River of Blue Fire (90 page)

“I can hear her, or feel her. There are no words. But she is just on the other side of something, and she is looking for a way out.” His head snapped back, as though he had been startled by a blast of noise. “She is very close!”

Renie crawled toward him, but stopped a few inches away. She was unwilling to touch him, afraid that she would somehow disrupt this incomprehensible circuitry. “Is she with the others? Can you find them? Can they find us?”

“I do not know. I will try to open the gateway, if I can remember what I did before.” His frown became a scowl of pained concentration. “It is so hard this time—I am doing something wrong.”

But even as he spoke those worried words, an invisible hand abruptly peeled a piece out of the air just a few meters away, letting golden light leak through. Within a second the rip had lengthened into a glimmering horizontal streak about the span of a human's extended arms. Twin lines of fire began to crawl toward the ground. A moment later a membrane of shimmering golden radiance connected them, a light that could be called nothing less than brilliant, but which also seemed strangely confined by its own outline.

Emily stared, gape-jawed. Renie, too, was helplessly fascinated. It was only the second time she had seen this happen, and it was just as impressive an effect as it had been in Forest. Only !Xabbu was not captured by the unearthly look of the thing: his eyes were tight shut and his lips moved in some silent invocation.

The brilliance became a little less. The curtain of flame darkened a fraction toward amber, and Renie was struck by the dreadful certainty that the experiment had failed, that if Martine had actually been somewhere on the other end, they had missed the connection.

A rush of noise erupted from the glow, a roar so sudden and immense that Renie could not hear her own shout of astonishment. Several shapes fell out of the gateway in a tumbling mass and knocked her and !Xabbu to the ground. The noise dropped away, and as it did, Renie saw the golden rectangle flare, then die. She could see little else, because something very heavy and spiky and sharp was lying on top of her, pressing her face into the unfinished ground.

“Martine?” she shouted as she struggled to squirm out from beneath the painful mass. “Is that you?”

T4b, the Goggleboy robot in his attack-armor, rolled away with a bellow of surprise. He landed on his backside and sat for a moment, staring at her, as though she were something quite impossible to believe.

One of the other shapes detached itself from the tumble of bodies. “Renie! My God, it is you!” The sim was still a nondescript Temilúni woman, but the accented voice was unmistakable.

“Martine!” She scrambled to her feet, ignoring the bruises she had gained cushioning T4b's landing, and caught the other woman in such a powerful embrace that she lifted Martine Desroubin's feet from the ground. “Oh, Jesus Mercy, how did this all happen? We thought we'd lost all of you forever! Is Orlando with you?”

Florimel's voice cut across everything like a buzzsaw. “William came through with us, Martine.” Renie took this to be good news. “He has hit his head on something, though. He is unconscious.”

“Thank God,” Martine murmured, and then astonished Renie by asking, “Do we have something we can use to tie him?”

“Tie him?” said Renie. “You mean, tie him
up
? Are you talking about the same William. . . ?”

“Yes. He is . . . I do not know what he is,” Martine said. “But he is not what we believed. He tried to kill Quan Li.”

“I don't understand.” Renie shook her head, helpless before this onslaught of strange new information. “Who all is here? What has happened?” This new world, preternaturally still only moments before, now seemed a hive of activity. T4b had regained his feet and was wiping his handspikes clean of not-ground—several of them were darkly streaked. He was also examining Emily 22813 with interest, although Emily looked at the armored man in turn as though he might be some kind of huge and particularly unpleasant insect.

Quan Li and Florimel (it took a moment to recognize which was which, since Renie had not seen them in a while, and both still wore similar Temilún bodies) were crouched over Sweet William, whose long limp figure, dressed in the familiar black, lay near the spot the gateway had opened. A rill of blood seeped from under his hood and down across his pale face. Florimel was tearing strips off her ragged peasant blouse to bind him; Quan Li was doing the same, somewhat angrily, as though she resented the other woman's help and would have preferred to tie the prisoner herself. Renie wondered how badly William had hurt her, to make retiring Quan Li so fixed and militant in her purpose.

There was no sign at all of Orlando or his friend Fredericks.

!Xabbu climbed to his feet, still holding the lighter. He watched all this activity with a kind of bemused detachment, as though in a shallower version of the trance he had summoned earlier.

“Did you find us, or did we find you?” Martine asked. She seemed quite ragged, able to keep on her feet only with Renie's support. “It was all so confusing. There is so much to tell!”

“We found something,” Renie explained, “a key or a remote trigger, something like that. An access device of some kind, anyway—it looks like a lighter, see? !Xabbu used it to open a gate. Two gates, now! We think it belonged to one of the Grail people, but this other man stole it . . .” She realized she was babbling with relief and happiness. “No, forget it, I'll explain all that later. But I don't understand this bit about William. He attacked Quan Li? Why? Is he mad?”

“I fear he is a spy for the Grail Brotherhood,” Martine replied. “When we were in the Place of the Lost—but I forget, you do not know where we have been, what we have done.” She shook her head and laughed a cracked little laugh. “Just as we do not know what has happened to you! Oh, Renie, how odd it has all been!” She wagged her head in exhaustion. “And this place! What is it? It feels very bizarre to me.”

Emily's sudden shriek startled both Renie and Martine so badly that they jumped. “Is he dead?” the girl squealed. “There's so much
blood
!”

Renie turned to look. While attempting to put some space between herself and T4b, Emily had almost tripped over Sweet William, but the girl was not the only one caught by surprise. Kneeling beside him, Florimel held up her hands and stared wonderingly at the scarlet that slicked them both to the wrists. Quan Li's hands were also streaked in blood; she shrank back from William with her eyes wide.

“He does have a head wound,” Florimel said, but she sounded uncertain. “They bleed very badly . . .”

Renie reached them in a few seconds, and with Florimel's help turned the long figure over. As William flopped onto his back, Renie let out a gasp of surprise. His black outfit was in ribbons across his belly, and all the creases were awash in blood. A puddle was forming beneath him on the oddly-colored ground, changing color where it had lain for more than a few moments, swirling with pale blues and greens and sickly grays in those places, but still bright red in the wounds and on his garments.

“Jesus Mercy.” Renie felt sick just seeing it. “How did this happen? It looks like an animal got him.”

!Xabbu bent close. “He is still alive. We must make more bandages and wrap him quickly.” He squatted, then took strips of cloth from Florimel and Quan Li that had been meant for use as restraints and began to pull them tight across the ugly wounds. T4b stood over them, absurdly out of place beside the monkey and the two peasant sims, like some offshore-factory children's toy dropped into a classical painting. Nothing on his costume would make suitable field dressings, that much was obvious.

Renie felt a tug on her arm, and allowed Martine to draw her to one side. Instead of asking for reassurance, Martine brought her mouth close to Renie's ear. Her whisper was so quiet that at first Renie was not sure she was hearing correctly, because the blind woman's words were shocking.

“One of them did it,” Martine said. “I'm sure that one of them must have tried to kill him. Something else could have attacked him in the cavern—the place where we were—but I felt some act of violence occur just as we entered the gateway, and we were all bunched in a group by then. I cannot tell who is guilty, though—which one of our number is only pretending to feel shock and sadness. Something in this new simulation, some distortion, is blurring my senses.”

Martine was talking as though she could read minds, and Renie had no idea what that was about. In fact, she had very little idea what
any
of this was about. “I don't understand.” She took a breath, then forced herself to speak quietly. “William is a spy, but one of us tried to kill him?”

“One of the people who came through with me,” Martine replied. “I believe that to be true—whatever the cause, it must have happened there, just before we went through the gateway. I am frightened, Renie.”

“What can we do?” She stole a quick look. Everyone except Emily seemed actively concerned for William's life, whatever he had done. And how could they be certain that Martine was right—that the blind woman's other senses were reliable? Just days ago she had been so overwhelmed by the network that she had been almost catatonic.

Martine abruptly turned to the others and said in a loud, shaky voice, “I know that one of you has done this to him.”

Everything stopped. Florimel and Quan Li's hands halted above Sweet William, still holding bandages torn from one of their shrinking garments, so that they seemed arrested in some staged tableau of mummification. T4b also seemed surprised, but his expression was hidden by his buglike mask.

Emily had been backing away from the bloody scene, hands clutched protectively over her stomach, but the girl from New Emerald City froze like a rabbit at Martine's shout. “I didn't do anything!” she howled, then bent double as though to get between the accuser and her unborn child.

“Not you, Emily,” Renie assured her. “But, Martine, we can't just . . .”

“No.” Martine shook her head. “What we cannot do is live with doubt. If I am wrong, I am wrong, but I do not believe it. And in a moment I will have an answer.” The small woman marched toward the startled group like a sheepdog trying to intimidate a pack of its feral cousins by sheer force of personality. “You know that I have ways of seeing things that you others do not—those who traveled with me know that, anyway.”

“What, because something attacked William, and you think it is one of us, you are to be the judge and jury?” Florimel shook her head in disgust, but there was a strange hint of fear and anger in her eyes as well. “That is madness!”

“It will not take much judging,” Martine snapped back, showing an aggressive force Renie had never seen from her. “It must be either you or Quan Li—you are the only two who have blood on you, and whoever did this would not come away clean.”

Florimel only scowled her contempt, and Quan Li made a weak protest, but Renie had a sudden flash of memory. “Martine, I saw
him
 . . .” she pointed at T4b, “. . . cleaning those spikes of his right after you all came through.”

“Saying what?” T4b bellowed. “That's far crash—calling me duppy? Sixes, gonna be sixes on everyone!” He raised his armored fists and flared his body-spikes like the spines of a blowfish, making himself a truly frightening package. Renie was forced to consider the fact that without Orlando and his barbarian sim, they would have trouble defending themselves against the Goggleboy if it did come to a fight.

Martine was unswerving. “Then T4b is a suspect, too. If the rest of you do not trust me, let Renie judge.”

“Zero be judgin' me,” T4b warned. “Far-scanning, you think that. You not, nobody not . . .!”

“
Stop
!” Renie bellowed as loud as she could, desperate to keep things from running out of control. “
Stop it, all of you
!”

In the near-silence that followed, !Xabbu's quiet voice cut through everything, startling as a gunshot. “He is trying to speak,” the baboon said.

Everyone turned to look; all saw Sweet William's black-painted eyes flutter open. Then, in that instant of expectant stillness, a figure abruptly leaped across William's body and attacked !Xabbu.

The attacker was one of the Temilúni sims, but at first Renie could not tell which—was not even sure for a confusing second or two that it
was
an attack, since assaulting the baboon made no sense. The whole thing seemed to unfold in slow time, without obvious logic, like some kind of drug experience. Only as the dark-haired woman raised herself to her knees, unpeeled !Xabbu from her arm, then flung him aside with surprising strength, could Renie see that the aggressor was Quan Li.

Something shiny had bounced away from the scene of their struggle and come to rest only a step away from Renie. It was Azador's pilfered lighter. As she belatedly realized that Quan Li had only attacked the baboon so she could snatch the device, Renie bent and grabbed it, then squeezed it tight in her fist.

Quan Li climbed to her feet, rubbing her bloodied arm. “Damn,” she snarled, “that little bastard can bite!” She saw Renie's bulging hand and took a surprisingly quick step toward her, but when T4b and Florimel moved up to take defensive positions on either side of Renie, Quan Li stopped. Her first flash of rage abruptly mutated into a disconcerting, lazy smile that stretched the features far more than seemed natural. “Why don't you just give me that and I'll be on my way, no harm to anyone.”

The Hong Kong grandmother's voice and posture had both changed dramatically, but the metamorphosis of her familiar face was even more terrifying. Some new soul had sparked to life inside her—or had finally been set free.

!Xabbu reappeared, limping back to stand near Renie's feet. Reassured that he did not seem seriously hurt, she had just opened her mouth to demand answers when Quan Li sprang with terrifying speed to one side, grabbed Emily, then jerked the girl close to her body in a single, continous movement as lithe and deadly as a snake strike. The grin widened. “If any of you takes another step toward me, I'll snap her neck. That's a promise. Now, let's talk about that lighter, shall we?”