River of Blue Fire (55 page)

When he reached the mouth of the cave, he remained in its shelter for long moments as he surveyed the area, trying to make certain no one from any of the other family groups was up and wandering around. The thin crescent moon had already passed beyond the looming cliffs; the campfires had all burned down, and silence hung so heavily on the place that he could hear a bird's wings flapping far out in the darkness above the river of air. He moved quietly to the edge of the nearest promontory, then let himself drop into nothingness, counting to twenty through a heart-stopping freefall before he spread his arms and felt the air lift him.

Chimes
, he thought.
I want chimes. And running water
.

The music, quiet splashing and the soft tang of metal on metal, rippled through him. He hovered for some minutes, letting the sound calm and center him, then mounted higher, back toward the roosts of the Middle Air People.

This was an amazing place, he thought. He was glad that he hadn't needed to share it with Dulcie for most of the day, since her next shift wouldn't begin until dawn. It made him feel like a child, this flying, this simworld—although not like the child he'd actually been, who had never experienced a moment of pure joy. Not until the first killing. But here, now, feeling the air wash over him, he felt stripped clean of everything earthly, a perfect machine, a thing of dark light and sweet music.

I'm a black angel
, he thought, and smiled through the chimes in his head.

He had seen her as they flew in, a pale-haired womanchild taking care of younger siblings in the boughs of one of the great trees—a mutation, perhaps, an albino, or some other kind of genetic sport. More important than her arresting looks had been her age, young enough to control but old enough to be sexually attractive. Dread had no interest in hunting actual children, and felt a faint scorn for those who did, as though they had failed some test of personal integrity. It was similar to the scorn he had felt for those who pretended to practice his own special art, but who did it only in VR, and with simulated victims—they faced no reprisal, feared no law. They would not be chased, as he always was, by the tame pack mastiffs who hunted the hunter on behalf of the common herd.

He squeezed the chimes into something a bit more emphatic, a theme for a heroic and solitary predator. No, those pretend-killers were not really doing it right. They were broken machines, but he himself was an almost perfect device.

His soft but dramatic searching music had been playing quite a long time when he finally located her family's sleeping cave. He had paid close but unobtrusive attention to where everyone went as the evening had worn down, but the landmarks he had noted—the oddly-shaped outcropping, the stunted sailor's knot of a tree that clung to the cliff face—were hard to locate in full moonless dark. But he was full of the high airiness of the hunt, and that alone had convinced him that he could not fail; that alone had kept him at his task until he found what he sought.

She was sleeping between two smaller children, a faint shape recognizable only by the dimmest starsheen on her hair. He poised himself above her like a spider at the edge of a web, seesawing gently until he had his balance for the one permissible strike. When he was ready, his hands thrust down. One clamped around her larynx, the other dug beneath her and scooped her up, prisoning her arms even as she spasmed awake. His sim body was wiry-strong, and the grip on her throat kept her from uttering even a sound. In three steps he was out of the cave, leaving a cooling space between the two children, who slept on, oblivious.

She struggled in his arms until he slipped his fingers to the carotid and pinched off the blood flow; when she had gone limp, he threw her over his shoulder and stepped out—like the rest of her people, she was inordinately light, as though her bones were mostly hollow. This led him down several distracting avenues of speculation, so that he almost missed his footing in the dark. He ran quickly to the huge outcrop he had noticed earlier, a jut of stone like a broken bridge that stretched far out over the valley, beyond the tips of even the largest horizontal trees, then paused at the base, preparing himself. This was the most difficult part, and if he had miscalculated, any number of dire things might result.

Dread shifted the girl's weight forward a little, then added an insistent backbeat to the ringing music in his head, preparing himself, setting the scene. The sky seemed to crouch lower, expectant, watching.

The star
, he thought.
Me. The impossible chance. Backlight. Heroic silhouette
. The camera in his mind saw everything, his poise, his cleverness, his courage. No stunt doubles. He alone.

He flung himself along the length of the promontory, pumping the virtual analogues of his own hard-muscled legs until he had reached sprinter's speed. The stone stretched before him, a dark finger pointing at an even greater darkness. It was hard to guess where the end was. Wait too long—disaster. Jump too soon—the same.

He jumped.

He had gauged it correctly, and sprang off the outcropping's farthest point. As he felt the air beneath him he extended his arms for more glide, doing his best to keep the girl balanced, but he could still feel himself beginning to sink. One person could not fly with the weight of two, even when the other was as small and slender as his captive. In a moment he would have to let her go, or he himself would be dragged down as well. He had failed.

He felt the wind stiffen. A moment later he was forced sideways, knocked head over heels, so that he had to pull his arms in and clutch the girl to him tightly. He had reached the river of air.

Dread's music swelled triumphantly. The river seized him in its grip and dragged him away from the camp of the Red Rock Tribe.

When she began to stir in his grasp, he fought his way out to the slower currents of the air-river, until he felt her weight begin to drag at him. Then, when he gauged the time was right, he let her go, then folded himself up to follow her down.

He had guessed correctly in this, too: Her innate reflexes saved her even before consciousness had fully returned. As she hovered, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand where she was and what had happened, he circled her in the darkness and began to talk.

Her throat still too bruised for speech, she could only listen as he described what was going to happen. When panic at last overwhelmed her, and she turned and fled away up the canyon, he gave her just a few moments' head start. A proper chase was one thing, but he knew it would be a very bad idea to let her actually beat him back to the nesting place of her people. After all, even bruised and terrified and confused, she was a better flier than he was.

It turned out to be a glorious chase. If she had kept on a straight course, she might even have outraced him, but in the dark she did not know quite who or what he was. As he had gambled, she chose evasive action, hurrying to a hiding spot and then, when he had flushed her out, swooping off to the next. At times he flew close enough to hear her terrified, hitching breath, and during those moments he did indeed feel himself to be a shadow-angel, an instrument of the cold side of existence, fulfilling a purpose that he alone of all mortals could even partially understand.

The pale-haired girl was tiring, her movements more and more erratic, but he guessed that they were also drawing close to the encampment. Dread had held his own excitement at bay for almost an hour, a prolonged foreplay that had pitched him to places that even the music in his head could only approximate. Images seemed to play out before his eyes, a reverse virtuality in which his most surreal and vicious thoughts were projected outward, onto the malleable darkness. Broken dolls, she-pigs eating their own young, spiders fighting to death in a bottle, butchered sheep, women made of wooden logs split and smoldering—the mind pictures seemed a halo around his head, filling his maddened vision like a cloud of burning flies.

The dog people, the screaming men, the child-eaters
. Half-remembered stories told to him in an alcoholic slur by his mother. Faces changing, melting, fur and feathers and scales sprouting from the skins of people who had pretended normality, but stayed too long by the campfire. The Dreamtime, the place where the unreal was always real, where nightmares were literally true, where hunters took whatever shapes they wished. Where little Johnny could be whatever he wanted and everyone would worship him or run screaming forever. The Dream-time.

As he spun himself above the failing, weeping quarry in a parabola that exactly graphed his own long-denied fulfillment, as he hung at the top of his rise and prepared to stoop, a blinding burst of light pierced his mind, an idea that had no words, and which would only begin to make a kind of sense later, in the calm after the killing.

This is the Dreamtime, this universe where dreams are made real
.

I will stand at the center of it, and I will
twist
it, and all of creation will fall down before me. I will be king of the Dream. I will devour the dreamers
.

And as this thought flared inside him like a fiery star, he plunged down through the black winds and fastened on the flesh and thrilling blood and crumpled them into himself, hot as flame, cold as zero, a dark and forever kiss.

He had just enough presence of mind afterward to hide the body, or what was left of it, in a place that would keep secrets. He retained only her knife, a wicked piece of volcanic glass honed sharp as a straight razor, not out of sentiment—he was not a collector—but instinct. Virtual or not, he had missed having a blade close to hand.

He stopped to bathe in one of the waterfalls, cleaning away the traces and letting the sting of cold water bring him back to something resembling sanity, but as he sailed back through the drying winds he was still amazed by the vague but overwhelming idea that now filled him. When he reached the cavern where his companions slumbered he had a brief lapse of concentration, nudging one of them in the dark as he tried to reach his own sleeping spot. At the protesting murmur he froze, fingers hooked like claws, reflexively prepared to fight to the death—even in this made-up world there would be no net, no cage ever, not for this hunter—but his disturbed companion merely rolled over and went back to sleep.

Dread himself could not even approach the edge of rest. His skull seemed full of glaring light. He left the sim body on autopilot and called Dulcie to take over ahead of schedule.

There was so much to think about. He had found the Dreamtime, the true Dreamtime, not the ghost-ridden bush of his mother's babbled tales. So much to consider. He had no need for sleep, and felt like he never would again.

“
C
ODE Delphi. Start here
.

“Something very serious has happened. One of the Red Rock Tribe—not a member of the family who found us, but one of the others who shares this system of caves—has disappeared. Builds a Fire on Air came to tell us, and although he clearly regarded us with suspicion, he was courteous enough not to accuse us of anything. A young woman named Shines Like Snow vanished during the night, getting up and walking away from her family, apparently.

“Needless to say, and this Builds a Fire on Air
did
tell us, suspicion has fallen on our company. We are fortunate that such a disappearance is not unheard of—young women have run away with men from other tribes before, or been kidnapped, and sometimes one of the flying people suffers an accident or meets a large predator while out at night—but it is rare, and everyone is very upset.

“Besides my own sorrow on their behalf, I am troubled by what seems to be a half-memory of my own, that someone
did
rise in the night.

“As I think I said already, I lay awake thinking late after we had all bedded down in this cave. When, without noticing, I had finally drifted into a shallow half-sleep, I dimly sensed someone stirring. Later, minutes or hours for all I could tell, I heard movement again. I thought I heard a whispery intake of breath and a murmur that sounded a little like Quan Li's voice, but of course that means nothing, as it could have been her, but caused by someone bumping her, or even just as a response to a dream.

“However, I must think about this carefully because now it may prove significant. But a quick discussion among us after the chief left reveals that none of the other four admits getting up in the night, and there is nothing to suggest any one of them is lying. I may have dreamed it. But the whole thing is troubling, of course. I also doubt now I will get a chance to ask any of the questions I had so longed to have answered, since Builds a Fire on Air and his family are very preoccupied, and in any case it might only draw more attention to us as outsiders.

“As I look out past my companions, who are huddled nervously on the cavern floor, I can perceive the far side of the valley, a stark mass of relatively static information made fuzzy by the variables of morning mist. The stones themselves must be purple with shadow, since the sun has still not risen above the cliffs.

“We have a long way to go just to get out of this world, and if these people turn against us we will not be able to escape them, any more than we could outrace a group of aerialists across a high wire. Aerodromia is their world, not ours. We do not know how far down the river the next gate is, nor do we know where any others might be.

“I think when we first thought of coming to the Otherland network, we—at least Renie and Singh and I—thought that it was like other simulation networks, a place where one learns the rules once, then puts them to use. Instead, each of these simulations is its own separate world, and we are constantly being caught up and held back by the things we find here. Also, we have come not a bit closer to solving the problems that brought us. We were too ambitious. Otherland is having its revenge.

“Builds a Fire on Air is coming toward the cave again, this time accompanied by a half-dozen weapon-bearing warriors—I can feel the dead solidity of their stone spears and axes, different from the signature of flesh and bone—and an agitated man who may be the missing girl's father. The chief is himself uneasy, sorrowful, angry—I can sense these things emanating from him, distorting the information space that surrounds him. The whole thing does not bode well.