"Do we just wait here until they find us?" Bonnie Mae Simpkins demanded in a breathless whisper.
"What are those things?" said Florimel. "Where did such monsters come from?"
Nandi Paradivash looked down at where Paul lay beside Sam's feet, still locked in some miserable dream. "They are copies of the real Twins—the men who have followed Jonas through the network. Apparently there are many of these duplicate versions, all obsessed with Jongleur's daughter, but usually harmless. Dread has control of the system, even though for the moment the Other is keeping him at bay. Apparently he has found a way to mutate these copies."
"But why?" Florimel demanded. She flinched as a long, choking scream cut through the already terrible noises above them, then plucked a nervously fidgeting monkey off her forehead and deposited it back on her shoulder. "He cannot destroy the operating system this way—all he is doing is killing the children! Is he simply mad?"
"He wants us to give up," Martine said in a slow, dead voice. "He wants us to surrender, to save the children."
"But even if we did they'd never survive." Sam waved her hands, trying to get the others to listen. "He's killing the what-do-you-call-it—the operating system! They'll all die anyway!"
"Perhaps . . . perhaps Dread is being more clever than we give him credit for." Martine sounded frighteningly hollow, as if she no longer cared about anything. That scared Sam badly. "He was clearly startled and very angry to find that the Other was still resisting him, but it he destroys it completely, he loses control of the network. Maybe he is not really expecting to lure us out. Maybe by doing this terrible thing to these children the Other is protecting, he is trying to drive the operating system insane."
"But don't any of you care?" Florimel's anguished words tore through the din. "Those are our children out there! Our children! And those creatures are murdering them! My daughter Eirene—I can feel her beside me at this moment, feel her real body next to mine, I swear it! She must be terrified, her heart is beating so fast! Because whatever part of her the Other stole must also be out there—and those things will murder her!"
And who else is up there with her? Sam wondered miserably. Who else is getting crushed and eaten right next to us? Renie's brother? T4b's friend? That poor kid who called himself Senbar Flay in the Middle Country? A great, cold hopelessness folded around her. Everything was pointless now. If they had shared one goal, it was to save the children and get themselves out of the network alive. They were going to fail on both counts.
"So what do we do?" Bonnie Mae said in a cracked, urgent voice. "Let them go on slaughtering the innocents?"
"Princess!" The jiggling bulk of Jack Sprat's wife appeared atop the rim of the pit only a dozen meters away. Sam and her friends shrank back against the ledge but the shapeless face was staring out over the pulsing waters and did not see them. The groaning, belching voice no longer sounded human at all. "Come back to us, Princess—we want to eat you up!"
Her scrawny, hideous husband followed her to the edge of the crater then began to move sideways along the rim, snatching up and throttling anything it could catch. It was headed right toward their hiding place. Even if it did not know they were there it would stumble onto them in moments. "Kill until you feed us," it creaked. "Feed us."
Bonnie Mae had fallen into prayer again. Almost paralyzed with fear, Sam looked at the looming Twins for a second, then turned her head away. She, too, wanted to close her eyes—not to pray, but so that she wouldn't have to see the things that were going to kill them all. Instead she found herself staring at a spreading darkness in the Well itself, a cloudy obscurity that rippled out from a point near the shoreline, dousing the vast, pulsing lights as it grew.
It's really dying, she thought. We're all going to die in the dark. . . ! Then something else caught her attention. A prickle of smaller lights trailed up through the darkness, tiny incandescent bubbles that grew more numerous by the second.
"Look," she said softly, then realized no one could hear her. "Look!"
Something was rising from the troubled waters. The angel again? Sam wondered. The Other? Is the Other finally coming? But it did not feel that way, nothing like the immense cold presence that had filled the Freezer. It was something smaller and more human—she could even get a dim sense of its shape now, a murky silhouette swimming upward through the midst of the twinkling lights.
The thing that broke the surface of the Well and clambered up onto the rim was the size and shape of a man, the lean, muscular body gleaming with smears of phosphorescence. The lights of the Well had faded to a dull gleam—even the massive Twins had become shadowy, obscure shapes. Frosted with streaks of light, the newcomer was the brightest thing on the landscape and all eyes turned toward him. For a sinking instant Sam thought it was Ricardo Klement, but then he turned and raised his sword and his face lifted so that she could see his profile, his long black mane of hair. Her heart exploded with astonishment and joy.
The Wicked Tribe rose shrieking from Nandi's shoulders. " 'Landogarner! 'Landogarner!"
"Orlando!" Sam screamed. "Oh, my God, it's Orlando!"
The roar of both murderers and victims had fallen away, but if he heard Sam's cry the newcomer gave no sign. He turned toward the Twins and pointed his sword at them, a mixture of salute and threat. The Jack Sprat thing let out a sobbing noise—Sam recognized only a moment later that it was an excited laugh—and lurched toward him. The lights of the Well suddenly blazed up again, returning the world to unsteady twilight.
Sam was scrambling up over the lip of their shoreline refuge when someone caught her by the leg and dragged her back down. She shouted in anger and slapped wildly at the restraining hand, certain it was Jongleur, but it was Nandi Paradivash, his face like gray marble in the light from the Well.
"Let him go," he told her. "This is his fight, I think."
"That's fenfen! I have to help him. . . !" She kicked, but Florimel had grabbed her other leg and would not let go.
"No, Sam," she growled. "The rest of us, we will only slow him down. See!"
"Yes, look," said Martine. "The Other has played his knight."
Sam had no idea what she meant and did not care—she could only tug helplessly against her friends' restraining hands. Orlando had sprung toward his huge adversary, the Thargor body moving with a speed she hadn't seen since the Middle Country simulation, his sword so quick it was all but invisible in the strange half-light from the Well. He struck three hard blows against Jack Sprat's legs before it could swipe at him for the first time, so that it was stumbling by the time its arm flailed out toward him. Even so it was a near-miss: the twiggy fingers whickered past his head so swiftly Sam knew they would have smashed it off his shoulders if Orlando had not flung himself to the ground.
Sam could not take her eyes from what was happening, even as she felt the others crowding up behind her. It was a dream, a nightmare—Orlando! Fighting for his life!
But there was something different about him, she saw now—not just his speed but even his shape. The body he wore was not the Thargor of the last days gaming in the Middle Country, the scarred, battle-hardened veteran of a hundred wars, nor even the younger version of the character he had become when they first crossed into the Grail network. This new Thargor was still muscular but lithe and lighter of foot than he had ever been in the Middle Country, as though Sam watched a version of the character she had never seen—a stripling Thargor that had existed only in Orlando's imagination.