River of Blue Fire (71 page)

Upaut's eyes grew wide. “May it do so? It has not been allowed to steer a craft since Osiris cast it down.” He stood, towering and spindly, and took the barge pole in trembling hands. As he set the pole for the first time and pushed off, the wolf god began to sing under his breath, a simple, up-and-down melody that in other circumstances Orlando would have found almost pleasant.

He crawled under the sailcloth, nudging the protesting Fredericks until his friend moved over. Orlando felt terribly hot, and now that he had stopped moving, his head was beginning to pound.

“Where are we going anyway?” Fredericks asked drowsily.

“I don't know. Downstream.” Orlando squirmed, trying to find a position that would allow his back muscles to unkink.

“And then what? Keep going in and out of different simworlds until we get to this Priam place?”

“That could take us years,” Orlando said dully. It was a horrible problem, but he couldn't think about it with his head throbbing like this. He felt a flash of anger at Fredericks, who always had to be told, never just thought things through by himself. Herself. “We have to come up with another way to find it,” he said. “We can't just go on like this until we get lucky, Fredericks. I won't last long enough.”

“What do you mean. . . ?” the other asked, then broke off and fell silent. Orlando rolled on his side, turning his back on his friend, and tried to find a comfortable position against the hard deck.

Upaut's voice rose, a dreamy singsong, chanting the same words over and over until Orlando had no choice but to listen.

“
Supreme one, beautiful in adornment
,

Your armor bright as the barque of Ra

Mighty in voice, Wepwawet! He Who Opens the Way
,

The master in the West
,

To whom all turn their faces
—

You are mighty in majesty!

Wepwawet, hear now this prayer
.

Khenti Amenti, hear now this prayer
.

Upaut, hear now this prayer
. . . !”

It was with a slightly uneasy feeling that Orlando realized the wolf god was singing his old hymns to himself.

When he wakened from a brief nap, sweaty and with his head still throbbing, Orlando was glad to see that Upaut's strange mood had passed. Their prisoner was poling the barge down the middle of the Nile, which had swelled here until both banks were quite far away. If the water was wider, though, the sandy face of the desert had not changed, still mile after mile of rusty sand stretching away into the distance. Only a jumble of fallen stones along the river bank broke the monotony, the vast but long-abandoned remains of some structure that Orlando did not want to ask about, for fear of provoking more of Upaut's tedious stories.

“Yes, as you see, the sands are spreading,” the wolf god said. “It has been a dreadful time, since Set was killed by Osiris. The season of Inundation comes, and there is not enough water to pverflow the banks and darken the fields. Going Forth comes, but in that season the ground is dry and the seeds are uncovered by hot winds. Harvest season comes, but the earth is barren. Then, when Inundation returns, Hapi's waters remain low and sullen. The desert, the Red Lands, have grown. The Black Land itself is threatened, and even Osiris in his great house at Abydos must be fearful.”

Orlando wondered who this Osiris was, whether he was the human master of this place, maybe even one of the Grail Brotherhood. “If the drought's so bad, why doesn't the Lord of the Two Lands, or whatever you called him, do something about it?”

Upaut looked around nervously, as though watchers might be hovering overhead in the flat blue sky. All Orlando saw was a vulture, spiralling lazily in the superheated air on the far side of the river. “It is said that Set's curse defies him. That is why he took back the Lord of the Red Land's body, so that he could threaten Set with the loss of it, which would leave his
ka
floating in the final, forever darkness.” Upaut shuddered, and the great pink tongue moistened the black lips. “But the curse of Set has not abated, and all the lands suffer.”

Fredericks had been stirring, and now sat up. He looked around and made a sour face. “Sand, sand, sand. This locks. I mean, utterly.”

Orlando smiled. In an upside-down universe, Fredericks' grumpiness was something to depend on.

“I'm serious, Orlando. If something doesn't happen, I'm going to scan out from all this sun.”

“Perhaps,” said Upaut, who had not had the benefit of shelter or a nap and might have been a little touchy, “Ra, in his great wisdom, is trying to speak to you. You should open your heart.”

“Ra is speaking to
you
,” Fredericks snapped. “He's telling you to shut up and steer the boat.”

Upaut gave him an inscrutable look, but fell silent.

Orlando wiped sweat from his forehead and wondered what his real body was doing with this simworld information.
I hope the doctors don't think it's a fever. Then they'll just fill me full of more contrabiotics. But I suppose the extra fluids they'll give me couldn't hurt
. It was strange to think he even
had
another body. He had been living in this particular Thargor-sim for so long now, his other existence had begun to seem like the pretense.

“What if we swim a little?” he suggested to Fredericks. “It would cool us off.”

Upaut looked at him as though he had gone completely mad. “But the favorite food of Nile crocodiles is godflesh.”

“Ah,” said Orlando. “Then I guess we won't swim.”

In the night, in the dark, he did not realize at first where he was, nor even quite
what
he was. The blackness had taken on dim form, a shape of ancient desolation, massive columns tumbled in the sands, huge granite blocks lying scattered like dice. The stars in the night sky were unnaturally bright, and gave the uppermost faces of the stone a sheen like silver.

“. . . 
I'm still trying
,” a voice was saying. “
Can't you hear me? Tell me you can hear me
.” The tones were familiar, and the urgency made Orlando curious, but he had to fight a great lethargy before he could move farther into the ruins. It came to him, as he floated forward between the flat or rounded faces of the intricately carved, fallen stones, that he was dreaming.

“
Boss? Just say something. I'll pick it up
.” The voice was faint, but since it was the only noise in the great emptiness of the night, he could hear it clearly, as though it whispered into his ear. “
Boss
?”

An obelisk lay on its side before him, all but a portion of its uppermost face and one sharply angled edge buried in sand. A carving of a beetle drew his attention: of all the thousands of images cut into the black granite obelisk, it alone gleamed, as though animated by starlight, and it alone moved.

“
I'm running outta time
.” The carving squirmed as though trying to escape its stone prison. He felt himself drawing near, his memory faintly pricked. “
If you can hear me, just let me know. Please, boss
!”

“What is it?” he asked. “Who are you?”

“
It's you! But I can't make out what you're saying. This talking-in-your-ear bit ain't working—I'm going to stick a probe up against your earbone, boss. No offense meant
.”

The little gleaming scarab moved convulsively on the obelisk. When it spoke again, he could hear it much more clearly. “
Say something
,” it directed him.

“Who are you?”

“
Beezle! Your agent—don't you remember? I know, you're pretty much asleep, boss, so this must be hard for you to grasp. Just listen, ‘cuz I don't want you to wake up, neither. You're dreaming, see, but that's the only time I can reach you. There's a certain REM frequency you hit on the way up and the way down, and it kinda works like a carrier wave. But it's hard to figure, and sometimes there are people here in your hospital room, so then I have to lay low
.” The shimmering beetle was motionless on the obelisk now, as though concentrating. “
So just listen for a minute, okay? On your direction, I dumped everything off your system and hid it
.”

He was beginning to make a little sense of what the thing was saying, and although he did not think of himself as specifically Orlando Gardiner, he now knew more or less who he was and who this strange-sounding creature was. But it was hard to engage fully with what the thing was telling him. “I told you to do that?”

“
Yes, you did! Now, shut up, boss, if you don't mind me saying it. Let me get on with what I gotta tell ya
.

“
I can only reach you like this at certain times, and you've been sick again, so it's been even harder. Your temperature's really high, boss. The doctors and your family are worried. So take care of yourself, if you can, okay? I've checked out this Atasco guy who got sixed in Colombia, like you asked me, and I tried to get to his system, but it's really, really weird, boss—all locked up, security everywhere, but not the kind you'd expect. Hard to explain, I'll give you a full report if you want
.” It paused for a moment; when Orlando did not speak, it hurried on. “
He was a member of something called the Grail Brotherhood, according to the information I've searched. Lot of weird little things in the news about them right now, rumors and like that. Lot of stuff about Atasco too, ‘cuz he's dead
.

“
But I need you to tell me if I'm going down the right alleys, boss. There's all kinds of information on the nets about TreeHouse now, too—rumors, a little hard news, everything. Some people died, some kids are in comas. Is this the kind of thing you want me to do? I can't do anything but audit-mode right now, no touching, just research. If you want me to be more active, tell me to do it—it's gotta be an order, boss. I can't do anything else unless you tell me to
 . . .”

Orlando tried to gather his thoughts, which were drifting like seaweed in a deep current. The ruins seemed to have shifted, edging closer, so that stone now loomed over him on every side. “Do it,” he said at last. He couldn't remember the creature's name. “Beetle. Do it. Everything.” He mused for a moment longer, trying to put words to the thoughts that were still swirling, still without coherence. “Come. Come and find me.” He tried to think of where he was, but could not. A place? “Egypt,” he said at last, although he knew that did not sound right. “I am . . .” For a moment it was almost there, a word, a thought . . . another land? It slipped free and was gone. “Egypt,” he said again. “Online.”

“
I'll do my best
,” the silvery shape told him. The glow began to fade. “
I'll try to get to you
 . . .”

The voice dwindled. The starlight dimmed. Orlando felt his name come back to him, clear now, but somehow unimportant. A moment later he realized he had been dreaming, and as he tore through the last gauzy veils of sleep, he struggled to remember what he had dreamed about.

Beezle
 . . . he faintly remembered.
In the ruins. Said he was looking for me—didn't he
?

It was already hard to summon up the details. He opened his eyes to find the broken stones in whose circumference they had made camp still around him, but instead of the silvery starshine of his dreams, they were touched by a faint pink glow—the first light of dawn. A rustling noise nearby reminded him that the wolf god Upaut had been terribly restless during the first part of the night; his mumbling had kept Orlando from falling asleep for a long time . . .

A shadow abruptly loomed over him, dark against the dark sky. Yellow eyes burned like lamps. Something cool and sharp touched Orlando's throat—Thargor's sword.

“The greatest of all spoke to it.” Upaut's voice, so mild and reasonable as they had made camp, had regained the triumphal tone of his self-hymn. “Spoke through you as you slept, because he knew Upaut was listening. He spoke to it . . . to . . . to
me
.” The wolf god uttered the personal pronoun with trembling pleasure. “Me! Upaut! And Ra spoke forth in his scarab-form, Khepera, Beetle-of-the-Morning! ‘
Do everything
,' he said. ‘
Come and find me
,' were his words to faithful Upaut. ‘
I am Egypt
,' he said to me, me, me!”

The wolf god did a strange dance, kicking up his long legs like a stick insect on a griddle, but kept the point of the sword near Orlando's face.

“My time of exile is over,” Upaut crowed. “And now I will go to Ra's temple, and he will give back to me my birthright! My enemies will be brought low, they will rub their faces in the dust and make great lamentation. Again I shall be Khenti Amenti, He Who Rules the West!”

The blade was waving uncomfortably close to his face; Orlando pushed himself back a few inches. Beside him, Fredericks had just awakened, and was lying beside him in wide-eyed alarm. “What about us?” Orlando asked.

“Ah, yes.” Upaut nodded gravely. “You have served as the Mouth of Ra. I will not shame myself by injuring his messenger. You may both live.”

Relief turned to indignation. “What about your promise?” Orlando demanded. “You swore on your godhood!”

“I promised not to harm you. I have not. I promised to guide you. I have, if only for a short time.” Upaut turned on his heels and strutted down to the beach, the early light picking him out, slender as a lotus-stalk against the dark river. Orlando and Fredericks watched helplessly as the wolf god pushed their boat out into the shallows and climbed in. When he had poled it out into the current, he turned to look back at the bank. “If you come before me when I am again master of the West,” he shouted to them, “I will be merciful. I will grant your souls honor!”