Shade shook her head. 'No way. No one who's ever made it down into the heart of the Ninth has done anything like that. There are things that happen down on Nine… ' Her voice trailed off.
'Like what?' Nick was eager. He had almost never heard even a scrap of rumor about Nine before.
Shade laughed at him then. 'You're asking me?' she said. 'You think I've been down there? As if I'd still be slumming around up here if I had… ' She sounded scornful again. 'No, some of them just come back and help a few newbies before they go on. I've got a ways to go yet.'
They went on in silence for a while, following the faint tune-up notes of Camiun across the darkling plain. It was hard to judge distances, but Nick thought it would have been something like a mile in the 'real' world. A Damned person ran by them, howling, in battle fatigues, and behind him came a couple of winged demons, their whips aflame, every stroke burning a white-hot slit through the big burly man's combat jacket as he fled from them. Nick slowed down to watch him go.
'Some gangster,' Shade said, bored. 'We get a lot of them down here. Little tin-pot dictators and their paramilitary hangers-on. While they're in power they think they're invulnerable, that they can kill anybody they like. But sooner or later it catches up with them. Their henchmen learn their bosses' lesson too well, that you don't have to treat anybody with pity, or compassion… and eventually the henchmen turn right around, shoot their bosses, and take their jobs. Not that they last long.' She chuckled.
Ahead of them, the volcano seemed to be getting closer, and Nick squinted at it. There was something odd about the shadows at its base. He was distracted, though. The darkness, the ash and the screams, they all seemed to press in strangely, and Camiun's tinkly tuning cadences seemed unusually distant. 'Kind of depressing down here,' Nick said.
Shade looked at him thoughtfully as she jumped over a small narrow crevasse that opened up in front of them. 'You feel that way?' she said.
Nick nodded. 'Sometimes. But it's worse up at home… a. whole 'nother story.'
'Problems?'
Nick made a face. 'The usual. My folks think I'm wasting money down here. Even some of my friends think I'm wasting time. None of them seem to think I'm capable of figuring out what I really want. 'You're too young to really know.' You'll get over this, it's just a fad… ' ' He sighed, glanced up at her. 'What about you?'
Shade laughed. 'Yeah, I've heard the same kind of thing. I ignore it. And my folks and my friends don't know anything about down here… so I ignore them, too. They're all so concerned, like it's going to affect my mind somehow. But, I mean, what's down here that could possibly be more depressing than real life?' And she gave Nick a look that, even in this dim light, was extremely ironic. 'Not enough money to do the things you want to, not enough time to do them if you had the money, not enough life to do everything you'd like to even if you had the time-what could be worse than that? This is just dark. And for us, not even painful… not as painful as the Real World.' She pronounced the words with profound disdain. 'A day job you can never afford to give up until you're too old to remember what you would have done with your days, if they'd been yours to spend, when you were young. What's a little fire and brimstone to that?'
She looked closely at Nick as they walked, almost as if there was some response she was expecting.
'I don't know,' Nick said. 'Life stinks, yeah, but I don't know if it stinks that much-'
'You are young yet,' Shade said. 'Just wait awhile. You probably have all these great ideas about how wonderful it'll be when you get out on your own, how you'll have all this terrific freedom. Wait till you do it, and see how hard you have to work just to keep a roof over your head and enough food inside you to keep your stomach from waltzing with your backbone every night… while the people you're interested in take themselves out of your life, one by one.' She laughed. 'After too much life spent that way… I can understand why some people might want to… you know. Do what they did. The Pit Angels…'
Nick had no immediate answer to that, for what Shade was saying had abruptly struck him with surprising fofce. It had never occurred to him that he wouldn't find life better after he finally left home, that there might be a bad side to freedom. But now, hearing it from someone down here, the possibility occurred to him that he might be making a mistake. Yet at the same time, if I don't make that mistake, I'm trapped… Trapped with an angry mom and dad, in an apartment that was too small and where they watched his every move to see whether they would approve of it. And if he kept going the way he had been going, before this most recent blowup, what would follow? College, but if he didn't manage to get a scholarship to someplace far enough away that he would have to live on campus, it would just be the same thing all over again…
but even more intolerable, because he would be college-age and still having to obey his parents' dumb rules. Everyone would laugh at him, and the whole point of college, getting away and exercising some independence, would be lost.
Yet Nick was pretty sure that he wasn't going to be in line for any scholarships. His grades hadn't been perfect. He was holding his own at Bradford, not in danger of failing… but the grades he had at the moment weren't going to get him into anything but the state college or one of the community colleges in the area. He could just hear his folks. Why spend money on boarding at someplace that's only twenty miles away? You'll stay here with us.
… Where they can keep me under their thumb.
Suddenly it all seemed very hopeless, and Nick just stopped where he was and gazed ahead in the blackness as Shade kept going. Suddenly he could understand it. Not wanting to go on, not seeing the point. Past college, what would there be for him? He wasn't even particularly sure what he wanted to do in the world. Or that there was anything for him to do in the world. For the past couple years now he had been surrounded by kids working hard, full of plans and goals, and he had laughed at them- busting their guts as if they were adults working at something that really counted. Now here he was, without any plans or goals, and suddenly Nick suspected that the other kids had, all along, known something he hadn't. Now they were heading toward lives, busy lives full of interesting things to do, even if the work was hard. And here I am, Nick thought, with nothing. Nothing.
And parents who're going to remind me of it every chance they get, for the foreseeable future.
Suddenly Nick could understand how nice it might be for it all just to stop. Like going to sleep and not waking up. The sudden desire for it to be that way, just quiet, just no more trouble, came down on him, darker and stranger than the surroundings… and Nick shivered.
Shade stopped, looked back at him. 'Nick. Come on, what's the matter?'
'Uh, nothing.'
That feeling was gone now, but it had been… weird. Nick went after her, shaking the umbrella a little to get the excess ash off it. The dark shape up ahead of them, in the shadow of the mountain, was a little better defined now, starting to look like a building. 'Uh-oh, watch out for this one,' Shade said, stopping very suddenly.
Nick stopped and looked down, stepping back hurriedly as the growing crevasse shot out arms in several directions, one of them stitching along right in front of his feet, the ash in front of him tipping down into it, faint flakes of darkness against the quickly revealed dull-red glow of the flow of lava, away down there. In the air above them, Camiun's tuning-up paused and then segued into a low quiet minor-key strumming. 'So strange,' Joey Bane's voice sang, 'so strange…'
They made their way around the new crevasse, and kept walking. A shadow reared out of the air near them as they walked. Nick stopped and stared at what was swinging there. Two shapes. It wasn't a tree of any kind. It was some sort of metal framework, and a man and a woman were hanging upside down from it. 'Mussolini,' Shade said. 'You know Italy… last century. They caught up with him, eventually.' She raised her eyebrows, just visible in the light of the nearby volcano. 'There are plenty more like that around here if you care to investigate… '
'Thanks, no.' Nick gulped, sickened by the image swinging gently in front of him. Then he looked past Shade, still unnerved by that odd feeling that had come down on him, and saw something more to the point. Past the tall metal frame, at the foot of the volcano, was something that interested him a whole lot more. A faint shimmer of light, something genuinely reflective in all that dead matte black-a wide, dark sheet of water. It was the Lake of Tears, and beyond it, reflecting darkly, rose the Keep of the Dark Artificer at last, all gleaming black towers and walkways, and high up in one tower, a single light.
'That's really it,' Nick whispered. 'Finally…'
'Yup,' Shade said, looking at the Keep. To Nick's eye she looked astonishingly blase about something which, in its way, was the heart of Deathworld. 'Bigger than it looks,' she said. 'Don't be fooled by it.'
He nodded, then turned back to Shade. There was something about her voice, something sad… 'Are you okay?' Nick said.
She looked at him in surprise. 'Why wouldn't I be?' The answer was defensive, flip, a little sarcastic…
