Aubrey pushed himself to his feet, unsteady on his legs. A portcullis of fog had dropped down into the archway. He walked into it with his head down.
Bands of cloud stretched like bungee cord, pulled tight against the bowling-ball surface of his helmet. He strained against it, taking one small step forward, then another. The portcullis warped and deformed, as if it were made of yarn, and then all at once it tore and dumped him face-first into the courtyard.
He picked himself up and marched into the great hall.
A harem waited there: two dozen lithe girls of whitest white, slim marble perfections, some in wavering opalescent silks and some nude. Couches and beds had been brought into the open space, and the girls tangled upon them, writhed in one another’s arms, between one another’s legs.
Other girls glided to him with blind eyes and faces desperate with eagerness. A woman he didn’t see grasped him from behind, pillowy breasts squeezed hard against his back, her lips on his neck. Sky Harriet was already on her knees in front of him, grasping for the zipper of his jumpsuit.
He dashed off her head with one backhand. Aubrey wrenched himself out of the arms of the woman clutching him from behind with so much force that her hands came apart in shreds of vapor. He waded through naked bodies. Every girl he’d ever jacked off to, from his first cello teacher to Jennifer Lawrence, tried to crowd in on him. He flailed right through them, tearing them into tattered banners of pearly mist.
He mounted the steps. Warriors waited in the dining hall: swollen marshmallow men, ten and twelve feet high, with cottony clubs, im mense hammers of cloud. They were less fully formed than the girls in the hall below. They had Play-Doh hands and arms that bulged in lumps that had more to do with comic-book anatomy than with actual human bodies.
Aubrey Griffin, who had last been in a fistfight when he was nine, welcomed them. He was breathing hard, and his blood was up.
A warrior swung his cloud sledge—the hammer’s head was as big as a Thanksgiving turkey—and caught him in the chest. Aubrey was surprised at how much it hurt, at the hard thud of pain that jolted through his torso. But he grabbed the business end of the sledge as it struck him and did not let go. Instead he pivoted, twisting and pulling the hammer along with him.
These things, these forms of hard cloud, were weak at the joints. They had to be, or they couldn’t bend and move. He ripped the sledge free from his attacker and tore an arm off with it. He came all the way around, whirling 360 degrees, and let the hammer go. It whipsawed into the oncoming mass of giants. It tore one in half, slicing through his waist, the top half of his body tumbling to the floor. The sledge was on a rising arc and took off the head of the marauder behind.
The gladiators of cloud surrounded him with fists and clubs.
He wrenched off a nearby arm and used it as a scythe, mowing the first wave down before him, in much the way a boy might use a stick to hack at weeds. He struggled through them as if he were plunging along in a waist-deep flood of custard.
They shrank from Aubrey, recoiling less from his fists than from his cheerful fury, his upper lip pulled back to show bared teeth. The cloud lacked the courage of its own convictions, was no more willing to really abuse him than it would allow him to fall. He did not share its reserve. By the time he made it halfway across the hall, he was panting, sweating in the chill, and he was alone.
He went on into the castle, but there wasn’t much to the place. After devising the entranceway and the feasting hall, the cloud seemed to have run out of ideas. He passed through the next soaring arch and found himself once again at the base of the dome.
The peak was a long way up, hundreds of feet above him. He felt a touch of light-headedness looking up there, and also something worse—the ghost of a glassy black pearl, hovering at the edge of his thoughts.
He pushed out a long, hard breath and began.
22
THE STOP COMMAND STRUCK WITH so much force it was almost a physical thing, snapping his head back. But when his thoughts returned to him, he had already climbed twenty feet. He blinked at tears, reached up, and drove his hand into the cliff face of cloud.
It nailed him again, a man stomping on a wounded wasp to make it stop crawling.
But he didn’t stop crawling. He shoved back.
NO, he roared, although he didn’t make a sound. It was a thought, reflexive and ugly.
His eyes watered over. The crest of the dazzling white globe blurred and doubled, then came back together. He was still climbing, seventy or eighty feet up.
Whatever was sending those psychic blows seemed to hesitate. Maybe it wasn’t used to being yelled at. Aubrey went another forty feet, reached a place where he felt that the slope had rounded off enough so it was safe for him to try standing up. He was just rising on wobbly legs when the black pearl took a cheap shot, struck him again. He staggered, his balance wavering, one heel sliding out from under him. If he’d gone backward, he might’ve tumbled a hundred and twenty feet down to the base, but instead he belly-flopped onto his stomach, hard enough to drive all the air out of his lungs. He sprawled, arms and legs spread out in an X, pressed hard to the curving floor of the cloud.
“Oh, you bitch,” he said, and forced himself up to his knees, then back to his feet.
He bore on. The frigid air tore at his lungs with each whooping breath. Gradually he became aware once more of a galvanic hum, felt as much as heard, right under his feet. It was like standing on a steel platform as a train approached. The thrumming sound increased as he climbed, until it was a deep, mechanical buzz that brought to mind the single note of feedback that opened “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles.
He stopped walking, fifty paces from the apex of the dome, and swayed on his heels. His head throbbed. His ears, too.
For the first time, he saw he was standing on something that wasn’t cloud. It was cloud-colored, a dull pewter shade, but it was harder than anything he’d felt yet, and it was right there, hidden under a carpet of vapor not even an inch thick.
He fell to his knees and fanned away the smoke. It seemed to lack the will or the density to thicken here. Beneath was the curve of what might’ve been the world’s largest pearl, a pearl the size of a ten-story building. It was not black but more closely resembled a polished sphere of ice. Except ice was cold, and this was warm and humming like a power transformer.
And something else. He could see something in it. Some dim form. It looked like an eel, frozen in the not-ice.