Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

He said it again, caught on some incomprehensible cusp. The momentary blackness was fading, but his voice echoed strangely, as if he stood outside himself, listening. "I'm an orphan. . . !"

"Sorry you had to find out about it like this, lad." Niles sounded genuinely troubled, but his face on the screen was as unreadably reasonable as ever. "For some reason the hospital couldn't get through to you there in the States, so they called me. I suppose you must have put me down as a backup or something."

"I'm . . . I'm an orphan," Paul said for the third time.

"Well, that's pushing it a bit, isn't it?" Niles spoke kindly. "I mean, I think you have to be an actual child to qualify, don't you? But I really am sorry, Paul. Still, she had a good run, didn't she? How old was she?"

"Seventy-two." He'd been in America for over half a year, he realized. "Seventy-three. That's not old at all. I thought . . . I thought she'd be around a few more years." I thought I'd get back to see her. How could I let her die alone?

"Still, she wasn't well. Kindest thing, isn't it?"

For an instant, Paul hated his friend's handsome face and easy sympathy. Kindest thing? Yes, if you come from the sort of family that shoots its old dogs and horses, it probably seems that way, A moment later the rush of fury was gone.

"Yes, I suppose it is," he said heavily. "I should call and make the arrangements. . . ."

"Done it for you, mate. It was all in her records, anyway. Do you want the ashes sent there?"

It was such a strangely repellent idea that Paul actually considered it for a moment. "No. No, I don't think so. I don't think she'd like Louisiana. I suppose she'll want to go in that place next to Dad." He couldn't for the life of him think of the name of the so-called remembrance park, had never visited his father's resting place—if a cubbyhole with a door in a fibramic wall made to look like marble could really be dignified to that extent. "I'll look up the details and call you tomorrow."

"That's fine. We're at the Oaks." Which was a breezy way of saying Niles' family were having one of their semiannual bivouacs at their country house in Staffordshire.

"Thanks, Niles. You're a good friend."

"Worry not. But how are things going on your end? I had sort of a strange call from your Americans a while back."

"I know." He debated telling Niles the whole story, but he was already in his friend's debt—how much did you actually owe someone who arranged to have your mother burned, anyway?—and did not want to descend deeper by keeping him on the phone listening to complaints and suspicions and just plain weirdness. "Things are okay here. Lots of stories to tell when we get together. A bit odd, I guess, but basically everything's fine."

Niles gave him a quizzical look, but with his usual deftness swiftly turned it into a smile. "Right. Well, stay out of trouble, old man. And I am sorry about your mum."

"I'll call you tomorrow. Thanks again."

He was embarrassed he'd said it in front of Niles, but as the elevator shot soundlessly upward, the word would not leave his head.

Orphan. I'm an orphan. I've got no one left. . . .

It was a bit overblown, perhaps—he hadn't seen Mum since leaving England, and while he was there he hadn't exactly moved heaven and earth to keep her at his side once she'd got sick the first time—but now that she was gone, something had definitely changed.

Who do you have, really? Niles? He'd be just as kind and efficient if it was you who'd snuffed it, and then he'd get on with his fabulous life. "You remember Paul Jonas," he'd say to his friends, who wouldn't. "Chap I've known since Cranleigh—we were at university together, too. Worked at the Tate? Poor old Paul. . . ."

She met him in the antique study, her fine features so rigid they seemed almost a mask, and gave him a very small, very polite smile. "Come in, Mr. Jonas. I've been looking forward to our lesson."

He paused in the doorway, disconcerted by the gleam in her eyes, a hint of excitement or even fear. "Miss Jongleur, I. . . ."

"Please!" Her laugh was a little too shrill. "We should waste no more time! You are already a bit late, dear Mr. Jonas, although I do not criticize. You must understand that time weighs heavily on me between activities."

He allowed himself to be pulled inside, yanking his hand through just in time to keep it from being caught by the closing door. Before he could even take a breath she had thrown her arms about his neck and was covering his face with kisses.

"Miss Jongleur!" He tried to detach himself but she clung to him like a creature of the tide pools fastened onto a rock. "Ava! Have you lost your mind?" He managed to get one arm against the firmness of her corseted stomach and push her back until he could get a grip on her shoulders and hold her away. He was shocked to see her eyes streaming with tears.

"They cannot see us here!" she said. "Our friend is protecting us!"

He only half-noticed that her phantom friend had somehow become his as well. "Even so, Ava—I told you this was a terrible idea! That it simply cannot be!"

"Oh, Paul, Paul." Disconcertingly, she bent her head and kissed his hand where it clutched her arm. Despite his monstrous uneasiness, the lunacy of it all, something in him responded with a throb in his groin, a twitch of the serpent sleeping in his spine.

"Ava, stop. You must stop."

"But, Paul!" She turned her huge, tragic, damp eyes up to him. "I have just found out the most terrible thing. I think my father . . . I think he is going to have you murdered!"

"What?" It was too much. For a moment he hated her, too—despised her helplessness and her derangement. How had he got himself into such a terrible, ridiculous situation? Something like this would never happen to Niles Peneddyn. "Why should he do that?"

"Come outside," she said. "Come into the wood. We can talk there."

"I thought you said we could talk here. That your . . . your ghost or whatever was protecting us."

"He is! But I cannot stand being in this house a moment longer. Caged like an animal. Time . . . time is so long here!" She threw herself at him again, and although he kept his face turned from hers, refusing her kisses, the straining, panicky need in her tensed body performed a strange inversion and he wrapped his arms around her, soothing her as though she were a terrified child.

Which she is, he thought, his fear and confusion mixed with genuine sorrow. They've done something terrible to her. Whatever they've done, it's criminal.

Her chest heaved against his. At last a little quiet came. "Come outside," she said. "Oh, please, Paul."

He allowed himself to be led to the door of the study, pulling away at the last moment so that they made a more decorous picture as they emerged from the supposed zone of safety.

She's even got me believing this, he realized. This ghost, this secret friend of hers. Either someone really has hacked the system or else Finney and Mudd just aren't paying attention. I can't believe they'd find this kind of behavior acceptable.

The house was quiet, the maids withdrawn to wherever they went—off-duty? Gossiping about their employer's crazy daughter in some modern break room down on lower floors? Or were they hanging in a closet like marionettes, waiting for the unseen puppeteer to use them again?

They have to be real people, he told himself. The Gothic atmosphere was beginning to make even the most freakish notions half-believable. I've bumped into one of them. You can't bump into a hologram and they don't make robots that realistic. He hoped he survived all this to make it back to England, if only so he could tell Niles and his other friends about it someday, preferably with a drink in his hand. This would be one story that he felt sure none of them could top.

Ava's breakfast sat untouched on the table in the sun porch. Paul looked at it wistfully, wishing he'd had more than a cup of coffee himself. Once out in the garden, his pupil broke into a trot. For a moment he felt drawn to hurry after her, then remembered the eyes that were almost surely watching; he walked down the path as sedately as he could manage.

She was waiting for him in the fairy ring, her eyes bright, but not with tears. "Oh, Paul," she said as he stepped into the circle, "if only we could always be together like this. Able to say what we wished without fear!"

"I don't understand what's going on, Ava." He sat down beside her, keeping a careful distance. She looked at him reproachfully but he chose to ignore it. "The last time we were here you told me . . . you told me you had a baby. Now you say your father is going to kill me. Not to mention your friend from the spirit world. How can I believe any of this?"

"But I did have a baby." She was indignant. "I wouldn't lie about such a thing."

"Who . . . who was the father?"

"I don't know. Not a man, if that's what you mean." She paused. "Perhaps it was God." There was no hint of mockery.

Paul was finally convinced beyond any residual doubts that she was mad. Her father's controlling obsessiveness, her prisoned life in this bizarre place—a zoo, really, with only one animal—had completely disordered her mind. He knew he should get up and walk back into the house, take the elevator down to Finney's office and resign, because no good could come from such a situation. He knew he should, but for some reason, perhaps the pain hiding behind her gentle face, he did not.

"And where is this child?" he asked.

"I don't know. They took him from me—they didn't even let me see him."

"Him? You know it was a boy? And who took him?"

"The doctors. Yes, I know it was a boy. I knew it even before I knew I was carrying him. I had dreams. It was very strange."

Paul shook his head. "I'm afraid I'm not understanding this very well. You . . . you had a baby. But you never saw it. The doctors took it away."

"Him. Took him away."

"Him. When did this happen?"

"Just after you came to be my tutor, six months ago. Do you remember? I was ill and I missed several days' lessons."

"Just after I came? But . . . but you didn't look like you were carrying a child."

"It was very early."

Paul could make no sense of it. "And you never. . . ." He hesitated, caught in the strange trap of speaking to her as though she truly were a girl from nearly two centuries in the past. "And you had never . . . been with a man?"

Her laugh was unexpectedly loud. She was very amused. "Who would it be, dear, dear Paul? Poor old Doctor Landreux, who must be a hundred years old? Or one of that horrid pair who work for my father?" She shuddered and inched nearer to him. "I have been with no one. There is no other man for me but you, my beloved Paul. No one."

He was losing the strength to object to her endearments. "But someone took the child away?"

"I didn't know at the time. I had been feeling ill for weeks. I was particularly sick in the mornings. I went to the doctors and they examined me—at least that's what I thought they did. I only found out later that they'd taken away my baby before it could grow. But somehow I knew anyway, Paul—I knew! But I only understood for certain when Miss Kenley told me."

"Miss Kenley. . . ?" He felt like he had walked into a play at the interval, and now was hopelessly trying to figure out what had happened in the first half. "Who. . . ?"

"She was one of the nurses who used to come in with Doctor Landreux. But Finney saw her whispering to me, and now she doesn't come in anymore. Miss Kenley was very sweet—she was a Quaker, did you know? She didn't like working here. She wasn't supposed to tell me anything, but she thought it was terrible, what they did, so she told the doctor she was going to see if I was improving, but instead she took me for a walk in the garden and told me that they'd taken out my little baby." A tear trickled down her cheek. "Before he could even grow!"

"So you only know you were going to have a baby because this nurse told you so."

"I knew, Paul. I knew in my dreams that there was a baby inside me. But when she told me the terrible thing they had done, then I understood everything."

"That's a lot more than I can say." The twitter of bird-song in the trees overhead was continuous and loud. Paul found himself wondering how sound could enter into the circle so freely, but their own conversation could somehow be kept secret.

But there has to be something going on, he thought. They wouldn't just let us sit here and talk about things like this, would they? Unless of course they already knew the girl was crazy and were curious how Paul would react. Was it all some kind of loyalty test? If it is, I don't want the job that badly. In fact, I don't want this bloody job at all.

Still, there was something in Ava's story that wasn't so easy to dismiss. That didn't mean it was true—the whole thing might be some hysterical fantasy of this Miss Kenley's, foisted on the unfortunately sheltered, gullible Ava—but it might mean the girl wasn't entirely deranged either. And whatever else she might be, she was certainly a victim.

"Let's talk about something else for a moment," he said, noting that she had moved a little closer still, so that her thigh, beneath dress and ruffled petticoat, was pushed against his. "Why do you think your father wants to kill me?"

"Oh!" Her eyes widened, as though she had entirely forgotten the danger that half an hour earlier had driven her to terrified weeping. "Oh, Paul, I couldn't bear to lose you, but I'm so frightened!"

"Just tell me why you think I'm in danger."

"My friend told me. You know, my friend."

Paul grimaced. "Yes, I know. Your ghost. What exactly did he tell you?"

"Well, he didn't really tell me—he showed me. In the same manner he showed me you, sitting in your room." She frowned—prettily, he thought, just like in the old books. Was it an automatic product of being raised in an old-books sort of way? "Paul, what is a grail?"

"Grail?" It was not the sort of thing he was expecting to be asked. "A grail . . . right, it's . . . it's a mythical object." Despite his university lit. courses and a dozen lectures on the pre-Raphaelites, his recall was embarrassingly vague. "The Holy Grail. I think it's supposed to be the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. Something like that. It features in a lot of medieval legends—all that King Arthur stuff." He sounded, he thought, like the kind of nonreading, philistine American he and his friends had always mocked. "I think there are other meanings, too—some cauldron from Irish folktales—but I can't quite remember. Why?"

"My father was talking about it with those cruel men who work for him, Finney and Mudd."

Paul shook his head. "You've lost me again, Ava."

"My friend—he showed me them talking in the mirror. Or rather, he showed me Finney and Mudd in the mirror, and they were talking to my father, who was in a mirror big as a wall. He was in the mirror tor them just like he is for me."

Finney and Mudd talking to their boss on a wallscreen, Paul thought. So Ava's phantom could not only trick those spying on her and Paul, he could also spy on the spies in turn. "And?"

"My father told them that the Grail was again within reach. And so perhaps it was time for you—he called you 'that Jonas character'—to disappear."

Paul was desperately trying to find threads of sense in this great, ragged tapestry of incomprehensibilities and folly. "People use the term 'grail' sometimes to mean something important, Ava—a project, a goal. I don't know what it would have to do with firing me, though, or even why your father should concern himself with such a small detail." He smiled to show his resignation to his own comparative insignificance, but she was not amused or reassured.

"He wasn't just talking about sacking you, Paul." She was stern, as though he had become the larky pupil and she the teacher. "Nickelplate—Finney—said they were ready whenever my father gave the word, and Mudd said, 'It won't matter much to anyone, anyway. All he's got is an old mother who won't last much longer. She's in no shape to raise a fuss.' I'm quite sure that's how he put it."

Something as cold and startling as a wet hand clutched his innards; for a moment, Paul felt dizzy with sudden panic. Nobody talked that way about terminating someone's employment, did they? It sounded like a crime drama. Surely there had to be some innocent explanation. Surely.

Aloud, he said, "She's gone now. My mum. She just died,"

"I'm sorry, Paul. It must very painful for you." Ava's eyes turned downward, showing a great expanse of dark lash. "I never knew my mother. She died when I was born."

He looked at her carefully. The flush of excitement had pinked her pale skin above the high collar of her dress. "You wouldn't . . . you didn't make this up, did you? Please tell me, Ava. I won't be angry, but I have to know."

Her hurt was as raw and obvious as a child's. "Make it up. . . ? But, Paul, I would never lie to you. I . . . love you."

"Ava, you can't. I've told you."

"Can't?" Her laugh was shrill, painful to hear. " 'For stony limits cannot hold love out'—your William Shakespeare said that, didn't he? I remember it from Romeo and Juliet."

Which is exactly why I wouldn't have taught that play to a lonely, impressionable young girl, he thought. Her other tutors have a lot to answer for. "I have to think, Ava. This is . . . this is quite a bit of information." The inadequacy of the phrase was laughable. "I need a little time to sort things out in my mind."

"Do you not care for me, Paul? Not in the slightest?"

"Of course I care for you, Ava. But you're talking about something much larger and a hell of a lot more complicated." As she colored and brought a hand to her mouth, Paul felt shamed. By her standards, he had used very strong language indeed. "Look, Ava, I just don't know what to think about all the things you've told me."

She put her hand on top of his, cool, dry fingers startling against his skin. "You think . . . you think I might be mistaken, don't you? Worse, you think I might be . . . what is the word? Hysterical? Mad?"

"I think you are a good and honest person." There was nothing else he could say. He squeezed her hand and gently removed it before standing up, then had a sudden thought. "Could . . . your friend . . . could he talk to me? Would he?"

"I don't know." Her composure was a thin facade covering something like devastation. Paul Jonas was glad he could not see the whole of it. "I will ask him."

The flickering light woke him up.

After a long, agonizing night, he had at last fallen asleep, helped or hindered by more wine than usual. His first disjointed thought was that the window blinds had somehow gone on the fritz and were jigging up and down, semaphoring him with the harsh and unwanted light of morning. It was only after he had dragged himself upright that he realized the arrhythmic flash came not from the window but the wallscreen.

A call. . . ? he thought dazedly. Why didn't it ring? A charge of fear went through him. A disaster. Emergency warning system. The tower's on fire.

He scrambled out of bed and dragged open the blinds. It was still deep night, the miniature city below still dark, the orange lights of the oil derricks the stars' only rivals. No flames were sweeping up the shiny black side of the tower toward him, nor were there any other signs of something amiss. It must be only a malfunction.

"Paul Jonas."

He spun around, but the room was empty.

"Paul Jonas." The voice came from nowhere in particular, as quietly intrusive as a buzzing fly trapped in a windowsill.

"Who . . . who is that?" But he knew even as he asked. The last traces of his cloth-headed grogginess vanished. "Are you . . . Ava's friend?"

"Avialle," the voice breathed. "Angel. . . ." The wall-screen flickered again, then bloomed with color. Ava filled it—not the Ava of this moment, but an Ava in full if ersatz sunlight, crouched beneath a tree spreading crumbs for the birds that surrounded her like a crowd of admiring Lilliputians.

"Who are you?" Paul asked. "Why do you talk to Ava—to Avialle? What do you want from her?"

"Want . . . want . . . safe. Avialle safe." It spoke with a strange, aphasic slur. Pity would have pulled at him, except something about the shambling, inhuman voice also scared him to death.

"And who are you?"

"Lost." It moaned, a strange staticky roar. "Lost boy."

"Lost . . . where? Where are you?"

For a long moment there was only silence as the image of Ava rippled away, replaced by unevenly shimmering bars of light. "Well," it replied at last. "Down in the black, in the black black black." The moan came again, a stutter of harsh sound. "Down in the black well."

All the hairs on Paul's body stood upright. He knew he was awake—every quivering nerve told him so—but the conversation had the terrible downhill feel of a nightmare.

He searched desperately for something to build on. "You want to keep Ava . . . keep Avialle safe, is that right? Safe from what?"

"Jongleur."

"But he's her father! What would he do to her. . . ?"

"Not father!" the thing groaned. "Not father!"

"What are you talking about?" The family resemblance was plain, although what was hawklike and cruel in the pictures Paul had seen of Felix Jongleur was softened and sweetened in the daughter. "I don't understand. . . ."

"Eating the children," the voice moaned. "Jongleur. Grail. Help them. Too much pain. And. . . ." The bars of light began to flicker more rapidly, until they nearly became a solid burst of radiance. Paul found himself staring helplessly. "All the children. . . ."

The light strobed even faster, a white rush so bright that as he stared even the walls of his room fell away. Then somehow he was toppling forward into the light, into a brilliance that had no ending, and the haunted voice was all around him, powerful and lost.

"The Grail. Eating the children. So many. . . ! Hurting them!"

His senses were afire with sensation, but he was helpless. He could do nothing as the light streamed over him, through him, scorched into his eyes and turned his brain to a knob of clear crystal. Faces began to appear, children's faces, but it was no simple stream of images: he knew these children, felt their lives and stories even as they flew past him like a flock of sparrows caught up in a hurricane wind. Hundreds of tiny spirits flowed through him, then thousands, each one a node of painful darkness in the sea of shining light, each one precious, each one doomed. Then, out of the whirling darkness, a new shape began to form—a great silvery cylinder floating in a vault of black emptiness.

"The Grail," the voice said again, imploring, mourning. "For Jongleur. Eating them. Ad Aeternum. Forever."

Paul found his voice, though he had no lungs to drive the air, no throat in which to form the scream.

"Stop! I don't want to see any more!"

But it did not stop. He was lost in a storm of suffering.

He woke up on the carpet with the true light of morning streaming through the window. His head felt like something rotten that had been imperfectly balanced on top of his neck. Even an extra-strong cup of coffee and a small handful of painblockers did nothing to make him feel more human. He was miserable.

He was also terrified.

There was no explanation for what he had experienced. He did not insult himself by pretending it might have been a bad dream—the details were too sharp, his waking position on the floor in front of the wallscreen too telltale. But there was no simple way of understanding. The thing that had contacted him was no ordinary hacker, that was laughably clear. He didn't believe in ghosts, especially ghosts who appeared on wallscreens. So what did that leave?

Paul sat by the window with shaking hands. Below, he could see one of the corporation's hovercrafts arriving at the esplanade just below the tower, the ship's cheerful white-and-blue paint at odds with his own current viewpoint—that the ferry was basically a larger version of Charon's boat, conveying passengers to a Hades in which Paul was already a resident.

He roused himself. The sight had given him a longing to be somewhere else, anywhere else. He could not spend another day inside the great black building. He needed to move, to get out. Maybe then he could think properly.

As he dressed he felt a pang of worry and sorrow for Ava. If he simply disappeared, even just for the morning, she would be frightened. He was reluctant to ride all the way up to her house, frightened that he would never be able to pull himself away from her, so he called and left a message with one of Finney's many assistants. "Mr. Jonas has business to take care of because his mother in England has died. He will be out for the day. Please ask Miss Jongleur to study her geometry and read two more chapters of Emma. Lessons will resume as usual tomorrow." Hanging up, he felt the same sort of guilt he had experienced as a child skiving off school.

I have to get out, he told himself. Just for a while.

Walking from the elevator across the huge atrium lobby to the front doors, Paul could not resist looking around to see if someone was following him.

But isn't that just what you aren't supposed to do when you leave Hades? What was that from, the Orpheus legend? That you weren't supposed to look back?

Whatever the case, he was not being followed by either weeping ghosts or dark-suited security personnel, although the vast lobby was so full of people it was hard to tell for certain. The wash of commingled voices echoing from the marble walls and down the crystalline, pyramidal ceiling was like the roar of an ocean, like the rush of childish faces that had invaded his sleep now made into sound.

He paused for a moment in the plaza before the front doors to look up at the tower, a mountain-high finger of warped black glass, a million darkly translucent plates trussed and polished. If this was indeed the gate of the netherworld, what kind of fool was he even to think about coming back? He had planned a day's research trip, since he was afraid to access the larger net from within the J Corporation matrix, but what was there to draw him back at all? A doomed girl? It would take someone with a lot more power in the world than Paul Jonas to break her free from that cage. Something called the Grail, some threat to the world's children? Surely he could do much more from the outside, perhaps as a secret informant to some serious investigative journalists, than he could ever manage under constant surveillance.

Should I just take off? Just go? For God's sake, what job is worth this madness, this kind of paranoia?

"There's something wrong with your badge," the woman said. He could see the ferry's gangplank just the other side of the security-glass air-lock door, but the door itself did not open.

"What do you mean?"

The young woman frowned at the symbols dancing on the inside of her goggles. "It's not cleared for departure from the island, sir. I'm afraid you'll have to step out."

"My badge isn't cleared?" He stared at her, then back at the gangplank, only a few meters away. "Then keep the damn thing."

"You'll have to step out, sir. There's a security hold on it. You can speak to my supervisor."

Before a half-dozen sharp words were out of his mouth, the security guards—exactly the sort that he had half-expected to be following him through the tower lobby—had escorted him to a quiet office for, as they put it, a quiet chat.

It was at least a little solace that afterward he was allowed to walk back out of the departure area and back to the tower by himself. Security hadn't been ordered to do anything to him, not even detain him, as long as he stayed on the island. A little solace, but not much.

Conscious that he had sweated himself rank inside his coat and shirt despite the cool of the morning, Paul stood inside the lobby elevators, full of terrified indecision. Did this mean they had heard him after all, talking the J Corporation equivalent of treason with the master's daughter? Or might it just be a fluke?

He had to see Finney. If he didn't, if he simply did as he wanted so desperately to do, returned to his room and got shatteringly drunk, he would be admitting that he deserved this treatment. He had to act innocent.

Finney's assistant kept him waiting twenty-five minutes. The spectacular view across to the city—a city now heart-breakingly out of reach, although it seemed so close he might reach out and prick his finger on the Riverwalk Spire—did little to soothe him.

When he was finally allowed in, Finney was finishing a call. He looked up, his eyes as always strangely hard to see behind his spectacles. "What is it, Jonas?"

"I . . . they wouldn't let me leave the island. Security."

Finney looked at him calmly. "Why?"

"I don't know! Something wrong with my badge. They said there was a security hold on it, something like that."

"Leave it with my assistant. We'll sort it out."

Paul felt a gush of relief. "So . . . I can get a temporary replacement or something? I've got some things I have to do in New Orleans." In the silence, he felt the need to make it more compelling. "My mother died. I have arrangements to make."

Finney was looking at his desk, although the desktop appeared to be bare. He nodded distractedly. "Sorry to hear that. We can make arrangements for you."

"But I want to do it myself."

Finney looked up at him. "Fine. As I said, leave your badge with my assistant."

"But I want to go now! Go off the island, deal with things. I mean . . . you can't keep me here. Not just . . . keep me here."

"But, my dear Jonas, what is your hurry? Surely you can make arrangements by net more efficiently. And these procedures might seem silly to you, but I promise you they're deadly serious. Deadly serious. Why, if someone tried to get onto the island—or off it, for that matter—without a valid badge, I wouldn't even want to think about the kind of terrible things that might happen!" Finney gave him a slow smile. "So you just sit tight, will you? Be a good boy. Entertain Miss Jongleur. We'll straighten everything out . . . in time."

Back in the elevator, Paul could hardly support his own weight. He stumbled to his room, turned off the lights, carefully and definitely shut off the wallscreen, then sat in darkness broken only by a pane of light tilting out from the crack between window and blind and tried to drink himself into oblivion.

He could see his own fingers touching the button of the elevator, see the dawn light bleeding into the corridor disappear as the doors swished shut behind him—he could see it, but he could not quite feel it. The drunkenness was still on him, a twisted, feverish disconnection. He did not know what time it was, only knew it was morning, only knew he could not take another night of such monstrous dreams.

The door hissed open, revealing the inner door. He leaned against it, resting his head on the cool frame while he clumsily entered his code and pressed his hand against the palm reader. Dizzy, he remained leaning for several stupefied moments after the lock had clicked.

One of the parlormaids looked up in surprise as he stumbled through. In her wide-eyed gaze he saw an entire factory of deceit. "You're real," he said. "So you must be a liar."

"Where are you going, sir?" She took a careful backward step, as though preparing to turn and run.

"Important business. Miss Jongleur. We're going out." The spectacle he must be presenting finally sank in. He tried to assume a slightly more dignified manner. "Sorry. I'm not well. But I need to give Miss Jongleur her lessons—she has to have her lesson plan for today. I'll be gone in a few minutes."

He continued down the corridor, trying to walk a straight line.

I'm not drunk, he thought. Not really. I'm bloody well coming apart at the seams.

He knocked on the door, waited, then knocked again.

"Who is it?"

"It's me," he said, then remembered the no-doubt listening ears. "Mr. Jonas. I have to give you your lessons for today."

The door flew open. She wore a white nightgown, soft but opaque, and had pulled her dressing gown on without tying it closed. Her dark hair, unbound and surprisingly long, spilled down past her shoulders.

Angel, he thought, remembering the ghost-thing's words. You're beautiful, he wanted to say, but retained enough sense to lift his hand and push his own sweat-damp hair from his forehead. "I need to speak to you for just a moment, Miss Jongleur."

"Paul! What's happened to you?"

"I'm ill, Miss Jongleur." He lifted his finger to his lips in a clumsy admonishment to silence. "Perhaps I need a little air. Would you mind coming outside with me while we discuss your work for today?"

"Let me . . . I just need to dress."

"No time," he said hoarsely. "I'm . . . I'm really not very well. Can you come out with me?"

She was frightened, but trying not to show it. "Let me get my shoes, then."

It was all he could do to refrain from pulling her down the hall by the arm. Two of the maids were standing in the doorway of the sunporch, for the moment not even counterfeiting work; they stepped aside as Paul and Ava approached, casting their eyes down.

"But I insist, Mr. Jonas," Ava said brightly for their benefit. "You are looking very poorly indeed. A turn in the garden while we talk will do you a world of good."

He could almost feel the maids' shocked propriety and was embarrassed for his pupil. His own floating, hapless confusion was such that he did not remember until they had reached the garden path that whatever else they might be, the Jongleur servants were not young women from two centuries past.

This time Ava did not hurry toward the wood, but walked with care, asking solicitously about Paul's health as they went, insisting that immediately upon leaving her he should drink a cup of chamomile tea and go straight to bed. It was only when they had reached the ostensible security of the mushroom ring that she turned and threw herself at him, clutching him so tightly he had to struggle to stay upright.

"Oh, Paul, dear Paul, where were you? When you did not come yesterday, I was so frightened!"

He did not have the strength to hold her off, did not have the strength to do much of anything. He had no plan, no solution. He was not entirely certain he was not going mad himself. "Your ghost friend. He came to me. Showed me . . . children."

"So you believe me?" She leaned back, staring at his face as though she might never see it again. "Do you?"

"I still don't know what to believe, Ava. But I know I have to get you out of here, somehow." A heaviness settled in his chest. "But I can't even leave myself. I tried to get off the island yesterday and they wouldn't let me."

"An island?" she said. "How strange. Are we on an island?"

The hopelessness of it all came crashing down on him. What did he think he was going to do? Kidnap and hide a girl who had never even left this building, the daughter of the world's richest man? A man with his own army, with tanks and helicopters? A man with half the world's leaders in his pocket? His knees weakening, Paul let himself slide down to the ground. Ava came with him, still clinging, and for a moment they were tangled together, the girl half atop him, her slim, uncorseted body pressing against him.

"I don't know what to do, Ava." He was light-headed, almost stoned on despair. Her face was very close, her hair surrounding both their heads like a canopy so that for a moment they were in half-darkness.

"Just love me," she said. "Then everything will be right."

"I can't . . . I shouldn't. . . ." But he had his arms around her waist, in self-defense if nothing else, to keep her from wriggling along the length of his body. "You're just a child."

"Stony limits," she reminded him, and her giggle was so unexpected he almost smiled himself.

And I am Fortune's fool. The quote swam up like the fish in the tiny, tended stream gurgling a few meters away.

Fortune's fool. He lifted his head and kissed her. She gave it back to him with all the untutored enthusiasm of her age, her breath sharp and fast, and after a moment he had to lift her away from him and sit up. The grass slowly sprang back erect where they had lain.

"My true heart," she murmured, tears in her eyes.

He could think of nothing to say back to her. Romeo and Juliet, he thought. Good Christ, look what happened to them.

"I have something for you!" she said suddenly. She reached into the collar of her nightgown and withdrew a tasseled bag that hung around her neck. She shook something small and glittery into her hand and held it out toward him. It was a silver ring with a blue-green stone cut into the shape of a feather. "It was a present from my father," she said. "I think it was my mother's once. He brought it back for her from North Africa." She held it up until the feather-shape caught the light, sparkling clear as a tropical ocean, then passed it to him. "He said the stone is a tourmaline."

Paul stared at it. The feather was strikingly carved, something light as air made from stone, the solidity of earth turned into a puff of wind.

"Put it on."

Still in a sort of trance, he slipped it onto his finger.

"Now you can't leave me." There was more than just pleading in her voice—it almost had the force of a command or an incantation. "You can't ever leave me now." An instant later she had crawled into his lap and put her arms about his neck, pressing her lips to his. He fought it for a moment, then surrendered to the full, forceful tide of madness.

"Oh ho!" someone said.

Ava shrieked and threw herself backward out of Paul's arms. He turned to see the grinning, misshapen face of Mudd peering at them through the trees.

"Naughty, naughty," said the fat man.

Suddenly everything went dark, sucked away as if down a long drain. The light, the air, the sound of Ava weeping, the trill of birds and the rustle of leaves, all fled. Nothing was left but blackness and empty silence.

He had been in the dark for so long that he had almost forgotten there was anything else. Then something cold crashed down over him and he woke up screaming.

Paul Jonas struggled up out of the emptiness, his skin raw and shocked, his head hot and swollen, as though he had been left out in the desert sun for hours. It was not sand or sun that he found when he opened his sticky eyes, though, but the flickering semidarkness of a cell.

The dull-faced priest Userhotep stood over him, still holding the clay water jar which he had emptied over Paul's bound body. Frowning as at a piece of machinery which had proved to be shoddily manufactured, the priest examined Paul for a moment, testing his pulse and pulling back his eyelid with a grubby finger before stepping away.

Robert Wells' yellow, hairless face split in a clownish grin. "My God, once you get started you don't shut up, do you?"

Paul tried to say something but could only moan. The arteries serving his brain seemed to be pumping something far more thick and caustic than blood.

"But we still haven't learned much," Wells complained. "So you found out something about the Grail—well, golly, I could have guessed that. It still doesn't explain why the Old Man didn't just have you killed. And it's clear from what you remember that his operating system was even more unreliable than we guessed, than even Jongleur guessed—that it achieved some kind of consciousness. But we stopped just short of the really interesting stuff." He shook his head. "That last part of the block is pretty strong, which suggests it was the thing he originally wanted wiped out. So, of course, that's what I want to learn."

Paul's throat was as rough as sharkskin, but he at last mustered the saliva to speak. "Why do you care? It's all over now. Jongleur's dead, my friends and I are prisoners, Dread's in charge. What does it matter?" The truth was, he didn't want to touch any more memories. A brooding disquiet lay over all that had returned to him, a sense that something horrible waited just around the corner. "Go ahead and kill me, if you really aren't any better than your new boss." It would be an end at least to the pain, it would be an end.

Wells wagged a lemony finger. "Selfish, Mr. Jonas, very selfish of you. If the Old Man's dead, that's all the more reason we need to know as much as possible. You may not be on the guest list, but the rest of us intend to make our homes here for a long, long time. If we have to replace the plumbing; we need to know the extent of the problem." He leaned forward until his face was very close. "And I must admit I'm curious about you. Who are you? Why did Jongleur single you out for such star treatment instead of just dumping your body in his private swamp?" He's had us taking very elaborate care of you at Telemorphix, you know. We really wondered who you were."

"You won't find out the rest," Paul said hoarsely. "The brainwashing, the hypnotic block, whatever it is, it's too strong."

"Hmmm. I think we can go a long way toward testing that theory without killing you." Ptah the Artificer moved back and the lector priest Userhotep stepped forward again. "I was wrong to think we could do the job with only minimal damage, though. We'll have to push the envelope a bit—see how much you can take. It's amazing what the brain will do to cope with extreme pain, you know. Some pretty extreme neurological effects. I wouldn't be surprised if we have you singing like a bird before we've done much beyond taking the top layers of your skin off."

Robert Wells crossed his bandaged arms over his chest, stared at Paul for a moment, then nodded cheerfully to the priest. "Well, Userhotep, I guess you might as well get started."

CHAPTER 29Stony Limits

CHAPTER 29
Stony Limits