The waters were almost entirely dark, the radiance that had once danced there only a flicker now; it barely touched the cocoon of cloudy gray overhead, so that even the few campfires seemed to give out more light than the Well. The growing shadow on both sides of the barrier held one other benefit: Paul had no doubt that Dread still waited beyond the cloud-wall, but at least they didn't have to watch that man-shaped point of infinite night pacing calmly back and forth on the other side anymore.
Out of his childhood a snatch of the Bible came to him. "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in if."
But there are two Satans in this universe, Paul thought. And one of them is in here. With us.
He stared at Felix Jongleur who, like Paul, sat some distance from the fire and the other survivors. Jongleur stared back. Their companions seemed far more interested in Orlando, who had not yet regained consciousness. But except for having been dead—something Paul thought was usually considered a fairly serious medical problem—the boy seemed to be suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion.
Nobody cares about me, he thought. Except the man who tried to kill me. But why should they care? They don't know what I know.
It had all come back—not just the terrible last moments in the tower, but with it all the little missing pieces, the day-to-day boredom and routine, everything that had been hidden from him by the post-hypnotic block.
"She's dead," he said to Jongleur. "Ava's been dead all along, hasn't she?"
"Then your memories are unlocked." Jongleur spoke slowly. "Yes, she is dead."
"So why was she here? Why did she keep . . . appearing to me?" He looked over at the others huddled around Orlando. They were only a few meters away but he felt so disconnected from them it could have been a Hundred times that. "Is it something like what happened to that boy—to Orlando Gardiner?"
Jongleur gave him a brief appraising glance. Even the firelight sparkling in his eyes did not make him look more alive. He looks like something stuffed, Paul thought. Something with glass eyes. Dead eyes.
"I do not know," Jongleur said at last. "I do not know what the boy is, although I have my suspicions. But my Avialle, when she died . . . all that was left were copies."
"Copies?" The word, although half-expected, chilled him.
"From earlier versions of the Grail process. Different mind-scans made at different times. None wholly satisfactory." He frowned as though about to send back an unimpressive wine.
"Like that Tinto from the Venetian simulation," Paul said. "I was right." Jongleur raised an eyebrow at the name but said nothing. "How did the . . . how did Ava—all those Avas—get into the system? Why did she keep appearing to me?"
Jongleur shrugged. "After she died, when I found that all the stored copies, even those made of Finney and Mudd, had been dumped, I thought there had been some malfunction in the Grail system. It is a huge and fearfully complex enterprise, after all." His eyes narrowed. "I did not realize that the Other—the operating system—had broken the bonds of its confinement, had made its way out of the strait-jacket of the network and into my own system. Even when I . . . saw her for the first time in one of my simulations, I did not understand how one of the copies could have made its way into the Grail network." His back straightened and his jaw set; Paul thought he looked like someone trying to mask either great pain or anger. "I was visiting my Elizabethan simworld. I saw her in Southwark, near the Globe Playhouse, being pursued by two cutthroats who looked like Mudd and Finney. I caught them and immobilized them for later study but she escaped. It was then I realized that all the missing copies must have somehow been dumped into the Grail network, but I still did not suspect the operating system."
"So . . . all the versions of the Twins are just copies?"
It was horrible having to cajole information out of this cruel man, this murderer, but the hunger for answers was too strong.
"No, Finney and Mudd still exist. After . . . what happened with Avialle they were punished—imprisoned, in a sense—but they still work for me. They are the ones that pursued you through the Grail network after your escape."
"But why, damn it?" For a moment the anger came back again in a surge of heat up his spine. It was all he could do to remain seated. "Why me? Why am I so damned important?"
"You? You are nothing. But to my Avialle you were something." The old man scowled and lowered his eyes. "The copies of her, all those ghosts—they were drawn to you. Not that I knew it at first. After Avialle was lost, I kept you imprisoned and unconscious. I still had many questions about what had happened. I implanted a neurocannula and brought you into one of my Grail network simulations so I could . . . investigate."
"So you could torture me," Paul spat.
Jongleur shrugged. "Call it what you will. I have almost no physical life anymore. I wanted you in my realm. But I soon noticed that you had attracted attention from . . . something. It was always fleeting, but I was able to capture traces. It was Avialle—or rather, the duplicate versions of Avialle. They were drawn to you, somehow. They could not keep away from you for long."
"She loved me," Paul said.
"Shut your mouth. You have no right to speak of her now."
"It's true. And my sin was that all I could truly offer her was pity. But that's still more than you can say, isn't it?"
Jongleur stood, pale with fury, and raised his clenched fists. "Pig. I should kill you."
Paul rose too. "You're welcome to try. Go on—you've done everything else to me that you could."
Paul's companions had turned as his argument with Jongleur grew louder. Azador hurried over to them. "Please, my friends, no more fighting. We have an enemy already—and he is enough for us all, eh?"
Paul shrugged his shoulders and sat down. Azador whispered something in Jongleur's ear, then went back to the group gathered around Orlando. Jongleur stared at Paul for a long moment before lowering himself back to the ground. "You will speak no more of that," he said coldly.
"I will speak of what I want. If you hadn't imprisoned her, treated her like something in a museum, none of this would have happened."
"You understand nothing," Jongleur said, but the fire was gone from his voice. "Nothing."
For a while Paul only listened to the distant hissing and popping of the fire, his companions' murmuring conversation. "So you stuck me in that simulation of the First World War," he said at last. "You staked me out. I was the bait,"
Jongleur looked at him as if from a great distance. "I hoped to bring her close enough to capture, yes. Perhaps eventually to gather enough of the copies to reconstitute something close to the real Avialle."
"Why? Was it anything so normal as a father's love? Or was it something less pleasant? Was it just because she was yours, and you wanted back what belonged to you?"
The old man was rigid. "What is in my heart . . . is for no man to know."
"Heart? You have a heart?" He expected anger, but this time Jongleur seemed too chilled and weary even to respond. "So what was it all about, then? All that madness, that bizarre museum of a house and grounds—what did you intend?"
Jongleur did not speak for a long time. "Do you know what an ushabti is?" he said at last.
Paul shook his head, puzzled. "I don't know the word."
"It does not matter," Jongleur said. "In fact, all this talk is worthless. We will both be dead soon. When the system collapses everyone here will die."