Pithlit swallowed. "I knew I would have cause to regret accompanying you."
Thargor laughed quietly. "If yon pipers are the worst we hear or see tonight, and we find the thing we seek, you will curse yourself for even hesitating,"
"If, swordsman. If."
Thargor turned Blackwind to the right and led Pithlit down the almost invisible trail into deeper shadow.
Massanek Coomb lay beneath the moon like a great dart beast, an ill-omened vale heavy with its own solitude. The very trees of the mountainside stopped at its edge as though they would not touch it; the grass that grew upon its ground was short and sparse. The Coomb was a scar in the woodland, an empty place.
Almost empty, Thargor noted.
At its center, partially obscured by rising mist, stood the great ring of stones. Inside the ring lay the barrow.
Pithlit tilted his head. "The music has stopped again. Why is that?"
"A man could go mad trying to make sense of such things." Thargor dismounted and looped Blackwind's reins around a tree branch. The charger had already turned skittish, despite a life spent treading paths no other horses knew. No point dragging him down closer to the place's center.
"A man could go equally mad trying to see the sense in this." Pithlit stared at the tall stones and shivered. "Defiling graves is a bad business, Thargor. Defiling the grave of an infamous sorceress seems to refute good sense entirely."
Thargor unsheathed Lifereaper. The runes glimmered silver-blue in the moon's cool light. "Xalisa Thol would have liked you much when she lived, little thief. I am told she kept a stable of small and well-made fellows like yourself. Why should she change her ways simply because she is dead?"
"Do not joke!" "Betrothed to Xalisa Thol" was a byword for a bad bargain—a few days of maddening bliss followed by years of hideous agony. The thief's eyes narrowed. "In any case, it is not me she will be meeting. If you have changed your mind, well and good, but I am not going inside in your place."
Thargor smirked. "I have not changed my mind. I but jested with you—I thought you rather pale, but perhaps it is the moonlight. Did you bring the Scroll of Nantheor?"
"I did." Pithlit rooted in his saddlebag and produced the object, a thick furl of cured hide. Thargor thought he could guess what sort of hide it might be. "I nearly wound up in the tusky jaws of a werehog getting it," Pithlit added. "Remember, you promised that nothing would happen to it. I have a buyer waiting."
"Nothing will happen—to the scroll." Thargor took it in his hand, faintly but invisibly disturbed by the way the script seemed to writhe against his skin. "Now, follow me. We will keep you well away from danger."
"Well away from danger would mean out of these mountains altogether," complained Pithlit, but fell into step behind him.
The mist surrounded them like a crowd of importuning beggars, pawing at their legs with cold tendrils. The great stone circle loomed before them, casting broad shadows on the moonlit fog.
"Is any magical artifact worth such risk?" Pithlit wondered quietly. "What can the mask of Xalisa Thol be worth to you, who are no sorcerer?"
"Exactly what it is worth to the sorcerer who hired me to steal it," Thargor replied. "Fifty diamonds of imperial weight."
"Fifty! By the gods!"
"Yes. Now, shut your mouth."
Even as Thargor spoke, the strange music came to them again across the wind, a haunting, discordant skirl of pipes. Pithlit's eyes bulged, but he held his tongue. The pair strode forward between the nearest pair of standing stones, ignoring the symbols carved there, and stopped at the base of the great barrow.
The swordsman caught the thief's eyes once more, reinforcing the order of silence, then bent and put Lifereaper to work as though it were only a common farm tool. Soon Thargor had hacked away a wide stretch of turf. As he began to unpile the wall of stones that lay behind it, a whiff of decay and strange spices rose from the opening. Up on the hill the horses nickered worriedly.
When he had cleared a hole big enough to accommodate his wide shoulders, Thargor waved for his companion to hand him the Scroll of Nantheor. As he unrolled it and whispered the words the sorcerer had taught him, words he had memorized but whose meaning he did not know, the painted symbols turned a gleaming red; at the same moment, a dim vermilion light was kindled in the depths of the barrow. When it died, and the glowing runes had also faded, Thargor furled the scroll and gave it back to Pithlit. He took out his flints and lit the brand he had brought with him—there had been no need for a torch beneath the bright moon—then eased himself down into the hole he had opened in Xalisa Thol's tomb. His last sight of Pithlit was of the nervous thief's silhouette limned by moonlight.
The first sight of the barrow's interior was both daunting and reassuring. At the far end of the chamber in which he stood, another hole—this one in the shape of an oddly angled door—led down into further darkness: the great mound was only the antechamber for a far larger excavation. But Thargor had expected nothing else. His sorcerer-client's ancient book had described the place where Xalisa Thol had immured herself before lying down to die as "a labyrinth."
He lifted a small sack from his belt and spilled its content into his palm. Glow-seeds, each one a small mote of light in this dark place, would serve to mark his path so that he would not wander below the ground forever. Thargor was among the bravest of men, but when the day of his death came, he wished it to be beneath open sky. His father, who had lived a life of near-slavery in the iron mines of Borrikar, had died in a tunnel collapse. It was a fearful and unmanly way to go.
As he pushed through the damp white roots that dangled from the ceiling, moving toward the door at the chamber's far end, he saw something strange and unexpected: a few paces to the right of the dark door something was flickering like a low fire, although it cast no light on the earthen walls. As Thargor watched, it flared into full radiance and became a hole in the air that seeped yellow light. He snarled and lifted Lifereaper, wondering if some magical spell had been laid here to trick him, but his blade did not shimmer in his fist as she did in the presence of sorcery, and the barrow smelled of nothing but damp soil and the faint odor of mummification—neither unexpected in a burial mound.
He paused, muscles tensed to iron-hardness, and waited for some demon or wizard to step through this magical door. When nothing emerged, he moved to the shining place and tested the opening with his hand. It gave off no heat, only light. After looking around the antechamber once more, just to be careful—Thargor had not survived so many near-fatal adventures through carelessness—he leaned forward until he could gaze into the bright portal.
Thargor gasped in disbelief.
Long moments passed. He did not move. Nor did he show any sign of life when Pithlit poked his head through the entrance hole and called to him, quietly at first, but then with increasing volume and urgency. The swordsman seemed to have turned to stone, a leather-clad stalagmite.
"Thargor!" Pithlit was shouting now, but his companion gave no sign of hearing. "The music is playing again. Thargor!" A moment later, the thief became even more alarmed. "There is something coming into the chamber! The tomb's guardian! Thargor!"
The mercenary pulled himself back from the golden light, swaying as though wakened from a deep sleep. Then, with Pithlit watching in stunned horror, he turned to face the dessicated corpse of what had been some great warrior shambling out of the darkened door at the chamber's far end. Thargor's movements were slow and dreamy. He had barely raised Lifereaper when the armor-clad mummy brought its rusted battle-ax down on his head, splitting his skull to the first knob of his spine.
Thargor fumbled in gray emptiness, Pithlit's astonished cries still echoing in his memory. His own astonishment was no less.
I'm dead! I'm dead! How can I be dead?
It was beyond belief.
That was a Lich. A stupid, sniveling Lich. I've killed thousands of them. How could I get toasted by something as fringe as that?
He searched wildly for a momen
t as the gray nothing washed over him, but there were no solutions, nothing to be done. The damage was too great. He exited, and was Orlando Gardiner once more.
Orlando pulled out his jack and sat up. He was so astounded by the turn of events that his hands moved in empty air for long moments before he unseeingly located—and then absently punched into shape—the pillows that cushioned his head, then reconfigured the bed so he could sit up. A cold sweat had pearled on his skin. His neck ached from being in one position too long. His head hurt, too, and the glare of midday through his bedroom window wasn't helping. He rasped a command and turned the window into a blank wall again. He needed to think.
Thargor is dead. It was so shocking, he found it hard to consider anything else, although there were many things to think about. He had made Thargor—he had made himself Thargor—with the labor of four long, obsessive years. He had survived everything, developing a facility that was the envy of players everywhere on the net. He was the most famous character in the Middle Country game, recruited for every battle, first choice for every important task. Now Thargor was dead, his skull crushed by a ridiculous low-level irritant—a Lich, for God's sake! The damned things were scattered around every dungeon and tomb in the simworld, cheap and ubiquitous a candy wrappers.
Orlando took a squeeze-bottle from his bedside and drank. He felt feverish. His head throbbed, as though the tomb guardian's ax had truly struck him. Everything had happened with such boggling abruptness.
That gleaming hole, that shining golden whatever-it-was-that had been something bigger, stranger by far than anything else in the adventure. In any adventure. Either one of his rivals had set the trap to end all traps, or something beyond his understanding had occurred.
He had seen . . . a city, a shining, majestic city the color of sunlit amber. It had not been one of the pseudo-medieval walled cities that dotted the simworld, the game territory known as the Middle Country. This vision had been alien but relentlessly modem, a metropolis with elaborately decorated buildings as tall as anything in Hong Kong or Tokyokahama.
But it was more than some science fiction vision: there had been something real about the place, more real than anything he had ever seen on the net. Set against the careful fractals of the game-world, it had glowed with its own splendid and superior presence, like a gemstone on a pile of dust. Morpher, Dieter Cabo, Duke Slowleft—how could any of Orlando's rivals have brought something like that into the Middle Country? Every spell-point in the world wouldn't allow you to alter the basics of a simplace that way. The city had simply belonged to a level of reality higher than the game he had been playing. Higher even, it had almost seemed, than RL itself.
That amazing city. It had to be a real place—or at least something other than netstuff. Orlando had spent almost his whole life on the net, knew it like a nineteenth century Mississippi pilot knew the big river. This was something new, an entirely different order of experience. Someone . . . something . . . was trying to communicate with him.
No wonder the Lich had been able to sneak up on him. Pithlit must have thought his companion had gone mad. Orlando frowned. He would have to call Fredericks and explain, but be wasn't quite ready to rehash things with Fredericks yet. There was too much to think about Thargor, Orlando Gardiner's alter ego, his more-than-self, was dead. And that was only one of his problems.
What was a fourteen-year-old kid supposed to do after he'd been touched by the gods?
CHAPTER 5
A World Afire
NETFEED/NEWS: Stuttgart Protest Memorial
(visual: parade of people bearing candles)
VO: Thousands gathered in Stuttgart for a candlelight vigil to honor the twenty-three homeless people slain by German federal police in a riot over housing,
(visual: young man in tears, head bloodied)
WITNESS: "They had body armor. Big spikes sticking out. They just kept coming and coming. . . ."
Using a flat screen drove Renie crazy. It was like boiling water over an open flame to wash clothes. Only in a miserable backwater hospital like this. . . .
She cursed and pushed on the screen again. This time it shot right past the "S"s and into the "T"s before she could arrest the scroll's progress. It shouldn't be this hard to get information. It was cruel. As if the bloody quarantine wasn't hindrance enough!
Bukavu 4 information posters were everywhere in Pinetown these days, but most of them had been so densely covered with graffiti that she had never quite absorbed the content. She knew there had been outbreaks of the virus in Durban, and had even heard a pair of women talking about someone's daughter in Pinetown who had died of it after traveling in central Africa, but Renie would never have guessed that the entire Durban Outskirt Medical Facility would be under official UN-mandated Bukavu Outbreak quarantine procedures.
If the disease is so damn dangerous, she thought, then what are they doing bringing sick people here who don't have it! She was furious to think that her brother, already struck down by some unknown illness, might be exposed to an even worse contagion in the place she had brought him for treatment.
But even as she raged, she knew the reasons. She worked for a public institution herself. Funds were short—funds were always short. If they could afford a hospital just to deal with Bukavu patients, they'd have one. The hospital administration couldn't be very happy about trying to keep their normal operation running under quarantine restraints. Perhaps there was even a very thin silver lining: Durban still didn't have enough B4 cases to warrant devoting an entire hospital to their care.
That was small solace, though.
Renie finally got the ancient interface to stop on the "S"s and she punched in her visitor code. "Sulaweyo, Stephen" was listed as "unchanged," which meant that she could visit him, at least. But seeing Stephen these days was always heartbreakingly short of anything she would have called a "visit."
A nurse reading from a pad briefed her as she struggled into an Ensuit, although there was little he could tell Renie that she had not gleaned from the single word on the monitor in the waiting room. She had become so familiar with the litany she could have recited it herself, so she let the nurse go when he had finished, despite the urge to hang onto any symbol of officialdom and beg for answers. Renie knew by now that there were no answers. No detectable viruses—including, thank God, no signs of the fatal disease that had forced the hospital into such heavy-handed security. No blood clots or other blockages, no trauma to the brain. Nothing. Just a little brother who hadn't awakened for twenty-two days.
She shuffled along the passageway, holding her air hose to keep it from catching on things. Groups of doctors and nurses—and possibly other visitors as well, since everyone looked pretty much the same in an Ensuit—hurried past her, making the same crackling and hissing noises she made. It was a little like being in an old news video about manned space exploration; when she passed a large window, she almost expected to look out and see the star-flocked depths of space beyond, or perhaps the rings of Saturn. Instead, it was only another ward full of tented beds, another campground of the living dead.
Renie was stopped twice on her way to the fourth floor and asked to produce her visitor's pass. Although both functionaries spent a long time examining the faint lettering—the effects of a dying printer exacerbated by perspex faceshields on the Ensuits—she was not angered by the delay. In a way, she found it vaguely reassuring to know that the hospital really did care about the security of their quarantine. Stephen had been stricken so quickly and thoroughly . . . and so mysteriously . . . that it almost seemed like an act of malice. Renie was frightened for her baby brother, frightened of something she could not explain. She was relieved to see that people were on guard.
Renie desperately wanted her brother to get better, but she was even more afraid of a turn for the worse. When she found him lying in exactly the same position as the day before, and all the monitors still locked on readings that were now as familiar as her own address, she felt both unhappiness and relief
.
Oh, God, my poor little man. . . . He was so small in that big bed. How could a little tearaway like Stephen be so quiet, so still? And how could she, who had fed him, protected him, tucked him in at night, had in all ways except biology been a mother to him, how could she be so maddeningly unable to do anything for him now? It was not possible. But it was true.
She sat beside his bed and put her own gloved hand into the larger glove built into the side of the tent. She carefully maneuvered her fingers past the tangle of sensor wires radiating from his scalp, then stroked his face, the familiar and beloved tine of his rounded forehead, his upturned nose. She was heartsick at being so completely separated from him. It was like trying to touch someone in VR—they might as well be meeting in the Inner District. . . .
A kindling of memory was interrupted by a movement at the doorway. Despite her own Ensuit, she jumped at the white apparition.
"Sorry to startle you, Ms. Sulaweyo."
"Oh, it's you. Any change?"
Doctor Chandhar leaned forward and surveyed the monitor dials, but even Renie knew there was no information to be had there.
"Much the same, it seems. I am sorry."
Renie shrugged, a resigned gesture belied by the heaviness in her gut, the warm imminence of tears. But crying was useless. All she would do was fog the faceplate. "Why can't anyone tell me what's wrong?"
The doctor shook her head, or at least moved the hood of her Ensuit from side to side. "You're an educated woman, Ms. Sulaweyo. Sometimes medical science does not have answers, only guesses. At the moment our guesses are not very good. But things may change. At least your brother's condition is stable."
"Stable! So is a potted plant!" Now the tears did come. She turned to face Stephen again, although at the moment she could see nothing.
A gloved, inhuman hand touched her shoulder. "I am sorry. We are doing all we can."
"What is that, exactly?" Renie struggled to keep her voice steady, but she could not help sniffling. How was a person supposed to blow her nose in one of these bloody suits? "Please tell me, what are you doing? Besides putting him in the sun and keeping him watered."