Mountain of Black Glass (116 page)

The god Osiris stared upward, frozen at the center of his own galaxy of reflections. “Dread . . . ?” he croaked.

At the sound of the name, Orlando heard a few of his companions cry out.

The jackal-thing laughed.
“I've found your secret, old man. And soon your system will do what I tell it to do. I think I'm going to like being the master of an entire universe.”

Another terrible shudder passed through the body of the giant, and for a moment the beast's features were subsumed by the blurry face it had worn before.
“It's still fighting me,”
the voice said, a little less thunderingly present, but still echoing in Orlando's mind and all across the mountain.
“But I've found how to hurt it, you see.”
The giant shape howled and spasmed; again the mountaintop vibrated on the edge of dissolution.
“Just give me a few moments and I'll have it behaving again. . . .”

The field of distortion pulsed. The giant continued to fight against something invisible, but its struggle was weakening. Through the storm of insanity Orlando heard a distant cry and turned to see that the falcon god had seized Fredericks and had lifted her up to its deranged, beaked face.

“What are you bastards doing to our system?” the falcon-thing bellowed. “What the hell have you done?”

Orlando staggered toward them, trying to ignore both the panicky voices in his head and the shadow Orlandos radiating away from him in all directions. Compelled by reflexes developed over half his young life, he had clung to his sword through everything; when he reached the Grail monster, he hacked at the back of its knee with all his failing strength. It dropped Fredericks in a heap and turned on him.

“Get away from it!” Renie screamed somewhere behind him, but Orlando paid no attention. The huge falcon-thing stooped, hands flexing, so angry it could think of no strategy but grab and crush. Orlando ducked under a flailing arm, then tried to stab at its unprotected side, but the other great hand flashed in and caught his blade and snapped the sword in half. Orlando tried to leap away, but he had little strength left. The creature lashed out and struck him like the front bumper of a truck; the impact was so great that he only knew he had been flung through the air when he smashed to the ground.

Darkness came down around him, and this time he almost did not find his way out again. He could barely see. His breathing was no longer just difficult but almost impossible. Even his inner voices seemed to have been shocked into silence.

Worst of all, he had lost his sword. He could see the hilt with its broken blade lying what seemed only a few meters away, but the distortion was still so fierce it was hard to judge—hard even to be sure it was really the sword and not one of its countless mirror-copies. Orlando began to crawl toward it, conscious through the pain only that his business was somehow unfinished. Things inside him were no longer connected the way they should be—he could feel things rubbing together—and a tiny, remote part of him marveled that he could feel so much damage to an imaginary body. Waves of blackness, red at the edges, rolled across him. He crawled on, trying to blink away the spots before his eyes, hoping that he was moving in the right direction.

Just as his hand closed on the hilt, something caught him by the foot and jerked him into the air. He hung upside down before a pair of massive legs. As blood rushed to his head, he lunged at the nearest one, hoping at least to scratch the god's skin with his broken sword, but the distance was too great. People were shouting his name, but they were also shouting Fredericks' name, even T4b's name. None of it mattered. The thing dangled him by his heel, swinging him like a clock's pendulum.

“You saboteurs have guts, I'll give you that,” the falcon god rumbled. “But I'm still going to kill you, you little shit.”

Fredericks desperately struck at the thing's legs, again and again, her hands bloodied, but the monster didn't even seem to notice her. Orlando hung, helpless in the Grail monster's grip, and waited to die.

 

P
AUL shouted in fear as the universe fragmented, but there was too much noise even to hear himself. Everything was coming apart and nothing made any sense.

It had all happened so quickly—Orlando walking right into the image where they watched the Grail Brotherhood, Fredericks shoving through after him. Renie had screamed for Martine to give her the lighter, then she, too, had leaped through, but even as she vanished, the scene of the golden chamber had started to dim, and the giant shape stretched across the valley had begun tossing and moaning like a man in a nightmare, making the very stone of the mountain shake. Then everything had turned inside out, and Renie and all the others had reappeared, along with the Grail people, while reality broke down around them all.

For a moment something possessed the giant entity—some wolfish presence the Grail people seemed to recognize, and whose very voice made Martine begin to shriek and hold her hands to her ears—then that apparition had flickered out again, sending the giant into convulsions once more. Now the whole of the mountaintop seemed shattered into a thousand reflecting pieces . . .

The thought bounced through his head like an echo:
Shattered . . . glass falling . . . shattered . . .

. . . And Orlando was fighting for his life against one of the Grail masters, who had grown to huge proportions, although still only ant-sized in comparison to the giant Other spread across the mountaintop, whose spasms of anguish washed across them all in waves of distortion. People were screaming, Renie and !Xabbu were chasing the one called T4b as he ran toward Orlando and the falcon-headed ogre, and . . . and . . .

Paul took a step to follow them, but a thousand Pauls moved at the same time in all directions, and he stopped, dizzy and confused.

“Jonas, help me!” The woman called Florimel raised the ghosts of a thousand hands toward him, her terror multiplied across an equal number of scarred, one-eyed faces. “It is Martine—I think she is dying!” The blind woman lay rigid at her feet, eyes rolled back beneath the lids.

Paul tried to go to them, but it was like trying to find someone in a hall of mirrors. As Florimel shouted again, he closed his eyes and staggered toward the sound of her voice, stopping only when he and Florimel collided.

“Give her air,” Florimel directed, then dropped to her knees and began pushing on the blind woman's chest. Paul had no idea what she meant, and was still staring a few seconds later when Florimel looked up. “Air, you fool!” she shouted. “Mouth to mouth!”

Paul closed his eyes again to shut out the dizzying, kaleidoscopic view. He found Martine's face by touch, then clamped his mouth on hers and blew. He could not help wondering what good it would do to try to resuscitate an unreal body, but none of it bore thinking about much—such mundane remedies in the middle of such chaos seemed like using a whisk broom to clean up a sandstorm.

Florimel gasped. Paul opened his eyes and saw her looking not at her patient but at something above them. The giant figure of the Other had lifted one arm toward the sky; impossibly massive, it stretched above their heads and over much of the valley, like a planet coming into view. As the giant groaned, still racked with nightmares, the ground shook and the visual distortions danced like windblown flames.

His stupefied attention fixed on the massive shape of the Other, Paul only half-heard Martine's gasp. Her hand, as if in imitation of the giant shape above them, rose and clutched at him.

“Martine, don't move!” Florimel reached to check her pulse. “You've had a bad . . . ”

The blind woman struggled to sit up even as her friend tried to hold her down. “No!” Martine choked. “The children . . . they are terrified! They are all alone! We have to go to them!”

“What are you talking about?” Florimel said harshly. “You aren't going anywhere. The whole world is going mad, and you almost died.”

Martine began to weep. “But you don't understand—I can hear them! I can feel them! The birds are so frightened. Something has got in with them, something hungry, and they can't escape!” She grabbed at her hair as though she would pull it out. “Make it stop! I can't stand to hear them screaming!”

As Paul crouched beside them, helpless, Florimel wrapped her arms around Martine. “We are here with you,” she told the blind woman. “We are here with you.” Her eyes too had filled with tears.

“But they are so f-f-frightened,” Martine sobbed.

An even stronger distortion rippled across Paul's vision, so that for a moment the two women seemed to recede from him down a long corridor. He staggered to his feet, flailing for balance. The giant's arm still hung poised above their heads, but no one else seemed to notice it. The falcon-headed Grail monster had lifted the boy Orlando into the air where he hung without moving, dead or as good as dead. Paul thought he could see Fredericks at the thing's feet, and another figure running toward them, but simply trying to focus on anything for more than an instant made him vertiginously ill. A couple of other shapes that might have been Renie and !Xabbu were running toward the monster and its captive, but they were still far away, tripping and stumbling through the shifting, inconstant landscape. Everything was falling apart. Everything was going hopelessly wrong.

“Ava!” Paul shouted into the air. “Why did you bring us here? What have you done to us . . . ?”

As if he had summoned her with his desperate cry, the angel appeared out of nowhere, flickering, inconstant, replicated a millionfold on all sides, and all her hopeless voices screamed in unison.

Paul had no idea who she was pleading with, and whether the one for whom she feared was Orlando, the giant stretched across the mountaintop, or even Paul himself.

The multiplied angel cried out once more, and her cry was echoed in the ground-shaking, hollow voice of the Other. The great arm looming above them trembled for a long moment, then the massive hand plunged downward like a moon falling from orbit and crashed into the dust on top of Renie, !Xabbu, Orlando, and the rest. The ground jumped as though a bomb had exploded, and Paul was knocked off his feet. A moment of comparative stillness followed. The angel and all her phantoms hung in the air, mouths open, eyes wide. The dust drifted down across the huge hand.

Orlando, Renie—they're . . . gone
. . . was all Paul had time to think, then everything hardened and shattered, a thousand angels flying apart, a stained-glass window smashed, shards flying, glittering, and he . . .

He was in the black tower, and it was all happening again, too late to stop it . . .

The glass shattered and Paul shattered with it, broken and scattering, then and now, scattering until the fragments became too small and his thoughts no longer held together.

 

O
NE moment Renie and !Xabbu had been in the great golden tomb-chamber of the Grail Brotherhood. An instant later, the world had fallen in upon itself.

!Xabbu snatched at her as countless identical shadows of themselves sprang out in all directions. The tomb and the mountaintop had folded together, somehow—the Grail survivors, Orlando, Paul, even the mysterious, giant Other, all inhabited the same accordioned, rippling space.

“It's all falling apart!” Renie shouted.

A huge creature with a falcon's head and mad blue eyes was bearing down on Orlando. Somewhere nearby Martine was screaming. Everywhere Renie looked, friends and enemies had been replicated like infinite strings of paper dolls.

There was no way even to grasp what was happening, let alone try to stop it, but Orlando was in immediate danger from the Grail monster—that was something Renie could understand. Even as she pulled !Xabbu toward their embattled friend, the vast shape of the Other, large as a row of hills, began to convulse. Its seismic roar of pain knocked her and !Xabbu to their knees.

Something was forming in the shadowy regions of the thing's face—a beast shape, dark, contorted, and sinister. A great yellow eye opened.

“Hello, Grandfather,”
it rumbled. Renie recognized the voice, and let out a shriek of despair.

“It's him! The murderer!”

Each word the thing spoke made the ground tremble. Renie reached for !Xabbu, but her friend lay stretched on the ground, face rammed against the black dust that was also somehow the golden chamber floor.

“Get up,” she shouted, so close herself to the edge of despair that she almost could not remain standing. “Get up! We have to help Orlando.”

“It is the All-Devourer,” !Xabbu moaned. He clung to the ground as though it were the deck of a storm-wracked ship. “He has come to take us all. This is the end of things!”

Renie wanted to weep. “Get up! It's not your All-Devourer, it's the Quan Li thing—it's trying to take over the system!” She bent and grabbed at his arm to pull him upright, struggling to remember the story he had once told her. “You said Porcupine beat the All-Devourer, remember? That's what you told me. You said
I
was the Porcupine, didn't you? Well then, get up, damn it! I need you!” She leaned close to his ear, still tugging hard on his arm. “!Xabbu! Even Porcupine couldn't do it by herself!”

Whatever the murderous Quan Li thing had done to the Other, it had not completely overwhelmed the giant's resistance. As the immense shape struggled against its possessor, the beastlike head blurred and vanished, but reality still remained fragmented.