City of Golden Shadow (111 page)

One instant of darkness, another of fiery brilliance-darkness, brilliance, darkness, becoming an ever-speeding stroboscopic alternation. He was falling through something-falling between. He could sense Gally somewhere just beyond reach, could feel the boy's terror but was helpless to relieve it in any way.

Then he was abruptly stationary again, down on his hands and knees on cold, hard stone.

Paul looked up. A white wall stretched before him, empty but for a huge banner of red, black, and gold. A chalice sprouted twining roses. A crown hovered above them, the legend "Ad Aeternum" written below it in ornate characters.

"I've . . . been here before." Although he only murmured, the slow, astonished words found little echoes up in the high ceiling. His eyes filled with tears.

It was more than the banner, more than the growing sense of familiarity. There were other thoughts crowding in, images, sensations, things that fell onto the parched earth of his memory like a renewing rain.

I'm . . . Paul Jonas. I was . . . I was born in Surrey, My father's name is Andrew. My mother's name is Nell, and she's very sick.

Remembrance was taking root in what had been empty places, sprouting and flowering. A walk with his grandmother, young Paul out of primary for the day and pretending to be a prowling bear behind a hedge. His first bicycle, tire flat and rim bent, and the awful feeling of shame at having damaged it. His mother with her chemical respirator and her look of tired resignation. The way the moon hung framed in the branches of a budding plum tree outside his flat in London.

Where am I? He examined the stark white walls, the banner with its strangely shifting colors. A new set of memories filtered up, sharp and bright and jagged as pieces of a broken mirror. A war that seemed to last for centuries. Mud and fear and a flight through strange lands, among strange people. And this place, too. He had been here before.

Where have I been? How did I get here?

Old memories and new were growing together, but in the midst there lay a scar, a barren place they could not cover. The confusion in his head was terrible, but most terrible of all was this blankness.

He crouched and raised his hands to his face, covering his eyes as he struggled for clarity. What could have happened? His life . . . his life had been ordinary. School, a few love affairs, too much time spent hanging about with friends who had more money than he did and could better afford the long drunken lunches and late nights. A not-very-hard-earned degree in . . . it took a moment . . . art history. A job as a bottom-level assistant curator at the Tate, sober suit, wired collar, tour groups wanting to cluck over the New Genocide installation. Nothing unusual. He was Paul Robert Jonas, he was all that he had, but that still didn't make him anything special. He was nobody.

Why this?

Insanity? A head injury? Could there be a madness this detailed, this placid? Not that all of it had been so quiet. He had seen monsters, horrible things-he remembered them just as clearly as he remembered the clothesline on the roof outside his university residence window. Monsters. . . .

. . . Clanking, gnashing, steaming. . . .

Paul stood up, suddenly frightened. He had been in this place before, and something terrible lived here. Unless he was locked in some incomprehensible kind of false memory, a déjà vu with teeth in it, he had been here and this was not a safe place.

"Paul!" The voice was faint, far away, and thin with desperation, but he knew it even before he knew which part of his life it came from.

"Gally?" The boy! The boy had been with him when they had fallen from that flying ship, but Paul had let that knowledge slip away in the rush of returning memory. And now? Was the child being stalked by that huge, impossible thing, the machine-giant? "Gally! Where are you?"

No answer. He forced himself to his feet and hurried toward the door at the far end of the hall. On the far side another imposition of reality and memory, almost painfully potent. Dusty plants stretched out in all directions, reaching toward the roofbeams, all but covering the high windows. He was lost in an indoor jungle. Beyond-he knew, he remembered-there was a giant. . . .

. . . And a woman, a heartbreakingly beautiful woman with wings. . . .

"Paul! Help!"

He lurched toward the boy's voice, pushing at the dry, rubbery branches. Leaves came apart in his hands, turning to powder and joining the dust that drifted and swirled at his every movement. The thicket parted before him, the branches falling back, dropping away, some disintegrating at his touch, to reveal a cage of slender golden bars. The bars were mottled with black and gray smears, and dark tendrils wound through them. The cage was empty.

Despite his fear for the boy, Paul felt a shock of disappointment. This was the place she had been. He remembered her vividly, the shimmer of her wings, her eyes. But now the cage was empty.

No, almost empty. In the middle, nearly covered by a tangle of vines and roots and the mulch of fallen leaves, something glimmered. Paul crouched and pushed his arm through the tarnished bars, straining to reach the center. His hand closed around something smooth and cool and heavy. As he lifted it and pulled it back through the bars, a string of chiming notes sounded in the air.

It was a harp, a curving golden loop with golden strings. As be held it before him and stared, it warmed beneath his fingers, then began to shrink, curling like a leaf on a bonfire. Within a few moments it had become as tiny as a twenty-pence coin.

"Paul! I can't. . . ." The cry of pain that followed was sharp and sudden in its ending. He stood, startled into trembling, then curled the golden thing in his fist and began to smash his way through the crumbling vegetation. He had gone only a few steps when a door loomed before him, five times his own height. He touched it and it swung inward.

The massive, hangar-sized room beyond had timbered beams and walls of piled, undressed stone. Huge wheels turned slowly; great levers pumped up and down. Gears the size of a double-decker bus chewed their way around the circuit of even larger gears whose full extent was hidden, but whose toothed rims pushed in through vast slots in the walls. The place smelled like oil and lightning and rust, and sounded like slow destruction. The noise, the deep, steady ratcheting that vibrated the massive walls, the monotonous hammerthump of great weights falling, was the song of an incomprehensible, unceasing hunger, of machinery that could gnaw away even the foundations of Time and Space.

Gally stood in the one clear space at the center of the room. Two figures flanked him, one thin, the other immensely fat.

A despairing darkness settled behind Paul's eyes as he walked forward. Gally struggled, but the two held him without effort. The slender one was all shiny metal, claw-handed, inhuman, with an eyeless head like a piston. Its companion was so fat that his oily skin was stretched almost to transparency, glowing with a suety yellow-gray light of its own, like a massive bruise.

The big one's broken-tusked mouth spread in a smile whose corners disappeared into the doughy cheeks. "You've come back to us! All the way back-and of your own free will!" It laughed and the cheeks jiggled. "Imagine that, Nickelplate. How he must have missed us! It's too bad the Old Man isn't here to enjoy this moment."

"Only right that the Jonas should come back," the metallic one said, an inner door opening and shutting in its rectangular mouth. "He should be sorry, too, after all the considerable bother he's given us, the naughty fellow. He should beg us to forgive him. Beg us."

"Let the boy go." Paul had never seen the pair before, but he knew them as well and hated them as powerfully as the cancer that had slowly killed his mother. "It's me you want."

"Oh, goodness, it's not just you we want anymore," the metal creature said. "Is it, Butterball?"

The fat one shook its head. "First give us what's in your hand. We'll trade that for the boy."

Paul felt the hard edges of the harp against the skin of his fingers. Why did they want to bargain? Here, in this place of their power, why should they bother?

"Don't do it!" Gally shouted. "They can't. . . ." The thing called Butterball tightened sluglike fingers on his arm and the boy began to writhe and shriek, twitching as though he had fallen onto an electrified rail track.

"Give it to us," said Nickelplate. "And then perhaps the Old Man will be kind. Things were good for you once, Paul Jonas. They could be good again."

Paul could not bear to look at Gally's gaping mouth, agonized eyes. "Where's the woman? There was a woman in that cage."

Nickelplate turned a near-featureless face to regard Butterball for a long, silent moment, then turned back. "Gone. Flown-but not far, not for long. Do you want to see her again? That can be arranged."

Paul shook his head. He knew these things could never be trusted. "Just let the boy go."

"Not until you give us what's in your hand." Butterball made Gally convulse again. Horrified, Paul held out the harp. Both faces, chrome and candlewax, turned greedily toward it.

The room shuddered. For a moment Paul thought the massive machinery had begun to break down. Then, as the walls themselves seemed to shred, he had a sudden and greater fear.

The Old Man. . . ?

But Nickelplate and Butterball were also staring, mouths open, as the very planes of geometric form began to slide apart around them. Paul was still standing with his hand outstretched, and Nickelplate abruptly took an impossibly long stride toward him, shining claw scrabbling for the harp. Gally, who had slumped to the floor, curled his arms around Nickelplate's shiny legs and the creature stumbled and fell with a sound of metal scraping on stone.

The room and Paul and everything shuddered again, then fell apart and curled in on itself.

He was frozen in midair above the sky once more, and the Great Canal and red desert again arched above his head-but the air was now empty where Gally had hung beside him. Where Gally had touched his outstretched fingers, his own hand was now closed in a fist.

Even as his bedeviled mind tried to grasp the abrupt transition from the giant's gearhouse back to this perfect stasis, the world surged into life. Colors came unstuck and ran. Solids became air and the air became water, swallowing Paul with a great, cold slurp.

He floundered, his lungs full to bursting but beginning to ache. The wet blackness around him was chill and heavy. He could make no sense of up or down. He saw a dim glow, a yellow that might be sunlight, and heaved toward it, wriggling like an eel. For a moment the light surrounded him, then he was in blackness again, but this time the cold was murderous. He saw light again, a cooler blue, and fought toward it. As he rose he could see the slender tips of dark trees and gray, clouded sky. Then his hand struck and bounced back. He kicked, thrusting his face up toward the light, scrabbling with his fingers, but something solid lay between him and the air, prisoning him in the freezing water.

Ice! He smashed at it with his fists, but could not make even a crack. His lungs were filled with burning coals, his head with smothering shadows.

Drowning. Somewhere, somehow, and never to know why.

The knowledge will die with me. About the grail. The meaningless thought flitted through his deepening personal darkness like a shiny fish.

The water was sucking all heat from his body. He could not feel his legs. He pressed his face up against the ice, praying for a pocket of air, but a tiny breath brought him only more wet coldness. It was useless to fight any longer. He opened his mouth to take in the water that would end his pain, then paused for a last instant to try to focus on the glimpse of sky. Something dark covered the hole, and in that same moment the ice and the sky and the clouds crashed down at him, shoving him back and startling the air out of his straining body. He gasped reflexively and water rushed in, filling him, choking him, obliterating him.

A curtain wavered, a fluttering screen of orange and yellow. He tried to focus on it but could not. No matter how intently he stared, it would not take on resolution, but remained soft and without texture. He closed his eyes, resting for a moment, then opened them and tried again.

He could sense something touching him, but it was an oddly detached feeling, as though his body were impossibly long and the ministrations were being performed on a very distant section. He wondered if he had been . . . he could not remember the word, but found instead an image of a hospital room, the smell of alcohol, a sharp small pain like an insect sting.

Anesthetized. But why would they. . . ? He had been. . . .

The river. He tried to sit up, but could not. The delicate ministrations, so soft, so distant, continued. He focused his eyes again and realized at last that he was staring at the shifting flames of a fire. His head seemed to be connected to his body by only a few nerves: he could feel something beneath him, and could tell that the surface was rough and uncomfortable, but his body was numb and the discomfort was purely speculative. He tried to speak, but could only make a faint gasping noise.

As if summoned, a face floated into view, perpendicular to his-line of sight. It was bearded and heavy-browed. The brown eyes deep in the shadowed sockets were round as an owl's.

"You are cold," the face said, the voice deep and calm. "Dying cold. We will warm you." The face slid out of his sight once more.

Paul collected what thoughts he could. He had survived again, so far anyway. He remembered his name and everything that had returned to him as he knelt before the rose and chalice banner. But where he had been was still missing from his mind, and where he was now had become a fresh mystery.

He tried to sit up and could not, but managed to roll onto his side. Feeling was beginning to return to his body, sprays of needle-pricklings up and down his legs that were rapidly growing worse-he was alternately racked by shivers and spasms of pain. At least he could finally see beyond the curtain of fire, though it took a moment before he could make sense of what was before him.

The one who had spoken and half a dozen other bearded, shadow-eyed men were crouched in a semicircle around the fire. A roof of stone stretched above them, but they were not in a cave so much as a deep overhang of rock in the side of a hill. Beyond the opening lay a world of almost perfect whiteness, a world of deep snow that stretched all the way to a line of saw-toothed mountains in the distance. At the base of the hillside, perhaps a half-mile away, he could see the thin gray shape of the frozen river and the black hole out of which these men had pulled him.