Trophies, all of them. Preserved and mounted after something had enjoyed an awful hunt through the galaxies, collecting specimens.
Ginny shivered.
Spinning twice again—a total of six spins—brought her back to the first gap. She recognized the first set of figures, though she still did not want to examine them up close and personal.
Personal might mean something very different here.
Without doing anything more difficult than spinning on her toes, she was making the entire valley revolve like a lazy Susan platter in a Chinese restaurant. Imagine that. Such power.
There were three entrances to the Vale of Dead Gods. She could imagine them evenly spaced around the bowl formed by the mountains, points on a weird kind of super-triangle.
Typhon space. Or the kind of space a dying universe falls into.
Which entrance should she take?
Each, she knew, would lead her on a unique and separate spiral course into the False City where her dream-sister waited. Other people could enter through other gaps and follow other spiral courses, but they would never meet, never see each other, separated by Typhon-time as well as Typhon-space.
That thought bothered her. All along, since she had left the green warehouse, she had hoped that Jack and maybe Daniel would come to save her from her persistent foolishness—always deliberately choosing the worst path, leading to disaster. Jack seemed the opposite, shifting toward a pleasant sort of survival, if not genuine fortune.
Daniel…
Daniel she couldn’t figure. Not a whole number. Irrational.
He has an irrational set of decimals.
Ah. What’s that mean when it’s lying down?
But they would no doubt enter the False City through other gaps, and that meant they’d never find her.
Ginny squinted at the guardians, forcing herself to see them for what they were—a matched pair, each with a circlet of ten or more eyes wrapped around otherwise human faces, lips and cheeks skewed in some strange emotion—the head set without a neck above powerful, many-limbed bodies, each limb configured to do something that she could not begin to understand.
She gave up her inspection. No sense adding confusion to madness. She decided that she would call this set of guardians the Welcome Wagon Committee to Hellgate One. She spun around again and named the second pair: WWC to Hellgate Two.
The experience could be repeated. Very scientific. Bidewell would be proud of her.
Spinning again, she found the WWC to Hellgate Three.
Shouldn’t just do this all day, however long a day is. Make your choice, Ginny. Even if it’s the wrong one.
That was her inner voice, nobody else’s. The other had fallen silent. She was alone.
Alone, Ginny knew she could always be relied upon to take the wrong path—except when she decided to go to the green warehouse. And even then, she tried to undo her good decision by venturing out. But now it wasn’t just her choosing. The sum-runners drew each other together.
So where were the others? Were they out searching for her in the mash-up, their stones tugging them along like eager terriers out for a run?
CHAPTER 96
* * *
The longer Jebrassy marched with Ghentun and Polybiblios, the more he realized what it was like to live around a Great Eidolon—even a fragment of one.
Polybiblios seemed to radiate knowledge. Some new and significant collection of facts or visions flowed into Jebrassy’s awareness every hour, filling him with history and science until his old self felt misplaced and overlooked.
Ghentun knew the epitome’s influence as well—and spoke his concern. “You’re leaking,” he told Polybiblios as they paused, helmets off, to rest and assess a new disposition in the Chaos around them.
The epitome squatted beside them. His movements had grown more certain and less awkward, far from the support of the Broken Tower and all the Librarian’s servants and selves. He was acquiring his own kind of agility, a grace that reminded Ghentun of an angelin—no surprise. “I apologize. I will try to be less generous.”
“I don’t mind much,” Jebrassy said quietly, staring at the changing ripples of stone. “I just need some time to catch up. I have to think about things and make them my own.”
“Of course,” Polybiblios said. “Long ago, philosophers would have played a game of questions with their students—or their servants. Each question, so the philosophers claimed, would coax out prior knowledge, natural instincts born into them. What you feel may not be just my ‘leaking.’ It may be your own quality, emerging right on schedule.”
Ghentun looked aside and shook his head. “You’ve taken us away from the path of the beacon. Why?”
“We will find the beacon again,” Polybiblios said. “It was perverted long ago, you know—shortly after my daughter vanished, and Sangmer disappeared in search of her.”
Jebrassy’s face crinkled in dismay. “Why?” His innermost voice still told him the beacon must be inviolate—the only thing that could guide them to Nataraja, their ultimate goal—their reason for being made in the first place. “That’s impossible. Who would do that?”
Polybiblios met their obvious anger with resigned sadness—an easy enough expression in an offshoot of one so old. He did not give them an answer right away. “I hardly remember my own child,” he said. “As much as she was my child, so many had a part in her making.”
“We know the story,” Jebrassy said.
“There are so many versions of the story,” Polybiblios continued. “The truth may lie frozen and buried in the rubble that shores up the foundations of the Kalpa. So many versions to compare with the fragments of memory that I’ve managed to retrieve.”
Jebrassy lowered his voice and his head and circled the epitome, his anger burrowing deep. Polybiblios followed the breed with calm yet not precisely fearless eyes. “My people are out here, dying or worse—for no reason?” the breed growled. “Because an Eidolon has forgotten, and others have been careless?”
“Not at all,” Polybiblios said. “Between Eidolons, all things have a purpose, sometimes more than one. My greater self knew the lineaments of change the Chaos would undergo over time—its gradual reduction. The beacon now points us to where we need to be. It is finally correct. Sit here.” He patted the ground with his gloved hand.
Jebrassy looked between the epitome and Ghentun, his fury undiminished—but controlled. Did this mean all the previous marchers had never had a chance? That they had been sacrificed to distract, provide cover, and prepare for a future time when only a select few would succeed?
With a supreme effort, Jebrassy sat and stared down at the black dust and sharp, ancient stones.
“The path we are taking fits the best version I’ve pulled from all the stories,” Polybiblios said. “Draw from your emerging qualities—think of Ishanaxade, making this same journey. Think of her long sacrifice, that things will come right again.”
“You had us search for the stories, then take them with us. You wanted us to find the real story by testing them all. Because you had lost the truth. You were careless.”
“I don’t deny carelessness,” Polybiblios said. “But putting the past—even could it have been perfectly recorded and stored for tens of trillions of years—packing all that into a microcosm, would have taken far more time and energy than creating and searching a Babel, practically speaking. And had we made that choice, preserving one history—or an ambiguous few—would not be enough to quicken a new cosmos. Not enough to seduce and distract Mnemosyne and awaken the Sleeper.”
“Sleeper?” Ghentun sat across from the epitome and the breed. “That’s an ancient idea. The Sleeper is supposed to have died at the end of the first creation.”
“The Father of Muses,” Polybiblios said. “Brahma, some called him very long ago. Not dead. But bored—and so, sleeping.”
“That sounds like nonsense,” Jebrassy said, fighting his own growing comprehension. He did not want to know anything that would blun
t his anger.
Tiadba was out there. They might never find her—
But Polybiblios was still overflowing, and this time they were brushed by the emotion of a Great Eidolon.
Ishanaxade.
Jebrassy and Ghentun looked at each other and felt a kind of sadness they had never known before—not the sadness a breed or a Mender could ever feel, but loss and betrayal that could only spread and age and mellow and sharpen all at once, among thousands of millions of epitomes and angelins, through the heights and inner recesses of the Broken Tower…across half a million years.
“The City Princes. They reset the beacon. They betrayed you,” Ghentun said.
“They betrayed my daughter,” Polybiblios said, looking away from them, as if he could not bear any kind of mirror. “We may have all betrayed her. What she must feel, after all this time—hiding out there, waiting. Or worse—captured.”
“If you know all the stories, then you know all the endings,” Jebrassy said. “Which one is true?”
“There are far more endings to a story than there are beginnings,” Polybiblios said. “The best stories start in the middle, then return to the beginning, then come to a conclusion that nobody can foresee. Sometimes, when you return to the middle, the story will change again. At least, they did when I was young.”
His voice seemed to hypnotize them. They saw a whirling lattice of fates surrounding a tiny and indistinct shape, barely remembered after so many ages.
“The City Princes,” the Keeper said, making it a kind of curse.
“They agreed to send Ishanaxade on a secret journey, without your knowing,” Jebrassy said. “But why?”
Ghentun placed his hands together as if in prayer. “Ishanaxade offered herself up to save the Librarian. She carried away the key to the most complete Babel the Librarian had created in the Broken Tower.”
“That much seems true,” Polybiblios said. “Whatever our disagreements, the Astyanax and all the other City Princes knew—”
“That a complete Babel, with all its parts brought together, would dissolve what remained of the old cosmos,” Ghentun said—and then saw that this knowledge did not come from Polybiblios. This was part of the image the Astyanax had placed inside his mind. “The muses, what little was left of them, would revive to examine the greatest wealth of stories—all possible stories, and all possible nonsense.”
“Both nonsense and story necessary for any creation, though, as always, there is a vastly greater proportion of nonsense,” the epitome said, and got to his feet. “My daughter sacrificed herself, when others wished only to see my project come to an end, incomplete.”
Ghentun said, “The Great Eidolons wanted to live whatever sort of life was left to them, trapped in the Kalpa, repeating their amusements, lost in decadent boredom but also extraordinary comfort—they wanted this to go on forever.” He stood, fists in the air. “You wanted to jumpstart creation. That would have been the end of us all.”
Polybiblios looked between them, guileless as a child—an exceedingly old child. “That was my expectation.”
“The Eidolons allowed Ishanaxade to cross the Chaos,” Jebrassy murmured. “But they knew Nataraja was already dead.”
“The City Princes made a deal with the Typhon,” Polybiblios concluded. “We were all betrayed. But that does not mean we failed. Far from it.”
The air in this part of the Chaos was growing stuffy and unpleasant. Together, as if in silent agreement that there must be a pause in this conversation, they sealed up their helmets and prepared to move on.
Jebrassy asked after they had resumed walking, “What is the Typhon, that it can make bargains?”
“Not to be known, young breed,” Polybiblios said. “But the Kalpa should have fallen long ago. It has not.”
“You knew this—yet you allowed me to send out marchers…” Ghentun was greenish-black with anger. He could no longer express himself in words.
Polybiblios looked around the changing landscape. “My daughter carried crucial parts of my creations, took them to Nataraja…Away from the reality generators. There was never any choice. But before she left, she asked both of us—Astyanax and Librarian—to join together and remake the oldest form of human being we could conceive of, in primordial matter. She asked that we assign their upkeep and education to the Menders. Of me alone, she asked that sum-runners be made and entrained—the most sublime of Shen technologies, more subtle even than the reality generators or this armor. And of me alone she asked that I place my fragmented Babels within the sum-runners, as a contingent plan—sending them back to course forward from the beginning of time, whispering to each other, and connecting all who touched them. Ishanaxade was mother to the ancient breeds. And she is mother to all who dream.”
“It is the greatest story of all,” Ghentun admitted. “She left her city, she left Sangmer—everything and everyone she loved. And she thought she served even as she betrayed.”
“What about Sangmer?” Jebrassy asked. “How could he possibly understand? Did he ever find her? What happened to him?”
“We live that story, young breed. We echo its flesh and bones, that we may tempt it out of hiding. And then, when it is finished, we move on—or come to our own abrupt conclusion.”
CHAPTER 97
* * *
Ginny felt something go out of her as she passed under the frozen gaze of the inner ring of giants. Her bubble of protection seemed to thin and breathing became difficult. The stone no longer tugged in a specific direction, but instead pulled her one way, then back, then another, its insistence growing weaker, until finally she stood as still as one of the statues, within sight of the defile where she had entered the valley.
There was only one conclusion she could draw from the stone’s reluctance to offer guidance. Either she had moved too far or traveled too fast…entering a place where one stone by itself could not protect her.
Why lead her on at all, then?
She wiped her eyes and noticed particles of soot floating above and around her, made more obvious by contrast against a rapidly coalescing mountain of ice that hung upside down over the valley. Needles and flows of sapphire blue grew from the floor in complete silence while she watched, her head cocked and neck growing stiff. They formed a ring of columns around the valley’s perimeter, as if to cage the False City, the central jade structure. Mist draped the mountain rims, thickening into clouds like clouds back home—if home was anywhere now. If she had ever grown up, ever lived, if any of her memories could be said to have been real…
Out here, the ice pinnacle and pillars possessed an eerie beauty more terrestrial than Chaotic, like the bottom of an iceberg, maybe, or the Alps inverted. Strange that something impossible would look more convincing, surrounded by things only very unlikely.
Her exhaustion became dark and profound, and she lay down on the uneven softness of the bubble, but her eyes would not close. She could not sleep—had not slept since leaving Bidewell’s warehouse.
But if she could sleep—and if she could dream—then she knew that her visitor, her other, was already inside the ghostly green city…and that Tiadba had also come to the wrong place.
Both had been misled.
Both had been betrayed.
Ginny thought of the awful, stocky old brute and his insinuations. She had not even spoken with Jack or Bidewell before leaving. Or Daniel. What would either of them have told her?
They might have told her to wait. And so, that was what she was going to do now that she had no choice. She would lie here just a bit above the valley floor, surrounded by mountains and paralyzed giants, with an upside-down mountain of ice waiting to fall at any instant—and she would wait. She would stay here forever, if necessary, growing more and more tired, until she simply floated off like a bit of weightless ash.
The moment of rest stretched on. She tried to roll over—felt the bubble closing in until she could no longer move. She lay on her back, watching the ice mountain block out the rim of fire. The f
ire had turned dusky orange, the darkness within faded to grayish purple. The wrinkled sky beyond the ice mountain was slowly obscured by blue mists, clouds edged with glorious gold. The sky itself was shrinking.
It was frightening and beautiful.
All she had seen so far was frightening and ugly.
“Something new is coming,” she murmured with numbed lips.
By which she meant something old.
CHAPTER 98
* * *
The three—Jebrassy, Ghentun, and the epitome of the Librarian—saw the paleness over the center of the vale.
They had walked many miles, approaching at times the innermost of the so-called Dead Gods that watched each other across the uneven plain. Their faces—if they could be called faces—seemed locked in a quiet, reflective arrogance, shaped by trillions of years of self-determined change, intelligence in control of all evolution; a variety of visages and shapes both handsome and incomprehensible, monstrous and beautiful at once, like so many sea creatures spread out on an immense, eternal reef.
“Will they ever live again?” Ghentun asked. Polybiblios seemed about to answer.
“No more time for lessons and leakings,” Jebrassy said. “Move on.”
The epitome listened with patient humor. “Time is indeed shorter. But time for others will not flow over this vale with the same speed, nor cover the same instants. This is a Turvy. Every pass, every gate, sends its entrants onto a different track to the center.”
“I thought there were only two fates left,” Ghentun said.
“Fates, yes—but in a Turvy, those paths can be swirled until they seem to lie parallel. You can jump from one to another—but they are the same, part of a spiral. In many regions of the Chaos the rules of the very tiny have been writ large. You have to spin twice just to face the same direction. Here, it is even more complicated. We can see behind us—there seems to be a way back, a retreat—but if we reverse course and try to leave, we will fail.”