City At The End Of Time (5 page)

The slender man who opened the door held up his silver dollar between thumb and middle finger. His pupils were large, black, and steady. He presented a cold, surprised smile—and then a superior grin.

“Mr. Glaucous. How nice to see you.”

Glaucous knew the signs of a Chancer about to strike. There was no time to lose. In the slender man’s fingers, the head of the crowned silver woman on the Morgan faced north. Glaucous rolled up one eye, drew down a contrary strand, bent it sideways—and the head faced south. The Chandler’s heart also flipped, instantly filling his chest with blood. His fingers twitched and he released the coin. Falling, the stamped ounce of gray metal landed flat on the carpet—eagle side up. His face turned sickly green. Silent, he toppled facedown, stiff as a plank, and covered the coin. Also tails.

In the bathroom, the veiled woman began to shriek. Without the Chandler, her talent and passion flowered unchecked. Fire shot from around and under the bathroom door. Glaucous lent his assistance. She achieved her heart’s desire.

That afternoon, wrapped in melancholy, Glaucous sat in his warm apartment, shades drawn, the only light in the cramped living room focused on a phone sitting on a table next to his chair. Behind the closed door to the bedroom, his own partner, Penelope, sang in a low, childlike voice. Around her song flowed a steady buzz, like an electric bulb about to go dark.

Glaucous’s eyes turned sleepy. An hour before, he had eaten a spare lunch—an apple and a piece of wheat bread with three thin slices of salami. In those first days in London, it would have been a feast. He stared at the phone in its oblong of golden light. Something was stirring. He could feel a strong tug on the triggering thread that announced prey. Always before, his employers had informed him of a new rule, changes in the game. This awareness was arriving without warning. Perhaps there had not been time. Had he made a mistake, eliminating the Chandler?

Reaching out, he could feel as many as three small birds in his vicinity—almost certainly three—though one seemed odd, not what he might have expected. Of the other two, from long experience, he was sure he knew their habits, their concerns and fears, their needs.

A darker air was arriving. Max Glaucous could feel it in his light, lucky fingers. Long dreaded, long awaited—destruction, followed by freedom—an extraordinary conclusion to his troubles. Three sum-runners.

Whitlow will join us. And the Moth. They cannot do this without me. Finally—my reward.
And my release.

CHAPTER 5

Wallingford

Trying to contain his churning, liquid misery, Daniel walked spastic. The sidewalk, old and gray and cracked, presented a rolling course of uneven obstacles. He leaned to the right on Sunnyside Avenue, grimly determined to make it home. He was ashamed. Daniel had always been the driver of his own soul, in control on the highways and byways of the fibrous multiverse. Now—he could barely keep from fouling his pants.

The neighborhood had not changed so much that he could spot the differences. In truth, he had never closely observed the houses more than a few doors away from his own. In his present hurry, there was no time to put together a catalog of obvious changes.

The sun slanted. This sick new body wore no watch and carried no keys; despite Daniel’s patting and thrusting, he could not find a key in all those pockets nor in the knapsack—but both he and his new body agreed, as they approached the concrete steps, the peaked porch roof and square tapered pillars,
this

was where they lived,
this
was where they hung whatever shingle they owned.
His
house. The same house. That much was the same, thank the powers that be.
Whatever powers care to take credit for any of my madness. And what about the sum-runners?

The lawn stood high and brown and overgrown with weeds. He climbed the steps from the street and jerked himself around the side yard to the rear, glancing back—apparently not used to entering the house by daylight—a furtive peer, then a scarecrow scramble through waist-high jungle to the back. The old rosebushes that had once belonged to his aunt were no longer in evidence, and—he noticed this as he made a horseshoe around the rear porch, trying to decide where he might have hidden a key—
there is
no key—

The windows had been papered.

The body remembered, so he went down on his knees—oh, how that made the snake twitch!—and pushed at a basement window, then skinnied himself through, stood on a box, and clambered to carpeted concrete floor—splish-splash, carpet soaked, the whole basement stinking of mold and mildew. The power was turned off. In the dark, he shambled up the basement steps, struck his shoulder against a first-floor wall, and fumbled his way by touch into the bathroom.

He pushed down his pants and found the toilet. The pain made him scream. He almost passed out. Daniel slumped against the wall, his elbow cushioned by the toilet paper in its wooden holder. Half an hour later he leaned forward and his hand found a candle stub on the bathroom sink. A match, a matchbox. He struck the match and lit the candle, then stripped down and took a cold shower—letting the body do what it knew how to do.

One foot out of the shower-tub, he fumbled for a filthy towel. Looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Eyes sunken and dull. Gaunt, straggling hair, skin sallow beneath a tangled, matted beard. Years of getting most of his calories from alcohol.

He heard a new, rough voice come out of that ruin of a mouth, between those rotten teeth—

“Oh—my…
God.
”

This was not Daniel Patrick Iremonk—not any sort of Daniel. This time, he had shoved himself into a body not even remotely his own. He had jaunted into an entirely new game—revealing a new and staggering aspect of his peculiar talent.

He was in another man, living another man’s life.

FOURTEEN ZEROS

CHAPTER 6

The Kalpa

Seventy-five years had passed since Ghentun had met the angelin in the Broken Tower—less than a blink for a great Eidolon, but a lengthy span for a mere Mender.

The Keeper walked unseen over the bridges connecting the three isles, the foundation plateaus that rose above the flood channels and supported the stacked Tiers; up the lifts and stair cores of the fifty-floor blocs of niches, as he did almost every wake, studying his charges, the ancient breeds, as they worked, moved about, talked, worried—escorted their wide-eyed children, fresh from the crèche—prepared foods purchased in busy markets, harvested from meadows and fields beyond the two broad flood channels, known as Tartaros and Tenebros.

In all the Kalpa, only the Tiers still had seasons worth observing—births and deaths, children delivered from the crèches on high, aging breeds relieved of their burdens by the Bleak Warden, their primordial mass recycled into new children, and a few—wanderers all, instinctively tuned—selected by the Keeper to be trained, equipped, and sent out into the Chaos to become marchers. A rhythm of interest now only to him, it seemed—but also, he hoped, to the Librarian who had planned it all ages before. Great Eidolons could so easily forget…

The chronological weather had calmed of late, and time was ticking along with such cheer—allowing actual days of sequence, when memory functioned almost as designed—that some in the Kalpa felt the old ways and rules might be returning. That was unlikely. The great reality generators were faltering, usually by tiny increments, but sometimes by leaps and bounds. Terrifying intrusions—streaks and smears of the Typhon’s nightmare void, breaking through to the Kalpa—were more frequent. Dozens of Ghentun’s breeds—most vulnerable, living as they did at the city’s foundation levels—had been destroyed or gone missing.

Something in the Chaos seemed to be hunting.

In the dark before wakelight, within a loud shout of the Tenebros bridge, teams of referees were sleepily clearing and roping off a fallow meadow, preparing for the games the breeds called little wars. Invisible—though not without some effect on the breeds around him—Ghentun made his way through the gathering crowds. He found a good vantage on a hillock, drew up his legs, and sat. Soon enough he would be on the move again.

Another game was in play—grander and much more dangerous, not just to the breeds, but to Ghentun himself—but at the end, they might find the key to defeating the Typhon. In the meantime, the citizens of the Tiers did their best to live as they always had—bravely, foolishly, wisely. They were hardy folk. Whatever the circumstance, they found their amusements.

The skirmish on the meadow was going splendidly, most agreed. The traditional engagement had begun while mist still draped the mounds and grasses. Five hundred breeds—divided equally into four tribes—began their contest at the sound of the judges’ horns, great jagged blats that echoed from the high, bright ceil.

Jebrassy—strong and dashing in armor he had made from purple keel-husks—sallied out with eight pickets in like garb to assess the chances of breaking through on their opponents’ left flank, and there was a lovely, knock-all fray in dense fog as they met other pickets. All along, as he fought—giving many more blows than he received—Jebrassy had the uncomfortable sensation he was being watched. From the corner of his eye, wisps, puffs, interruptions in the fog that hollowed and twisted and vanished—distracted him. He did not fight as well as he wished, and perhaps that was fortunate, considering the damage he was already doing.

Jebrassy and his fellows—Khren and the others—took to their combat with spirit, swinging their stravies with such conviction that few challenged them, and many lodged protests with the judges who glumly wandered in to intercede.

The older warriors squatted with narrow, discouraged eyes. The good days were gone, they said, shaking their heads. Some felt the contests were not violent enough—others, that mercy and honor had been forgotten. They seldom agreed about much.

Through morning and into evening, the war resumed, mounted with shouting and cursing and singing of martial airs, bluster, batting, torn hair, and flying spittle, until the ceil dimmed to brown and welcome tweenlight fell over the breathless, bruised combatants.

The seniors loved to watch fights, as long as not too many were hurt—and Jebrassy’s crew was pushing that tolerance to the edge. Many groaned and limped away—and many more grumbled on the field and off.

Jebrassy, by his own estimation, retired from the din in full glory, head bandaged, arm wrenched. In camp, he was dosed by a stolid medical warden, a drum-shaped machine with stubby lift-wings, now folded. Though almost faceless—just three off-center glowing blue eyes in an oval head—the wardens always seemed saddened by such goings-on, but performed their duties without chide or complaint. Sometimes, it was said, in the broad dark ports high in the walls or in the ceil, overlooking the meadows and fields, the Tall Ones, masters of the Tiers—in the naive conception of the breeds—watched these lovely little engagements and made judgments that would be taken into account when the Bleak Warden came to snip your final hours and fly you to the crèche. Some even claimed—though Jebrassy highly doubted it—that the Tall Ones walked among their favorite fighters, and if they were not doing well, clouded them in mist and flew them away…

But he had fought to his satisfaction, thumping and being thumped, and so be it; he was willing to be profane and think in other directions. That somehow made things better. As the warden finished its patient ministrations, Jebrassy looked up past the gleaming, off-center eyes, squinted at the mellow browns and greenish-golds of the tweenlight ceil, and wondered what the Tall Ones really thought of such idiocy. He had never known anything but the Tiers, of course, and that irritated him. His spirit felt crushed beneath that vast, rounded roof. He was an adventurous fellow, filled with ambition to exceed the sight lines shared by those around him—short, flat lines, mostly, though long enough in the fields to suggest the mysterious Wide Places some whispered about, where one could see forever. Standing beside a makeshift stand displaying sweet chafe and tork—intoxicating juice fermented in heavy jugs—an elderly male breed waited while the warden applied a last twist of bandage. Jebrassy