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The buckles on Shandy's boots were now very hot. He burned his hand drawing his knife, but managed, crouching first on one foot and then on the other, to hack the buckles off. He straightened again, trying to ignore the way his leather scabbard smoked when he put the knife back and wondering when he'd start to feel the nails that held his boot soles on. Thank God Blackbeard had forbidden pistols.
"I didn't get much farther than right here," said Blackbeard softly. He turned to Davies and grinned. "Go ahead - walk out to the pool's edge."
Davies swallowed, then took a step forward.
"Stop!" called Hurwood from behind them. He and Friend and Bonnett had just blundered through the gap, stumbled, and then managed to put Beth down more or less gently as they fell to the dark sand. Hurwood was the first to sit up. "Apparent directions are no good here. You could walk in a straight line till you die of starvation, and never get any closer to the Fountain. It would, in all probability, seem slowly to circle you as you walked."
Blackbeard laughed. "I wasn't going to let him get so far that we couldn't get him back. But you're right, that is how it looked. I walked in toward it for two days before I admitted you can't get there from here, and then it took me three more days to walk back out to where we're standing."
Hurwood stood up, brushing himself off. "Days?" he asked drily.
Blackbeard looked sharply at him. "Well, no, now you mention it. The sun rose but never got much past what you'd call dawn before it decided to go down again. Dawn turned straight into dusk, with no real day between."
Hurwood nodded. "We're not really in Florida now - or not particularly, anyway, not Florida any more than we're in every other place. Have you studied Pythagoras in any depth?"
Davies and Blackbeard both admitted that they had not.
"The contradictions implicit in his philosophy are not contradictions here. I don't know whether the circumstances here are the general or some special case - but here the square root of two is not an irrational number."
"Infinity - apeiron - as it exists here, would not have offended Aristotle," added Leo Friend, who, for once, seemed to have forgotten Beth Hurwood.
"Good news for Harry Stottle," said Blackbeard. "But can I get rid of my ghosts here?"
"Yes," said Hurwood. "We've just got to get you to the pool"
Blackbeard waved toward the Fountain. "Lead the way."
"I shall." Hurwood hefted the bundles he'd brought along, then lowered them carefully to the sand.
As Hurwood and Friend crouched to untie the bundles, Shandy sidled over to Beth. "How are you doing?" was all he could think of to say.
"Fine, thank you," she said automatically. Her eyes were unfocused and she was breathing shallowly but very fast.
"Just ... hang on," Shandy whispered, angry at his own helplessness. "As soon as we get back to the beach, I swear, I'll get you out of this ... "
Her knees bent and she was falling; he managed to get his arms around her before she hit the sand, and when he saw that she'd fainted, he laid her down gently on her back. Then Friend had shoved him away and was taking her pulse and lifting her eyelids to peer at her pupils.
Shandy stood up and looked over at Hurwood, who was using the torch to light a lantern that had been in one of the bundles. "How can you do this to your own daughter?" Shandy asked him hoarsely. "You son of a bitch, I hope your Margaret comes back just long enough to curse you and then collapse in a pile of corruption as foul as your damned soul."
Hurwood glanced up incuriously, then returned to his work. He had got the lantern's wick lit, and now he lowered the hood over it. The hood was metal, but not featureless - random-looking slits had been cut into it, and they cast lines of light out across the dark sand.
Shandy took a step toward the old man, but Blackbeard was suddenly in front of him. "Afterward, sonny," the pirate said. "He and I are working together right now, and if you try to foul my plans you'll find yourself sitting on the ground trying to stuff your guts back into your belly." He turned to Hurwood. "You about ready?"
"Yes." Hurwood stuck the still-flaming torch upright in the sand and then stood up with the lantern. The square wooden box now hung at his belt like a fishing creel. "Is she well?" he asked Friend.
"Fine," said the fat man. "She just fainted."
"Carry her."
Hurwood raised the lantern in his single hand and stared at the patterns of light-lines it threw onto the sand. After a few seconds of study he nodded and began walking, on a course that led slightly away from the fountain.
Friend managed to stand up with Beth's limp form draped over his shoulders, though the effort darkened his face. He stumped along after Hurwood, the breath whistling in and out of him, and the rest of the group followed, with Bonnett and the odd boatman lurchingly bringing up the rear.
It wasn't a steady walk. Frequently Hurwood paused to peer at the light-lines and fiercely argue mathematical niceties with Friend, and once Shandy heard Friend point out an error in one of "your Black Newton equations." Several times they led the shuffling group in sharp changes of direction, and for a long while they all just marched around and around in the outline of a square; but Shandy had noticed that, no matter what their apparent direction, the moon never shifted from its position above his left shoulder, and he shivered and wasn't tempted to offer any sarcastic comments.
The torch that Hurwood had planted in the sand was as often visible ahead, or off to one side, as behind them, but every time Shandy looked at it it was farther away. The Fountain itself was so difficult to focus on that he couldn't perceive any change in its distance, but he did notice that the two bridgelike structures had moved closer together.
Then he noticed the crowds. At first he thought they were low fog banks or expanses of water, but when he stared hard at the uneven gray lines on the horizon he saw that they were made up of thousands of figures rushing silently back and forth, their arms waving overhead like a field of grass blades stirred by a night wind. "I should never have believed," said Hurwood softly, pausing in his calculations to look at the distant multitudes, "that death had undone so many."
