"WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL. . . ?" was the last thing he heard—a thunderous bellow from above, but already curiously muffled—then even that stone-shattering noise dwindled away as Paul was swallowed by silence and nothingness.
Growling wordlessly, sputtering saliva that fell like rain onto the dusty floor, Dread scrabbled in the debris for long moments, like a child who has discovered nothing in his birthday-present box but tissue paper. They were gone.
The growl rose to a choking snarl of rage. Black spots burst before his eyes like negative stars. He kicked over a temple wall, sent another crashing down with a flailing hand, then bent in the swirling dust and grabbed a stone obelisk. He snapped it loose from its base and hurled it as far as he could. A puff of desert sand marked its distant landing.
When he had smashed the entire temple complex into lumps of crumbling sandstone, he stood in the wreckage. The anger was still there, pressing on the front of his brain until he felt it might catch fire. He threw back his head and howled, but it brought no relief. When the echoes had died in the distant mountains, the desert was silent again, still empty but for himself.
He closed his eyes and screamed, "Anwin!"
It took several seconds before she responded, and through each of those seconds a pulse beat in his skull like a hammerblow. When the window opened, hovering in midair against the desert sky, her eyes were wide with shock and surprise. He didn't know if she was seeing his real self or the mountainous form of Anubis, god of the dead. At that moment, he didn't care.
"What? What is it?" She was sitting in a chair—the angle suggested she was seeing him on her pad instead of the wallscreen. She looked not just startled but guilty and for a fleeting instant his rage cooled enough to wonder why that might be. Then he thought of Martine and her little friends winking out right beneath his fingers and the choking rage fumed up inside him again.
"I'm on the network," he gasped, trying to tame his fury enough to communicate, when what he really wanted to do was tear down the universe and stamp on it. "A connection has just . . . opened up. I need to follow it—go through. It's something to do with the operating system." The operating system itself had defied him—that was the most galling part. When he realized what was happening he had sent a bolt of pain through it that should have frozen every function. He had half-thought he would destroy the thing once and for all, but had been too angry to care. Instead, it had absorbed the punishment and acted anyway. somewhere. It had defied him! And they had defied him, too. They would all pay.
"I'll . . . I'll see what I can do," she stammered. "It may take a little while."
"Now!" he shrieked. "Before it closes completely, or disappears, or whatever. Now!"
Her eyes wide with something more animal than mere guilt, more electric than surprise, she bent to her machinery.
"It's still there," she said. "You're right. But it's just a backdoor in the programming."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It's a way in and a way out of the network, except it only seems to open inward. I can't explain because I don't really understand." Her terror had been subsumed by concentration, although he could see her fingers trembling above the screen. Even in his white-hot rage he could admire her all-deflecting absorption, her total love for what she did.
Kindred souls, in a way, he thought. But still different enough that my kind of soul has to eat your kind of soul. He would take care of her when he had finished destroying Martine and the others—had the Sulaweyo bitch been with them? He hadn't had time to notice—and after he had reduced every last bit of volition in the operating system into whimpering imbecility.
"I've hooked it up for you as best I can," she said at last. "It's a bit like one of the gateways in other parts of the. . . ."
"Go away now," he said, disconnecting her. He narrowed his focus until he could almost see the dwindling point of transit like a will-o'-the-wisp still floating above the shattered sarcophagus. He could feel his twist strong within him, glowing like a hot wire in his forebrain, roused without his intention, as sometimes happened when he was hunting. Well, I'm hunting now, he thought. Too right I am. They had mocked him, the freaks, and now they thought they were safe. I'm going to find them all, then I'm going to pull them into pieces, until there's nothing left but screaming.
He stepped through, a god with a heart of black fire. A mad god.
Paul could only lie in the dust, struggling to remember where he was, who he was . . . why he was.
It had been like traveling through the center of a dying star. Everything had seemed to collapse into infinite density; for a time he could not measure, he had thought he was dead, nothing but particles of consciousness dispersing in the void, moving farther and farther apart like ships lost from their convoy until communication failed and each became a solitary mote.
He was still not entirely certain that he was alive.
Paul pushed himself up from the ground, which was as dry and dusty as the courtyards of the Temple of Set. There was one huge improvement over Egypt: the sky was gray, spattered with distant stars, the temperature cool. Paul was at the base of a low hill, in the midst of a plain bumpy with other such hills. The landscape seemed strangely familiar.
Bonita Mae Simpkins sat up beside him, rubbing her head. "I'm hurting," she said in a flat voice.
"Me, too. Where are the others? Where are we, for that matter?"
"Inside, I think," said someone else.
Paul turned. Martine was making her way down the steep hillside, half-walking, half-sliding on the loose soil. She was trailed by Nandi, T4b, Florimel, and a boy he didn't recognize—a small, dirty child with raggedly cut black hair. The Wicked Tribe, their color muted in the twilight, circled above them like a swarm of gnats.
"What do you mean?" he asked. "And who's that little boy?"
"This is Cho-Cho," Martine announced. "Sellars' friend. You already met him—he just looked a bit different. We've been having a talk, and now he's going to be traveling with us."
"Chance not, lady," the little boy said sullenly. "You people loco."
Martine and the others reached the bottom just as Paul and Bonnie Mae finally got onto their feet. Paul felt so weary and sore he immediately wanted to lie back down. He had questions, lots of questions, but no strength to ask them.
"As to where we are," Martine said, "I think we are inside the operating system."
"But I thought we'd been inside it along, more or less."
"No." She shook her head. "We have been inside the Grail network, and the operating system extends throughout that network like invisible nerves. But I think now we are inside the operating system itself, or at least some private preserve of its own, kept safe from all its masters, Jongleur and the Grail Brotherhood, and now Dread."
"Renie said . . . she was in the heart of the system," Paul remembered.
"How can you know such a thing?" Nandi said sharply. "It makes some sense, but it can only be a guess."
"Because I touched the Other before it brought us through," she said. "It did not speak to me in words, but I could still understand much. And because we have been to a place like this before. Twice, although the first version, the Patchwork World, was unfinished. I failed to understand the similarity on the last occasion, but I am now seeing the patterns for a third time."