"What?" Paul was almost screaming. "Good Lord, this man has been killing your people but you're just going to let bygones be bygones because you're you're . . . bloody chums now? How can you?"

"Because it never happened," Jongleur said scornfully. "These are his people, what is left of them." He waved his hand to indicate the wreckage of the wagons, the remaining Gypsy men and women huddled around their fires. "Everything else was fantasy."

"!Xabbu!" Sam said, louder this time. "Everybody, I utterly forgot about !Xabbu because of those monsters, and Orlando, and . . . and everything. He went into that pit-he dived in! I went in after him but it spit me out and I couldn't get him. He thought Renie was down there!"

This set the circle around the campfire buzzing.

"Then he is gone, Sam," Florimel said at last. There was something softer and sadder in her tone now.

"Orlando came back from there!" Sam said angrily.

"That is different, Sam," Martine told her. "You know that it is."

Because he isn't alive like !Xabbu, Sam thought but didn't say. That's what she means. Deep down, much as she hated it, she knew Martine was right. Several of her companions were all talking at once now. Because Orlando didn't come back from there, he was . . . born from there.

"There is an easy way to find out if she is there," said Jongleur loudly. A sour smile played around the edge of his mouth. "But I am sure you have thought of it already and need no assistance from a monster like me."

"Don't push your luck," Martine warned him. "If you have something useful to say, do so."

"Very well. Do you still have your communication device? I was with the woman Renie when you called her before. Why not call her again?"

"My God," Martine said. "My God, with everything going on I had completely forgotten." She pulled a chunky silver lighter from the pocket of her coveralls.

"How did you get that?" Sam asked, completely confused. "Renie had it!"

"It is a copy," Martine told her. "I will explain later."

Sam saw the glint of satisfaction-or perhaps something else-in the hawk-faced man's eyes. She jumped to her feet and pointed at Jongleur. "Don't let him get near it!"

He spread his hands. "I am on the other side of the fire. There are, as you pointed out, many of you and only one of me."

Martine lifted the lighter. "Renie," she said, "can you hear me? It's Martine. Renie, are you there?"

For long moments, there was nothing.

"Can you hear me, Renie?"

Then suddenly her familiar voice was in their midst, as close and clear as if she had joined them at the campfire. "Martine? Martine, is that you?"

Martine laughed with delight. "Renie! Oh, what a blessing to hear you. Where are you?"

"I'm . . . I don't really know. Inside the operating system, I guess. But that's only the beginning of how bizarre this all is. !Xabbu is with me. . . ."

"!Xabbu!" Sam found herself crying again. "He's alive!"

"Can you hear Sam Fredericks?" Martine said, still laughing. "She. . . ."

Something knocked Martine to the ground. Sam shouted and stood up. Orlando, still sore and weary, took a full two seconds to struggle to his feet beside her. Azador stood over Martine, the lighter in his hand and a hugely triumphant grin on his face.

"I have it back!" he shouted. "I have it back!"

The voice seemed to come out of nowhere.

"Renie," it said, "can you hear me? It's Martine. Renie, are you there?"

She had fallen into a sort of half-drowse, exhaustion having finally overwhelmed everything else, and for a long moment she could not even remember where she was.

"!Xabbu, what's going on?" She stared at the dry pan, the thorn bushes and the brightly starred sky, trying to imagine where Martine could be. Could you dream inside a dream?"

"Can you hear me, Renie?" Martine asked again.

"It is in your kaross." !Xabbu pointed at the antelope-hide garment she wore. Renie fumbled out the device. It was still a lighter, just as it had always been, although it now seemed the most unlikely object in an entire, unlikely world. She pressed hot points in sequence, praying she had remembered the right order. "Martine? Martine, is that you?"

"Renie! Oh, what a blessing to hear you. Where are you?"

She looked at !Xabbu, then down at the small shape of Grandfather Mantis crouched at the bottom of the gulley beside the trickling stream. It lay on its side now, legs drawn up. It must still be breathing, she thought distractedly, or all this would be gone.

But do gods breathe? she wondered an instant later.

"I'm . . . I don't really know. Inside the operating system, I guess. But that's only the beginning of how bizarre this all is. !Xabbu is with me. . . ."

"Can you hear Sam Fredericks?" Martine sounded absolutely joyful. Renie felt tears spring to her eyes.

"She. . . ."

Abruptly, the transmission stopped.

"Martine?" Renie asked after a moment. "Martine, are you still there?" She turned to !Xabbu. "It just . . .

cut off."

The mantis stirred. She could hear its words in her head but they were desperately soft, "You should not . . . should not have spoken. The All-Devourer will follow your words now. It will come straight here."

"Did you cut us off?" Renie crawled to her feet, aware as she did so of the absurdity of standing up to shout at a dying insect. "Those are our friends!"

"Too late. Too late for them." It was only a whisper, faint and distant. "All we had left . . . was a little time. And now it is gone."

"Martine!" Renie shouted at the lighter. "Martine, talk to me!" But when the device finally spoke again it was not Martine's voice she heard.

Azador backed away from the blind woman, who was already struggling up onto her knees, apparently not badly hurt. "Mine!" he said feverishly. "They thought they could take it from me-my gold! But Azador does not forget!"

Orlando snarled and raised his sword, but before he could take a step toward the thief someone shouted, "Nobody move!"

With a nightmarish, underwater feeling, Sam turned to see that Felix Jongleur had snatched up the boy Cho-Cho, who struggled like a scalded cat until Jongleur laid the broken blade of Orlando's old sword against the child's throat.

"I am not bluffing," said Jongleur. "Unless you wish to see your only connection to this man Sellars killed before your eyes you will sit down and stay seated." He turned a baleful stare on Orlando. "Especially you."

Azador moved toward Jongleur, the lighter in his cupped hands, a look of reverence on his face.

"Look-is it not beautiful? You were right, my friend. You said the blind woman would have it and you were right!"

Jongleur smiled. "You have been very patient. Will you let me see it?"

Azador stopped, his joy suddenly turned to suspicion. "You cannot touch it."

"I do not want to touch it," Jongleur said. "I only wanted to look, to make sure they had not tricked you-you heard what they said about a copy."

"It is no copy!" Azador said indignantly. "I would know! This is mine!"

"Of course," said Jongleur.

Cho-Cho suddenly wrenched free of the old man's grip and dashed away across the Gypsy encampment. Azador turned to watch the boy go, and as he did, Jongleur grabbed Azador and set the broken blade against his neck then dragged it across his throat. Already gurgling blood, the Gypsy turned toward his supposed ally in amazement and tried to strike at him, but Jongleur grabbed his arm. Azador sagged and fell to the ground. Jongleur stood over him, holding the lighter in his red-smeared hand.

"Bastard!" shouted Paul Jonas. Orlando said nothing but was already moving toward the bald man.

Jongleur held up the lighter. "Careful. I could easily throw it into the Well from here, couldn't I? Then you have lost your friend Renie."

Orlando stopped short, breathing like a mastiff on a choke chain, his whole face disfigured by fury, "I knew it!" Sam darted a look at Azador. The Gypsy's blood had made a blackish puddle on the shadowy ground beneath him. His dying eyes were still wide in astonishment. "I knew it!" she screamed at the old man. "You liar! You murderer!"

Jongleur laughed. "Liar? Yes, certainly. Murderer? Perhaps, but not if you mean him." He poked Azador with the toe of his Gypsy boot. "He is not even a person. He is another copy, just like the Twins. Just like my Avialle."

"Copy?" asked Paul haltingly.

"Yes-a copy of me," Jongleur said. "A rather poor and incomplete one from early in the process, given a home here by our rogue operating system. Perhaps it was taken while I was sleeping, I cannot remember. It certainly seems to have been dominated by a parade of my boyhood fantasies. That ridiculous Gypsy camp, the kind that only ever existed in Victorian fiction-I recognized it immediately."

He smirked. "When I was a child I used to pretend that I came from such a place, not from my so-boring home and my so-boring parents."

"What do you think you have accomplished, Jongleur?" demanded Martine Desroubins, her face still smeared with dirt from Azador's assault. "This is a standoff. We will not let you escape with the lighter."

"Ah, but you cannot stop me." He showed his teeth in a predatory grin. "I have been waiting very patiently for this. Now I am going home to pull the plug on you and my ex-employee and my entire recalcitrant system. Be grateful-there should be no pain. I imagine your hearts will simply stop." Jongleur held the lighter up. "Priority Override," he said. "Tears of Ra."

An instant later he was gone, vanished entirely from the dead lands beside the Well.

CHAPTER 44.

Stolen Voices.

NETFEED/NEWS: Arizona-The Voucher Society?

(visual: Thornley in front of state capital building) VO: Arizona's first Libertarian governor, Durwood Thornley, is proposing to extend the school voucher system to a whole variety of taxpayer opt-outs, and his critics are not very happy about it. Thornley's proposed system would allow a variety of ways to reroute taxes for services that the individual taxpayer does not want to support. As an example, Thornley's staffers suggest that people without cars could redeem their roadbuilding vouchers for repair work on patios and sidewalks, or taxpayers without pets could use animal control vouchers to pay for extermination of unwanted house and yard pests. . . .

For a moment he feared that the override had not worked-that somehow the system had managed to undo its own basic programming-but the moment of darkness dissolved into the familiar depthless gray of his own system. He could feel his body again-not the robust physicality of the false form but his actual dying body, floating in its tank, maintained only by the careful attention of countless expensive machines.

But for all the horror of returning to his true condition, it was still a wonderful feeling.

Felix Jongleur was home.

And now to trigger the Apep Sequence. There was no question the Other had to be destroyed, especially if Dread had it in his control. It was a shame to lose the millions of hours of work that had gone into it but this particular operating system had long since proved his worst fears to be underestimations.

It would be a shame if the Grail network itself should suffer too much damage, though. It was not the people trapped in it that worried Jongleur-he had not a single qualm about killing Paul Jonas and the rest, especially since as far as he was concerned Jonas had been on borrowed time for two years-but he did not know how well the network would survive being shut down. Even with a backup operating system in place there would doubtless be huge losses in detail and responsiveness, since the system had been geared to the unique and astonishing capacities of the system known as the Other. And beside Jonas and his friends, anyone else still in the network, and thus still hooked into the Other's peculiar matrix, would doubtless die as well. He could not even be sure that the ghost-versions of Avialle would survive, although as code they should remain in memory when the network was revived.

He wished now that his own attempts to find and develop another operating system had borne fruit, or even that there had been time to work with Robert Wells to produce a proper alternative system of a more conventional sort, but it was too late for regrets. This was a war-a war for his own network, which had demanded ludicrous quantities of money, sweat, and blood-and in war there would always be casualties.

The most worrisome thing, of course, was his own safety. He had already been reluctant to commit himself permanently to a virtual body, so how could he trust one of the lesser systems designed by Wells'

Telemorphix engineers-more reliable than his own perhaps, but far less sophisticated?

But if Avialle's copies can survive a system shutdown, he thought, then my waiting virtual body should survive the changeover as well. And if I must risk completing the Grail process, even without entirely trusting the new system-well, I have never been afraid of risk. The events of the past days had been unforeseen; he had come close to despair but he had remained strong. To survive and conquer now he would have to remain smarter and more aggressive than those around him, just as he always did.

It had not been easy to stay patient-and meek with Jonas and the others, especially when he had known that one of the access devices was again within his easy reach, being carried by the woman Martine. But a single access device had never been of any use to him, or he could have taken Renie Sulaweyo's by force days earlier. He had feared he might somehow have to find his own way into the heart of the system, but luckily that coarse Sulaweyo woman had stumbled into it on her own. Jongleur had only needed to wait until contact was opened between the two devices so he could risk everything on one gamble, praying that when his override command reached Renie Sulaweyo's end of the communication circuit inside the Other, it would force the system's compliance.

Of course, risk was one thing, foolish risk another: he had prepared for the moment carefully, pretending to help the clownish Azador, quietly urging the pseudo-Gypsy to take back what he stupidly thought was his, so that if the first attempt to steal it should fail, Jongleur himself would still be free to try again.

In fact, he found it a bit disconcerting to discover how easily he could trick and manipulate another version of himself-even a flawed version. It almost wounded his pride.

But that was a small detail. Everything had worked just as he had planned. He had waited, gambled, and won.

And now it is time. Time to play the endgame.

He ordered initialization of the Apep processes, setting in motion the complicated preparations so that he would be able to trigger it as soon as possible and be done with his rebellious operating system, then he rose out of the empty gray system-space into the reality of his great house.

Which, to his definite surprise, seemed to be completely empty.

What is going on here? The building's systems were alive with conflicting alarms-a fire alarm from the underground floors and a secondary alarm warning of a toxic release event from the island's offshore power plant. He brought up his camera-eyes and began to flick through the employee levels. It was Sunday, so of course the building would not be full, but the halls and offices were uniformly deserted.

Jongleur put out a priority message to security but no one answered. He brought up the view of the building's security station, two floors below him. It was empty.

Impossible. Something was very wrong. He sent out an even higher priority message to the island's private military base, but all its lines were engaged. Someone had turned off his connection to the base surveillance cameras as well. He flicked to one of the low-orbit satellites and focused in until he could see movement-a great flurry of movement, in fact, like an ant army on the march. His troops were boarding a line of company ferries. Being evacuated.

Jongleur could sense the machineries of his heart trying to race, then the equipment compensating. He felt the cool placidity of countervailing chemicals flushing through his system. He found the override controls and turned down the tranquilizing flow: something terrible had happened, was happening right now, and he did not want to be lulled.