Mountain of Black Glass (60 page)

Renie, with some difficulty, restrained herself from pointing out that he might not outlive the experience by much.

A weary voice called from somewhere back in the line, “Do not go rushing in, my bravos. There are observances to be made, you know.” The company slowed as they reached the end of the corridor and its draped mirrors; as Viticus walked forward his outlaw tribe parted to let him pass. “Where is Koony?” he asked when he reached the front.

“Here, Viticus.” The man in the harlequin suit stepped out of the crowd. He seemed tired and distracted now. Renie wondered what that might mean.

“Come along, then, old fellow. You wanted to see how we honor the Mother, didn't you?” The pale chieftain strode through the door at the end of the hall with Kunohara beside him.

Renie and the others now found themselves hemmed in the midst of the unwashed bandits, who gleefully poked and prodded them. “Do you think Kunohara will protect us?” Florimel asked softly. Renie could only shrug.

“I don't know what he'll do. He's strange. Maybe we should . . .”

Her sentence was never finished. As if at some signal, the entire crowd of bandits surged forward through the door at the end of the corridor, carrying Renie and the others with them. After jostling their way with much show of evil temper through the bottleneck of a small but high-ceilinged anteroom, the bandits spread out into the wide space on the far side, a rectangular chamber even larger than the Campanile, full of chill air. Windows lined the two long sides, although the glass had been smashed from every one on the left and several on the right as well, starting at the far end of the room. Through these gaping apertures the rooftops, turrets, and spires of the House could be seen stretching endlessly into the distance, tinged a dull red by the last of the setting sun. Cold wind blew in across the few remaining spikes of glass that clung to the frames. Those windows still unbroken were of stained glass, huge multicolored squares, their subjects hard to discern by the dying light, although Renie thought she saw faces.

Their captors marched them forward until they had almost reached the far end of the room, where Viticus kneeled before an oil fire smoking in a wide bronze bowl while Hideki Kunohara stood a short distance away, watching. On the far side of the fire a shadowy shape loomed higher than a man, lit in a weirdly glinting manner by the flames, its silhouette somehow rough and unstable. The tall, seated figure, robed and hooded, had hands clasped on knees and a face shrouded by the sagging hood. Renie had a terrified moment before she realized that the thing was a statue; a fear almost as deep returned when she realized it was composed entirely of shards of broken glass.

Most of the bandits had held back, unwilling to approach the idol too closely, but the bearded giant Grip and a dozen more pushed Renie and her companions down onto their knees.

Pale Viticus turned from the thing of glass. His eyes were hooded as though he could barely keep himself awake, but there was still somehow a bright watchfulness to him. “It is the Mother's day,” he said, examining Renie and the others. “All praise her. Now, which of these shall be her gift?” He turned to Kunohara. “It is sad, but we can only give her one in the proper way.” He gestured to the nearest unbroken window, whose picture was entirely unrecognizable now that the sun had vanished behind the far rooftops. “Even so, in a few more years we will have no more windows, and we will have to find another spot . . .” He paused as a cough shook him, then dabbed at his lips with his soiled sleeve. “We will have to find another place to bring the Mother of Broken Glass her gifts.” He squinted, extending a languid finger toward T4b. “We have not given her a man the last two years—she will thank us for this strapping fellow, I think.”

Grip and one of the other bandits seized T4b by his arms and dragged him toward the first intact window. The teenager fought uselessly: when his sleeve fell back and exposed his glowing hand, Grip started and leaned his head away, but still maintained his hold.

“No!” Florimel struggled with her own captors. Beside her, Emily let out a cry of true terror, ragged as a death rattle.

“It is only a little time to fall,” Viticus assured T4b. “Only a moment of cold wind, and then you will have nothing to fear ever again.”

“Kunohara!” Renie shouted. “Are you going to let this happen?”

The harlequin crossed his arms on his chest. “I suppose not.” He turned to the bandit chieftain. “I cannot let you have these people, Viticus.”

The powdered man regarded the prisoners, then Kunohara. He seemed more amused than anything else. “You are being dreadfully boring, Koony. Are you certain?”

Before Kunohara could reply, the bandit named Bibber stepped forward, face contorted in fury. “Who's this little dung-monkey to say no to the White Prince?” He leveled his blunderbuss at Kunohara, trembling with outraged traditionalism. “Who is he to tell the Spiders how to honor the Mother?”

“I don't think you should do that, Bibber,” said Viticus mildly, but the bandit was so outraged he paid no attention to the chieftain whose honor he was defending. His finger curled on the trigger. “I'll blow this little crease-wipe clean out of the House . . . !”

Kunohara made a small gesture and both Bibber's arms suddenly burst into flame. He immediately dropped to the floor, shrieking and thrashing, surrounded by an ever-widening circle of nothing as his comrades hurried to get away from him. Kunohara waved his finger and the flames were gone. The bandit lay curled beside his forgotten gun, stroking his forearms and weeping.

Kunohara laughed quietly. “It is good, sometimes, to be one of the gods of Otherland.” He still sounded a bit drunk.

“Can we use none of them?” Viticus asked.

Kunohara eyed Renie's companions. Emily was crying. T4b, reprieved, had sunk to his knees again in front of the window. “The monk?” the harlequin said, half to himself. “He is not one of you, after all,” he pointed out to Renie. “He is . . . well, you know what I mean.”

Renie was outraged, although what he said was technically true. “Brother Factum Quintus has just as much right to live as we do, whether . . .” She paused—she had been about to say
whether he's a real person or not,
but realized that might not be the kindest or the smartest thing to bring up. “It doesn't matter,” she said instead. “He
is
one of us.”

Kunohara turned to Viticus and shrugged.

“So, then,” said the White Prince. “Grip?”

The giant bent and scooped whimpering Bibber up from the floor. He took a step to one side to get around T4b, then—with Bibber already squealing in unbelieving horror as he realized what was happening—got a good hold on his captive and heaved him through the stained glass window, which exploded outward around him.

The scream went on for long seconds, growing fainter all the way down. In the silence that followed, a few remaining pieces of glass slid from the frame and chinked to the floor.

“Thank you, Mother, for all you have given me,” Viticus said, bowing toward the statue of glass shards. He bent and with his long fingers tweezed up the pieces that had sprayed from the shattered window, then tossed them onto the statue's lap. For a moment it seemed to swell a little, a trick of the guttering firelight.

Renie, frozen in shock at the callous murder, suddenly felt the cold room grow colder still, although the wind had not risen. Something was changing, everything somehow shifting sideways. For a moment she was certain it was another of the bizarre hitches in reality, like the one they had experienced when they had lost Azador on the river, but instead of the entire world shuddering to a halt the air only became thicker and colder, clingy as fog. The light changed, too, stretching until everything seemed farther away from everything else than it had been only instants before. Some of the bandits cried out in fear, but their voices were distant; for a moment Renie felt certain the statue of the Mother was coming to life, that it was about to step down from its plinth, claws creaking open. . . .

“The window!” gasped Florimel. “Look!”

Something was forming in the very place where only seconds before Bibber had plunged to his death, as though the stained glass were growing back to cover the gaping hole. A pale blur in the middle became a rough sketch of a face. A moment later it grew clearer, a faint, smeary image of a young woman, dark eyes staring blindly.

“The Lady . . . ” someone cried out from the crowd behind Renie. All sound was distorted—it was impossible to tell whether the words were spoken in joy or horror.

The face moved in the cloudy plane that filled the frame, sliding from corner to corner like something trapped.
“No!”
it said,
“you send me nightmares!”

Renie felt !Xabbu clinging, his head only inches from her own, but she could not speak; nor could she take her gaze from the suggestion of a face surrounded now by a halo of dark hair.

“I do not belong here!”
Her indistinct gaze seemed to take in Renie and her companions.
“It hurts me to come here this time! But you summon me—you send me my own nightmares!”

“Who . . . who are you?” Florimel's voice was barely audible, as though someone had gripped her throat in strong fingers.

“He is sleeping now—the One who is Other—yet he dreams of you. But the darkness is blowing through him. The shadow is growing.”
For a moment the face grew even dimmer; when it reappeared, it was so faint that her eyes were little more than charcoal smudges on the pale oval of her face.
“You must come to find the others. You must come to Priam's Walls!”

“What do you mean?” Renie asked, finding her voice at last. “What others?”

“Lost! The tower! Lost!”
The face dwindled like a cloud torn by high winds. After a moment there was only the square hole where the window had been, a gaping wound opening into night's deeps.

 

It was long moments before Renie could feel anything again. The deep cold had gone, replaced by the lesser chill of the wind skirling in the turrets outside. Outside, evening had turned into night; the only light remaining in the high chamber was the inconstant flicker of the oil fire.

The bandit chieftain Viticus was sitting flat on the floor as if blown there by a great gale, his rouged face slack with surprise. “That . . . that is not what usually happens,” he said softly. Most of the rest of the bandits had fled; those who remained were facedown on the floor in positions of supplication. Viticus hoisted himself onto his trembling legs and purposefully dusted his breeches. “I think it likely we will not come here again,” he said, and walked to the doorway with careful dignity, although his shoulders were tensed as though he expected a blow. He did not look back. As he passed through, the remainder of his Attic Spiders clambered to their feet and hurried after him.

!Xabbu was tugging at Renie's arm. “Are you well?”

“Enough, I guess.” She turned to look for the others. Florimel and T4b were both sitting on the floor, and Factum Quintus lay on his back talking to himself, but Emily was in a limp tangle near the far wall, just beneath one of the broken windows. Renie hurried to her side and reassured herself that the girl was still breathing.

“She's just fainted, I think,” Renie called over her shoulder to the others. “Poor child!”

“Priam's Walls, is it?” Hideki Kunohara was sitting cross-legged beneath the jagged likeness of the Mother, his expression distant. “You are indeed in the center of the story, it seems.”

“What are you talking about?” Florimel snapped, regaining a little of her composure. She came to join Renie at Emily's side, and together they turned the girl until she was resting in what seemed a more comfortable position. “That means Troy, does it not? The fortress of King Priam, the Trojan War—no doubt another one of these damned simulations. What does it mean to you, Kunohara, and what do you mean, ‘center of the story'?”

“The story that is taking place all around you,” he said. “The Lady has appeared and given you a summons. Quite impressive, even I have to admit it. You are wanted in the maze, I suppose.”

“Maze?” Renie looked up from Emily, who was beginning to show signs of waking. “Like with the Minotaur?”

“That was in the palace of Minos, in Crete,” Florimel said. “There was no maze in Troy.”

Kunohara chuckled, but it was not a particularly pleasant sound. Again Renie felt something wrong about him, a certain febrile wildness. She had thought it was liquor, but perhaps it was something else—perhaps the man was simply mad. “If you know so much,” he said, “perhaps you can answer all your own questions, then.”

“No,” Renie said. “We're sorry. But we are confused and frightened. Who was that . . . that . . . ?” She gestured at the window where the face had appeared.

“It was the Lady of the Windows,” Brother Factum Quintus said behind her, his voice full of awe. “And I thought I had experienced the full run of marvels, today. But there she was! Not just an old tale!” He shook his head as he sat up, as oddly articulated as a stick insect. “They shall be talking of this at the Library for generations.”

He seemed to have missed entirely the fact that they had almost been hurled to their deaths, Renie thought sourly. “But what did she want, this . . . Lady? I couldn't make any sense of it at all.” She turned to Kunohara. “What in hell is going on around here?”

He lifted his hands and spread them, palms up. “You have been summoned to Troy. It is a simulation, as your comrade said, but it was also the first simulation the Grail Brotherhood constructed. Near the heart of things.”