Sea of Silver Light (74 page)

"What are you doing?" he screamed at her. "Martine, get down!"

"Of course," she said as bullets whistled through the grass at her feet. "I should have seen it before." She sprinted for the tree. "There would be no gallows on sacred ground," she shouted.

Terrified for her, Paul rose and began squeezing off shots, hoping only to distract the attention of the circling Dreads from such an easy target, but his luck had changed: although he thought he saw one of the torch-wielding shapes snap backward in the saddle, none of his other bullets seemed to have any effect. He looked over his shoulder and saw Martine reaching up to the hangman's noose, pulling it with her fingers as though readying it for a particularly large neck. Golden light burst out of it. Within moments it was an opening larger than she was, extending from the knot at the top of the noose all the way to the ground. T4b and Florimel were already running low across the hilltop. Paul turned to see the mounted men charging up the hillside, their shouts rising like the belling of hounds at the kill. He fired his last shot, flung the empty revolver toward the dazzle of torches, then sprinted for the glow.

Martine was waiting just at the edge. She grabbed his arm and together they dived into the heatless golden brilliance.

For a moment, as Paul fell through onto hard stone, it seemed that their pursuers had come through after them: the unsteady light of torches was everywhere.

Reassured by the silence, Paul sat up. The torches hung in wall brackets along a vast stone facade, outshining even the stars in the black sky. The wall was covered with painted scenes in the stiff Egyptian style, colorful portraits of people and animal-headed gods.

He stood, feeling for broken bones, but found nothing worse than skinned knees and ripped coveralls. Beside him Martine and Florimel and T4b were also climbing to their feet. The quiet, an almost palpable thing in this gallery of vast stone walls, was broken only by the sound of his companions' breathing.

"We made it," Paul whispered. "Brilliant, Martine."

Before she could reply, a shape appeared around the edge of the building, monstrously large but as silent as a cat. In one bound it stood before them and over them, a lion-bodied, human-headed giant. Crudely stitched in many places like an ancient doll, the sphinx leaked sand from a dozen gaping seams. Its eyelids were sewn shut.

"You trespass on sacred precincts,"
it announced in a voice so low and powerful that it seemed to shake the stones.
"This is the Temple of Anubis, Lord of Life and Death. You trespass."

Paul found himself struggling to make words come out of his mouth, terrified by the astounding size of the thing. "W–w–we . . . w–we don't . . . mean. . . ."

"You trespass."

"Run!" Paul shouted, turning, but before he had gone three steps something struck him like a velvet freight train and smashed him into darkness.

CHAPTER 25

NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 7.0 (Eu, NAm)-"Escape!"

(visual: Zelmo on ledge)

VO: Nedra (Kamchatka T) and Zelmo (Cold Wells Carlson) are on the run from Iron Island Academy, but agents of Lord Lubar (Ignatz Reiner) shoot Zelmo with a Despair Ray, and now he is desperate to kill himself. This is last episode before "Escape!" folds into the "I Hate My Life" plotline. 5 supporting, 25 background open, cold-weather outdoor shoot. Flak to: GCN.IHMLIFE.CAST

For the third time they poled the raft across the sluggish current, steering toward the far shore. The bank seemed little more than a long stone's throw away, but after strenuous exercise by Sam and the new arrival Azador on one side, !Xabbu and Jongleur on the other, they had moved no closer.

At last they dragged the poles out and stood up straight to catch their breath. Released now to the current, the raft began to drift lazily downstream. The meadowlands on the far bank, so unexceptional, so apparently identical to the side of the river from which they had come, were beginning to seem like some mythical continent out of the past.

"Someone must swim," Jongleur said. "A person may be allowed where a boat is not."

Sam was nettled. The old man might have been proved right in his conjecture that crossing the river, not following it, was the key to traversing this strange land, but she still didn't like the assumption of command in his voice.

"We don't work for you," she said through clenched teeth. Something bumped her in the small of the back and she whirled, ready to shout at Jongleur, but it was !Xabbu who had nudged her. He gave her a significant look; it took Sam a moment to figure it out.

We're not supposed to talk about who Jongleur is,
she remembered, and felt ashamed. All those years as a thief, creeping through the houses of the rich and powerful in the Middle Country—the imaginary rich and powerful anyway—and here she was, when it really counted, almost blurting out secrets for no reason. She lowered her eyes.

"He is right," Azador said. "We will not know for certain until someone tries to swim. I would do it, but with my leg. . . ." He made a gesture of regret, of heroism postponed.

Sam waited for !Xabbu to volunteer and was surprised when he did not. Usually the small man insisted on taking the primary risks before he would let anyone else, especially Sam, do something dangerous. "I guess it's me, then," she said. So all those years of morning swim practice would get some practical use. She hoped she'd get to tell her mom about it someday. The thought of something so gloriously mundane as laughing with her mother about swimming those hated laps sent a sharp spike of longing through her.

"Wait, I am not sure. . . ." !Xabbu began.

"It's okay, I'm good at this." Without giving herself more time to worry, she lifted her arms and leaped from the edge of the raft. When she surfaced she could hear Azador and Jongleur cursing at the violent rocking caused by her dive.

The water was a bit of a shock, colder than she expected, and though the current was slow, it was a steady drag that made swimming a great deal more difficult than it had been in the pool back home; still, after a few awkward kicks she got her body level and began to cut an angular path across the river, heading for the grassy, welcoming slope of the far bank.

A couple of minutes,
she guessed, gauging the distance.

Within half a hundred strokes it became obvious that either the current was deceptively strong or she was suffering the same fate as the raft. She lifted her head above water and changed to a breast stroke so she could better see what was happening. She dug river water out from before her, surged against the resistance, made headway . . . but the land got no closer. Frustrated, she dove under the surface, forcing her way down until one of her hands brushed against the thick grasses waving at the bottom of the river before flattening out again. She kicked as hard as she could, wriggling her body like a fish. She was proud of her strength: she would not give up without testing herself and the simulation.

When she couldn't hold her breath any longer, she gave another two kicks, then allowed herself to glide upward. The shore was still just as far away. Disgusted, treading water, she had turned around toward the middle of the river to look for the raft when a sudden, shocking pain stabbed at her leg.

Something grabbed me. . . !
was all she had time to think before she slid under the water. She fought her way back up through agony, one leg helpless, and realized it was not some carnivorous river dweller that had struck but a cramp in her calf. It made little difference: she could not keep herself above water for more than a moment, and she was exhausted from her fruitless swim.

Sam shouted for !Xabbu, but her nose and mouth were full of water and it came out as little more than a gurgle. She simply could not kick the cramped leg. nor could she do much else. She tried to roll over on her back and go limp—the words
dead man's float
bubbled through her brain, a very unreassuring phrase—now the pain in her leg was excruciating and river water was rolling across her face. She had just sunk under the surface for the second time when something whacked hard against her shoulder. She grabbed at the barge pole, clutching it as though it were the shepherd's crook of her very own guardian angel. Which, in a way, it was.

"I was very frightened, Sam." !Xabbu had been unwilling to leave her side to make the fire, and had left the job to Azador. As she huddled beside the low blaze, still shivering a half hour later, she found herself actually grateful to the mustached man. "I was hoping, hoping very hard, that we could get the raft as far as you swam," !Xabbu went on. "Oh, I was frightened."

Sam was touched. In some ways, her experience seemed to have been worse for him than it had been for her. "I'm okay. You saved me."

!Xabbu only shook his head.

"So we are thwarted," said Jongleur. "We cannot cross the river, either by boat or by swimming."

Sam made an effort to stop her teeth from chattering. "But there must be a bridge. Those little animals or whatever they were—the Bubble Bunny ones—they said something about going to a bridge. We just never found out what they meant." She could not help glaring at Jongleur, since it had been his frightening temper that had driven the natives away. She thought she saw a shadow of guilt cross his face.

Maybe he's a little bit human,
she decided.
Just a little.
Of course, it might only be regret at having interfered with his own chances.

"But there are no bridges," Azador declared. "I have gone all the way around this bloody river three times. You have gone around it once yourself. Did you see bridges?"

"It's not that simple," Sam said stubbornly. "We can see the other side of the river, but that doesn't mean we can get there. So if we can see things we can't reach, why shouldn't there be things that we can't see but we
can
reach?" She had to stop and say it over again in her head to see if it made sense. She decided it did, more or less.

"We can do nothing more today." !Xabbu's troubled expression had not gone, but it had changed into something different, more remote. "We will think again in the morning." He reached out and touched Sam's arm. "I am happy you were not hurt, Sam."

"Just my leg, and that's better now." She smiled, hoping to cheer him a little, but wondered how convincing it was with her teeth still chattering.

For all !Xabbu's concern, he was not beside her when Sam woke sometime in the middle of the night. She could see the shadowy forms of the other two revealed by the dying coals, but no sign of the small man.

Call of nature, like,
she guessed, and had almost toppled back into sleep when she remembered that there was no longer such a thing for any of them. She jerked upright. The idea of losing him, of being left alone with only Jongleur and Azador, was too horrible to consider.

I don't want any of this. I just want to go home.

She tried to calm herself, forcing herself to imagine what Renie or Orlando would do. If !Xabbu was gone she had to go and look for him, that was all. She considered rousing the others but decided against it. If she could not find any sign of him within a hundred meters or so of the campfire she would think about it again.

She was just pulling a smoldering stick out of the fire to use as a torch when she noticed that someone else had already had the same idea: a hundred meters from the camp a single spot of orange light stood out against the black velvet hills. Sam trotted toward it.

The end of !Xabbu's torch had been spiked into the soft loam of a grassy hillside; he was sitting beside it. He did not look up at her approach, and she was just beginning to feel frightened again when he shook himself out of his reverie and turned to her.

"Is everything all right, Sam?"

"Yeah, chizz. I just woke up and . . . I was worried because you were gone."

He nodded. "I am sorry. I thought you were too deeply asleep to notice." He turned back to the sky. "The stars are very strange here. There is a pattern, but I cannot hold it in my mind."

She seated herself beside him. The grass was damp, but after the mishap in the river she scarcely noticed.

"Will you not be cold?" he asked.

"I'm okay."

They sat for a while in silence, Sam fighting an urge to drive the fear away with friendly noise. At last !Xabbu cleared his throat, a sound so uncharacteristic in its uncertainty that Sam felt her skin goose pimple.

"I . . . I did a terrible wrong to you today," he said.

"You saved me."

"I let you go into the river. It should have been me, but I was afraid."

"Why should it have been you? You're as bad as Renie—you think you should do all the dangerous things before anyone else."

"The fact is that I feared the water. I was almost killed once in the river where I grew up, when I was a child. A crocodile."

"That's terrible!"