River of Blue Fire (80 page)

Gally darted ahead, but the alley ended on the bank of one of the canals, the only way forward a stone bridge arched like a cat's backbone, hung with lanterns at each end. If they tried to cross, the soldiers would certainly spot them, but there was no place to hide in the narrow alley—the armored troop filled it wall to wall. Gally hesitated for only a moment, then swung down over the wall beside the bridge. Paul was glad he had been watching—if he had blinked, the boy would have simply vanished. He scrambled over the low parapet behind him. The tramp of booted feet and the men's voices were so loud that it seemed a miracle they had not yet been spotted.

They found perhaps a meter of vertical space beneath the bridge, and half that distance in front of them before the ground fell away in a straight drop, too far down to the canal for them to go in without a splash. Repository of many of the wastes of the Most Serene Republic, the water stank, but that was the least of their worries. They crouched, Paul with his head pressed painfully against the underside of the stone bridge, and listened to the soldiers trudge up the span. Then, maddeningly, the footsteps stopped. Paul held his breath. He could barely see the boy in the shadows, but he could tell by the tense stillness that Gally was holding his breath, too.

Something splashed into the water an arm's length away from them. Paul held himself firmly, resisting a violent flinch. Whatever it was continued to patter the canal, and then another splashing began beside it. The smell of urine wafted to them.

“. . . Tried to kill a senator,” someone said above them. His companion mumbled something and they both laughed; the arcs of the streams jiggled and the pattering changed rhythm for a moment. “No, I would, too,” the first one said, “but you don't want anyone to hear you say that, do you? Wouldn't want to wind up in the Room of the Cord.”

“Mother of God,” a voice shouted from further up the bridge, “what, are you two sweet on each other? Hurry it up—we've got two assassins to find.”

“Did you hear?” the first man said. “One of them's a boy, a street urchin.” His stream dwindled and then stopped. “They should round up those little dockside crabs and boil the lot of ‘em, that's what I say.” His companion was also finishing, but his words were still inaudible. “Yes,” the first added, “but at least we'll get to have some fun with this one when we find him.”

Paul could not believe these soldiers could have heard so quickly by any normal means—it was only a quarter of an hour since he and Gally had fled the cathedral. Somehow, Finch and Mullet had manipulated the simworld, moved information across the city at greater-than-Renaissance speed. As ridiculous as he knew it to be, Paul was outraged at the unfairness of it.

The soldiers tramped down the far side of the bridge. Gally put his hand on Paul's arm to keep him in place and still. The soldiers' voices and footfalls grew faint, then were gone. The seconds stretched. Everything was silent except for the almost inaudible lapping of the canal against the bank.

“I . . . I don't remember anything before the Black Ocean,” Gally whispered at last, invisible in the shadows.

Paul, thinking only of escape, could not immediately make sense of the words. “Before. . . ?”

The boy spoke clumsily, as though something squeezed his throat. “Corfu, all that—I don't remember it, not really. I just
know
it. But I'm starting to remember other things—the Oysterhouse, like you said, and traveling with Bay and Blue and the others. I . . . I think I even had another name at first, before I was Gally. But I don't remember anything from before we came out of the Black Ocean.” His voice hitched. He was weeping. “I don't remember my mother or my father . . . or . . .
anything
.”

Even in the midst of danger, Paul could not help wondering who Gally and the other Oysterhouse children really were, what their place in all this might be. Were they escaped prisoners, as he was? “You've talked about this Black Ocean several times, but I don't know what it is,” he told the boy. “Was it a place like this. . . ?” He realized that the concept of a simulation would probably mean nothing. “Was it a country, like the Eight Squared or here—like Venice?”

There was a pause. “Not really.” Gally had stopped crying, but still spoke haltingly. Paul suddenly remembered being startled to discover that the sleeping boy did not breathe. He touched his own chest now, felt its slow, regular motion. Even taking simulation into account, why should he breathe, as though he were in his real body, and Gally not? “It's hard for me to remember good,” the boy went on, “but it was just . . . just dark. Not like this, but dark forever. And for a long time there was nothing except me and God.”

“You and . . . God?”

“I don't know. Somebody was there in the dark, but all around me, sort of, and I heard the voice talking in my head. One voice. It told me who I was. It told me I was going to live in a new place, and . . . and . . . that's all I can remember.” Gally's wistful tone vanished. “We should get moving.”

“Christ, you're right.” Paul crawled out from beneath the bridge and almost slipped down the muddy bank into the canal. The night sky seemed strikingly close, the stars bright as frozen fireworks. “I almost forgot,” he muttered, astonished at himself. All these mysteries, however fascinating, could wait until they were safe. Gally clambered out past him and jogged back up the alley. Paul fell into step behind him.

But safe where
? he thought.
The bird-woman told me to find the Weaver. And where did Nandi say that would be—Ithaca? Which would be Greece, I guess, some Greek myth or other. But isn't there an Ithaca in America, too? Little town in New York or somewhere
?

They hurried through the streets. The few people they passed here were uncostumed, and seemed to have little to do with the festivities, except that a few of them were the worse for drink. Twice more they had to hide from soldiers, but their pursuers never came as close as they had the first time. Even the Doge's troops seemed to have decided there was little chance of capturing fugitives in the confusion of Carnival night.

“We're in Cannaregio now,” Gally whispered after another long jog, barely audible over the sound of their feet on the stones. “Not too much farther.”

The boy led him through back alleys and across empty squares with the nimble certainty of a fox trotting home to its den. Paul could not help thinking how lucky he was to have Gally here to guide him. In fact, he had been lucky in all the simulations, and that was another important thing to remember. Like the real world, this network could surprise you—there was good to be found, real kindness. It seemed the Brotherhood couldn't make their VR worlds truly realistic without bringing along at least a few of reality's happier chances. That would be something to cling to when despair gripped him again, as he had a feeling it almost inevitably would.

The fog grew thicker as the night stretched into the last dead hours before morning. Paul waved at it but it did not disperse, and when he stopped waving it flowed back in to fill the same spaces again.

“Brine mist,” Gally explained, barely visible through the murk. “From the sea. They call it ‘Bride's Veil,' too.”

Only a people who considered themselves wedded to the ocean, Paul decided, could give such a romantic name to such dire, dank stuff.

In fact, the brine mist turned midnight Venice into something even more surreal than before, which hardly seemed possible. With a church seemingly on every corner, the faces of monsters and saints loomed out of the fog without warning; the statues, whether pious or grotesque, all seemed to stare out and up, gazing eternally at something beyond even Venice's grandeur.

“That's the Zen Palace over there,” Gally whispered as they passed a building which stood high above the swirling mists. Their pace had slowed with fatigue, or at least Paul's had, to something scarcely more than a swift walk. “You know, where the Cardinal's family lives.”

Paul shook his head, too exhausted and frightened to care, but Gally took it as a sign that he didn't understand. “You know, the one whose tomb the lady takes care of. Cardinal Zen.”

Beside feeling profoundly uninterested in tourist information at the moment, Paul was still feeling bitter toward Eleanora for deserting them, however sensible her reasons. He slowed and then stopped in order to suck in a larger amount of the sea-scented air than he had been getting. “Where's this hospital?” he wheezed.

“Just ahead. Past the Jesuits.” Gally gently took his arm and got him moving again.

Paul's legs were rubbery and his lungs were burning. It was very difficult to run for half an hour without stopping, another piece of information left out of the adventure stories and flicks he had seen. In fact, adventuring in general was ridiculously hard work.

If I'd known I was going to be doing so much of this running for my life
, he thought miserably,
I'd have gotten myself in better shape first
. . . .

As the boy led him past the Baroque facade of the church he had called “the Jesuits,” and out into a public square, Paul felt a sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach: the unreasoning fear, the chill that the Finch and Mullet creatures induced in him, had returned. He looked around, wide-eyed. Perhaps a dozen people bundled against the cold were finishing out Carnival night in the small square. None of them bore any resemblance to their pursuers, but although Paul's sensation of dread was fainter than it had been back in the cathedral, it was undeniably the same.

“Oh, God,” he gasped. “They're here—or they're close.”

Gally's eyes were wide. “I can feel them, too. Ever since they touched me when we were in that . . . that dream-place, I can feel them.”

“Dream-place?” Paul frowned, trying to remember. He and the boy crept across the square like soldiers on patrol, watching every shadow. The Venetians loitering near the steps of the Jesuits called after them—slurred, incomprehensible jests.

“In that castle in the sky,” Gally explained quietly.

“You remember that?” Paul had half-believed the castle
was
a dream, that and the machine-giant he had met there the first time—it had been so palpably different from his other experiences.

Gally shuddered. “They touched me. It . . . it hurt.”

Like a ghost ship sliding out of the fog, a small dark building with four tall chimneys sprouting from its roof was becoming visible on the far side of the square. Gally took his hand to hurry him forward, letting him know that this was the place they sought, but Paul found himself suddenly unwilling to enter. There was something about its brooding shape that unnerved him, and the sense that their pursuers were near had grown stronger. Perhaps they were even waiting inside. . . .

A tall shape materialized out of the mist. Gally squeaked.

“What good wind?” asked a deep, quavering voice.

The unsteady figure was shrouded in a threadbare cape that flapped like ragged wings. With his long-nosed, almost chinless face and bright eye, the old man resembled nothing so much as a dirty harbor bird. “What good wind?” he demanded again, then squinted at Paul and the boy. “Strangers!” he said loudly, making Paul extremely uncomfortable. “Do you bring wine? It is hard times at the Oratory. We guests of the Crusaders are forgotten—and on Carnival night, of all nights!”

Paul nodded in what he hoped was a pleasant fashion and tried to step past the stranger, but the ancient creature caught his cloak with a surprisingly firm grip. Gally was almost dancing in his hurry to move on.

“Come,” said the old man, tainting the mist with his sour breath. “Just because we are old does not mean we should be forgotten. Do we not fast, just as other Christians do? Should we not then celebrate, too?”

“I have no wine.” Paul could feel the shadow of their pursuers moving over them, darker and darker, wider and wider. An idea came to him. “If you take us into the hospital, help us find what we're looking for, I'll give you some money and you can buy yourself wine.”

The old man swayed as if amazed by such good fortune. “Into the hospital? That is all? You want to go into the Crusaders?”

“We want to visit someone.”

“No one comes to visit us,” their new guide said, lurching back toward the four-chimneyed building. He was not contradicting Paul, but stating a mournful fact of life. “We are old. Our children are gone away or dead. No one cares what happens to us, even during Carnival.” He spread his arms like an albatross banking on the breeze as he led them around the side of the building, then through a door that Paul would have never seen in the mist and on into the dark, echoing interior. “The front is barred tonight, to keep us out of trouble,” their guide said, then tapped with his finger on the side of his nose. “But they cannot keep old Nicoló inside. And now I will have wine, and drink until my head is full of songs.”

Paul's first impression was that the Crusader hospital was rather lavishly haunted. A dozen silent forms, wrapped in blankets and sheets, shuffled across landings and up and down the stairs; others stood in doorways, staring at nothing as fixedly as the statues on the churches outside, mumbling or crooning wordlessly. The Oratory was a refuge for the old, Gally whispered, clarifying Nicoló's complaints—especially for those who had no family to take them in. Not all were senile; many turned sharp eyes on the newcomers, or questioned Nicoló about them, but their guide only waved his arms grandly and led Paul and the boy deeper into the building, until they stood at last before the candlelit chapel. A relief of the Madonna and her child stared down at them from above the doorway.

Paul stared at the Savior's infant face, suddenly at a loss. They had no idea where in the hospital the gateway might be, and it seemed unlikely Nicoló or any of the other residents would know—why should the sims know anything about the network's infrastructure? So it was up to him to decide what would be the most likely spot. He thought desperately, but could only think of the river crossings he had made. What about when there was no river? Was there some other way to recognize an exit door, or were the indicators visible only to the people who had built these worlds?