Mountain of Black Glass (15 page)

“Oh, my God . . .” Orlando shuddered. “But how did I get here? And why won't you tell me who you are?”

The woman squinted at him as though judging whether he was worth the effort of serious conversation. “Watch that cursing, boy. My name is Bonita Mae Simpkins. My family call me Bonnie Mae, but you don't know me that well, so for now you can call me Mrs. Simpkins.”

The headache which had been merely excruciating at first was getting worse every moment. Orlando could feel his eyelid twitching badly, but that was the least of his worries. “I . . . I want to get some answers, but I feel pretty impacted,” he conceded.

“You're not well, boy, that's why. You need more sleep.” She frowned, but her touch was gentle on his forehead. “Here.” She drew something from a fold of her baggy white cotton dress. “Swallow this. It'll make you feel a little better.”

Under the pressure of that gaze, he did not argue, but dry-swallowed the powdery ball. “What is it?”

“Egyptian medicine,” she said. “They make a lot of it from crocodile poop.” For the first time she allowed herself a quick smile at Orlando's horrified expression. “But not this. Just willow bark. Another few thousand years, I 'spect they'll call it aspirin.”

Orlando was not as amused as Mrs. Simpkins, but he had no strength left to tell her so. He lay back. Fredericks squatted beside him and took his hand. “You'll be okay, Gardiner.”

Orlando wanted to remind his friend that okay was the one thing he would never, ever be, but already something was dragging him down, like river weeds tangling the legs of a drowning man.

 

He felt a little better the next time he woke, and after some bargaining was even allowed to sit up. All his nerves felt like they were coming back to life. Whatever was stuffed in his mattress felt as bristly as horsehair, and the light streaming in through the doorway of the room splashed with almost painful brightness against the white walls.

When Mrs. Simpkins wandered off briefly to another room, he called Fredericks over. “What's going on?” he whispered. “What happened with the temple and how did we get here? Where
is
here, anyway?”

“It's someone's house.” Fredericks looked over his shoulder to make sure the formidable Mrs. S. was not in sight. “Pretty big, too. She was telling the truth, though—you were scanned out. A bunch of guys with, like, clubs were going to kill you, but she calmed you down.”

“But where are we? It's still Egypt, right? How did we wind up here?”

Fredericks' face was unhappy. “Egypt, yeah, but I don't really know the rest. After we reached the temple place—I really thought some kind of monster was going to come out of there and just utterly devour us or something—I guess I blacked out, then I just kind of . . . woke up again. And you were gone. But we were near the edge of the river, and there was like this big city around us. And then I heard people shouting, and I went to look, and it was you, and you were standing in the river, scanning majorly, shouting something about God's offices.”

“I don't remember any of that,” said Orlando, shaking his head. “But I had some really weird . . . I don't know, dreams, experiences . . . about that temple place.” He had a sudden, worried thought. “Where are the monkey kids?”

“They're here. They just won't come inside—that woman scares them. They were all climbing around on you when you were still sleeping, the first afternoon, and she chased 'em out with a broom. I think they're living in a tree in the open place out there—what's it called, a courtyard?”

“I don't get any of this . . .” Orlando said. “I mean, what's someone named Bonnie Mae doing in ancient Egypt . . . ?”

“There weren't a lot of folk named Orlando Gardiner laboring to build Pharaoh's pyramids either,” said a sharp voice from the doorway. “Now were there?”

Fredericks started back guiltily. “He's feeling better,” Orlando's friend asserted, “so he was asking some questions.”

“Well he might,” Mrs. Simpkins said. “Well he might. And I s'pose I might have a couple myself. Like, where you got this, and why you were hanging onto it so tight there are still finger marks in the clay?” She held up the piece of broken pot, waving the feather design in front of Orlando's face. “Talk to me, boy. The good Lord don't care for liars—He cannot abide those who do not tell the truth.”

“Look,” Orlando said, “no offense, but why should I tell you anything? I don't know who you are. I mean, thanks for taking care of us and giving us a place to stay, but maybe we should just get going now, let you have your house back.” He tried to climb to his feet, then had to try even harder to avoid falling down. His legs felt overcooked, and even the effort of steadying himself brought his breath fast and frequent.

Bonita Mae Simpkins' laugh was mirthless. “You don't know what you're talking about, boy. First off, you couldn't walk around the corner yet without your friend helping you. Second, in another hour it's going to be dark, and if you're outside, you'll get torn to pieces. You ain't the Daniel of
this
lion's den.”

“Torn to pieces?”

“You tell him,” she said to Fredericks. “I don't take well to being argued with these days.” She folded her arms across her broad chest.

“There's . . . there's some kind of war going on,” Fredericks said. “It's not very safe outside at night.”

“Not very safe?” the woman snorted. “The Lord has given you a gift for understatement that is truly miraculous, youngster. The streets of Abydos are full of abominations, and that's the truth. Creatures with the heads of vultures and bees, men and women who throw lightning and ride in flying boats, scorpions with human hands, monsters you can't even imagine. It's like the Final Days out there, like the Book of Revelations, if the good Lord will forgive me saying so about a place that ain't no more than a poor copy of His universe in the first place, no more than the work of sinful men.” She fixed Orlando with an agate eye. “And what's more, from what I understand, all this craziness is your fault, boy.”

“What?” Orlando turned to Fredericks, who shrugged and looked sheepish. “What is she talking about?”

“Well,” his friend said, “you remember Oompa-Loompa? The guy with the wolf head? Apparently, he sort of started some kind of revolution.”

“Osiris is gone at the moment, but his lieutenants Tefy and Mewat are wrathful creatures,” said Mrs. Simpkins. “They are going to do their level best to get things back under control before their boss comes back, and to creatures like them, that means a lot of pain and a lot of killin'—and they've already done a goodly amount. So don't tell me what you're going to do or not do, boy.”

Orlando could only sit for a moment in horrified silence, trying to make sense of it all. The angle of the light on the far wall had changed already, the shadows creeping up the whitewash, and with the woman's words still echoing in his thoughts he could almost feel the held breath of a community waiting fearfully for darkness to come. “So . . . so what are we supposed to do? What's all this mean to you . . . Ma'am?”

Mrs. Simpkins grunted, signifying her approval of a more respectful Orlando. “What it means to me is more than you're ready to hear yet, boy, but you came stomping through the tomb-builders' neighborhood with the feather of Ma'at clamped in your hand like it was your last friend, and I mean to know why.”

“How do you know about . . . about her?”

“Who's asking the questions, boy?” She glared at him. Orlando felt certain she could crack a walnut between those eyebrows if she wanted to. “Not only do I know about her, my husband Terence died in Osiris' dungeons to protect her secrets, and eight more of my friends have died here, too. So you can understand I'm a little bit short-tempered about the whole thing. Now you better talk to me.”

Orlando took a breath. Self-preservation screamed at him not even to think about asking another question, but he had been under sentence of death too long to be easily cowed. “Just tell me who your friends are, please. Why are you here?”

Bonita Mae Simpkins also took a breath. “I'm praying for patience, boy.” She closed her eyes as though it were the literal truth. “We are the Circle, young man, and we are going to send every one of these sinners and false gods down to hell on the express elevator. Now, s'pose you start talking.”

“N
O, that feels quite ordinary.” Florimel opened her eyes. “Everything feels just as it does in real life. Sharp feels sharp, soft feels soft, hot feels hot, even when the fire is artificial. In fact, it is becoming a bit uncomfortable.”

“Sorry.” Renie moved the smoldering stick away from Florimel's bare shin. She tested it near her own hand; the heat did indeed feel quite realistic. “So even in this place, we're still getting almost perfect simulation.”

“But we still do not know the whys and wherefores,” said Martine, frowning. “We have quite different equipment, all of us. Renie, you and !Xabbu do not even have telematic implants. But we are all getting input that seems equally sophisticated.”

“Not at first,” Renie remembered. “!Xabbu used to say that his sense of smell was disappointingly limited, that he thought it was because they hadn't built much into the military VR system we were using. But I haven't heard him complain about it lately. Maybe he's just gotten used to it.”

Martine seemed about to say something, but instead an odd expression crossed her face, what Renie thought of as her satellite-tracking look, as though information was being beamed to her from the black distances of space.

“There he is,” said Florimel, climbing to her feet. “We can ask him.”

Renie turned to see !Xabbu's familiar shape poised on the brow of a nearby hill, as though he had stopped to watch them. “They're back quickly. I wonder where Emily and T4b are.”

“Fighting,” said Florimel dryly. “Hitting each other with their school bags, perhaps. It is hard to tell sometimes if they are worst enemies or teenage lovers.”

“Well, if Emily is looking for a stepfather for her baby, the choices are pretty limited in this group.” She squinted. “Why is !Xabbu just standing there like that?” A breath of chill hurried through her, and she raised her arm to wave at the unmoving monkey shape. “!Xabbu?”

“It is not him,” said Martine in an odd, choked voice.

“What?”

“It is not him.” Martine was also squinting, her sightless eyes squeezed shut like someone suffering a bad headache. “I cannot tell who or what it is you are seeing, but I can tell you it is not !Xabbu.”

Even as Renie scrambled to her feet, the baboon on the hill made a slight movement—whether backward or to the side was hard to tell—and was gone.

 

The spot where he had stood was quite empty, the unfinished land open and uninhabited around them as far as they could see, a rumpled crazy quilt with no folds or prominences substantial enough to hide anything.

“Where did he go?” Renie wondered. “There's nowhere to disappear to.”

“Unless like the thing T4b and I saw the other day,” Florimel suggested, “it merely stepped through the air and vanished.”

“But what
was
it, then? What did you think it was, Martine?”

“I am sorry not to be more useful,” the French woman said, “but I cannot guess. I know only that its pattern was not !Xabbu's. What I ‘see' is too hard to describe. But I can tell you that it seemed both more complicated and less complicated than one of us.”

“Was it like those ghost-children you described?” Renie asked. “One of those?”

“No. Those felt like people, whatever they were in fact. This seemed like an opening into something else, as though the thing you saw as !Xabbu were a kind of glove-puppet, and I was sensing the hand underneath.”

Florimel made a harsh noise. “I cannot say I like the sound of that. Something from the Grail Brotherhood, come looking for us? Perhaps even the false Quan Li, come back again in a different shape?”

Martine shook her head, rubbing at her eyes as if she had tired herself out staring at something. “I think not. Perhaps it was just a strange quirk of this environment. A reflection, perhaps—a sort of echo of the real !Xabbu.”