“We could jump to the other track and get to the center faster, couldn’t we?” Jebrassy asked.
“No,” the epitome said. “We are where we need to be.”
Ahead, the gathering cloud had hardened into an upside-down mountain of ice, its edges like scalloped blades.
“The tracks will merge soon enough,” the epitome said. “The cosmos is in its final moments. The revolt of the very small is about to begin—and I don’t mean you, young breed. The pressure on the Typhon is growing. Out here, the former master does not know how to change.”
“What pressure?” Ghentun asked.
“This is all that remains. The Chaos has shrunk to two circles. One circle surrounds this vale. The other surrounds what is left of the Kalpa. There may still be a path between them, sprinkled with bits and pieces of the past. I don’t know. Maybe that’s closed, too. Outside lies nothing. That is the Typhon’s legacy. For all its power, it can leave no mark—only void. It tried to be a god, and it failed. There is no nowhere left for it to go. No escape.”
“All the stories left unfinished?” Jebrassy asked, unsure, then disgusted.
“No. If we succeed, what comes after, not even the whole of my self could understand. We will be as children before wonders. There is a greater force, who thus far has paid little heed to most of our trillion centuries.”
“Hmph. The Sleeper?” Jebrassy was tired of being ignorant until taught. He wanted to teach himself—learn on his own. Learn what had happened to Tiadba.
He was almost afraid to know.
“The Turvy will be the Typhon’s last chance,” the epitome said. “It will need to capture us and prevent the sum-runners from being joined. Watch for trods. Gliders, Scouts, Ascendants, Silent Ones…If they have nowhere else to go, they’ll come hunting here.”
They moved on toward the bowl and the green center of the vale. Ahead, blue pillars of ice grew to meet the upside-down mountain’s gleaming edges.
“Something’s coming,” Jebrassy said. “Not trods. Not monsters. Something else—I can feel it.”
“So can I,” the epitome said. “So can they all.”
They could hear a thin, shrieking bellow now—pulsing in from all around, an awful nastiness, like strangling, screaming, and shouts of warning commingled.
The giants lining the mountains were struggling to speak. Some seemed to struggle to move—shivering and stiffly casting off soot and rubble from around their bases.
“They’ve seen this before,” Polybiblios said. “It’s this vision that filled their blood and marrow and turned them fossil. It’s what the Witness has tried to warn us about for half an eternity.
“The Typhon has nowhere left to hide. It is coming here with all its servants—all those it has captured and tormented. Here we will find my daughter.”
CHAPTER 99
* * *
The seeing had not gotten any easier. There was an optical perversity that no manner of twisting and squinting could set right. Even within their protective caul, which Jack hoped he would never need to explain—he felt maligned by the views that somehow crept into his eyes.
Any living place showed both decay and growth, like the jumble of dead and living trees in a forest, or even a city burned, booted, crushed by war. Here there was only shoddiness, a despondent dullness of wit, will, and enthusiasm—in short, a lazing failure to keep and maintain.
This place showed only decay.
Not much comfort to be had from resting his eyes.
Jack was aware that Glaucous had been trying once again to hook his affection and trust, to consign these little fish to one or another basket—his, or failing that, Daniel’s. Daniel was a fake, of course—without actually slinking, he slunk, and without saying anything, he lied. Even the truth from his lips was deceptive, because they were not his lips. Glaucous was little better—honest in shape, but that shape worse than lies.
Still, they all had to stay close. Their bodies rejected what lay beyond the bubble. One could fall back just six or seven paces—no one dared more—before all suffered exhaustion, closeness of breath, headaches, sneezing—blood from nose, ears, fingertips. They were filthy with soot and streaks of wiped blood. The bubble did allow something like smell—phantom scents, madness and burning, sour and sick.
Nobody was supposed to be here. Here did not tolerate intruders. Now they could see almost nothing—a kind of spot of dim glow for some distance, restless darkness on all sides, a tumbled blankness, gray invalidity, the wholesale lack of anything and everything, only slightly less disturbing than the more defined things they had already seen.
Sometimes the tumbles and wrinkles assumed the crooked aspects of a landscape, then just as easily gave it all up—a bad piece of work—and resumed void.
Something seemed to surround the void and briefly spin, like being caught inside a wheel or a gyroscope. But then it vanished.
It might never have been.
The design on the box.
Jack had almost given up hope for Ginny. They hadn’t found her or her trail—the surface beneath their shoes mostly felt like old but solid rock—but their sum-runners had pulled them along with precisely the same tug as Ginny’s. Or so he assumed, since Daniel’s two stones behaved just like Jack’s.
The dead, empty cities were now behind them—incomprehensible hulks floated ashore from far, severed times, beached and then subjected to perverse inspection, angry dissection, and finally—Jack tried to imagine and reconstruct it—a restless, angry rejection.
Whole cities cast aside like broken cadavers, marked and scattered with hatred and confusion. All that wreckage worked over by a starless, pitchy, unhappy thing, totally powerful, yet completely clueless within and without.
His fancies grew.
Glaucous’s rough voice knocked him out of his fugue. “While you two slept, I kept watch. We’ve come around some things like hills or mountains.”
“How could we sleep?” Daniel objected. “We were walking.”
“You sleep, walking or not.”
Jack wrinkled his nose. “Nightmares without sleep,” he suggested.
“Lies without reason,” Daniel countered, and looked left at Glaucous. Their shoes made an unpleasant sound falling on the bubble and pressing it to the uneven black rock—a squeaking trunch, trunch.
“Gentlemen,” Glaucous said, as if urging civility. Then he halted and stared ahead and his eyes grew wide. “Couldn’t be.”
Jack and Daniel moved two paces by reflex before stopping. “Couldn’t be what?” Jack asked.
“I am a sensible fellow,” Glaucous insisted, sleeving sweat from his cheeks.
Now it was Jack’s turn to see movement ahead—small, dark shapes, low and sleek, with long curls rising and twitching. Not unfamiliar, certainly not frightening in and of themselves. And yet—here!
“Cats,” Jack said. Daniel turned.
“Amazingly capable, cats,” Glaucous said. “Excellent and powerful Shifters, and some are Chancers. Gods and masters of those who diminish and gnaw.”
The shapes had faded.
Glaucous took a deep breath. “Now, as to those hills and mountains,” he said. “They’ve been described to me. They enclose an unhappy place.” He made as if to dig a furrow in the air with his spaded palm. “I’ve been told this is where the Moth delivers shepherds and their stones. A long, shallow gouge—like a valley ringed with high peaks, surrounded by unspeakable things taken prisoner in far places. And in the center of it all, a shallow bowl with three fate-braided entrances, confounding to Chancers and Shifters alike.
“This is where the Chalk Princess rules.”
CHAPTER 100
* * *
The False City
Tiadba had been wrapped in a cocoon of dust and fiber, like sweepings neglected in a corner. Her eyes stung and pricked but she did not dare lift her fingers to wipe them—hands and skin were both crusted with sharp grit.
Often enough, over hours like beads strung on endl
ess necklaces, she had felt the grit crawl on her skin as if alive…Could not imagine what it might be.
Living, consuming decay.
Did not much care.
Here, beyond exhaustion, trapped—one bead of the necklace cold, the next neither cold nor warm—drained and burned to a crisp yet still capable of pain, not caring whether there was pain, only now and then could she rouse memory of her companions—her fellow marchers—and when she did, the grit jabbed all the more sharply. Memories and regrets had become tiny shards, sharp and glassy, caked on her skin and jabbing into her eyes.
Tiadba had seen her marchers carried along the glowing, fluid trod through a hole like spreading lips rimmed with sores, into a great dingy hollowness…had seen bloated, slavering things, long and malevolent, hurry from far walls to dangle from squirming legs and stab with scimitar jaws.
Jaws that smoked and sparked.
Grabbing, piercing, and burning, then scurrying back into the hollowness.
Tiadba curled. If she curled tight enough, perhaps she would simply fold into herself and vanish. Anything could happen here.
She opened her eyes long enough to lift her hand, crusted over by dried blood. Bits of glove—shreds of dead armor that no longer protected or spoke—tried to glimmer on her fingers. But memory and betrayal pushed the shreds apart, finished the task of peeling them away, leaving her totally naked.
All were naked.
She could not tell how long it had been before she was lifted and her eyes were brushed clear. She blinked at the immensity of gloom and shadow and dust.
She stood or had been propped stiffly on what might have been the side of a hill under a great canopy. The limits of the canopy seemed to waver, to rise and fall, uncertain not just in color or brightness, but also in distance and dimension. Still, something was arriving, something coming near promised to give what she was seeing proportion and perspective.
Something—or someone.
“Hello, crèche-born.”
Drops of cool, soothing liquid fell into her eyes and then froze them in place—to stare unblinking at a triangle of unformed whiteness.
A cool, crystalline voice of immense beauty and sadness whirled up and lay on the porches of her ears, then introduced itself word by word, languid, stroking. The words filled her ears and caused a dull, stretching pain.
“I compelled Shapers and Menders to make you. Do you know me?”
The shape within the triangular cloud coalesced. Above the middle arrived a face—well-shaped, eyes large and deep—beautiful and sad and commanding. An emotion rose, swelling within Tiadba: deep recognition, built into her at birth, ordained for all her kind ages before. She suddenly wanted to feel glad. This was reunion, what should have been a time of joy. “I know you,” she said.
“And I know you. I am proud, young breed. You are rich with dream. You have brought time forward…as you were designed to do. But now your connection with what has gone before is a curse. There is only turmoil and torment to come. But in this, our last moment of peace, I am allowed to ask one question of all who are brought here. That is my torture—an instant of anticipation and hope.”
Tiadba tried to see more clearly the dazzling white face like softly mobile stone, malleable outlines surrounded by other pieces whirling up and falling back again on chill, dust-laden wafts.
The face drew close.
Tiadba tried to pull back—shrink away.
“Do you know what has become of Sangmer, called the Pilgrim?”
The voice, so close to Tiadba’s face, carried no hint of breath or moving air—but a strange sweetness surrounded her all the same in that sensual desolation.
Tiadba felt a stinging shock. She thought of lying beside Jebrassy on the bed, making love and trying to riddle the ancient stories…of moments in the Chaos, reading from the ever-changing books to soothe and inform the marchers—but there had never been a conclusion to those stories, and the words were often obscure.
However, before this cold, frightening beauty, Tiadba could not help but offer hope. “I might have seen him. Maybe I wouldn’t know,” she said, lips numbing even as she spoke. “Tell me what he looks like.”
“I don’t remember.” Sadness and zeroing cold fogged between them. “No time remains, no time at all…” Words like falling and dying insects. “You have brought me nothing.”
“I’m sorry…” Tiadba searched for a word, found it in the memory of her other. “I am so sorry, Mother.”
“I am sorry, as well, crèche-born. You cannot know my sorrow. It would be a mercy if we both could die.”
CHAPTER 101
* * *
“We’re never going to find her,” Daniel said. “We’re crazy to even be out here.”
“Where would you have us go, young master?” Glaucous asked.
“Everything’s different,” Jack said. “It’ll keep getting more different. Maybe it will get better.”
The gap between the monstrous statues—the gap that opened into the bowl where stood the most unlikely city of all—had closed behind them as if it had never been.
“Three choices,” Glaucous said. “This is the best.”
“You said the Chalk Princess is just around the corner, right?” Daniel said. “Why doesn’t she swoop down and take us?”
Glaucous stopped. His breath pumped and hissed like a steam engine losing its push. “She’s here,” he said.
“What do you think will happen?” Daniel asked.
“She’ll release me,” Glaucous said. “No reward, no punishment. Just put me to an end. I deserve no more—and no less.”
He resumed walking like a long-suffering beast.
Daniel could hardly breathe. A feeling of heaviness, and compression, like bricks on his chest…he tried to understand what was going on in terms of physics but only made a bad job of it. “Vacuum energy heading back up toward zero,” he muttered. “Higgs field collapsing. Too small.”
“What?” Jack asked.
“Nothing. We’re lost.”
It did look as if they were out of options.
The land had never made sense. Now it was little more than a succession of silhouettes, trains and trails of pointless shadow. They had long since passed out of the neighborhoods of compressed and crunched history, through mad playgrounds of whatever passed for time outside their bubble—and now they were simply nowhere.
Fortunately, that nowhere was becoming smaller.
Daniel faced them. “The stones still tug. There’s still direction.”
Jack shook his head and took the lead.
They still had up and down, forward but not back, a kind of sideways…the limited movement a blessing in territory otherwise devoid of any particular quality. There was no going back and starting over. Something would not allow it.
“Whole numbers,” Daniel said.
Jack walked into deeper shadow. For a moment Glaucous and Daniel almost lost sight of him, just two or three steps ahead.
“Jack!” Daniel called.
They caught up. Glaucous chuffed and staggered.
“You’re a whole number,” Daniel said. “An integer.”
“Whatever,” Jack said. His fingers tightened on the stone.
“Your call number,” Daniel said. “However long it is, it’s an integer—it’s not irrational, and it’s not infinite.”
“We always ask for their numbers,” Glaucous affirmed, looking between them. “Not that we know what we’re asking for. Too long to speak aloud, all folded into trick paper. First seventy-five digits crucial, however.”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Daniel said. “I don’t belong in any library. Books make me uncomfortable. I don’t have a call number. Never did have a folded piece of paper. Or if I do, it’s not an integer—it’s irrational. I don’t have a story. That’s why you didn’t hunt me.”
“Interesting,” Glaucous said.
“I’ve had a long time to think it through,” Daniel said. “I don’t belong. Som
eone or something sent me back, stuck me there, but I just don’t fit.”
Jack disappeared into the murk.
Again, something spun all around them—the vanes of a gyroscope—and faded.
“Slow down!” Daniel called.
CHAPTER 102
* * *
It took Jebrassy a while to realize that he could no longer see or hear the others. He paused and waited. Drifts of sharp grit slid over the rippled black rock. The ripples had grown deeper—they were now channels in a curved maze that stretched to either side as far as he could see. Ahead, the edges of the ripples had risen up, curled over, and joined—creating a low wall of tunnel entrances, and beyond that, another higher rank, and still more beyond them.
He sat on the rim of a channel and waited some more, but neither Ghentun nor Polybiblios seemed anywhere near. Maybe they had gotten in front of him and already entered the holes. He could not wait. This might be another kind of trap—an eternity of indecision. Tiadba was still waiting.
He made up his mind to try one of the closest entrances. Only when he was some distance in, stooped, did he think that now that he was committed, the tunnel might be blocked ahead, and if he turned around, it would be blocked behind. It caused a moment of terror—he ran and pushed deeper into the tunnel, wanting to get it over with, to learn for sure that he was trapped, finally and irrevocably.
But nothing in the Chaos ever repeated itself, or was ever what he anticipated. The tunnel continued, growing a little in girth, and finally debouched into a larger space; how much larger, he couldn’t tell, even after his eyes had cleared of sweat.