Sea of Silver Light

The merchant Seneb fought clumsily, but the aged priest was no match. His mostly toothless mouth sagged open as the younger man seized him and cracked his head against the polished stone of the temple floor, over and over.

Dread's female guest had closed her eyes. He smiled. If she thought that would solve the problem, she might be interested to find out how easily her eyelids could be removed. He turned to his other guest, who was just begi

"A little bored?" Dread waved his silver staff and the merchant and priest melted screaming into puddles on the marble. The crowd of watchers shrieked too. Dread was intrigued; he had expected them all to be numbed to pain and death by now. "Well, then perhaps it's time to get on with our own business."

"You can torture me as much as you want," the woman said. "Even if you really were the Devil, I'd have nothing for you but the back of my hand."

"Oh, come now." Dread leaned over until his great muzzle touched her cheek and his nose pressed wetly on her ear. He licked the side of her face and wondered idly what it would feel like to take her head off in one bite. Would knowing it was a real person make it different? He had tried it enough times with this simworld's virtual inhabitants. "Let's play a game . . . what was your name? Ah, right, Bo

"I'll tell you nothing. Get thee behind me, Satan."

"Yes, well, I'm sure you'd keep your mouth shut like a good little martyr, no matter what I did to you, Little Red Riding Hood. At least at first. But let's not waste time." He turned and reached a massive hand toward the other prisoner. The ends of Dread's stark black fingers began to glow an incandescent red. "But how long can you stay quiet if it's your little Indian friend here that's taking the punishment?" He leered at his male captive. "Wishing you had made it out of this simulation before I took over, aren't you?" He closed his long fingers on the man's leg. Flesh sizzled and steamed. The prisoner's shrieks made even the numbed crowd moan and fall to the floor.

"No!" the woman screamed. "Stop it, you devil! Stop it!"

"But that's just the point, sweetness." Dread lifted his smoking fingers in a gesture of mock helplessness. "It's not up to me to stop it—it's up to you."

"Don't . . . don't tell him anything, Mrs. Simpkins!" Nandi Paradivash was shivering with agony, but struggling to remain upright. "I am no less bound than you. My life is nothing. My pain is nothing."

"Oh, on the contrary," said Dread. "It's quite a bit. And if she won't talk to save you, I think you will when I start on her." He gri

CHAPTER 14

The Stone Girl

NETFEED/NEWS: Net Has Its Own Folklore

(visual: artist's rendering of TreeHouse node)

VO: Net historian Gwenafra Glass says that, like all new countries, the net has its own folktales, mythical beasts, and ghosts.

GLASS: "You go back to the earliest days and you hear about things like cable lice. TreeHouse is another sort of example. It's a real node, but it's been embroidered over the years into something that's mostly fantasy. And more recently we have things like the Weeper, which is a strange sobbing voice people hear sometimes in unoccupied chat nodes and unfinished VR nodes. And of course an old folktale from the twentieth century, the gremlins that used to lock up fighter airplanes, has carried over into the Glowbugs and Lightsnakes that people these days claim to have seen in VR environments, but no one ever finds in the code. . . ."

Renie looked wildly from side to side, but could see no sign of whatever had made the sound. The nearest of the ghostly shapes pursuing her was a pale smear in the twilight murk, frighteningly close, but still several dozen meters away. She took a step to steady herself and to her horror felt something clutch at her ankle. She leaped away with a muffled shriek.

"Down here," a small voice said. "You can hide!"

Something rustled near Renie's feet. "I . . . I can't see you." Wind carried the pursuing creature's liquid groan down the slope. "Where are you?"

"Down. Get down!"

Renie dropped to her hands and knees amid the undergrowth, baffled by the shadows. One of the patches of darkness widened a little and a small hand reached out, closed on her wrist, and tugged. Renie crawled forward and found herself in a recess scarcely larger than her own huddled form, a space where a tangle of fallen branches had been silted over with crushed leaves and dirt. Pushing in headfirst, she could see nothing of the pocket's other inhabitant, and could feel only a childlike form pressed the length of her side. "Who are you?" she asked quietly.

"Sssshhh." The shape next to her stiffened. "It's close."

Renie's heart was still beating uncomfortably fast. "But won't it smell us?" she whispered.

"It doesn't smell things—it hears them."

Renie shut her mouth. She huddled, the smell of damp earth in her nostrils, and tried not to think about being buried alive.

She felt the hunter's approach before she heard it, a gradually growing sense of panic that made her skin tighten and her already speeding heart threaten to rattle right out of her chest. Was this the helpless, paralyzing horror that Paul Jonas felt each time the Twins came near him? Her respect for the man went up another notch, even as she fought down shrieking panic.

The terrifying thing had moved above them now; she could sense it as clearly as if a cloud had swung in front of the sun. Her throat tightened until the urge to scream was gone. She could not have made a noise if she wanted.

But the thing itself was not silent. It moaned again, the sound so pulsingly near that it seemed to turn Renie's bones to sand in their sockets, in the wake of that awful noise she could hear other sounds, a sighing murmur, as though the phantom whispered to itself in a voice of wind, meaningless sounds just on the edge of speech. The breathy gibberish was as unbearable as the scream. It was the sound of a dying or even dead intelligence, an empty madness. Renie, already in darkness, squeezed her eyes shut until her face ached, clenched her teeth together, and prayed directionlessly for strength.

The sounds gradually grew more faint. The sensation of hungry, brainless malevolence also lessened. Renie cautiously let out her breath. The shape beside her touched her arm with cool fingers, as though to warn her against premature celebration, but Renie had no urge at all to move or make a sound.

Several minutes passed before the small voice said, "I think they're all gone now."

Renie wasted no time backing out of the tiny cavern of twigs and leaf-scatter. Afternoon, or what passed for it in this sunless place, was almost entirely gone. The world was gray, but seemed still a bit too bright for this shank of twilight, as though the stones and even the trees gave off a faint light of their own.

The foliage rustled at her feet. The little figure that crawled out was mottled gray and brown, human-shaped but not very exactly so, as though it had been cut out of raw soil with a cookie cutter.

Renie took a step backward, "Who are you?"