Sea of Silver Light (33 page)

The Praetorian Guard fought nobly, but against ten thousand shrieking Carthaginians they could do little; Hannibal's armies cut their way down the Via Triumphalis like a knife through hot fat. Emperor Tigellinus was dragged from the Golden House with his arms bound behind him. Hannibal himself climbed down from his black horse and beat the emperor to death with a stick—a mark of respect, of sorts.

The most bizarre thing in what would become a week of horrors too great to comprehend, was not just that the monster Hannibal of Carthage should rise from his ancient grave, but that he should storm Rome with an army of men who looked so much like himself—in fact, some survivors swore that every soldier was absolutely identical. It was at least certain that instead of the diverse band of mercenaries he had used the first time he had come down into Italy in the days of the Republic, Ligurians and Gauls, Spaniards and Greeks, this time there was a strange uniformity to his troops—each and every one small but well-knit, with black skin, long dark hair, and a strange Asian cast to his eyes. Wherever they were from, they burned and pillaged and murdered with a cruelty so savage and arbitrary that even in the early hours of the assault some Romans swore that the very pits of the Earth had opened and belched forth this army of demons. By the end of the first day, scarcely anyone would have argued.

The few who saw him and survived said that Hannibal himself had the same dark skin and oddly hooded eyes as his troops. Other than his gold-shod horse and his banner, went the horrified whispers, Hannibal was only distinguishable from his minions by the silver staff he carried at all times, and by the fact that he alone, of all his implacable army, seemed to find the ghastly events amusing. He laughed as the young men of equestrian families were brought before him to be butchered, laughed just as hard when their sisters and mothers begged for mercy, as though the whole terrible rampage were a kind of performance conducted for his benefit alone.

He is no human, but an evil god,
survivors murmured to each other as they huddled in sewers and basements.
He may call himself Hannibal, but even the scourge of Cannae was never so cruel.

As the sun set on the first day of his conquest, the evil one came to the heart of the city, the Forum Romanum. and built himself a palace there. Flies in the millions hovered over the place, darkening the red skies like storm clouds. The demon built his house from corpses and near-corpses, piling them high, skewering them face-up on tall wooden stakes to make his walls, so that each dying man's last sight was of another body being rammed down on top of his own.

At the center the arch-monster Hannibal ordered a throne built from skulls of all sizes, skulls which only hours before had held the diverse thoughts of living folk; when it was finished he sat upon it, surrounded by the high walls of his new palace—walls that screamed and bled and begged—and had the prisoners of Rome brought before him, one by one, then in bunches as the evening wore on, and to each he ordered some terrible thing done.

The old Stoic Seneca, who had advised three emperors, and who himself was the first to admit that many considered him the conscience of Rome, stood brave but weeping before the enemy's throne and quoted Euripides in Hannibal's grinning dark face, saying,
"My mother was accursed the night she bore me, and I am faint with envy of all the dead."

The demon laughed loud at this, and had the old man's arms and legs carefully taken off so he should not kill himself, then kept him at the foot of his throne like a dog and made him witness to all that happened afterward.

And indeed, in the end, there was not one of the living who did not at last come to envy those who had already been killed. . . .

It was hard work being God, Dread had begun to realize.

He stood in pale sunlight before his throne room in the Forum and sniffed the dawn air, his keen nostrils sifting the scents of smoke and blood and putrefaction for something more subtle, without knowing quite what it was he sought. His soldiers, a thousand mirrors of himself, kneeled in the Via Sacra, waiting silently for orders. He sniffed again, trying to understand what he was missing, what he was pursuing on the breeze on this lovely spring morning, made only a little less so by the odor of a thousand unburied corpses. Perhaps the faint trace of purpose, of a real challenge.

Destruction for its own sake was beginning to pall, he decided as he surveyed the charred rooftops of Rome. Already he had obliterated half a dozen of the Old Man's favorite simulations, not to mention a select few belonging to some of the network's other masters, and he was beginning to find such exercises boring. It had been exciting at first—he had spent several days engineering the rape of Toyland, testing his cruel imagination to such a degree that near the end, as he lay sated in the midst of the wreckage like a lion beside its kill, he had an almost unheard-of moment of self-doubt, wondering if the elaborate tortures he had visited on Mary Quite Contrary and Little Bo Peep and Tom the Piper's Son, his thundering devastation of their fairy-tale land, might be evidence of some latent pedophilia. The idea had disturbed him—Dread found child molesters a particularly pathetic lot—and when he had moved on to his next target, savaging a charming little comic simulation of 1920s London, he had been careful to limit his more personal and arcane pursuits to those clearly of adult age. But now, several simworlds on, after pursuing the flower of Roman womanhood through fields and burning villas in this latest world, until both bravery and weeping surrender no longer intrigued him, and after a program of terror that was starting to become mechanical. Dread was definitely growing bored.

He picked one of the Dread-soldiers at random and gave it a nonfunctional copy of his silver staff.

"You're Hannibal now, mate," he told his simulacrum. "Here's your first job. Release the gladiators and give them all knives and swords and spears." He frowned. It was hard to care anymore, impossible to forget he was just talking to a poor copy of himself. "Oh, and destroy all the food stores. When that's finished, you and the rest of the soldiers withdraw, form a perimeter around the city, and we'll see what the survivors get up to."

He did not wait for an answer—what did it matter?—but flicked himself back into the heart of the system.

The problem was, it was so easy to destroy things here, but hard to keep it interesting. Initially, of course, just the idea of wreaking this kind of havoc within the Old Man's staggeringly expensive simulations had been pleasure enough, almost like giving the ancient bastard a good beating, and the endless power to cause horror on such a scale had its own intriguing allure. Now he was beginning to feel the limitations of the exercise: soon his complete license to roam the worlds of the network and do to them what he wanted would lose all savor. In any case, it was not true destruction: unless he froze them in eternal and somewhat boring devastation, or destroyed the code behind them (a very different and far less viscerally satisfying kind of revenge), the simulations eventually would simply cycle through and start over and all the destruction he had committed would be wiped away as though it had never happened.

Dread floated in midair in the immense but mostly featureless complex he had built for himself, an open-plan structure crafted entirely of smooth white virtual stone. Outside the windows stretched unclouded blue sky and the endless Outback scrubland he had seen on netshows in his childhood but had never visited, the emptiness that filled the center of his native country. It was not enough simply to hold gross power over the network, he was beginning to think. With the whip of pain—or its analog, since there could be nothing like true pain for an artificial intelligence, however lifelike—he had demanded it give him unlimited control, repeatedly scorching the operating system until it abandoned all protections against him. But even though control had been given to him, there were still too many limitations, and it galled him to realize that although he had equaled Jongleur's power over the system, he still could not surpass it. He could not locate an individual user, for one thing—the system was too complex for that, too distributed. If the blind woman Martine had not announced her presence over an open communication channel, he would not have known she was alive, let alone been able to guess where she was. He regretted now that he had been busy with Dulcie at the time: a quick check of the Kunohara simworld revealed that his former companions' whereabouts were again unknown. He should never have left it to anyone else, even Jongleur's own agents.
Especially
Jongleur's own agents. Dread was developing a greater understanding of the Old Man's frustration with incompetent subordinates.

Confident, cocky, lazy, dead,
he reminded himself. The Old Man had thought himself unquestioned master of the network and he had lived to regret it. Dread decided he needed to pay better attention to avoid making similar mistakes. But who could threaten him?

It was not all bad, he reflected—if nothing else, locating Martine and the rest of his former companions would be the first challenge he had found in days. And Jongleur himself seemed to have disappeared from the system entirely, even disconnected from his own system's port into the network. Was he dead, or simply offline and lying low? Dread knew his victory would not be complete until his onetime employer groveled before him. It would be a fine day when it came. Even the devastation of Toyworld and Atlanta and Rome would seem like a picnic compared to what Dread was planning for Felix Jongleur.

Oh, and the Sulaweyo bitch.
Not only was the virtual Renie out there somewhere in the Grail network, but Klekker and his boys should be getting hold of her real body very soon now. He made a mental note to check on the progress of the Drakensberg operation.
Won't that be interesting? I'll have her offline and online, both—her body and her mind. It could be . . . very special.

Dread let the halls of his ice-white palace fill with music, a children's chorale from out of the random choice of his system. The singers, innocent as bees making honey, brought back to him the final hours of Toyland, a thought that at this moment he found aesthetically unpleasant. He dropped the voices in pitch and felt relaxation flow through him.

God, or at least the Grail network's bloody-handed equivalent, rested a while from his heavy labors.

The thing is,
he thought after a while,
I can't do without little Dulcie Anwin just yet. I don't know how to make new things, I don't really know how to modify things in any big way. The operating system is like a door—if I lean on it, it opens or closes, but the options are pretty limited.

He had tried giving it natural language commands, but either the system was not set up that way or it was pretending not to understand. All the pain he could inflict on it had not made it communicate, which had left him only able to reshape things that already existed—mutation gradients, sim replacement algorithms. Such limitations were frustrating, and the need to work with the vagaries of a network that should have been his like a cheap whore offended him.

One thing was clear: if he wanted to find Renie Sulaweyo and Martine Desroubins and the others, he needed to be able to use the system in a more sophisticated way. Jongleur's own agents were hopelessly flawed, based on what was happening in the bugworld. Dread was also beginning to think nothing else in this virtual world could be nearly as interesting as getting his own hands on the real people who had defied him. And he would take such magnificent revenge when he did! Something fabulous and inventive and achingly slow. Surely the mind that had imagined flaying the leading citizens of Rome, then turning their skins into hot air balloons set aloft with their families clinging to the bottomless baskets—surely a mind of such artistry could deal with his few remaining enemies in a way that would be truly awesome, even . . . beautiful?

Dread slipped into a half-sleep, floating in his white palace, chasing ideals of pain and power that others could not even imagine.

The elevator seemed to take a long time to go down ten floors. Anger made him tight all over, hot and full of pressure. When the door at last whispered open, Paul thought he might explode out into the reception area like boiling blood out of a hemorrhaging artery.

There was no one at the reception desk, which was just as well—he didn't much like the pale, angular young woman who usually sat there, and didn't want her to see him screaming like a maniac. He walked around the curved room, just composed enough not to trip over any of the stylish and expensive Rostov Modern furniture, and laid his hand on the door panel.

His first reflexive thought at seeing them huddled close together at the desk, the small neat head almost touching the shiny bald one, surprised even him.

They know all the secrets. All the bad secrets.

He stood in the doorway, suddenly aware of his own breach of propriety, his own relative powerlessness, and the self-righteous fury cooled. But there was another side to his upset, the silly, embarrassing part of him that believed all those childhood ideals, the ones he had dragged with him through school like a ragged coat despite manifest evidence that it was going to lose him more friends than it gained. No sneaking, no grassing—he still believed it. Duty and fair play. All that high-minded public school nonsense, which the children who had been born to it had discarded while they were still in short pants, but which to a scholarship boy like himself was exotic and precious.

He looked at the two of them, silent and oblivious to the intruder, undoubtedly communing through some cordless connection—Paul himself didn't even have a neurocannula, further proof of his old-fashioned hopelessness—and could not help feeling exactly like a schoolboy again. He had come to scold the older boys for not playing fair, but now that he was alone with them, he knew that what he was going to get was a terrible beating.