Chapter Fourteen

The bridge was gone, and belatedly Shandy wondered if any of the others had ever seen it. Or had Hurwood, for example, seen the whole thing as a walk up an impossibly long church aisle? Now they were on a muddy slope, facing down, and Shandy could feel icy moisture seeping through the knees of his trousers.

He looked around a little wildly, his earlier panic returning, for something felt very wrong, very disorienting, here—but he could see no excuse for the feeling. The mud slope curled away from them on either side, and, squinting in the dim light, he saw that the edges of it curled back in and met, some distance away; it was a slope-sided pit, and water spouted and splashed way down there at the bottom. The sky was a blanket of eerily fast-roiling clouds lit from above by, presumably, the moon.

He glanced around at his seven companions to see if they shared his unease. It was hard to tell. Beth had regained consciousness—Shandy wondered when—but was just blinking dazedly, and Bonnett was as expressionless as an embalmed corpse.

"Onward," said Hurwood, and they all started down.

Though he several times slipped and slid in the mud, Shandy found himself oppressed by the idea of how solid the earth itself was. It gave him a feeling like claustrophobia, in spite of the high, churning clouds.

Then it occurred to him— seven companions? There should only have been six! He hung back and identified the laboring figures below him: there was Blackbeard, and Davies, and Bonnett, and Beth and Friend and Hurwood … and no one else. That was six. Shandy scrambled after them, and then just to reassure himself he counted the figures … and again got seven.

There was a smell, too, like stagnant water and ancient plumbing. A night for terrible smells, he reflected. The thought reminded him of something, and he worked his way over toward Davies.

"Speaking of disagreeable smells," Shandy muttered, "I thought you weren't supposed to do resurrection magic on the land."

"Miss the hot-iron smell, do you?" the pirate said quietly. "But no, Jack, they ain't doing any of that kind of magic here; they're just getting their souls … adapted … so they can do it later, somewhere at sea." The slope flattened out now, and they were able to stand up straight without being braced for a fall. "No," Davies went on, "they couldn't do one bit of it here—have you ever felt such solid ground?

Makes everywhere else feel like … just big rafts."

That was it, Shandy realized—that was what had been bothering him. This place gave one no sensation of motion. He'd never thought a place on solid land could seem to be moving, except during earthquakes; before today he'd have laughed at anyone who claimed to be able to feel the motion through space of the planet Earth. Now, though, it seemed to him that he had always been fundamentally aware of that motion, albeit as unthinkingly as the way a fish is aware of water.

Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, he thought, would find this place even more disturbing than I do.

They had all reached the level area except Bonnett, who was slowly bumping his way down the slope in a sitting position. "How many of us are there?" Shandy asked Davies.

"Why, uh … seven," the pirate answered.

"Count."

Davies did, then swore in alarm. "You and Bonnett and Thatch," he said quickly to himself, "and the three Old Worlders, and me. That's seven. Right, and there's nobody else. Whew, for a moment there it did look like eight, didn't it?"

Shandy shook his head unhappily. "Count again, fast, and you'll get eight. Do it slow, naming each one, and you get seven."

Davies counted again, darting a finger at each dim silhouette, once quickly and then once again slowly

—and when he was done he spat out a weary obscenity. "Jack," he said, his voice tight with a disgust that Shandy thought concealed terror, "are our eyes bewitched? How can there be a stranger among us who becomes invisible only when we count carefully?"

Shandy didn't even try to answer, for he'd taken a closer look at the Fountain. He had already noticed that the water, though being flung high into the air, was oddly thick, seeming to slap more than splash when an upflung mass of it fell, and that it was the source of the dim phosphorescence as well as of the stagnant smell, but now he could see faces in the agitated liquid—hundreds of faces forming one after another as if the Fountain was a mirror spinning in the center of a crowd, and each briefly appearing face was contorted with fear and rage. Though repelled, he took a step closer—and then saw the swaying curtains of palely colored light, like a moving Aurora Borealis, that streamed away upward from the whole expanse of the Fountain and played silently across the face of the clouds far overhead, seeming to be the force that kept them churning.

Hurwood stepped up beside Shandy. The old man was breathing shallowly and quickly. "Don't anyone look around," he said. "Everybody just … keep looking wherever you are looking. The thing we need to talk to cannot appear if too much attention is paid to it."

With a chill Shandy realized that the thing Hurwood sought must have been the extra figure that he and Davies had kept coming up with in their counting.

Somebody nearby whispered something, and Shandy expected Hurwood to demand silence, but then the one-armed sorceror was answering in a language Shandy had never heard, and he realized that the whisper had also been in that language, and that the whisperer was not one of their party.

The alien voice spoke again, more firmly but still very softly, and it seemed to Shandy that the speaker was right at his elbow. Shandy was obeying Hurwood and staring straight ahead, but peripherally in the dimness he could see someone beside him—Davies was on his other side … was this their mysterious whisperer? Or just Bonnett? Or even Beth? Shandy was strongly tempted to peek.

The voice stopped. "Eyes front," Hurwood reminded everyone. "Close them if you'd prefer, but no one is to look around." Then he spoke again, more tensely, in the other language, and when he finished Leo Friend added a phrase that was obviously a question.

The soft, unplaceable voice answered, and spoke at some length, and Shandy wondered how long he could continue staring straight ahead. The thought of closing his eyes in so horribly motionless a place as this made his belly go cold, but even holding still was becoming unbearable.

At last the voice stopped, and all at once Hurwood and Friend were moving. Shandy risked a squinting glance their way. They were hurrying toward the shore of the pool around the Fountain, and when they got there they walked right into the viscous fluid and crouched in the shallows to dip some of the stuff up in their hands and eagerly drink it. Then they waded back up onto the muddy ground, and Hurwood spoke again.

The answer that came a few seconds later was very faint, perhaps because people had shifted their gazes. The voice spoke only a few syllables.

Instantly Hurwood and Friend dug into their pockets. Hurwood produced a pocket knife, and Friend finally just yanked a pin from his powdered wig, and at the same moment each of them jabbed himself in a finger and shook blood onto the cold mud.

The blood spatters hissed where they fell, and then it looked to Shandy as if two clawlike hands had burst up out of the mud, but a moment later the things stopped moving and he realized they were plants—spindly cactus-looking things, but conspicuous in this desolate landscape. Shandy now noticed a third plant, farther down the shore, but it was withered and stiff.

Then Blackbeard strode forward, and, though Hurwood reached out to stop him, in two long strides the pirate-king was ankle deep in the pool. He scooped up some of the liquid and drank it, then walked back out of it, bit his finger and shook off some blood. Again there was the hissing and the eruption of the mud, and a moment later another spiny plant had sprung up, a few yards from Hurwood's and Friend's.

The pair of sorcerors stared at him, an identical surprised and slightly alarmed expression on their faces, but then Hurwood just shrugged and muttered, "Nothing to be done."

The one-armed man spoke again, and was again answered by the faint voice, though now it sounded to Shandy as if it were coming from the other side of the group, beyond Davies.

"Damn," muttered Hurwood when the voice stopped. "It doesn't know that right now."

Shandy saw Friend shrug. "We can wait for a while."

"We'll wait until it knows, and has told me," said Hurwood firmly.

"Who's this it?" asked Blackbeard.

"The … personality we were questioning," said Hurwood, "though the pronoun 'who' overstates the case." He sighed, apparently at the hopelessness of trying to explain, but then his professorial reflexes seemed to take over. "Newton's laws of mechanics are entirely useful in describing the world we know—for every action there's an equal but opposite reaction, and a uniformly moving object will continue to move uniformly unless acted upon by some force—but if you get very particular about very small-scale events, if you deal with them in such specific, needlessly obsessive detail as to almost qualify you for a lunatic asylum … you find that Newton's mechanical description of reality is only mostly correct. In tiny extents of space or time there's an element of indecisiveness, postponement of definition, and you can catch truth as loose as an underdone egg. In our normal world this isn't a big factor because the … odds, I guess you'd say … are pretty consistent from place to place, and overwhelmingly strong in favor of Newton. But here they're not consistent. They're polarized here, though the overall net values are the same. There is no elasticity in this ground, no uncertainty, and so there's a lot out here in the air. What we were questioning was a … tendency toward personality; the likelihood of an awareness."

Blackbeard snorted. "What language was that, that likelihoods speak?"

"The oldest one," said Hurwood imperturbably.

"Is that," Shandy found himself asking, "why the thing is so hard to locate?"

"Yes," said Hurwood, "and don't try. It isn't any where — where is as inappropriate to this phenomenon as who. If you watch for it you're watching for a what, at some particular where and when —and on that basis you may find many things, but you won't find. He finished the sentence with a vague wave and a fading whistle.

For at least a full minute they all stood there shivering in that cold dark valley, while Hurwood patiently called some unintelligible phrase over and over again. Shandy looked around to see how Beth was enduring, but Hurwood sharply told him to keep his gaze steady.

Finally Blackbeard said, "This delay wasn't part of our bargain."

"Fine," said Hurwood. He sent his strange sentence out once again; and then he added, to Blackbeard,

"Go, if you like. Good luck getting back to the jungle."

Blackbeard swore, but stayed where he was. "Your ghost-thing is looking something up for you, hey?"

"No. It will eventually manifest itself again, but it won't be the same personality as before; though at the same time it won't be a different personality either. 'Same' and 'different' are far too specific. And it won't have learned what I want to know. It will simply happen to know it this time. Or, if not this time, it will know it some time. It's like waiting for two or twelve to come up in a game of dice."

More time went by, and finally one of Hurwood's patient calls was answered. Beth's father conversed with the unlocated voice for another minute or so, and then Shandy heard him plodding heavily across the mud.

"You can all look anywhere you please now," Hurwood said.

Shandy watched Hurwood, and he wasn't reassured to see the narrowed eyes and the hardened jaw-muscles of the ex-Oxford don.

"Leo," Hurwood said tensely, "hold Elizabeth."

Friend was wheezingly happy to obey. Beth still seemed to be in a stunned daze, though Shandy noticed that she was breathing very rapidly now.

Hurwood reached down and untied the wooden box from his belt; he loosened the wooden lid with his teeth and shook it off. Shandy couldn't see what was inside. Then Hurwood shuffled over to Beth and held it, open end up, under her right hand.

"Cut her hand, Leo," the old man said.

Shandy started forward, but long before he could get there Friend reached down with his hairpin and, his lips wet and his eyes half-closed, drove the pin into Beth Hurwood's thumb.

It brought her out of her daze. She jumped and looked down at her punctured hand, and then looked past it into the box her father was holding, into which the quick drops of her blood were falling—and she shrieked and lunged away, scrambling on all fours up the muddy slope.

Shandy took off after her and caught her a few yards up, and he put his arm around her heaving shoulders and shook her gently. "It's over now, Beth," he gasped. "Your hand's cut but we're alive and I think we're headed back now. The worst is—"

"It's my mother's head!" Beth screamed. "He's got my mother's head in that box!"

Shandy couldn't help looking back in horror. Hurwood was sitting down in the mud to slide the wooden lid back onto the box, an expression of almost imbecilic satisfaction lighting up his old face, while Friend just looked hungrily at Beth, his hands still raised in the position they'd been in when he was holding her—but Davies, and even Blackbeard, were staring at the one-armed man with astonishment and loathing.

Hurwood struggled to his feet. "Back," he said. "Back to the sea." He was so tensely cheerful now that he seemed to be having difficulty in speaking.

They all scrambled wearily back up the slope, and when the ground leveled out Shandy put his arm around Beth again and walked with her, though she didn't acknowledge his presence with even a glance.

The bridge was gone. Hurwood led them forward along a rutted dirt road between fields of heather under a rain-threatening sky; mountains rose in the distance, and when Shandy looked back he saw a cluster of old, almost entirely windowless stone buildings behind a wall—a monastery, perhaps, or a convent—and when he peered more closely he saw that a slim, long-haired figure was standing at the wall's top, over the closed gate.

He was unable to elicit any response from the young woman plodding lifelessly along at his side, but, still looking back, he raised his free hand in a wave, and the figure on the wall waved back at him—

gratefully, he thought.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14