City At The End Of Time (22 page)

“Sometimes, under a bridge. Other times, I hide out in the clusters on the flood channel walls.”

“The old Webla neighborhood? High up among the false books?”

“Nearby. Lots of empty niches. Sometimes I stay with a friend.” He tapped his knee. “I find shelter.”

“Has anyone ever spoken to your visitor, the other?”

Jebrassy lifted one finger, yes. “My friend tells me about him, sometimes.”

“But you don’t remember what was said.”

Two fingers circling, no.

“Do you know others who stray?”

His hairline flexed. “Maybe. A glow I’ve just met once. She…she wants to get together later. I don’t know why.” Jebrassy let that thought hang between them.

“You have no value?”

“I’m a warrior, a vagrant, no family.”

The sama hooted low amusement. “You don’t understand glows, do you?”

He glared.

“You say you’re unworthy. But not because you stray. Why, then?”

“I want to know things. Earlier, if I couldn’t join a march, I thought I would fight the Tall Ones and escape the Tiers.”

“Huh! Do you ever see Tall Ones?”

“No,” he said. “But I know they’re there.”

“You think you’re special, wanting to escape?”

“I don’t care whether I’m special or not.”

“Do you think this glow is dim?” the sama asked. She hadn’t moved since they squatted and started talking, but his own knees hurt.

“She doesn’t look dim.”

“Why do you want to meet with her?” She scratched her arm with a filthy fingertip.

“It would be interesting to find someone—anyone—who thinks like me.”

“You’re a warrior,” she observed. “You take pride in that.”

He looked away and drew back his lips. “War is play. Nothing here is real.”

“We get delivered by the umbers and we learn from our sponsors and teachers. We work, we love, we get taken away when the Bleak Warden comes. More young are made. Isn’t that real enough?”

“There’s more outside. I can feel it.”

She rocked gently on her ankles. “What else do you dream about? When you’re not straying.”

“The intrusion that took Mer and Per. I saw it. I was just out of crèche. After, the wardens made me sleep for a while, and I felt better, but I still dream about it. I thought it had come for me, but it took
them
…doesn’t make sense.”

“No? Why?”

“Intrusions come and go. The wardens put up shades and fog, clean up, and it’s over. Teachers just keep quiet. Nobody knows where the intrusions come from, what they’re doing here—even why they’re called ‘intrusions.’ Do they come from outside? From the Chaos—whatever that is? I want to know more.”

“What more is there to know?”

Jebrassy got up.

The sama rocked. “I don’t offer comfort. I fix letterbug nips, pede pinches, sometimes I fix bad dreams—but I can’t help
these
.”

“I don’t want comfort. I want answers.”

“Do you even know the right questions?”

Jebrassy said, too loudly, “Nobody ever taught me what to ask.”

Outside, the noise of the market dwindled. He heard a plaintive whine—a hungry meadow pede tethered in a stall, waiting for its tweenlight supper of stalks and jule. The sama poked out her wide lips and fell back from her squat, then stretched her legs and arms and let out a deep, sighing breath. He thought his visit was over, but she did not draw aside the blankets that curtained the booth.

“I’ll go,” he said.

“Quiet,” she advised. “My legs hurt. I’m wearing down, young breed. Not too long before the Bleak Warden comes. Stay a bit longer—for me.” She patted the ground. “I’m not done trying to riddle you. Why come to a poor old sama?”

Jebrassy sat and gazed uncomfortably at the thatched roof. “This glow, if I get interested in her, and she in me…it won’t be right. She has sponsors. I don’t.”

“Did
you
approach
her
?”

“No.”

The sama pulled a sachet of red jule from her robe, wrapped it, and tied it with chafe cord, making a broothe for steeping in hot water. “Drink this. Relax. After you stray, take notes. Do you have a shake cloth?”

“I can find one.”

“Ah—you mean, steal one. Borrow one from your friend, if he has one, or from the glow, if you see her again. Write it all down and come back to show me.”

“Why?”

“Because we both need to know what questions to ask.” The sama stood, drew back the blankets, and let in the failing gray light from the ceil. The market was closed and almost empty. “Perhaps dreams are like flapping a shake cloth—you erase all the words you didn’t choose. Young warrior, we’re done, for now.”

She pushed him out of her stall.

A very young glow, fresh from the crèche—tiny red bump still prominent on her forehead, swad-boots wrapped around her tiny feet—stood before a shuttered stall, feeding a hungry pede. The pede curled its glossy black segments around her ankles, wriggling its many legs. The young glow squirmed and looked up at Jebrassy with an expression of tickled delight.

He touched his nose, sharing the moment.

To take a partner, inherit or be assigned a niche, live in the Tiers in silent contentment, ignoring things you couldn’t understand…sponsor a young one…

Why want more?

He had seen how much the intrusion concerned the wardens. None of this was going to last long, he could feel it in his bones.

On his way to the Diurns, Jebrassy stopped, peered at the ground, then knelt to examine the quality of the gravel that lined the path. Until now he had never given much thought to the substances that made up his world. He compared the gravel to the material used in most of the bridges, asking himself how this stony stuff differed from his own flesh, from the crops in the fields—and from the flexible stuff of the wardens, which he had had a number of opportunities to feel as he was being hauled away from one or another altercation.

Gravel, crops, flesh—not the same as the exposed isles beneath the Tiers: silver-gray, neither warm nor cold, but strangely neutral to the touch. Yet that silver-gray stuff constituted the foundation and the walls and probably the ceil, the limits of his world.

Again, Jebrassy needed desperately to know more—to understand. In that regard, he differed from nearly all the breeds he knew, so much so that he wondered if there had been a mistake in his making, if the umbers had dropped him on his head after hauling him out of the crèche.
Stork.

He shook his head sharply at that unknown word, that difficult memory of a sound.
You’re delivered by the umbers—they’re like storks, right? They leave you under a cabbage leaf.

“Shut up.”

His bare feet took him farther down the path.

You’re like an animal in a zoo. But you don’t even know what a zoo is. Why are they keeping you
here?

Jebrassy did not
dislike
his visitor, and certainly did not fear him, but these residues offered no answers. When Jebrassy strayed—when the visitor took over—typically, nothing happened, as Khren had pointed out.

“I don’t know what you are,” Jebrassy growled under his breath. “But I wish you’d
go away
.”

He stood by the bridge, looking over the still and covered meadows market and the beginning of the long roads which fanned out to the far limits of fields and walls surrounding the Tiers, their neighborhood—half a day’s brisk journey across, overarched by the ceil, the curtain wall, the moist wall, their vertex at one extremity—and the long round wall opposite—most difficult to reach, but under and through which ran the flood channels.

Sometimes the teachers referred to the round wall as the outer, and the other two as inner. All of them—limits.

Barriers to curiosity.

CHAPTER 17

The wardens had spread mist and black curtains around the site of the intrusion, at the outer perimeter of a field of chafe sprouts in the shadow of the Moist Wall. They now hovered, awaiting Ghentun’s inspection.

Behind the curtains, an irregular section of the chafe field measuring about a third of an acre had been turned into fine snowy crystals, primordial matter converted to something different, deadly or useless: the hallmark of the Typhon, perverse, even malevolent. In the middle of the crystals, a male breed—a farmer, judging from his stiff scraps of clothing—had been carelessly rearranged. The farmer had still been alive when the wardens found him.

“Did you kill this one?” Ghentun asked the lead warden.

“He was suffering, Keeper. We summoned a Bleak Warden and terminated him. No one has touched him since.”

The Bleak Warden itself—slender, with a red thorax and shiny black lift-wings, now lay deactivated beside the farmer. White crystals cluttered its frozen, bent limbs. It would have to be disposed of, along with the body, the soil, and all else that the intrusion had touched. Ghentun glanced toward the straight road that led from the unused inner precincts—the Diurns and the apex bridge—all the way across the meadows and fields to the narrowed, arched haft where the first isle absorbed the Tenebros flood channel. A few breeds were still about in the tweenlight. All of them avoided the fog.

In the seventy-five city years since he requested his interview with the Librarian, Ghentun estimated he had lost over two thousand breeds. These invasions into the lowest levels of the Kalpa were now occurring once or twice every dozen sleep-wakes. Most seemed to target breeds—those who saw, who perceived, in the oldest ways. More often than not, the wardens investigated and drew their conclusions without his presence, but Ghentun was beginning to doubt their accuracy. He could not discount the possibility that the wardens were being manipulated by the city officers, Eidolons loyal to the Astyanax, who in all these thousands of centuries had paid little attention to the Tiers. In the Kalpa’s higher levels and more prosperous urbs, the reality generators seemed better able to protect the vast majority of citizens. Intrusions rarely occurred there, but perhaps it was because the Chaos had no interest in Eidolons. Still, the more intrusions there were in the Tiers, the more danger there might be for the higher urbs—real, metaphysical danger, and political danger for the Astyanax. Once the poor farmer had been removed, the whited soil was scraped and stored in sealed containers by small gray wardens. As before, the containers, the victim, and all the wardens who had touched them—tainted by that contact—would be locked away in the vaults deep below the flood channels. Ghentun had visited those vaults several times during the past century. They had been unspeakable in their fermenting, noxious morphing.

“We will have to
export
this one, Keeper,” the lead warden confided as Ghentun knelt beside the contorted body. “The vaults are nearly full.”

This was almost too much for Ghentun to bear. The tainted evidence of the intrusion would have to be shot out into the Chaos.

CHAPTER 18

The tweenlight had turned tawny gold, ushering in flat wispy clouds and the muddy shades that came before a sleep. The lowering flush of light was so diffuse and universal that Jebrassy cast only a faint hint of shadow. Everything around him—old and abandoned—seemed lost in a smoky dream. The Diurns lay flush against the curtain wall, accessible by a long and sometimes treacherous hike past the end of the abandoned Apex Causeway where it connected the tips of the three isles—the plateaus that supported the stacked Tiers. The curtain wall, in turn, ascended three miles to the overarching ceil, upon which the lights and darks of wake and sleep played out in endless, faded procession, as they had for tens of thousands of lives.

All this fell within one sweep of his eye from where Jebrassy now walked along the causeway. He also glanced from side to side to make sure there were no screeches or wardens waiting in the shadows to nab sleep-hikers. The wardens were particularly vigilant after an intrusion. Behind him, the causeway stretched more than a mile toward the bridges that had once carried the old neighborhood’s traffic over the Tartaros, the larger of the two channels that separated the blocs. Four slender, twisted spires flanked the conclusion of the causeway, five hundred feet tall and needled through with fluted pipes that, it was said, had once produced deep and awesome sounds—music. Whether the spires were original to the Diurns or had been added later was unknown—there were so many tottering, muddled layers of old breed construction here, contributing to the dangers of the entire precinct, which had long ago been condemned and blocked by debris and screech sentinels. Most of these had themselves long since collapsed, failed, or were simply forgotten, and were no longer necessary, since few of the ancient breed felt the urge to come here. There was enough faded grandeur in the inhabited parts of the Tiers to satisfy anybody.

At the apex where the Curtain Wall met the Moist Wall, spread an amphitheater that could once have seated thirty or forty thousand of the ancient breed. As a stripling, Jebrassy had been here twice, demonstrating his bravery or at least his persistence—climbing the debris, evading the few sentinels that were still active, making his way down the dirt-encrusted, sloping aisles between the risers to the gallery, a roofed labyrinth that stretched for several hundred yards to the proscenium. The Diurns were visible from several points in the gallery where the roof had fallen. Jebrassy, working his way once more through the stone maze, speculated as he had before that this might have been the site of old initiation rituals, and was certainly not part of the original construction. Even upon his first visit, the labyrinth had proved simple enough to solve—a left-handed maze with a distal twist, made easy by ages of decay.