Mountain of Black Glass (78 page)

She shook herself, trying in vain to dislodge the coldness that seemed to have soaked into her spirit, then bent and began searching.

Although the body was as rigid as something cast in bronze, Renie's earlier presence beneath the dying sim proved a stroke of luck. The peasant tunic had bunched up when the monster fell forward, leaving the inside pocket open even after the sim and its clothing had turned solid. She flattened her hand and reached in, wondering a little at how disturbing it was to touch even a simulated dead thing. Her fingers closed around a heavy, smooth shape.

“Thank God.” She lifted the lighter. The bulky little metal shape was almost invisible against the gray sky: the daylight was vanishing quickly. “Thank God.”

What if the pocket hadn't been open?
she wondered.
Can you cut through the virtual cloth on a sim after it's gone terminal like this? Is it just impossible, or could you do it with a blowtorch or whatever those things are, a filament saw? Not that we'd have found either of those things in this world.

She stood and crawled back up the roof, grateful at least for this one stroke of luck. The idea of dragging the Quan Li corpse all over the House in search of something capable of cutting into the clothing was a very unpleasant one.

Emily's mostly ineffectual attempts to lend first aid were being further undercut by her desire to gaze down from the splintered window like some crop-haired Juliet at her hero T4b, so !Xabbu climbed up to help tend Florimel. Watching him make his way nimbly up the wall, Renie paused.

“How do we get the rest of us back inside?” she wondered aloud.

!Xabbu looked over his shoulder. “Brother Factum Quintus is coming up the stairs,” he said. “He can help us. We can use one of these cloth hangings to pull you up.”

The monk appeared at the windowsill, squinting and holding his hands to his head.

“I am sorry I was no help,” he said, “but I am glad to see you are alive. Was that your enemy? He was a rare and dangerous creature. He looks amazingly like a woman, though.” He leaned on the sill and groaned. “I believe I have struck my head on every stair on the staircase.”

“Florimel needs more help, Renie,” !Xabbu announced. “She is very cut and bloody, and one of her ears is gone. We need to find a place that is warm and protected.”

“I . . . never liked the ears . . . on this sim . . . anyway,” Florimel said wanly.

“Somebody has to shoot you before you make a joke?” Renie asked. She tried to keep her voice light, but it felt as much of an effort as dragging !Xabbu and T4b back off the parapet. “Okay, let's go. But before you start pulling us up, can you throw down one of those tapestries?”

!Xabbu dropped to the floor inside. A moment later he returned, dragging the heavy piece of fabric. “It is a little torn where I pulled it from the wall,” he explained as he slid it over the sill to Renie.

“Doesn't matter,” Renie said. “I just . . . I just want to cover Quan Li.”

“That was not Quan Li, that was a monster,” snarled Florimel, grimacing with pain as !Xabbu returned to examining her lacerated face. “The one who killed William, and maybe Martine.”

“Jesus Mercy,” Renie said. “Martine—has anyone looked for her? !Xabbu?”

But the little man was already gone, scampering toward the room from which the monster's ambush had begun.

“She is here!” he shouted. “She is . . . I think she is all right, but she is . . . not awake.” A moment later he remembered the word. “Unconscious! She is unconscious.”

“Thank God.” Renie swayed a little. “Just . . . just give me a moment to do this,” she said. “There may have been a monster wearing this sim, but it was Quan Li's once—the real Quan Li—and she was one of our companions, if only for the first hours.” She moved back down the roof and carefully draped the fabric over the hardened form. “I think that . . . monster told the truth about one thing anyway,” she said, looking back to the others. “I think the real Quan Li must be dead. I wish we could bury her properly. It feels so terrible, leaving her here.” She dipped her head.

“The people,” T4b said suddenly, “the Indian people . . . some of them do this.”

Renie and the others turned to look at him. The young man fell silent, suddenly shy. His pale face plastered with lank black hair looked even more vulnerable protruding from the outsized, cracked shell of his armor.

“Go on, T4b,” Renie said gently. “Javier. What do you mean?”

“Some of the Indian tribes, they put the dead ones on platforms up in the tree branches. Sky burial, they call it. Leave 'em for, like, the birds and the wind.” He was serious and solemn; much of his street persona seemed to have dropped away. “This is kind of like that, seen? 'Cause we couldn't carry her all the way to some ground or nothing anyway, could we?”

“No, you're right.” Renie nodded. “I like that. We'll just leave her here . . . buried in the sky.” Renie pulled back the top of the tapestry until Quan Li's head was exposed, then left the empty sim and climbed back toward her companions. Behind her, the small dark shape lay on its side facing the edge of the roof, like a child who had fallen asleep watching the first stars begin to gleam above the needle-shadows of the Spire Forest.

 

As !Xabbu had reported, Martine was alive. Except for a knot on the back of her head behind her ear, she also seemed to be unharmed, although she was still unconscious: she scarcely stirred as they cut her loose from the pipe to which she had been bound.

Florimel had not been so lucky. When the group finally made their way down Weeping Baron's Tower to a carpeted, windowless room on the lower floor—T4b had insisted there be no view of the Spire Forest and its precipitous angles—Renie continued their companion's medical care while !Xabbu stacked broken furniture in a fireplace that looked to have been unused for decades, if not longer.

“Your ear is gone,” she told Florimel, who seemed as stunned and disassociated by her experiences as Renie was by her own brushes with death. “And I can't tell for certain until I get the blood cleared away, but your left eye doesn't look very good either. It's swollen closed right now.” Renie winced as strips of facial tissue shifted like sea kelp under her careful cleaning. Knowing that the body, and hence the damage, was purely virtual did not make the task less disturbing. “It looks like the bullet missed you, though—except for maybe the ear, I think the damage is all from the gunpowder. I guess we got lucky.”

“Just clean it and bind it,” Florimel said faintly. “And find something else to wrap around me—I am cold. I am afraid of shock.”

They draped a velvet wall hanging around her shoulders, but Florimel continued to shiver. When !Xabbu got the fire lit, she moved closer to it. Brother Factum Quintus found some ancient linen napkins packed in an old chest in one of the other rooms; torn into strips and tied together, they made decent bandages. When Renie had finished Florimel looked like something out of a horror movie, her head bumpy and misshapen with knotted bandages, but the worst of the bleeding had finally been staunched.

Florimel's one good eye peered fiercely out from the strips of linen. “That is enough,” she told Renie. “Rest and warmth are what will help me most now. See to the others.”

The rest of the damage was surprisingly light. T4b's armor had protected him from almost everything except cuts and scrapes on his face and his natural hand—the other still glowed faintly, and showed no change—but Renie felt sure that underneath his ruptured chestplate his torso must be a bloody, bruised mess.

He waved her away. “Don't want to take it off, do I? Probably holding me together, like.”

Renie doubted that, but she couldn't help wishing he would let her clean out any scraps of the shattered armor that had worked their way into his virtual skin—who knew what kind of opportunistic infections might be coded into this quasi-medieval House world? But T4b seemed to prefer wincing stoically at every movement, which brought tears of sympathy to Emily's huge eyes as she sat holding his hand.

“What happened to you?” Renie asked !Xabbu as she cleaned the cuts on his creased monkey hands. The repressed emotion made her voice quiver; she hoped she didn't sound like she was angry with him. “You were gone so long—where did you go? I was so worried. I mean, we all were.”

Before he could reply, Martine abruptly groaned and tried to sit up. The effort failed; the blind woman rolled onto her side and made dry retching noises.

Renie crawled to her side. “Martine, it's okay. You're safe. That thing, that monster—he's dead.”

Martine's eyes rolled, unfocused. “Renie?” Tears formed. “I did not think to hear your voice again. He is dead? Truly dead, or just pushed offline?”

“Well, he's out of the network.” She stroked Martine's hair. “Don't try to talk—you've been hit on the head. We're all here.”

“He didn't want me making noise,” Martine said, “didn't want you to know he was waiting.” One quivering hand stole up to touch the bump behind her ear. “Even though he was behind me, I sensed the blow coming. I leaned forward, so he did not hit me directly. I think he meant to kill me.” She covered her eyes with her fingers, a curious and pathetic gesture. “I wish he were truly dead. God, how I wish it!”

Renie touched Martine's arm. Martine snatched at her hand with a surprisingly desperate grip and held it.

“We cannot go anywhere until we are healed, at least a little,” said Florimel slowly. “We can stay here while we plan what we will do next. Unless there are other dangers we do not know about . . . ?”

Brother Factum Quintus, who had been quietly making bandages, looked up. “Other than bandits, some of whom you met the other day . . .” He frowned, considering. “Hmmm. Perhaps you should gather up your enemy's guns. Yes, yes. Even if we cannot find powder or shot, they might convince a potential foe to leave you alone.”

Renie nodded. “Good idea. But you have already more than done your duty to us, and we're sorry it's brought you into so much danger. If you want to get back to the Library now . . .”

“Oh, I will, when I have helped as much as I can here. And my own small suffering has been more than worthwhile—I have seen enough new things to keep me writing and studying for years.” His look turned shrewd. “But I think I see disappointment in your face. Could it be I have offended you in some way, that you are tired of my company?”

“Oh, no! Of course not . . . !” Renie stammered.

“Then I suspect it is because you have things to discuss you do not feel comfortable speaking about in front of me.” The monk folded his hands in his lap. “I know that your group is unusual, and I could not help but notice that you spoke of your enemy as being other than ‘truly dead,' but instead as being ‘off the network.' ” Factum Quintus wrinkled his brow. “What sort of net might that be? I rather doubt you are talking about the cords we use to protect the books in the Library. What do the ancients say of the word?” He paused for a moment to recall. “Yes, I believe the citation is, ‘anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections . . .' Hmmm. Unhelpful.” His homely face brightened. “A metaphorical meaning, perhaps? A network can mean a political faction, or even a sort of maze. Whatever the answer, clearly there are things here I do not understand . . . and perhaps cannot understand. But even if you wish to send me away, I would ask first to hear your ape companion's tale, as the Spire Forest is largely unexplored in our day, and I cannot help wondering if he has made any interesting discoveries.”

A strangely bitter smile curled along !Xabbu's baboon muzzle. “I have no objection to telling my story, although it brings me no happiness.”

“Go on,” Renie told her friend. Something about the monk's words or the way he said them had left her oddly troubled, and she wanted time to understand why.

“During the first hours, little happened,” !Xabbu began. “I climbed many of the towers, peered in at windows, but found nothing. It was not fast work—almost every time I had to climb back down to the level of the roofs after I had finished my search, so I could be sure I was not missing any of the towers in the dark. There are many! Perhaps a hundred, and each a different kind of challenge.

“Late in the evening, as I was resting on a stone rainspout, partway up one of the larger towers, I heard voices. At first I thought they came from inside the tower. I listened carefully, thinking it might be the bandits we had already met or others like them, but I realized after a moment that the people speaking were above my head on the tower roof!

“I climbed cautiously until I found a place where I could hide behind an ornament on the roof corner and watch them. There were perhaps a dozen all together, mostly men, but I heard at least one woman's voice, and a few of the shapes were small enough to be children. They had built a fire right on the roof tiles, up against one of the chimneys, and seemed to be cooking dinner. They were even more shabby than the bandits we had met, their clothes and faces so dirty that the people themselves were hard to see even from a short distance away. Their speech, too, was unusual—I could understand much of it, but only by listening carefully. The words had strange shapes, and they pushed them together in strange ways.”

“Steeplejacks!” declared Factum Quintus with deep pleasure. “They are few—in fact, some believe that there are none left. They have lived atop the House so long that they are supposed to have become part bird. Did they have wings or beaks?”

“No, they are just people,” !Xabbu said. “And there are more than a few left, if I understood them correctly, since they seemed to speak of other families. But there are fewer of them now than when I found them,” he added sadly.