Read Online Sea of Silver Light by Tad Williams - Free Book Online

and carry you all the way down this damned mountain, tired as I am?" Suddenly realizing that she was indeed exhausted, she slumped down next to the girl. "Are you really going to do that to me?"
    Sam looked at her solemnly, struggling for self-control. Her breath hitched; she waited until she could speak. "I'm sorry, Renie. But how can we go anywhere with . . . with. . . ?"
    "I know. I hate the bastard—I'd like to throw him off the mountain myself. But we're going to have to live with Felix Jongleur until we get some answers to what's going on. What's that old saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?" Renie squeezed the girl's arm. "This is a war, Sam. Not just a single battle. Putting up with that terrible man . . . well, it's like being a spy behind foreign lines or something. We have to do it because we have a bigger purpose."
    Sam looked down, unable to hold Renie's gaze. "Chizz," she said after long moments, but she sounded like death. "I'll try. But I'm not going to talk to him."
    "Fine." Renie clambered to her feet. "Come on. I didn't just bring you out here to talk to you alone. We still have to. . . ." She broke off as a shape moved slowly around one of the broken spikes of stone which were the primary features of the barren landscape. The handsome young man who stood there said nothing, but only stared back, empty-eyed as a goldfish in a bowl.
    "What the hell do you want?" Renie asked him.
    The dark-haired man did not answer for a moment. "I . . . am Ricardo Klement," he said at last.
    "We know." Just because he was brain-damaged didn't mean he had earned any of Renie's sympathy. Before the Ceremony went awry, he had been another one of the Grail murderers, just like Jongleur. "Go away. Leave us alone." Klement blinked slowly. "It is good . . . to be alive." After another pause he turned and disappeared among the rocks.
    "This is so utterly horrible," Sam said weakly. "I . . . I don't want to be here anymore, Renie."
    "Neither do I." Renie patted her shoulder. "That's why we have to keep going, find our way home. No matter how much we want to give up." She grabbed Sam's arm and squeezed again, trying to make her hear, force her to understand. "No matter how much. Now come on, girl, get on your feet—let's go find some more rocks."
     
    !Xabbu was using the stones they had already gathered to construct a wall around Orlando's naked sim, something that looked more like a lidless coffin than a cairn. The pseudo-stones, like the rest of the environment on the black mountain, were slowly changing: with every hour that passed they looked less like the thing they were supposed to be, more like a sort of cursory 3D sketch. Orlando's Achilles sim, though, had retained its almost supernatural realism: lying in the improvised tomb, he did indeed look like a fallen demigod.
    Confronted with her friend's empty shell, Sam was crying again. "He is dead, isn't he? I keep wanting it not to be true, but that's probably how everyone feels, right?"
    Renie recalled the achingly bleak months after her mother's death. "Yes, it is. You'll be seeing him, hearing him, only he won't be there. But it gets better after a while."
    "It'll never get better. Never." Sam leaned down to touch Orlando's stony cheek. "But he is dead, isn't he? Really, really dead."
    Renie was finding it almost as difficult as Sam to contemplate leaving behind a body that still looked so full of life. There had been other strange signs too. Unlike all the other sims she had seen whose living owners had died, Orlando's garments had remained soft and supple despite the marble-like solidity of the body beneath. This strange state of affairs had even made Renie wonder for a while if he might not still be living, just lost somehow in his own deep coma back in real life, but numerous surreptitious experiments—performed when Sam was otherwise distracted so as not to raise her hopes—had made Renie as certain as she could ever be in