City At The End Of Time (39 page)

They backed out of the sama’s niche. A Bleak Warden entered, slow and silent. It settled to spread its folds over Grayne, and with a slight stir, before she could open her eyes, she was no more. A mercy, considering what was soon to come.

“Bring me the male,” Ghentun said.

“And the female?”

“She will march. Pick others—friends, if they have any. Complete the sama’s travel group however you can, and speed their training.”

CHAPTER 43

The sound began low and heavy—a bass hum that vibrated the walls of Tiadba’s niche. Jebrassy opened his eyes and twitched an arm, knocking one of the precious books off the sleeping pad. The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was Tiadba’s soft, steady breath—sweet and soothing. But the bed next to him was empty.

He sat upright, listening, and thought that the thumping might come from Tiadba moving around. Where was she?

But the sound was much too loud. It felt as if the Tiers themselves were shivering apart. He pulled on his curtus and stumbled over the scattered bedclothes to the door, which had opened halfway and seemed to have stuck. Somehow, that frightened him more than the sound, which grew even louder.

The shaking made it difficult to stay on his feet.

Over the deep rumble came another sound, no less frightening but higher-pitched—wailing and shrieking, like creatures in horrible pain.

He squeezed through the opening and fell to his knees in the corridor. His hand nearly touched a deep, greasy blackness spreading along the floor of the hall like a hole cut into the substance of the Tiers—and growing. His eyes tried to focus on what had fallen into the hole—a fleeting impression of blurs that might have been two or more breeds, trying to swim against the blackness—and then something grabbed his shoulder and whirled him around.

A huge warden nearly filled the hallway, its wings folded, strong, hard arms extended, one clutching Jebrassy, the other throwing a net, a thick cross-weave of glowing fibers that sucked itself in over the blackness and seemed, for the moment, to hold it back.

The warden pulled him away. “You are going,” it said, in a voice both passionless and irrefutable. Jebrassy was lifted from the floor and dangled like a doll. He swung his head just in time to see Tiadba squeeze past the warden’s gray carapace into the half-open door of the niche. The shriek and the roar grew, and to it Jebrassy now added his own shouts of pain—and a question: “

Why?
”

Then Tiadba was back in the hall. She had retrieved a bag—their books. Turning her back to the warden, cringing, she allowed herself to be grasped and lifted. They both stared straight into the roiling dark that filled the opposite end of the corridor—

The roar, the wailing—

The net holding back the blackness had dissolved. The blackness advanced, offering at the crest of its dark wave three, four, five breeds—Jebrassy could not count them all—bobbing and twisting in ways nothing could twist, terrified, turning inside out and then skin side outward again, while still horribly alive, arms and legs moving with impossible speed—heads spinning like tops. The heads began to grow, the blurred eyes to expand, as if they would explode—

Tiadba added her screams to theirs.

And Jebrassy
knew
. He had seen this before, smaller, more concentrated. They were on the leading edge of an intrusion—like the one that had sucked away his mer and per. With a jerk, the warden retreated down the corridor, bumping and scraping the walls. Behind them the hallway squeezed itself into a wall and golden wardens gathered around the stair core to throw nets everywhere—

Their own warden spun them, pulled them inboard to avoid banging them against whatever chamber or new branch of hall they had entered, smooth and silvery—a hall or pipe he had never seen before.
A lift! Like the one in the Diurns.

Jebrassy tried to reach for Tiadba but could not quite brush her with his fingers. She was alive, he could see that—she clutched the bag of books tightly to her chest—but she squeezed her eyes shut and bowed her head as if in submission.

The journey along the shining pipe took almost no time, the air rushing by so quickly that despite the shield of the warden’s body, Jebrassy’s clothes were nearly torn from him. He felt his exposed skin grow warm—and then they flew from an opening in a far wall. The warden spread its wings and they rose in a gliding curve over the third isle. Jebrassy managed to open his eyes long enough to see how high they were—and was instantly sick.

He could not see Tiadba now—except for a foot thrust out from under the second wing—but with his stomach empty, a kind of fated calm came over him.

The first and second isles had been carved open, exposing dozens of levels. He looked with odd dispassion over broken and scalloped walls, whirlpools of retreating darkness—falling breeds. The air smelled rotten and burned at once. Half the ceil was gone, exposing something he had never seen before—the city
above
his sky, bits and pieces of unknown architecture, spirals and silvery arcs, walls and walkways, moving in an intricate dance of remediation, trying to reassemble and re-create safe havens for other citizens—

Citizens above the Tiers, also suffering—perhaps dying—

The warden lifted them over a cloud of dissolving darkness, but not without exposing them to a stench so great Jebrassy wanted to be sick again, but could not—

He heard Tiadba weeping. The warden’s wings and arms rearranged for swifter flight, allowing them to look into each other’s eyes across the short distance, and in her expression there was something outside Jebrassy’s understanding, outside his range of sympathy—

Tears streamed from her cheeks and blew off behind. But behind the tears, she was laughing—weeping and laughing at once with terror and with glee.

And then they were struck—something ugly and resentful reached out and pierced the warden, turning it black and crusted—then just
touched
Jebrassy—and his body filled with a violation unlike anything he had ever known before, and pain—pain so deep he could not give it voice.

TEN ZEROS

CHAPTER 44

Puget Sound

The storm began at sea as a tight, dark streak of cloud, like the smear of a giant brush loaded with gray mud. In the early morning hours, it spread quickly over the Olympic Peninsula, sucking in all the dark clouds, tightening and directing its spiral of winds, accumulating and controlling the charges behind the jagged lightning—then flowed across Puget Sound, where it formed the shadowy suggestion of an impossible giant—a female giant.

The shadow blew inland, then south, and swung back. It could not seem to find what it wanted, and so it lashed its wings against the city. Most frightening was not the continuous deluge of rain, but the lightning, which struck in clusters, in a rainbow of colors, and with a pummel of explosive reports, like the pounding of huge fists on a cathedral organ.

Heads turned and eyes averted, the citizens watched in mounting fear as the flashes grew more intense and more frequent. Not content with leaping from sky to ground, the lightning began to arc sideways, lancing between skyscrapers, blowing out windows, and crawling along the exterior lines of beams and girders, wrapping the towers in a lace of frustrated electricity—only to erupt again near ground level, stabbing through the tight-packed buildings like sabers through cheese. Sirens howled. Fire trucks and police vehicles added to the keening cacophony as far north as Lake Union. The storm compacted and gathered purpose. From above, it now formed a fat arrow paralleling the I-90 bridge, broad fletches over Lake Washington, powerful head probing: dumping, flooding, flashing.

It had found what it was looking for.

It followed an old white van.

CHAPTER 45

Wallingford

Uh-oh.

Something unlikely this way comes.

It took Daniel less than a minute to decide that the storm might be a hunter—but it was not after
him
. It raged south of his neighborhood, south of downtown.

As the rain began, then the lightning, he turned away from the morning drivers and their cars, working their way west along Forty-fifth to the freeway. He was done with street corners and begging. This morning, he was no longer just one of a thousand gray men and women standing on the littered curbs of a thousand on-ramps. That life was over. A new one had begun.

Above all, he was a survivor.

He looked south to follow the storm’s progress. Not even the flash of lightning and horizontal twists of clouds could break his new sense of physical joy.

For two hours now he had been enjoying freedom from the snake in his gut. What was left of Fred was no longer capable of putting up much resistance. This body was young, relatively healthy—though not in the best of shape.

Back in the house, Mary was still asleep—and Charles Granger lay dead on the couch, covered with a blanket, pitiful and spent. At least that was not his fault, Daniel thought. The broken-down pile of meat had simply given up.

Healthy again, Daniel had a fierce, unreasonable pride in his strength, his abilities. As well, he had no doubt now that there were others like him in the city—and they were about to be collected. To himself, he cheerfully sang, “
Dirus irae.
”

He did not want to be caught in the open when the storm found what it was looking for. Even a few miles away the side effects would be unpleasant.

And he needed to retrieve his boxes, hidden behind the fireplace in the abandoned house.

CHAPTER 46

West Seattle

The van shuddered as it left the West Seattle Bridge. Squat and low in the driver’s seat, pale with tension, Glaucous swerved around a car stalled in the left lane—corrected the van as it rose on one set of wheels, jerked it back on a straighter course, then took the time to wipe sweat from his eyes with scarred knuckles.

In the back, tied up in a heavy canvas sack, Jack Rohmer had worked his arm through the drawstring and waved his fist as he rolled back and forth over the cold metal floor. Glaucous had stopped his trills and whistles of birdsong. Now he was selling things, long ago. “Costards, pippins, starberries, currants!” he called, in the full glory and joy of the old times. Penelope discharged a sharp grunt as lightning blasted a passing utility pole. A transformer sparked and tumbled over their windshield, bounced along behind them.

All the while, Glaucous was muttering words with no apparent sense or connection to their journey or their peril: “Shoestrings and jute! Oakum and fiber! Paper and rags, any old iron! Scallions! Onions!

Leeks! Bones and
FAT
!” (This as lightning struck again) and “Plasters and pastes! Plasters for all, plasters and poultice, what ails will draw!”

A stench filled Jack’s nose, rank and oppressive, not just the sweat and confinement of the bag, but a taint from his recent jaunt. He had jumped too far, crossed into a diseased knot of world-strands, dissolving, looping—stinking of something awful.

He knew that the van was being followed, that his reek was being tracked…

Glaucous seemed to share the same opinion. In between his pointless calls—he was now working his way through “Bluing! Blue stuffs! Indigo!”—he paused and leaned toward his partner, as if to speak in confidence, then, shaking his head, pulled back and wrenched his spine straight, his shoulders as square as they could be, incredulous he would even think of giving voice to such thoughts, whatever they might have been.

He could not afford doubts—not now.

Penelope had broken the armrest from the van’s door and held it out, squeezing the plastic and steel like a banana. Her eyes almost popped from their fat-draped orbits.

Speckles of weird light danced on their faces.

Glaucous clapped a hand over his mouth and nose and stared above his thumb, eyes wide.

“What
is
that?” Penelope shrieked, her vocal register that of a frightened kindergartener.

“It is
magnificence
!” Glaucous shouted. “It is power and promise, a plight, a troth!” His words belied his expression; brows low, piggish eyes receding into his skull.

Jack now had his arm out of the sack up to the shoulder and was squirming to push his head through.

“What are you
saying
?” Penelope squealed.

“Something is hunting us! Too eager, waiting too long!”

“Hunting
what
? You promised we would be safe!”

“
I
will be safe.” Glaucous gave her a guilty glance, then wheeled the van onto an off-ramp and said, with grim curiosity, sunken eyes on the rearview mirror, “I turn up this road—bolts like giant feet, stamping feet, they follow and turn
with
me! I have not seen this before, believe that, dear queen of buzz and hum—not before, not ever. We have not called for a delivery, yet I sense something other than a Gape. The Chalk Princess is anxious. More than we bargained for. A large bite, this youngster—more than we can chew!”

Jack was beyond fear. The cloying treacle and liquor of Glaucous’s talent had pinched to sour vinegar, stinging in his nostrils and brain, opening up choked glimpses of branching, looping world-lines—none of them good, all of them in fact awful.

What was happening had never happened before, not in Jack’s experience, nor in the experience of any ancestor who had ever contributed to the sum of the genes ratcheting in his flesh and blood—even as far back as the primordial slime.

CHAPTER 47

Wallingford

Daniel drew up Fred’s gray wool jacket and walked west, shoulders hunched, feeling the storm gather its power.

A sharp jerk of sense had reversed his arrogance and pleasure at his new body. The storm wasn’t after him—but it would work quite well as a distraction. He had been too preoccupied to pay close attention—stupid, stupid!

There was almost certainly another target nearby—another fate-shifter. Maybe more than one. But someone in the employ of the thing that hunted them could still set his sights on Daniel. He would be special.
I no longer dream of the city. I don’t know why—I just don’t.
A bad shepherd—isn’t that what they call me?