Mountain of Black Glass (105 page)

The monstrous thing that enveloped him flinched back—there was no other word to describe the suddenness and violence of the reaction. The effect was so dramatic that it almost broke the frail membrane that still held Dread in the world of the living. Somewhere, his body arched and sucked in air—he could almost see it, see Dulcie Anwin standing over the bed and its shrieking alarms, her face contorted with fear and hope—and he expanded his strangled consciousness to fill the space that had been given back to it. He twisted again, and again the thing that had attacked him heaved away, retreating in all directions, dispersing itself through the system like a cloud evaporating in bright sunlight. As it retreated, Dread finally let go, closer to death than he had ever been in a life full of mortality.

 

For a long time after that, Dread simply
was
—a leaf drifting on a puddle, a drop of dew poised and fat on the end of a grass blade. The seamless gray of the system platform had returned; he floated in it, and it waited for his commands. He slowly gathered back his strength and his will, putting them on as though redonning the armor of a questing knight, fitting each piece over limbs which had been scorched almost to cinders by the dragon's breath.

But I won,
he thought.
I did it—me. The hero. The solitary pure one. The one who sees through lies. The one who can't be broken.

He allowed the Beethoven to climb back up again, the fourth movement beginning its stirring quick-march tempo in his skull.
Hero.

He reached out and found the controls of the Otherland system once more. There was much that was odd about them, even to his keen but unsophisticated perceptions. He experimented, and found that the safeguards were a strangely imprecise tool. Even a system this complicated was at base a machine, and thus susceptible to simple commands—stop, go; on, off. But as he triggered one of them, and felt the thing which had almost killed him—felt it even though it had made itself remote from the intruder and his fiery, painful sting—he thought he could feel something like a shudder pass through the system.

The more he considered, the more it seemed to Dread that the Brotherhood controlled their unusual operating system by pain, of a sort. And if there was anything that Dread knew about, if there was any language of which Dread was a living master . . .

The last movement of the Ninth was swelling in his head now, the chorus shouting like warrior angels flying to the attack, buzzing his bones with the mighty “Ode to Joy.”

The thing which had tried to kill him, the security system, had broken and fled, and was now hiding in the most shadowy reaches of its impossibly vast matrix. But Dread had learned how to inflict pain on it. It feared him. Whatever it truly was, artificial being or fantastically complicated neural net . . . it had run from him.

Everything else could wait. The Old Man, the Sulaweyo bitch, everything.

“Feuer-trunken.” That means “Fire-drunken.” Drunk with fire. Like a god
. . . Dread laughed, echoing the music, almost shouting with the pleasure of his victory and his returning strength.

It was time to hunt.

F
OR a single shimmering moment, everything was right.

Sam Fredericks had spent a largely sleepless night wrestling with ideas that seemed far too slippery to be described by words like
duty
and
loyalty,
and when she slept briefly in the last hours before dawn, her mind was still not completely made up. When she woke to the sounds of battle, screams and curses and the dull smack of blade on armor, so close it might have been happening in the next room, she was terrified—not just by what she heard, but by what she now knew she must do.

Orlando was still sleeping, deeper and more peacefully than he had in weeks. Even the Myrmidons rapping on the cabin door, begging their king to come out and lead them before the Trojans destroyed the camp, did not stir him.

Sam crouched for a moment beside the bed. Orlando's face, or at least the face of Achilles that he wore, was as beautifully composed as something in a museum. She felt a clutch of helpless misery as she realized that the statues in museums were of people long dead. She reached out and touched him, sliding her fingers down his temple and into his tousled, golden hair.

Would I be in love with him if he looked like this?
she wondered.
Big and strong and beautiful?

It was hard to look at him. There was too much wrapped up in it, too many feelings that had no names. Sam stood up.

It was not easy to put on the armor, but she had been helped with her own by slaves, and she had tried to pay attention. She knew she really should call someone—that it was vitally important everything fit properly—but she did not want to give away the secret, and was even more reluctant to have someone intrude on the silent connection between herself and her sleeping friend.

Achilles' armor was heavier than her own, which had been heavy enough; she was grateful the system had given her a heroic male form and the muscles that went with it. When she had finished fitting the heavy bronze to her body, she returned to Orlando's side. She hesitated, then bent and kissed him on the cheek.

Outside, the soldiers were dashing back and forth, armored for combat but unable to do anything because their king had forbidden it. Fredericks stood in the doorway of the cabin as she cinched the leather strap of the borrowed helmet under her chin. One of the men noticed her and almost staggered with surprise. He dropped to one knee in a spontaneous gesture of fealty that made Fredericks blush hotly with shame and even a kind of secret pleasure.

Others saw her and a shout arose. Some hurried to surround her, full of questions which she did not answer; others hurried to tell the rest of the Myrmidons that their king was going to war. Sam gestured to the nearest charioteer, who sprang to life as though electrified and bellowed for his comrades. Within moments drivers had begun harnessing the horses, both men and animals almost trembling with excitement.

Achilles' own chariot appeared, the yoked horses snorting and stamping, the driver fighting hard just to keep them from bolting across camp toward the curling black smoke and the clamor of battle. Doing her best to imitate the nonchalance of a hero, Fredericks handed him her borrowed spears, then vaulted up behind him. The Myrmidons, both the chariot riders and the foot soldiers, formed up loose ranks around her; she scarcely had time to find and get a good grip on the leather strap attached to the chariot's rim before her own horses began to rear, almost jerking the car out from under her. The driver used the whip to settle them, but they seemed wild as demons.

Someone pointed down the beach. Fredericks turned in time to see a mass of men surge out from behind one of the ships, locked in a vicious dance of spear and shield. The Trojans were so close! She thought she should shout something inspiring, but could think of nothing that wouldn't sound like bad high school drama; more importantly, she didn't want to risk giving away her secret. Instead, she raised her spear and jabbed it toward where the Greeks were desperately fighting to keep the torch-bearing Trojans away from the line of ships, then shouted “Go!” in her charioteer's ear, trying to pierce the din of the excited Myrmidon soldiers.

The chariot shot forward so quickly that only the strap kept her from tumbling out the back. With a rising, animal howl, her troops surged out behind her.

The Trojans who had reached the ships, where they had a slight numerical advantage over the straggle of defenders, looked up in shock at the sound of the Myrmidons bearing down on them. When they saw Sam waving a spear, doing her best to stand erect in the bouncing chariot, their expressions of surprise turned quickly to terror. Within moments they had disengaged from the Greeks and were stumbling in a disorganized rout back across the camp. Several went down, arrow-pierced, as Sam's charioteer pulled hard on the reins and turned the horses in pursuit.

All across the Greek settlement knots of battling men frayed and collapsed within moments of sighting Sam and the Myrmidon soldiers, a wave of astonishment that spread outward faster than men could run. By the time she and her chariots had reached the middle of the camp, the Trojans were fighting to get back out the gate. The Myrmidon assault smashed into the bottleneck of fleeing soldiers. Sam clung to the chariot rim as shouting men heaved around her. She had not yet struck a blow, but men were dying beneath the chariot wheels, and the survivors were being speared by her infantry like fish caught in a draining pond. The Myrmidons chanted the name of Achilles as though it were a magical spell, hacking and stabbing at everything in their path.

The clog at the gate abruptly loosened as the men who only a quarter hour before had all but overwhelmed the Greek defenses now spilled out onto the plain in panicky flight. A terrible joy rose through Sam, up from her groin and along her spine, unfolding in her head like a hot bloodflower. How mighty she felt! It was like being a god—wave your spear and whimpering men threw themselves into the mud.

As her charioteer steered the horses through the crush at the gate, a Trojan warrior who had fallen twenty meters ahead clambered to his feet without his weapons or shield and ran away across the uneven ground, so terror-struck he did not turn away to one side or the other, but only went tripping and stumbling on before the chariot. Sam lifted the long, heavy spear and balanced it. She might not be Achilles, might not even be Orlando, with his long experience as Thargor in half the wars of the Middle Country, but this simulation had given her a hero's muscles, a hero's arm, a hero's aim. She drew the spear back and flung it.

For a single shimmering moment, everything was right.

In Sam's favorite sports, soccer and baseball, there were instants of pure clarity when it was only you and the ball, when the world went silent and the second stretched. With a runner sprinting down the base path, you cocked, strode, and threw, and even if you weren't the strongest arm in the world, there were times, golden times, when the throw was perfect—when even if the ball was going to bounce once or twice, you knew as you released it that it would nestle into the fielder's glove at just the right height, and everything would come together, runner, base, ball . . . but you would already be strolling off the field, because you knew what was going to happen.

The spear flew from Sam's hand as though it were on a rail, flexing slightly as it hissed through the air, but even though the man was stumbling over the uneven ground, Sam knew as it left her that the line of flight and the line of the target would intersect as neatly as if they had been drawn with a ruler.