Renie was the first to wake. She rolled over and looked at Sam twitching in uneasy slumber. The girl was bearing up as well as could be expected, but Renie was worried: she suspected the teenager's restraint was due mostly to the flattening of exhaustion. Acting on impulse, she gently withdrew the ruined sword from Sam's waistband, then sat back and waited for Jongleur to wake.
!Xabbu and the hard-faced man began to stir at the same time. Felix Jongleur seemed to be having a bad dream—his hands clenched and unclenched, and his lips were moving as though he were trying to speak. It made Renie feel more than a little happy to think that something might be preying on the monster's conscience.
Jongleur started upright, muttering, "No, the glass. . . ." then looked around blearily. His gaze touched on Ricardo Klement, lying a meter away, eyes open but otherwise almost lifeless. Jongleur shuddered and rubbed his face.
"So," Renie said suddenly and loudly. "What's with you and Paul Jonas, anyway?"
Jongleur froze like a startled animal, then his face became as carefully expressionless as the mask he had worn as lord of ancient Egypt. "What did you say?"
"I asked what your problem is with Paul Jonas." She kept her own voice aggressively casual, but her heart was beating fast.
Jongleur was on his feet in an instant, moving aggressively toward her. "What do you know of him?"
Renie was ready. The broken sword blade flashed up, inches from his face. Jongleur froze again, staring, lip curled and showing teeth.
"I don't think you should come any closer," she said. "What are you, anyway—French? There's still a little accent to your English. Maybe you're used to those North African black women, the ones whose husbands tell them what to do. Well, I'm not that kind of African, old man. Back up and sit down."
He moved no closer, but did not retreat either. "Accent? A poor jibe from you, with your school grammar draped over the township patois." His hands were knotted, knuckles like little white eggs. Renie could tell that the autocrat was only one bad decision on her part from trying to use them on her, sword or no sword. "What do you know of Jonas?" he demanded again.
"That's not the way we're going to play this game." She saw that !Xabbu was sitting up now, watching her carefully, silently. "You said before that we weren't going to get any information from you for free. Okay, I suppose that's fair. We know a lot about Paul Jonas. You know a lot about the network. Let's trade."
He had mastered his rage now, although the cords in his neck and arms were still pulled tight. "You think much of yourself, woman."
"No. I know my limitations—that's why I don't feel very comfortable about our arrangement. You need our help to get down this godforsaken mountain, but what do we get back for it? If we do make it down and you disappear on us, we have nothing but another enemy on the loose."
Jongleur narrowed his eyes. "I saved your life."
Renie snorted. "That would carry more weight if I didn't know you'd just as happily push me as catch me. And we've saved yours since then, anyway. None of this has anything to do with what I'm talking about. Let's share, shall we?"
Sam also sat up now, a child to whom waking into bizarre situations was sadly becoming second nature. Nevertheless, this time she was watching the proceedings with a curiously feverish intensity. !Xabbu moved close to the girl, perhaps to keep her from intervening in this edgy bit of diplomacy. Renie felt strengthened by his trust.
"What do you want to know?" Jongleur said. "And what do you have to trade?"
"You already know what we have to trade. Paul Jonas. We know him—we know him well. In fact, we've traveled with him." She watched carefully and was rewarded by a flicker deep in Jongleur's eyes. "Why don't you tell us about the Other?"
"Ah. You have learned some things, then."
"Not enough. What is it? How does it work?"
His laugh was as harsh and sudden as a shark bite. "You must be more of a fool than I thought. I spent enough money to dwarf the national product of your miserable country developing this system, put years of my life into it, and had dozens of people killed to protect my investment. Do you believe I would give that away for nothing?"
"Nothing? Is Paul Jonas really nothing?" She frowned—his face had gone cold again. "He was with us, you know. You were within a dozen meters of him back on the mountaintop, when everything started falling apart." She saw his expression of disbelief and laughed harshly. "He was! Right there, and you didn't even know it."
Jongleur was clearly wrestling with the idea. For the first time she saw a real crack in his facade of power, a shadow of unhappiness. "It does not matter," he said at last. "He is not here now. I want Jonas himself, not old news. Can you deliver him to me?"
Renie hesitated for a moment, trying to figure out which way to take it. "Maybe."
Jongleur's smile was slow and humorless. "You lie. This conversation is over."
Stung, Renie tightened her grip on the sword hilt. "Oh, yes? Before we even get a chance to talk about your daughter Ava?"
To her astonishment, Jongleur actually staggered a step backward. His face went bloodless, so that his dark eyes seemed to bulge out of the sockets. "You speak her name to me again and I will kill you, blade or no blade," he said in a grating whisper. He was struggling for control and barely succeeding, and that was the most frightening thing Renie had seen so far. "You know nothing of anything . . . in far over your head. Not . . . not another word! You understand?" He turned and moved out onto the path. Just before he stepped out of sight, he turned and thrust a quivering finger toward her. "Not another word!"
When he was gone, silence fell in the small enclosure. Sam was looking at Renie with wide eyes.
"Okay," Renie suddenly felt very shaky. "Okay, if that's the way he wants it. He's a murdering bastard anyway, so it's not like we're going to be friends." She hesitated for a moment, then handed the broken sword back to Sam. "In case he's angry enough to push me off the edge or something. Keep it safe."
"Chizz," said Sam in a muted voice.
Jongleur stayed well ahead of them for hours, although he was almost always within sight, shoulders stiff, face resolutely forward. A part of Renie wanted to speak mockingly of his behavior—the most powerful man in the world, who had climbed over the bodies of countless people to get to the top, had stalked off like an angry child when the game did not go his way. But that snide inner voice, she recognized, came from the part of her that feared the man and which wanted desperately to bolster her own courage. A more sensible portion of her realized she had touched something deep and catastrophically dangerous in Jongleur. She had seen his quick and frightening angers, but this had been something different, an ice-cold fury that she feared would not dissipate.
She had goaded a bad man, it seemed, and made him into a personal enemy.
Things might have been worse with Jongleur had the mountain not still demanded all their attention. The path was growing worse, a slow but obvious devolution, and they were all disheartened. Almost half the time now was spent edging along the narrow trail with their backs against the stone, forced to stare at the ugly drop down into the weird silvery mist. Even Jongleur appeared to decide on practicality after a while, dropping back until he was only an arm's length in front of !Xabbu, but they found no place wide enough-for a safe transfer of leadership for many hours.
After they did, !Xabbu led for a long time, holding down his speed so Renie and the others could keep up, although even the Bushman was visibly flagging. They had several near-accidents because of fatigue, but what was even more depressing was how clear it was that they had reached the very end of the trail's usefulness. At this pace, Renie felt sure, the equivalent of another day in this hourless place would find them with their faces pressed against the mountainside, edging along on tiptoes.