sidled across the floor of the dusty chamber, not quite upright, but not on all fours, blurring the difference between his real inner self and his sim body in a way that always made her nervous. “I appreciate that you are concerned for me, my friend, but I believe it is the best way.”

Her fatigue was making her stupidly stubborn—it was hard to argue with !Xabbu's logic—but Renie would not let go easily. “So we're supposed to just let you go off by yourself? Not just after a murderer, but climbing around hundreds of feet above the ground?”

“Can we six this so I can get some 'zontal?” T4b snarled. “He's a monkey, seen? Monkeys climb.”

Helplessly looking for allies, Renie turned to Factum Quintus, who shrugged. “It is not my argument,” he said. “But as I told you, it will take us days to walk up and down corridors and stairs, searching all these towers on foot, and in very few of them would we be able to reach the upper rooms without warning any occupants.”

Renie clenched her teeth, biting back an angry reply that would convince no one. It was useless to antagonize her friends. The most pressing argument of all was one she could not make, not without announcing her own selfishness: she was terrified she might lose !Xabbu. After all they had experienced together, she could not imagine where she might find the strength to go on without him. With Stephen as good as dead, the small man was the closest thing she had to loving family.

“We are tired, Renie.” Florimel was clearly finding it difficult to keep resentment out of her voice. “We must sleep.”

“But . . .”

“She is right,” !Xabbu said. “I will not change my mind, but it may look different to you after you have rested. I will take first watch—I shall not go anywhere until it is dark, in any case, so we can sleep through as much of the day as we need.”

“I don't want to sleep.” It was Emily, her voice tremulous. “I want to go home. I . . . I
hate
this place.”

Renie fought for patience. “You've been in worse.”

“No.” The girl sounded quite certain. “It makes me feel sick to be here. It's bad for my baby, too.”

Renie wondered if there was something going on that they did not understand, but had no strength to pursue it. “I'm sorry, Emily. We'll leave as soon as we can get our friend Martine back.”

“Don't want to stay here at
all,
” Emily grumbled, but quietly, like a child back-talking a parent who had already left the room.

“Sleep,” Florimel grunted. “Sleep while you can.”

The minutes of silence that followed were not restful ones, and the sleep Florimel recommended seemed impossibly distant. Renie realized she was clenching and unclenching her fists. She could sense !Xabbu looking at her, but she did not want to meet his eyes, even when he sidled closer.

“There is a story my people tell,” he said to her quietly. “Perhaps you would like to hear it?”

“I would enjoy hearing it, too,” announced Brother Factum Quintus, “—oh, that is if I am not being rude!” he added hurriedly, but he was clearly abrim with anthropological interest. Renie could not help wondering in what sort of scholarly archive !Xabbu's tale might end up, another thread in the strange tapestry that was the House. “And if the others don't mind, of course.”

T4b groaned in a way that confirmed for Renie once and for all that he truly was a teenager, but despite the noise of protest, did not actually object.

“Does what we others think matter at this point?” Florimel grumbled.

“It is a good story,” !Xabbu assured them. “One of my people's favorites. It is about Beetle and Striped Mouse.” He paused and settled himself in a comfortable position, sitting on his haunches. They had drawn the chamber's heavy curtains—unlike the tower room above, it had only one window—but a thin spear of morning light had found its way through a gap in the fabric. Floating dust shimmered in the beam like silver.

“Beetle was a very beautiful young woman,” he began. “All the young men would have tried to make her their own, but her father Lizard was a sour old man and did not want his daughter to leave him. He put her in his house, a hole deep under the earth, and would not let her out into the sunlight. He would let no man court her.