City at the End of Time

  One of the younger females brought up a short stool, on which Grayne sat with a sigh and completed the inspection.

  Is this a trick? She can’t be a march leader. She’s so old—why hasn’t the Bleak Warden come for her? Jebrassy felt his face tighten into a frown, and forced himself to relax—he did not want to reveal any more than he had to.

  “Twenty have been chosen,” Grayne began. “Four from this group, sixteen…elsewhere. The Kalpa is forever—but we are new. We are youth and newness. We are not pets, not toys—we are hope, kept bottled until needed. And now the cap is pulled—we are needed. No one else in the Kalpa has the will to cross the Chaos.”

  “No one else,” the group intoned.

  “We send our marchers through the gates, across the border of the real, into mystery—to find our lost cousins and to free ourselves. What’s out there, beyond the Kalpa?” Grayne asked softly. “Does anybody really know?”

  Jebrassy shook his head, his eyes held by her black, intense glare.

  “Do you?” she asked him directly.

  “No.”

  “And so we all give up to mystery, to the unknown, to save ourselves from suffocation. Are you with us?”

  “Yes,” Jebrassy said.

  Grayne studied him, then got up from the bench, reached into the pocket of her robe, and produced a small bag. The old sama walked around the chamber, handing out little square tabs to everyone—except Jebrassy.

  “We’ll meet one more time before the march. Everyone will go now—except the fighter. And Tiadba.”

  Tiadba helped Grayne along the pipe to the surface. Jebrassy followed. The three of them stood there for a moment, while Grayne’s breathing slowed. “Everything you know is wrong, young fighter,” she said.

  The others in the group had already spread out over the rutted fallow field and then down the path through the low groves, slinking past the solitary and unmoving warden, its vanes glowing a faint and pulsing blue in the darkness.

  The pedes had curled into glinting, twitching bundles in the near dark, to conserve heat.

  “I know I’m ignorant,” Jebrassy said, keeping his voice low. “But I’m not stupid.”

  Grayne reached out and took Jebrassy’s jaw in her strong, knobby fingers. She twisted his face toward her, eyes darting. “Tiadba tells me your visitor knows nothing of the Tiers, or the Kalpa. Where do you think he comes from?”

  Jebrassy did not pull away. “Tiadba probably knows more about him than I do.”

  “Never mind,” Grayne said, and shivered in the cooling air. “Let’s walk.”

  The sama’s niche was humble enough—she dwelt in the lowest tier of the third isle’s main bloc, within a kind of support column, surrounded by ancient, silent machinery—great hulks of smooth hardness, lumbering, dark, and unrevealing of the tasks they had once performed.

  The niche’s furnishings were equally humble—a few dun-colored blankets and cushions, a small box where she kept her food—and a larger box, equipped with a finger lock. She offered them water and they sat quietly as she touched the box, opened it, and removed—

  A book. A real book, bound in green, with letters on its spine and its front cover. It was the first real book—loose and whole—they had ever seen. Tiadba let out her breath as if someone had knocked her in the stomach. Jebrassy kept his expression under tight control, unsure once again what either of these two females were up to—perhaps no good. Perhaps they were part of a trap laid by the Tall Ones to entice foolish young breeds…

  His mind raced through confusion after confusion, and then he looked at Tiadba—and realized that she was as entranced as he.

  Grayne clutched the book to her bosom and stepped slowly toward them. “I love these dangerous, impossible things above all else in the Tiers,” she said, holding it out in both hands and opening it for their inspection. “Isn’t it lovely?”

  Jebrassy longed to hold it, but did not dare reach out. The cover had been worked with flowers of types unlike any he had ever seen in the produce fields, placed around a design that attracted his eyes immediately—a cross circled by interlaced, apparently whirling bands.

  Tiadba glanced at him. He nodded. This design was familiar—though they had never seen it before.

  “Is it from the shelves in the upper Tiers?” Tiadba asked.

  “Those books aren’t real,” Jebrassy said. “I’ve tried to pull them out. They’re just decoration.”

  Grayne circled two fingers over the book and pursed her lips, blowing out her cheeks with a snorking whuff. “Miles and miles of temptation and futility. A curiosity, I think, that we instinctively love books, yet can’t have them, can’t read them, can’t do more than look at their spines, cemented into those awful, wonderful shelves.” She solemnly laid the book on a small table between them. “Touch it. It’s very old, very sturdy—it’s been waiting to be of use for many thousands of lives. You can’t harm it.”

  Tiadba had tears in her eyes as she lifted the book and smelled its cover. “Can you read it?” she asked Grayne.

  The sama held up one finger—yes. “Some of us have translated pages. Many pages.”

  “How?” Jebrassy asked.

  Grayne beamed. “Of all my strange instructions and duties, I love this part most of all. There is a secret so wonderful that no one will believe you if you tell them—so don’t bother.

  “Once, when we were quite young, my crèche sisters and I made up a game. We climbed to the upper Tiers, then ran along the impossible shelves. We laughed and leaped and pulled at the unmoving spines, top shelves, bottom shelves, one up, one down, center shelves…tugged on the odd, unyielding volumes for hours, laughing and leaping and failing and falling, and laughing some more. No one expected we would ever succeed, but we believed, as children will, that if we felt so attracted to them, if there were so many children’s stories and legends about books, there must be some truth behind them—something behind the tantalizing spinebacks.”

  Grayne squatted slowly, in private her movements more obviously painful. Jebrassy wondered if he would live long enough to feel that sort of pain. She’s the oldest breed I’ve ever seen…

  For the first time, he caught himself thinking that a visit from the Bleak Warden might be a blessing—not a thing to be feared.

  “I wasn’t the first to find it—our first loose book on the shelves. It was my best friend, Lassidin—full of curiosity, fastest of all my sisters. A spark among glows, you males say. To me, she was a flame…” Grayne closed her eyes. “The Bleak Warden claimed her long ago. But she was the first to solve that riddle, watching, in her brightness, always watching, all the time seeing things we did not, puzzling it through, running, leaping, tugging…until she got it right.”

  Grayne lifted a crooked finger and hooked at empty air, reliving the moment. “Lassidin grabbed a spine…just the right spine—and before our eyes she pulled down a book. That surprised her so much she fell and landed on her butt. The book flopped open on the dusty floor, revealing a page covered with letters from an ancient alphabet—some familiar, most not. All of my crèche sisters—there were four of us, families could be larger then—gathered around the book and looked, afraid to touch it. Two ran away. Lassidin and I somehow gathered up the courage to take the book to our family niche, where we hid it from our mer and per. At first we told no one. And when we returned to that spot in the Tiers, where the gap had been—we found another book in its place, as false and unyielding as before. We wondered if we had been dreaming, and rushed back to our niches—where Lassidin had placed the book in this old box, with its finger lock.

  “By the time we returned to the upper levels, a few wakes later, Lassidin had solved the puzzle of the shelves, and the shelves rewarded her—us—for cleverness. We pulled down the second of many, which we then retrieved and hid away with the first.”

  “How many?” Tiadba asked.

  Grayne tightened her lips and touched the stiff fur on her nose. “More than one,” she said, a faint
smile on her lips. “Fewer than a dozen.”

  “Who loosened the books? Why let anyone look at them?” Jebrassy asked. “I thought the Tall Ones wanted to keep us ignorant.”

  “A sophisticated question from our young warrior,” Grayne said. “I don’t know the answer. Some say, however, that a great and powerful citizen, far above the Tall Ones, created these shelves to honor his daughter—long dead or missing. They may not have been intended for us at all. At any rate, in time the Bleak Warden came for my sisters, but never for me.” She looked up. “I am the guardian of Lassidin’s box, and all the books we plucked from the walls—all the books we were allowed to find.”

  Tiadba turned to the next page in the green book. Her nose drew up in fine wrinkles and she pushed her chin forward. “I can’t read it. The letters are too different.”

  “They are old. A few are still familiar.”

  Tiadba followed the lines with her fingers, then said, “Here’s one. And another.” Delighted, she showed Jebrassy.

  “My crèche sister Kovleschi was meeker and did not chase the shelves with us—but she knew of antique letterbugs, marked on their wing-cases by such letters. We visited the families who kept and prized them, and there we studied the way they formed words—and compared how younger bugs with different, newer symbols formed the very same words.”

  Letterbugs could live many breed lifetimes, and were often passed down for generations.

  “In time, we were able to piece together a syllabary, and from that, a beginning dictionary. But even then we could read only a few passages. There are still so many that mean nothing to me. Though I’ve memorized them…as many as will hold still. They seem to change, you know.”

  Tiadba handed the book to Jebrassy. He, too, examined the first page—and his brow shot up. “‘Sangmer,’” he read, drawing his finger under one odd word. “Is this about Sangmer?” Sometimes the teachers told frightening stories to breeds who had misbehaved, some involving a traveler named Sangmer, who died after he strayed beyond his neighborhood.

  “Perhaps I haven’t been so foolish after all,” Grayne said, eyes twinkling. “Most of our books speak at many points of Sangmer and Ishanaxade. They were partners, and not always happy ones. A tempestuous pair. What little we can read tells us that ultimately they both vanished in the Chaos.”

  “And what do the other books tell?”

  “More puzzling still, they speak of things no breed can understand. Of the aging of the world outside this one, and of the decline of all-powerful rulers…and how they were forced to retreat to the Kalpa. There is even a brief history of the last years of what seems to have been a shining brightness in an open sky, something called the ‘sun.’”

  “I’d like to read that,” Jebrassy whispered. “I’d like to read them all.” He looked around as if afraid that Grayne, the niche, the box—these real books—might just vanish in a puff.

  With her staff, Grayne pulled the box toward her. “These were our books. They were meant for us alone, to guide us. You will find your own books—and they will accompany you to places we could never go. Perhaps they will even finish the great story.” She narrowed her eyes, near exhaustion.

  Tiadba seemed stunned, but she took the book from Jebrassy—pulled it from his grasping fingers—and handed it to Grayne, who returned it to Lassidin’s box.

  Grayne closed the cover and locked it. “This will be the last march,” the old sama said. “Out there you will go, utterly ignorant, unless you find your books and learn how to read what they contain. You will tell those stories to your fellows. Every march has its stories and instructions. Those are the rules.”

  “Whose rules?” Jebrassy asked.

  Grayne ignored him. She removed her cloak, revealing thin, bowed shoulders under a smooth black gown, and handed it to Tiadba. “The sisterhood made this, many lifetimes ago, when we were all young. Look inside…sewn within the lining, our crude syllabary and a comparison dictionary. All made by referring to the antique letterbugs. Some of those bugs still survive. You must look for them—borrow them—learn your own words, add what you can to our knowledge.”

  “Why us?” Jebrassy asked.

  “Better to ask why you, young warrior,” Grayne said. “I would have passed this all on to Tiadba. That was my plan—until she chose to be adventurous. For a time, angry with her, I thought I would die with our box locked, taking my revenge against a world that made no more lovely and sensible sisters. But I have my instructions.”

  Tall Ones? Jebrassy held his tongue on this question, but still blurted, “You guide the marches. You arrange for equipment, you send them…” He could not untangle this knot.

  “True. I have been used, but have always hoped—in my defense—that someday, individuals at least would return, and tell me of what lies beyond the border of the real. None has. How many have I condemned?” She wiped a tear, then straightened and assumed her sama mien. “Here is our secret—what the sisterhood discovered. Lassidin and I listed the most promising Tiers and levels in the syllabary. The false shelves in all the inhabited levels are locked and useless. Only in the deserted levels do they sometimes free a book. Look to those shelves. They are not always the same. Understand why, and how, and you will learn what we learned.

  “Now…there’s very little time, young breeds,” Grayne said. “I believe the Bleak Warden will soon pay me a visit. But before that happens, I must arrange this final march.”

  Jebrassy looked down, excited, confused—and frightened.

  “Your first challenge is to learn what you can—so very little, but it might save your lives. Then—you will be taken into the flood channels, to begin your training.”

  CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  All the water of the Tiers flowed through this conduit, which vanished in low mists beyond where Jebrassy stood, at the edge of the outer meadow. The water made a dismal, sleepy sound as it dropped along its sluice. It was clear and smelled wet and a little sad. He measured with his arms and fingers the distance between the top edge of the sluice and the dirt that surrounded it—that same pebbled, granular, brown-gray soil found everywhere in the Tiers. He was still trying to understand everything at once—and it made his head hurt.

  Farther back, closer to the bridge, the conduit had been higher. Perhaps the water didn’t reach the far wall, but vanished into the ground, absorbed as if by a rag. Somehow, the ground, granular and rough, sucked it down, spread it out, purified it.

  Whatever pulls the water, pulls me. And does the ground tug the water in and out the same way it tugs me? I don’t know anything about where I live.

  Confused, frustrated, he felt like striking out—always his first impulse when he confronted his abysmal ignorance.

  He stood and turned at the sound of footsteps. At first he couldn’t see who it was over a rise in the meadow—but then he made out Khren’s round, shock-furred head. Beside Khren paced three young breeds, all wide-eyed with anticipation.

  Tiadba had said he needed to find four helpers, and that she would meet them all at the spiral stair core that rose through the inward end of the first isle Tiers. They were going to visit an abandoned level high in the Tiers. They might spend all day searching just a few of the halls that radiated from the stair core—a very small part of the abandoned levels—and with the lights dimmed, a few extra pairs of hands and bright, young eyes would certainly be useful. Still, Jebrassy felt uneasy that they would be sharing their rare time together with others—even uneasy about Khren, who had been with him on so many adventures.

  The young males ran down to the straight road and clustered around him, touching fingers and giving sharp whistles of greeting.

  “Shewel, Nico, Mash—this is Jebrassy,” Khren said. “A very unwise and devious breed.” They were impressed; Khren had obviously been filling their heads with nonsense.

  “You’re a warrior,” said Shewel, the tallest, a gangly young male with wide-spaced eyes and reddish scalp fur.

  “Not m
uch time for fighting now,” Jebrassy said.

  “He has a glow to fill his empty hours,” Khren said, and Jebrassy shot him a look. Khren danced aside, as if he had thrown a rock.

  The young breeds were breathless. “What are we looking for?” Nico asked. He was pale, his hair and fur silver, his eyes light blue—handsome enough, but with a high, piping voice. “Is there food buried out here? Strange things the wardens hide?”

  “Nothing like that,” Jebrassy said. “We’re going to search an empty level in the Tiers.”

  “Looking for dream-ghosts?” Mash asked. He was a strong, square-headed youngster—the youngest, Jebrassy guessed, but also the largest. Breeds sometimes told their young a tweenlight tale that the most beautiful dreams broke free when one awoke and flew off to hide in the deserted levels, where they might be gathered in baskets and brought back to sweeten future nights. Bad dreams—obviously, those should be avoided. “Bright or dark?” Mash persisted, defensive, as the others scoffed. He circled the group as if embarrassed to join them.

  “No dreams. We’re going to explore the shelves and look for books. Try to pull them out. Real books we might be able to read.”

  “No!” the group chorused, disappointed. They knew all the books were false. “That’s stupid—a waste.”

  “A large bag of sweet chafe and tropps to anyone who finds a real book,” Jebrassy said. “And whether we find any or not, we share three bags when we get back, so everybody goes home full. But none to slackers.”