The jackal shape vanished, leaving the real Dread, ordinary size and dressed all in loose-fitting black, standing on the top step of the throne. "Didn't mean to upset you, sweetness." He sounded more annoyed than contrite.
"I just. . . ." She shook her head. "What's going on here, anyway? You said this was the . . . Old Man's place. Where is he? What have you been doing since you got into the system?"
"Oh, this and that." His human grin was only slightly less feral. "I'll explain more later, but first I want to take you on a little tour. Just for fun."
"I don't want to watch any more burning priests, thank you."
"There's lots of things more interesting to see than that." He raised his hand in the air and the silver rod abruptly shrank to a small silver cylinder. "Let's go."
"That's the lighter!" she said. "What. . . ?" But the high hall of Abydos-That-Was and its thousand patient priests had already vanished.
It was indeed a tour. From their first stop in the streets of Imperial Rome, complete with the shouts of street vendors and the wind off the Tiber rank with the scents of human sweat and urine, Dread moved Dulcie in short order to sweltering afternoon on an African plain inhabited by strange creatures as large as elephants, but which Dulcie had never seen before, and then in quick succession through the plum-treed gardens of some clearly mythical China, to a cliffside position overlooking a waterfall a mile or more high, and at last to the white weirdness of the ultimate north, where the convulsing Aurora Borealis hung over their heads like a fireworks show stuck on extra slow speed.
"My God," she said, watching her breath hang as vapor in the air, "it's staggering! I mean, I knew there were a lot of simworlds—we saw quite a few through the Quan Li sim, but. . . ." She shivered, mostly out of reflex. Due to some wrinkle in the simworld, or to Dread's control of it, the temperature here felt no cooler than an early spring evening. "And you can just go anywhere. . . ?"
"Go anywhere, do anything." His grin was now only half a smile, the expression of the proverbial canary-catching cat. He rolled the lighter in his fingers. "I won't need this much longer. And you can do whatever you want too, if you behave yourself and keep me happy."
She felt a tingle of warning. "What does that mean, exactly. . . ?"
"Do your job. Stay out of trouble." He paused to stare at her in a way that made her squirmingly uncomfortable. It was almost as though the attempted incursions into his hidden storage had appeared on her forehead like stigmata. "You have no idea what I've got going here."
She looked out at the endless ice fields, the northern lights shimmering. "But what about your employer? Where did he go? How is it that you have access to everything. . . ?" Nearby, a piece of ice the size of a football field groaned and shifted, lifting a jagged edge above the permafrost and tipping the entire plate on which Dulcie and Dread stood. She grunted in fear, staggered, and put her hand on Dread's arm for support.
He opened his eyes wide. "You don't have to worry," he said, although he seemed to be enjoying her discomfiture. "Even if you get killed here, you'll just drop offline. We're the only people left with on-and-off access."
"What about the owners? What are they called, the Grail people?"
He shrugged. "Things have changed a bit."
"And you can control the system? You can make things happen?"
He nodded. He seemed as pleased as a child, and Dulcie realized that just like a child, he was anxious to show off. "Anything you'd like to see?"
"Have you let those other people off the network, then?"
"Other people. . . ?"
"The ones we were traveling with—Martine, T4b, Sweet William. If you can control the access to the network, you should be able to set them free. . . ." She realized suddenly that she missed them. After living with them day in and day out for weeks, she knew them better than she knew most of the people in her real life. They had been so miserable, so frightened and trapped. . . .
Dread's blank look had become something even deeper and more distant. She pulled at his sleeve. "You are going to set them loose, aren't you?" When he did not answer, she tugged again. He snatched his arm away with a quick violence that almost yanked her off her feet.
"Shut up," he snapped. "Someone's using the main broadcast channel."
As she watched, in a white world silent but for the deep shifting of ice, his lips moved minutely as he subvocalized to the invisible someone. A slow smile stretched his face. He seemed to say something else, then his fingers flicked momentarily across the lighter. He turned to her slowly, eyes bright.
"Sorry about that. Something I'll have to see to later." He nodded. "What were you saying?"
"About the others—the ones the Grail had trapped online."
"Ah, yes. As a matter of fact, I've just been too busy to see to Martine and the rest. But I'll be getting to them directly. You're right—I need to deal with them." He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, his curious elation had been banked like the coals in a fire. "Come along—we've got one more thing to see."
Before she had time even to open her mouth the polar icecaps had dissolved and the two of them were hovering in midair above a vast and unbroken expanse of ocean. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, scalloping the wave-tops in brassy light, but otherwise there was nothing to see for miles, not even seabirds.
"What's this. . . ?" she began, but he flicked up his hand, demanding quiet.
They hung above the endless green for long moments, then Dulcie saw that the pattern of the waves was beginning to change just before them, the regular crisscross of breakers churning into something more chaotic. As she watched, openmouthed, the churn became a great boiling, the waves lifting into plumes dozens, perhaps, even hundreds of meters tall, flinging gobbets of froth into the air. Then, like the nose cone of a missile launched from some inconceivably huge submarine, the first tower top pierced the surface of the angry seas.
It lasted over an hour. For most of that time Dulcie was aware of nothing but the unfolding spectacle before her. The city heaved up from the waters with a surging roar, as though the earth itself were painfully giving birth—the spires of its tallest buildings first, tangled in great ropes of kelp, the walls of the citadel following closely behind, their armor of barnacles glittering wetly as they emerged into the sun. When the citadel had breasted, water sluicing down its roofs and walls before thundering into the ocean, turning the waters into white foam as far as she could see, the mountain and the rest of its clinging city arose, the drowned streets gleaming as they came back into the light.
When it was over, and the monstrous empty husk of island Atlantis had returned from the depths, Dread slipped his arm companionably around her shivering shoulders and leaned close to her ear.
"Play your cards right, sweetness," he whispered, "and someday all of this will be yours." He reached down and patted her on the buttocks. "I'll even dry it off for you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a few loose ends to deal with. Just keep out of trouble, and make sure that my loft doesn't catch on fire or anything, right? Cheers."
An instant later she was lying on the couch in the converted Redfern warehouse, muscles cramped and head pounding. Across the room, Dread's unmoving form lay like a corpse set out for viewing.
It was only when she had finished her shower and was sipping her second glass of wine of the afternoon that she realized she had just been taken on what must have been the strangest first date in history.
"Here, honey," Catur Ramsey told the little girl. "Come here and look at the giraffes."