Mountain of Black Glass (53 page)

“Hang on!” Orlando called as he was dragged nearer to the gateway. “Pull!”

“Don't pull him out,” Nandi warned. “He will let us know—he is counting also, and he must have time to make observations.”

“Observations?” Orlando shouted. “Something's trying to swallow him!”

Nandi reached out to help steady them. A moment later, Orlando was surrounded by a distracting cloud of yellow—the Wicked Tribe, swarming like bees. By the time Nandi had reached twenty in his slow count, Orlando felt what he thought was something jerking on the cloth rope through the steady pull. He threw all his Thargor-weight against it and yanked hard, half-expecting to drag some terrible monster through the gateway who had gulped the old man like a fishhook, but instead the venerable Pingalap popped out of the golden rectangle as suddenly as a cork from a bottle. The countervailing pressure gone, Orlando and Fredericks tumbled backward, Orlando landing on top of his friend.

The Wicked Tribe whirled delightedly above them like stars over a cartoon head injury. “Again!” they squealed. “Pull, pull, fall down! Again!”

“It was some sort of wind tunnel,” Mr. Pingalap gasped. He was crouching as though he had just finished a marathon, his wispy hair sticking straight up and an expression of bliss on his face. “A canyon, in truth, but the wind caught me and dragged me right off the edge. I am glad you had me anchored!”

Nandi frowned at his calculations. “It should have been Prester John's African kingdom—could it have been that?”

The old man slapped his bony knees and straightened up. “I don't know. I saw nothing except rocks and trees.—I was busy flying like a kite at the end of a string.”

“We'll have to do it again,” Nandi said.

The Tribe had finally begun to settle. “What that shiny thing was?” Zunni asked, perching on Orlando's nose so that she was only a banana-colored blur. “Why door there, then no door?”

Orlando realized that the Tribe had never seen one of the gateways, and as he levered himself back upright, wondered again how the children had gone straight to this Egyptian simulation and been imprisoned, while he and Fredericks and everyone else connected through the Blue Dog Anchorite man had wound up in Bolivar Atasco's Temilun.

The thought was interrupted. Bonnie Mae Simpkins entered the chamber, Kimi and sullen Vasily in tow. “There's something happening at the front door,” Bonnie Mae told Nandi worriedly. “The soldiers outside are all shifting around, and that big sphinx thing—what's his name, Saf?—is standing up now. He's not saying anything, but he's standing there like he's waiting. I don't like it.” She saw the monkeys draped across Orlando and her eyes narrowed. “There you little monsters are. I'm going to put you rascals in a sack.”

“Run away, run away!” the monkeys squealed, rising in a yellow cyclone and rushing past her, through the antechamber and back out into the temple's great hall.

“This is not
funny!
” Bonnie Mae shouted after them. “You all come back here!” For the first time since Orlando had met her she sounded genuinely frightened, but the monkeys had managed to get out of earshot quickly enough to escape the compelling force of her voice. “They're just kids—they don't understand this is dangerous,” she said helplessly. “Vasily, Kimi, come help me catch them.”

The two women hurried out, but Vasily stopped at the far door, gazing into the main chamber. “The fighting will start soon,” he called back. The dreamy way he said it made it sound like he couldn't wait.

“All the more reason to help them find those children,” Nandi shouted to him. “We have no time for distraction here.” He turned and patted Mr. Pingalap on the shoulder. “Forward, please.” As Orlando and Fredericks took up positions once more, wrapping the cloth around their fists for a better grip, the slender man summoned up another gateway. “Step through!”

As the naked old man disappeared into the light, Nandi told Orlando, “It is most strange you should be bound for Troy. I met a man who was also going there, or at least to another part of the same simulation. A very strange man indeed. Do you know someone named Paul . . . what was it?” He fingered his lip, trying to remember but clearly distracted by what was going on around him. “Brummond?”

Orlando shook his head. He looked to Fredericks, but his friend only shrugged: it was apparently not a name Orlando had missed during one of his illnesses.

A few seconds later Mr. Pingalap returned, bearing news of what Nandi seemed to think was the Prester John simulation he had mentioned earlier. He brightened a little. “I may have the pattern correctly now—it is a bit wider oscillation than I had guessed, that is all. The next one should be Kalevala, and then a place that I have never visited, but which my informants call the Shadow Country—apparently it is almost completely dark all the time.” He frowned and shuffled his tiles full of calculations. “Even if we cycle through as fast as we can, and I am correct about everything else, it will take us almost an hour before we can open the gateway to Troy.”

As the old man ran out his lifeline and stepped through the newest gateway like a very scrawny astronaut going for a space walk, Nandi suddenly said, “No, it was not Brummond—that was the first name he gave, but not his true name. I should have remembered, but my mind is very full just now. It was Jonas—Paul Jonas.”

Orlando almost let go of Mr. Pingalap's rope. “Jonas! That's the one Sellars told us to look for!” He turned to Fredericks. “Wasn't that it? Jonas?”

Fredericks nodded. “Sellars said Jonas was a prisoner of the Brotherhood. That he helped him escape, I think.”

Two jerks on the cloth rope reminded them of their duties; they reeled in Mr. Pingalap, who reported that he had seen acres of snowy forest and men in carts pulled by huge reindeer, which report pleased Nandi. “Kalevala, that's good.” His expression darkened as he turned back to Orlando and Fredericks. “So the man I met was freed by your mysterious Sellars? Jonas told me he was being pursued by the Brotherhood, but he had no idea why. Did Sellars tell you why the Brotherhood imprisoned this man?”

“Sellars didn't tell us
fenfen,
really,” Orlando said. “Didn't have time—somebody killed Atasco in the real world, and we all had to run.”

Nandi's response was swallowed by a huge echoing
clang
that shook the floor and made them all jump. Outside the small chamber voices rose in screams and cries of fear.

“It begins.” Nandi's face was grim. “That is bad. We have even less time than I had hoped.”

Vasily bolted into the gateway room, feverish with panic and excitement. “They are breaking down the door! It is war! The Brotherhood is coming!”

“It is not the Brotherhood.” There was an edge of quiet anger in Nandi's voice. “It is something happening just in this simulation and most of the participants are Puppets. Just help find those children. You will do the Circle no good if you get yourself killed.”

Vasily did not seem to hear him. “They are coming! But the Lord has seen them, seen all the blasphemy, and there will be blood!” A series of ringing impacts filtered in from the great chamber, like someone striking a huge gong. Vasily darted back out into the main part of the temple.

Nandi shut his eyes for a moment; when he opened them, he wore a look of studied calm. “We work with the tools we have.” He turned to Mr. Pingalap. “I think we must try one more time to confirm that I have not misunderstood some larger pattern, then we will start opening and closing gateways as fast as possible.”

The old man sketched a little bow. He stepped into the newly opened gateway as a violent, grinding screech pierced the air, followed a moment later by a terrible crash that shook the very floorstones. After a moment's silence the screaming began again.

“It sounds like the temple doors have been thrown down,” said Nandi. He saw Orlando's glance dart toward the door of the chamber. “Keep your grip,” he cautioned. “We do not know for certain what is happening out there, but Mr. Pingalap needs you here.”

“But why don't we just go through one of these things?” Fredericks pleaded. “We can do all this testing somewhere else, can't we?”

Nandi paused in his count. “It is not so simple. . . .”

“What do you mean?” Orlando was tired of being treated like a child. “Should we just wait here until they come and kill us? All these gateways open somewhere!”

“Yes,” Nandi snapped, “and many of them to somewhere far worse than this.” He stared hard at Orlando, and that momentary fierceness made him someone quite different—a warrior, a crusader. “You young people do not know what is in my heart—what I must consider. Many of the simulations are in deadly chaos and most of these gateways lead to worlds that now have only one working gate. If I take us to one of those worlds and that gateway shuts off also, then what? Even if we survive, we will have lost the fight!” He reached for some kind of equilibrium and found it. “This is what I was brought here to do,” he said more softly. “I did not think I would have to solve such critical problems so fast, but it is my task and I will do it.”

He was interrupted as Mr. Pingalap hurried back through the gateway. “I do not like that place,” the old man announced, “but I think it is your Shadow Country—dark, it was very dark. Some faint lights, and things moving—large things, I think.” He wrapped his bony arms across his thin chest.

“Then we must start cycling as fast as we can,” Nandi declared. “You boys must go find Mrs. Simpkins and the others. Convince them to come back now. Be assured that if I can think of a place to take them all, I will. There is no point in unnecessary sacrifice—this is not our struggle anymore.”

“Convince them?” Orlando was struggling to understand, but it was hard to be patient. “Can't you just order them or something?”

“If I could order them, our fellowship would not be a Circle.” Nandi's face grew all too human for a moment, tired and frightened, but he managed a weak smile. “This is our great task, you see. Everyone has their own part to play. And this is my portion of that task.” He turned and made the hand gestures to summon a new gateway.

 

The temple had gone strangely quiet.

Orlando and Fredericks moved cautiously out of Nandi's gateway chamber and across the darkened antechamber beside it until they stood in the doorway. They knew they had to find the other members of the Circle, but it was impossible to ignore what was going on at the far end of the enormous hall.

The patch of sky visible where the bronze doors had once loomed was night-dark, but the front of the chamber was now illuminated by hundreds of torches held by soldiers who filled the temple porch, rank upon rank. They were not the only ones who had come calling. A phalanx of weird, leathery men stood just inside the ruined doors, all of them shiny bald and covered in ill-fitting gray skin. Each wore a thick piece of plated armor around his torso from neck to groin that seemed somehow part of his body; each held a ponderous mallet, a thick handle of wood with a stone head. The temple's besieged inhabitants had retreated from the front of the temple until they were squeezed in a mass against the walls opposite the shattered doorway. Only the massive sphinx Saf stood before the invaders, but by himself he had created a standoff.

“So the fear of Osiris has proved greater than respect for Grandfather Ra,” said a harsh voice near Orlando's knee. The ugly little domestic god Bes clambered up onto a ceremonial stand beside him, clearing away a lovely vase by toppling it to the floor before seating himself. In the nearly silent temple, even the sound of the clay shattering sent panic rippling through the crowd, but the besiegers and the sphinx remained as motionless as a wall painting. “See—they have brought the creatures of night into the temple of the sun.” Bes pointed to the silent, leathery figures in the doorway. “Tortoise-men! I had thought them all slaughtered by Set in the red desert long ago. But now Tefy and Mewat have set them loose in the heart of Abydos—they have cast down the very doors of Ra's house.” He shook his head, but the expression on his homely face seemed almost as intrigued as appalled. “What times these are!”

The tableau was so charged with potential violence that Orlando could not take his eyes off it. He reached for Fredericks' arm and found his friend almost vibrating with tension. “What . . . ?” Orlando began, but never finished the question.

The wall of soldiers parted, the torchbearers falling back into a line on either side until they had created a path of red-lit shadows leading up to the doorframe and its gigantic broken hinges. Two figures walked slowly up that path toward the temple. Something about them seized at Orlando's heart: as fearsome as were the soldiers and the stiffly silent tortoise-men, that dread was nothing compared to the sudden weight of illness and doom he felt at the sight of the two mismatched shapes. Many of the temple's defenders seemed to feel it, too, moaning and struggling to move even farther back, but they were pinned by the chamber's far wall and there was no room left for retreat. A woman lost her balance, screamed shrilly, and was sucked down into the close-packed crowd as though by quicksand. As she vanished beneath the crush of legs, the temple fell nearly silent once more.

“Orlando,” said Fredericks in the breathy voice of someone trying to wake up from a bad dream, “Orlando, we . . . we have to . . .”

The two figures stepped through the doorway. One was so grotesquely fat it seemed a miracle he could stand unaided, let alone move so gracefully. A hood around his head at first seemed to be a monk's cowl, but was actually part of his skin; the rest of his massive body was clothed only in a loincloth, making it easy to see the oily scales that covered him, black, blue, and gray, patchy with disease. A long swollen tail dragged behind the cobra-man like dead flesh.