Mountain of Black Glass (29 page)

“Let's just sit down, then. Are we all here? T4b?” When he responded with a preoccupied grunt, she lowered herself onto what felt like a carpet. “Well, it's certainly something different than the last place, but it would be nice to know more.”

“I am going to break something,” !Xabbu suddenly announced from a short distance away.

“What are you talking about?”

“There is furniture here—many of the shapes are chairs and tables. I am going to break up one of them and see if I can make a fire.” The little man seemed to take a long time, perhaps looking for the right sort of wood, but at last everyone heard splintering. !Xabbu returned, saying, “Much of it is broken already, it seems.” He set at the lengthy task of spinning one piece against another.

Mindful of the fact that she had more or less accepted—or perhaps demanded—the responsibilities of leadership, Renie made a quick, crawling tour around her troop. Martine was busy trying to make sense of the new environment. Florimel was waiting for something unpleasant to happen and did not want her concentration disturbed. Renie thought of something she wanted to ask Emily, but before she went to the girl, she stopped to exchange quiet words with T4b.

“It's back,” he said wonderingly, and held up his left hand so she could see it silhouetted against one of the gray windows. It seemed a little translucent, although it was hard to be sure in such dim light, but he was right: it was undeniably back. She reached out to touch it, then snatched her fingers back.

“It . . .
tingles.
Like electricity.”

“Pure tasty, huh?”

“I guess.” She left him admiring his restored digits and crawled to where the girl sat by herself. “Emily?” The girl did not reply. “Emily? Are you all right?”

She turned slowly. “It's funny,” she said at last. “For a moment, I didn't think that was my name.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. It just didn't seem like my name. It didn't . . . feel right.”

Renie had no idea where to go with that, so she left it. “I wanted to ask you if you still have the gem Azador gave you.”

Emily hesitated. “My pretty thing? That my sweet pudding gave me?”

It was hard to hear that self-absorbed bastard Azador described as a “sweet pudding” and not laugh out loud, but Renie managed. “Yes. I'd like to look at it, if I could.”

“Too dark.”

“Well, I'd like to hold it, then. I promise I'll give it back.”

The girl reluctantly passed her the stone. Emily was right—it was indeed too dark to see much. Renie rolled it in her fingers, feeling the hard, many-faceted weight of it. “Did it ever do anything?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know—change. Talk to you. Show you pictures.”

Emily giggled. “That's silly! How would it do that?”

“I don't know.” She handed it back. “Can I look at it again when we have some light?”

“Okay.” Emily was still amused by the idea of a talking gem. Renie crawled back toward the others just as a small flame began to grow beneath !Xabbu's ministering hands.

The Bushman took three broken table legs and held their splintered ends in the fire until they caught, then handed one to Renie and one to Florimel, keeping one for himself. As the flames multiplied, yellow light reached out to the walls, revealing the room around them. It was as large as Martine had suggested, a huge, high-ceilinged hall like something from a manor house—Renie could almost picture the bejeweled nobility from some costumed net extravaganza waving their fans and gossiping beneath the nowdusty candelabra. Large pictures hung on the walls, but either the torchlight was too dim or the pictures too old: only vague shapes were visible within the cumbersome frames. Bits of furniture stood here and there around the carpeted floor, as though the place had once been a reading room, or an oversized salon, but as !Xabbu had reported, much of the furniture was broken, although the villains seemed to be extreme age and neglect rather than violence.

Florimel stared up at the distant ceiling. “It is monstrously big. Like a train station! I do not think I have ever been in a room so large. What sort of palace must this be?”

“Some kinda scan-ass Dracula house,” opined T4b. “Saw this in
Vampire Sorority: Utter Suction,
me.”

“T4b's right about one thing,” Renie said. “It's not the cheeriest place I've ever seen. Do you think the whole thing's a ruin? More important, is it deserted?”

Emily suddenly got up and moved closer to the rest of the group. “I know what kind of place this is.” Her voice was tight. “There are eyes in the walls.”

“Martine, is there anyone around?” Renie asked. “Someone watching us?”

“Not that I can tell.” The blind woman shook her head. “The information is very static here. It seems to have been deserted for a while, just as it appears.”

“Right.” Renie stood up, holding her torch high. “Then I think we might as well start exploring. We're never going to find Quan Li—the spy, I mean—if we just sit here.”

No one was thrilled by the idea, but no one raised any useful objections either. !Xabbu broke legs off a few more collapsed chairs to use as spare torches, then put out the campfire, leaving a small burned spot in the ancient carpet that made Renie feel obscurely shamed. They headed out across the shadowy room.

“Stay close together,” Renie warned. “We have no idea what this simulation's supposed to be—T4b could be right. There could be vampires or anything.”

“Eyes,” Emily repeated quietly. Renie asked her what she meant, but the girl only shook her head.

It took them perhaps a quarter of an hour of cautious exploration to cross the great hall. They stopped to examine many of the crumbling artifacts on the way without adding much to their understanding. The furniture and ornamentation seemed like something out of the Baroque era in Europe, but there were other elements that seemed likely to be of an earlier time, and some—like a plaque bearing an unconvincingly-rendered carving of a railroad train—definitely from later. Renie also spotted what looked like a row of dusty electric lights along the top of one of the walls, but it was too dark to be sure.

They stepped through the tall, wide doors at the room's far end, Florimel walking point with T4b flexing his new hand at her side, Martine and Emily behind them. Renie and !Xabbu brought up the rear, and so were the last to learn that the room on the far side, except for the shapes of its high windows—more and smaller—and its furniture—less of it, and with a vast wooden floor instead of the thick carpeting—was much like the first.

“Whoever used to live here,” Renie noted, “must not have liked being crowded.”

The three pictures in this room were hung closer to the floor, only a few meters above the parquet, and Renie paused to examine them. Two of them contained what looked like hunting scenes, highly stylized. The hunters appeared human, if oddly archaic, but the animals they were riding did not quite look like horses, as though painted from hearsay by someone who had never actually seen one.

The picture in the middle was a vast portrait study of a person who might have been either male or female: it was hard to tell because the subject was wrapped head to foot in a dark robe which blended into the blackening background. The hood was pulled so low over the sitter's face that only a pair of sharp, glittering eyes, a prominent nose, and an unsmiling mouth were visible in its shadowy folds.

Renie wished she had not stopped to look.

This second vast room had doors on all four sides. After walking all the way across to the farthest door and finding what appeared to be another hangar-sized chamber beyond it, Renie and the others trooped back across to one of the side entrances. The corridor outside ran parallel to the great halls, and although it, too, was lined with pictures and busts in shadowy niches, it was of more human dimensions, only a few meters wide and the same distance high; no vote was needed to settle which route the company preferred.

“Any suggestions on a direction?” Renie asked Martine.

The blind woman shrugged. “No difference that I can perceive.”

“Then let's follow this hallway back in the direction we came from. That way, if we don't find anything, we'll at least be staying in the general area of the first room, since we know a gateway can manifest there.”

It was a good plan, but after half an hour or so of tramping down the corridor, past locked door after locked door, and after a few entrances into and depressed exits from more huge, deserted rooms, Renie had begun to wonder if they would be able to remember which of these chambers had been their starting point. The decorations were no real help; most of the pictures were so faded and encrusted with dirt that they could have been anything. The busts uniformly portrayed old men, vaguely Caucasian, but with enough small variety in their features and enough dust caked in the crevices of the old dark stone that she would not even have sworn to that distinguishing fact.

After perhaps an hour, the monotonous trek was finally alleviated by Martine's announcement that she sensed a change in the information.

“What sort of change?” Renie asked. “People?”

“No. Just . . . force being applied. It is hard to explain, and anyway it is too far away to tell for certain. I will let you know when we get closer.”

A few minutes later the blind woman stopped them and pointed to the corridor wall on the opposite side from the gigantic rooms they had first explored. “There. In that direction. I think it is the river.”

“The
river?
” Florimel squinted at the wall; it seemed to pulsate gently, an illusion of the flickering torchlight. “You mean the
river
river? The one that runs through all the simulations?”

“I do not know, but that is how it feels. It is a torrent of change, that is all I can say for certain, and it is that way.”

They began trying doors on that side of the corridor, but it was not until after at least a dozen attempts that they found one unlocked. They trooped through another large room, this one lined along the walls with gallery benches, as though it had once been used for some kind of performance. Most of the seats had collapsed. An empty space in the middle of the room where the dust was thick as icing sugar gave no indication of what the spectators might once have watched.

On the other side of a door at the room's far end they found a broad walkway, bounded on the near side by a wall not unlke the corridor they had been following, but on the far side by an ornate wooden railing. The passage was still roofed, but there was no wall behind the railing. Beyond they could see only darkness; the noise of moving water rose faintly from the void.

Renie tested the railing carefully before leaning her weight against it. The torchlight found nothing to bounce off, either across or below. “Jesus Mercy,” Renie said. “It's a long way down to the river—must be at least ten floors below us.”

“Don't be leaning out,” T4b told her anxiously. “Just six that right now.”

“I'm tired,” said Emily. “I don't want to walk anymore.”

!Xabbu fingered the railing. “I could climb down and see what is there.”

“Don't you dare.” Renie looked at the others. “Can we make it a little farther? If we turn right here we'll be heading pretty much back toward where we started.”

The group agreed without much enthusiasm, although Emily continued to make her own feelings very clear. Renie did her best to be patient—the girl was pregnant, after all, or seemed to be, and they had made her walk for perhaps two hours—and concentrated instead on trying to make sense out of what they had seen so far.

“Could this be some version of Buckingham Palace or the Vatican?” she asked Martine quietly. “I mean, it's so huge!”

Martine shook her head. “It is like no place I have seen or heard of, but it seems to be bigger than either of those.”

Their torches still illuminating nothing but darkness beyond the left-hand railing, their ears full of the urgent but muffled rush of water, they did not at first notice that the walkway was widening—that the wall on the right side and its row of doors had begun to curve away from the rail. When the difference had become something like a dozen meters, the companions suddenly reached a second railing that curved in from the wall side, then bent to run parallel to the first.

They stopped and looked around nervously. Although the wall that contained the doors and niches, now as familiar as a doddering uncle, continued to curve away from them to the right, the walkway beside it had run out, walled off by the second railing. Beyond, darkness lay on that side almost as deep as on the left, broken only by a few faint squares of light far in the distance. The twin railings stretched away in front of them along either side of a tongue of carpeted walkway, lonely as a trestle bridge over a gorge.

!Xabbu had already wandered past the security of the widest part, making his way cautiously out onto the carpeted spit, his torch held high despite his animal gait. “It is just as solid as it has been,” he said. “And seems to be in good repair.”

“Not going there,” Emily said, shuddering. “Don't want to.”

Renie was not particularly inclined to do so either, but she was struck by a sudden thought. “Hang on a moment. Those lights, out there.” She pointed to the faintly glowing rectangles far along the right side of the great empty space.

“They are windows,” said Florimel. “Why do you care?”

“They're
lit
windows,” Renie replied. “The first lights other than our own we've seen.”