!Xabbu's face fell. He shook his head.
"We don't know," Sam Fredericks explained. "We got separated."
!Xabbu seemed about to say something else, but Martine Desroubins, who it seemed had also survived the attentions of the fairy-tale crowd, was standing beside one of the wagons clapping her hands loudly. "Florimel, Paul, Javier—all of you," she called. "We must talk. Now." Suddenly distracted, she turned slowly toward the spot where Paul stood. Unlike him, she seemed to have no trouble seeing past the unfamiliar faces and forms. "Fredericks . . . !Xabbu?" She climbed down and fought her way through the crowd of refugees until she could put her arms around both of them.
Within moments Florimel had joined the group, laughing, seizing !Xabbu so hard Paul worried she would crack the little man's ribs. The Bushman seemed oddly reserved, but Paul thought it might be his own unfamiliarity with !Xabbu's human face. Even T4b allowed himself to be drawn into reunion embraces and the babble of half-articulated questions and answers.
"Enough," Martine said abruptly, although she still held Sam Fredericks' hand firmly in her own. "We do not come at a happy time, no matter how it eases our hearts to see you. Dread is behind us."
Fredericks screwed up her face in puzzlement. "Dread?"
"You have seen him only once, I think, on the top of the black mountain when he was the size of a god—an evil, angry god."
"Scanny! Yeah, I remember!"
"Well, that is the Dread who is coming—no, who is already here. The operating system fights him. There."
Only a few last flickers of lightning now blinked in the distant hills, gleaming scratches across the night sky, dim as firefly trails.
Paul and the others settled down around one of the campfires, huddled beneath the night. The Well pulsed beside them, a pit full of earthbound polar lights that turned even the few familiar faces grotesque.
Martine tried to keep some kind of order in the proceedings but curiosity and urgency made too volatile a mix: few questions were entirely answered before another volley had been launched. Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins and the little boy named Cho-Cho could only watch in amazement as the words fountained out of the others. Paul found himself almost as impressed by hearing the adventures of his own group recounted—it made a formidably strange tale—as he was by hearing what had happened to !Xabbu and Sam. But one element of their story struck him more powerfully than any other, until at last he had to interrupt Sam Fredericks in mid-flow.
"I'm sorry, but. . . ." His head was throbbing, his entire body so weak with stress and fatigue he could barely sit up, but he could not let this go. "I almost can't believe I'm hearing this. You traveled with Jongleur? With Felix Jongleur, the bastard who made this whole thing?" The bastard who stole my life away, he wanted to shout, but he could see by Sam's expression that she was not happy about it either.
"We . . . we thought we had to do it, even if it was majorly impacted." She looked to !Xabbu for support, but the little man had risen a few minutes earlier and walked off to do something, so she had to turn back to Paul. "Renie said . . . she said we might need him. Need what he knew."
Paul fought down his anger. "I'm amazed." He swallowed. "That you didn't just push him off a cliff, I mean. Or skull him with a rock." Paul sat up straight and tried to calm himself—there was much crucial information to share.
"Where did he go, finally? What happened to him?"
Sam took a moment to answer. "What . . . what do you mean?"
"When did you part ways with him, or did something eat him, I hope?"
Her age was truly apparent for the first time. She was suddenly a nervous teenager faced with an angry adult. "But . . . he's here." She looked at Paul and his companions as though they should know this already. "Right over there," she said, pointing.
Paul felt a kind of tightness around his temples, a band of pain. Only a few meters away Azador and a bald man in dark clothes stood watching them, Azador talking animatedly, his companion silent, eyes half-shut. "That's . . . that's him?" Paul's chest felt like someone was sitting on it. "That's Felix Jongleur?"
"Yes, but. . . ." Before Fredericks could get out another word, Paul was on his feet and running.
Azador looked up. "Ionas, my friend!" he said, opening his arms, but Paul was already past him. He threw his full weight onto the bald man and dragged him to the ground. Jongleur had seen him coming, but Paul's anger was such that for the first moments there was no stopping him. He seized Jongleur's head in both hands and smashed it back against the ground, then climbed up onto him and began swinging at his face. The man fought back, throwing up his arms to block Paul's wild blows, writhing in an effort to unseat him. Paul had the satisfaction of feeling some of his punches land on Jongleur's hard head, but it seemed to be happening at a distance greater than the length of his arms. Voices were shouting in his head and his exploding rage seemed to have knocked time slightly out of joint.
Stole my life! Tried to kill me!
He swung again and again.
Bastard! Murderer!
He was grunting some of the words out loud. There were other voices too—Paul could dimly hear people calling his name, pulling at his arms—but Jongleur stayed coldly silent. The older man had weathered the flurry of blows; now his hand snaked up and clutched Paul's chin, forcing his head backward until his vertebrae threatened to separate.
"Kill you!" Paul shouted, but Jongleur was slipping away from him as though Paul were on the bank of a river and his enemy on a boat in the current. Dimly, through the haze of anger and adrenaline, he realized that he was wrapped now in several arms and was being lifted from the ground and off his quarry. At least two of the men holding him were Gypsies, muscular men who smelled of wood-smoke.
"Let me go!" lie bellowed, but it was no use. He was held too firmly.
"Just stop," Florimel said in his ear. "You will do no good, Paul."
Azador had pulled Jongleur back out of Paul's reach. "Why are you doing this?" the Gypsy demanded. "You are my good friend, Ionas. But this man, too, he is my friend. Why should friends fight?"
Paul heard Azador's words but could make no sense of them. He stared at Jongleur with helpless hatred. The older man returned his look, his face a mask of placid contempt, a trickle of blood from his nose the only sign of what had happened.
"Martine?" someone asked. Paul realized for the first time that the blind woman was part of the crowd pinioning him. "Martine?"
"What is it, Sam?"
"I can't find him, Martine." Sam Fredericks looked pale even in the odd, metallic light from the great pit. "He's gone somewhere—gone!"
"Who are you talking about?" Martine asked. Some of the people holding Paul began to loosen their grips, although the two Gypsy men still held him securely. "Who's gone?"
"!Xabbu," Sam said miserably. "He got up from the campfire but he never came back. And now I can't find him anywhere."
Watching the others split up into pairs to search for !Xabbu should have made Sam feel better, but it didn't. Something in the suddenness of his disappearance made her certain that what had happened to him was much worse than simply wandering off or getting lost.
!Xabbu doesn't get lost, she told herself and was miserable again.
She knew she couldn't just stand and wait for the others to come back, but she had no idea of where else to look. She had already been all along the fringes of the Gypsy camp, calling the small man's name into the press of refugees beyond the circled wagons, and that was probably what Martine and the rest were doing right now, too, but she could think of no better way to spend her time. Anything was better than just sitting here, cooling her heels at the end of the world.