Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

Paul stared at the lithe, dark man trussed on the floor of the cavern. The prisoner stared back, eyes narrowed as though he were a dog about to bite; Paul had no doubt that, given the chance, he would indeed cheerfully rip out their throats. "A thousand more? What do you mean?"

Bat Masterson shoved the prisoner with the toe of his boot, earning a look of even more tightly focused hatred. "Just as I said, friend. When they came down on us, we thought they were an ordinary war party of Comanche or Cheyenne. We didn't have much chance to get acquainted, though—we were too busy getting killed—so we only noticed after a while that they all look just the same. It's a ticklish mystery, sure enough. I reckon it's some tribe that's been inbreeding too long." But he did not look confident in his solution.

"They're devils," the mustached man who had been guarding Dread suggested. "Simple as can be. Ground opened up. Hell busted out."

"But, shit, Dave why would hell be full of octoroons?" Masterson tugged at his mustache. "Oh. Begging your pardon, ladies."

Martine, for one, was paying little attention to what was being said. "It is Dread," she murmured dreamily, "but also it is less. I can feel that now. He has copied himself somehow—used something as a framework, perhaps one of the Indian tribes, then replicated himself."

"Ma'am," Masterson told her, "I have to say that I can't figure out what in blazes you're talking about. Have you met these fellows before?"

Paul shrugged, tried to think of something to say. "Not really. It's hard to explain."

"Met him, yeah," T4b said. "Sixed him, too," he added unhelpfully.

As Masterson stood perplexed, scratching his head beneath the plug hat, Paul put his hand on Martine's shoulder. They needed to do something, it was clear, but it was pointless trying to explain the devolution of the network to the sims who lived in it. "Now what?"

"Even if a million of these waited for us," she said softly, "we would still have to make our way past them. We have no other way out of here." She turned to Masterson. "Can you lead us to Dodge City? Or at least tell us something of what to expect? We do not want to go there, but we have no choice."

"If'n you folks just want to get killed," the man named Dave offered, "you all oughta just walk off the cliff yonder. Be quicker and a lot cleaner."

"Mysterious Dave doesn't talk much," Masterson said with a sour smile, "but when he does, it's usually to a purpose. He's right. You go down there, you'll all die. No question about it. No, you stay here with us and stay alive—we could use a few more hands."

"We can't," said Paul, wishing fervently that it were otherwise. He'd heard enough about Dread to thoroughly terrify him, a monster as bad as Finney and Mudd, but with brains. The idea of a thousand of them, waiting. . . . "We can't. God, I wish we could stay. But we have to go."

"But why, blast it?" Masterson almost shouted. "Where are you from? And more importantly, didn't your mothers have any children with brains?"

Florimel, who had been watching the Dread sim with a mixture of horror and disgust, finally spoke up. "We cannot stay. We have a need to go to your Dodge City. It cannot be explained any more than that."

"It's . . . it's religious, I guess you could say," Paul said, reaching desperately. "We've sworn an oath."

Masterson fell silent for a moment, eyeing them all. "I suppose I should have known, seeing those queer outfits you're wearing. But it's still a bad bargain all around. We lose your help, you lose your lives." He spat in disgust, missing the snarling face of Dread only by mischance.

"Can you tell us the best way to reach the place?" Martine asked. "We do not know these mountains, and we don't want to meet any more of the monsters who caught us before."

"You'll find that this fellow's kin are worse than any jackalos." Masterson growled. "As far as finding your way down into that hellhole. . . ."

"I'll take 'em as far as the river," a voice said.

Paul turned to see the black man named Titus, who had been leaning on the cavern wall listening. "Thank you. That's very kind."

"See if you feel that way when they're taking your scalp off," said Titus. "I think you're fools, but I got me another long patrol to do so I might as well keep you out of trouble until you're closer. But it'll have to wait until dark."

Masterson had walked a short distance across the cavern; he returned with the pistol Paul had carried earlier. "Take this," he said. "It's reloaded. I hate like sin to see it lost and the bullets wasted, but I've got a Christian duty of sorts, I guess."

Paul stared at the ivory handle and dark steel barrel as though it were a snake. "I said I didn't want to carry it anymore. Besides, if there are a thousand of them, what good will six bullets do me?"

Masterson shoved it into his hands and leaned close to Paul's ear. "I thought you had at least a little sense, friend. You think I'm going to let you take women down into that place without a gun to do the honorable thing? Do you think when they catch you they're just going to kill you?"

Paul could only swallow what felt like a stone in his throat and accept the gun.

Only a few people saw them off. The rest of the refugees seemed to have decided that there was not much point in wasting time on a group of doomed fanatics. Of the half-dozen who stood at the cavern's outer edge, only Annie Ladue seemed genuinely sad.

"I can't believe you're going off to . . . that you're going off without even taking a meal with us."

Paul frowned. How to explain that they needed no food and could not afford to waste time eating? All this prevarication, not being able to tell people the truth about their own existences. . . . It was something like being a god among mortals, but he doubted most gods ever felt so miserable. "It's our religion," he said, by way of an explanation.

Annie shook her head. "Well, I'm not the most Christian woman you'll meet, I suppose, but Godspeed to you all." She turned abruptly and walked back inside.

"I'll not offer you my hand," Masterson said. "I can't abide such foolishness as this. But I will echo what Annie said, and add 'good luck.' I can't imagine where anyone could find that much luck, though. Titus, make sure you at least come back safely."

"What . . . what are you going to do with the prisoner?" Paul asked.

"Let's put it this way," said Masterson, "in consideration of tender sensibilities. We're not going to be giving him a testimonial dinner. But it'll be a lot quicker than what you'll get down in Dodge if his kinfolk catch hold of you." He nodded his head, tipped his hat to Martine and Florimel, and led the rest of the silent farewell party back into the cavern.

"Well, on that cheerful note," Titus said, "I reckon we should get going. Y'all follow me close and quiet. If I hold my hand up like this, just stop—don't say nothing, just stop. Got me?"

The river was already hidden in shadow below them as they set off, and evening shadows ran purple down the far mountains. Bringing up the rear, Paul could barely see his companions, although the nearest was only a few meters in front of him.

How many worlds? he wondered. How many worlds are falling under shadow right now?

It was not a question he could ponder very long or very thoroughly while making his way down the steep mountain slope, a thousand feet or more above the river valley.

Even with the confident Titus leading the way, they did not make very fast time. Florimel's bad leg slowed them, and T4b did not seem to like heights anywhere near so much when he wasn't imagining himself playing a familiar game. Almost half the night passed before they felt the moisture of the river in the air, although they had heard its thrashing roar for some time.

Titus was sparing of conversation, but during their stops for rest he told them a little of his life, of his childhood in Maryland as the son of a freed slave and his own escape westward. He had spent much of his adulthood as a trail hand—Paul had never known that there were black cowboys, but Titus said there were thousands like him all over the southwest. He had been riding herd on a shipment of shorthorns that had come up from Texas to the Dodge City railhead, and was in town spending his pay on the night the earth began to move.

"The most frightening thing I ever saw." He was almost invisible in the moonlight, but his pale, crooked teeth showed for a moment as he put a wad of tobacco into his mouth. "Worse than all those hundreds of same-looking fellows on horseback that came later, screaming and hollering. Everything was shaking, then the land just folded up—at first I thought we were sinking into the middle of the Earth, then I saw that it was mountains growing right up out of the ground all around us, shooting up like a cane-brake. I thought it was Judgment Day, like my mama taught me. Maybe it was. Maybe this is the End of Days. Lots of others think so."

And for them it is, Paul thought. But when they're all dead, will they rise again and start over like the Looking Glass people? Or has Dread frozen this simulation in permanent decay?

Titus was right—the mountains had simply sprouted from the ground like weeds. As they neared the valley floor they found no foothills, no gentling of the slope, only a jumble of boulders and scree around the mountains' roots. This was the most difficult part of the journey so far, every step threatening to set off a landslide, so although he was aware of the glow for some time, it wasn't until they were actually standing on the muddy fiats beside the river that Paul saw the fires of Dodge City.

"Great God," Florimel said quietly. "What have they done?"

"What they'll do to you," Titus whispered. "And to me, too, so shut up!"

He beckoned them into a hollow where a cluster of boulders had tumbled free of the mountainside and stood piled like a giant pawnbroker's sign. From this pathetic hiding place they could look out across the river and the narrow valley to a huge bonfire in the main street that blotted the stars with its massive plume of smoke, as well as countless lesser blazes running along the roofs of Dodge City like Christmas tinsel. Shadows leaped and twirled through the stark, red-lighted streets; even from the far side of the river, they could hear screams.

"It's burning down," Paul whispered.

"Naw. Been like that since those devil-men took it," said.

Titus. "Burns and burns, but it doesn't never burn down." He shook his head slowly. "The End of Days."

"So where are we going, exactly?" Paul quietly asked Martine. He could feel his own heart hammering, and could see that Florimel and T4b were no less disturbed at the idea of walking into such a terrible place.

"I don't know. Let me have a quiet moment to think." She got up and crawled a few meters away, putting one of the massive boulders between herself and her companions.

"Hate to spoil things," Titus said, "but it's time for this mother's son to be moving on."

"Just wait a moment longer," Paul begged him. "We may have more questions to ask you. . . ."

The moment stretched into something longer, while Paul and the others watched the proof of Titus' words not a half-kilometer away, flames that burned and burned along the housetops and high false fronts but never consumed them, despite the apparent flimsiness of the buildings.

"It is no use," Martine said, crawling back. "I can make nothing of it—too many distractions, too much disruption. If Dread had set out deliberately to make things difficult for my senses, he could not have done better."

"So where then?" Florimel demanded. "Simply walk into that? It would be madness."

"Just follow the river, us," T4b suggested. "Make a raft. Sail on out of this scan-palace."

"Were you not listening?" Although her voice was low, Martine sounded as angry as Paul had ever heard her. "There is no other way to the place we seek. If we follow the river to the far gateway, and we are not killed by something on the way, there is little chance the gate will be open and no guarantee it will not dump us somewhere worse. If we wish to reach Egypt we must find this nearer gateway."

"Find we get sixed up true, ask me," T4b muttered, but fell silent.

"Where are the places we have encountered these things before," she said to Paul and Florimel. "Mazes? Catacombs?"

"The mines?" Florimel suggested. "There were mines on the mountainside." She groaned. "Great God, I do not think I can climb back up."

"Cemeteries," Paul said. "Places of the dead. The Brotherhood's little joke." He allowed himself a grim smile. "Came back and bit them in the arse, too, didn't it?" He turned to Titus, who had been watching them with puzzled fascination. "Is there a cemetery in the town?"

"Oh, yeah, just outside to the northwest. Over that way." He pointed across the river, out toward the darkness to the left of the blazing town. "Got some silly-ass name. Boot Hill, something like that."

"Boot Hill," Paul breathed. "I've heard of it. Can we just cross the river and walk to it?" He looked at his companions. "We won't even have to go into the town at all."

"I got no idea what kind of nonsense you all plan to get up to, but I can tell you this—you're not getting to Boot Hill by going around Dodge that direction. When the mountains came up, the riverbanks broke up over there. It's a swamp now, and there are snakes as big around as a bedroll and long as a twenty-mule team, not to mention mosquitoes the size of hawks." He shrugged. "I know it doesn't make no earthly sense, snakes and jackalos and whatnot just coming up out of the ground like that—why didn't anyone see one before? That's why I think it's Judgment."

"We know about the snakes here," said Paul. "We met one. What about the other way around, east of the town?"

"Not too good of an idea. Just beyond town that way the Arkansas drops off just like that," he tilted his long fingers steeply downward, "—a waterfall—and there's a canyon goes down so deep it's dark at the bottom even at high noon. Canyon stretches for miles that direction. Why do you think we're all living on that mountainside instead of getting the blazes away from here?" He stood up. "You should have listened to Masterson when he told you to stay put. He's a good man, and has a lot more sense than most. Now I'm going to get moving. I don't like being this close to Dodge."

"But wait," Florimel said, a hint of panic in her voice. "Do we just . . . walk across the bridge?"

"If you can't wait to lose your scalps, sure enough. There's a dozen or so of them devil-men sitting on it night and day. But if you'd like to draw the whole thing out a little longer, I suggest you wade across the river a few hundred feet this side of the bridge. The Arkansas is good and shallow this time of year, even with all this topsy-turvy."

He threw them a mocking salute and then was gone into the darkness, silent as a bird flying.

"Everyone seems pretty damned certain we're going to be killed," Paul said quietly.

"Everyone is probably right," growled Florimel.

The Arkansas waters, though never more than waist-deep, had a distinctly sinister feel, warm and oily. The river even had a strange undertow which tugged steadily at the travelers despite the sluggishness of the current, like a street urchin who had found his intended mark and would not turn loose.

Paul found he did not want to think about the water much, not just because of the unpleasant feel, but because he found himself imagining the many different things that might be swimming toward them from the swamp Titus had described.

Far on their right along the riverbank, illuminated by another group of huge bonfires, stood a massive fenced enclosure that Paul guessed was some kind of yard for shipping cattle. Despite the late hour it seemed that branding was going on, although wordless but still distinctive shrieks made it clear the victims were not cows.

Not all the voices were raised in pain. As a chorus of shouts and laughs rolled out from the stockyard Paul saw Martine falter and almost fall into the water. He grabbed her arm to brace her.

"To hear his voice again," she whispered, eyes squeezed tightly shut as if she could somehow make herself deaf by increasing her blindness. "To hear it multiplied, echoed over and over on all sides. . . ."

"It's just a trick. Like you said, they're just crude copies. He's not really here." But was that true, he wondered, or wishful thinking? Perhaps Dodge had a new sheriff.

A dozen meters from the bank, Martine grabbed Paul's arm again. For a moment he thought that the situation had finally become too much for her, but though her face showed strain, she was alert, listening, scanning.

"Titus was right," she hissed. "There are men on the bridge."

"That's why we're here," Paul said, but he waved for T4b and Florimel to stop.

"But there are men on the other side of the river, too," she said. "Not close enough for us to hear them, but I can sense them. If we come up out of the river we'll be right in their laps."

"So what should we do?" Paul was fighting to keep a handle on his own desperation. Cries of misery and terror floated through the valley, echoing dimly in the mountainsides. "We can't go back!"

"Turn west," Martine said decisively. "Stay in the river. Go under the bridge. We'll be closer to the side of town we want—we will not have to cross so much open ground."

"You said there are men on the bridge!" Florimel whispered, leaning in close. "What if they hear us?"

"We have no other choice," Martine told her, but still no one moved. Paul could feel the moment hanging and knew that, surprisingly, the others were waiting for him to decide. He turned and began wading toward the bridge.

As they drew closer he could see shadowy human shapes atop the span, silhouetted by the numerous fires, but to Paul's relief they were down at the end nearer the town. He moved out toward midstream and into a deep spot where the oily water again streamed just beneath his chest and even higher on the two women. The wooden bridge was wide and low, but there was plenty of room beneath for them to pass. As Paul moved under it the darkness enfolded him like a fist.

Before he had gone halfway he heard loud footsteps above him. He froze, hoping the others would do the same even though they couldn't see him. The bridge creaked as more men joined the first. Paul cursed silently: the footsteps seemed to be right overhead. Had they been spotted? Maybe the Dread-replicas were just waiting until they emerged from the bridge's shadow to shoot them like fish in a shallow pond.

Even as he stood, his pulse beating so hard in his temple it felt like someone was tapping his head, he heard a muffled splash a few meters away, then a wash of current. An invisible something was in the water with them—one of the men climbing down from the bridge to investigate? Paul pulled the gun out of the inner pocket of his jumpsuit and held it high above the level of the water, afraid to shoot but terrified at the thought of a wrestling match with anyone as wiry and strong as the man they had seen in the cave.

"What. . . ?" Florimel whispered, but never finished her question. Something thundered from above, an explosion so sudden and loud that for a moment Paul thought he had pulled his own gun's trigger by accident. The shot was still echoing in his ears when something big and solid smashed into him. He was thrown sideways off his feet; if he had not been flung into one of his companions, he would have gone under the water, gun and all. The men above were shouting and laughing, which covered the noises of terror from Paul's friends as they realized that something huge was in the water with them, thrashing violently.

"Snake!" Martine hissed, sounding serpentine herself in her fright. T4b let out a muffled screech as a flailing, muscular tail knocked him over. Paul flailed through the water until he found the struggling youth, then got a grip on his arm. Florimel grabbed him, too, and together they yanked him back to the surface, bubbling and sobbing.

"Don't move!" Martine whispered. "Quiet!"

T4b might have wanted to argue, but he was too busy spewing river water. Florimel held him. The serpent was still thrashing the waters near them, but was moving away, as though it had struck them in a panic rather than by intent. When it fought its way out into the light on the east side of the bridge, Paul's skin crawled. The thing which had scraped against him was almost the size of the ore-train monster that had chased them down the mountain.

A dozen more shots thundered down, making the water hiss all around the huge tube of the snake's body. The men on the bridge were shrieking with joyful bloodlust.

"For God's sake," Martine said, "now, now!"

As she sloshed away, Paul grabbed T4b again and helped Florimel drag him toward the west side of the bridge. Behind them the wounded snake had beaten the waters to a firelit froth. The men jumped around on the bridge overhead as though they were dancing, firing shot after shot into the river and the dying reptile.

Despite a midnight hot as an oven Paul was shivering when they dragged themselves up onto me riverbank, deep in the shadows a hundred meters west of the bridge. He and his companions lay in the mud for several minutes, panting. They could still hear the party on the bridge, although the gunshots now came infrequently.

As they forced themselves to rise and move up the bank the other noises of the town reasserted themselves, screams and cries that sounded barely human, tearful pleading, more of the shouting and devilish laughter of the town's destroyers. But to Paul's amazement there was also music, something he knew he should recognize, a classical melody played on a tinny piano that yawed in and out of rhythm, as though someone were staging the torture and slaughter like a pageant and had commissioned the most incongruous soundtrack they could imagine.

Wanting to know as little as possible about what was going on in Dodge City, Paul led the company farther to the west, despite Martine's headshake of warning, but he quickly discovered that Titus had been right: within moments they stumbled onto swampy ground, and into sucking mud up to their knees.

Florimel found herself in something even more treacherous. If T4b had not been just behind her, still making quiet hawking and spitting sounds from his own immersion, she would have been gone beneath the surface of the quicksand before Paul or Martine had noticed her absence. While Tb4 clutched her, Martine—who despite her blindness could clearly see in the dark better than the rest of them—found a stick to hold out to her. When they dragged her free, Florimel too was weeping.

"It is too much," she said. "I am not strong enough—I can barely walk on level ground."

Paul turned to Martine. "Okay. You were right, I was wrong. So where do we go?"

"I cannot say for certain—this place is very distorted to my senses—but the swamp comes right up next to this side of the town. We must stay among the buildings if we wish to avoid stumbling into more quicksand."

Paul closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. "Right. Here we go."

They cautiously retraced their steps to the place they had come out of the river. Front Street lay in front of them again, its buildings all in perpetual flame. A quarter of a mile away to the east a huge bonfire blazed in the middle of the street, between the main railroad line and its spur, and countless dark shapes reeled and whirled around it, celebrating a festival of destruction that had apparently been going on for days. But although most of those who had devastated the city seemed to be gathered there, dozens more staggered back and forth across the street at the end where Paul and his companions waited in the shadows, desperately hoping for some miracle that would allow them to make their way across the wide street unobserved.

Although all of Front Street's blazing buildings still stood, some of the facades had collapsed, leaving the interiors open to the companions' horrified eyes like museum dioramas—and a strange, terrible museum it was. In the saloons, blank-eyed women with scorched legs danced on burning stages, wearily ducking the bottles and sharp objects being flung by whooping audiences of replicated Dreads. Men hung upside down from chandeliers with their throats cut, blood-drained like deer being readied for the smokehouse. Other bodies lay piled in the streets, although some had been propped against buildings or on benches in ghastly tableaux. The Dread-men reeled back and forth, drinking busthead whiskey out of jugs, some so drunk they crawled in the gutter barking like dogs or danced with vomit still streaking their mouths and chests.

It's not real, Paul tried to tell himself. It's just like a netshow—not even that. These aren't even actors, just puppets. But it was hard to make himself believe it when every smell and sound was so horrifyingly real, and especially when he knew the things around him could hurt him or even kill him.

Up the street, one of the Dreads rolled a barrel into the huge bonfire, then stood gaping as the ammunition inside began to explode. Within seconds the instigator was cut into bloody ribbons by flying lead, but others of his kind came running toward the fire, excited by the noise. Some went down in the hail of random bullets, but the others seemed to find the spectacle vastly amusing and formed a whooping circle around the fire.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Paul signaled the others forward, out into the open street. They loped silently to the railroad tracks that ran down the middle of Front Street, trying not to look too long at the mostly female corpses tied to the tracks. There was not in any case much left to see, since someone had run a locomotive back and forth over them several times before apparently tiring of the game and setting the locomotive itself on fire. The remains of the engine still stood on the tracks like the blackened skeleton of some huge sea creature, affording them a moment's shelter from any eyes which might look their way, but the stench of the mutilated bodies quickly drove them on.

They had almost crossed into the safety of the shadows beyond the end of the street when Martine suddenly slowed and clutched at Paul's arm. Although most of the Dread-men were now capering around the bonfire at the far end of the street, Paul and his companions were still in the open, exposed to any chance gaze, and his nerves were screaming, but Martine pushed at him insistently.

"Can't go this way," she gasped. "Head toward the cross street."

He had learned his lesson. Without argument, even though it went against all his instincts, he turned and trotted a short way back up Front toward the center of the town before turning north into a side street beside a two-story building whose smoldering front still proudly proclaimed it "Wright, Beverley and Co." They had only just stepped off the main avenue when a group of riders came thundering around the corner from the direction where they had just been heading, a small troop of drunken Dread-men riding mutant horses, bellowing as they went past the shadowed cross street where Paul and the others pressed themselves back against the side of the building.

The music was louder in the side street, as though they stood near the speakers in a hellish amusement park, but there was something in the wobbly sound of it that made Paul want to turn away from it and brave the main thoroughfare again. His more logical side won out: he waved for the others and they headed away from Front while the noise of the piano rose and fell.

"Mozart," Martine breathed. "He told me he liked Mozart."

Paul did not have to ask who she meant.

As they hurried up the side street, trying to stay in the pockets of shadow, Paul at last saw the piano player. The room in which he played might once have been the back parlor of one of the saloons which faced out onto the main street, a secluded nook where cowboys or gamblers with money in their pockets could spend a little private time with the town's professional women, but some explosion had taken out most of the wall, and privacy was in any case clearly a thing of the past. The player was an old black man, although his color now was much closer to gray. He was surrounded by swaying duplicates of Dread who were either too drunk to move much or were actually attending to his warped rendition of Mozart. The failings of the music became even more understandable when Paul saw that the legless pianist had been tied to his bench with barbed wire, and sat like a becalmed ship in a spreading pool of his own blood.

Now it was Paul's turn to stumble, gagging, and to be helped along by the others.

It took them long minutes to dodge from building to building, the fires making their skin itch, their ears full of the cries of the dying and those pleading for death—an agonizingly extended walking tour through the inferno. Paul had to fight to keep going. Every bit of sheltering darkness seemed to offer an oasis of peace. Each open space felt like it was watched by hundreds of eyes.

Thank God we came after they'd been at this for days, he thought as he struggled to catch his breath in the smoldering, smoky depths of a livery stable. Thank God those Dread-clones have wallowed in this evil so long that they're almost senseless with it. He could not let himself think about the hundreds of Dodge City inhabitants whose misery had given him and his companions this chance.

They had crossed their second street and stood in a trembling huddle in a doorway across from the ruins of a newspaper office. A pile of what at first seemed to be some kind of animal skins lay in the dusty street. Paul had only just recognized them as the remains of more citizens—they had been run through the printing press until rolled bonelessly flat, and one unlucky victim even had a "Dodge City Welcomes Visitors!" headline printed across his now greatly extended body—when Martine waved tor silence. Since none of them had the breath to speak, it seemed a bit unnecessary.

"Over that way," she said at last. "It was just a moment, but I . . . I felt it."

"Felt what?" Florimel's voice was flat with shock and fatigue.

"A gateway, I think."

T4b stirred. "Anywhere, gotta be better."

They followed her along the gutted buildings and then west down Walnut Street. Behind them the Mozart was slowing like a gramophone in need of cranking. As they staggered out into the shadows west of the town, Paul saw that the moon was just now climbing above the peaks of the mountains, as if confused by the cataclysmic changes to its familiar plains.

"This way," Martine panted.

It was such a relief not to be surrounded by burning walls that Paul could almost feel the darkness cover him like a cool, damp cloth. They made their way northwest along the edge of the swamp, squelching through the mud, slipping and sticking, but it seemed a thousand times preferable to what they had left behind. Even when a buzzing thing as large as a rat alighted on Martine's shoulder, making her shriek and fall to the ground, Paul felt the bargain was worthwhile. He plucked it off her with the nonchalance of complete, exhausted misery, and twisted it between his hands until it splintered, oozed, and died.

"There," Florimel gasped as Paul helped Martine to stand. "I think I see it!"

She was pointing at a pale, low protuberance a quarter, mile away, burnished by moonlight until it seemed the lop of a giant's buried skull. Despite their sagging weariness they broke into a trot across the slickly treacherous flats.

"Fenfen!" T4b cried out, his voice full of despair. For a moment Paul thought the youth had fallen, but when he turned he saw T4b was peering back at a cloud of small fires that had detached themselves from the greater burning that was Dodge City. "Torches," T4b moaned. "Following us, like."

Paul pulled the boy until they were both moving at a stumbling trot once more. "Hurry!" he shouted to the others. "Someone's seen us!"

The ground around Boot Hill was harder, drier, and when they reached it they broke into a sprint. Paul tripped and the earth seemed to leap up toward him, smacking him like a heavy hand, but now it was T4b who reached down and tugged Paul back onto his feet.

The graveyard on top of the hill was surprisingly small, a couple of dozen wooden crosses and a few modest stone markers littering the uneven ground. There were more rocks than monuments. Other than buffalo grass, the only object on the hilltop higher than Paul's waist was a slender ash tree with a noose dangling from a long branch—a hanging tree.

"Where is it?" Florimel asked. "The gateway?"

Martine was pivoting slowly from side to side like a radar dish sweeping the skies. "I . . . I cannot tell. It will not reveal itself to my command, and there seems nothing here large enough to contain it. A grave. . . ?"

"Want me to dig, tell me," T4b said, bending to scratch at the nearest mound like a crazed dog. "Need to get out now—for true!"

The torches were moving toward them with terrifying speed, and now Paul could see that the torchbearers were at least a dozen Dread-men mounted on the strange black horses with hands. As the war party sped up the hill, not slowed in the least by the horses' bizarre gait, Paul felt himself sinking into apathy. He dragged Ben Thompson's pistol out of his pocket. It felt heavy as an anchor.

"Javier, be quiet!" Martine shouted from behind him. "Let me think!"

Paul sank to one knee, trying to steady the gun. The first of the Dreads had reached the bottom of the slope. Paul did his best to aim, wishing for the only time in his life that he had been the kind of boy fascinated by weapons. He waited as long as he dared, sweating so that he could barely keep his finger on the trigger; then, when the rider was less than twenty meters away, he shot.

Whether from blind luck or some vestige of the original simulation favoring the human participant, his shot struck the ape-horse and sent it crashing to the ground. It must have rolled on its rider, for he did not rise after the horse had skidded to a leg-flailing stop. The other Dread-men veered away sideways, taking a circular path around the base of the hill, screeching now with rage, or perhaps even with pleasure at the diversion. Many of them were armed with rifles and pistols; their guns cracked and bullets whined across the hilltop. Paul flung himself to the ground. Florimel and T4b did the same. Martine did not.

"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 24Getting out of Dodge

CHAPTER 24
Getting out of Dodge