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What would he say now? she wondered. Everything vanished, Renie gone, Sam trapped in the middle of literally nowhere?
"Neck-deep in fenfen and waiting for the tide to rise," that was what he'd told her once in the Middle Country, when they'd turned from stuffing their pockets full of treasure to discover a twenty-meter-long snake forcing its way in through the underground chamber's only exit.
That's where I am now, Gardino, she thought. For real this time. Wailing for the tide to rise. . . .
!Xabbu saw the tears ru
"I knew she was the most reliable of you," Jongleur said disdainfully, "but I would not have thought you two would collapse so quickly in her absence. Have you no backbone at all? We must go on."
The bony-faced man was such a horror Sam could not even look at him, but !Xabbu grew tense beside her. "It is foolish to go when we have no idea where we are going," the small man said. "Did you have any better luck searching than I did?"
Jongleur hissed out breath, as though he had sprung a small leak. "No. There is nothing. If I had not taken my steps carefully and followed backward along the same track, you might never have seen me again."
"Wouldn't that be sad."
Jongleur ignored her. "That is doubtless what happened to your companion. Wandered off after we made the transition to whatever this place is, and ca
"Renie would not do such a thing," !Xabbu said firmly. "She is too smart for that."
Jongleur flicked his hand dismissively. "Still, she is lost, however you choose to explain it. As is Klement." His smile was wintry. "I suppose we can be fairly certain they have not eloped."
!Xabbu rose to his feet. He was a full head shorter than Jongleur, but something in his posture made the taller man step backward. "Unless you have something useful to say, you will stop talking about her. Now."
Jongleur peered down at him, a
"No more remarks." !Xabbu stared at Jongleur for a long moment while Sam watched them both, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that without !Xabbu she would be alone with this ancient monster. Jongleur stared back. At last, !Xabbu put his hand down and touched her arm. "He is right only in one thing, Sam. We can wait a little longer for Renie, but even if she is nearby, we might not find her. Sound does not carry well in this place. She could pass a hundred meters from us and we would not know it. At some point we must move on and hope that we find her along the way."
"We can't . . . just go without her!"
For a moment !Xabbu's composure slipped, giving Sam a glimpse of the pain he was hiding. "If . . . something has happened to her. . . ." He stopped and darted a look at Jongleur, clearly unwilling to show such things in the man's presence. "If we ca
He spoke with his normal calm, but such desolation lay just behind the words that Sam felt as though her own river of sorrow had met another at least as great—that if they were not both very careful, the combined waters might overflow the banks and flood the world.
The poor visibility meant that she had to stay fairly close to Jongleur while !Xabbu did his work, and it was all she could do to keep her loathing of the man in check. His proud face seemed made of stone, a chiseled monument, like Sam's own father at his stiffest and angriest, but without the redeeming sense of humor she could always tease out of him. She could not help wondering how someone with Jongleur's wealth and power could turn himself into a thing, could bend so many lives with his cruelty . . . for what? Just to keep himself alive? To enjoy centuries more of cold, unhappy power? Sam had trouble at the best of times understanding why old people would want to continue on, long past the point they could do anything that she could imagine as worth doing; someone like Jongleur, who had already lasted into a third human life span, was beyond her grasp.
Orlando had been afraid of dying, too—terrified of it, she realized now, and all those death-simulations had been meant to desensitize him to what was coming so unfairly soon. But even if he had been given the chance to escape that death, would he have done what this man had done, taken the lives of i
Even her father had told her once, when she was battling her mother over her name, "If you want to be Sam, be Sam—just be the best damn Sam you can." His serious scowl had suddenly become a laugh. "Someone ought to put that in a children's book."
Missing her father and her wide-eyed, nervously affectionate mother suddenly became a hurt at least as great as the pain of losing Orlando, and for a moment a shadow threatened to overtake her completely. Sam stared at Jongleur sitting a few meters away and could not tell if the dimness was the mist or her own teary eyes, but she knew that whatever happened, she didn't ever want to be like him, angry and frozen and alone. . . .
A movement startled her out of her thoughts. !Xabbu's small form appeared from the gray. He sat down beside her gingerly, as though he ached.
"Well?" snapped Jongleur.
!Xabbu ignored him. He took Sam's hand—she hadn't quite become used to his frequent, careful touching, but she still found it reassuring—and asked her how she was feeling.
"Better, I think." She smiled a little, realizing it was true. "Did it work?"
He wearily returned the smile. "As I often say to Renie, the skills I have are not the sort that turn on and turn off. But I think I am making sense of things, yes, perhaps a bit."
Jongleur made a quiet hissing noise. "Any other man of my generation would find it comical to see me staking my life on two Africans and, unless I miss my guess about this girl, a Creole—and we have already lost one of the Africans." He rolled his eyes. "But I have never been a bigot. If some instinct of yours will show the way out of this place, then damn you, tell us."
!Xabbu shot him a look of real dislike—one of the strongest things Sam had seen from him. "It is not 'instinct,' not in the sense you mean. Everything I know about finding my way has been learned, taught to me by my father's family. They taught me other things you do not seem to know either, like kindness and good sense." He turned his back on Jongleur, who seemed stuck between outrage and sour amusement. "I am sorry to have left you with this man, Sam, but I had to move far enough away that I could not see you, could not even hear the two of you breathing. All in this network is stranger than in the real world, and it has been hard at the best of times to make sense of things. But this place is even more difficult—until a little while ago, I would have said there was nothing at all to sense beside ourselves. It might still be true—like a starving man hoping to scent game, I might have convinced myself of what is not true."
"You think you . . . smelled something?"
"Not exactly, Sam. For a long time I just sat, trying, as I said, to forget the sounds and smells of you and . . . and this man. For some of the time, I hoped I might hear Renie calling far away." He shook his head sadly. "But after a time I gave up and just . . . opened myself. It is not mystical," he said hurriedly, peering over his shoulder at Jongleur. "Rather it is being able truly to hear, to smell, to see—the things people in the city world seldom do, because everything they need comes to them, hurries toward them as though it were shot out of a gun." His face grew solemn as he searched for words. "After a while, I began to feel something. Perhaps it is a little like Martine, how she senses things—it takes a while to understand the patterns here—but I think it is simply that I finally had the stillness and . . . what is the word? Alone-ness? I finally had a chance to hear." He squeezed Sam's hand again and stood up. "That way," he said, pointing outward into a portion of the pearly void no different than any other. "It could be that my mind is making things up, but I feel there is something there, in that direction."